Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History

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The Romans were the first people to give Britain shape. They occupied it for 400 years, but after they withdrew the order they had created collapsed into chaos. Slowly, very slowly, order began to return. It came first through the messages of the Christian missionaries, particularly Saint Augustine, who brought back the ideas of Rome, by then a Christian city, to the island which had been abandoned 200 years before. It was enlarged and developed by the Anglo-Saxon kings, the greatest of whom was Alfred the Great, King of Wessex.

Britain succumbed to invasion for the last time in 1066 when the Normans became its rulers, destroyed the Anglo-Saxon way of life and started to lay the foundations of the medieval state. The Catholic Church and the monarchy held the country in their grasp until the Reformation broke them apart. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century was one of the most important acts in a process which would see the evolution of Britain into a nation state. Shakespeare helped give that nation its tongue.

In 1707 Britain joined with Scotland, but managed its relationship with its other neighbour, Ireland, far less successfully. The failure of the Home Rule movement in the nineteenth century would have disastrous consequences for both countries in the twentieth.

Today, in the twenty-first century, Britain is a part of Europe and shares its national aspirations with twenty-seven other countries. The island which carved its identity by withdrawing from the shifts and changes of a continent in turmoil has re-entered the arena from which it came. Once again Britain is replanting its roots.

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_a86383d4-6377-5660-8fea-aeb6161b48f7)

Stonehenge (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

3100 to 2200 BC (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

The huge and ancient stone monument known as Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, is one of Britain’s oldest monuments. Its origins are uncertain. It is surrounded by myth and legend. It belongs to the beginning of Britain.

Stonehenge is an island of antiquity stranded in a twenty-first century melting pot.

If you drive east to west across southern England you may well pass Stonehenge. It stands just a few hundred yards back from the A303, one of the country’s busiest main roads taking traffic to and from the West Country. Travelling westwards you are more than likely to have time to get a good view of it because it is here that the fast dual carriageway funnels into a two-lane road and the traffic queues can be enormous. Stonehenge is an island of antiquity stranded in a twenty-first century melting pot. At this point the journey west crosses a bridge of nearly 5,000 years of history as the achievements of the most ancient rites of man stare stonily towards his most recent and most frenetic.

Stonehenge was built in different phases over many hundreds of years. To begin with, in about 3100 BC, it was a circular ditch with an internal bank and fifty-six holes around its perimeter. A few hundred years later two circles of bluestone were erected. Bluestone is not native to Wiltshire but comes from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire in West Wales. After that the bluestones were dug up and rearranged and the familiar sarsen stones brought to the site. These form Stonehenge’s most famous image of the pillars with lintels across the top. The sarsen stones came from Avebury, about 18 miles to the north. In the last phase, about 2200 BC, the bluestones were put back again to form a circle and a horseshoe inside the sarsen pillars. All these different arrangements took place over hundreds of years and leave many questions unanswered. What was Stonehenge for? Who built it? How did the bluestones get from Wales to Wiltshire? Throughout the history of Britain people have tried to answer these questions, adapting their answers to suit the age in which they live.

In the twelfth century Henry of Huntingdon wrote a history of the English people from the Roman invasion to the reign of Henry II. He described Stonehenge as one of the four wonders of Britain but declared that no one knew why it had been built, or by whom. His contemporary, Geoffrey of Monmouth, came up with a rather more colourful account. Stonehenge, he said, was constructed as a memorial to nobles who had been slain in battle by the Saxon chieftain, Hengist. He dates the origin of the monument to the time of Aurelius Ambrosius, who emerged from the chaos following the Romans’ retreat to lead Britain in its war against the Saxons. According to legend, Ambrosius was the uncle of King Arthur and having decided to build the monument sought advice from the magician Merlin. Merlin told him of a stone circle in Ireland called the giants’ dance. Ambrosius sent his men to fetch it and, with Merlin’s help, they brought it back to Wiltshire. A sacred ceremony was held at Stonehenge where Ambrosius was crowned as king of his people: myth and ritual were even then part of its story.

In the seventeenth century, James I, always interested in scholarship, asked his Surveyor-General, Inigo Jones, to carry out an investigation into the reasons why Stonehenge was built. Inigo Jones was a great architect but a somewhat naive archaeologist. His love of classical antiquity influenced the design of the magnificent buildings he built for his king in London, but they got him off on the wrong foot as far as Stonehenge was concerned. He came to the conclusion that it was a Roman temple to the god Coelus. Once again the influences of the age, rather than historical accuracy, had been used to determine the origins of this ancient monument.

