The oldest house in Britain.

  I enjoy history.

  This isn’t a new fact; I’ve been very open about this. It’s a massive part of my artistic and creative pursuits. With this I’m drawn towards media that explores the new findings rather than just throwing out what everyone already knows(1).

  So, when I watched ‘Digging for Britain’ this year, I was delighted to see that a lot of finds and excavations were situated in the iron age and earlier. Graves, settlements, and offerings seemed to show up all over the place.

  But there was one site that piqued my interest, and that was a Bronze age hut found on a Cardiff rugby pitch(2).

  In the excavation, archaeologists found evidence of people living, working, and repurposing the site. It was likely a place of high prestige, as the axe heads were unusual and not wholly utilitarian and therefore used as a status symbol. Another thing they found was the post holes had been used more than once. While this could be put down to rotting wood replacement, they also pointed to another explanation. That this hut was disposed of and rebuilt to separate the previous occupier from the new one.

  This is fascinating because it implies that it was dismantled, similar in belief as that of the Apache, where things are destroyed after a death. It’s a moment that moves the social order onwards and clears the area for future use. Though they did not do it for similar reasons(3), the parallels are interesting. There is a systematic destruction of the past in these acts, but with a decorum that could be seen through our alien eyes as disrespect. Neither of these groups destroyed these artifacts out of malice, but more likely fear(4) or honour.

  If we did explore these, I think we have to imagine what our relationship with these things would be. What is the symbolism that this destruction gives? Why must the items cease to be used in such a final way? Do we create the same things again, or create something different?

  Let’s think like a group. Your leading family(5) has died off. The patriarch or matriarch was a leader with certain ideals that were necessary for your collective survival. Now the next in line needs is taking control. How do you symbolise this transference?

  If we were to look at most European monarchies, there are items that are preserved and carry a special resonance. The sceptre, the crown, the orb(6). But that doesn’t seem to be the case with the hut.

  If we look at the Apache for another way of explanation, we can see that their destruction is highly individual. The possessions of the deceased are destroyed and not carried on, as the dead person’s things are not theirs to keep but to give to the spirit as appeasement. If we used this frame to explore the hut, could we see a similar attitude?

  The hut, what’s left of it anyway, did seem to be a high-status area. It was reused, which indicates that the location was important, but the structure was not. So if we were to use our big, creative brains that are able to come up with other ways of existing, what can we come up with?(7).

  This is mine.

  The VIDP(8) has passed. Their accomplishments and accolades are remembered at the ‘wake’ and the next in line takes over. But to both honour the dead and challenge the newcomer, the hut is not reused. It is ceremoniously taken apart and destroyed. The belongings are given back to the land(9) or melted down to be fashioned into other things. A new dwelling is erected on the same spot as it is a sacred space, but the slate otherwise has been wiped clean. Now the new leader must act as they see fit, separated from the actions of the ancestor. New treasures have to be commissioned and spread about. This gives those in charge a motivation to both make a name for themselves and create new prosperity for their people. Allowing for new styles of art and expression to arrive in the area, founding a new fecundity of culture that binds up the people.

  This stops as either the traditions a no longer observed(10) after a few generations or outside forces means the area has to be abandoned(11).

  This is all writing a nice lore for a place that we know little of the people. But it limits us to understanding the past through a similar lens that we see our world through, you are equally making up history as I just did. We are not the people of the past, and they are not us, each is equally valid. But we can’t allow our biases cloud the actual facts of their lives.      

  History is more complex than that.

1.     ‘Knows’ is a problem for me because we don’t actually know much about anything. People say they know that we progressed from stone to bronze but forget that it took a while because people throughout all of history are fickle and would rather stick with what they know.

2.     I think it was more an open field that had a rugby pitch on it, but my point still stands.

3.     The Bronze age hut was 4000 years ago whilst the North Americans are more contemporary.

4.     The Apache, from the website called www.alivehospice.org they were/are fearful of the dead, as they resent the living. My original group was another tribe, but I can’t remember where it was in ‘the origins of everything’ by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I might revisit them in the future because indigenous ways of living are just amazing.

