A New History of England E-Book

Jeremy Black

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Classic Histories Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

In this new and updated edition of A New History of England, historian Jeremy Black takes a cool and dispassionate look at the vicissitudes of over two millennia of English history. He identifies two central themes: the lack of geographical and economic uniformity within England; and the fact that, from the Roman invasion onwards, a united England was often politically associated with part of Europe, from the Scandinavian Cnut to the German origins of the Hanoverians and their descendants. Professor Black steers his way through the labyrinthine complexities of historical narrative with elegance and clarity, providing a lively analysis of major events and personalities and important underlying themes, taking his account right up to the Brexit controversy.

Leseprobe

A NEW HISTORY OF ENGLAND

A NEW HISTORY OF ENGLAND

JEREMY BLACK

First published in 2000

This revised second edition published in 2008

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Jeremy Black, 2000, 2008, 2013

The right of Jeremy Black to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9624 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. A Transformed Environment

2. Before the Romans

3. The Roman Period

4. Anglo-Saxon England

5. The Old English Monarchy 899–1066

6. Norman England 1066–1154

7. Medieval England 1154–1485

8. Tudor England 1485–1603

9. Stuart and Interregnum England 1603–1714

10. The Eighteenth Century 1714–1815

11. The Nineteenth Century 1815–1914

12. Towards the Present 1914–2008

13. Identities

Selected Further Reading

JEREMY BLACK MBE is Professor of History at Exeter University. Among his many publications are the best-selling History of the British Isles (Macmillan), Culloden and the ’45 (Sutton), Pitt the Elder: The Great Commoner (Sutton) and A New History of Wales (Sutton).

For Ron Blumer and Muffie Meyer

PREFACE

This is a new history of England for two linked reasons. The first, mundane, one is that I published a heavily-illustrated history of England in 1993, but the second reason is more important. The situation now appears different, in some important respects very different, to when I was writing in 1992. First and foremost, the future and identity of Britain or, to give the current full title of the state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, have become unclear. This owes most to the process of devolution in Scotland and Wales, but also reflects growing interest in regional government. Second, the possibility that the process of ‘Euro-convergence’ will dramatically alter the character of both England and Britain has become more pressing.

Thus, there is renewed interest in considering the identity of England and it is appropriate to offer an historical dimension to this question. Yet, that does not make clear how best to provide such a dimension, especially for the last three centuries. In particular, the relationship between the history of England and that of Britain, on which I have deliberately written separately, is unclear. Is the history of England that of Britain with the ‘other bits’ left out? If not, how is a history of England to be written? The following is one scholar’s suggestion. Obviously it is not definitive. No work is. Even more so, the contracted length encourages a reflective approach. Many of the readers will be English. I hope that both they and others will consider how they would have written the book, because our different senses of the past, our past and that of others, register history and give it shape. The past provides the framework and vocabulary for experience, just as the future does for hope. By the standards of both, the present is generally found wanting, but past and future also exist in a counterpoint with each other. Those who fear the future tend to praise the past, while those who chart hopeful destinies for the future are often critical of the past. The curse of the past is particularly present for those who seek to empower themselves through past grievances, whether real or imagined; but to abandon history leads to the broken continuity with the past in which identities are lost and values atomised.

I would like to thank Christopher Feeney, a most sympathetic and helpful publisher, Helen Gray, Sarah Flight and Mary Critchley for their valuable editorial work at Sutton Publishing, and Bill Gibson and Robert Peberdy for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. I benefited from the advice of Nigel Aston, John Blair, Sue Bruley, Grayson Ditchfield, Joyce Ellis, Stephen Evans, John Gardiner, David Griffiths, Ann Hughes, Helen Jewell, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Don MacRaild, John Martin, Nigel Saul, Henry Summerson, David Taylor, Alex Walsham, Carl Watkins, Ann Williams, and Jenny Wormald on particular points and sections, and from the opportunity to develop ideas provided by invitations to give lectures in Cambridge, Oxford and on the Queen Mary II. This book is dedicated to two friends whose filmmaking combines clarity and accuracy to an exemplary decree. They are also fun people and wonderful hosts.

INTRODUCTION

It is tempting in 2008 to offer a new history of England that focuses on how the past (and present) would have been different had England not been linked to other parts of the British Isles. Such an approach, that of the what if, for which the technical term is counterfactualism, can be attempted, in some cases with apparent precision. For example, it is possible to take electoral results and subtract those from non-English seats. These certainly suggest a very different national history. Conservatives and their allies would have won nearly every election in the last two centuries (although, of course, the shape of politics might have been very different had only England been at stake).

It is also possible, although far more difficult, to consider how English history would have been different without, for example, the (Welsh) Tudors and the (Scottish) Stuarts. More recently, over the last century, it is noteworthy how many politicians have come from outside England, and it is worth assessing how far politics would have been different without say Lloyd George. The modern Labour party has a particularly powerful Scottish tendency.

Envisaging different courses of political development relates to a wider question of national identity. In the twentieth century, English identity was frequently ‘constructed’, in other words formulated, in terms of images and values that were apparently redolent of a Southern identity. This could be seen, for example, in posters produced both during the major wars and in the inter-war period, with their reassuring, almost domestic, images of Southern Downland. The implicit, and, at times, explicit contrast was with the world of what was termed the Celt. In short, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were assumed to represent a very different culture.