Later in the seventeenth century, another study of Stonehenge began to get a bit closer to the truth. John Aubrey was an antiquarian, biographer and gossip whose book, Brief Lives, is a highly entertaining account of many of the most distinguished people of the time. He was interested in objects as much as people and recorded his observations of Stonehenge in a book about British monuments. In particular he noticed the depressions or holes around the perimeter of the original ditch, which have since been called the ‘Aubrey Holes’ in his honour. He surmised correctly that Stonehenge belonged to an early British civilisation, but in trying to locate its origins more exactly he came up with the idea that it was a Druid temple. This thought fuelled the imagination of the eighteenth century. The concept of a mysterious ruin set in a quiet landscape, its eerie history of ceremony and sacrifice blending with the force of nature played perfectly into the romantic ideas of the time. Stonehenge obligingly fell in with fashion.

It was only in the twentieth century that Stonehenge started seriously to reveal at least a few of its secrets. Up until the end of the First World War it was privately owned. Back in the seventeenth century, when he had first seen it, James I had tried to acquire it but had been unsuccessful. In 1918 it belonged to a successful local livestock farmer and racehorse owner, Cecil Chubb, who had bought it on a whim for £6,600 three years earlier. He gave it to the nation and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, made him a baronet as a token of thanks. After that, the monument began to be subjected to serious examination over an extended period of time. It became the responsibility of the Ministry of Works which, worried that the property it had inherited might be unsafe because of falling stones, asked an archaeologist, William Hawley, to carry out an extensive excavation. He would be the first person to take a prolonged look at Stonehenge for many years. He replaced stones that had fallen down and secured others that were in danger of toppling over. He found human remains which indicated that the monument might have been used as a site for funerals. Most importantly, he was the first person to realise that Stonehenge was not just one monument, but the result of different activity by different groups of people over many hundreds of years. In the 1950s and early 1960s, as further research revealed how Stonehenge probably looked when it was first built, other stones were put back in their original positions. The monument we see today is therefore to a certain extent a work of restoration. Previous ages had allowed it to suffer at the mercy of time and weather, leaving it to exist as a ruin in almost any form. It is only the meticulous knowledge of our own time that has let us see it as the early people who built it in the first place might have done.

With the work of restoration distinguished scientists, as well as archaeologists and historians, have turned their attention to Stonehenge. A theory developed that the monument was placed where it was as a temple to the sun and that the individual pillars and stones could predict eclipses of the sun and the moon. Computer science was used to try to substantiate this theory and other monuments were analysed to see whether they had similar characteristics. It established that there was every reason to believe that Stonehenge and other ancient places in Britain had astronomical connections and could have been used to interpret and predict the movement of the heavens. More extravagant theories have grown up alongside these purely scientific conclusions. Some people believe that ley lines connect places such as Stonehenge with other sites in Britain, emitting psychic or mystical energy. Their magical powers are part of an old religion that in a free and tolerant world can now be reborn to celebrate its rituals in the temples from which it was driven long ago. The earliest emblem of Britain’s past still has a place in the life of the country today.

None of this of course provides final answers to the questions that still surround Stonehenge. It seems incredible, for instance, that the early inhabitants of Britain transported heavy bluestones – some of them weighing as much as 4 or 5 tons each – from Wales to Wiltshire. In 2001, a group of enthusiastic volunteers tried to see whether such a feat might be possible and, with £100,000 of lottery money behind them, constructed a replica of a Bronze Age raft with a piece of bluestone as cargo. It ended up at the bottom of the sea. A more prosaic explanation could be that the movements of glaciers carried the stones from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain, but that will not prevent the invention of other notions about the origins of Stonehenge. In March 2008 archaeologists returned to the site to begin important new excavations. Their work was organised and funded by the BBC for a television programme and they were hoping to prove that ancient man transported the bluestones from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain because of their healing properties. The archaeologists broke through to a layer which once held smaller bluestones and unearthed fragments of pottery and artefacts. Stonehenge, they said, could have been a ‘Neolithic Lourdes’. Britain’s most ancient monument once again captured the spirit of the age as television went in search of its secrets.

At Stonehenge, ancient and modern will always coalesce. It belongs to a time when the evidence of history is nothing more than a silent landscape and a few fragmentary relics beneath our feet. We know very little about it or the people who built it, but its deep, forgotten past is where our history begins.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_b57eaa29-a59b-55d9-b4ee-3caf9727e15c)

The Roman Invasion of Britain (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

43 AD (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

In 43 AD, Roman forces under the command of the Emperor Claudius invaded Britain and began what became a complete conquest of the country. Britain remained a province of the Roman Empire for nearly 400 years.

