Bloody British History: Suffolk E-Book

Robert Leader

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Bloody British History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 156

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Death, Danes and disaster in Dark Age Ipswich! The castles are burning! Attacks, rebellions, battles and wars in ancient Suffolk! Queen of Blood and Fire! The dark days of Bloody Mary revealed! Sea of blood! Smugglers, sea battles, U-Boats and invasions along the Suffolk coast! The Zeppelins are coming! Bombs and bodies in the First World War! Suffolk has one of the most amazing histories of any British county. Betrayals, conspiracies and invasions have left their mark on this eastern frontier. Discover how vicious power struggles between the Danes and the Vikings shaped the history of not just the county, but the United Kingdom as a whole. Read of the troublesome Bigod dynasty, the Suffolk city under the sea and the strange story of the thousands of burnt corpses that washed up on the county's beaches during the Second World War. Discover the dark truth inside!

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

Introduction

AD 61

Ambush on the Stour

AD 616

‘And the River Ran Foul …’

AD 633

The Demon-Battling Monk

AD 794

Aethelberht Loses His Head

AD 865

Vicious Vikings

AD 1010

Ulfketel, the Fighting Earl

AD 1069

The Last Viking Assault on Ipswich

AD 1174

Bigods Bold, the Bully Barons

AD 1216

The Barons’ War

AD 1326

The She-Wolf of France

AD 1328

The Lost City Under the Sea

AD 1381

The Peasants are Revolting

AD 1447

Beheaded with a Rusty Sword

AD 1514

The Defiant Bride

AD 1553

Bloody Mary

AD 1586

Suffolk’s Buccaneer

AD 1605

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

AD 1642

The Civil War

AD 1665

The Roar of Cannon and the Stink of Blood

AD 1667

The Last Invasion

AD 1672

Caught With Their Pants Down

AD 1683

A Murder Plot that Failed

AD 1735

The Hadleigh Gang

AD 1759

Redcoats, Red Roses, and Raw Red Courage

Four Headless Horses

AD 1915

Beyond the Call of Duty

AD 1917

Zeppelins Over Suffolk

AD 1922

Shipwreck and Storm

AD 1938

The Second World War

AD 1943

The Railway of Death

AD 1953

Storm Surge, the Floods of Death

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

OKAY, SO YOU’VE NOTICED that this book is a bit slim for a fully detailed history of Suffolk. That’s because it isn’t the complete history. It’s called Bloody British History: Suffolk because that is what it is. It’s all the bloody, gory bits, with all the dreary, boring bits left out.

It’s not designed for classrooms and history lessons. It isn’t going to teach you all the dry old stuff and turn you into a knowledgeable bore. It’s just an enjoyable romp through all the blood and battles and all that’s gory, ghoulish and bizarre.

It includes the legends, the murders and a few naughty bits. It may chill your blood, it may make you shudder, but once you’re hooked, it won’t let you get away. Read it if you dare.

NB All uncredited images are the property of the author.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dymond, David and Northeast, Peter, A History of Suffolk (Phillimore, 1995)

Riching, Derek and Rudderham, Roger Ian, Robber Barons and Fighting Bishops (Jack Nichals Publications, 2003)

West, H. Mills, Ghosts of East Anglia (Barbara Hopkinson, 1984)

Wilson, Derek, A Short History of Suffolk (Batsford, 1977)

Borough of St Edmundsbury Official Guide, 1976

AD 61

AMBUSH ON THE STOUR

HISTORY IS A blood-spattered litany of lessons never learned and the history of Suffolk is no exception. No doubt the Stone Age men fought each other over the most attractive women, the best caves to live in and the spoils of the hunt. The Celtic tribes, though, enjoyed many a scrap on a larger scale. They developed iron-tipped spears and arrows to make the job of killing and butchering a bit easier than with the old flint axes.

The Iron Age peoples built wooden forts and dug ditches for their defence and, to scare the hell out of their enemies, painted their faces with blue woad and spiked their hair with white lime. They had developed the wheel and their nobles rode chariots with iron-rimmed wheels and flashing iron blades sticking out from the axles. Their priests were the white-robed Druids who worshipped the old gods of the earth, the moon and the water.

