The Little History of England E-Book

Jonathan McGovern

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 408

Beschreibung

What did the Romans do for us? Did King Arthur really exist? Who was Bloody Mary? Why did Great Britain go to war with Napoleon? Formed out of a union of warring Germanic kingdoms in the tenth century ad, England rose to become the most powerful nation in the world and the operations room of an empire spanning a quarter of the world's land surface. The Little History of England tells the great story of English history as simply as possible. This fast-paced and comprehensive narrative takes the reader on a journey from the beginning of the world to the present day. Historian Jonathan McGovern brings an insider's perspective into play, explaining the real significance behind the tumultuous history of this remarkable country.

Leseprobe

For my parents

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Jonathan McGovern, 2024

The right of Jonathan McGovern to be identified as the Author 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 467 3

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

Prefatory Note

1    In the Beginning

2    The Anglo-Saxons (426–1066)

3    The Normans (1066–1153)

4    The Angevins (1153–1216)

5    The Early Plantagenets (1216–1327)

6    The Fourteenth Century (1327–1400)

7    Lancaster and York (1400–1485)

8    The Early Tudors (1485–1547)

9    The Later Tudors (1547–1603)

10  The Early Stuarts (1603–1649)

11  Revolution and Restoration (1649–1714)

12  Early Hanoverian Britain (1714–1760)

13  Later Hanoverian Britain (1760–1838)

14  Victoria and Edward (1838–1910)

15  The Early Twentieth Century (1910–1953)

16  The Later Twentieth Century to the Present Day

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

England in the late ninth century.

The United Kingdom and Ireland in the present day.

PREFATORY NOTE

This book is a super-concentrated history of England. I have tried to make the narrative as simple as possible without dumbing the material down. If this has meant occasionally having to state the obvious, I can only ask readers to take it in good part. I wanted this book to be accessible, dependable and, above all, useful.

1

IN THE BEGINNING

England is not really very old. There was no kingdom of England until the tenth century AD, no kingdom of Great Britain until 1707 and no United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until 1801. The universe, by contrast, started to expand 13.8 billion years ago, and the earth was formed out of a whirling cloud of dust and gas about 9.3 billion years later. The landmass of Britain took shape over millions of years as a result of massive geological events such as the closure of oceans and the collision of continents.

Dinosaurs roamed parts of the country until their extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago, due to the fallout from an asteroid colliding with the earth. The landmass of Britain began to resemble its current shape during the Tertiary Period, which ended 2.6 million years ago. Britain’s climate during the Tertiary was largely subtropical, the coasts arrayed with palm trees and the swamps infested with crocodiles.

Britain’s prehistory was influenced by wave upon wave of human migration. Bipedal hominins of the genus Homo evolved in Africa 2.3 million years ago and may have first found their way to Britain as early as 900,000 BC, during the Early Pleistocene epoch, when Britain’s climate cycled between congenial warmth and icy cold. For an unimaginable length of time, successive waves of hunter-gatherer hominins made Britain their home, including communities of heavy-browed Neanderthals. Hominins travelled to Britain via Doggerland, an area of land that once connected south-east Britain to the continent. They fashioned rudimentary tools and weapons from natural materials like flint, hunted the woolly rhinoceros and the mammoth, and wore skins to stay warm. They were absent from Britain from around 180,000 BC because the climate had become inhospitably cold. During the Eemian interglacial (130,000–115,000 BC), Doggerland was submerged under water due to rising temperatures and sea levels. It re-emerged as a narrower land bridge when temperatures began to cool again, forming an entry point for hominins to trickle back into Britain from around 60,000 BC.

HOMO SAPIENS

Homo sapiens, the best and worst of creatures, evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago and first arrived in Britain in about 40,000 BC (Upper Palaeolithic period). Early Homo sapiens populated Britain for tens of thousands of years. They organized themselves into nomadic kinship groups and practised cave and rock painting. Eventually, they displaced their hominin cousins. The most famous early Homo sapiens specimen from Britain is Cheddar Man, dating from the eighth millennium BC (Mesolithic period), whose remains were discovered in a subterranean waterway in Somerset at the turn of the twentieth century.

A new, comparatively advanced type of Homo sapiens reached Britain’s shores from the Mediterranean in around 4000 BC (Neolithic Period), crossing over on rafts because Doggerland was now permanently submerged. The country that welcomed the Neolithic settlers would have been a magical place to modern eyes, covered in forests that had sprung up since the melting of the Pleistocene ice. These settlers introduced farming to Britain, lived in villages and were well organized and technical. Though their lives were hard – with atrocious levels of infant mortality – they probably ‘worked fewer hours per year than a modern man or woman’.1 Their outstanding legacy is Stonehenge, which they built over the course of several centuries in what is now Wiltshire, with the iconic circle of sarsen stones erected between 2600 and 2400 BC. The purpose of Stonehenge is still debated, but it was probably some kind of temple. For reasons now unknown, possibly genocide or perhaps just disease, the Neolithic settlers were displaced in around 2400 BC by yet another wave of migrants, named the Beaker People because of the bell-shaped beakers they buried in the graves of their dead. The Beaker People were descended from the Yamnaya peoples of the Eurasian Steppe, a belt of grassland stretching from Central Europe to East Asia.

