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The British Islands
king; but they would often bully him also, and try to make him enforce absurd customs.
Their buildings.And so the ages rolled along, and these ‘Cave men’ or ‘Stone Age men’ began to thin the forests a little, or took advantage of the clearings caused by forest fires. They began to come down from the hilltops, on which their earliest homes had been made, into the valleys. They began to come out of their caves, and began to build themselves villages of little wooden huts; they began to make regular beaten track-ways along the slopes of the downs; they began, perhaps, to raise huge stone temples to their heathen gods. Was it they who built Stonehenge, whose ruins, even now, strike us with wonder and terror?
Their trade with foreigners.Tribe began to exchange its goods with tribe; the flints of Sussex for the deer horns of Devon, for deer horns make excellent pickaxes. Foreign traders came too, to buy the skins of the wild animals, also perhaps to buy slaves. Our ancestors were quite willing to sell their fellow men, captives taken in war from other tribes. What these foreigners brought in return is not very clear; perhaps only toys and ornaments, such as we now sell to savages; perhaps casks of strong drink; perhaps a few metal tools and weapons. For in Southern Europe men had now begun to make tools and weapons of bronze; the day of stone axes was nearly over. So by degrees the Stone Age men of Britain learned that there were richer and more civilized men than themselves living beyond the seas, who had things which they lacked; and, as they coveted such things, they had to make or catch something to buy them with. Therefore they bred more big dogs, killed and skinned more deer, caught more slaves. So trade began in