In his famous novel, I, Claudius, Robert Graves gives us a striking picture of the Emperor who conquered Britain. Hidden from public view by a family ashamed of his stammer and slobbering, he is dragged from hiding by the assassins who have murdered his predecessor, the mad Caligula. They make him Emperor, confident they can control him. What they do not realise is that Claudius’s behaviour is the result of illness, not foolishness: he will make a better Emperor than they think.

Graves’s portrait is based on the writings of the Roman historian, Suetonius, who described the activities of the first twelve Roman Emperors in often lurid detail. According to him, corruption, a thirst for power and lust seemed to be the principal characteristics of the men who ruled half the world. Their policies, if they deserve such a description, were designed to keep them in power by appeasing the people. The conquest of Britain fell into this category. It began because a new Emperor needed to consolidate his position: 400 years of Roman Britain started in order to give Claudius the adulation he needed from the citizens of Rome.

Claudius was not the first Roman leader to cross the Channel in an attempt to incorporate Britain into Rome’s vast foreign conquests. In 55 and 54 BC Julius Caesar, then master of all of Gaul, decided to invade. His first expedition was on quite a small scale, but his second was much larger. In 54 BC he landed with five legions (about 25,000 men) and 2,000 cavalrymen somewhere near Deal on the Kent coast, and throughout the summer successfully fought his way north until he crossed the Thames, probably at Brentford in Middlesex. The purpose of this expedition is unclear. Some time before the end of the summer he decided to return to Gaul. He never went back to Britain although he recorded, as he did in many places where he fought, his impressions of the people. The men dyed their bodies with blue woad, he said, which made them look very frightening in battle; they wore their hair long, but shaved everywhere else apart from on the upper lip; and they shared their wives among them. These were the people that he had invaded, subdued and left behind. It would be nearly a hundred years before the Romans returned.

Claudius, aware that his survival as Emperor would require something more substantial than his reputation as a fool, turned to Britain as the place where he could demonstrate military prowess. It also made some strategic sense. Unless brought under Roman control, the island of Britain could have proved a useful base for the Empire’s enemies to attack its possessions in Gaul. In May 43 AD, a large force of 40,000 men under the command of Aulus Plautius landed on the south coast, though not before their commander persuaded them to set sail in the first place. The soldiers did not like the idea of a journey into an unknown world. Once across the Channel, however, their campaign went well. They defeated the British chieftain, Caractacus, who fled to Wales, and by the autumn were ready to receive their Emperor so that he could enjoy his triumph. At Colchester eleven British tribal kings surrendered to Claudius, who was now able to return to Rome as warlord as well as Emperor. The Senate voted to build him a triumphal arch in recognition of his victory. The inscription on it read that he had ‘brought barbarian peoples beyond the Ocean for the first time under the rule of Rome’. The Roman occupation of Britain had begun.

The Romans took Britain very seriously, grasping possession of their new province with ferocious speed. Within seven years of Claudius’s triumph they had established a base at London, built a bridge across the Thames and begun to construct a road network throughout the south of England. Caractacus came out of Wales to confront them but was betrayed by a rival tribe and sent as a prisoner to Rome where Claudius pardoned him. Ten years later, Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni in the east of England, attacked Colchester, London and St Albans. Apparently tall with long, red hair, Boudicca, and her army of tribesmen, succeeded in terrifying the Roman invaders. In 61 AD her vast troop of footsoldiers and charioteers, their women and children watching from wagons drawn up around them, faced a much smaller Roman force. The site of the battlefield is not known, but it is believed to be in the Midlands, possibly near what is now Wroxeter in Shropshire. Roman discipline utterly defeated British size. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by the victorious forces of the Empire and Boudicca herself died shortly afterwards, perhaps by her own hand.

By the end of the 70s AD most of England was under Roman control; however the Britons of Scotland remained unconquered. Agricola, who became Governor of Britain in 78 AD, decided to carry the fight into their territory and won a major victory at Mons Graupius near Aberdeen in 84 AD. He claimed that Scotland had been subdued, but in this he spoke prematurely.

At Mons Graupius the commander of the Britons made a speech to his troops in which, the Roman historian Tacitus tells us, he told his men that they were all loyal to one united race. The Roman troops, he cried, had no such glorious unity because they came from all over the world. His description of the Roman army’s origins was quite accurate, although he was unwise to assume that this was a military weakness. The Roman Empire was by its very nature cosmopolitan and the men who fought for it came from many different backgrounds. Aulus Plautius, Claudius’s commander, had been a provincial governor in Eastern Europe, in what is now Hungary and Austria. Suetonius Paulinus, the commander who defeated Boudicca, was the first Roman general to cross the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. Agricola, the victor at Mons Graupius – and, incidentally, Tacitus’s father-in-law – was born in southern France, in what is now Provence. The conquest of Britain was carried out by men whose home was where duty took them. Wherever they were – in the African desert, the German forest, the English fen or the Scottish mountain – they rigorously applied their abilities to the cause of imperial victory.