CELTIC MIGRATION

The last great prehistoric migration to Britain began in the Bronze Age. In around 1000 BC, there was an influx of settlers from what is now France, who brought with them Celtic culture and languages. This is about the time that Britain was ruled, according to legend, by a Trojan descendant of Aeneas called Brute, who is said have rid the land of giants. Fanciful chronicles, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain, record that Brute was the ancestor of King Leir and other legendary kings. Centuries after the arrival of the Beaker People and the Celtic migrants, their descendants could plausibly consider themselves indigenous Britons because the details would likely have passed out of memory by then. It is hard to know how far the two groups intermingled, or to what extent their numbers were boosted by continuing Celtic migration. These genetically and culturally diverse peoples are commonly referred to as the Celts or Britons. They got on with their simple lives while great civilizations were growing up elsewhere in the world. The ascendant Roman Republic proved its growing might in 202 BC, when a Roman army defeated the Carthaginian general Hannibal.

The population of Britain in the first century BC was possibly as large as 2 million, equivalent to about a fifth of the population of modern London. These 2 million people were divided into more than thirty tribes, each with their own customs and chieftains (sometimes called kings and queens). There were the Parisi in what is now the East Riding of Yorkshire, the Demetae and Silures in South Wales and the Dumnonii in the West Country. The Romans called the whole island ‘Britannia’ because some of its inhabitants were known as the Pritani. According to Roman testimony, each tribe had two governing classes: a knightly class, who served as military leaders, and a priestly class called druids, who arranged religious ceremonies, settled legal disputes, divined the future and even organized human sacrifices, possibly using the terrible Wicker Man. The Greek geographer Strabo observed that the Britons were taller and darker-haired than the Gauls, or French Celts, but also more barbaric. Not so barbaric, though: they knew the arts of metalwork, pottery, glass production and horsemanship and they traded with their neighbours, regularly providing tin to enterprising Phoenician merchants. Some Britons lived in basic towns that were connected to each other by a network of roads. Like their ancestors, they dwelt in roundhouses: primitive structures built of stone or other materials, with conical thatched roofs.

ROMAN BRITAIN

Great empires invariably conquer, absorb, bully or at the very least meddle in the affairs of less developed states. This is done to protect imperial interests, certainly, but there is more to it than that: empires reach out, probe and expand as if by some law of nature. Britain’s history was to be shaped forever when her elites came into direct conflict with the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar, then Roman governor of Illyricum and Cisalpine Gaul, invaded Britain in 55 and 54 BC (Late Iron Age). The first invasion was really a reconnaissance mission, while the second was a display of military strength, with Caesar accompanied by five legions. His immediate aim was to stop Britain from aiding the enemies of Rome during the Gallic Wars, so his interventions were modest: he made treaties, established a few Roman puppets as British chieftains, and took a few token hostages, before returning his attention to the main objective, the conquest of Transalpine Gaul. He later described the ways of the Britons in his Commentaries on the Gallic War: the men shaved all their body hair, saving only their moustaches and the hair on their heads, and daubed themselves with war-paint to enhance their fearsomeness in battle. He also claimed that the Celts practised polyandry. Caesar’s Gallic War, however, is not exactly a reliable guide to prehistoric Britain: modern archaeologists have shown that his comments on British agriculture are grossly inaccurate.

About a century after Caesar’s departure, Emperor Claudius, the fourth emperor since the end of the Roman Republic, authorized a more ambitious invasion of Britain. Rome was alarmed by the spread of anti-imperial sentiment on the island, particularly on the part of two kings of the Catuvellauni tribe, the brothers Caratacus and Togodumnus, who ruled territory that now falls within London, Essex and Hampshire. These brothers attacked a Roman ally named Verica, king of the Atrebates tribe, which furnished a good pretext for Roman intervention. Claudius also coveted Britain’s rich mineral resources: gold, silver, tin and lead. Four Roman legions under the command of Aulus Plautius landed in Britain in around May AD 43, probably at Richborough on the east coast of Kent. Some British chieftains resisted the arrival of the Claudian invaders, while others put up little to no defence, signing up as client kings under the protection and authority of Rome.

Togodumnus was slain in battle, while his brother evaded capture for a few more years and the invaders seized the strategically important town of Camulodunum (Colchester) from the Catuvellauni tribe. They set it up as their capital, intending to extend Roman dominion over the whole island. Emperor Claudius himself arrived in Britain in August with war elephants and a portion of the Praetorian Guard – an elite unit of imperial bodyguards – though he stayed no longer than a couple of weeks. When Plautius was recalled to Rome in AD 47, Publius Ostorius Scapula succeeded him as governor. Ostorius Scapula and his successors established hundreds of military sites in Britain, ranging from small forts and stores bases to full legionary fortresses. Imperial Rome maintained overseas territories in part for military-strategic reasons: the emperor needed the support of a large army, and it was politically safer to have such an army spread out across the world rather than concentrated in one place.