This approach was misleading in a number of ways. Most seriously, it offered essentially unitary accounts both of England and of the Celtic world, and presented these as clearly contrasting. Such unitary accounts were inaccurate, as was the clear contrast. Furthermore, the combination led to the implication that elements that seemed similar to the other were, in some fashion, aberrations, even disloyal or traitorous. This could be seen in the depiction of the industrial regions of northern England as closer to the Celtic world than to English identity and interests: Tyneside, for example, having more in common with Clydeside than with Dorset.

Such an account receives some support from a unitary approach to history. If, for example, the identity of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is to be electorally constructed around images of Southern Downland and/or successive Conservative victories, then Liberal and Labour heartlands indeed appear different because they overlapped considerably with the Celtic world. Yet, this is misleading, because national identity and interests are not uniform, in two senses: geographically uniform and consistent over time; nor are they uncontentious.

The attempt to imply that there is uniformity instead tells us more about images of ‘Englishness’, important and influential as they are, than it does about the far more complex reality of overlapping and often very different, if not contentious and clashing, senses of identity. Alongside nationhood, people can also identify through social structures, religion, gender, ethnicity and other factors, although there is a risk of putting excessive weight on modern ideas of self-identification through gender, ethnicity and other factors.

It is unclear that such categories were as potent in the past as they are today. While, for example, ethnicity was an issue for the early Norman elite or for Jews in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, village, locality and social group seem more potent markers for the majority of the population. Place, however, is a complex issue. Dominant senses of place may relate not to the country or state, but to the locality or region, or to a wider space defined by identities and issues such as religion.

These points should be understood in the following account, as it is not always possible throughout the text to add, let alone dwell on, the caveats just mentioned. A working definition is also adopted from the outset. It is that the English are those who live in England. This approach has its limitations, but it avoids having to deal with the history of where the English went, and in large numbers; and also does justice to the ethnic mix that composed and recomposed the population of England, which is understood throughout the text as what is currently England.

Separately, it is worth noting that the idea of Britain, especially of the Anglicized bits of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, is, in many (but by no means all) respects, essentially a ‘bigger England’ view: an English identity was stamped on some of the ‘Celtic Fringe’ and, in turn, opposition to real or alleged English interests and values helped drive local identities and political activism. This was different historically to the situation within England where a patchwork of sometimes very different regional identities interacted, and cemented, bolstered and changed this England, without the notion of an imposed identity. Alongside the strength of the core of England – Westminster, London, the monarchy, the system – there has been a dynamic interaction of the English regions with the national system, not least thanks to the operation of the social system and of nationally defined political groupings.

Lastly, this book seeks to provide more than just a brief narrative, useful as that is for those who want a shape for the history of the country. Such a shape is indeed best offered by a chronological approach. Yet there is also a need at the outset for a discussion of England itself, a brief mention of its geography, separate consideration of what is in many ways the most important narrative, the human impact on the environment, and also reference to the role of this environment in England’s history.

ONE

A TRANSFORMED ENVIRONMENT

Popular and artistic images of England relate largely to the countryside. The Downland of South-East England has played a particularly important role, but is far from alone in providing or encapsulating senses of place, not only of England but also of parts of the country. Yet this is very much a changed country, a transformed environment. This transformation is true both of the physical environment and of the plants and animals that also live in England.

The pace of change is obvious today. To travel in England is to see the impact of human activity, not only the ever-spreading roads and towns, the asphalt, brick and concrete, but also a countryside that has been transformed. Prior to the arrival of humans, much of England was woodland, but the virgin woodland had been cleared by the end of the Middle Ages in the fifteenth century, and in lowland England in large part by the beginning of the Iron Age (c. 700 BC) and, even more so, before the start of the Middle Ages. Much of England was swamp or marsh, but that has been drained from the Roman period and, more intensively, especially in the case of the East Anglian Fens, from the seventeenth century. Human impact on the environment is apparent even in areas that are not cultivated. Some have been deforested or, like the Suffolk and Norfolk Breckland, subsequently, afforested. In Hampshire, the Waltham and Bere Forests have been destroyed and the Forestry Commission’s Micheldever Forest created to the north. Mining, quarrying, gravel extraction, and animal rearing have affected most of the terrain of England that has not been cultivated. The fall of the water table due to extraction by drilling and pumping, has been a particularly marked feature of the last century. It has led to considerable changes in surface conditions, including the intermittent flow of formerly constant streams. More generally, human light and noise have come to dominate the environment: two developments which rapid technological change has accentuated.

Aside from land-use, the terrain has also been organized by human beings. Territory has been delimited, controlled by fences or stone walls, surveyed, named, and mapped, all processes that mark human control. These processes have been largely directed against possible rival human claimants, and, where the enclosure of common land was concerned, elicited violent human reactions. Yet, for much of history, animals had also to be kept out. Thus, dwellings and farms were organized to keep away animals, such as wolves and foxes. Much of this activity was designed to protect not so much humans as the animals they reared and the plants they grew. Human control of the environment was in a way a partnership: oxen, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and chicken were important, but it was a partnership controlled by humans. The dominance of the environment was an aspect of this control. The bulk of this book will concentrate on history ‘between’ humans, but it is worth remembering that at every stage there is another history, that of the relationship with the environment.