Apart from Claudius, two other Emperors stand out as having an important part to play in the history of Roman Britain. The first, Hadrian, became Emperor on the death of Trajan in 117 AD. He turned out to be a highly competent ruler, conscientious and interested in learning about the territories he controlled. Like many Emperors of Rome, he had to watch his back: he had enemies everywhere. He therefore undertook long visits to the furthest outposts of the Empire to meet the troops who defended it. This was a wise strategy. It inspired loyalty in men who, separated from central government by long tours of duty in remote corners of the world, could become tempted into revolt. Hadrian seems to have enjoyed these expeditions, taking satisfaction from the task of securing his Empire’s frontiers. In 122 AD he came to Britain at a time when, as far as we can tell, the northern part had been suffering from the invasion of barbarian tribes. Determined to put a stop to these – and to indulge in his love of building – the Emperor decided to construct a wall across Roman Britain’s northern frontier. Picking the narrowest neck of territory that he thought suitable for the purpose, he built a great stone defence system from the estuary of the River Tyne in the east to the shores of Solway Firth in the west. This was Hadrian’s Wall, 80 Roman miles long (73.5 in modern miles) with a small fort at one-mile intervals along the whole stretch of it. The size and shape of the wall changed as the Romans developed their thinking during its construction; most of it was completed within eight years. It was the biggest fortified frontier in the whole of the Roman Empire, a resolute emblem of its enormous power. After Hadrian died in 138 AD his successor, Antoninus Pius, who may have decided that he needed a military exploit to prove that he was not too mild-mannered, decided to reoccupy southern Scotland. He ordered his legions to move north and built another wall – the Antonine Wall – from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde. With an eye to economy he had it made out of turf. But the Pictish tribes of Scotland proved hard to subdue. When Antoninus’s successor, Marcus Aurelius, came to power the Romans retreated to behind Hadrian’s great edifice where they stayed until the time came for them to leave altogether. Marcus Aurelius is today remembered more for his writings as a stoic philosopher than as an Emperor, and in the rearrangement of Britain’s northern defences he seems to have taken a leaf out of his own book: ‘That which is not good for the bee-hive,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be good for the bees.’

The other great Roman Emperor inextricably caught up in the affairs of Britain was Constantine. In 305 AD he left the intrigues of the capital of the Empire behind to campaign with his father, Constantius, in Britain. Constantius was a Caesar, a junior emperor in charge of the northern provinces. Father and son fought against the Pictish tribes still untamed north of Hadrian’s Wall, but in 306 Constantius died at York. His troops then proclaimed his son Emperor, even though the Praetorian Guard in Rome had nominated a rival, Maxentius. Some historians believe that Constantine built the great Roman walls around York at the time of his proclamation. Whatever the truth there is no doubt that at a crucial moment in the history of the whole Roman Empire, this ancient British city became the centre from which its future sprang. From there Constantine would go on to defeat his rival outside the gates of Rome and, as one of the greatest Emperors in the last century of Roman power, tolerate the rise of Christianity, create a new capital in Constantinople and die converted to the Christian religion.

The country developed froma wild, barbarous land intoa unified self-governingprovince – Britannia.

The impact of the Roman occupation on Britain was profound. The country developed from a wild, barbarous land inhabited by fierce tribes into a unified self-governing province – Britannia. A network of roads linked all corners of the land; a single currency created a coherent market for trade; and the refinements of Roman civilisation brought fine buildings and magnificent fortifications to the towns and cities. Latin became the language of law and education. The British adopted the customs and attitudes of their governors: many of them wore togas. British metals were taken back to the heart of the Empire to be fashioned into weapons and armour, and wine and exotic fruits made their way northwards in return. Britain developed into what it would become again – a trading nation. But no empires last forever. By the end of the fourth century AD, Britain, like the rest of Rome’s once indomitable possessions, was suffering from invasion on all sides. The Empire had finally cracked in two with an eastern half based in Constantine’s capital of Constantinople and a western part still trying desperately to cling to power in Rome. In 410 AD the last Emperor of the western Empire, Honorius, told the people of Britain that he had no legions left to defend them. Britannia, Rome’s most northerly outpost, the troublesome island that had over four centuries succumbed to its power and become one of its most precious possessions, was abandoned. The unity of Roman Britain broke apart and the country surrendered to the tribal ambitions of foreign marauders. The Dark Ages had begun.

