History of England 1-6

Contents

List of Illustrations

1. Hymns of stone

2. The Roman way

3. Climate change

4. Spear points

5. The blood eagle

6. The measure of the king

7. The coming of the conquerors

8. The house

9. Devils and wicked men

10. The road

11. The law is lost

12. The names

13. The turbulent priest

14. The lost village

15. The great charter

16. Crime and punishment

17. A simple king

18. The seasonal year

19. The emperor of Britain

20. The hammer

21. The favourites of a king

22. Birth and death

23. The sense of a nation

24. The night schools

25. The commotion

26. Into the woods

27. The suffering king

28. Old habits

29. The warrior

30. How others saw us

31. A simple man

32. Meet the family

33. The divided realm

34. The world at play

35. The lion and the lamb

36. The staple of life

37. The king of spring

38. Come to town

39. The zealot king

40. The king of suspicions

41. A conclusion

Further reading

Index

List of Illustrations

1. Stonehenge, from an illuminated manuscript (© akg-images/British Library)

2. A silver relief of Cernunnos, the horned god of Iron Age worship (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

3. A mosaic from the Roman villa at Bignor in West Sussex (© akg-images/Florian Monheim/Bildarchiv Monheim)

4. A stylized depiction of some protagonists in the Roman conquest of Britain (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

5. The helmet of a great Germanic overlord, from Sutton Hoo (© akg-images/British Museum)

6. A nineteenth-century print of a Saxon manor (© akg-images/North Wind Picture Archives)

7. Saxon soldiers about to engage in battle (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

8. ‘Alfred in the Danish Camp’ (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

9. Aethelbert, the great king of Kent (© akg-images)

10. The Venerable Bede in his scriptorium (© akg-images/British Library)

11. The incipit of the Gospel of Saint Matthew from the Lindisfarne Gospels (© akg-images/British Library)

12. A Viking ship (© akg-images/British Library)

13. An image of Ethelred, commonly known as ‘the unready’ or ‘the ill-advised’ © akg-images/British Library)

14. Edward the Confessor, king of England from 1042 to 1066 (© akg-images/British Library)

15. The Normans crossing the Channel for the invasion of 1066 (© Getty Images/Bibliothèque Nationale)

16. The death of Harold in battle, from the Bayeux Tapestry (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

17. A man wielding an axe, taken from Topographia Hibernica (© akg-images/British Library)

18. An image of man and dogs from the Luttrell Psalter (© akg-images/British Library)

19. A nineteenth-century woodcut of a medieval manor (© akg-images/North Wind Picture Archives)

20. An image of Matilda, de facto queen of England from March to November 1141 (© akg-images/British Library)

21. Henry II confronting Thomas Becket (©akg-images/British Library)

22. Richard I, more commonly known as ‘Richard the Lionheart’ (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

23. ‘John Lackland’ on horseback (© akg-images/British Library)

24. The season of March as seen in The Bedford Book of Hours (© akg-images/British Library)

25. The varied labours of the agricultural year (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

26. The abbots, and monks, of a medieval monastery (© akg-images/British Library)

27. The building of a monastery (© akg-images)

28. Edward I addressing one of his parliaments (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

29. A view of Harlech Castle (© IAM/akg-images)

30. Queen Isabella, errant wife of Edward II (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

31. The Black Death (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

32. A woman who has contracted leprosy (© akg-images/British Library)

33. A bloodletting (© akg-images/British Library)

34. The Battle of Crécy (© akg-images/British Library)

35. The tomb of the Black Prince (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

36. The image of Richard II from the ‘Wilton Diptych’ (© akg-images/Erich Lessing)

37. A page from Wycliffe’s Bible (© IAM/akg-images)

38. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral (© akg-images/Bildarchiv Monheim)

