Later in the seventeenth century, another study of Stonehenge began to get a bit closer to the truth. John Aubrey was an antiquarian, biographer and gossip whose book, Brief Lives, is a highly entertaining account of many of the most distinguished people of the time. He was interested in objects as much as people and recorded his observations of Stonehenge in a book about British monuments. In particular he noticed the depressions or holes around the perimeter of the original ditch, which have since been called the ‘Aubrey Holes’ in his honour. He surmised correctly that Stonehenge belonged to an early British civilisation, but in trying to locate its origins more exactly he came up with the idea that it was a Druid temple. This thought fuelled the imagination of the eighteenth century. The concept of a mysterious ruin set in a quiet landscape, its eerie history of ceremony and sacrifice blending with the force of nature played perfectly into the romantic ideas of the time. Stonehenge obligingly fell in with fashion.
It was only in the twentieth century that Stonehenge started seriously to reveal at least a few of its secrets. Up until the end of the First World War it was privately owned. Back in the seventeenth century, when he had first seen it, James I had tried to acquire it but had been unsuccessful. In 1918 it belonged to a successful local livestock farmer and racehorse owner, Cecil Chubb, who had bought it on a whim for £6,600 three years earlier. He gave it to the nation and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, made him a baronet as a token of thanks. After that, the monument began to be subjected to serious examination over an extended period of time. It became the responsibility of the Ministry of Works which, worried that the property it had inherited might be unsafe because of falling stones, asked an archaeologist, William Hawley, to carry out an extensive excavation. He would be the first person to take a prolonged look at Stonehenge for many years. He replaced stones that had fallen down and secured others that were in danger of toppling over. He found human remains which indicated that the monument might have been used as a site for funerals. Most importantly, he was the first person to realise that Stonehenge was not just one monument, but the result of different activity by different groups of people over many hundreds of years. In the 1950s and early 1960s, as further research revealed how Stonehenge probably looked when it was first built, other stones were put back in their original positions. The monument we see today is therefore to a certain extent a work of restoration. Previous ages had allowed it to suffer at the mercy of time and weather, leaving it to exist as a ruin in almost any form. It is only the meticulous knowledge of our own time that has let us see it as the early people who built it in the first place might have done.
With the work of restoration distinguished scientists, as well as archaeologists and historians, have turned their attention to Stonehenge. A theory developed that the monument was placed where it was as a temple to the sun and that the individual pillars and stones could predict eclipses of the sun and the moon. Computer science was used to try to substantiate this theory and other monuments were analysed to see whether they had similar characteristics. It established that there was every reason to believe that Stonehenge and other ancient places in Britain had astronomical connections and could have been used to interpret and predict the movement of the heavens. More extravagant theories have grown up alongside these purely scientific conclusions. Some people believe that ley lines connect places such as Stonehenge with other sites in Britain, emitting psychic or mystical energy. Their magical powers are part of an old religion that in a free and tolerant world can now be reborn to celebrate its rituals in the temples from which it was driven long ago. The earliest emblem of Britain’s past still has a place in the life of the country today.
None of this of course provides final answers to the questions that still surround Stonehenge. It seems incredible, for instance, that the early inhabitants of Britain transported heavy bluestones – some of them weighing as much as 4 or 5 tons each – from Wales to Wiltshire. In 2001, a group of enthusiastic volunteers tried to see whether such a feat might be possible and, with £100,000 of lottery money behind them, constructed a replica of a Bronze Age raft with a piece of bluestone as cargo. It ended up at the bottom of the sea. A more prosaic explanation could be that the movements of glaciers carried the stones from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain, but that will not prevent the invention of other notions about the origins of Stonehenge. In March 2008 archaeologists returned to the site to begin important new excavations. Their work was organised and funded by the BBC for a television programme and they were hoping to prove that ancient man transported the bluestones from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain because of their healing properties. The archaeologists broke through to a layer which once held smaller bluestones and unearthed fragments of pottery and artefacts. Stonehenge, they said, could have been a ‘Neolithic Lourdes’. Britain’s most ancient monument once again captured the spirit of the age as television went in search of its secrets.
At Stonehenge, ancient and modern will always coalesce. It belongs to a time when the evidence of history is nothing more than a silent landscape and a few fragmentary relics beneath our feet. We know very little about it or the people who built it, but its deep, forgotten past is where our history begins.
In 43 AD, Roman forces under the command of the Emperor Claudius invaded Britain and began what became a complete conquest of the country. Britain remained a province of the Roman Empire for nearly 400 years.
In his famous novel, I, Claudius, Robert Graves gives us a striking picture of the Emperor who conquered Britain. Hidden from public view by a family ashamed of his stammer and slobbering, he is dragged from hiding by the assassins who have murdered his predecessor, the mad Caligula. They make him Emperor, confident they can control him. What they do not realise is that Claudius’s behaviour is the result of illness, not foolishness: he will make a better Emperor than they think.
Graves’s portrait is based on the writings of the Roman historian, Suetonius, who described the activities of the first twelve Roman Emperors in often lurid detail. According to him, corruption, a thirst for power and lust seemed to be the principal characteristics of the men who ruled half the world. Their policies, if they deserve such a description, were designed to keep them in power by appeasing the people. The conquest of Britain fell into this category. It began because a new Emperor needed to consolidate his position: 400 years of Roman Britain started in order to give Claudius the adulation he needed from the citizens of Rome.
Claudius was not the first Roman leader to cross the Channel in an attempt to incorporate Britain into Rome’s vast foreign conquests. In 55 and 54 BC Julius Caesar, then master of all of Gaul, decided to invade. His first expedition was on quite a small scale, but his second was much larger. In 54 BC he landed with five legions (about 25,000 men) and 2,000 cavalrymen somewhere near Deal on the Kent coast, and throughout the summer successfully fought his way north until he crossed the Thames, probably at Brentford in Middlesex. The purpose of this expedition is unclear. Some time before the end of the summer he decided to return to Gaul. He never went back to Britain although he recorded, as he did in many places where he fought, his impressions of the people. The men dyed their bodies with blue woad, he said, which made them look very frightening in battle; they wore their hair long, but shaved everywhere else apart from on the upper lip; and they shared their wives among them. These were the people that he had invaded, subdued and left behind. It would be nearly a hundred years before the Romans returned.
Claudius, aware that his survival as Emperor would require