I remember once being involved in a documentary series for the BBC with the historian, John Roberts. It was called ‘The Triumph of the West’ and in it he explained how Western ideas and values had grown to be such a dominant force throughout the world. One sequence was filmed in the Forum in Rome. Roberts talked about Charlemagne, who in the late eighth century conquered a large part of Western Europe and tried to bring some sense of order to the chaos created by the wars of its different tribes. In 800 Charlemagne entered Rome where the Pope made him Holy Roman Emperor, a title that would exist in European history for centuries afterwards. Imagine, said Roberts, what it must have been like for Charlemagne, a man who could not write but who was struggling to tame the disruption all around him, to enter the Forum Romanum – a place which he had never seen before and of which he had no conception. He must have realised that the Roman Empire, although it had been extinguished four hundred years before, created a civilisation more advanced and more sophisticated than the one in which he was living.

For Britain, as for the rest of Europe, the collapse of the Roman Empire was an extraordinary period in its history. Nearly everything it had built – its language was one exception – was eventually demolished. It would be 600 years before anything remotely comparable emerged to replace it.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_7efbd495-5003-5d66-aaf8-d0dcc8a5b7c9)

Saint Augustine Arrives in Britain (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

597 AD (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

In 597 AD Saint Augustine landed in Kent as a missionary from the Pope in Rome. At the same time Celtic missionaries were at work in Ireland, Scotland and the North of England. Britain’s beginnings as a Christian nation had begun.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is one of the greatest works in British literature. Published in six volumes over twelve years between 1776 and 1788 it surveys its subject with effortless control, its elegant prose never distracted by the mass of detail it seeks to describe. In the last chapter one short sentence stands out. Summing up his colossal narrative Gibbon wrote: ‘I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.’ In other words religion – Christianity – was for him as much a cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire as was the rise of barbarism. In the main part of the book he devoted two famous chapters to Christianity in which he displayed the sceptical attitudes of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. ‘The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity,’ he wrote; ‘the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.’ He is particularly scathing about miracles: ‘The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church.’ There is much more in the same vein. For Gibbon, Christianity sapped the strength of the Empire and so contributed to its fall.

His views were undoubtedly harsh – the barbarians would probably have sacked Rome with or without Christianity – but in today’s secular age Gibbon’s disenchantment with organised religion must still sound appealing to a lot of people. Whether or not one takes his view, the fact remains that from the start of the seventh century to the middle of the nineteenth, the history of Britain is as much about the history of religion as anything else. Today we may have abandoned Christian teaching in favour of scientific instruction, and prefer a society built on civic concepts of liberty rather than any thoughts of a duty before God, but we were not always like that. Saint Augustine’s mission ensured that Britain was eventually drawn into Europe’s Catholic Church. The Emperors might have gone, but Rome remained a powerful force in the life of Britain.

The history of Britain is as much about the history of religion as anything else.

We know very little about the development of Christianity in Britain during its early years. Rumour has it that Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave up his prepared tomb for the body of Jesus, visited Glastonbury many years after the Crucifixion, but there is no evidence for this. As Christianity developed, its organisation spread all through the provinces of the Roman Empire and by the middle of the second century AD had become established in Britain. The religion prospered as the Empire tottered. In the third century, when Rome was under threat from Asia as well as Northern Europe, Christians were able to evade prosecution as their persecutors turned their attention to more pressing matters. By the beginning of the fourth century they had strengthened sufficiently to become tolerated; by the end of it theirs was the official religion.

The British took on the role of independent thinking even at this very early stage of Christian development. A man called Pelagius, who came from Britain, began to teach a doctrine that denied the idea of Original Sin, and the bishops of Gaul became so worried about its effects that in the early fifth century they sent Saint Germanus to meet with British Christians and explain the errors of their ways. During his visit Germanus went to pay homage at the shrine of Saint Alban, a martyr who had been executed during one of the last crackdowns on Christianity in the middle of the third or possibly at the beginning of the fourth century.

Before Augustine reached Britain, Celtic missionaries had begun their work, starting in Ireland, which was never part of the Roman Empire. Saint Patrick, who in his youth had been captured by raiders and taken to Ireland as a slave, seems to have carried out missions around the early part or middle of the fifth century. Much later Saint Columba travelled from Ireland to Scotland, and had founded the monastery on the Western Isle of Iona by the time Saint Augustine arrived in Kent. Christianity had successfully survived the Roman withdrawal and was continuing its work among the people of Britain. Up until the end of the sixth century, however, this work had been concentrated in Celtic areas, among the people who had previously fled west and north when German and Scandinavian tribes invaded in the wake of the Romans’ departure. It had not yet penetrated the lives of these new arrivals who were masters of Britain’s central areas. The decision to try to convert them was the most important in the whole history of Christianity in Britain.

