Bloody British History: Britain E-Book

Geoff Holder

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Bloody British History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Britain has an incredible history, steeped in all manner of blood, death, disease and horror. From cannibals to concentration camps, Geoff Holder covers events both great and gory from Britain's terrible past, with kings, queens and pretenders to the throne; sea battles, massacres and attacks from the air. This collection explores it all, with hundreds of amazing true stories, including seven ill-judged attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria and the Gestapo's secret plans to bring a conquered Britain to its knees. There will be blood ...

Leseprobe

Dedicated to all the members of my family who have been in the wars.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Image Sources

Introduction

16700 BC Cannibals from the Dawn of Time

3500 BC Prehistoric Warfare

AD43 Invasion! (Roman Style)

AD60 Burn Londinium to the Ground!

AD122 Another Brick in the Wall

AD428 Invasion! (Barbarian Style)

AD937 May the Force be With You

AD1002 The St Brice’s Day Massacre

AD1066 Last Stand at Stamford Bridge

AD1069 The Harrying of the North

AD1139 Anarchy in the UK

AD1190 The Jewish Massacre at York

AD1192 Richard and John: Brothers in Arms

AD1205 Pirates of the High Seas

AD1277 Edward I, Hammer of the Welsh

AD1314 The Battle of Bannockburn

AD1349 The Black Death

AD1400 Owain Glyndwr: Wales in Revolt

AD1415 Henry V: Agincourt and All That

AD1441 Sex, Lies and Witchcraft

AD1455 The Wars of the Roses

AD1485 Pretenders to the Throne

AD1513 The Six Executions of Henry VIII

AD1549 Edward VI: Family Feuds and Plots

AD1553 Bloody Mary

AD1558 Mary, Queen of Scots

AD1558 ‘Blood Pouring from the Scuppers’

AD1603 Keeping up with the Jameses

AD1605 Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

AD1649 To Kill a King: the Execution of Charles I

AD1665 The Greatest Sea Battle of the Age

AD1666 London’s Burning!

AD1679 Scotland Invents the Concentration Camp

AD1689 The Siege of Derry

AD1715 Jacobite Rebellions

AD1796 Invasion! (French Style)

AD1803 Invasion! (Napoleonic Style)

AD1819 The Peterloo Massacre

AD1842 Assassins’ Creed

AD1888 Jack the Ripper

AD1911 The Siege of Sidney Street

AD1915 Death from the Skies: Zeppelin!

AD1939 U-boat at Scapa Flow

AD1940 Death from the Skies: the Blitz

AD1940 Invasion! (Nazi Style)

Bibliography

Copyright

IMAGE SOURCES

Pages 5, 45 (left), 59, 60, 61, 63 (right), 158: T. Tindall Wildridge, The Dance of Death in Painting and in Print, 1897; pp. 43, 57 (right), 63 (left): Madalen Edgar (ed.), Froissart’s Chronicles, 1912; p. 86: Martin A.S. Hume, The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth, 1898; p. 44: Harry Johnston, Pioneers in Tropical America, 1914; p. 87 (left): John Foxe, Book of Martyrs, 1860s; p. 131: Thomas Archer, Gladstone and his Contemporaries, 1886; pp. 144, 145: H.W. Wilson, His Majesty the King, 1935; p. 90 (left): Chatterbox, 1914; p. 56 (right): Anon., Glen Albyn, 1880s?; p. 100 (lower left): Easton S. Valentine, Fifeshire, 1910; pp. 94 (left), 100 (upper left): Sir Walter Scott, A Legend of Montrose, 1878; pp. 29, 87 (right), 93, 101 (bottom left): James MacKenzie, The History of Scotland, 1894; pp. 52, 53: Jane Porter, Scottish Chiefs, 1875; p. 34: Wilson’s Tales of the Borders Vol. 1, 1848; p. 91: G. le Faure, La Guerre sous l’eau, 1898; p. 22, 127 (upper right): William J. Forster, Famous Britons, 1903; pp. 25, 79, 89, 90 (right), 104, 148: J. Edward Parrott, Britain Overseas, 1908; pp. 132, 133: TheIllustrated London News, 1849; p. 114: Allan Fea, Some Beauties of the Seventeenth Century, 1906; p. 12, The Quiver, 1888; p. 125 (right): William O’Connor Morris, Napoleon, 1901. The image on p. 135 is from Wikipedia Commons. The photographs on pages 51 (right), 110, 115, 116 and 118 are by the author. As ever, thanks to Ségolène Dupuy. All other images have been provided by The History Press, or come from the Library of Congress (LOC).