5.     Let’s just assume that we are in a hierarchical system for this one time.

6.     Mainly the British crown here, sorry about that.

7.     This is not inherently archaeology, but it’s important for us to come up with these answers. To reject the myth of progression is difficult, but once you do you notice the infinite possibilities that are available to us for future society.

8.     Very Important Dead Person.

9.     Hoards are found like these, where artifacts are placed in the earth. Think like a ‘return to the earth whence you came’.

10.  We see this all over the place. The old is dropped as something else is prioritised. Sometimes down ton conflict.

11.  England has SO many abandoned towns and villages due to enclosure and industrialisation. If we learnt about these lost landmarks, I think we would be very annoyed, but it’s not in the ruling class’s interest to teach these histories. You literally have to go out looking for them.

The beauty in dead people's things

  I get a little teary eyed when I see a hoard. Maybe it’s just empathy on my part, but I can’t help but wonder about the people on the other end of the items. It’s almost like a long plastic cup telephone connecting me to them and the string has rotted, allowing a little information through but time has muffled the vowels and erased the consonants..

Artistically, Hoards are(1) treasure troves. When a new find is discovered it’s like Christmas (though most finds are done nearer to summer), allowing a glimpse at the aesthetics they left. These items have usually not seen daylight for hundreds of years and are brought out of the earth like they’ve just been woken from a long sleep, which gives off a feeling that they should be left for another five minutes. For my own practice, these are godsends for ancient motifs and forms that I can explore.

  For example, when I saw the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum(2) I became enamoured with the rock art and the metalwork of the Neolithic and Bronze age. How they created beautiful stone axe heads with smooth faces and glittering gold necklaces that represent the sun, I can’t help but be in awe. Before this exhibition, I was mainly focusing on Anglo Saxon and Celtic styles, things that are 'British'. Afterwards, I noticed how stupid that is. Everything is influenced by each other and limiting myself is to ignore thousands of years of ‘European’(3) artistic expression! If I’m exploring ancient British art, this exhibition taught me that I can’t be picky.

But when I saw the Stonehenge exhibition, I found the people as well. The lost people we forget actually existed in prehistory. Those axe heads and pieces or jewellery were made and cherished by those who looked after them. They personalised them, they wore them until they broke and even fixed them. There’s life in these items, and I think they knew that as well(4). We have found items that have been repaired several times, meaning that there is a chance that they were heirlooms being passed down.

  Unfortunately, this is a post about hoards. We didn’t find these artifacts in someone’s nan’s dresser. They were (sometimes) buried and left in the ground only to be found closer to our time.

So why? What lead people to leave them?

When someone intentionally buries something, there’s usually a few reasons. Stashing and Offering come to mind right now.

  Stashing is what squirrels do with nuts. It’s keeping items safe for future use. There might be a threat of danger, so on the safe side people keep valuables away to only get them when they need them. Like the squirrel, some people forget where they stashed stuff, so that’s how it’s there. The sadder reason might be that there wasn’t anyone to recover them.

Offering is mostly religious. These items were left and were never meant to be recovered. This includes your funerals or your sacrifices. There are finds like the Battersea shield, which was pristine, being given to the Thames River as an offering. The Sutton Hoo burial was a funeral, so the buckle(5) was never to be found. There’s a theory that the Staffordshire hoard was a ‘killing’, where the pommels and others were ritualistically broken(6).

  Like the archaeological community, hoards are extremely interesting in what they show us about the past. What people believed, how people lived, what people valued. They are extremely human things that we have access to.

Nevertheless, interest should not be the only thing to take from these things. We can learn about the people and how they interacted with the world, what they saw as important or worth saving, whilst also recognising the limits or our own understanding. Like a lot of fields of knowledge, we can get stuck in our cultural frame of knowledge and completely create a fake reality that was never there. We can also incorporate our findings to mould our world with their culture to become more ‘complete’ in a sense(7).