39. A scene from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (© akg-images/British Library)

40. The coronation of Henry IV in Westminster Abbey (© IAM/(akg-images)

41. The Battle of Agincourt (© akg-images/Bibliothèque Nationale)

42. The wedding of Henry V and Katherine of Valois (© akg-images/British Library)

43. Joan of Arc (© akg-images/Archives Nationales, Paris)

44. Henry VI in full martial array (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

45. The Warwick family tree, from John Rous of Warwick’s De Regius Angliae (© akg-images/British Library)

46. Edward IV (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

47. Elizabeth Woodville (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

48. Edward V (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

49. Richard III standing on a white boar (© Mary Evans Picture Library)

50. Elizabeth of York and Henry VII, from a nineteenth-century illustration (© Sarah, Countess of Essex/Getty Images)

51. An allegory of the Tudor dynasty (© akg-images/British Library)

1

Hymns of stone

When the first sarsen stone was raised in the circle of Stonehenge, the land we call England was already very ancient. Close to the village of Happisburgh, in Norfolk, seventy-eight flint artefacts have recently been found; they were scattered approximately 900,000 years ago. So the long story begins.

At least nine distinct and separate waves of peoples arrived from southern Europe, taking advantage of warm interglacial periods that endured for many thousands of years; they are races without a history, leaving only stones or bones as the evidence of their advance and retreat. Against the wall of a cave of the Gower Peninsula has been found the body of a man laid down 29,000 years ago. His bones were stained with a light patina of red, suggesting either that they were sprinkled with red ochre or that his burial garments were deeply dyed. He also wore shoes. Around him were various items of funereal tribute, including bracelets of ivory and perforated shells. His head had been removed, but his body had been placed in alignment with the skull of a mammoth.

He was young, perhaps no more than twenty-one, but in that far-off time all men and women were young. He was clearly some kind of clan leader or tribal chieftain. At the beginning of the human world, a social hierarchy already existed with marks of rank and status. The cave in which he was interred was visited by many generations, but we do not know what secrets it contained. The people whom he represented passed from the face of the earth.

Only the last of the arrivals to England survived. These people came some 15,000 years ago and settled in places as diverse as the areas now known as Nottinghamshire, Norfolk and Devon. In a Nottinghamshire cave the figures of animals and birds were carved 13,000 years ago into the soft limestone ceiling; the stag and the bear, the deer and the bison, are among them.

Generations passed away, with little or no evidence of change. They persisted. They endured. We do not know what language they spoke. Of how or what they worshipped, we have no idea. But they were not mute; their intellectual capacity was as great, or as small, as our own. They laughed, and wept, and prayed. Who were they? They were the forebears of the English, the direct ancestors of many of those still living in this nation. There is an authentic and powerful genetic pattern linking the living with the long dead. In 1995 two palaeontologists discovered that the material from a male body, found in the caves of Cheddar Gorge and interred 9,000 years ago, was a close match with that of residents still living in the immediate area. They all shared a common ancestor in the maternal line. So there is a continuity. These ancient people survive. The English were not originally ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Celtic’; they were a prehistoric island people.

The study of prehistory must also be the study of geography. When the settlers arrived in England, 15,000 years ago, the North Sea was a great plain of lakes and woodland. It now lies submerged, rich in the unseen evidence of the past. Yet we can in part rescue that which has been lost. Oak woods, marshes covered by reeds, and open grasslands covered the land. It was a warm and humid world. Red deer and voles inhabited the landscape; but they shared it with elephants and macaque monkeys. Among them wandered groups of humans, twentyfive or more in each group, pursuing their prey. They fired upon the animals with flint arrowheads, and used carved reindeer antlers as axes; they carried wooden spears. We do not know how they were organized but the discovery of ‘butchery sites’, where tools were manufactured and food prepared away from the main settlements, suggests a measure of social control.