The man responsible for Augustine’s mission was Pope Gregory. The story goes that some years before, while still an abbot, he was walking in the Forum when he saw some English slave boys for sale. Intrigued by their blond hair he asked the slave owner where they came from. ‘They are Angles,’ he was told. ‘Not Angles, but angels,’ he is reported to have replied, ‘and should be co-heirs with the angels in heaven.’ On becoming Pontiff Gregory, remembering the Saxon children he had seen in the Forum, he decided to put into action a plan to convert them and chose Augustine for the task. Augustine collected a group of monks to help him and set off. They travelled from Rome, through southern France, and stopped to rest at a monastery on the island off Lérins of the coast of Provence. Here in the pleasant surroundings of the Mediterranean they began to hear frightening stories of the dangers of travelling through Gaul, as well as being treated to tales of the Saxons and their murderous ways in the untamed country to the north. They asked Gregory if they could come home, but the Pope refused. ‘It is better not to begin a good work at all, than to begin it and then turn back,’ he told them in a letter. Suitably reprimanded, the little band pressed on. They travelled up the Rhône valley, spent the winter in Paris and in 597 AD crossed the Channel landing at Thanet in Kent. Their whole expedition had been carefully planned. They chose Kent because its king, Ethelbert, whose territory extended as far north as the Humber, was married to a Christian.

The mission was a great success. Ethelbert was converted and by December of that year over 10,000 of his people had been baptised. The missionaries found the ruins of an old Romano-British church in Canterbury which they rebuilt. By the end of the seventh century it had become the spiritual headquarters of the leader of the Christian Church in England – and remains so to this day. Pope Gregory sent Augustine reinforcements from Rome and with them letters explaining how he saw Christianity spreading through the country. He laid out in considerable detail the future organisation of the Church, recommending that the country be split into two halves, north and south, as it had been in Roman times, with the northern section based in York. Augustine failed to complete this part of his task, mainly because the Celtic bishops refused to cooperate with him. Augustine had been less than tactful in his second important meeting with the Celts, refusing to rise from his chair when they approached him. They were naturally suspicious of him and his Roman ways: this sort of behaviour convinced them that he was not to be trusted. The Christian religion had its divisions then as now. But the planning and care with which Augustine approached his task ensured that Roman ideas prospered, and eventually triumphed, in the way in which the English Church was organised. Pope Gregory was a wise guide. He knew how easy it was to lose people after they had been converted: they needed your constant attention. He urged Augustine not to abandon the old pagan rituals completely, but to incorporate them into new forms of worship. The heathen midwinter solstice, for instance, was slotted in to coincide with the birth of Christ. Old temples were consecrated as new churches, and Christianity embraced rather than uprooted the practices it intended to replace.

Early in the sixth century, long before Pope Gregory planned Augustine’s mission to England, a monk called Saint Benedict wrote a rule book for the monastic life. He described a monastery as ‘a school for the Lord’s service’, and set out the qualities a monk needed to have. ‘Idleness,’ he said, ‘is the enemy of the soul.’ Work, obedience and humility were essential to a life of devotion. Monks should own nothing and share everything. Saint Benedict told them what they should eat, what they should drink, what they should wear and when they should worship. His book became the basis upon which monasteries all over Western Europe were run: the discipline of the early Christian monks made them a powerful force capable not only of putting down deep roots in a single place, but also going out into the world as the persuasive agents of conversion. In Britain the growth of monasteries proved to be an important part of the country’s submission to the Christian message. Lindisfarne, founded by Saint Aidan in 635, became the centre for wresting Northumbria – which in those days made up the whole of the North of England – from pagan worship.

The date of Augustine’s death is not known but he seems to have died very early in the seventh century, probably around 604 AD. The English Church prospered but arguments continued about the proper days for feasts and important celebrations. In 664 AD the King of Northumbria, Oswy, called a synod at the abbey in Whitby to resolve the disputes between the Celtic and Roman Churches. The southern kingdoms of Wessex, Kent and Essex were following ritual according to the teachings of Rome, but the north preferred the Celtic way that had been taught them by Saint Columba and his missionaries from Iona. Oswy, influenced as much by a desire to form political alliances with his fellow princes in the south as he was by religious convictions, listened to the debate and pronounced in favour of Rome. ‘Peter is the guardian of the gates of Heaven, and I shall not contradict him,’ he is supposed to have said and, mindful of his own salvation, added: ‘otherwise, when I come to the gates of Heaven, he who holds the keys may not be willing to open them.’ All bishops and monasteries were brought under the authority of the Archbishop in Canterbury where Saint Augustine had built his church nearly seventy years before. The mission sent from Rome had finally triumphed and the long, troubled history of the Catholic Church in Britain had begun.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_9c928d01-9bf5-528f-8e30-e66219bb252b)

Alfred the Great Becomes King of Wessex (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

871 AD (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

Alfred the Great was the most important Anglo-Saxon king to rule in Britain between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman invasion of 1066. By protecting his kingdom against conquest by the Vikings, he ensured the survival of the English language and English laws.