Then the Romans appeared in a full-scale invasion and we get the beginnings of recorded history.

The expanding Roman Empire launched its first attack upon the shores of England in the year 55 BC, which was led by Julius Caesar, who was then the Roman commander in Gaul. His eighty ships were beaten back by a combination of storms and dogged counter-attacks by the local Celtic tribes. One year later, Caesar returned with 800 ships and achieved some initial success. However, it was not until AD 43 that the Emperor Claudius personally led a major invasion of Britain.

The Emperor Claudius, from a contemporary coin. (THP)

The Roman army landed again in Kent and quickly defeated the local tribes, the Catuvellauni, under their king, Caratacus. They then marched north through Essex to what is now Colchester, where another ten tribal chiefs surrendered and signed treaties of friendship with Rome. They included the Iceni, or Eceni, who were then dominant in Suffolk and Norfolk.

The southern boundary of the Iceni tribal lands ran in a rough line from Newmarket to Aldeburgh, so the Iceni ruled most of Northern Suffolk. The southern half was the home of a Celtic tribe called the Trinovantes, but they had been invaded and conquered by the Catuvellauni from the west. The Iceni had long been rivals of the Catuvellauni and were happy to see their aggressive southern neighbours humbled and beaten.

The Roman invasion of Britain was prompted by two main causes: the Emperor Claudius needed a major victory to promote his position at home, but also found it necessary to control, invigorate and expand the trade in English corn and iron and cloth to sustain his large standing armies on the Rhine and in other parts of central Europe.

Roman map of Britain. (THP)

The Romans came, they saw, they conquered – but not without some initial setbacks. In AD 47, the Iceni joined a rebellion with the other Celtic tribes and that had to be put down, but it was only a foretaste of what was to happen in the traumatic year of AD 61.

Prasutagus – the client king of the Iceni – died, but in an effort to preserve some of his heritage and appease his Roman masters, his will left his estate divided. One half was to go to Rome, the other half to his widow and heirs. The greedy Romans wanted it all and when Queen Boudicca protested, she was whipped and her two daughters were assaulted. In doing so, the Romans had enraged a tigress. Up until this point, the proud Iceni had pragmatically accepted the brute fact of Roman rule, but whipping their queen and abusing their princesses was something they could not tolerate.

TARANIS, THE GOD OF WAR

Every Iceni village would have contained a Hall of Warriors, a general meeting place where the men would have gathered to drink and tell stories, and close by would be the temple of Taranis, the Celtic God of War.

Taran was the Iceni word for thunder, and the Celtic belief stated that the sound of thunder was the sound of Taranis’ chariot wheels crushing the skulls of his enemies as he stormed through the sky. The chariot wheel was the god’s symbol and has since become incorporated into the familiar symbol of the Celtic cross.

Boudicca’s cries for vengeance roused both her own people and the neighbouring Trinovantes. Suddenly the whole of East Anglia was united in an unholy uproar. Riding at the head of her racing hordes and chariots, the warrior queen stormed down upon the nearest symbol of Roman authority, the Roman town of Camulodunum, or what is now Colchester in Essex.

With their blue-painted faces and white, spiked hair, the blood-lusting Britons must have made a terrifying sight. The town was destroyed by fire and its inhabitants massacred. The great Temple to Claudius, who was worshipped as both emperor and god, was torn down. Much later, in 1907, the severed stone head of the once-revered statue of Claudius was fished out of the River Alde in Suffolk.

Boudicca still rides above Westminster Bridge.

Boudicca’s enraged forces were unstoppable. The Ninth Legion, who had been stationed in the Nene Valley, marched south to deal with the insurrection. They were ambushed somewhere in the Valley of the Stour, probably near modern Haverhill, and lost 1,000 men.

The historical record is sparse on details, but to achieve her victory, Boudicca’s attack must have come as a complete surprise. We can imagine her horse-drawn chariots bursting out of the trees like thunderbolts of fury as they smashed through the long column of weary, marching soldiers. To have lost so many men, the Romans would have had no time to form a shield wall or any of their usual defensive tactics. The snorting, foaming horses would have kicked through their lines, the wheel blades of the chariots slicing into the bare legs below the leather kilts of the soldiers. Many of them would have fallen crippled, to be speared where they lay by the following horde of screaming Britons.

