Falling in Love

17. Ogbury Barrows

We went to Ogbury Barrows on an archological expedition. And as the

very name of archology, owing to a serious misconception incidental to

human nature, is enough to deter most people from taking any further

interest in our proceedings when once we got there, I may as well begin

by explaining, for the benefit of those who have never been to one, the

method and manner of an archological outing.

The first thing you have to do is to catch your secretary. The genuine

secretary is born, not made; and therefore you have got to catch him,

not to appoint him. Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation

of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your hand; and when

you have found him you will soon see that he slips into the onerous

duties of the secretariat as if to the manner born, by pure instinct.

The perfect secretary is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and

portly bearing, a dignified representative of British archology, with

plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a heaven-born genius

for organisation, and utterly unhampered by any foolish views of his own

about archological research or any other kindred subject. The secretary

who archologises is lost. His business is not to discourse of early

English windows or of palolithic hatchets, of buried villas or of

Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work or of dolichocephalic skulls,

but to provide abundant brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that

the owners of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with

lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities, to see

that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and all the young ones

somebody to flirt with, and generally to superintend the morals,

happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific

enthusiasts. The secretary who diverges from these his proper and

elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the

antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of

woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should

by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon

the arduous task of arranging for dinner), proves himself at once

unworthy of his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from the

secretariat by public acclamation.

Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set him busily to work

beforehand to make all the arrangements for your expected excursion, the

archologists generally cordially recognising the important principle

that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own pocket, and

drives splendid bargains on their account with hotel-keepers, coachmen,

railway companies, and others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at

fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition. You also

understand that the secretary will call upon everybody in the

neighbourhood you propose to visit, induce the rectors to throw open

their churches, square the housekeepers of absentee dukes, and beard the

owners of Elizabethan mansions in their own dens. These little

preliminaries being amicably settled, you get together your

archologists and set out upon your intended tour.

An archologist, it should be further premised, has no necessary

personal connection with archology in any way. He (or she) is a human

being, of assorted origin, age, and s*x, known as an archologist then

and there on no other ground than the possession of a ticket (price

half-a-guinea) for that particular archological meeting. Who would not

be a man (or woman) of science on such easy and unexacting terms? Most

archologists within my own private experience, indeed, are ladies of

various ages, many of them elderly, but many more young and pretty,

whose views about the styles of English architecture or the exact

distinction between Durotriges and Damnonians are of the vaguest and

most shadowy possible description. You all drive in brakes together to

the various points of interest in the surrounding country. When you

arrive at a point of interest, somebody or other with a bad cold in his

head reads a dull paper on its origin and nature, in which there is

fortunately no subsequent examination. If you are burning to learn all

about it, you put your hand up to your ear, and assume an attitude of

profound attention. If you are not burning with the desire for

information, you stroll off casually about the grounds and gardens with

the prettiest and pleasantest among the archological sisters, whose

acquaintance you have made on the way thither. Sometimes it rains, and

then you obtain an admirable chance of offering your neighbour the

protection afforded by your brand-new silk umbrella. By-and-by the dull

paper gets finished, and somebody who lives in an adjoining house

volunteers to provide you with luncheon. Then you adjourn to the parish

church, where an old gentleman of feeble eyesight reads a long and

tedious account of all the persons whose monuments are or are not to be

found upon the walls of that poky little building. Nobody listens to

him; but everybody carries away a vague impression that some one or

other, temp. Henry the Second, married Adeliza, daughter and heiress of

Sir Ralph de Thingumbob, and had issue thirteen stalwart sons and

twenty-seven beautiful daughters, each founders of a noble family with a

correspondingly varied pedigree. Finally, you take tea and ices upon

somebody's lawn, by special invitation, and drive home, not without much

laughter, in the cool of the evening to an excellent table d'hte dinner

at the marvellously cheap hotel, presided over by the ever-smiling and

urbane secretary. That is what we mean nowadays by being a member of an

archological association.

It was on just such a pleasant excursion that we all went to Ogbury

Barrows. I was overflowing, myself, with bottled-up information on the

subject of those two prehistoric tumuli; for Ogbury Barrows have been

the hobby of my lifetime; but I didn't read a paper upon their origin

and meaning, first, because the secretary very happily forgot to ask me,

and secondly, because I was much better employed in psychological

research into the habits and manners of an extremely pretty

pink-and-white archologist who stood beside me. Instead, therefore, of

boring her and my other companions with all my accumulated store of

information about Ogbury Barrows, I locked it up securely in my own

bosom, with the fell design of finally venting it all at once in one

vast flood upon the present article.

