Stonehenge

Stonehenge is not medieval.  It was built somewhere around 2500 BC.  But medieval people of course knew it was there, it's hard to miss a circle of huge standing stones, and they had their own theories about it.

 Modern archaeologists of course have had plenty of theories as well.  The current thinking is that it was built during a (relatively) short period at the end of the Stone Age (the Neolithic) which also saw most of the other great stone circles and standing stones erected across Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.  During a period that may have been as short as a century, Neolithic men across the region dragged huge stones many miles and heaved them up into position without machines, horses, or even the wheel.  (One assumes Neolithic women were wondering when the guys would do something useful, like raise some food.)  (Am I sexist in assuming the women had something better to do than create huge erections? of course not.)

And it certainly is a remarkable achievement.  Stonehenge's big stones weigh several tons each. The bluestones, those making a smaller circle in the center of the monument, came from Wales, 175 miles away.  (Stonehenge is unique in this; all the other stone circles in Britain just were built from local stone.)  There is even a site near the original Welsh quarry that has pits spaced the same as the stones at Stonehenge, but with no stones in them (maybe a test run?)  There is also some evidence that the cremated human remains found at Stonehenge are from people who had been living in Wales, perhaps those who had accompanied the bluestones to their final destination.

The biggest Stonehenge stones were all quarried locally, but they still would have needed to be dragged several miles.  And think about trying to heave the lintel stones up on top of the standing stones.  It's no wonder that Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing King Arthur stories in the twelfth century, said that Merlin had magically erected Stonehenge, having brought the stones from Ireland (some millennia-old legend of bluestones coming from Wales?).

In modern popular belief, Stonehenge is often attributed to the Druids and the Celtic peoples, and self-styled pagans like to hold special ceremonies there at the summer and winter solstice (the longest and shortest days of the year).  Stonehenge is indeed lined up with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice, but we know nothing of what this may have meant for the builders' religion.  We know a little about the Druids, but they came along some 2000 years later, making it pointless to assume similarities.

Whatever it meant to the people who built it, Stonehenge has generated lots of meanings in the last thousand years.  It has been taken as King Arthur's "real" round table, as proof that giants used to exist, as a sign of alien visitors from outer space, and of course as an excuse to wear green and do "pagan" dances.  The chronicler William of Huntington, writing in England in the 1130s, was probably more honest than most when he said he had no idea when or why it was built.  He still named it a "wonder of England."

The megalith builders (as they are called) did not only erect stone structures.  They also built huge circles of wood, sometimes made of very old, very tall oaks that would have weighed even more than the stones.  Archaeologists have found the remains of such "wood henges," though they are not visible now as the stone circles are; millennia ago, however, they would have stood as impressive monuments for centuries.

Although we can only guess at what the megalith builders were trying to do, it is interesting to note that they had agriculture, and thus a (fairly) reliable source of food, not needing to wander around hunting and gathering.  Some 4000 years after Stonehenge was built, the Inca emperors in what is now Peru had great stone structures built to honor their gods (and themselves), again using stone-age technology (this was not long before Columbus) and having well-established agriculture.  (They concentrated on walls, rather than standing stones, and smoothed the stones so that they would fit together so tightly you couldn't even slide a piece of paper between them.)

There is a good article on the current scientific understanding of Stonehenge's construction in the August 2022 National Geographic.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval society, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.