In this relationship, other animals have been wiped out, controlled or domesticated. This process is a continuing one. It has affected well-known and more obscure species. Some, such as the bear and the wolf, were wiped out, the former by the end of the Roman period, the latter, it is alleged, by Peter Corbet in 1281 on the orders of Edward I. Other species, for example the corncrake, became far less common. The corncrake was traditionally a bird of flower-rich meadows and damp grasslands. It declined from the time of the First World War (1914–18) when cooperative hand-cutting by neighbouring farmers who cut their fields in rotation declined. Mechanization led to earlier cutting, which destroyed nests and broods of young. The decline was exacerbated after the Second World War (1939–45) by early cut silage which reduced the success of nesting. Other causes included the drainage and reseeding of damp pastures, and increased staking which led to the loss of essential tall vegetation at the start of the breeding season.

As conservationism gathered pace in the twentieth century, there were efforts to reintroduce animals. Thus, from 1989 red kites were introduced. These birds of prey had, like the golden eagle, been nearly wiped out by gamekeepers. The last kite in Middlesex disappeared about 1777, and in northern England about 1850. By 1989, they were restricted to Wales, although they have since been reintroduced to parts of England, for example Yorkshire. Signs of recovery are also now evident in the case of the bittern, one of England’s rarest and shyest birds. Numbers fell from about seventy booming males in the 1960s to fifteen or sixteen by 1994: population levels are calculated by counting the number of males calling or booming. Large-scale restoration work of the reed beds where they live is now taking place.

It would be misleading to neglect the extent to which the natural environment also played a role in the human story. The geography of the country is important. First, and most importantly, England is the major, most fertile and most populous portion of an island. The natural resources and economic and military power which a unified England possessed enabled her to extend her control to Wales and Ireland, and to become the undisputed predominant partner in the resulting United Kingdom. It was not easy, however, to conquer the entire island and indeed only once, under the Interregnum ‘Commonwealth’ government of 1650–2, was Scotland conquered, in large part thanks to the victories of Oliver Cromwell over Scottish armies. Yet, although inroads were at times made into northern England, states based in Scotland were not able to conquer England which, therefore, enjoyed security in its home base. Despite this security, control of Ireland was often justified in terms of the strategic threat which an independent Ireland would pose.

On its island, England was also difficult to conquer. There were successful invasions, notably in 1066 and 1688, but it was much harder to invade a country by sea than by land. As a result, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and part of the twentieth, Britain prided itself upon its possession of the most powerful navy in the world.

As a result of its military geography, England tended not to have a permanent land military establishment comparable to that of other European states, who relied upon conscript armies to greater or lesser degrees. This had an impact on the government, society and politics of the country, although it is necessary to avoid the assumption of an automatic correlation. Indeed, the determination of numerous rulers to campaign outside the country and England’s frequent membership in larger states with external commitments lessened the importance of this factor.

Britain’s island existence engendered an insularity which made for suspicious minds when it comes to relationships with Continental Europe, not that these suspicions were necessarily inappropriate. The nineteenth-century tradition of ‘splendid isolation’ in foreign policy could be regarded as the precursor of Britain’s present status as the ‘awkward partner’ within the European Union.

England’s position on an island also helped ensure that fishing and foreign trade played a major role in its history. The expansion of England was in no small part due to the economic power which the importing and exporting of goods made possible. Indeed, England’s dependence upon the importation of foreign foodstuffs for the sustenance of her people has made the country vulnerable during wartime. Like Japan, but unlike say Australia, England was not only an island, but also one in which the bulk of the country was readily accessible from the coast. This access was improved through the construction of canals in the eighteenth century, and railways in the nineteenth. In addition, like Japan, but unlike Madagascar or Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the centre of government was not in the interior. The role of the sea was fostered by the nature of the offshore waters and the role of oceanic currents. Both ensured a rich fish life.

The most important of the offshore currents was/is the Gulf Stream. This brought warm waters from the Caribbean to British shores and helped ensure that the climate was far more temperate than other areas at the same latitude, such as Sakhalin, Kamchatka, and Labrador, a position that would be gravely threatened by any movement of the Gulf Stream. The relatively mild climate contributed to a longer growing season that permitted the cultivation of a range of cereal crops. Furthermore, farm animals were able to live out of doors. Rainfall was such that England avoided drought and did not require expensive and burdensome irrigation systems. The agricultural base is important, as food imports did not become significant until the late eighteenth century, and only came to meet a large portion of English food needs in the late nineteenth. Until then, population figures were, in part, related to the quantity of food that could be produced in England.

Alongside these general characteristics there was/is remarkable geological diversity that ensured a great variety in terrains and soil types within relatively small areas. The geological inheritance was mineral rich, and mineral resources, ranging from plentiful coal and iron-ore to limited gold deposits, were exploited from early on. England was the first country in the world that developed large-scale production of coal, and that was to be important both in its industrialization from the late eighteenth century and to the development of a north–south divide, as the most important coal deposits were found in the North and in the north Midlands, rather than in the South, although there was coal mining in Kent and Somerset.