  For me, I can’t help but try to figure out the people behind the hoard. The stories are fascinating, because every so often there will be something so personal that it will be questioned. A piece of bone in a jar of gold coins or an inscription on a piece of wood. These are as important as the metals that surround them. The Galloway hoard has silk from China in it for god sake! It has stories that are beyond our imagination, and I think people like J.R.R Tolkien knew that.

  The world is so much more complex than just moments in time that we forget that people make it up(8), and that’s why I love it so much. The hoards allow us to see the past and humanise with it more than you would if the past was a series of documents. Human history is not books, it is what has made us. My practice is simply me trying to explore these different worlds through an artistic medium, but you just can’t go wrong with a good hoard!

1.     Literally as well.

2.     Again, conflicting opinions about that place.

3.     I mean, what counts as European? It’s a term so fluid that its almost defunct. Is it a Continent? Is it a Peninsular? It’s a place for sure, but a place with no fixed residents until we started supergluing them to the soil. Remember kids, we all started as nomads until we decided to settle, and even then, that’s not even a sure thing.  (David Graeber, the Origin of Everything)

4.     There is poetry about ‘killing’ items and returning them to the earth. There are Bronze age sword dykes that have been folded and placed in the ground. This is not a European thing as artifacts all over the world have been found to be destroyed for the same reason.

5.     That gorgeous belt buckle.

6.     Back to point 5 with that. Also, Beowulf tells us of this practice. The treasures of fallen foes are broken and given back to the earth that the materials sprung from.

7.     Complete. An interesting idea, poorly written here. What I’m trying to say is that we can take aspects of other ways of doing things to make a better world. It is not limited to geography or temporality. If we ignore these as ‘primitive’, we don’t learn that we are the ones changing, not history.

8.     Both make it up (what it consists of) and also make it up (we write it down, and therefore neither correct nor finished).

Pam ydw I’n dysgu Cymraeg

As an artist exploring British Identity, its history and its complexities, I find the languages fascinating.

We have English, Scots, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, and Cornish. If we’re going to include Ireland (1) in it, then we also Irish and Manx (though unfortunately that died). Historically we also have Norn, a type of hybrid of Norse and Gaelic that was developed in the Viking times, though that also died a death.

But I’m going to focus on Welsh, the oldest language spoken in Britain (2).

You can’t really avoid Welsh when talking about Britishness, its one of the four countries (3) that make up the United Kingdom. Its vibrant history is both idolized and romanticized. Thought to be full of druids and wizards, it is a magical place to go. I recommend going to the many Neolithic sites, Pentre Ifan is one of the best. It is so different to the rest of Britain that of course you fall in love.

But with all that, things haven’t been so pleasant, and that’s why Cymraeg interests me so much.

So why am I learning Welsh? Isn’t it a useless language compared to English? Why not focus on more useful languages like Spanish, French or German (4)? My first answer would be ‘shut up’. My second would be put into several sections.

One: I love language.

This one is simple; language is a tool for both communication but also observation. The many tongues all over the world have histories and contexts that shape the way we see, different uses of hierarchy and ownership for example. Welsh is interesting with this as Cael (to have) isn’t always used for ownership, rather the object is with the subject.

I have a dog.

Mae ci gyda fi (literally: ‘Is a dog with me’)

I don’t think this works for everything (5), but that’s a really different way of looking at objects, like each has its own agency (6). But my point sticks, foreign languages are fascinating in how they observe the world.

Two: Ancestry.

This one is always tricky, because when you bring bloodlines and histories into discussions of identity, you get some weirdos. Especially in England, which absolutely sucks (I’ll talk about that later). But I do have a Welsh connection, far enough for it to be forgotten but close enough to see it was important.

Everyone who has ethnic ties to Britain will likely have Welsh in them (Welcome to genetics). The Welsh I’m talking about would be the ones who assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms during the Heptarchy (7), conflict didn’t wipe out the Britons(8). What happened definitely included pillaging, but also the intermarriage between both occupier and native. So most modern day English people would be part Welsh Briton, and consequentially Romano-British (9).

