This book, therefore is both a variation on the theme of my Five Arts, and ment of my Concise History of England, a political history in which hasize the creative activities of man, and in che Preface wrot d to England’s creative achievements, as opposed to its crimes and ot irrelevant. ‘St loes Comwall = a 1966 5 | 1 Prehistoric Beginnings Some three-quarters of million years 2go primitive man reached north-west Some thee cure quart of milion years couless generations of these slow-wited, shambling creatures spent their che lower animals, gathering food and hunting, their greatest creative tools and weapons # le to help them in ‘Phen about ory thousand years ago, during the las new sock appeared, men not unlike ourselves, the big? of the final period of the Old Stone Age. Teis wit thse new men of Anrignaian and Mapdalenian cies that the history of at begins. The cqld winds blowing off the ice-cap drove them to seek caves, and on their hunters of southem France and northern Is they hoped to kill: the mammoth, to which Europe had been cal, as was that of the spiritual experience. in comparison with Britain, and it arctic climate exhaust impulse. Sanumerable centuries they inhabited caves, ftom Kent's Cavern in Devon to the north of Yorkshire, they left no graphic records on their walls, and the only remains oftheir art ate a few engravings on bone, such as those of a horse's head dnd a masked man engaged in some magic ritual, found at Creswell Crags in compared to the work of the artists of xe and pei, and they ae among the tain, some fifien thousand years ago. necessity coaned tothe self during foCarving fom the tomb at Now Grange, Ireland, «1800 3c. called atchitecture, And even this great age of painting, which Ga vigour and economy of execution has never been surpassed; came to an end twelve thousand years ago There followed the long barren centuries of Mesolithic before 2000 5c, men of the New Stone Age, bringing 2 is the real and succeeding Early Bronze Age ruction covered four centuries, approximat ly altered and added to, and nowhere el of stones nearly fourreen feet high, and 2 horseshoe o cach pair with its separ ffee-standing bluestones repeat the pat ese ks of sandstone, or sarsens, some of them weighing fifty tons, were 1 chalk dow lintels of the lusion of recession the kind of refinement that makes the perfection of the Parthenon, ‘These subdeties, indeed, suggest the influence of Greece of Mycenean times, as do the recently discovered carvings of bronze axcheads and a dagger on one of the ‘Belore it fll into rain Stonehenge must have had mu an Egyptian temple, which, despite its circular shape, y resembles, and that i¢ was a temple there can be little doubt. Surrounded by a Gitch and bank, it stood, as it were, upon a plinth, complete, classical in its fsolation, and Neolithic ‘worshippers on its perimeter would ‘watch the pro- zsion of priests about the ambulatory, and the celebration of mysteries within the sanctuary of the great trilithons. It would be not unlike wate peformance of a play, and perhaps Stonehenge is the prototype of the ‘rounds? Pr vhich medieval miacle plays were presented, and ultimately ofthe ‘wooden O' for which Shakespeare wrote. ofthe grandeur of some ways it ple of «1800-1400 BC. Unlike 2 for asurope W the spa designs brought fom the Meditenancan by the megalith las. A. combination ofthe two traditions is found on the stange litle