The Little Book of England E-Book

Stuart Laycock

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Little Book of
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 267

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Did you know? • The first African community to arrive in England was stationed at Aballava on Hadrian's Wall to keep out the Picts. • Admiral Robert FitzRoy, creator of the Met Office, was so upset by criticism of his weather forecasts that he shot himself. • While studying at Cambridge, Charles Darwin formed the 'Glutton Club' for the purpose of eating unusual animals. • Ada Lovelace wrote a computer code in the nineteenth century, before a working computer had even been invented. • Maids of Honour at Henry VIII's court were given eight pints of ale per day and his army mutinied in Spain when the ale ran out. A little book about a BIG subject. England's not huge in land mass, but there is a lot to say about this little country. Yes, we'll be touching on the obvious bits – Shakespeare, 1966, disappointing weather, etc., but we'll also be going in search of what's under the surface of English history, society and culture. What is it that makes England England? People all over the world think they know the answer to that: the King or Queen, awkward politeness, Beefeaters and losing in penalties in international football. But we English know that we're a bit more complicated than such stereotypes. Or are we? Let's find out.

Leseprobe

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Stuart Laycock and Philip Laycock, 2023

The right of Stuart Laycock and Philip Laycock to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 198 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

A Little (Very Little) Introduction

1      So Where did England Come From?

2      A Lot of Kings, Queens, Princes, Princesses ... and Some Prime Ministers

3      A Surprising Number of Rebels

4      Making Friends with the Neighbours – Or Not

5      The World Comes to England

6      The Sometimes-Wild Weather and the Wildlife

7      Interesting Names for Interesting Places

8      The Industrial Revolution, Science, Trade and All That

9      The English: Language, Literature and Lyrics

10    The English and Food

11    Good Sports – Or Not

12    Random Thoughts on Being English Today

A LITTLE (VERY LITTLE) INTRODUCTION

England is, of course, a huge subject. OK, it’s not huge in the sense of a huge landmass or a huge (by world standards) population, but it’s huge because there is SO much that you could say about England.

It’s a country that is known the world over. Go to virtually anywhere on the planet and say you’re from England and they will have some idea of what you are talking about and where you are from.

England has, of course, long been a global force. Names such as Shakespeare, Queen Victoria (yes, she was a bit German), Churchill (yes, he was half-American) and Bobby Charlton are known across the world. As are Beefeaters (the folk in the fancy red costumes at the Tower of London, not the restaurant), Tower Bridge, bowler hats and gin and tonic.

This England is a special country (though, to be fair, most people in most countries think theirs is special) and so, here, in about 50,000 words, two English people (yes, we are an eighth Scottish and one of us is married to a Scot) are going to try to sum up, for anybody who is interested, what we find particularly special and/or interesting and/or amusing about this great country, this royal throne of kings (and queens), this scepter’d isle, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this England (had to go a bit Shakespearean there).

Welcome to The Little Book of England (which is most definitely NOT The Book of Little England – that would be something else entirely).

1

SO WHERE DID ENGLAND COME FROM?

Some people say, ‘You only know where you’re going, if you know where you’re coming from.’ With England, that could be a bit of a problem, since nobody really knows exactly where it came from or how it came into being.

A lot of countries have pretty much agreed origin stories. Sure, there are historical controversies and debates, but the country’s people have a broad sense of what happened when and how it led to the creation of their nation.

The origins of England, however, are situated deep in what used to be known (and, by many, are still known) as the Dark Ages. This was a phrase invented to indicate the comparative lack of historical sources for the period but has the rather unfortunate effect that people somehow instinctively think the period itself was rather dark. So, in movies about the period, you tend to get a lot of people wandering around looking rather depressed under grey skies. However, there were probably many warm and sunny days during the Dark Ages (well, this is England, so perhaps not that many) and historians today tend to prefer the term ‘the Early Medieval Period’. Basically, it’s what happened after the end of Roman Britain.

WHAT DID THE ROMANS EVER DO HERE?

The Romans, of course, had, by AD 410, been here for some time. Julius Caesar (yes, him), having slaughtered his way across Gaul, turned up here in 55 and 54 BC and found a lot of tribes who were the result of millennia of immigration into Britain, migration within Britain and occasional peaceful co-existence and a lot of mutual slaughter.