We can still see the people walking towards us. On the sand at Formby Point, on the northwest coast of England, there are human footprints continuing for 32 feet (9.75 metres). The prints of many children are among them. The men were approximately 5 feet and 5 inches in height (1.55 metres), the women some 8 inches shorter (20 centimetres). They were looking for shrimps and razor shells. Footprints are found in other parts of England. Some appear on the foreshore of the Severn estuary; they fade away at the point where, 7,000 years before, the dry land became swamp. Now, on the flooding of the tide, they are gone.

These are the prints of what have been called Mesolithic people. The term, like its counterparts Palaeolithic and Neolithic, is loose but convenient. These people cleared the woods and forests by burning, in order to make way for settlements or to render the hunt for game more effective. Pine was also burned to make way for hazel, whose autumnal nuts were a popular source of food; they knew how to manage their resources. The early English have been called ‘hunter-gatherers’, with dogs employed for hunting, but their life was not that of undisciplined nomadic wandering; their activities took place within well-defined boundaries. They ranged through group territories that adjoined one another. They liked the areas where land and water meet.

Some 11,000 years ago a great lake covered what is now the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire. On the bank of this lake was built a platform of birch wood. It might have been used to expedite fishing, but it is more likely to have been a site of ritual ceremonial; the people wore amber beads, and left behind the bones of pig and red deer, crane and duck. A round house has also been discovered, 11.5 feet in diameter (3.5 metres), that has been dated to approximately 9000 BC; it was constructed of eighteen upright wooden posts, with a thick layer of moss and reeds to furnish a sleeping area.

Its inhabitants used barbed antler points, flint knives and scrapers; they started fires by means of iron pyrite. The house itself seems to have possessed a hearth. They used canoes to travel over the lake; one paddle has been found, but no craft is now visible. It has disintegrated through time. But there are survivals. At this site, known as Star Carr, were discovered twenty-one fragments of deer skull, some of them still with antlers. Were they a form of disguise for hunting? More likely, they were part of a shamanistic covering to enter the spirit of the deer. It might have been an early form of morris dancing, except that the numinous has now become simply quaint.

The Mesolithic English lived in settlements such as that found at Thatcham in Berkshire; the modern town itself is in fact the latest version of human community on the same site. Some atavistic impulse keeps habitations in the same place. 10,000 years ago the people lived on the shore of a lake. Burnt bones, burnt hazelnuts and patches of charcoal used for fires, were found; here, in other words, was all the panoply of daily domestic life. Cleared spaces represented the floors of small huts. The first English house was made of flexible saplings, bent over and covered with hides. It measured approximately 20 feet by 16 feet (6 metres by 4.8 metres).

Hundreds of other such settlements existed, many of them in coastal regions that now lie upon the seabed. The coasts were once between 70 and 100 feet (between 21 and 30 metres) higher than their present level and, as the seas rose, so the settlements were lost in the deluge. We may never know very much more about the Mesolithic English because their remains are beneath the waves. One submerged village came to light when some divers peered into a burrow made by a wandering lobster off the Isle of Wight; the crustacean was flinging out pieces of worked flint. A settlement of craftsmen and manufacturers, as well as hunters and fishermen, was then revealed. A wooden pole, with a flint knife embedded in it, was rescued from the waters. A canoe was found, carved from a log. The remains of structures like houses could clearly be seen. They were workers in wood as well as in stone. This is part of the lost English world under water.

The water rose so much that, after the melting of the ice sheets of the glacial era, it encircled what had become the archipelago of England, Scotland and Wales. 8,000 years ago, the marshes and forests of the plain lying between England and continental Europe were obliterated by the southern North Sea. It may not have come as a tidal wave, although earthquakes can precipitate great masses of water. It is more likely to have happened gradually, over 2,000 years, as the land slowly became swamp and then lake. In earlier ages of the earth, two catastrophic floods had already created the Channel between England and France. With the influx of new waters the archipelago (we may call it an island for the sake of lucidity) was formed; 60 per cent of the land surface became what is now the land of England.