INTRODUCTION

This sanguinary canter through British history commences with cannibalism from the depths of prehistory and ends with the Gestapo’s detailed plans for ensuring compliance once Hitler’s Nazis had occupied the country. Along the way you will encounter bloodthirsty (and bloody-minded) Romans, Picts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors and Stuarts, not to mention a rogues’ gallery of murderers, pirates, assassins and military nutjobs. You will also learn the technique of blinding your enemy during a windy medieval sea battle, how to interpret the Wars of the Roses as a football match, and the use of cheese as an instrument of torture.

There are battles a-plenty in this book, for battles have traditionally provided the hooks on which to drape the greater tapestry of history. Battles are also nice, straightforward narrative events that we can easily understand: two sides fight, one wins (usually). But battles are actually comparatively rare in the overall history of warfare. For a battle to take place, both sides must ‘agree’ to fight; that is, face up to each other on a certain piece of ground. But battles are high-risk events, and more time is usually spent evading battle, or manoeuvring your opponent into accepting battle on disadvantageous terms. Historically, most warfare has not consisted of pitched battles but of skirmishes (fights between small groups that are broken off before total destruction), raiding (small-scale short-term attacks with a specific aim in mind – perhaps to destroy an item of tactical value such as a bridge, or to take food, livestock or slaves) and sieges (surrounding and grinding down a town or fortress). The other common form of warfare, especially in the Middle Ages, is the chevauchée, an extended march through enemy (or neutral) territory, burning and pillaging everything in the way. William the Conqueror was a chevauchée master, and the tactic was standard practice for English armies in France and Scotland and Scottish armies in the North of England. The average chevauchée featured enough atrocities to shame an SS division, so they are rarely touched upon by popular histories, and skirmishes and raids are not generally very newsworthy – which is why battles dominate the narrative.

Numbers quoted for deaths in battle here should be treated with a pillar of salt, as most estimates fail to take into account deaths after battle – from wounds, infection, disease, starvation, ill-treatment and summary execution of prisoners. The dying doesn’t stop when the main killing does.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that the main experience of most people for the majority of history was not blood, but mud. Most of our ancestors were not soldiers, kings or nobles, but workers; the people who brought in the harvest or performed repetitive tasks in a workshop or factory. This book is not, however, a history of agricultural drudgery or industrial grime: it is the Bloody British History.

AND SO: THERE SHALL BE BLOOD. ENJOY.

16700BC

CANNIBALS FROM THE DAWN OF TIME

‘Eating people is wrong.’

Flanders and Swann, ‘The Reluctant Cannibal’, 1956

Somewhere around 14,700 years ago, the vast ice sheets that had reduced Europe to an Arctic wasteland suddenly began to withdraw – perhaps over as little as five years. The small bands of humans who had survived the intensely cold period by huddling in their ‘refuges’ in slightly warmer Spain and southern France started to follow their game herds of reindeer and wild horse as the animals moved north over land that was now free of ice. Some of these humans crossed Doggerland – the now-submerged land bridge that once joined the British Isles to the Continent. A small group of them set up a seasonal shelter in Gough’s Cave, now part of the world-famous network of caves in Somerset’s Cheddar Gorge. And it was here that Britain’s oldest-recorded cannibals consumed human flesh and drank liquids out of the skulls of both adults and children.

The evidence comes in the form of the bones of five people: two adults (one young and one older); two adolescents; and a child of about 3 years old. All had had the flesh stripped from their bodies and their bones cracked to extract the valuable marrow inside. Cut marks on the bones showed that the bodies had been processed using the same stone tools and same high level of butchery skill that had been employed to cut up the animals whose bones were also found in the cave.