Caesar had a lot of trouble with the weather (no surprise there then) and with some of the locals, who were generally unenthusiastic about joining the Roman world and showed their lack of enthusiasm in the traditional manner, by chucking spears at the invaders. Caesar returned to Gaul, not having achieved much, and declared victory. Well, he was writing the history of his own ventures himself, so he could do that sort of thing.

Almost a century would pass after that before another Roman leader would dare to send his troops across the Channel. To the Romans, who were very much part of a Mediterranean-based empire, Britain just seemed extremely far away and, to them, the Channel was part of Oceanus, the uncharted ocean that surrounded the known world. It all seemed pretty uninviting to Romans and Emperor Claudius only decided to invade because the Romans had already invaded everywhere else that was closer and had a better climate.

In AD 43 the legions landed in Britain again. Some of the British tribes had now decided they quite liked the idea of joining the Roman world, and assisted, or at least didn’t oppose, the newcomers. A lack of British unity and a more determined display from the legions, this time, eventually produced Roman Britain.

Some Britons, such as Caratacus and Boudicca and her Iceni, were still very unenthusiastic about the whole idea, but this combination of imperial brutality and Roman cultivation of some of the British tribal leaders eventually led to Roman control across all of what is now Wales, and across England up to Hadrian’s Wall.

It didn’t, however, lead to huge enthusiasm for Roman culture across the whole of the island. In much of the west and north, people went on living their lives pretty much as they had before the Romans arrived. In Caledonia, the locals were particularly unenthusiastic about Rome. Every so often, the legions would advance north of Hadrian’s Wall on a mission to occupy the whole of the island and, every time, after a while and defeated by a combination of the weather, the distances and locals throwing things at them, the Romans would eventually give up and retreat to Hadrian’s Wall.

This turned into a bit (or actually quite a lot) of a strategic nightmare for the Roman Empire. They never managed to control the whole of Britain, and because (after all the problems they experienced in Caledonia) they didn’t even seriously consider tackling Hibernia (Ireland), Roman Britain was a vulnerable little bit of the Empire, separated from mainland Europe by Oceanus and surrounded by enemies.

Consequently, the Romans had to keep a big chunk of their army here during the entire period of the Roman occupation of Britain. This produced some unexpected results of its own. The Roman soldiers here were often bored and the Channel that separated the island from Europe made it a nice little place for rebellious generals to establish themselves before leading legions into mainland Europe to attempt to seize the imperial throne. One of these rebellions would change the history of the entire world, another would see British troops reach the Adriatic and another would destroy Roman Britain and, in the end, the whole Roman Empire too.

In AD 306, the troops of Constantine acclaimed him emperor in York. He then led his troops into mainland Europe, took Rome in AD 312, and in AD 313 began the process of making the Roman Empire officially Christian.

In AD 383, another general, Magnus Maximus, would also lead his British army into Europe. He has no link to Maximus Decimus Meridius (of Gladiator fame) nor, despite some of his coins carrying the legend ‘MAG MAX’, does he have any connection to Mad Max (of Mad Max fame). The venture of Magnus Maximus was not quite as successful as that of Constantine. He was defeated and executed in AD 388 in Aquileia near northern Italy’s Adriatic coast, though he does still live on in Welsh medieval legend as Macsen Wledig (as in ‘The Dream of Macsen Wledig’).

Then, in the early fifth century, the British legions thought they’d give it another go. In AD 407 they acclaimed another bloke called Constantine as emperor, perhaps because it was almost exactly a century since the first Constantine had launched his rebellion and because it had worked so well that time. Unfortunately for Constantine III (as he is known to history) and his troops, it wasn’t going to work that well this time, and the ensuing chaos was going to have huge consequences for the Roman Empire, Britain and England.

It all went quite well for him to begin with. He seized control of Gaul and made plans to take control of the rest of western Europe. However, it wasn’t just Constantine’s army that was on the move in Gaul. At the end of AD 406, a huge mass of people, including Vandals (that’s the type with a big ‘V’, not the blokes with a small ‘v’, who break things for fun), Alans (not all of them called Alan) and Suebi (not all of them suave, though some of them may have been) had crossed the Rhine and advanced into Roman-controlled territory.