The land then becomes the object of topographical enquiry. Where, for example, is the exact centre of England? It is marked by a stone cross at the village of Meriden in Warwickshire; the consonance of Meriden with meridian or middle of the day is striking, and that may indeed have been reason enough for a cross to be raised there. In fact the true centre of the country is to be found on Lindley Hall Farm in Leicestershire. The property was recently owned by a couple with the surname of Farmer.

The effects of this novel insularity eventually became evident in the tools which were fashioned in England. They became smaller than those shaped on the continent, and certain types of microlith were in fact unique to this country. Yet the island was no less inviting to the travellers who came across the waters in boats manufactured of wood or of osier covered with stitched skins. They came from northwestern Europe, proving that the Anglo-Saxon and Viking ‘invasions’ were the continuations of an ancient process.

They also came from the Atlantic coasts of Spain and southwestern France, but that migration was not a recent phenomenon. The Atlantic travellers had been colonizing the southwestern parts of England throughout the Mesolithic period, so that by the time of the formation of the island a flourishing and distinctive civilization existed in the western parts of the country. The travellers from Spain also settled in Ireland; hence the relationship between ‘Iberia’ and ‘Hibernia’. The Iron Age tribe of the Silures, established in South Wales, always believed that their ancestors had come from Spain in some distant past; Tacitus noted that these tribal people had dark complexions and curly hair. These are the people known later as ‘Celts’.

So differences between the English regions already existed 8,000 years ago. The flint tools of England, for example, have been divided into five separate and distinct categories. The artefacts of the southwest had a different appearance to those of the southeast, encouraging trade between the two areas. Individual cultures were being created that reinforced geographical and geological identities. There is bound to be a difference, in any case, between those cultures established upon chalk and limestone and those built upon granite.

A division is to be observed within England, established upon two broad zones. The Lowland Zone – comprising the midlands, the Home Counties, East Anglia, Humberside and the south central plain – is built upon soft limestone, chalk and sandstone. This is a place of low hills, plains and river valleys. It is a place of centralized power and settlement. It is soft, and various, and pliable. The Highland Zone in the north and west – comprising the Pennines, Cumbria, North Yorkshire, the Peak district of Derbyshire, Devon and Cornwall – largely consists of granite, slate and ancient hard limestone. This is a place of mountains, high hills and moors. It is a region of scattered groups or families, independent one from another. It is hard, and gritty, and crystalline. These two regions do not face each other; they face outwards, towards the seas from where their inhabitants came. We can see the changes upon the ground itself. In Wessex the border of the ‘finds’ from one settlement stops at the point where the chalk meets the Kimmeridge clays. These people would move no further west. So regional differences began to spread.

Differences, in accent and in dialect, may already have existed. There was an original language in the southeast of which traces still survive in contemporary speech – the words ‘London’, ‘Thames’ and ‘Kent’ have no known Germanic or Celtic root. It is possible that the people of East Anglia and the southeast began to speak a language that developed into Germanic, and that the people of the southwest spoke a language that would become Celtic. The Germanic tongue became Middle English before flourishing as standard English; Celtic speech diverged into Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic. It is pertinent that in Wales and Cornwall Celtic inscriptions can be found in stone, carved during the Roman age, while in southern England there are none. Tacitus reports that, at the time of the Roman colonization, the south-eastern English spoke a language not unlike that of the Baltic tribes. But there can be no certainties in the matter. All lies in mist and twilight.

When the mist rises, we see extraordinary things. Beneath a burial mound in Wiltshire, near Avebury, was discovered what had once been a surface layer of soil dating from 3500 BC; it had been preserved by the construction of the barrow. The significance of this ancient ground was confirmed by the discovery of tiny grooves running at right angles, one to another, so that they form a crisscross pattern. These grooves were cut by a plough. It was a forked tree branch, strengthened by a stone tip, pulled by an ox. It is the first evidence of a field in England. It represents the beginning of farming. We have entered what has become known as Neolithic England. This small patch of land was cleared by the destruction of dense woodland; it was cultivated with the plough; it then became pasture for sheep and cattle; a boundary fence or hedge was erected; the barrow was then built some 1,500 years later. In this sequence of events we see the slow changes of prehistory.

