British Pit Dwellings in the neighbourhood of Doncaster

Abstract

I am about to treat of a subject of interest to one and all—by some it would be called an era pre-historic—to point out to you how the earlier races who inhabited this island defended themselves from the rains and frost of this unequal climate, how they banded themselves together in tribes for mutual security and family life. I am about to speak of their dwellings, at a time when the wild beasts roamed through the vast forests of this part of the country; when the deer, and the wild boar, and herds of British cattle wandered in droves amongst heaths, woods, and marsh-lands. Professor Phillips’ “Yorkshire,” the highest authority we have, states as follows, p. 187: “We find the great Irish elk, the red deer, the fallow deer, the bos longifrons, the common ox, the goat, the sheep, the horse, the boar.” Yet the tribes who inhabited these sea-coast districts were far from savages. They traded with their neighbours, bartered their commodities, they worked and smelted iron, they had metal rings for money, they had chariots and darts. Of the tribes of Britain one of the most important, if not the most important, were the Brigantes; the regions peopled by them stretched from shore to shore from the German Ocean to the Atlantic by east and west; the limit of their northern boundary we do not attempt to define, but their southern boundary would be most probably near by where now we meet. The “Maxima Caesariensis” of ...