At the time, Roman commanders tended to see such groups more as potential recruits to fight in various Roman civil wars than as any big threat to the Empire and, while Constantine III and other Roman commanders were fighting each other, the Vandals, Alans and Suebi managed to make it across Gaul into Spain, where they made themselves at home and established their own kingdoms. As other groups from the east arrived within the Empire, other such kingdoms would be established and, eventually, there would be nothing much left of the western Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the locals had pretty much had enough. They were still paying their taxes but most of the Roman army that was supposed to be defending them from raiders attacking them from west, north and east was in mainland Europe, fighting other Romans.

Britain had never really been high on the list of imperial priorities and, at that time, with civil wars raging and a lot of blokes freshly arrived in the Empire also wandering around heavily armed and looking for plunder and land, Britain pretty much didn’t figure on the list of imperial priorities at all.

In about AD 410, Britain rebelled and left the empire, and the empire hardly even noticed. By AD 411, Constantine III was dead and Britain was on its own against other bunches of heavily armed men who would soon start arriving on the island in significant numbers.

A NEW NORTH SEA FERRY SERVICE

These bunches of heavily armed men (with some women, armed or not) were coming from various directions. There were groups coming across the Irish Sea from Ireland. There were groups coming south from the lands beyond Hadrian’s Wall. And there were groups coming across the North Sea and Channel.

These last groups contained a wide range of ethnic groupings, including some Franks and Frisians, but the main three groups were Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Again, there was probably some fluidity among the groups but, in brief, a lot of people from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia were looking across the North Sea and thinking that Britain looked like a good destination for building a new life (well, the weather was better here in winter). Once they got to Britain, bringing a lot of their own culture, they would establish cultural zones that sort of divide into Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

Now this is where it all gets a bit difficult to identify what exactly is happening and who is doing what to whom and with whom, which in terms of understanding England and English history is very unfortunate, since this is pretty much where England originates.

There had, of course, been people in Britain for a very long time, and there must have been still lots here when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes started arriving in significant numbers in the first half of the fifth century. There was also some fluidity in Celtic tribal identities, but the Romans had sort of cemented in place the tribal structure they encountered when they invaded the island by making the tribes the basis of their civil administration structure here.

There were Catuvellauni, Trinovantes, Iceni, Atrebates, Dobunni, Brigantes and lots of other tribes here when the Romans arrived, and there almost certainly were these same peoples still here when Roman power disappeared in AD 410. However, since the period after this sees the disappearance of a lot of the archaeologically visible culture of Roman Britain, including things such as coins, mass-produced pottery and Roman-type architecture, it’s very hard to know exactly how many Britons there still were and what exactly they were up to.

The Victorians used to think this disappearance of much of the culture of Roman Britain was caused by Angles, Saxons and Jutes rampaging through villages and towns, slaughtering and burning enthusiastically. They were aided in this view by the writings of one Gildas, a British cleric writing in the early sixth century, who is pretty much our major source for the earliest decades of English history and who did indeed include some pretty gory rampaging in his account of the period. However, archaeologically, it looks likely that the main disappearance of Roman culture, in fact, mostly happened before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived here in any quantity. So, people have gone looking for other possible causes.

Some have suggested climate change (in this instance, the weather getting colder rather than hotter), some have looked at the possibility of plagues, others have suggested a massive financial crisis brought on by the withdrawal of Roman government. A major possibility is that, in the power vacuum left by Rome, the tribes fought each other for control of valuable land and resources in a series of civil wars.

Most likely, there was a combination of causes, but whatever this exact combination was, the result was that the newcomers from across the North Sea were arriving in a land where the local culture and economy was considerably weakened and there was probably some land unfarmed and available.

So, what exactly happened next? The short answer is nobody really knows. We don’t know how many Britons were still in the east and south of Britain when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived. We don’t know how many Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived. We don’t know whether the Britons mainly fought the newcomers or the newcomers mainly settled peacefully alongside the existing residents. We don’t know whether the newcomers mainly intermarried with the locals, or instead mainly evicted them and sent them fleeing westwards. In short, we don’t really know whether early England was mainly an Anglo-Saxon country or mainly a British Celtic country with an Anglo-Saxon veneer, in which many Britons adopted Anglo-Saxon culture, just as many of them had previously adopted Roman culture.