The transition from hunting to farming was itself a very gradual one; there was no agricultural revolution in any meaningful sense, just the increments of days and years and centuries of habitual practice. Custom was the keystone of life. In this long period flint tools were replaced by sickles and polished axes; pottery was introduced to England; new forms of communal ritual emerged. But in the space of an individual generation, which we may estimate between twenty and thirty years, it must have seemed that nothing had changed. When we use terms like ‘Mesolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’, we should remember the underlying deep continuity that represents the nature of England itself.

The slow expansion of farming can be dated from 4000 BC. The woods and forests of the country were cleared, at first sporadically but then extensively; the moors of northern and southwestern England, and the heaths of East Anglia, were in part created by human activity. On this newly open ground wheat and barley crops were harvested. Domesticated pigs and cattle were kept, as well as sheep and goats. But sheep were not originally English. All of these animals were brought over in ships, not being native to the island, emphasizing the extent to which seafaring visitors contributed to the now familiar landscape.

This was a time of rising temperature, and in the glowing sun the people expanded; during the entire Neolithic period, from approximately 4700 BC to 2000 BC, the population trebled and has been estimated at 300,000. The pressure of ever-increasing numbers helped to accelerate the intensity of cultivation, and by 3000 BC the available countryside was marked out in small rectangular fields. Where there are fields there will be fences and ditches; there will be stone walls. Fences have been found beneath prehistoric burial mounds, testifying to their ancientness.

The presence of the barrows, where the dead reside upon the landscape, is a further sign of a settled society with its own forms of ritual and worship. Evidence can be found for the construction of houses and of scattered farmsteads with settlement pits, for enclosures where cattle might be herded or fairs and meetings held. One such enclosure, built in Cornwall before 3000 BC, was guarded by a great stone wall; the remains of houses were found here, sufficient accommodation for approximately 200 people. So the beginning of the English village, or of the English town, is to be found in the Neolithic period.

Roads and trackways were built from settlement to settlement. The Icknield Way took the prehistoric traveller from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk. Lanes led from farmstead to farmstead. The Pilgrims Way linked the great religious centres of Canterbury and Winchester. Ermine Street is now known, in part, as the Old North Road. The Jurassic Way goes from Oxfordshire to Lincolnshire. Watling Street ran between Canterbury and St Albans, passing through what may have been prehistoric London. Long causeways were built across the soft fens of Somerset, from timber that was felled in approximately 3800 BC; the varieties of wood used in their construction, from ash and lime to hazel and holly, suggest that they were especially grown for the purpose. The specific properties of the wood, utilized by the Neolithic English, are not known to us. Their technology is lost.

Many of the roads loosely known as ‘Roman roads’ are much more ancient; the Romans simply made use of the prehistoric paths. Modern roads have been built along the routes of these ancient lines, so that we still move in the footsteps of our ancestors. They created a network of communication that extended throughout England. This was a populous and busy civilization, much more sophisticated than was once generally thought. Along these routes were transported axe-blades for the use of farmers or house-builders, pottery of all kinds, and leather goods. Flint was mined in underground galleries entered by hundreds of shafts reaching a depth of 50 feet (15.2 metres); then it was sent over the country.

Yet the great division was steadily growing more pronounced. On the Atlantic side rose up megalithic portal tombs and passage tombs, unknown in East Anglia, the midlands and the southeast. These great stone hymns to the dead, erected for 600 years from 3800 BC, are the emanations of a distinctive culture that originally came from southwestern Europe. The same tombs are found in Portugal and Brittany, Scotland and the Orkneys, suggesting that there was in essence a shared European religion inscribed in the siting of stone.