BOUDICCA’S REBELLION

The Britons eventually revolted, as the subjugated inevitably do, in AD 60, under the leadership of Queen Boudicca from the East Anglian Iceni tribe. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, Boudicca exhorted her men to oppose the ‘imported despotism’ and to return to their ‘ancestral mode of life’, for it was better to be poor and free than wealthy and enslaved.2 The rebels sacked Colchester and other towns, slaughtering tens of thousands of Roman citizens, but the rebellion was eventually crushed by the fifth Roman governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, whose men reportedly slew 80,000 Britons in battle. With their immense resources and knowledge, the Romans seemed like creatures from another world. They were to remain Britain’s overlords for more than three centuries.

Successive Roman governors extended imperial dominion over the island, conquering Wales in the reign of Emperor Flavius (AD 69–79), but they failed to subdue Scotland or Ireland. Although the governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola won a significant victory over the tribes of Scotland at the Battle of the Graupian Hill (AD 83), his successors failed to follow up on this achievement. The Romans evacuated southern Scotland in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, and Hadrian’s Wall was built in 122 across what is now Cumbria and Northumberland to guard against incursions by the Caledonians, a Celtic tribe. This policy of retreat was briefly reversed during the reign of Emperor Antoninus Pius (138–61), first of the so-called Good Emperors. In Antoninus’ reign, Hadrian’s Wall was temporarily abandoned, and a new turf wall called the Antonine Wall was built further north, west of the Firth of Forth. However, Hadrian’s Wall came back into service in around 154. After fighting a wasteful war on the northern border, the Romans abandoned their ambition of conquering Scotland. The best and most fertile land, in any case, was to be found in lowland Britain.

WHAT THE ROMANS DID FOR US

There were two kinds of Roman province: senatorial provinces, governed by annually appointed proconsuls, and imperial provinces, run by long-term governors accountable directly to the emperor. Roman Britain was an imperial province, run with the aid of a complex bureaucracy. The governor’s staff was headed by a centurion, who was assisted by other officeholders such as adjutants and registrars. Taxes were collected by procurators, who operated semi-independently of the governor and received an annual salary of 200,000 sesterces. Britain’s client kings were left undisturbed at first so long as they supported the Roman administration, but one after another their kingdoms fell under the direct governance of Rome.

The Romans founded new towns across Britain, recognizing that urbanization was the foundation of civility, and these towns served as administrative centres. The Romans were the first to recognize a piece of land north of the Thames as prime real estate, where they founded the great city of Londinium. Roman London was graced with a forum, a basilica, an amphitheatre, temples and bathhouses. The conquerors also laid at least 8,000 miles of layered road in Britain. Two of the great Roman roads were Watling Street, which ran north-west from Dover all the way to Chester, and the Fosse Way, which connected London to York. The British gradually succumbed to the allure of urban civilization, with all its creature comforts. Their elites built villas for themselves in the Roman style, especially in the south, with timber frames, mosaic floors and underfloor heating. They became rather fond of sipping imported wine from red Samian ware cups. However, Britain remained very much a country under occupation, with over 50,000 troops stationed there by the mid-second century. The governors exercised absolute authority over everyone living in Britain except Roman citizens, who had the right to appeal to Rome.

Emperor Septimius Severus (reigned 193–211), a despot who had to be carried in a litter on account of illness, arrived in Britain in 208 accompanied by his family and a section of the Praetorian Guard. He directed a campaign against the Caledonians in Scotland and put down a rising of the Maetae, another Celtic tribe living south of the Caledonians, in 210. During his reign, Severus split Britain into two provinces, Britannia Superior in the south and Britannia Inferior in the north, with Londinium and Eboracum (York) chosen as the respective capitals. The administrative geography of Britain would thus remain unchanged until 296, when the co-emperor Diocletian divided Britain into four provinces, administered from London, York, Cirencester and Lincoln. After facing three years of guerrilla warfare in the north, Severus died at York in 211.

The third century was a time of great political insecurity for the Roman Empire, which was troubled by coups and countercoups, and emperors being assassinated seemingly every other year. This inevitably led to increasing militarization in Britain. In around 286, the Roman naval commander Carausius pulled off a coup to establish himself as ‘emperor’ of an independent territory that included Britain and part of France, but was eventually assassinated by his own finance minister, and Britain was reconquered by the co-emperor Constantius I in 296. The Roman army, newly conscious of its enormous power, was at this time in the habit of appointing emperors on its own authority, choosing whichever men happened to offer its soldiers the most money, termed a ‘donative’. The army did not hesitate to remove its chosen emperors if they failed to pay up, or if some other candidate came along and offered more. For instance, Constantine the Great (reigned 312–37) was proclaimed emperor by the army at York in 306.