‘Rule Britannia!’ is one of Britain’s favourite patriotic songs. Even those who find its expressions of national superiority a little hard to take can find themselves jolted into acquiescence when it is belted out with gusto at events like the Last Night of the Proms. It has been a hit ever since it was first performed in the grounds of Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire in 1740 where it was the last, rousing number in a masque composed by Thomas Arne for the daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The masque tells the story of a wise, brave king who has fled from his enemies to live anonymously in exile among his people. He is visited by a spirit who tells him not to despair. He rallies, rounds up his troops and leads them to victory. The plot ends as the King’s son announces that British values have triumphed – ‘See liberty, virtue and honour appearing’ – and then comes the song that tells us ‘Britons never will be slaves.’ The masque is called Alfred.

Alfred was a good subject for Thomas Arne’s entertainment. The Prince of Wales was the centre of opposition to the King’s prime minister, Robert Walpole. He and his followers called themselves ‘patriots’ – so it suited their purposes to make a connection between their beliefs and those of Alfred, the patriot king who had saved his country from the tyranny of the Viking invaders. In the early eighteenth century, Alfred came to be seen as the perfect representation of British liberty and justice. The gardens at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, one of the great ornaments of the English landscape, contain a ‘Temple of British Worthies’ designed in 1734 by William Kent in which King Alfred is described as the ‘mildest, justest, most beneficient of kings’. He ‘crush’d corruption, guarded liberty and was the founder of the English constitution’. He is the only king in British history to be called ‘Great’. He looms out of the Dark Ages like a beacon of safety. He is seen as an image of courage and common sense around which the British can build the continuity of their history. Without Alfred all might have been lost. He is the link to our true past.

By the beginning of the ninth century Britain was broadly divided into the Celtic areas of Wales, Scotland and Cornwall and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. The highly successful King of Mercia, Offa, who ruled in the second half of the eighth century, had built a fortification along the length of his boundary with the Celtic tribes to the west. Offa’s Dyke effectively created the outline of the country which has been known as Wales ever since. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had emerged through battle and conquest between rival warlords. Since the middle of the seventh century they had fallen under the command of the Roman Church and their monks and clergy held enormous power. The Church was divided into parishes which supervised the needs of the people in their immediate vicinity. The abbots and monks could read and write, but many of the people to whom they preached could not. The clergy became the administrators of many aspects of everyday life, making wills and apportioning land. Superstitious kings, anxious to save their souls, were often only too happy to grant estates to the abbeys and monasteries that were growing up everywhere, and the Church was equally happy to benefit from this need for spiritual insurance. Already the very early signs of feudal society were beginning to emerge, a world in which each man had his place and was expected to keep to it. The Anglo-Saxons were farmers and woodsmen. They lived in clusters in small townships or in groups alone in the forest. They were suspicious of each other and did not take kindly to strangers. Then, into this quiet, inward-looking, agricultural world came the Vikings.

The Vikings were seafarers: the Anglo-Saxons were landsmen. Towards the end of the eighth century and into the beginning of the ninth, Viking sailors began to cross the North Sea from Denmark and Norway to loot monasteries and churches positioned on the British coast. Throughout the ninth century the Vikings fanned out all over Europe in search of treasure to steal and land to conquer and some went further afield, across the Atlantic to the coast of North America. The British invasions came mainly from Denmark. Great armies of Danes, different bands of warriors who had agreed to unite behind a single leader for the purpose of carrying out a raid, landed on the shores of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. Their numbers grew as they learned more about the prizes Britain had to offer. By the end of the ninth century they had created ‘Danelaw’, the rule of Vikings over Anglo-Saxons, across the whole of Northumbria, Mercia and most of Wessex. Only the western end of Wessex, Somerset and Devon, the furthest point in England from their Danish base, had not yet fallen under Viking control.

Alfred became King of Wessex in 871. He had the foresight to get a friend and confidant of his, Bishop Asser, to write his biography and much of what we know about him comes from this. His four elder brothers, three of whom had served as Kings of Wessex for a brief period of time, had died, perhaps killed in fights against the Danes. He was only twenty-one when he succeeded to the throne but experience of fighting the Vikings meant that he was an ideal choice to take over. He was not in good health and his natural temperament seems to have been for scholarship rather than war. He was a devout Christian.