But I also have people who are Welsh, at least I think so, in my family tree. Down Wardour Street in the early 1800’s, there lived Owen Griffiths and Jane Hughes. They had a daughter called Elizabeth Griffiths who had a son called James Charles Griffiths Chapman. They made me, and what interests me is that they clearly felt that Griffiths was important enough to add to his name. It’s like they wanted him to keep in mind where he came from. I can’t say this with absolute certainty, of course (10), but it is a connection.

The other is that I went to the place that has my surname, Handley, which is up by Chester. It’s up by North Wales, and historically would have been home to Romans and Britons (11). So what I can infer is that if I am from there (12) then it’s likely I had ancestors who were part of a big bilingual scene. English and Welsh spoken in the same town to help with things like trade. So naturally I’m interested in that aspect.

Three: Politics

This might be annoying for some people, but I like diversity. Stability for me can be translated into stagnation (13). So, anything that injects something that shakes the pot a bit is welcomed with open arms. This of course (10) leads me to look at the world holistically, and it’s mad to think that we allowed any kind of homogeny to exist. People move around all the time in history, present day, and (just a prediction) in the future. We cannot be the same, as we are always adapting and changing.

Saying that, there’s a difference between migration and colonisation. As an Englishman, I can’t really escape this fact. The world uses English for a lot of administration and is the official language of many countries that are not England. Why? Oppression and suppression of anything indigenous to put it bluntly. To spread ‘civilisation’. We call it the British Empire, but it was primarily English (14) with officers who privileged the occupier over the native. So English is the overlord with local languages dying, resulting in more of the same.

The first to be affected by this was the Welsh. Or Cymru to be precise. The language slowly died in the east (15) before only being spoken in Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria (16), but it wasn’t until the Normans that the real shit happened. People were encouraged to move to Monmouthshire so that the English crown could control it more. Think ‘colony’ because it was. In fact, most of South Wales doesn’t speak much Welsh, it’s more centred in the North now.

But it gets worse! After this, there were moves to have churches only conduct services in English and there were even punishments for speaking Welsh in schools, things like the Welsh Knot. It discouraged the learning of Welsh and promoted a more cohesive population that only spoke English. This was a knife in the stomach of Welsh, but it was not dead (17).

With this, Welsh Traditions were also falling to the wayside, meaning that both the tongue and the culture was being eroded. This is a story shared all over the world where Imperialism latched it’s claws on.

So, I’m learning Welsh for this reason also, to diversify the British tongue away from the dominance of English. It’s likely to go nowhere globally, but I feel I have a moral obligation to celebrate it. Welsh is a beautiful language, just like so many around the world! English should not be the only thing spoken here on this island, we have so much to choose from, and the active eradication of any other way of communication is categorically bad (18). Being the same is not a good thing, because if we get rid of our differences, we cannot learn what is wrong. We cannot improve. We cannot grow as a people (19).

So yeah, it’s a complex issue, maybe for another blog, but something I feel strongly with.

Conclusion:

Britain is a strange beast. It’s been a land that has had a lot go on in a small amount of time. But in that time, we’ve forgotten where we’ve come from (20). We are so much more interesting than what Britain stands for now. And to that end, I have to speak Welsh.

My interest in history and historic styles of art has shown me that you can reignite these cultures and perspectives, it only takes effort and education. That’s what I’m trying to do, as well as showing the intricacies of the past. It’s not simple, and we look at the people of the past, not as humans like us, but as primitives. I think this is a terrible way to think of history, as it promotes an inevitability of falls and rises that only really benefit those in charge.

Like, it’s not even a ‘um-er’ situation. If we are to actually celebrate what it means to be British, it means to diversify the voices that call this place home. There should not be a correct way to speak in a certain place, we’ve seen how that works in the past as well as the present. France is pushing for a single way to speak French (the Parisian at the cost of the multiple dialects and offshoots in the south), and I hope that it fails.