Ogbury Barrows, I would have said (had it not been for the praiseworthy

negligence of our esteemed secretary), stand upon the very verge of a

great chalk-down, overlooking a broad and fertile belt of valley, whose

slopes are terraced in the quaintest fashion with long parallel lines of

obviously human and industrial origin. The terracing must have been done

a very long time ago indeed, for it is a device for collecting enough

soil on a chalky hillside to grow corn in. Now, nobody ever tried to

grow corn on open chalk-downs in any civilised period of history until

the present century, because the downs are so much more naturally

adapted for sheep-walks that the attempt to turn them into waving

cornfields would never occur to anybody on earth except a barbarian or

an advanced agriculturist. But when Ogbury Downs were originally

terraced, I don't doubt that the primitive system of universal tribal

warfare still existed everywhere in Britain. This system is aptly summed

up in the familiar modern Black Country formula, 'Yon's a stranger.

'Eave 'arf a brick at him.' Each tribe was then perpetually at war with

every other tribe on either side of it: a simple plan which rendered

foreign tariffs quite unnecessary, and most effectually protected home

industries. The consequence was, each district had to produce for its

own tribe all the necessaries of life, however ill-adapted by nature for

their due production: because traffic and barter did not yet exist, and

the only form ever assumed by import trade was that of raiding on your

neighbours' territories, and bringing back with you whatever you could

lay hands on. So the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to

grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn't; and,

in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil

and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt

as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place by artificial

barriers.

On the top of the down, overlooking this curious vale of prehistoric

terraces, rise the twin heights of Ogbury Barrows, familiar landmarks to

all the country side around for many miles. One of them is a tall,

circular mound or tumulus surrounded by a deep and well-marked trench:

the other, which stands a little on one side, is long and narrow, shaped

exactly like a modern grave, but of comparatively gigantic and colossal

proportions. Even the little children of Ogbury village have noticed

its close resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in

their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when they play upon its

summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault

underneath. But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead

that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short,

squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and

Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily

manage. It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the

greatest men don't by any means always get the biggest monument.

The archologists in becoming prints who went with us to the top of

Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised (with demonstrative parasol) that

'these mounds must have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in

fact they were: but though they stand now so close together, and look so

much like sisters and contemporaries, one is ages older than the other,

and was already green and grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the

fresh earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its side,

above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic warrior. Let us begin

by considering the oldest first, and then pass on to its younger sister.

Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed. Not, to be sure,

one quarter so ancient as the days of the extremely old master who

carved the mammoth on the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the

Dordogne, and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier

portion of this volume: compared with that very antique personage, our

long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact be looked upon as almost

modern. Still, when one isn't talking in geological language, ten or

twenty thousand years may be fairly considered a very long time as time

goes: and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty thousand years

have passed since the short, squat chieftain aforesaid was first

committed to his final resting-place in Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years

since, we local archologists--_not_ in becoming prints this

time--opened the barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we

expected, the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving

conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment had clung

for all those long years around the grassy pile of that ancient tumulus.

Its centre, in fact, was occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big

Sarsen stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of the

house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering skeleton of

its original possessor--an old prehistoric Mongoloid chieftain. When I

stood for the first moment within that primval palace of the dead,

never before entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I

must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,

something like a resurrection man, but most of all like a happy

archologist.

The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in fact, a buried

cromlech, covered all over (until we opened it) by the earth of the

barrow. Almost every cromlech, wherever found, was once, I believe, the

central chamber of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind

and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding earth (and

then we call it a 'Druidical monument'), while in others the mound still

encloses its original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric

tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves are quite

modern and commonplace personages compared with the short, squat

chieftains of the long barrows. For all the indications we found in the

long barrow at Ogbury (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us

at once to the strange conclusion that our new acquaintance, the

skeleton, had once been a living cannibal king of the newer stone-age in

Britain.

The only weapons or implements we could discover in the barrow were two

neatly chipped flint arrowheads, and a very delicate ground greenstone

hatchet, or tomahawk. These were the weapons of the dead chief, laid

beside him in the stone chamber where we found his skeleton, for his

future use in his underground existence. A piece or two of rude

hand-made pottery, no doubt containing food and drink for the ghost, had

also been placed close to his side: but they had mouldered away with

time and damp, till it was quite impossible to recover more than a few

broken and shapeless fragments. There was no trace of metal in any way:

whereas if the tribesmen of our friend the skeleton had known at all the

art of smelting, we may be sure some bronze axe or spearhead would have

taken the place of the flint arrows and the greenstone tomahawk: for

savages always bury a man's best property together with his corpse,

while civilised men take care to preserve it with pious care in their

own possession, and to fight over it strenuously in the court of

probate.

