Bronze Age men had axes
to hew down the wood, they had also sickles and reaping-hooks to cut
their crops, and a sort of hoe or scraper to till the soil with.
Specialisation reached a very high pitch. All the remains of the Bronze
Age show us an agricultural people by no means idyllic in their habits
to be sure, and not all disposed to join the Peace Preservation
Society, but cultivating large stretches of wheat or barley, grinding
their meal in regular mills, and possessed of implements of
considerable diversity, some of which I shall proceed to notice later.

The evidences of commerce and of navigation are equally obvious. Bronze
itself consists of tin and copper: and there are only two parts of the
world from which tin in any large quantities can be procured--namely,
Cornwall and the Malay Archipelago. The very existence of bronze,
therefore, necessarily implies the existence of a sea-going trade in
tin, for which some corresponding benefits must of course have been
offered by the early purchaser. As a matter of fact, we know with some
probability that it was Cornish tin which first tempted the Phoenicians
out of the inland sea, past the Pillars of Hercules, to brave the
terrors of the open Atlantic. Long before the days of such advanced
navigation, however, the Cornish tin was transported by land across the
whole breadth of Southern Britain and shipped for the Continent from
the Isle of Thanet. A very old trackway runs along the crest of the
Downs from the West Country to Kent, known now as the Pilgrim's Way,
because it was followed in far later times by mediaeval wayfarers from
Somerset and Dorset to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury.
But Mr. Charles Elton has shown conclusively that the Pilgrim's Way is
many centuries more ancient than the martyr of King Henry's epoch, and
that it was used in the Bronze Age for the transport of tin from the
mines in Cornwall to the port of Sandwich. To this day antique ingots
of the valuable metal are often dug up in hoards or finds along the
line of the ancient track. They were evidently buried there in fear and
trembling, long ages since, in what Indian _voyageurs_ still call a
_cache_, by caravans hurriedly surprised by the enemy; and owing to the
unfortunate accident of the possessors all getting killed off in the
ensuing fray, the ingots have been left undisturbed for centuries for
the benefit of antiquaries at the present time. 'It's an ill wind that
blows nobo