As well as cannibalism, the inhabitants of Gough’s Cave also made drinking vessels out of skulls. Shortly after death, the heads were severed at the base of the skull. A stone lever was inserted into the mouth to break the lower jaw away from the main skull, and the jawbone then smashed open to extract the marrow. The tongue, lips, ears, cheeks and nose were cut away, the eyes pulled out, the major skull muscles were cut off and the scalp removed. Once the soft tissues covering the skull had been meticulously pared away, the bones of the face were smashed off, leaving just the bowl-like vault of the skull. The edges of this were then smoothed down, leaving a drinking vessel that could hold about two pints. What the cannibals were drinking is unknown, but it could easily have been just water (rather than, say, blood).

Starting with a severed head, a skilled hunter could probably have taken about half a day to fashion one of the skull-cups. The three skull-cups that have been identified came from the two adults and the 3-year-old child. At 14,700 years old, these Upper Paleolithic specimens are the oldest known skull-cups on the planet. The plates of the child’s skull, by the way, had not yet fused, meaning it would have probably leaked.

Cheddar cliffs, where Britain’s oldest recorded cannibals lived. (C-DIG-ppmsc-08152)

It’s not known why cannibalism was practiced at this place and time. There is no evidence of violent death on the bones of the five individuals, so perhaps they died of natural causes and, in the starvation economy of winter, their meat could not be allowed to go to waste.

Genetic studies, however, have found that very early humans – possibly as far back as 500,000 years ago – may have been cannibals as a matter of course. Research published in the journal Science in 2003 found that human populations around the world today carry a gene which protects them against prion diseases, which are serious diseases of the brain often caused by eating contaminated human flesh. We may all, it seems, be the descendants of cannibals.

In Britain, cannibalism turns up in just a few cases in the later archaeological record:

Between 2000–1000 BC: five leg bones discovered at Dorney Lake, Berkshire, found with stone tool cut marks, and signs of gnawing and being broken open for the marrow.

Between 30 BC and AD 130: an adult’s thigh-bone from Alveston Cave, Gloucestershire, split to extract the marrow. Many of the thirty-seven individuals found in the cave had suffered from deformities – which probably marked them out as ‘different’ or ‘uncanny’ – and several showed signs of violent death. The best guess at the moment is that they represent a Druidic ritual of mass human sacrifice, possibly connected with a desperate appeal to the gods during the time of the Roman Conquest.

Cheddar Man, Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton, was also found in Gough’s Cave, this time in 1903. Dating to about 7150 BC, in the Mesolithic period, he was more than 7,000 years more recent than the cannibals of the Upper Paleolithic – but he had been murdered by a powerful blow to the back of his head. Was this the first evidence of an early British murder?

3500BC

PREHISTORIC WARFARE

‘An average of 70 per cent of men engaged in ancient battles were killed or wounded, whereas only 60 per cent of combatants in the bloodiest modern battles have become casualties.’

Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization, 1996

DATELINE: AROUND 3580–3535 BC

The young man had been running away when he was shot in the back by a flint-tipped arrow. He fell forward, crushing and smothering to death the infant he had been carrying in his panicked flight. Both were buried by falling rubble when the fortification around them was burned to the ground.

DATELINE: ABOUT 3570 BC

Fourteen people were slaughtered in the raid, most killed by arrows. One man’s pelvic bone still contained the tip of the flint arrowhead that killed him.

DATELINE: BETWEEN 440–390 BC

The group of women and children – including babies – had their throats cut and were dumped unceremoniously into the hastily cut ditch of their uncompleted hill fort. The outer wall – started in a desperate attempt to provide a second line of defence against the attackers, but never finished – was then pulled down over the massacred bodies.

These are just three examples of archaeological evidence for warfare and communal violence in prehistoric Britain. They come from, respectively: the Neolithic Stepleton enclosure at Hambledon Hill in Dorset; the Wayland’s Smithy burial chamber in Wiltshire (constructed about 800 years earlier than the nearby ritual complex of Stonehenge); and Fin Cop, a devastated Iron Age hill fort in Derbyshire.

