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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
READ IN A DAY. REMEMBER FOR A LIFETIME. In his bestselling, internationally-acclaimed The Shortest History of Germany, James Hawes told the story of a nation in 240 invigorating pages, tracing the roots of today's challenges back to the first encounters with Rome. In The Shortest History of England, he takes the same approach to his homeland. As he journeys from Caesar to Brexit via Conquest, Empire and World War, he discovers an England very different to the standard vision. Our stable island fortress, stubbornly independent, the begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, is riven by an ancient fault-line that predates even the Romans; its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbours, whether we like it or not; and -- for the past 1,000 years -- it has harboured a class system like nowhere else on Earth. There has never been a better time to understand why England is the way it is -- and there is no better guide.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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FURTHER PRAISE FOR JAMES HAWES
‘Engaging… I suspect I shall remember it for a lifetime’
The Oldie on The Shortest History of Germany
‘Here is Germany as you’ve never known it: a bold thesis; an authoritative sweep and an exhilarating read. Agree or disagree, this is a must for anyone interested in how Germany has come to be the way it is today.’
Professor Karen Leeder, University of Oxford
‘The Shortest History of Germany, a new, must-read book by the writer James Hawes, [recounts] how the so-called limes separating Roman Germany from non-Roman Germany has remained a formative distinction throughout the post-ancient history of the German people.’
Economist.com
‘A daring attempt to remedy the ignorance of the centuries in little over 200 pages… not just an entertaining canter past the most prominent landmarks in German history – also a serious, well-researched and radical rethinking of the continuities in German political life.’
Nicholas Boyle, Schröder Professor of German, Cambridge University
‘Fascinating … as an introduction to the most important country in Europe today, this is a great read, and an ideal primer’
Tribune on The Shortest History of Germany
‘Yes, the Nazis are here, but so too is a history stretching from the Germanic tribes who took on the Roman Empire, right up to Chancellor Angela Merkel… Comprehensive, vivid, and entertaining… if you want to understand a country on which much of the free world is now pinning its hopes, you could do worse than start here.’
Irish Examiner
‘Absolutely brilliant … Hawes sets about tearing up the Prague picture postcard-image of Kafka with tremendous, crowd-pleasing vigour’
Ian Sansom, Guardian, on Excavating Kafka
‘performed with wit and finesse … his book is full of enlightening surprises … [Hawes] is an admirable guide, leading us through this tangled intellectual copse.’
The Times on Englanders and Hunsii
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CONTENTS
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To my mother, Janet Hawes née Fry, who dodged V-1s in Cricklewood
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‘The English have lost their sense of themselves as an ancient shared culture… In English schools, history is taught in a strangely episodic manner – Roman, Tudors, Second World War – so students have no continuous historical narrative… The English don’t even know their country geographically. Most southerners have little interest in what goes on up north, and most northerners wouldn’t be able to find Guildford on a map.’
Louisde Bernières Financial Times, 29 Jan 2020x
Foreword
In 1944, on her way to school in Cricklewood, my mother heard a V-1 cut out above her. She threw herself flat on the pavement. Some twitch in the Nazi gyroscope decided that glass and rubble would rain down all around her, but that she would live to tell the tale.
My sons have heard it from her. So with luck, in 2094, one or other of them will be able to tell his grandchildren that he knows what it felt like to dodge a V-1 in London in 1944, because their great-great-grandmother told him.
A century and a half, hurdled by a family story. Try it with your own. Seven long generations like that – a short queue at the check-in to eternity, the old and the young holding hands – and we are back at the Battle of Hastings.
Our past whispers in our ears, whether we hear it or not, and makes us what we are. And given the state of England today, we’d better get to know ourselves a bit better. So where to begin? Well, we know almost to the hour when England emerged from archaeology, and entered history.
At dawn on the 27th August, 55BC – about fifteen long generations ago – a fleet appeared out of the night off Ebbsfleet in Kent, bearing none other than Julius Caesar.xii
PART ONE
From Caesar to the Conqueror
55bc–1087ad2
England before the English
By 55bc, Rome had vaguely known for many years of a mysterious land beyond Europe inhabited by people the Greeks called the Pretaniki or Bretaniki. It was famous mainly as a source of tin, the vital metal that could transmute copper into brass or bronze. The Phoenician merchants who dominated this lucrative trade kept their business secrets to themselves, so when Caesar invaded from newly-conquered Gaul, he knew that the Britons had dealings with the Gauls, that tin could be found there, and that the nearest part of the island was called Kantion, but that was about it.
