Langham Features

Image credit: René Cortin; licence

As we say elsewhere, ‘to remind everyone of what we have here in this village, we intend also to run occasional features about the many interesting and sometimes quirky buildings that give Langham its own special, unique, and precious character and make it such a life-enhancing place in which to live and work.’

Such posts will be called ‘Langham Features’ and are distinct from those about planning matters. However, they have a place here in that the more you know about where you live, the more emotionally invested in it you become and the more you are motivated to defend it.

To kick things off, a potted account of the prehistoric landscape and its people might not come amiss, so here it is:

The earliest known trace of habitation is the 1974 discovery of a small spread of burnt flint pot boilers 1.5m–3m in diameter, just inside the parish boundary near Sidney House Farm in Saxlingham, unearthed while hoeing sugar beet. These may be as old as half a million years or as young as the late Iron Age, around 42 AD. Other archaeological finds are documented here; in any event it is clear that what became Langham was inhabited by people during the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age.

The changes in landscape and vegetation since then have been immense. Melting glaciers at the end of the last ice age ushered in the Holocene (the current geological epoch) and shaped the hills and dales we know today – for example, the Blakeney Esker, which forms the rise surmounted by the lane from Langham to Wiveton.

Before about 6500 BC, sea-levels were much lower than they are now, so that this area would have been well inland. After that time Britain became an island, with consequences for the native flora and fauna: some species not already endemic found it impossible to colonise from the Continent.

The vegetation, too, will have seen immense change. Melting glaciers scour the landscape with billions of tons of water mixed with rocks and stones. In the harsh conditions left behind only lichens can find a foothold; as they increased, died and rotted, the beginnings of soil began, later exploited by low-growing herbs, then dwarf birch, then birch itself, in what is termed ‘plant succession’. If unchecked this leads eventually to ‘climax woodland’, typically dominated by lime and oak with a dense understorey of ferns, holly and the like. In some areas grazing animals like the aurochs will have produced a more open, park-like feel, but the overwhelming impression would have been of a land covered by trees.

The fauna here, besides aurochs and red deer, almost certainly included wolves, brown bears, wild cats and lynxes, and an abundance of birds that we cannot well conceive.

During the Paleolithic the locals would have been not farmers but hunter-gatherers. Each tribe would have consisted of thirty or forty partly nomadic people. To see out the winters they dug pit-dwellings lined with dried ferns, big enough for a whole family. With a roof of branches covered with animal skins, and with everybody inside, such a pit soon became as warm as any centrally heated room today.

They lived to a large extent in harmony with the rest of the ecosystem: indeed, they were a part of it. Nevertheless, they sometimes used fire to flush out game, and this began to have a profound effect on the tree-cover.

Trees began to disappear in earnest during the Neolithic or New Stone Age. Immigrants from continental Europe brought organised agriculture, a technology imported from the Near East. They practised ‘slash-and-burn’ to clear ground for crops: axes with flint blades are surprisingly effective. It is wasteful, for the ground so cleared is fertile for but a limited period. Thus more and more forest needs to be cut down and burnt if the farmers are not to starve. Farming as opposed to hunting and gathering markedly reduces infant mortality. The indigenous people died out or intermarried with the newcomers, so that by the time the Bronze Age began (about 5000 years ago), Langham would have been a place of farms, and so it essentially remains to this day.

There is one often-overlooked aspect of the agricultural revolution. Hunter-gatherers can roam; farmers cannot. They are fixed in one place, with an investment in the land. Yet their sociobiology has not had time to evolve, and like the hunter-gatherers they live in tribes, or, as we would have it, villages.

Division of labour among hunter-gatherers is usually primitive and ill defined. The men tend to go out hunting while the women remain with the children and do the gathering – of plants, fungi and small animals that are easily caught. There might be a shaman or a medicine man, and of course a chief; in pre-history such tribes in Europe are believed sometimes to have been matriarchal. Certain people in a tribe naturally have a talent for particular activities, such as tracking or making baskets, but on the whole everyone takes a hand at everything. What is more, back then in ‘Langham’ everyone had to get along with his fellows or risk expulsion, which meant a premature, horrific and inevitable death alone in the forest.

A fixed population is much easier to guide, control and, perhaps, exploit than a mobile one, and so was born the priestly or political class. Dissent, to some degree, becomes possible; and division of labour becomes much more marked. It is division of labour that enables civilisation.

One of the products of civilisation is writing, the keeping of records, and the next feature in this series will look at the written history of our little village.