CHRISTIANITY AND COLLAPSE

The Roman Empire had always been polytheistic, but for three centuries the monotheistic Christian faith had been radiating out from its point of origin in Palestine, then a Roman province. In a decision that would have momentous consequences for world history, Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity because he believed that the Christian God had blessed his efforts at the critical Battle of Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312. Constantine’s conversion, and the later promotion of Christianity as the Roman state religion under Emperor Theodosius (reigned 379–92), placed all the might of the Roman Empire behind what had once been a peripheral and persecuted religion. Bishops were introduced in Britain by 314, and by the late fourth century Christianity was widespread. Among the British Christians were Pelagius, branded a heretic for denying the doctrine of original sin, and Patrick, who served as Bishop of Ireland and later became her patron saint. The fourth century was a veritable golden age for Roman Britain, a time of prosperity and commercial expansion. The Romans were keen to maintain peace and order on the island, which indicates that it had become an important source of revenue.

The eventual decline of Roman power in Britain was closely connected to the general decline of the Roman Empire. The Roman army in Britain removed to Gaul in 407 on the orders of the low-born usurper Emperor Constantine III, and there was a native British revolt against Roman rule in 409. In the following year, Alaric, king of the Germanic tribe known as the Visigoths, sacked the City of Rome itself. From this date, the Romans were too troubled with internal crises to care much about a rainswept isle where neither olive nor vine could prosper. They stopped demanding taxation from Britain, and over the following couple of decades, Roman infrastructure in Britain disintegrated. The collapse of Roman Britain positively invited invasion. The Britons faced immediate incursions from Picts (tribesmen from what is now Scotland) and Scots (tribesmen from what is now Ireland). They appealed to Emperor Honorius for help in around 410, but he advised them ‘to take precautions on their own behalf’.3 The Roman administration and army were leaving for good. Britain was on her own.

2

THE ANGLO-SAXONS(426–1066)

There is scant evidence about the nature of British government immediately after the Roman withdrawal. It has been suggested that emergency power might have been wielded by the council of the civitates, a formerly ceremonial body composed of representatives of the towns. Alternatively, British petty emperors may have emerged to fill the power vacuum. All former Roman provinces experienced ‘radical material simplifications’, and many technologies requiring large-scale organization fell into abeyance.1 However, some Roman infrastructure survived. The British citizens of Verulamium (near St Albans) continued to maintain their town’s plumbing network after the departure of their erstwhile masters, while a Roman bathhouse in Bath was still open for business a century later.

The events that followed are described in an epistle by the sixth-century British writer Gildas. Titled On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, this epistle tells a compelling, if rather simplified, story. In 426, a generation after the Romans had left, a man named Vortigern established himself as king of the Britons. Vortigern is said to have invited Germanic mercenaries into the country to defend its inhabitants from barbarian incursions. Gildas simply called the mercenaries Saxons, but later sources identified them as Angles, Saxons and Jutes (and sometimes Frisians), hailing from territories now in northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. They were promised land grants in return for their help, a typically Roman strategy, which suggests that Vortigern may have been a member of the Romano-British elite.

The mercenaries were led, according to tradition, by two brothers called Hengest and Horsa. Vortigern’s short-sighted policy was to have disastrous consequences for the Britons, as the newcomers are said to have mutinied and claimed large swathes of territory for themselves and their kin. A period of protracted warfare ensued between the natives and the Germanic warriors, whose descendants became known as the Anglo-Saxons, or English. This narrative is roughly consistent with the best modern research, though geneticists have proved that continental northern Europeans had already begun to arrive in Britain in substantial numbers before the Roman withdrawal. The three centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 are known as the Migration Period for good reason; wandering and dislocated tribes, mostly from northern Europe, moved into former Roman territories in droves in search of opportunity.

KING ARTHUR

Legend has it that the Britons were led to victory by King Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon. Arthur is not mentioned in any documents until the ninth century, apart from a solitary reference in a Welsh poem, The Gododdin, which was written in around 600 but carries little weight because the relevant passage may have been interpolated by an even later scribe. Many of the details now associated with Arthur – the magicians Merlin and Morgaine, the sword in the stone and the knights of the round table – were probably invented by later writers, though it is not impossible that they were passed down from an earlier, oral tradition. There was certainly a British military triumph in around the year 500 at Mount Badon, probably located somewhere in southern England, which may have been the work of a king named Arthur.

However glorious, the British victory was short-lived, for the Anglo-Saxons later regained the upper hand and won a decisive victory in 571 at Bedcanford, a place that has not been located with certainty by modern historians. By the mid-seventh century, the Anglo-Saxons ruled most of what is now England, and they ultimately became the dominant (and quite possibly the majority) population. A number of British kingdoms survived, such as Cornwall, which did not come under English rule until the early ninth century. Some displaced Celts took refuge among the Welsh hills and the crags and glens of the Scottish Highlands. The triumph of the Anglo-Saxons is reflected in the fact that a version of their language is still spoken in England today. The Welsh and Cornish languages, meanwhile, are direct descendants of the Celtic tongue that was predominant in Britain: Brythonic. England’s place names are also overwhelmingly of Germanic origin, though it is difficult to know how many of these are Germanic variants of earlier place names.

Anglo-Saxon communities coalesced into territorial kingdoms in the sixth century. It used to be said that there were seven kingdoms by the seventh century (The Heptarchy), but in fact the number varied, and there were other kingdoms besides the traditional seven (East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex). The kings south of the River Humber submitted to overlordship – where necessary – from more powerful kindgoms, while the north-eastern kingdom of Northumbria was normally politically independent. Rival kingdoms competed for supremacy, with Kent, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex each at one time the most powerful in the land. Northumbria was the hegemon kingdom for most of the seventh century, having gobbled up British kingdoms in the Pennines such as Elmet, but lost its position of supremacy in around 685.