Efforts have been made, using DNA analysis, to try to work out what proportion of the population’s DNA in early England had origins on the other side of the North Sea, and what proportion had British origins, but the results suggested by different analyses have varied widely. What can be said with some certainty is that (not surprisingly) the highest proportion of newcomer DNA is found in places closest to mainland Europe, such as East Anglia, while in western parts of England, several DNA groupings seem to have been there since the Iron Age and seem probably to represent the tribes that the Romans found in Britain when they arrived here.

So, now we come to the historical record, such as it is. This has been assembled from three main sources, Gildas, the British cleric writing in the early sixth century, already mentioned, Bede (yes, the Venerable) an Anglo-Saxon monk writing mainly in the early eighth century, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first assembled perhaps in the ninth century. You’ll notice from the dates that none of this is exactly what you’d call contemporary reporting of what went on in fifth-century Britain, but from the various sources it is possible to assemble a rough kind of narrative for what was perhaps going on in some places at that time.

We have already seen how Roman commanders in mainland Europe unintentionally allowed newcomers to establish kingdoms within their borders. Something similar seems to have happened in at least one instance here. A British ruler, perhaps called Vortigern, allowed Saxons to settle within his realm in about AD 449, on the understanding they would fight for him against his enemies. However, a pay dispute happened and, instead of just going on strike or going to arbitration, the Saxons, perhaps led by two characters, Hengist and Horsa, decided that they would like their own kingdom in Britain instead. After a certain amount of slaughtering, they got that, establishing the kingdom of Kent.

The new kingdom took its name from the existing British tribe in the area, the Cantii, and some of its early warriors seem to have worn metalwork which incorporated Roman and British design elements but, nonetheless, there was a new power in the land.

In 1949, a boat (somewhat confusingly a replica Viking, not Saxon, boat) was sailed from Denmark to Kent to mark the 1,500th anniversary of Hengist and Horsa’s supposed arrival. And today, the Hugin replica is on display at Pegwell Bay in Kent.

A LOT OF KINGS AND KINGDOMS

Over the next century and a half, more such kingdoms emerged, accompanied with, again, some more slaughtering. These included the South Saxons (a name that would become Sussex) and the West Saxons (a name that would become Wessex). There were also the East Saxons (yep, Essex) and the Middle Saxons (Middlesex). The last lot never really made it as a kingdom but would later (much later) do quite well with cricket.

But what of those Angles, I hear you say? Well, there were, of course, the East Angles (in East Anglia obviously) and the Middle Angles (who, like the Middle Saxons, never really made it as a separate kingdom), and to the north of them, the small kingdom of Lindsey (at that stage a kingdom, not a person), and then Deira and Bernicia. Deira and Bernicia were north of the Humber and would eventually become, yes, Northumbria.

And the Jutes? Well, the Jutes don’t appear to have made it big over here. Kent was sort of Jutish – oh, and the Isle of Wight, and the bit of land opposite the Isle of Wight.

How Anglo-Saxon these ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms were is a bit unclear. Some of the kingdoms, such as Kent, had British names and the names of Lindsey, Deira and Bernicia all had British origins. And the ‘Saxon’ who is said to have founded Wessex, he had a British name too – Cerdic, a form of Caradoc or Caratacus.

It’s all very confusing and it’s hard to know exactly what was happening. Nevertheless, some kind of distinction had emerged between kingdoms in the east and south of Britain that were culturally Anglo-Saxon and generally pagan, and kingdoms in the west of Britain that were culturally British and Christian.

And there were battles between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons, some of which the Britons won. Gildas mentions a man called Ambrosius Aurelianus, who led the Britons to victory over the Saxons, and he mentions the British victory at the siege of Mount Badon.

Having mentioned Badon, it seems a good place here to mention a name linked to Badon, Arthur. Yes, it’s King Arthur himself, legend of book, stage, screen and possibly history. Arthur, if he existed, was a war commander leading Britons against the Anglo-Saxons, sometime either in the late fifth or early sixth century, yet, despite some uncertainty over his existence, he would become a hugely significant figure in the later culture both of England and Britain, as a prime example of the warrior king.

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century work, the History of the Kings of Britain, which was, in fact, in large part a work of historical fiction, told Arthur’s story in great detail and became a massive bestseller across England and Europe – to the extent that you could have a massive bestseller in the days when books had to be copied by hand. Two hundred manuscripts of the book remain, and that’s a lot of hard work, hand-copying, by anybody’s standards.