The diversity of the geological inheritance and related variety in landforms was linked by some commentators to the country’s history. Indeed, the notion of environmentalism as a key to history was developed in the nineteenth century and proved very influential in the early twentieth. This idea was extensively applied to English history. In his Historical Maps of England during the First Thirteen Centuries (1869), Charles Pearson stated, ‘Our geography is in the fact the history of the land’. In A New Student’s Atlas of English History (1903), Emil Reich claimed that ‘History is largely the make of geography’. Environmental influences appeared the best way to explain why nations and states developed with particular characteristics and interests. Environmentalism could make the process seem natural and necessary. It played a crucial role in the organic theory of the state, and in the treatment of culture as defined by the integration of nature and society. Pearson presented geography as playing a direct role in English history. He argued for example that the extensive woodlands near the south coast ‘explain why England was settled from east and west’, and suggested that, although ‘man triumphs over the elements’, this triumph was essentially a matter only of the previous half-century. Certainly the railway construction of the mid-nineteenth century, with the use of explosives to assist tunnelling and the construction of mighty bridges and viaducts, was a major development in the ability of humans to determine lines of communication. The telegraph lines built along railways were also crucial to the new victory over distance.

Pearson also saw geography at work in the great political divisions of the country’s history. He termed the mountains ‘the conservative element . . . in our history’; and observed that the Roman presence was limited in the upland regions – the south-west and Lancashire – and that ‘it was precisely these parts where the nationality was unbroken, that afterwards sustained the struggle against the Saxon’. In the civil war of Stephen’s reign (1135–54), Pearson noted ‘the Empress Matilda, who represented the not infrequent combination of a legitimate title and an oppressive government’, drew her support from the upland west, whereas Stephen was backed by London ‘and the commercial towns of the east’. In the 1260s, ‘London and the south and east were with the great constitutional leader De Montfort; the north and west sided with the King [Henry III]. In the Wars of the Roses the Yorkist party, which on the whole was that of good government, received partisans from the same district as De Montfort’. Similar comments were made about the Civil War (1642–6), and then, for Charles Edward Stuart and the Jacobite uprising in 1745 ‘nowhere but in the north-western counties, still only partially civilized, did he find recruits. Our country is so small, that in Cumberland and Westmorland at least, the hills are losing their old influence.’

This interpretation neatly linked a conventional nineteenth-century view of progress through a limitation of royal authority with a sense that upland areas were socially conservative and politically reactionary. Modern scholarship is more sceptical about De Montfort and the Yorkists, although the geographical basis of support for the two sides in the Civil War receives considerable attention and is often related to socio-economic criteria. Pearson’s observation about the hills could be a throwback to the pre-nineteenth-century view that mountains were hideous and oppressive. As a result, when, as is commonly the case, you have ‘history written by the victors’, the defeated were associated with upland areas possibly at least in part as much from inherited prejudice as from acute observation.

Pearson’s environmentalism and, in particular, his theme of the difference between upland and lowland was taken up in the Philips’ New School Atlas of Universal History (1928), with the map ‘The Two Halves of England’, which showed land over 600 ft, navigable rivers, cathedral cities, universities, chief ports, centres of the wool trade and iron smelting, and was designed to display ‘the distinction between the hilly north-western and the level south-eastern halves of England, which has profoundly influenced its history’. As if to indicate the timeless nature of this distinction, the map bore no date.

In the same period, O.G.S. Crawford stressed the geographical approach to history and prehistory in his Man and his Past (1921). He was responsible for a series of interwar historical maps produced by the Ordnance Survey that mapped locations and distributions against the background of physical geography.

Cyril Fox, an archaeologist who greatly influenced interwar British historical geography, produced, in his lengthy Archaeology of the Cambridge Region (1923), a scholarly account of a physically based cultural zone and its historical characteristics. Fox used distribution maps that were coloured to show the physiography of the region: rivers and meres, fen and marsh, and areas probably densely forested. Fox explained ‘the cultural differentiation of the eastern plain’ in a way that emphasized physical factors but left room for others:

At the commencement of this analysis the tendency to unity of cultural character in the Cambridge Region in any given age was held to be the natural consequence of the geographical unity which a river basin possesses. The peculiar configuration of the district – a narrow belt of open country bordered by fen and forest and forming a highway into Norfolk and North Suffolk – has, however, permitted this tendency at times to be modified by military or political action.

Fox went on to publish The Personality of Britain. Its Influence on Inhabitant and Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times (1943). This emphasized the distinction between lowland and highland zones, but not in any deterministic fashion. Such a relationship is common in subsequent work, certainly on the crucial and long settlement period(s) of English history prior to 1200. It is indeed clear that there was causal interaction with the environment. For example, the lack of natural obstacles and the relatively small area of England encouraged Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman advances, but they also all benefited from the extent of the removal of woodland during the Bronze and Iron Ages.