The chief's own skeleton lay, or rather squatted, in the most

undignified attitude, in the central chamber. His people when they put

him there evidently considered that he was to sit at his ease, as he had

been accustomed to do in his lifetime, in the ordinary savage squatting

position, with his knees tucked up till they reached his chin, and his

body resting entirely on the heels and haunches. The skeleton was

entire: but just outside and above the stone vault we came upon a number

of other bones, which told another and very different s********e of

them were the bones of the old prehistoric short-horned ox: others

belonged to wild boars, red deer, and sundry similar animals, for the

most part skulls and feet only, the relics of the savage funeral feast.

It was clear that as soon as the builders of the barrow had erected the

stone chamber of their dead chieftain, and placed within it his honoured

remains, they had held a great banquet on the spot, and, after killing

oxen and chasing red deer, had eaten all the eatable portions, and

thrown the skulls, horns, and hoofs on top of the tomb, as offerings to

the spirit of their departed master. But among these relics of the

funeral baked meats there were some that specially attracted our

attention--a number of broken human skulls, mingled indiscriminately

with the horns of deer and the bones of oxen. It was impossible to look

at them for a single moment, and not to recognise that we had here the

veritable remains of a cannibal feast, a hundred centuries ago, on

Ogbury hill-top.

Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or

bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either

a club or a stone tomahawk. The skull of the great chief inside was

entire and his skeleton unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that

the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or

prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain's tomb, and eaten

with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an

inner chamber behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger

relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons squatted

there in the same curious attitude as their lord's, as if in attendance

upon him in a neighbouring ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of

women--so our professional bone-scanner immediately told us--and each of

their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle by a single

blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they were not the victims intended

for the _pice de rsistance_ at the funeral banquet. They were clearly

the two wives of the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son

and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master in his new

life underground as they had hitherto done in his rude wooden palace on

the surface of the middle earth.

We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal savage king

(after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as

well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our

archological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two

years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green

as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of

the party then assembled there had been a prime actor. Looking down from

the summit of the long barrow on that bright summer morning, over the

gay group of picnicking archologists, it was a curious contrast to

reinstate in fancy the scene at that first installation of the Ogbury

monument. In my mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked,

yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the terraced slopes of

Ogbury Down; I saw them bear aloft, with beating of breasts and loud

gesticulations, the bent corpse of their dead chieftain; I saw the

terrified and fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and

the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the slaughter; I

saw the fearful orgy of m******e and rapine around the open tumulus, the

wild priest shattering with his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his

victims, the fire of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the

heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered stone

chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals around the mangled

remains of men and oxen, and finally the long task of heaping up above

the stone hut of the dead king the earthen mound that was never again to

be opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we modern

Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious mattock the sacred privacy

of that cannibal ghost. All this passed like a vision before my mind's

eye; but I didn't mention anything of it at that particular moment to my

fellow-archologists, because I saw they were all much more interested

in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about an exalted personage and a

distinguished actress with which the model secretary was just then duly

entertaining them.

Five thousand years or so slowly wore away, from the date of the

erection of the long barrow, and a new race had come to occupy the soil

of England, and had driven away or reduced to slavery the short, squat,

yellow-skinned cannibals of the earlier epoch. They were a pastoral and

agricultural people, these new comers, acquainted with the use and abuse

of bronze, and far more civilised in every way than their darker

predecessors. No trace remains behind to tell us now by what fierce

onslaught the Celtic invaders--for the bronze-age folk were presumably

Celts--swept through the little Ogbury valley, and brained the men of

the older race, while they made slaves of the younger women and

serviceable children. Nothing now stands to tell us anything of the long

years of Celtic domination, except the round barrow on the bare down,

just as green and as grass-grown nowadays as its far earlier and more

primitive neighbour.

We opened the Ogbury round barrow at the same time as the other, and

found in it, as we expected, no bones or skeleton of any sort, broken or

otherwise, but simply a large cinerary urn. The urn was formed of coarse

hand-made earthenware, very brittle by long burial in the earth, but not

by any means so old or porous as the fragments we had discovered in the

long barrow. A pretty pattern ran round its edge--a pattern in the

simplest and most primitive style of ornamentation; for it consisted

merely of the print of the potter's thumb-nail, firmly pressed into the

moist clay before baking. Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early

pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by

the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we

discovered the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful

wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no

consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated

both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to

the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full

consent) on the land of his fathers.

Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead? Why

did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses,

and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't

have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations

which so profoundly agitated the mind of 'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation

was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.;

and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,

when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances

of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for

adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference

to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due to a further

development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above

that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.