These and several other examples give the lie to what was once a widely accepted generalisation: the idea that before the Roman invasion, prehistoric British society was relatively peaceful. It was once thought that Iron Age hill forts, for example, were mostly about demonstrating status and prestige rather than being actual defensive structures. In fact, it seems that, strangely enough, the immense labour required to construct a massive ditch, a bank and a wooden palisade is not about showing off to the neighbours, but about keeping out other people armed with lethal weapons: if it looks like a major defence, then it probably is designed for defence, and with good reason. The frenzied but doomed attempts to build a last-minute defensive wall at Fin Cop, and the subsequent massacre of women and children, show that the danger of attack was all too real. At Crickley Hill, near Cheltenham (Gloucestershire), more than 400 arrow points have been uncovered around the palisaded defences – arrows fired by an attacking force. And at Carn Brea, a well-defended Iron Age ‘fortress’ in Cornwall, a concentration of almost 1,000 arrowheads has been found around the entrance. Both of these examples suggest sizable attacking forces and organised groups of archers. And groups of organised archers imply the mass production of bows and arrows – missile weapons more sophisticated than melee weapons such as clubs and axes – as well as training and a military hierarchy.

In the Wayland’s Smithy example mentioned above, fourteen people were killed, eleven of them adult males. This was probably a raid or a surprise attack: Neolithic societies would have been unable to support sustained warfare. Eleven men may have represented a significant proportion of the total adult male population of the farming community in the area, and their loss may have had a terrible knock-on effect. Perhaps, following the raid, the harvest was not gathered in, and many others in the community subsequently starved to death. One curious characteristic of the bodies found at Fin Cop is that they are all of women and children: no adult men have been found. It is speculated that the men were either all killed in a battle elsewhere, or taken away as slaves. The killing of children and babies suggests ‘ethnic cleansing’: the attackers did not want to merely defeat their enemies; they wanted to wipe them off the face of the earth.

In none of the cases cited above do we know who was doing the attacking, or why. Given the importance of livestock in prehistoric societies, it is likely that some of the violence was the result of cattle raids. Perhaps other conflicts were in pursuit of grain stores, or female captives, or prestige goods. The evidence of massed attacks on hill forts in the Iron Age, however, suggests something more serious, more organised, more purposeful – the acquisition of territory, perhaps, or control over mines or other valuable natural resources. Or simply ethnic hatred.

Whatever the reasons, it is clear that prehistoric Britain was no golden age of peace, where intellectual mystics pondered the mysteries of the universe in stone circles and sacred sites – instead, it was a place where violent death was just an arrow-shot away.

AD43

INVASION! (ROMAN STYLE)

‘And so they managed to cross the river and kill many of the natives who were taken by surprise.’

Cassius Dio, Roman History, early third century

The massed British tribes watched fascinated as the Romans on the opposite bank of the river appeared to be engaged in some massive logistical activity. Surely, the Britons thought, all this was preparation for an assault – but how was the Roman army going to cross the treacherous waters without a bridge? The painted warriors watched and waited, anticipating the moment when their knowledge of their home terrain would inevitably lead to a killing field when the invaders tried to cross the River Medway.

Meanwhile, a short distance downstream, a group of specially trained infantry from Batavia (modern-day Netherlands) were swimming across the river in full battle armour, quite unnoticed. These Roman equivalent of SEALs crept up on the place where the Britons had parked their chariots, and cut the hamstrings of the horses, before quickly withdrawing. Enraged at the loss of their prized steeds, the Britons launched a headlong pursuit to the east. And thus fell totally for the next part of the Roman ruse.

‘And we’ll cross the river over there while the Britons are distracted by our cunning plan.’

The overt preparations for crossing the river had just been a piece of theatre. While the Britons were being distracted by the withdrawing Batavians, the main Roman force was crossing the river at a narrower point upstream, to the west. The Roman commander, Aulus Plautius, had planned well. Two legions forged a bridgehead on the northern bank of the river, fighting off a British force that had not only been taken by surprise, but was lacking the tactical advantage normally supplied by their fast, agile chariots. A third legion crossed the river under cover of darkness, and now the Roman force was sufficiently strong enough to make a breakout.