Causewayed enclosures of the same period are to be found predominantly in southern and eastern Britain; these are oval or circular spaces surrounded by a ditch cut into segments. They were used for the purposes of ritual, but the system of belief and practice was different from that of the southwest. Unlike the massive gateways of death revealed in the excavation of portal tombs, the open spaces suggest a more egalitarian or at least communal faith.

From the same epoch emerge the long parallel lines of ditches that have become known as cursus monuments; they cross what must have been cleared countryside, and can extend as far as 6 miles (9.6 kilometres). They are part of a ritual landscape of which the significance is now lost. Yet we know well enough that in this age of England the ground was holy; the stones, and the earth, were sacred. The English of the early Neolithic age had some direct communion with the terrain, and with the creatures that lived upon it, beyond the reach of the modern imagination.

All roads lead to Stonehenge, part of the greatest of all sacred sites. It began with a circle of fifty-six timbers, erected in approximately 2800 BC and placed in a ritual landscape that had already been in existence for 500 years. A cursus, 1½ miles long (2.4 kilometres), runs just to the north. Also found were pieces of rock crystal that must have been carried from Alpine regions. Salisbury Plain was then the spiritual centre of the island. From here radiate the chalk and limestone ranges of lowland Britain. A network of ridgeways and trading routes converged upon it. It was the largest area of habitable land. It was accessible by rivers. It was a great cauldron of human energy and purpose.

At some point, around 2200 BC, the first stone circle was being formed. The change from wood to stone has been related to a profound cultural movement, resulting in the building of monumental enclosures elsewhere, in the decline of ancestor worship and in bouts of warfare between opposing groups. In Peterborough a male and a female, with two children, were found within the same grave; the male was killed by an arrow in the back. In Dorset several bodies were found lying in a ditch, with a rampart fallen upon them; one of them had been killed by an arrow.

The building of Stonehenge was the largest and most protracted programme of public works in the history of England. A series of bluestones was first erected in 2200 BC; these stones were largely igneous in origin and were considered to have magical healing properties. The bluestones were then dismantled after a life of approximately 100 years and replaced by thirty sarsen stones; they formed a circle around five pairs of trilithons arranged in horseshoe pattern. At approximately the same time a wooden henge, or circular monument, of twenty-four obelisks was erected less than half a mile (0.8 kilometres) from its stone companion; it may have been a burial centre or the site of some other ritual activity.

Another henge and stone circle, known as Bluestonehenge, was erected a mile (1.6 kilometres) to the southeast along the bank of the Avon. A large village was also constructed, less than 2 miles away (3.2 kilometres), variously interpreted as a lodging for pilgrims, a ritual centre, a place of healing, or a home for those who erected the sarsen stones. Whatever the explanation, Salisbury Plain was the site of communal and spiritual settlement on a very large scale. It was once conceived to be a largely empty field, but now we find it to have been a field full of folk.

From this period was found the body of a man variously called ‘the Amesbury archer’ and ‘the king of Stonehenge’; his grave contained over 100 artefacts, including gold hair ornaments, copper knives, pots and boars’ tusks. Over his body, crouched in a foetal position, were scattered flint arrowheads. This was the last resting place of a tribal chieftain. Oxygen isotope analysis revealed that he had been brought up in the colder regions of northern Europe. What was a foreign king doing on Salisbury Plain? Was he on pilgrimage? There is evidence of an abscess and a painful bone infection. Had he crossed the sea to be healed? Or did he reign here as one of the tribal chieftains who, in an era without countries or nations, were not necessarily confined to one region?

In the final phase of building, approximately 1600 BC, the pits or holes for two circles of standing stones were hollowed out; but they were never filled. So the shape, and therefore possibly the nature, of Stonehenge has changed over a period of 1,200 years. It would be strange if it were not so. The same distance of time separates us from the Saxon age. It has been argued that the stones were a burial ground, a centre of pilgrimage and of ritual healing, a great observatory and a celestial clock, a place of public ceremonial and ritual. There is no reason why they could not have fulfilled all of these, as well as other, functions in the various eras of their existence. At the time of their erection these great stones seemed magnificent and immoveable in the earth; now, from a distance of 4,000 years, they dance in a pattern before us.