In 1191, Abbot Sully even found what was claimed to be the grave of Arthur and Guinevere in Glastonbury Abbey. It was a convenient find since the abbey had recently suffered a devastating fire and an increase in the tourist trade would help the abbey’s finances. Glastonbury, of course, still gets a lot of visitors today, even if not all of them are there for King Arthur. Yes, the younger generation probably associate Glastonbury more with the festival there, rather than a post-Roman warrior who may or may not have existed and may or may not have been buried there.

Henry VII called his son and (at that stage) heir Arthur. However, the prince died young and instead of a second King Arthur, we got Henry VIII. More about him later in the book.

And Arthur kept on inspiring writers over the centuries. In the fifteenth century, for instance, there was Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. In the nineteenth century came Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’. In the twentieth century, we had assorted Arthur movies, and yes, of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and its musical, Spamalot.

However, we now need to return to the sixth century, where Gildas was being somewhat less than inspired by Constantine, King of Dumnonia (Devon, Cornwall and a bit of Somerset). Tintagel, in Cornwall, the reputed birthplace of Arthur, was almost certainly one of his strongholds, but Gildas did not see Constantine as a noble warrior king. Constantine’s sins, according to Gildas, included multiple adulteries and attacking two royal youths at a church altar. He was never going to get nominated for Pious King of the Year.

Gildas was none too keen on some of the British royals but, there again, he didn’t like the pagan Saxons either. Gildas is said to have died in about 570 and he really wouldn’t have liked what was about to come next.

In 577, at the Battle of Deorham (now Dyrham near Bath), a West Saxon force under Ceawlin (another British name, basically, Colin) and his son Cuthwine defeated a British army, killed three British kings and captured Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. With this battle, the Anglo-Saxons destroyed the last remaining British kingdom (probably the successor to the mighty Dobunni tribe) in what is now south-central England, and reached the western sea, cutting the land route between the Britons in Cornwall and Devon and the Britons in what is now Wales. Just a few years later, in the early 600s, a Northumbrian force under King Æthelfrith destroyed another British army in a battle at Chester, threatening the land route between Wales and the Britons to the north in Cumbria (a name that has the same origins as Cymru, the Welsh word for Wales) and beyond.

Gildas would, however, have approved of some developments in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the decades after his death, because Christianity was coming to the Anglo-Saxons. It all perhaps started in a slightly questionable fashion. Pope Gregory allegedly saw some blond boys in a slave market in Rome, asked who they were and, on being told they were Angles, made some quip about them being more angels than Angles. Presumably Gregory liked (at least some of) his angels to be blonde.

Anyway, allegedly on the basis of all that, Gregory in Rome decided that he would reach out across Oceanus to this land. He assembled a task force of about forty, under a priest called Augustine, and despatched it to England. Soon after that, however, he had to despatch them again to England, because Augustine had returned with a plea not to be sent to this distant island lurking on the edge of the known world.

In 597, Augustine finally landed, like the legions before him, in Kent. He was, however, on a peaceful mission and, fortunately for him, unlike what had happened to the legions, none of the locals threw anything sharp at him. Soon, with the permission of King Æthelbert of Kent, and the encouragement of his Frankish and Christian wife, Bertha, Augustine and his mission had established themselves in the capital of Kent, Canterbury. The Archbishop of Canterbury is, of course, the head of the Church of England today.

ONE BIG KINGDOM

Christianity would spread fairly fast through the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the seventh century. Meanwhile, the kings of the various Anglo-Saxons were competing enthusiastically for political and military power. The Anglo-Saxons were still occasionally advancing against the Britons in the west, but they were also spending a lot of time fighting each other and trying to acquire dominance over each other. This was, as yet, nothing resembling an actual Kingdom of England, but, somewhere amidst all the fighting, there did develop the concept of the Bretwalda.

We have already seen how hard it is to know what was going on in this whole period, so it won’t surprise you that people can’t entirely agree on what the word ‘Bretwalda’ means. It might mean ‘ruler of Britain’ or, it might mean ‘ruler of a wide domain’. Broadly speaking, however, it does seem to have been a term that was applied to the king in each generation who was the pre-eminent king in England – the king who had power and influence over the other kings and princes. It was probably not an official title, but more a matter of opinion and an acknowledgment of the realities of power in an England where, ultimately, power came from the sword’s sharp edge. Bede gives a list of pre-eminent kings, which includes Ceawlin of Wessex – the bloke who, among other conquests, captured Bath, Gloucester and Cirencester – and Æthelbert of Kent.