In 878 the Danes mounted a surprise attack. Alfred was nearly captured and had to retreat into the Somerset marshes. The apocryphal story of his burning the cakes probably stems from this period: the lonely, troubled King so lost in thought while he shelters amidst his people that he forgets to watch the cakes before the fire as the farmer’s wife has told him. We have no evidence for this incident. What we do know is that this was a time of crisis for him. ‘King Alfred, with a few of his nobles and some knights and men of his household, was in great distress leading an unquiet life in the woods and marshes of Somerset,’ Bishop Asser tells us. ‘He had no means of support except what he took in frequent raids by stealth or openly from the pagans, or indeed from Christians who had submitted to pagan rule.’ From this position he managed to regroup and defeat the Danish leader, Guthrum, at Edington in Wiltshire. This decisive victory led to the Treaty of Wedmore in 878 in which Guthrum agreed to be baptised and to withdraw to behind the lines of existing Danelaw, leaving Wessex free. Alfred consolidated this victory eight years later when he recaptured London from the Vikings, and succeeded in beating them off when they attacked again in the mid-890s AD. This was a heroic achievement. The wars against the Vikings had left the Saxons demoralised and recalcitrant. They often resented royal orders and sometimes deserted to the other side. Alfred must have displayed impressive qualities of leadership to maintain an army capable of defeating the Danes. He knew he had no choice: it was the Vikings’ custom to kill the leaders of the forces they defeated in battle.

Alfred’s victory against Guthrum temporarily preserved the Anglo-Saxon tradition in a foreign world, but it might not have lasted had the victorious King not then demonstrated that he was as good a governor as he was a general. He ruled Wessex for another twenty-one years after the Treaty of Wedmore, a period in which he set about trying to improve the standards of education at his court. He recruited scholars from across the Channel where, following the civilising efforts of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century, standards of literacy were higher. He was determined to resist the encroachments of the pagan Vikings and encouraged his clergy to improve both their teachings and writings. Most significantly he translated books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon, including Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also introduced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first record of historical events to be written in English.

Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come.

He also turned to the administration of his kingdom laying out laws, as other Anglo-Saxon kings had done, in his Doom Book. He wanted to protect weaker members of his disheartened country pronouncing: ‘Any judgement should be even, not one judgement for the wealthy and another for the poor.’ He provided a structure for rents and taxes, regulating how much people had to pay and to whom. He also introduced a system of fines – wergild – the money to be paid by those who committed crimes. Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come under other rulers of Britain. They could own land in their own name; there was no natural right for a first-born son to inherit; no woman could be sold or forced into marriage; and wives were entitled to divorce their husbands.

Alongside all of this Alfred strengthened his country’s defences, copying the earthwork forts which the Danish used very successfully. He built a strong administrative system and, aware of how vulnerable his kingdom had been from attacks from the sea, created a fleet. Taken together these things gave his people a primitive nationhood. Alfred knew they needed an army for protection, and laws for their administration, but he also realised that these on their own would not be enough to keep them safe forever. To survive Wessex needed things that it believed in, that were worth fighting for. Alfred wanted his people to understand the value of their own history and the importance of their Christian learning. The importance of their past was their best defence against the uncertainties of their future. The little nation of Wessex was an embryo from which grew ideas and methods which would heavily influence the future course of British history.

In 1693 an Anglo-Saxon jewel was found in Somerset, not far from Athelney where Alfred hid before his successful counterattack against the Danes. It is made of gold and enamel and covered with a piece of rock crystal. The purpose of the jewel is unclear, but some believe it to be an aestel, a book pointer, which Alfred intended to send to his bishops with his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Another theory is that it might have been a symbol of office for Alfred himself, or for one of his officials. The face of the jewel has a figure on it which may be Christ representing the incarnate ‘Wisdom of God’, or possibly the spirit of Sight. Whatever its use might have been, it is a beautiful relic from a time more than eleven hundred years ago when the Anglo-Saxon people of England faced the possibility of virtual extermination at the hands of a savage enemy. The jewel, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, bears the inscription, in Anglo-Saxon: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’

Alfred died at the age of about fifty in 899 AD. In the biography that he commissioned from Bishop Asser he comes across almost as a saint, and succeeding ages have not demurred from that opinion of him. It was not only the eighteenth century that held him up as an icon of liberty. In the next century Charles Dickens in A Child’s History of England called him ‘the noble king … whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance nothing could shake’. Today we tend to take a more objective view. Alfred’s achievements were momentous, though we probably feel they fell short of sainthood. But then a man does not need to be a saint to inspire affection or gratitude. When we think of the plight of Wessex in the second half of the ninth century and reflect on the King who rose out of the marshes of Somerset to rebuild his kingdom in such an extraordinary way, we realise that, saint or not, we owe a great deal to Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon King, and for the things he did. We might even say: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’