I have to learn Welsh. I have to learn Cornish(21). I have to learn Gaidhlig. For my family, ancestors, and the cultural health of Britain (22).

(1) For this bit, I prefer not to call what we know the British Isles ‘The British Isles’, but rather the Insular European Isles. Can’t remember where I heard this so no source, but it does steer clear of that little problem.

(2) It has changed of course, but has been here before Latin, English and Gaelic forced themselves over here.

(3) I am pissed off that Cornwall is not included in it. Arguably Wales was not a country for long period, only a principality, but that does not excuse its sidelining. Justice of Kernow.

(4) I want to learn all of them. Probably not fluently, but enough to have conversations with strangers.

(5) Still learning.

(6) Must point out, I’m talking about abstract objects, not dogs. Dogs are not objects, they are friends.

(7) Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, Kent, Essex, Wessex, Sussex (I put all the sex’s at the end as I’m immature). Where is Nessex? Norfolk likes to keep it in the family, so no one’s invited.

(8) In ‘Y Gododdin’, its claimed that many millions of Saxons died from Northumbria to Liverpool. That’s a big front with a ridiculous number of dead. Sounds cool though.

(9) If we’re going to talk about ancestry, the Romans controlled Britain. There’s evidence of Africans were in the Roman military (Moors at Hadrian’s wall) and administration (Ivory Bangle Lady of York), so to say that there is no chance that Britain ever had a black presence just doesn’t add up. Also, it predates the English, so grow up.

(10) Or ‘wrth gwrs’

(11)Another interesting thing about places by the River Dee, there was a history of Irish Raiders. After the Romans left, many groups took their chance to gain land. Vikings as well, but a tad later.

(12)My father’s father’s father’s etc. When it comes to it it’s not so much of a connection but a clearer picture of people moving. I am not claiming to own Handley, I’ve been there and I was a little bored of it. Little to do.

(13)Ok, so big statement there. I’m not saying that stability is bad, but if everyone does the same things and stays in the same place, either the people are about to die (of boredom or old age) or the culture.

(14)I find it annoying that you have Scotland walking around like it did nothing. They benefited from Imperialism just like England but conveniently they can curtail that fact by the oppression by England. Most of the highland clearances were done by Clan chiefs trying to get more for their land, separating the people from the homes they had made. There was no loyalty to the people, but they expected people to move because of their hierarchical position. Then they send their children to London where they live for the rest of their lives without ever going to their ancestral lands. As you can tell, I’m not a fan.

(15)There’s an interesting debate if the east spoke a more Germanic language, as the Belgae did seem to have a grip in Britain at the time of Julius Caesar. You then have the injection of Latin that might have led to a more Romantic language there, like French.

(16)There was a Celtic P language present in Cumbria until the 12th century. The kingdom of Strathclyde is evidence of this, until the Gaels and Angles took it over. But that’s why it’s called Cumbria; Cymru (Wales), Cumbria (Also Wales).

(17)Cornish was already dead, with the last speaker dying in 1790(?) and Irish was being hampered by the famine, that was caused by exportation rather than dependence. How can we not be annoyed at the famine? It wasn’t caused only by crop failure, but capitalist interests. As an Englishman, to think that it was done under the name of the country that also went through removals through the same interests leaves a horrid taste in my mouth.

(18)I am, of course (10), talking globally. I’m trying to keep it to Welsh and Britain, but with a global empire that did so much cultural damage that you can’t ignore it. I can’t ignore it. The languages of America and Australia (to name two Western-centric names of places) need recognition as Welsh, Gaidhlig or Kernowek.

(19)Globally again.

(20)Where we come from. I mean the diversity of the historic presence of humans on the land we call Britain now.

(21)I’m learning Welsh first as it’s meant to be easier. I have morals, but I’m pragmatic.

I think I’m going to go into my complex relationship with England at some point. But to keep it short, the ruling class fucked up the world under the banner of England for profit. That association has now tainted what it means to