After Æthelbert, he goes on to Rædwald of East Anglia. Now, since this is the king who was probably buried with the sumptuous Sutton Hoo treasure, it does indeed seem reasonable to see him as a king who may have had some kind of special status among other kings.

Interestingly, although generally the Sutton Hoo treasure is regarded as a superb example of Anglo-Saxon taste and craftsmanship (which generally it is), there are pieces in it that are (or may be) of British manufacture. There is, for instance, a spectacular British hanging bowl and it has been argued that a magnificent, large ceremonial whetstone, kitted out as a sceptre, is also of British manufacture.

After Rædwald, Bede continues with his list to a bunch of north-eastern kings. These were powerful people and, since Bede himself lived and worked in the north-east, it was also, no doubt, useful for him to compliment local royalty. In doing so, however, Bede ignores a figure who should feature in such a list of pre-eminent kings – one of the most interesting and enigmatic characters of early British and English history, Penda of Mercia.

Penda was a pagan, which is almost certainly one reason why the Venerable (and very Christian) Bede didn’t want him in his list. Another reason was that Penda spent quite a lot of his time invading the north-east, which was Bede’s home territory.

The origins of Penda are unknown and there may have been Britons in his family as well as Anglo-Saxons. It is clear, however, that Penda created Mercia as one of the great kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, dominating the centre of Britain and spreading its power in all directions. Interestingly, while other Anglo-Saxon kings were attacking the Britons, Penda allied himself with Britons to attack Anglo-Saxons.

In 633, for instance, with Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, he defeated and killed Edwin of Northumbria (one of Bede’s list of pre-eminent kings) at the Battle of Hatfield Chase, fought most probably near Doncaster. The amazing Staffordshire Hoard is connected to the early history of Mercia. The close alliance between Mercia and Welsh kings would not last, but Mercia itself (the name probably means something like ‘Land of the borders’) would go on to play a huge role in English history. And the name is still used today – as in the British Army’s Mercian Regiment or the West Mercia Police.

Despite some of his biases, Bede is, of course, a huge figure in English literature and in the writing of English history. And it is possible to see in him how the idea of a broader identity, which encompassed peoples from various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, was beginning to emerge when he was writing in the early eighth century. His most famous work, for instance, is called in Latin the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, but is known in English as the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Sometime around 900, one of Bede’s Latin references to English territory was translated into English as ‘Engla londe’, |a term that would eventually become ‘Englaland’ and then, yes, England.

Mercia continued to do well for itself during the eighth century, with the so-called Mercian Supremacy (a lot more swords than in the Bourne Supremacy). This was the age of King Offa of Mercia, whose name is now attached to the mighty Offa’s Dyke earthwork in the Welsh borders.

However, the power of Wessex was starting to rise, a process that was somewhat abruptly interrupted by the arrival of, yes, the Vikings. And no, they didn’t have horns or wings on their helmets. It would have been fairly impractical in battle, even if such helmets do look rather fun in Victorian illustrations.

The Vikings arrived originally as raiders but soon saw an opportunity to take land permanently in a country that had, again, rather warmer winters than their own. The Vikings had conquered huge amounts of England when Alfred (the Great, of course) managed to inflict a decisive defeat on them at the Battle of Edington in 878.

Wessex was taking control. Alfred died in 899, but his son Edward the Elder continued the process, ending up controlling perhaps most of England, in fact, and because of that he took the title ‘King of the Anglo-Saxons’. His son, Æthelstan, continued the process and took the titles ‘King of the Whole of Britain’, which he wasn’t, and ‘King of the English’, which he pretty much was.

Edgar, who ruled from 959 to 975, consolidated the English kingdom, and England had pretty much arrived as a country. Obviously, there would be changes of ruler and changes of dynasty, and eventually England would be linked to the other constituent parts of what is now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but from about the tenth and eleventh centuries we can say that there is a place called England.

So, what is this England and who are the people who have lived in it and who live in it now? In the rest of this little book, we are going to take a little look.

2

A LOT OF KINGS, QUEENS, PRINCES, PRINCESSES … AND SOME PRIME MINISTERS