In all these eras, however, the stones are evidence of a controlling power that could organize vast numbers of people in a shared project. This was a hierarchical society with an elite, tribal or priestly, that could coerce or persuade many thousands of people into fulfilling its ritual will. The inhabitants of Salisbury Plain, to put it no broader, were under the guidance and protection of leaders who were rich in land and in cattle; the more we understand the material remains of this Neolithic culture, the more impressed we become by its range and authority. The construction of Silbury Hill, in the same region as Stonehenge, would have taken the labour of 1,000 men working every day for five years. The construction of Stonehenge itself would have entailed millions of hours of labour. Its bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, some 200 miles distant. So great parts of England were already under organized administration long before the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons came; land, labour and material resources were governed by some form of central control.

It is suggestive that, in the course of the formation of Stonehenge, communal burials were being replaced by individual burials. The ‘king of Stonehenge’ is just one example. In some graves the body of the chieftain is accompanied by weapons, and in others the corpse is surrounded by goods. These are the graves of leaders and high priests, often with their immediate families. England had become an aristocratic, rather than a tribal, society.

The contours of the Bronze Age, succeeding the Neolithic in the standard time-lines of prehistory, are still to be found everywhere. They have endured for almost 4,000 years, and can be seen in a certain light. In the hour before sunset, when the rays of the sun lie across the English fields, the old patterns of the earth rise up and the land seems to return to its origins. The banks and ditches of hundreds and hundreds of small rectangular fields can be discerned. The sweep and extent of these fields are truly extraordinary; they can only really be comprehended from the air and, seeing aerial photographs for the first time in 1929, the historian G. M. Trevelyan was moved to declare that ‘the discovery of these old Celtic fields, from under the palimpsest of later agricultural systems, is the most romantic thing that has come to stir our historical imaginations since the first Cretan finds’.

A lost world was revealed. The uplands and downlands of southern Britain were laid out in fields, with hedges and stone walls stretching for mile after mile; drove-ways and waterholes can be seen among these rectangular ditched fields. It is a feat of organization to rival that of the building of Stonehenge, and bears all the marks of powerful central planning. It seems likely that many thousands of square miles of land were laid out in one significant single act or set of acts, an example of land planning that has never since been rivalled in English history. In the process the English landscape was created.

This intensive cultivation is the best possible evidence for a steady rise in population. By 1900 BC there were as many as a million people, rising to more than 2 million by the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion in 55 BC. It was of course an agricultural society, with its own regional variations. More and more territory was brought into cultivation, and has continued as productive arable land ever since. The woodland was cleared. Grass for pasture was created. There were more sheep than there would be in the sixteenth century ad. There was little appetite, or perhaps leisure, for monumental construction; working the land had become a more important activity.

Settlements were to be found everywhere, most of them located away from the monumental sites. Single households, and small hamlets, abounded. Enclosures were surrounded by a fence or ditch. ‘Hut circles’ were in fact groups of round stone houses with beehive roofs where the perfume of burning peat mingled with the smells of the farmyard. If every settlement was a light, then the whole of England was now ablaze. The island people were settled on Dartmoor, in the Lake District and on the North York moors.

They buried their dead in family units, the bodies cremated and laid in decorated urns. So the cemeteries of the Late Bronze Age, from approximately 1300 BC, have become known as ‘urn fields’. Their discovery in the middle of the seventeenth century inspired the antiquary, Sir Thomas Browne, to compose Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk. He was moved to declare that ‘what time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits.’ In this he has caught the remoteness of the long-dead, of whose rituals and customs we can have no conception.