Having called to him the merchants from all parts, Caesar could learn neither the size of the island, nor what or how numerous were the nations which inhabited it, nor what system of war they followed, nor what customs they used.
Julius Caesar, The Gallic War
Caesar’s fleet crossed the Channel in a single night, but could find no decent anchorage; his attempted landing at Ebbsfleet was met with a reception so ferocious that it never got off the beach. He tried again the following year. This time he made it as far as the Thames Valley, which was enough for him to learn that the Britannici were not a single people at all.
Inland, there was an old-established population, whereas the maritime portion (i.e. the south-eastern coastal region) had recently been settled by raiders from the country of the Belgae. Indeed, a Belgic leader had recently claimed some kind of overlordship in Britannia. Modern archaeologists agree that there was a distinctive Aylesford-Swarling/Atrebatic4culture in the South-East at this time, closely linked to the Belgic Gauls.
The South-East is already different in 54bc: Belgic cross-Channel culture in Caesar’s day
Caesar and his army didn’t stick around, but the elite of Britannia were suitably awed. Some thirty years later, the Greek writer Strabo described Britannia as virtually a Roman property, whose chieftains came to dedicate offerings in the Capitol. By 43ad, Emperor Claudius decided that it had developed enough to be worth invading and taxing properly.
Claudius really only cared about the tribes already advanced enough to be making and using coins. The limit of their territory is no coincidence. It is also the line of the Jurassic Divide, where young sandstones, clays and chalks give way to older shales and igneous rocks.5
Geology, geography and climate conspire timelessly in favour of the South-East
By 100ad, the South-East was a peaceful, prosperous colony. Its people, wrote the historian Tacitus, were obviously related to the Gauls. Beyond, to the north, were people clearly Germanic in origin, while those in the west were like the Iberians. It now occurred to the Romans – as it occurred to almost every later ruler of the South-East – that, since they controlled the richest part of the island, they should also rule those other peoples.6
They failed. In what is today known as Scotland, resistance was so tough that the Romans fell back and built Hadrian’s Wall, which still entrances walkers. What we now call Wales and the north of England were only ever ruled and taxed at spear-point. Roman civilisation in Britannia was effectively limited to what is today southern England. The only other truly Romanised areas were along the great roads which led to the northern bastion of York and connected the vital garrisons at Caerleon and Chester (the line of this road is still basically the western border of England). Thus the Romans, having found south-eastern Britannia already different, made it far more so.
It was in the fruitful plains of the South-East that the Latinized Britons were concentrated, in a peaceful and civilian land, where the site of a cohort on the march was a rarity, where Roman cities and villas were plentiful and Roman civilisation powerful in its attraction.
Trevelyan
7The Channel didn’t cut Britannia off from the rest of the Empire, but was the vital link. Britain was within sight of Gaul (Tacitus) across a very narrow strait of the sea (Ammianus) which could be crossed in about eight hours (Strabo). When the Rhineland was starving in 359ad, the future Emperor Julian didn’t even attempt to convoy grain by land from neighbouring Gaul. Instead he built 800 ships, sent them to Britannia, and the voyage being short, he abundantly supplied the people (Zosimus).
Towards the end of the third century ad, this sea-road came under threat from people whose descendants would one day call themselves the English.
Enter the Saxons
In 286ad, writes Eutropius, Franci et Saxones infested the Channel. This is the first written mention of the Saxons. A successful general called Marcus Aurelius Carausius was sent out to deal with them. However, Carausius soon declared himself Emperor and built a short-lived cross-Channel realm with support from the very Franks and Saxons he’d been despatched to defeat. It’s distinctly possible that the Roman fortifications which still stand along the south-eastern coast date from his reign.
Coin of Carausius
In 367ad, the Saxons took part, along with the Picts, the Scots and the Franks, in the great barbarian conspiracy which threatened the complete destruction of Roman Britain. Imperial rule was briefly restored, but in 383-4ad, the Roman armies left Britannia to fight other Romans. The last great Roman general, Stilicho, brought the legions back to Britannia and restored a kind of order in 399ad.8
Documentary evidence from this time is very scanty, but we have one fascinating piece: the Notitia Dignitatum, a list of the Empire’s military/customs commands. One such command is the fortified shore of south-eastern Britannia, held by the comes litoris Saxonici – the Count of the Saxon Shore. This is the only mention of the Saxon Shore. Nobody is sure what it means, because the Notitia exists only as far later copies, and the Latin is degenerate. But all the other commands in the Notitia are named after the local populations, not the potential enemies, which strongly suggests that as early as 400ad, the Channel coast was actually settled by Saxon auxiliary troops and their families, serving Rome. Archaeology has evidence to back this idea up.
