- Rural Life and Farming -
One particular plant, fat hen (Chenopodium album), occurs very regularly in the
seed evidence from iron age sites. Today it is universally regarded as a weed but in
times past the young plant has been used as a vegetable like spinach for human
consumption; the mature plant can be treated like hay for winter animal fodder and
the seeds can be ground up into a flour for bread-making. Its frequency suggests it
could well have been a serious crop plant in prehistory, especially with regard to its
germination time and short life-cycle. It normally germinates in early June and can
be harvested in early September. Given its diversity of uses, it could have been
employed as a catch crop, being planted when a cereal crop had failed. Alternatively
it could have held its place as a cropping plant in its own right.
The wealth of cereals, legumes and other plants clearly indicates that the Celtic
farmer had a wide variety of choice. In addition, given the knowledge of the micro-
climate and soil types available to him, there can be no doubt that land was used
optimally. It requires but little experience not to plant specific crops where they
won't thrive.
The methods of harvesting crops, especially cereals, offer a number of choices in
that the resources a crop offers are quite considerable. A reference by Strabo which
describes the Celtic practice of specifically harvesting the ears of the cereals focuses
attention upon the problem. No doubt Strabo mentions the practice simply because
it was so different from the Roman harvesting methods. If he was correct in his
observation, and the subsequent Celtic invention of the harvesting machine (vallus)
in the second century AD which strips the heads off the cereals supports him, then
the direct result (substantiated by experiment) is a virtually pure harvest of the cereal
in question. When both emmer and spelt wheats are ripe and ready to harvest, the
joint between the cereal stem and ear, the rachis internode, becomes extremely brittle
and breaks off very easily (Figure I 1.4), so easily, in fact, that the use of a sickle is
made redundant since the ears literally come off in the hand. Impurities in the crop
are represented primarily by black bindweed (Polygonum bilderdykia) amd common
cleavers (Galium aparine) which entwine themselves around the cereal and its ears
and are extremely difficult to separate during harvesting. These too are found -.·ith
carbonized cereal grains. Common cleavers is particularly interesting since it might
well be an indicator of the autumn sowing of cereals. It rarely appears as a weed of
a spnng-sown crop.
The obvious second crop of a cereal field is the straw itself. In the case of barley
straw, the crop is a significant source of winter fodder, while the wheat straw,
less palatable to livestock, is important for thatching, animal bedding, perhaps for
matting and even basket-making. But there is potentially a third crop to be con-
sidered. Inevitably the fields were infested with arable weeds even if the spaces
between the rows were carefully hoed during the growing season. A common ratio
of arable weed to cereals even in a managed field, as revealed by experiment, is 2:3.
Of these arable weeds all of which germinate after sowing and come to fruition
before harvest, quite a percentage are food plants. The vetches, cleavers, oraches,
bindweeds and fat hen, amongst others, are all worth collecting as storable food
supplies. It is not unreasonable, therefore, since all these seeds are found in the
carbonized seed record, to suppose a triple harvesting, first for the 'sport' food
plants, second for the cereal itself and finally for the straw.