The role of geography in England’s history is not one that has been pushed to the fore, certainly for the history of the last millennium. Whereas the role of geographical factors in affecting settlement patterns in the centuries after the departure of the Romans is well known, this is far less the case for subsequent periods. Yet, geography is in many respects the factor that helps to explain the regional variations that are so important in England’s history. These variations subvert any emphasis on uniformity, although, in turn, local circumstances also highlight the impact of national developments, for, given the great variety of geographical background, it is striking to note how much there is in the way of similarities. Reference to geographical influence does not, however, make clear how best to explain or assess this influence. It is all too easy to adopt a determinism akin to much of the discussion of socio-economic factors. This is inappropriate. It is more reasonable to stress influence without assuming any automatic response, a theory known as ‘possibilism’. This allows for the vitality and variety of human responses, both of which emerge clearly in England’s history.

TWO

BEFORETHE ROMANS

England had a long history prior to the Roman conquest in the first century AD. Much of it is obscure, although excellent work has been carried out by archaeologists. Within Europe, early man lived first in the warmer areas of the South but, when the climate permitted, spread from there into Northern Europe. Human remains of early hominids and finds of tool assemblages have been found in many sites in Southern England, including Stoke Newington, Clacton and Swanscombe. Neanderthal hunters also left sites in Southern England, but these were far fewer than in France and Germany, especially South-West France. The Neanderthals were replaced by anatomically modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period (c. 35,000 to c. 12,000 years ago). This lengthy age saw a development of social structures and stone blade technology. People retained useful objects for future use, had craftsmen with ideas of symmetry, and performed tasks entailing a division of labour. Cave or rock shelters from the period in England include Gough’s Cave, Soldier’s Hole and Kents Cavern in the South-West, Boxgrove in Sussex, and Mother Grundy’s Parlour, Robin Hood’s Cave and Pin Hole in the North Midlands.

The Upper Palaeolithic was followed by a period of climatic improvement, as the last Ice Age came to an end in around 10,000 BC. This led to a northward spread of forest and wildlife in Europe. The trees of a cold climate – birch, pine and hazel – were followed by oak, elm, ash and lime, all of which came to cover England between 7,500 and 5,000 BC. These deciduous forests were rich in plant and animal life. Animal life also changed in its composition and became plentiful, with red and roe deer, and wild pig arriving. This encouraged an expansion in the number of hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic period (c. 8,300 BC to c. 6,000 BC). They were equipped with microlithic flints. Mounted in wood or bone hafts, these provided effective tools for use, for example, as knives or as arrowheads. Settlements became more fixed and trade developed. As the ice melted, the sea level rose, and in about 6,500 BC the land-bridge that joined England to the Continent across the southern North Sea was cut.

This did not prevent a spread of agricultural developments from the Continent. Domestic crops and agriculture originated in the Near East and spread into England in the fifth millennium BC, although hunting, fishing and gathering continued. The move towards a more settled human imprint centred on farming, permitted a larger production of food, and that, in turn, led to a greater material culture, not least of pots, for storage and cooking. In addition, trade increased. All of these ensured that the archaeological trace improved, but, nevertheless, there is still much that is obscure. The plough was in use in southern England in about 3,500 BC. This helped increase crop yields, and encouraged the clearing of forest. Analysis of layers of pollen and the dating of the shift from tree pollen to open-country and field species suggest that land clearance occurred in Blea Tarn in Cumbria in about 4,525 BC and Hockham Mere in Norfolk in about 4,045 BC. The spread of domestic animals – sheep, goats, pigs, cattle and, later, horses – was followed by wheeled vehicles. With domestic animals came milk, wool and an ability to pull ploughs.

As the population rose, evidence of settlements increases. The evidence takes the form of ‘causewayed camps’, ritual monuments, and burial chambers, such as the West Kennet Long Barrow. Such works required much labour, suggesting a rising level of social organization, although it is difficult to assess its nature.

The monuments of the period were far from constant in type. Barrow tombs were followed between 3,200 and 1,500 BC by stone circles and circular ditched enclosures or henges. In England these were concentrated in the West Country, although they were more widely distributed. As they were also found in North-West France, there is evidence of a cultural region linked by sea. Indeed trade along the coasts and also across seas was a crucial development in English history.

The most famous legacy of the period is Stonehenge, a ritual centre that developed in phases. It took possibly 2 million man-hours to complete (by c. 1,550 BC), and the blue stones came from as far as the Prescelly Mountains in Wales. The nature of the rituals that took place there are unclear, but the effort and organization necessary for the construction of Stonehenge are obvious. Furthermore, Stonehenge was not alone.

Aside from major constructions, there was also an improvement in the range of craftsmanship, as the use of copper increased with developments in smelting and casting. Metalworking had spread into southern England by the third millennium BC. This increase in the material culture was followed by the dissemination of a new burial pattern, known as ‘Beaker’, from the distinctive pottery found in the graves. Unlike the communal graves of earlier Megalithic tombs, these were individual burials with rich grave-goods, suggesting a more stratified society.

The Copper Age was followed from 2,300 BC by that of bronze, a harder alloy of copper that was more effective in tools and weapons. Bronze replaced not only copper but also hard stone and flint. The social stratification already in evidence appears to have become more pronounced. Large burial mounds have been linked to areas likely to have benefited from trade, suggesting the existence of an elite. Aside from trade, agriculture increased in response to a rising population, and there is evidence for massive Bronze Age land division: laying-out of fields. More marginal areas were cleared of trees and cultivated. It has also been suggested that Bronze Age England was more bellicose. There is increased evidence of fortifications and weapons, and it has been argued that society was dominated by warriors.