The first known English three-dimensional figure, from Spong in East Anglia. Archaeologists are in no doubt that it is Germanic; it comes from a cemetery whose ‘earliest burial dates from around AD 400–420’
This early presence may explain why the other people of Britain called – and still call – all Englishmen Saxons(sassenach, saesneg), though the Saxons were soon followed by other tribes. But what should we call them? The name Anglo-Saxon was not invented for another 450 years or so (under Alfred the Great) and the land only started being called Englalonde in the early 10th century. The tribes who would one day call themselves the English would be accurate, but cumbersome. So we’ll just use the English as shorthand for all Germanic settlers, though it’s unhistorical. In any case, what really matters is why they came.9
Invasion or Invitation?
The Roman legions finally left Britain in 407ad, to fight in endless civil wars. The southern Britons now found themselves taxed yet undefended, so they felt the necessity of revolting from the empire, and living no longer under the Roman laws (Zosimus). Our only real source for what happened next is The Ruin of Britain (c.540 ad) by the Romano-British monk Gildas. He records, in Latin, his people regretting their rash break with the Empire and making a famous last plea for Roman help, known as The Groans of the Britons, in around 450ad:
The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians, between these two means of death we are either killed or drowned.
But these barbarians weren’t Saxons. Gildas doesn’t mention Germanic tribes at all in these years. The deadly enemies of civilisation in Britain were two foreign nations, the Scots from the north-west [i.e. the Irish], and the Picts from the north, who came in coracles. And since Rome could no longer help, the Romano-British turned to another European people.
ad 443 This year sent the Britons to Rome & bade them assistance against the Picts, but they gave them none, for that they fought with Attila, King of the Huns, & then sent they to the English & English-kin nobles
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle1 [author’s emphasis]
10The English didn’t invade. They were invited from Europe to save Romano-British civilisation from home-grown barbarians. In return they were offered land in the richest part of the island.
ad 449 King Vortigern gave them land in the South-East of this land withal that they should fight with the Picts. They then fought with the Picts & had victory wheresoever they came.
Chronicle
Soon, though, the English broke out of their agreed enclave. There was nothing special about this. All over 5th-century post-Roman Western Europe, the Germanic warriors who had largely staffed the Late Roman army were on the move in the Migrations of the Peoples. Something unique, though, did take place in south-eastern Britannia.
The Founding Uniqueness
Everywhere else in Europe, the Germanic invaders came, they saw, they conquered – and then they assimilated. In England, 11and only in England, they entirely replaced the culture they found. This is England’s founding uniqueness. It explains why the modern English find their immediate neighbour-language, Welsh, utterly strange, yet can still almost understand German swearing from around 850ad: hundes ars in tino naso, meaning (of course) hound’s arse in thine nose.
So why did the Germanic migrants only stay Germanic in England? Partly, it was because Britannia had already declined and fallen into a land run by local warlords whom Gildas calls tyrants. All the incoming English found were ruins – and seeing nothing worth adopting, they stuck to their own culture. They could do so because of the other vital difference: the sea.
The Channel didn’t protect Britannia: it made total conquest possible. Elsewhere in Europe, the Germanic conquerors were all-male war-bands. An entire tribe – old people, nursing mothers, small children and all – couldn’t survive long overland journeys through hostile territory. The English, though, could ship whole clans across to the Saxon Shore in a day or two, landing at well-built, long-familiar Roman ports.
When news of their success and the fertility of the country, and the cowardice of the Britons, reached their own home… swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island
Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (c.731ad)
Everywhere else, the single male Germanic warriors intermarried with local women, so the Latinate languages – and Christianity – survived. The English brought their own womenfolk with them, so they stayed English pagans.
The Curious Case of the Disappearing Language
The English conquest was so complete that nothing remains of the Romano-British language in modern England except dreamlike fragments like the yan-tan-tethera way of counting sheep in the north of England (one-two-three in Celtic) or hickory-dickory-dock (eight-nine-ten).
The Victorians, familiar with the notion of ruthless, racial colonisation, had no doubt what this meant:13
Those who fought against our forefathers were killed and those who submitted were made slaves… Now you will perhaps say that our forefathers were cruel and wicked men… But anyway it has turned out much better in the end.
Old English History for Children, Edward Freeman, 1869
Yet modern science shows that most of modern English people’s DNA comes from the Romano-British.