The triumphant Boudicca led her forces on to the major Roman towns at London and then to St Albans, torturing and burning and slaughtering every Roman and Roman sympathiser she could find. The Iceni advance was only halted when the Romans managed to gather 10,000 troops to fight a set battle. The Romans were outnumbered ten to one but, at last, their superior training and discipline won the day. This time it was Boudicca’s forces who were routed and slaughtered. The Warrior Queen is said to have taken poison and died by her own hand.

The reprisals in Suffolk and Norfolk were equally savage, and probably the reason for that stone head of Claudius to be thrown into the river. No survivor of the Iceni warriors would want to be caught with a trophy from the sacking of Camulodunum.

THE ROMAN SHORE FORTS

The next two centuries in Norfolk and Suffolk were relatively peaceful. The Roman economy and rule of law were comfortably accepted, along with the benefits of increased long-distance trade. The Iron Age landscape of hill forts, small settlements and farms was changed into one of expanding small Roman towns, small to luxury villas, often with under-floor heating and bath houses, and a growing network of arrow-straight Roman roads.

By the third century of Roman rule, the short, direct trade routes to Europe were being threatened by Saxon pirates, prompting the construction of a chain of Roman forts to defend the Suffolk shore. A large fort at Burgh protected the great estuary of converging rivers that has now shrunk to Breydon Water. Another fort at Walton near Felixstowe protected the estuary of the Orwell and the Stour.

The Roman war galleys attached to the forts patrolled the river mouths and the North Sea, fighting off the raids of Germanic pirates. But the Roman Empire was disintegrating and the barbarians grew bolder. When the Romans withdrew, it was the turn of the Saxons to invade the Suffolk shore.

AD 616

‘AND THE RIVER RAN FOUL …’

WHEN THE ROMANS marched their legions out of Suffolk and Norfolk in the early part of the fifth century, their departure marked the beginning of the power vacuum that became known as the Dark Ages. The Saxon pirates had already become a troublesome presence in the North Sea, and it was around this time that all the East Anglian defences broke down: the Saxon shore forts which the Romans had built at Burgh and Walton fell into decline. Stalwart Roman legionnaires no longer manned their ramparts. The fast-response cavalry units had disappeared. The sleek Roman war galleys that had patrolled the vulnerable estuaries and river mouths of the Wash, the Yare and the Orwell had all gone.

Invaders from the sea harassed the region in this era. (THP)

Rome needed all she had to defend the heartland of a shrinking empire. In Rome’s hour of need, Britain was abandoned. The pirates became bolder and in their wake came waves of Jutes and Angles and Saxons from the Germanic tribes of Northern Europe. Expanding communities and their ambitious warlords rowed their longboats across the North Sea and pushed their way bloodily into the estuaries and up the rivers. These people stayed as settlers and invaders, pushing back or mingling with the Celtic Britons. The newcomers were mainly illiterate. Like the Celtic peoples of the earlier Iron Age, they left no records to speak for themselves and so their first two centuries were a Dark Age. There would have been many bloody battles for supremacy between the established Roman Britons and the new arrivals, but we can again only imagine the fury and the despair of those engagements.

Slowly the Dark Ages were followed by the Saxon Age, when these intermingled peoples began to form powerful kingdoms. To the south were the kingdoms of Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Kent, and to the west and north, the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria. The Kingdom of East Anglia was formed by the North Folk and the South Folk and by the eastern part of Cambridgeshire. Its legendary symbol of three crowns is still used in the arms of the Borough of St Edmundsbury and the University of East Anglia.

The Venerable Bede, a monk historian writing around AD 730, listed Raedwald of East Anglia as one of the four major Over-Kings of the seventh century. His capital was at Rendlesham on the banks of the River Deben in the heart of Suffolk.

BEOWULF

This was the age of Beowulf, the legendary hero and leader of a band of warrior brothers whose courage and adventures were acclaimed in one of the few great poems of the time. Beowulf battled monsters and dragons. He slew the monster Grendel with his bare hands and then fought and killed the monster’s mother in a cavern under a lake. He was a paragon of Saxon virtues and master of the Saxon sword. One suggestion is that the saga of Beowulf was actually written by a poet at the royal court of Raedwald. The story would have been sung and applauded in Raedwald’s hall and in the lesser halls of the villages and settlements.