They were to be challenged by the arrival of a new metal, iron. The smelting and forging of iron spread from West Asia and arrived in England by 700 BC. Iron was the most common metal, and its availability ensured that iron goods ceased to be rare and, instead, became widely used. By 500 BC iron tools were being used to clear trees. Iron hoes and nails brought new flexibility to agriculture and construction. Iron also made better weapons, particularly when carbon was added to make steel.

Subsequently, England was exposed to pressure from the Celts, a culture that appeared in South Germany in about 800 BC and then spread over much of Europe, including France. The extent of Celtic influence in England is controversial, although features of Celtic settlement, culture and civilization have been found in southern England. However, it is unclear how much was due to a widespread population movement, to more limited immigration, or to trade. If the first two, it is unclear how much should be attributed to invasion. The likelihood is that there was a mixture of all these influences, unsurprisingly so as the period in question was lengthy. The impact of ‘Belgic’ peoples from northern France (a Celtic group) has been traced in the development of what can be termed states, such as that of the Trinovantes (later Essex), the use of coins, and the development of towns, such as Wheathampstead, Seaford, Hengistbury, and Colchester, the capital of the Trinovantes.

Iron Age society in England was different to that of its nemesis, imperial Rome. There were proto-towns, known to the Romans as oppida, but not a developed urban civilization, and states but not a sophisticated governmental system with differentiated administrative functions. Language was divisive and there was no written culture. Yet there had also been much development. Much of the woodland had been cleared, particularly in areas with light soil, and agriculture was both varied and extensive. It supported a growing population, a settled society and an aristocratic elite. The announcement in 2006 of the discovery of an ancient bronze off Salcombe provides evidence of trade with the central Mediterranean, although this trade may not have been direct.

Although there were ‘states’, there was not only nothing to match Rome, but also no sign of an identity, political or otherwise, that might be termed England. There was no one state, nor federation of states, that was co-terminous with England. Nor was there any ‘proto-England’, any state that might, had Rome not intervened, have taken over England, rather as Rome had done in Italy. Nor was there any uniformity of conditions over England; indeed the term had no meaning in this period and is used simply to indicate the area that was later to be termed England. Statehood and urban development were most pronounced in southern England, while the use of coins was restricted to southern England and the Midlands. The term the English also has no meaning for this period.

Counterfactuals are always tricky, and it is unclear what would have happened but for the conquest. The areas of Germany and Scotland that were not conquered by Rome were essentially to develop into a number of small kingdoms that focused on farming but also took part in trade, as did Ireland. Through trade and war, they interacted with their neighbours, including Rome. Yet this interaction was far less than England was to experience as part of the Roman empire.

THREE

THE ROMAN PERIOD

Britain was the only island attacked by Rome outside the better-known and more placid, or, at least, certainly less tidal, waters of the Mediterranean. Julius Caesar’s invasions in 55 and 54 BC were bold steps. He claimed that they were necessary to end the support of tribes in southern England for the Celts who were resisting his conquest of Gaul (France). However, it was largely personal prestige and the dictates of politics in Rome that led to his expeditions, as they also did for the following expedition, that of the Emperor Claudius in AD 43. Caesar needed to show that the invasions were necessary for him to remain in control of the army in Gaul, the basis of his power. He also wished to win glory.

In 55 BC, Caesar did not move from his beachhead in Kent. The Romans were victorious in hard fighting, but the damage done to their ships by equinoctial gales and the scale of the resistance led Caesar to come to terms with the local tribes. In 54 BC a larger force made an unopposed landing, again in Kent. Caesar won a victory near Canterbury, defeating the tribal leader, Cassivellaunus, and crossed the River Thames. Cassivellaunus’ capital, possibly Wheathampstead, was seized, an attack on the Kent beachhead was beaten off, and Caesar reached a settlement with Cassivellaunus. Hostages and tribute were promised by the local rulers and a client ruler installed for the Trinovantes.

England was no pushover, but the Romans benefited from their opponents’ inability to contest the passage of the Channel, and from their fighting advantage once landed. The disciplined Roman infantry, with its body-armour, javelins and short swords, was more effective than that of the English who had little body armour and lacked effective missile power. English chariots were vulnerable to Roman archers and their hillforts to siegecraft. Furthermore, English farmer-soldiers could not afford to be soldiers all the time, and their farming also made them vulnerable to Roman devastation.

Caesar’s expeditions were not followed up for nearly a century. Rebellion in Gaul, and then civil war in the empire took precedence and, once order was restored by Augustus, the German frontier was a higher priority. Caligula planned an invasion, but did not mount one. Had the invasions of 55 and 54 BC been followed up more rapidly it is probable that England would have been conquered earlier, although there is little reason to believe that the Romans would have been able or willing to press on to conquer Ireland and Highland Scotland, and thus unite the Brtitish Isles.

In search of a military reputation, Claudius launched an invasion with about 40,000 men in 43 AD. After an unopposed landing, probably in Kent, the Romans defeated a confederation of forces in three battles, two of which were caused by contested crossings of the Medway and the Thames. The Emperor then arrived, with the first elephants seen in England, and received the surrender of Colchester.