The majority of eastern, central and southern England is made up of a single, relatively homogeneous, genetic group [i.e. the Romano-Britons] with a significant DNA contribution from Anglo-Saxon migrations (10-40% of total ancestry). This settles a historical controversy in showing that the Anglo-Saxons intermarried with, rather than replaced, the existing populations
‘The Fine-Scale Genetic Structure of the British Population’,
Nature 2015.
In England, then, the Romano-Britons survived, but switched languages, just as the vast majority of people later did in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
The Wessex Deal
Gildas tells of successful native resistance led by a Romano-Briton called Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom later writers have tried to identify as King Arthur. Be that as it may, archaeology and common sense suggest that as the English advanced from the South-East, they met serious opposition. After all, the Britons, whom the early English called waelisce or waehla (from a Germanic word meaning Romanised ones, also seen in Walloon and Wallachia) still hold out in the far west to this day, language and all, as the Welsh.
Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s Map of River-Names. Area I was conquered by c.500, and thoroughly Anglicised. Area 2 was conquered by c.600; here, many rivers still have Celtic names, suggesting an abiding presence. Conquest of Area 3 wasn’t complete until c.700; even small rivers still have pre-English names, suggesting that the population changed little. Area 4 resisted into modern times (Cornwall) or still does (Wales).
It seems that in Area 2, the Romano-British elite cut deals. Several names in the royal Wessex genealogy sound distinctly Celtic: Cerdic, Caedwalla, Cenwahl. The men of Wessex 15defeated what sound like Gaelic warlords at Dryham, near Bath, in 577ad, but the Venerable Bede makes a curious point about the victor: ‘Caelin, King of the West Saxons, was known in the speech of his own people as Ceaulin’. This suggests that early ‘English’ Wessex was bi-lingual even at the very top. And indeed, the laws of King Ine of Wessex (c.700ad) show beyond doubt that he ruled two cultures: the waelisce were generally second-class citizens, but they were protected by law. Some owned hundreds of acres (only 5–10% of the English themselves actually owned any land) and were deemed second in ‘blood-price’ only to thegns of the royal household itself. Most strikingly of all, Ine commanded the cyninges horswealh, which translates neatly as The King’s Welsh Horse. At Lady Mary Church in Wareham, five memorials to what must have been important people, inscribed with lettering clearly Celtic in origin, date from as much as 250 years after the birth of English Wessex.
The Romano-British of lowland Britannia were neither killed nor driven out. Instead, led by their elites, they adopted Englishness – and eventually the language – from the top down. Almost from the start, English identity wasn’t a racial fate, but a political choice – a hard choice, no doubt, but a choice.2
After 600ad, that choice became far less drastic for the conquered natives, because Englishness itself was being dragged fast out of the pagan, Germanic world. Rome was back.
Bibles and Book-Law
Every English cleric since Bede has loved the tale of how, around 590ad, Pope Gregory saw some boys at a Roman slave market. 16On being told they were Angles, he joked: Well named, for they have angelic faces. An Italian Bishop, Augustine, was accordingly dispatched to convert them. The mission was enabled by the Franks, who had already been Christian for a century. Their king’s daughter, Bertha, had recently married Ethelbert of Kent. At first he refused to convert, but he did allow Bertha to make over a Roman mausoleum in Canterbury for Augustine as the first English-speaking church.
By 601ad Ethelbert had given in to Augustine, or the Franks, or his wife, and converted. He now set down the laws of his lands in writing. They stress the privileged position of the Church in society, and lay down in great detail the fines for various acts of rape and violence (12 shillings for cutting off an ear; 50 shillings for knocking out an eye; 12 shillings for having sex with a nobleman’s maid – but only 6 shillings if she is a commoner’s maid). Here is civilisation coming in at ground zero.
These laws were written in English. This was unique: all the continental Germanic nations wrote down their laws in the prestige-language, Latin. In England, almost nobody spoke Latin anymore, so the everyday language was, from the dawn of literacy, given the awesome privilege of being written down. Until the Norman Conquest, the English, alone in Western Europe, were ruled in their own tongue.
Ethelbert was Bretwalda (paramount king) in England, so his example was instrumental. The next Bretwalda, Readwald of East Anglia, stayed pagan but allowed a Christian shrine in his pantheon. He’s widely assumed to be the man buried in the magnificent ship-tomb at Sutton Hoo, where the priceless treasures mix local pagan work with imported Christian and prestige goods.17
Onward, Christian Soldiers
The Church went to work extirpating English paganism, and by 655ad the last pagan English king, Penda of Mercia, was dead. Now, the question was which brand of Christianity would win. The Celts and some of the northern English wanted to stay independent of Rome, and stick to their own customs. Most English bishops wanted to line up with the Continent. At the Synod of Whitby in 663/4 Bishop Wilfred triumphed by posing the question: Who holds the keys to heaven? No one could deny that it was St Peter, patron of Rome.