These were very closely knit tribal communities where social cohesion was based on kinship and honour and loyalty foremost to the king or lord. Personal security lay in knowing that relatives would avenge one’s death and, in battle, all honour lay in protecting the chief. To survive the war leader or withdraw before him from the fight meant undying shame and disgrace.

The fictional Beowulf exemplified all these ideals and would have been a role model for every aspiring young Saxon hero.

SUTTON HOO

Much of what we know about the life and times of Raedwald was uncovered at Sutton Hoo, a high bluff overlooking the River Deben near Woodbridge in Suffolk. In 1939, in the largest of the seventeen burial mounds located here, a local archaeologist discovered the burial ship of an ancient Anglo-Saxon warrior king. It was one of the richest Anglo-Saxon graves ever to be excavated in Europe and the warrior king is believed to have been Raedwald. A great hoard of gold, bronze and silver was placed with him, along with his weapons and armour in his full-sized wooden burial ship, which was then covered by a massive earth barrow.

A similar ship burial was excavated near the River Alde and at a Saxon cemetery near Lakenheath two Saxon warriors have been unearthed, both of whom had their horses buried beside them. It seems that all kings and lords were buried with evidence of their wealth and power, and all warriors with their swords and shields to hand.

Sutton Hoo is now a National Trust site with a brand new exhibition hall to display its discoveries and to tell the story of how our Anglo-Saxon forebears once lived.

The recreated Saxon village at West Stow.

The three crowns of Saxon East Anglia.

At one stage, in AD 616, Raedwald gathered an army and marched it north through Mercia to do battle with Aethelfrid, the king of Northumbria. The story relates that Edwin, an exiled prince of Northumbria, had fled and sought sanctuary in Raedwald’s royal court. Aethelfrid obviously saw Edwin as a dangerous rival and offered Raedwald bribes to have the young man murdered. Raedwald might have been tempted but his wife is credited with reminding him that he was a man of honour. The King of Northumbria then resorted to threats of war and invasion.

In these pagan days there were strict codes of honour. No true king or lord could sell his honour for money or betray the obligations of hospitality once given. Raedwald had sheltered Edwin and got himself into a fix with only one way out. He gathered his army and marched north to take the fight to Northumbria.

They met on the east bank of the River Idle and fought a ferocious battle. Raedwald had moved quickly, so that Aethelfrid had not had time to fully gather all his forces, although Raedwald lost his son Raegenhere in the battle. The East Anglian king had split his forces into three groups, led by himself, Raegenhere and Edwin. It seems that Aethelfrid may have mistaken Raegenhere for Edwin, and so he concentrated his assault on Raegenhere and cut him down. Raedwald was enraged at the death of his son and led a furious onslaught that resulted in a great slaughter of the Northumbrians, including the death of Aethelfrid. The East Anglian army smashed and butchered the Northumbrians and the river was said to have run foul with the blood of Englishmen.

Raedwald set the exiled prince Edwin upon the throne of Northumbria and returned to Suffolk in triumph. Now it was Aethelfrid’s sons who had to take their turn in fleeing into exile.

AD 633

THE DEMON-BATTLING MONK

Saint Fursey, the man credited with converting the bulk of East Anglia to Christianity, was born in Ireland in the early seventh century. He was educated and then inducted into his uncle’s monastery and devoted himself to a religious life. In his lifetime he established religious houses in Ireland, England and France, and was renowned for his Christ-like miracles and for his ecstatic visions.

He fell into trances, where he claimed to have heard heavenly choirs singing, recognised the saints and conversed with angels, who fought demons for his soul. He saw fantastic images of heaven and hell and received spiritual teaching and instructions, including a command to do twelve years of apostolic labour, and to ‘Go, and announce the Word of God.’ In one vision he passed through the fires of hell and a spiteful demon hurled the body of a burning sinner at him. The body struck and burned Fursey’s flesh, and the saint is said to have carried the burn mark for the rest of his life.