This was not to be a raid or a short-term occupation akin to the Roman advance to the Elbe under Augustus. After Claudius decided to make Britannia a Roman province, the Romans rapidly overran most of the south. The Iceni of East Anglia and the Atrebates of Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire were given client status, while the hillforts of the West Country were captured. Vespasian, then commander of the II Augusta legion, and later Emperor, destroyed more than twenty hillforts, including Maiden Castle, when he conquered the Durotriges of Dorset and Somerset. Caratacus, the leader of the Catuvellauni, continued resistance from Wales, but was defeated in 50–1 AD. Fleeing north, he was handed over to the Romans by Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes of Yorkshire, who became a client ruler.

The most effective response occurred in 60 AD. The Governor, Suetonius Paulinus, was campaigning in North Wales when the Iceni under Boudica (Boadicea is a later corruption of the name) rebelled. The Iceni were enraged by vicious and corrupt mismanagement and expropriation and by the abuse of her family by the Romans, including the flogging of Boudica and the rape of her daughters. The Iceni were supported by the Trinovantes, much of whose land had been confiscated to support the colony of Roman veterans at Colchester (Camulodunum). The major Roman settlements – Colchester, London (Londinium) and St Albans (Verulamium) – were stormed and their inhabitants slaughtered with great cruelty. However, as with the Indian Mutiny against English rule in 1857, there was no united response, in large part because there was no basis for political unity. Cogidubnus, the client ruler of the Atrebates, for example, remained loyal. Furthermore, the regular Roman forces moved rapidly. At a battle somewhere in the Midlands, Paulinus crushed Boudica, who died, probably by suicide. The Iceni and their allies were then ‘pacified’ with typical Roman brutality.

The Romans pressed on to conquer the whole of England, but this was not automatic. The civil war that began with the Emperor Nero’s suicide in 68 was the first of a series of conflicts within the Roman elite that periodically weakened the Roman military effort and presence in England until the eventual fall of the empire. The pace of advance resumed in 71 with the subjugation of the Brigantes (71–73/4) and of Wales (73/4–6). Highland Scotland and Ireland, however, were to escape the Roman grasp, with long-term consequences for their separate development that are difficult to evaluate. Inchtuthil in Perthshire is the northernmost major Roman fort. From about 122, the Emperor Hadrian constructed the most impressive legacy of Roman rule in England, a stone wall 70 miles long at the narrowest part of the island, the Tyne–Solway line. Designed to mark a frontier, this was not the end of Roman attempts to move north. None, however, proved more than short-term.

Roman England displayed the characteristics of other imperial provinces, although its frontier position ensured that there was an extensive military presence. The settlement of people from elsewhere in the empire, many of them former soldiers, was matched by the Romanization of the native elite. Towns had a far greater role than in pre-Roman England. They developed as centres of administration, trade and integration, many of them on the sites of modern cities. The administrative hierarchy and military system were not unchanging, but, by the mid-second century, London, the major port of Roman England, and thus its crucial link with the rest of the empire, was the provincial capital. The city had developed on the lowest bridging point on the Thames. York, Chester and Caerleon in South-East Wales were the long-standing bases of three legions, while Colchester, Lincoln and Gloucester were coloniae, towns founded for veterans. Provincial capitals included Canterbury, Chichester, Cirencester, Dorchester, Exeter, Leicester, St Albans and Winchester. Rectilinear grid street-plans, centred on forums and basilicas, developed in these towns, although some smaller towns were less planned.

The towns were linked by roads, some of which are still used today: Watling Street from London to Chester became, in part, the A5. Roads were built to a high standard, with stone foundations and gravel surfaces, and were frequently straight. No equivalent road-building programme followed in England until the turnpikes of the eighteenth century. The planned network of the roads helped both communications and military control. They were a testimony to the impact of a powerful governmental structure that also organized a large-scale drainage scheme in East Anglia, built the Foss Dyke, a canal to link Lincoln to the River Trent, brought economic changes designed to supply the army, and introduced effective taxation.

As goods and money were moved in a regular fashion across greater distances, and also to and from the Continent, inter-regional contact increased, and new fashions and designs were disseminated, as in the pottery industry. The population rose and the area under cultivation increased, an aspect of the Roman control which extended to the environment.

Agriculture improved. In the late third and fourth centuries, larger ploughs were introduced and coulters were added. This led to the cutting of deeper furrows, which permitted the working of heavier soils. The introduction of two-handed scythes enabled hay to be cut faster and thus larger quantities to be stored for winter forage. Corn-drying kilns were constructed, and crop rotations were introduced. The greater quantity of archaeological material surviving from the Roman period suggests a society producing and trading far more goods than its Iron Age predecessors.

The prosperity of the rural economy underwrote the cost of building numerous villas: large noble houses in the country constructed in a Roman style and heated from under the floor by a hypocaust system. They were very different to the native tradition of housing. Villas, such as Chedworth, the remains of which can be visited near Cheltenham, were supported by nearby farmsteads. Villas had a major effect on the organization of the landscape and the ability to produce an agricultural surplus. From this surplus stemmed non-agricultural production and trade supported by coinage. However, this needed a superstructure of Roman administration to survive: hence the collapse in the fifth century.