Their bridgehead secured, Rome’s multinational Christian soldiers flooded in, led by a Greek, Theodore of Tarsus, and an African, Adrian of Canterbury. They showed how the most deeply-held beliefs of common people can be changed by a determined new elite. Within a single generation, the English abandoned their ancient custom of burying the dead with grave-goods for the afterlife.
The practice of furnished burials came to an abrupt end in the ad 670s-680s. The disappearance of these rites coincided exactly with Theodore of Tarsus’s period as primate… a far more radical shift in burial practice among the general population than previously considered possible.
Current Archaeology, 6 Nov 2013
Fresh from victory over their own pagans and Celtic heretics, English Christians saw themselves as the heroic shock-troops of the Papacy. The oldest surviving Latin Bible of all is the stupendous Codex Amiatinus, a gift to the Pope from Bede’s teacher, Coelfrid (642-716); the monks of Jarrow bought two thousand cattle just to make the vellum for it. St Boniface (c.675-754) led a counter-invasion of the old English homelands in 18Germany: still able to talk to the Germans without a translator, he made good progress before winning martyrdom. Alcuin of York became the most trusted political advisor to Charlemagne. Astonishingly, their personal correspondence survives, showing how the English churchman advised the great Frankish king during his restoration of the Roman Empire in 800ad.
The Great Divide
By the end of the 8th century, the English had reached the limits of their expansion in Britain. In the North, the powerful kingdom of Northumberland was defeated by the Picts at Nechtansmere (c.685ad). In the west, the Mercians under King Offa made a great effort to finally conquer the waelas in 778-84ad. They failed, so they built a colossal dyke to deter cattle-raids and mark the border, patrolling it with mobile guards.
Offa’s Dyke is the largest, most impressive, and most complete purpose-built early medieval monument in Western Europe Dept. of Culture, Media and Sport, UNESCO application
Two centuries before the Conquest, the borders between the English and their neighbours were basically the same as they are today. And already people had noticed a North-South divide within the English themselves. Bede, writing in about 731ad, mentions the Humber nine times, every time as a variation on the idea that the Humber estuary divides the Southern Saxons from the Northern.
Where exactly Bede placed the North-South line further west is impossible to say – not least because modern Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire and even Herefordshire were still disputed by the Welsh. Over time, though, the Trent became fixed in people’s minds as a semi-border within the English.19
The traditional symbolic dividing line between North and South was the river Trent… a noticeable northern consciousness can be traced back as early as Bede
Andrea Ruddick
The Church officially recognised this divide in Bede’s lifetime: in 733ad its lasting, two-headed York-Canterbury structure was settled. So did lawyers: in a charter of 736ad, Aethelbald of the Mercians is king of all the provinces which are generally called by the name of the South English [sutangli].
The Jurassic Divide, which had defined pre-Roman and Roman Britannia, also shaped the English conquest. And 20before long, this cultural divide within England was massively reinforced.
The South Alone Survives
The Vikings pillaged as far south as Pisa, so there was nothing special about their raids on Southampton (840ad) or London (842ad). In 865ad, however, English history again took a unique turn. A huge Viking force smashed into Northumbria and East Anglia – then carved up the land for settlement. England wasn’t being raided; it was being colonised. After his defeat at Chippenham (6 January 878), the one surviving English king, Alfred of Wessex, was reduced to a fugitive.
Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made.
Alcuin, 793ad
21Somehow, Alfred’s Wessex had a unique resilience, perhaps because it had been born as an almost equal, law-based fusion of invading English and resident Romano-British elites. The memories of rural people easily span a mere couple of centuries.3 It may be that Alfred of the Cerdicingas (as the Wessex royal family styled itself) was able to call, at the vital moment, on older, deeper loyalties than other English kings.
At any rate, Alfred was able to regroup, rally the shires, and defeat the Danes at the Battle of Eddington (878). Their leader, Guthrum, accepted baptism and agreed to the Treaty of Wedmore, then Alfred and Guthrum’s Peace (878-880).
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Importing Unity
Alfred now wanted to unite the English – Saxons, Angles and all. In his youth, he had twice visited the court of the Carolingian Franks at Aachen. There, the great medieval deal of Church-State rule established by Charlemagne (with advice from Alcuin) was firmly established. Alfred imported it.