Just after dawn, the Britons attacked – their total numbers are unknown, but there may have been anything up to 17,000 warriors present. Highly trained in this form of combat, the disciplined Romans pushed wedge-shaped columns into the scrum. It was a desperate, brutal struggle that could have gone either way. After much slaughter, one legion broke out and circled back on the Britons from behind, a manoeuvre that almost cost the legion’s commander, Hosidius Geta, his life. Geta, however, fighting ferociously in the midst of the combat, cut his way free, and was later honoured as a war hero back in Rome.

Encircled and ‘outgunned’, the Britons realised they were defeated and withdrew, leaving perhaps 5,000 dead on the battlefield. The Romans had lost around 850 men. It was the summer of AD 43, just a short time after the Roman invasion fleet had landed, and the Battle of the Medway signalled the start of the complete conquest of lowland England.

Most warfare consists of avoiding battle until the time is right, and in this sense the British leaders, the brothers Caratacus and Togodumnus, were masters of battle tactics. The landing of the invasion fleet at the north-eastern tip of Kent was unopposed because the Britons did not have enough forces in the area. The Britons gave ground and sent out small harassing units to nip at the flanks of the four legions as they moved through Kent, the skirmishes being enough to delay the Roman advance long enough for the British warriors to be gathered at a strong point – in this case on the north bank of the River Medway, somewhere to the west of modern-day Rochester. Unfortunately the Britons had severely underestimated the sheer military skill of the Romans, who had used the river-crossing ruse on previous campaigns in Europe, and had in place their Batavians as ‘special forces’. The strength and tenacity of the British opposition can be judged by the fact that the fighting lasted for two days, whereas most battles of the period were over in a matter of hours.

The Britons withdrew to the north bank of the Thames, and once the Romans had (with difficulty) crossed that river, they ‘slaughtered many of them’, according to the Roman historian Cassius Dio. Dio goes on to state: ‘But, as they [the Romans] followed up the remainder without due care, they became entangled in the trackless marshland and lost many men.’

Around this time Togodumnus died, possibly from wounds received at Medway, but his brother Caratacus carried on the fight, fleeing west and north to tribes unknown to him. Probably though a combination of support from the Druids – who may have seen in him the only military leader capable of mounting an effective resistance to the invaders – and his own personality, Caratacus mounted a fierce upland campaign that only came to an end when he was handed over to the Romans by another tribe, the Brigantes, in AD 51.

In the short term, Aulus Plautius was forced to cool his heels at the Thames while he waited, under orders, for the Emperor Claudius to arrive and ‘take’ the native capital of Camulodunum (Colchester) in what was nothing more than a public relations exercise designed to impress the Senate and public of Rome. With the Claudian circus taking six weeks to arrive – an imperial entourage and a troupe of war elephants do not move nimbly – Plautius, champing at the bit to consolidate the invasion, ordered the Second Augustan Legion under Vespasian to attack the south-west. Vespasian sailed to the Dorset and Hampshire coast and, according to the Roman historian Suetonius, fought thirty battles, defeated two tribes, overran the Isle of Wight and overcame twenty native fortresses. An example of Roman tactics can be found at Hod Hill, a hill fort near Blandford Forum in Dorset. There, fifteen ballista bolts were found – a ballista being a catapult that fired heavy iron-tipped arrows, a kind of Roman guided missile that could also be used to set fire to thatch and wooden buildings. The concentration of the bolts at Hod Hill suggested these artillery weapons had been mounted on a tall siege tower; from this vantage point the bolts rained down on the chieftain’s hut, a tactic which led to a rapid surrender. Shock and awe.

Caratacus pleading for his life before the Romans. He survived, but spent the rest of his life a captive of Rome.

AD60

BURN LONDINIUM TO THE GROUND!

‘On this ground we must either conquer or die with glory. There is no alternative.’

Speech attributed to Queen Boudicca (invented by Tacitus)

The IX Legion was on a forced march through eastern England. A few days earlier, it had been summoned from its winter quarters on the River Trent with the almost unbelievable news that the great city of Camulodunam (Colchester), the gleaming beacon of Roman life and civilisation in the province of Britannia, was now nothing but a fiery graveyard, its great temple toppled, its inhabitants slaughtered down to the last babe in arms.

