British chariots armed with swords or scythes as altogether
apocryphal. The existence of iron in sufficient quantity to be used
for such a purpose is incompatible with contemporary facts, and
unsupported by a single vestige remaining to our time. The country
was then mostly forest, and the roads did not as yet exist upon which
chariots could be used; whilst iron was too scarce to be mounted as
scythes upon chariots, when the warriors themselves wanted it for
swords. The orator Cicero, in a letter to Trebatius, then serving
with the army in Britain, sarcastically advised him to capture and
convey one of these vehicles to Italy for exhibition; but we do not
hear that any specimen of the British war-chariot was ever seen in
Rome.

It is only in the tumuli along the coast, or in those of the
Romano-British period, that iron implements are ever found; whilst in
the ancient burying places of the interior of the country they are
altogether wanting. Herodian says of the British pursued by Severus
through the fens and marshes of the east coast, that they wore iron
hoops round their middles and their necks, esteeming them as
ornaments and tokens of riches, in like manner as other barbarous
people then esteemed ornaments of silver and gold. Their only money,
according to Caesar, consisted of pieces of brass or iron, reduced to
a certain standard weight.*
[footnote...
HOLINSHED, i. 517. Iron was also the currency of the Spartans, but it
has been used as such in much more recent times. Adam Smith, in his
Wealth of Nations (Book I. ch. 4, published in 1776), says, "there is
at this day a village in Scotland where it is not uncommon, I am
told, for a workman to carry nails, instead of money, to the baker's
shop or the alehouse."