Anglo-Saxon society was stratified, with kings at the top, followed by ealdormen and thegns (noblemen and gentry; the terms changed meanings over time), ceorls (free peasants), laets (the half-free) and serfs or slaves (often of ‘Celtic’ extraction). There were few defined constitutional limits on the power of kings, but in practice they were expected to seek advice in great assemblies, known in later times as the witan or witenagemot. The common Anglo-Saxon folk lived in little thatched cottages, while their nobles lived in long timber halls.

THE ANGLO-SAXONS FIND GOD

By the sixth century, all the British tribes and kingdoms were Christian. The pagan Anglo-Saxons began to convert to Christianity in the same century, in part because kings sought to civilize and ‘Romanize’ their dominions. Another attractive feature of Christianity, from a king’s point of view, was the doctrine of obedience to rulers, deriving principally from Chapter 13 of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The Anglo-Saxon conversion was described at some length in the eighth century by the Venerable Bede, a polymath who spent most of his life at Jarrow Abbey in Northumbria. The first Christian Anglo-Saxon ruler was King Æthelberht I of Kent (reigned ?560–616), who was converted to the faith by his wife and a delegation of missionaries sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great. After the Christianization of the realm, some English clerics established international reputations. Alcuin of York (d. 804) worked as a tutor in Charlemagne’s household and was one of the architects of the Carolingian Renaissance, a flowering of learned culture and scholarship.

Anglo-Saxon helmet from the late sixth or early seventh century, unearthed in 1939 at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. Made from iron and tinned copper.

Within the Anglo-Saxon Christian church, there were at first divisions between the proponents of Roman and Celtic practices, with the central dispute concerning how to calculate the date of Easter Sunday. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, King Oswiu of Northumbria (reigned 654–70) came down in favour of the Roman date of Easter. Other kings followed suit, and so Oswiu’s decision heralded the beginning of the ascendancy of Roman Catholic religion throughout the island.

MERCIA AND WESSEX

In the English kingdoms during the seventh and eighth centuries, succession crises were routine, the murder of kings was commonplace. Three kings of Northumbria were assassinated and four deposed between 765 and 796, as four noble families competed for supreme power. The kingdom of Mercia became the supreme kingdom in the eighth century, expanding its dominions to absorb neighbouring kingdoms such as Hwicce in the West Midlands. The despotic Æthelbald of Mercia (d. 757) was the mightiest king of this period, but little is known about the politics of his reign. He exercised overlordship over southern England, including London, until he was murdered in his sleep by his own bodyguards.

Mercian supremacy continued during the reign of Offa (757–96), the first Anglo-Saxon monarch to be called ‘king of the English’ (‘rex Anglorum’) in charters that are definitely authentic. Offa established relations with the mighty Charlemagne, king of the Franks and emperor of the Romans, although he offended Charlemagne with his boldness in trying to negotiate an unequal marriage alliance between his son and Charlemagne’s daughter. He also built Offa’s Dyke to defend his kingdom from the Welsh dwelling beyond his western border. There is significant debate surrounding the purpose of this 64-mile border rampart, which may have been designed to thwart ‘cattle rustlers and small-scale raiding parties’ rather than armies.2 After Offa’s long reign came to an end, he was succeeded as king of the Mercians by Ecgfrith (who died of sickness a few months later), followed by Coenwulf (reigned 796–821), remembered as a powerful ruler. Meanwhile, a prince of the Kentish blood royal named Ecgberht, who had formerly been a political exile at the court of Charlemagne, won the crown of Wessex by conquest in 802. In 825, Ecgberht defeated King Beornwulf of Mercia in battle, and in 829 he conquered Essex and received the submission of the king of Northumbria. Wessex thereafter replaced Mercia as the foremost kingdom of England. Southern England has been the dominant element in the British Isles ever since.

VIKING MENACE

Beginning in the late eighth century, the kingdoms of England – along with the rest of western Europe – faced an acute threat from bands of Danish and Norse pagan warriors, known to the English of that time as flotan, or seamen. We know them better as the Vikings. When the first Vikings sailed to the British Isles in their enormous longships, they preferred to pick low-hanging fruit, sacking a series of secluded religious houses that they found to be basically defenceless: Lindisfarne Priory on Holy Island in 793, Jarrow Abbey in 794 and Iona Abbey in 795. Over time, their targets became more ambitious, and they held certain advantages over the English, not least the element of surprise, as well as their superior seafaring capability. A Viking ship excavated in Norway two centuries ago (the Gokstad ship) is over 76ft long and would have had the capacity to carry around thirty men.