There were also religious and cultural changes. Roman cults spread, although assimilation with native Celtic beliefs was important. When Christianity became the state religion, this brought more systematic cultural links between England and the Continent. The pre-Roman druids, whom the Romans stamped out, and the cults of the Olympian gods which they introduced, had both lacked diocesan structure and doctrinal regulation. The Olympian cults, however, linked England to the Continent. So also did the cult of Mithras which was of Persian origin and closely connected with the Roman army. Mithras was seen as an agent of good or light endlessly fighting evil or darkness. Mithraic congregations normally met in underground or partly underground buildings. Women were excluded, as from much else of Roman life.

In addition, pre-Roman pagan practices still continued. This was an aspect of the limited impact of Roman culture. Outside the towns, which were the centres of consumption, authority and Roman culture, England was not as thoroughly Romanized as other provinces of the empire, such as Gaul. It was further from the centres of the Roman empire.

Roman England was weakened by the inability of the Roman empire to devise a consistently accepted system of imperial succession, and the willingness of military units to support their commanders in bids for power, although such bids were not continual. After the decades in which Roman rule was established, in Britain there was no civil revolt. Instead, the unreliable sector was the army. In addition, the impact of defending Roman England from outside attacks, including Picts from Scotland, Scots from Ireland, and Saxons from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, was considerable. Their attacks became serious in the 350s, ending a period of prosperity that had begun in the 270s, and a successful invasion in 367 led to a widespread devastation. Order was restored by Theodosius between 368 and 369. By 370 a chain of ten forts stretched from Brancaster, Norfolk to Portchester, Dorset. This ‘Saxon Shore’ was designed to protect harbours and estuaries along the vulnerable east and south coasts. The construction of town defences from the third century indicated an attitude of growing defensiveness.

Civil war in the empire and ‘barbarian’ invasions led to renewed problems in the 400s. In 406 Gaul was invaded, and England, threatened with being cut off from the rest of the empire, created its own emperor, Constantine III. As an English-based self-styled ‘Roman Emperor’, he was an interesting early instance of a short-term de facto English autonomy but one that was not designed to lead to independence. Indeed Constantine III took a significant part of the island’s military forces to Gaul to counter the ‘barbarian’ threat. These troops did not return. The Romano-Britons, disillusioned with the rebel Constantine’s activities, expelled his administrators and appealed to the true emperor, Honorius, for the restoration of legitimate rule. He, hard pressed in Italy by Alaric, the Visigothic leader, who captured Rome in 410, could do no more than tell them to look to their own defence. This was the end of the Roman empire in England.

FOUR

ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

The period after the end of the Roman empire is the most obscure in England’s history over the past two millennia. The early Germanic invaders were illiterate, and Bede and other later written sources provide a different account from the archaeological evidence. The latter anyway has to be used with care because of the difficulty of interpreting evidence and its uneven spread, reflecting, in part, the varied pattern of excavation and fieldwork activity. Nevertheless, such evidence suggests that there was already a substantial Germanic presence in eastern England before the 450s. Then, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Saxon annals written considerably later, probably first in Alfred’s reign in the ninth century), Jutes, under the probably mythical Hengist and Horsa, founded the kingdom of Kent; although, in fact, there were originally probably two Kentish kingdoms.

The process of ‘barbarian’ arrival is also unclear. As elsewhere in Western Europe, ‘barbarian’ mercenaries were hired and probably came to demand power for themselves, although it is unclear how far there were large-scale migrations into England and how much there was therefore a replacement of the earlier population. Some scholars emphasize a considerable measure of continuity in the population.

Jutes established themselves in Kent, the Isle of Wight and parts of Hampshire, the Saxons elsewhere in South-East England (Sussex: South Saxons; Essex: East Saxons), and the Angles further north. Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons, centred on Hampshire, eventually became the most important Saxon kingdom, although the process by which particular ethnic groups came to be associated with specific territories is open to doubt.

The new states, however, were bitterly resisted. Late- and post-Roman society was increasingly militarized and able to mount long-lasting resistance, although the economy of Roman Britain declined after the formal end of imperial government in 409. In addition, the post- (or sub-) Roman British were themselves divided into warring kingdoms and, unlike in the fourth century, could not call for assistance from the Continent. Most of lowland England had been conquered by 600.

The length of time that the Anglo-Saxon conquest took limited its ability to lead to an abrupt change. Furthermore, it means that it is difficult to distinguish between the impact of the invaders and that stemming from the consequences of the end of imperial Roman rule. The break with Roman rule ensured a transitional stage in which governmental power ceased to be wielded by those appointed by Rome.

Anglo-Saxon conquest brought more sweeping change, both because of Germanization, not least linguistically, and because, under the pagan invaders, Christianity, introduced under the Romans, became a tenuous presence. It is likely that the population of England fell dramatically, not least because of plague. In the areas conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, the Romano-Britons largely fled or survived as slaves and peasants, although the latter could lead to a significant level of both survival and continuity with Anglo-Saxon settlement. Furthermore, the conventional view is contested by scholars who argue that there were few Anglo-Saxon settlers, and that the great majority of the population remained British, but acculturated to a militarily dominant invading elite.