The Homes of the North Britons
We have seen how North Britain came to be one country ruled by one king; let us now see what kind of homes the North Britons lived in after the…
From: 400 C.E. To: 1034 C.E.
Location: Scotland
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
The Homes of the North Britons
From A Short History of Scotland by Peter Hume Brown, 1908.
We have seen how North Britain came to be one country ruled by one king; let us now see what kind of homes the North Britons lived in after the Romans left, till the time of Malcolm II. We know very little of these homes from books, but, as parts of them are still standing, we know pretty well how they were made.
Images from book, by P. Hume Brown.
These houses are not all of the same kind, which shows that the people of North Britain did not all live in the same way. For instance, there is a kind of house which is mostly found in the country where the Britons of Strathclyde lived. These houses are called Lake-Dwellings, because they are built not on land but in lakes, at a little distance from the shore. This is how these Lake- Dwellings, or Crannogs, as they are named in Scotland, were made. If there happened to be an island or several islands in the lake, the houses were built on these, and were, of course, almost all made of wood.
If there did not happen to be an island, then an island was made by sinking stones and logs of wood to the bottom till they rose above the surface of the water. Then, that the people who lived in the dwellings might be able to get to the shore, canoes were kept, or a causeway was made which could be destroyed when it was necessary. In the year 1863, when Loch Dowalton, in Wigtownshire, was drained, nine of these islands were discovered which had been made by men's hands, and in them were found a number of things that had been used by those who had lived there.
There was a hearth-stone, and also the bones of oxen, pigs, and sheep which had been the food of the Lake-Dwellers. There were also found an iron axe, the heads of hammers, beads of glass and amber, a bit of a leather shoe, and a sauce-pan of bronze, which must have been made by Roman hands, as it had the owner's name stamped on it in Latin. And near the islands were several canoes, each made of a single tree, by hollowing it out
Why did these people make their houses in lakes and not on the dry land, where it would have been so much easier to build them?
It was to be safe from their enemies, who would not be able to take them by surprise, and who would have to use canoes to reach the islands, and canoes cannot be made in a moment.
We do not know when these Lake-Dwellings were first made, but from the articles made of iron found in them we know that their inhabitants must have belonged to the Iron Age. People must also have dwelt in them after the Romans left North Britain, because, as we have seen, things made by the Romans are found in them. What we now think, though we cannot be quite sure, is that the Britons of Strathclyde lived in the Lake-Dwellings to be as safe as possible from their enemies, the Angles, who were constantly making war on them.
A very different kind of home from the Lake-Dwellings is one that is chiefly found to the north of the river Forth, though a few are also found to the south of it These houses are called Brochs or Pictish Towers (because the Picts were supposed to have lived in them), and are high, round castles, with very thick walls.
It is very likely, indeed, that those who made these Brochs only used them when they were attacked by their enemies, and that they had other houses in which they usually dwelt. In the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and in the counties of Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross, there are the ruins of more than three hundred of them.
They were chiefly built near the banks of rivers, lochs, and the shores of the sea, which means that the people who dwelt in them lived chiefly on the fish they caught. In a little island among the Shetlands, called Mousa, there is one of these Brochs, of which so much is left standing that we can see how they were made.
Though the top is broken off, it is forty feet high, that is, higher than a two-storey house. It is built of stones laid on each other, but without lime to hold them together, and the walls are about sixteen feet thick. There is only one door, and when you go inside you find a staircase which leads up to six floors or galleries; and when the building was whole there must have been still more. In such a place a great number of people could live together, and it would have been hard indeed, at a time when there were no cannons, for an enemy to break into it.
From the things that have been found in the Brochs, we can see that the people who lived in them belonged to the Iron Age, like those who lived in the Lake-Dwellings. They must have known how to grow corn, and how to spin and weave; they had lamps and utensils for cooking; they had ornaments such as beads and bracelets; and altogether they must have been able to live very comfortably, when they were not troubled by their enemies.
There is still another kind of dwelling in which the North Britons must have lived after the Romans left the country.
These are what are called Earth-houses, or Picts' houses, because the Picts were supposed to have lived in them. Sometimes in ploughing fields, the plough has come against a flat stone, which looked as if it had been placed there by the hands of men, and when the ground was dug up one of these Earth-houses was found. A narrow hole leads into a winding passage, which grows wider and wider till you come to a chamber, with the walls and the floor and the roof all flagged with flat stones. Sometimes there are two or three chambers, and sometimes there are as many as forty houses together, so that there must have been quite a village made up of them.
On the surface of the ground near them, there have also been found the remains of what have been dwelling-houses and folds for cattle, and it is thought that the people may have lived in the underground dwellings in winter and in those above ground in the summer. Just as in the case of the Lake-Dwellings and the Brochs, things have been found in the Earth-houses which show that people lived in them after the time of the Romans, and that they knew the use of iron, and grew corn, and reared sheep and cattle.
These, then, were the homes in which our fore-fathers lived for a long time after the Romans left the country, and the way these houses were built shows that the people who dwelt in them were not mere savages. But we know also that they could not only build strong and comfortable houses, but that they could make beautiful things which any workman of the present day would be proud of.
For example, there have been found such things as shields, sword-sheaths, mirrors, bracelets, and other ornaments, usually made of bronze, but sometimes of silver or gold, and all beautifully decorated with figures, and some of them painted red, yellow, blue, and green. Such things as these were made while the people were still pagan; but when they became Christian they began to fashion new things, such as bells, crosses, and ornaments, for the churches, with such wonderful patterns on them, that the most skilful artist now could not make them better.
But there was another kind of art, quite as wonderful, which must not be forgotten. In Ireland, those who lived in the monasteries were very fond of writing books and painting pictures in them, and this they could do more beautifully than the monks of any other country.
When the Irish missionaries came to North Britain, therefore, they brought this art with them; and we are told that, when St Columba was in lona, he spent a great deal of his time in copyingreligious books. Only one book of this kind has come down to us, but who wrote it we cannot tell. It is called the Book of Deer, from the village of Deer, in Aberdeenshire, where one of Columba's monasteries was set up, and it is supposed to have been written in the ninth century, that is, the century in which Kenneth MacAlpin lived. Besides other things, it contains the Gospel of St John and portions of the other three Gospels, beautifully written in Latin, and with pictures or illuminations, as they are called, in different colours.
Brown, Peter Hume. A Short History of Scotland. Oliver and Boyd, 1908.
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