Addicted to the marauding life, Viking bands fell into a pattern of raiding southern England practically every year. One desperate annual sally, followed by months of ease and idleness, was preferable to toiling at the plough. The most serious invasion was mounted in 865, when three brothers, Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan and Hubba, landed in East Anglia. Unlike earlier raiding parties, whose leaders had been mainly interested in looting, Ivar and his confederates sought lasting conquest. They captured York in 866, renaming it from Eoforwic to Jorvik, and their presence helped to bring unprecedented prosperity to the city. Viking armies also conquered the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and much of Mercia between 867 and 874 and came very close to conquering Wessex too. It is easy to exaggerate the barbaric nature of the Vikings, who were not without culture, but equally, it should not be forgotten that they sacrificed enemies to Odin by ripping their lungs out through their backs (a practice called ‘blood eagle’). That both Anglo-Saxons and Vikings were formidable warriors may be confirmed by the fact that the all-powerful Byzantine emperors, who styled themselves Lords of the Cosmos, employed them indiscriminately as mercenaries to form their imperial bodyguard.

The fate of Wessex still hung in the balance in 871, when an energetic young nobleman by the name of Alfred succeeded his late brother, Æthelred I, as king of the West Saxons. Alfred’s military skill, particularly his creation of a standing army and his establishment of naval defences and burhs (fortified settlements surrounded by earthworks), saved his kingdom from Viking domination. According to a probably apocryphal story, first recorded two or three centuries after Alfred’s death, the king was forced to hide from Danish Vikings in a West Country swineherd’s cottage in 878, where he was chastised by the man’s wife for allowing her hearth-baked loaves to become scorched: ‘Why, man, do you sit thinking there, and are too proud to turn the bread?’3 In the same year, Alfred defeated the Danes, led by Guthrum, at the Battle of Edington. Guthrum then agreed to submit to Christian baptism and to withdraw from Wessex as two of the conditions of the Treaty of Chippenham, sometimes called the Treaty of Wedmore.

A later treaty, probably signed in 886, established the boundaries between English territory centred in the south and west and Danish territory centred in the north and east, called the Danelaw because it was administered according to Danish legal traditions. In the later years of his reign, Alfred introduced to the kingdom of Wessex a law-code called the Doom Book, which, among other things, contained the earliest English treason legislation. This code was passed with the consent of the witan, arguably a foretaste of the English Parliament’s later legislative function. Alfred was traditionally credited with dividing England into counties and hundreds (subdivisions within each county), and while this is now known to be inaccurate, England was certainly ‘shired’ in the late Anglo-Saxon period. Later in his life, the king was taught to read Latin by a bishop named Asser, and he spent his mature years translating Latin prose and poetry into his native tongue.

THE UNIFICATION OF ENGLAND

Political and territorial unification was the hallmark of the later Anglo-Saxon period. Edward the Elder, king of the West Saxons from 899 to 924, survived a rebellion by his cousin Æthelwold at the very outset of his reign, and in the following decades, he succeeded in capturing most of the Danelaw, forcing the local Anglo-Danish gentry to recognize his sovereignty. He gained control of London in 911, was recognized as king of Mercia in 918 and became overlord of the fledgling kingdom of Scotland in 920. Edward’s son Æthelstan (king of the West Saxons 925–939) is often regarded as the first king of England because he came to rule over Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, Cornwall, York and the Danelaw, winning a famous victory against a coalition of Scots, Dublin Norsemen and Strathclyde Welsh at the Battle of Brunanburh (937). After Æthelstan’s death, however, his composite kingdom collapsed. In 940, King Edmund (reigned 939–46) ceded significant territories in the Midlands and Lincolnshire to Norse Vikings led by Olaf Guthfrithsson, king of Dublin.

It was not until the reign of Edgar (king of the English 959–75) that England was unified for good, ‘put together out of the traditions of Mercia and Wessex under the pressure of the Vikings’.4 The name of England is derived from the Old English name ‘Ænglaland’, Land of the Angles. Edgar maintained peace by running a strict and powerful government. He also oversaw a programme of monastic reform, attempting to strengthen the moral and spiritual character of monasteries and strictly enforcing the Rule of Saint Benedict, a sixth-century manual of precepts for monastic life. After his death, Edgar was succeeded by his teenage son, Edward the Martyr (reigned 975–8), whose sobriquet gives a clue as to his fate. During Edward’s brief reign, two factions contended for political dominance: a royalist ‘monastic’ party, led by the king, and an ‘anti-monastic’ party that opposed the growing influence of monks, nominally headed by the king’s half-brother, Æthelred. Edward was ultimately murdered by the anti-monastic party at Corfe on 18 March 978, and though Æthelred bears no blame since he was around 10 years old at the time, he was crowned king as a result.

Æthelred II of Wessex, king of England from 979 to 1013 and again from 1014 to 1016, used to be referred to as Æthelred the Unready, but this has long been recognized to be a misnomer based on his Old English nickname. Chroniclers contemptuously called him Æthelred Unræd (‘Ill-counselled Æthelred’), a pun on his name implying that he should have sought better advice. Although he seems to have been a capable king in his early adulthood, Æthelred was later dominated by successive factions of powerful advisers. Under his watch, the Vikings – who had by now converted to Christianity – were newly emboldened to make incursions into English territory. At the Battle of Maldon in 991, an English army was wiped out by a host of Viking marauders who arrived on ninety ships. To make matters worse, Æthelred levied a heavy tax on his subjects called the Danegeld, used to buy off invaders and to pay renegade Danish soldiers fighting for the English. Æthelred combined incompetence with ruthlessness; in November 1002, he ordered the slaughter of all the Danes in England, a black deed known as the St Brice’s Day Massacre, though how many Danes were actually killed is unknown.