Somewhere near Camulodunam, the IX encountered the people responsible for the conflagration: a ‘rabble’ of native Britons armed mostly with agricultural tools and hunting bows, their bladed weapons (such as swords) having been confiscated several years earlier. Unable to form into their defensive squares, the long column of Roman infantry found itself split up into small groups. They were annihilated. Perhaps some 2,000 men were slaughtered where they stood. The 400 or 500 cavalry, including the legion commander Petilius Cerealis, only survived by galloping away, very very fast.

The destruction of the IX Legion was a shocking blow to Roman prestige. Worse was to come. The important trading centre on the Thames, Londinium, was in the rebels’ sights. With insufficient troops to defend it, the Roman military abandoned the town. The rich fled to Gaul (France) on ships. About half the city’s population of 30,000 took to the roads south, refugees struggling to keep up with the troops and supply wagons as they headed for the safety of pro-Roman Kent. Those who were left behind were utterly defenceless; all were killed when the British hordes descended on the city, many being crucified, mutilated or impaled on stakes. Londinium itself became nothing more than a pile of ash. Shortly afterwards, the city of Verulanium (modern-day St Albans) suffered the same fate.

The episode was known to contemporaries as ‘the fury’: an anti-Roman rage that would stop at nothing – that would not shy from the very worst atrocities, even against women and children. To unleash such unflinching terror, something extraordinary must have happened.

And it had.

In the first century AD, as many as 50,000 Roman soldiers were stationed in Britain, almost one-eighth of the total military force of the Empire. This figure alone tells you all you need to know about what a troublesome, rebellion-prone place Britain was: while many tribes sued for peace and numerous native chiefs and aristocrats clearly saw the benefits of becoming Romanised – wine! luxury goods! toilets! – sedition was never far away. Especially as the Romans insisted on acting like every clichéd strutting bad guy you’ve ever seen in the movies.

When Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, died in AD 60, the Roman civilian and military elite on the ground idiotically chose not to negotiate a new deal with the friendly kingdom, but to treat that kingdom as if it was an enemy. The Icenian royal family was dispossessed and treated like slaves, money and estates were stolen, and nobles were bankrupted and evicted.

At the heart of this was a dynastic problem: Prasutagus had no son, and had left half of his kingdom to be shared between his two young daughters. The Romans feared the instability this would cause, and so decided to make a pre-emptive hostile takeover of the Icenian assets. A group of Roman soldiers raped the two girls – an extraordinary event inasmuch as rape, far from being condoned, was subject to severe punishment in the Roman army. The legal writer Ruffus stated that ‘a soldier who takes a girl by force and rapes her shall have his nose cut off, and the girl be given a third part of his property’. Also extraordinary was the public flogging of Prasutagus’ widow – for free women could not be legally flogged. And the queen was definitely a free woman.

Her name, by the way, was Boudicca.

It was Boudicca who unleashed the fury that left perhaps 50,000 corpses in the ashes of Camulodunam, Londinium and Verulanium. It was Boudicca who commanded the forces that cut the IX Legion to pieces. And it was the warrior-queen Boudicca who foolishly led a vast and unruly British horde against a fully formed Roman army in a pitched battle somewhere in Warwickshire. Despite a superiority of numbers, the native forces lacked the steely discipline of Roman battlecraft. It was one of the greatest slaughters of all time. The Roman writer Tacitus crowed that 80,000 Britons were killed that day – clearly an exaggeration, but no one knows by how much. The body count almost certainly numbered in the tens of thousands. Boudicca herself was killed or committed suicide.

Paulinus, the Roman general who defeated Boudicca, was another type we all recognise: the ‘take no prisoners’ career soldier for whom the only option is to always escalate the violence. Having destroyed the main rebel force, Paulinus cut and burned a reign of terror across southern England. Not surprisingly, this just provoked more resistance, and it took another year (and reinforcements from the Continent) before the rebellion was finally contained. At one point, the Empire had even contemplated abandoning Britain altogether. The Boudiccan revolt was a brief candle, and a failure. But it had put the lie to the invincibility of Rome.

AD122

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

‘The Roman Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.’

Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 and All That, 1930

The Roman army reached lowland Scotland in AD