When men began to bury their dead, they did so in the firm belief in

another life, which life was regarded as the exact counterpart of this

present one. The unsophisticated savage, holding that in that equal sky

his faithful dog would bear him company, naturally enough had the dog

in question killed and buried with him, in order that it might follow

him to the happy hunting-grounds. Clearly, you can't hunt without your

arrows and your tomahawk; so the flint weapons and the trusty bow

accompanied their owner in his new dwelling-place. The wooden haft, the

deer-sinew bow-string, the perishable articles of food and drink have

long since decayed within the damp tumulus: but the harder stone and

earthenware articles have survived till now, to tell the story of that

crude and simple early faith. Very crude and illogical indeed it was,

however, for it is quite clear that the actual body of the dead man was

thought of as persisting to live a sort of underground life within the

barrow. A stone hut was constructed for its use; real weapons and

implements were left by its side; and slaves and wives were ruthlessly

massacred, as still in Ashantee, in order that their bodies might

accompany the corpse of the buried master in his subterranean dwelling.

In all this we have clear evidence of a very inconsistent, savage,

materialistic belief, not indeed in the immortality of the soul, but in

the continued underground life of the dead body.

With the progress of time, however, men's ideas upon these subjects

began to grow more definite and more consistent. Instead of the corpse,

we get the ghost; instead of the material underground world, we get the

idealised and sublimated conception of a shadowy Hades, a world of

shades, a realm of incorporeal, disembodied spirits. With the growth of

the idea in this ghostly nether world, there arises naturally the habit

of burning the dead in order fully to free the liberated spirit from the

earthly chains that clog and bind it. It is, indeed, a very noticeable

fact that wherever this belief in a world of shades is implicitly

accepted, there cremation follows as a matter of course; while wherever

(among savage or barbaric races) burial is practised, there a more

materialistic creed of bodily survival necessarily accompanies it. To

carry out this theory to its full extent, not only must the body itself

be burnt, but also all its belongings with it. Ghosts are clothed in

ghostly clothing; and the question has often been asked of modern

spiritualists by materialistic scoffers, 'Where do the ghosts get their

coats and dresses?' The true believer in cremation and the shadowy world

has no difficulty at all in answering that crucial inquiry; he would say

at once, 'They are the ghosts of the clothes that were burnt with the

body.' In the gossiping story of Periander, as veraciously retailed for

us by that dear old grandmotherly scandalmonger, Herodotus, the shade of

Melissa refuses to communicate with her late husband, by medium or

otherwise, on the ground that she found herself naked and shivering with

cold, because the garments buried with her had not been burnt, and

therefore were of no use to her in the world of shades. So Periander, to

put a stop to this sad state of spiritual destitution, requisitioned all

the best dresses of the Corinthian ladies, burnt them bodily in a great

trench, and received an immediate answer from the gratified shade, who

was thenceforth enabled to walk about in the principal promenades of

Hades among the best-dressed ghosts of that populous quarter.

The belief which thus survived among the civilised Greeks of the age of

the Despots is shared still by Fijis and Karens, and was derived by all

in common from early ancestors of like faith with the founders of Ogbury

round barrow. The weapons were broken and the clothes burnt, to liberate

their ghosts into the world of spirits, just as now, in Fiji, knives and

axes have their spiritual counterparts, which can only be released when

the material shape is destroyed or purified by the action of fire.

Everything, in such a state, is supposed to possess a soul of its own;

and the fire is the chosen mode for setting the soul free from all

clogging earthly impurities. So till yesterday, in the rite of suttee,

the Hindoo widow immolated herself upon her husband's pyre, in order

that her spirit might follow him unhampered to the world of ghosts

whither he was bound. Thus the twin barrows on Ogbury hillside bridge

over for us two vast epochs of human culture, both now so remote as to

merge together mentally to the casual eyes of modern observers, but yet

in reality marking in their very shape and disposition an immense, long,

and slow advance of human reason. For just as the long barrow answers in

form to the buried human corpse and the chambered hut that surrounds and

encloses it, so does the round barrow answer in form to the urn

containing the calcined ashes of the cremated barbarian. And is it not a

suggestive fact that when we turn to the little graveyard by the church

below we find the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, as

opposed to the pagan belief in the immortality of the soul, once more

bringing us back to the small oblong mound which is after all but the

dwarfed and humbler modern representative of the long barrow? So deep is

the connection between that familiar shape and the practice of

inhumation that the dwarf long barrow seems everywhere to have come into

use again throughout all Europe, after whole centuries of continued

cremation, as the natural concomitant and necessary mark of Christian

burial.

This is what I would have said, if I had been asked, at Ogbury Barrows.

But I wasn't asked; so I devoted myself instead to psychological

research, and said nothing.