THE DANISH KINGS OF ENGLAND

Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, invaded England in 1013, possibly in pursuit of revenge for his slain kinsmen, and forced Æthelred into exile. Though Æthelred soon managed to recapture his throne, his position remained precarious. Swein’s son, Cnut, launched a massive invasion of England in 1015 with the aid of his housecarls, a company of elite soldiers, and Æthelred died of unrelated causes in the following year. Cnut defeated Æthelred’s son, Edmund Ironside, at the Battle of Ashingdon in Essex in 1016, establishing himself as the first Danish king of England. According to one version of events, Edmund would have won the battle had he not been double-crossed by the Mercian ealdorman Eadric Streona, who falsely proclaimed the king’s death in the heat of battle to dishearten the English.

Cnut cemented his new position by appointing leading Danish allies to the English aristocracy, and by marrying Æthelred’s widow, Emma, in 1017. He had two wives to warm his bed despite being a Christian; the other was called Ælfgifu, literally ‘Elf’s Gift’. He won the approval of a national assembly held at Oxford in 1018, collecting a tribute of over £80,000 from his new subjects. Cnut built a palace on the bank of the Thames to shore up his power, which was later rebuilt by Edward the Confessor and became known as Westminster Palace. Westminster would serve as a centre of royal administration for centuries to come, and of course Parliament still meets there today. In 1019, Cnut inherited the crown of Denmark after the death of King Harald II, Swein’s firstborn son, and he ruled over both kingdoms until his death in 1035.

A few years into his reign, Cnut divided England into four districts: East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex. Wessex was placed under the jurisdiction of the powerful Anglo-Saxon nobleman Earl Godwin, while Mercia was given to Earl Leofric, the husband of Lady Godiva. According to a story first recorded in the early thirteenth century, Lady Godiva rode naked through Coventry in 1057 to save its inhabitants from paying a toll, with her long hair covering ‘the whole of her body like a veil’.5 Cnut’s appointment of earls as deputies raised the unwelcome possibility that they would become overmighty subjects, but Cnut did not really have to worry about this because he had all the power of Denmark at his disposal to keep them in line. A tale of Cnut’s feigned attempt to hold back the tide was first recorded over a century after his death, and it is just as doubtful as the Godiva story. Seated on the seashore, Cnut commanded the sea not to flow over his land, and when the tide came in as usual, he declared: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’6

Two more Danes occupied the English throne after Cnut’s death, his feuding sons Harold Harefoot, son of Ælfgifu (reigned 1035–40), and Harthacnut, son of Emma (reigned 1040–2), whose name literally means ‘tough knot’. Though Cnut had intended for Harthacnut to be his successor, this plan failed because Harthacnut was too slow in travelling to England to receive the crown. Seizing the advantage of proximity, Harold had himself proclaimed king in Harthacnut’s absence. Harthacnut waited until 1040 before he finally set sail for England to claim his inheritance by force. He defeated his brother in battle with the assistance of his half-brother, the Anglo-Saxon nobleman Edward the Confessor.

Edward the Confessor possibly served as joint-king with Harthacnut from 1040 to 1042. When Harthacnut died in 1042, Edward became king in his own right, marking the return of the crown to the Anglo-Saxon line. He ascended the throne in his late thirties and ruled for over two decades as a forceful and uncompromising king, even outlawing his own father-in-law, Earl Godwin, in 1051. The second decade of Edward’s reign was a time of peace and prosperity, but instability returned in 1065 with a rebellion in Northumbria, which resulted in the king’s agent, Earl Tostig, being forced into exile. Edward died soon after with no male heir, and the crown descended upon his brother-in-law, the powerful nobleman Harold Godwinson, chief of the House of Godwin.

THE FIRST ENGLISH LITERATURE

A substantial literature survives from the Anglo-Saxon period, written in both Latin and Old English, including religious works, collections of riddles and over 30,000 lines of vernacular poetry. The heroic poem Beowulf, the crowning glory of Old English literature, was probably written in the seventh or eighth century. Set in fifth-century Sweden and Denmark but reflecting English values, Beowulf narrates the eponymous hero’s defeat of three successive monsters: a demon called Grendel, Grendel’s mother and finally, fifty years later, a fire-breathing dragon. This poem, with its flashing swords and majestic mead-halls, gives an incomparable taste of Anglo-Saxon civilization. It was first translated into modern English in 1837, and there have been many other translations since; Seamus Heaney’s (1999) is the best for general purposes. Another terrific Anglo-Saxon poem is The Wanderer, a lament of 115 lines in which the speaker describes the hardships he has suffered while roaming the world after the death of his lord:

A man without country, without kin,

Knows how cruel it is to have sorrow

As a sole companion. No one waits

To welcome the wanderer except the road

Of exile itself. His reward is night-cold,

Not a lord’s rich gift of twisted gold

Or a warm hearth and a harvest of wealth.7

The Victorians were fascinated by the Anglo-Saxons, believing their habits and customs to be the origin of England’s democratic traditions and love of freedom. In 1896, the novelist and historian Sir Walter Besant wrote that the qualities of the Anglo-Saxons, especially masterfulness, obstinacy and restlessness, remain noticeably present in the English character. It has also been suggested that the English fondness for word games, puzzles and quizzes can be traced to the Anglo-Saxon love of riddles.8 Few historians would endorse such ideas today, but analysis of modern DNA has been used to estimate that the present-day English population owes at least 10 per cent and possibly as much as 40 per cent of its ancestry to this redoubtable breed of scholars and conquerors.

3

THE NORMANS(1066–1153)

Everyone knows that William the Conqueror, the bastard-born Duke of Normandy, won the crown of England by conquest at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The rulers of the Duchy of Normandy in the eleventh century were French-speaking nobles of Viking warrior stock. Edward the Confessor, whose reign we have already described, was a friend to Normandy and had willingly appointed Normans to government posts in England. In fact, he had even gone so far as promising to name Duke William as his successor to the throne. Since England’s southern coast is less than a hundred nautical miles from the tip of Normandy, the kingdom of England was a tempting prize for an ambitious Norman duke.

According to the version of events told by the Normans, the English nobleman Harold Godwinson swore in Normandy in 1064 or 1065 that he would support William’s claim to the English throne. Whether or not this really happened (it probably did), Harold secretly resolved to claim the throne for himself. When Edward died, Harold was formally elected as king by the nobles of England, who needed little convincing that a Norman succession was not in their best interests. He was crowned on 6 January 1066 at the newly built Westminster Abbey. His allies announced that the late king had named Harold as his successor on his deathbed, in a last-minute change of heart. Soon after Harold’s accession, what looked like a great tailed star appeared in the sky, now known to be Halley’s Comet, which wise men interpreted as a fearful omen.

THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS

William must have expected Harold’s double-dealing because he had been planning to invade England for at least three years. With the blessing of Pope Alexander II, he readied a fleet of ships and recruited a mixed army of Normans, Bretons and Frenchmen, who agreed to join the campaign in return for a share of any future spoils. They landed at Pevensey, an abandoned fortified settlement in East Sussex, before sunrise on 28 September 1066. King Harold had precious little time to ready his men for battle, since only three days earlier he had fought and defeated his brother Tostig and the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada – another claimant to the throne of England – at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Harold then marched 250 miles south to meet the Normans at a location about 6 miles from the town of Hastings, East Sussex. The main landmarks of the terrain were two hills about a mile apart (Caldbec Hill and Battle Hill) and a grand old apple tree. The English army was composed of around 7,000 men and consisted mainly of axemen fighting on foot, while the Norman army was of roughly the same size and included archers, crossbowmen and cavalry. The population of England in 1066 was around 1.75 million, so her fate was left in the hands of a tiny fraction of Englishmen.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066. According to the Norman historian William of Jumièges, the Duke of Normandy reassured his supporters that King Harold’s champions would be easily beaten because they were ‘effeminate young men, sluggish in the art of war’.1 The chronicle also records that the duke engaged in psychological warfare by sending a minstrel called Taillefer to dismay the English. Taillefer rode in advance of the Norman army and tauntingly juggled with his sword. When an English soldier rode forward to confront him, the Norman deftly beheaded the Englishman and held the head aloft as a trophy, a sign that providence favoured the duke’s cause. The English had a favourable position on high ground, assuming formation on Battle Hill. They formed a shield wall and successfully blocked the first Norman cavalry charge.

However, the Normans may then have used a feigned retreat, tricking some of the English to pursue them and fall into a trap. The Normans attacked the English lines again, killing King Harold (possibly with an arrow through the eye) and his two younger brothers. Demoralized, the English took to flight and many were cut down by the pursuing Normans. After his victory at Hastings, William proceeded to capture Canterbury, Winchester and London. The Norman triumph was later depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, a linen embroidery stitched in Canterbury, measuring over 200ft. The English were understandably less jubilant; a native chronicler alleged that God had permitted William’s victory as punishment ‘for the people’s sins’.2 The real reasons were somewhat more mundane, including the superiority of Norman military technology. For example, the Anglo-Saxons had built no castles worthy of the name.

Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the death of King Harold in 1066.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

On Christmas Day 1066 King William I was crowned at Westminster Abbey, marking the beginning of his twenty-one-year reign. He had a harsh and commanding voice, coupled with the strength befitting a warrior king. His height was reasonably impressive for his time, 5ft 10in, and though his body was altered by obesity in his later years, he retained an aura of majesty. A monk who knew him personally testified to his capacity for hard work, his moderation in drinking and his religiosity. His contemporaries noted that he was far more powerful than any previous king of England, and that under his watch, the realm became more secure and orderly. Others, however, emphasized his cruelty and avarice. Anglo-Saxon critics complained about his draconian Forest Law, which seemed to prove that he was more interested in preserving game than in securing the welfare of his own subjects.