Yet in certain respects they are not so distant as the philosopher implied. The men wore woollen cloaks, above a tunic known as a kirtle; the kirtle was still being worn in the sixteenth century. The women wore tunics and jackets, covered also by a woollen cloak. Shoes were made of skin, and men wore woollen caps. The women of more elevated status wore elaborate necklaces of jet, in the manner of Victorian ladies. One grave has yielded evidence of a woman who had a concealed ‘pad’ to bolster her hair. Men and women of the higher class sported ornaments of gold and bronze, as well as blue beads imported from Egypt. Amber jewellery was imported from the Baltic region, testifying to the range of international trade in Bronze Age England. Browne did not know that the people of this ancient period ate soups and stews as well as dressed meat; they consumed a kind of dried porridge made of wheat, barley and oats. Beer, wine and other alcoholic drinks were an integral part of the diet. Varieties of berry as well as hazelnut, herbs and seaweed, were eaten.

In his disquisition Browne went on to note that ‘the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity’. In the matter of their faith, at least, he has proved to be correct. The devotions of these people cannot be divined except in the broadest terms. The focus of ceremony and worship shifted from the sky to the earth; the steady exploitation of the land by Bronze Age farmers would have increased the significance of fertility rituals. There was in particular a pronounced attention to water and to watery places – springs, rivers, fens and marshes among them. The Thames, for example, became the home of Bronze Age weapons and other artefacts. In the Thames itself the offerings of weapons, bones and ornaments were kept separate and distinct; at Eton there are many skulls but no metal. Tools were left in dry, and weapons in wet, locations. An intricate taxonomy of worship cannot now be comprehended. Wooden platforms and causeways were built beside the river, part of the sacred space in which the priests of the people dwelled.

The significance of water is apparent throughout prehistory, with burial mounds and henge monuments sited by the rivers of England. For example, 368 Neolithic axes have been found in the Thames. It has been surmised that the deposition of Bronze Age work was part of a rite in propitiation of the dead and therefore a form of ancestor worship. If the dead were believed to cross between two worlds, they would have a particular affinity with the river; the river gains access to the underworld through a myriad passages, and springs ever fresh and renewed from its source. There is another, and perhaps more prosaic, explanation for the fervour elicited by water. There was literally water in the air. In the late Bronze Age the weather was growing cooler and wetter.

So we see the Bronze Age English in glimpses. A stirrup is found in a grave. Some seeds are deposited at the base of a bowl. The bones of a sheep are excavated from the refuse pit of a settlement. Weapons are uncovered everywhere – spearheads, socketed axes, rapiers and, at a slightly later date, swords. There is evidence of harnesses, and bronze fittings, for horses. And there were chariots. In Peterborough have been uncovered the traces of wheel ruts that would have supported a vehicle with a width of 3½ feet (1 metre).

From all these traces and tokens we can infer the presence of a warrior aristocracy, in a kingdom or group of sub-kingdoms that stretched from Dorset to Sussex. The culture of the middle and late Bronze Age is roughly contemporaneous with that of Troy, as depicted by Homer, and it had the same predilection for kings and warriors, feasting and ritual battle. It was a warrior society with small-scale sporadic fighting between elites, with gift exchanges between leaders, and tribute from the subject population in the form of food. That was one of the reasons why the land was so extensively farmed.

Defended settlements, and other enclosures containing buildings, were ubiquitous. These are the prototypes for the hill forts that are characteristic of southern England in the Iron Age. In Dorset, for example, a fence made out of great tree trunks – set in a trench some 10 feet (3 metres) deep – was built around an area of 11 acres (4.4 hectares).

Strong regional identities were already being formed, as well as regional divisions. The trading advantage of the Thames Valley region with its access to the European mainland, for example, helped to eclipse the agricultural wealth of Salisbury Plain. The north was engaged in stock-raising, while the south tended to concentrate upon cereal production. Trade encouraged interdependence.

Commerce of all kinds was increasing throughout this long epoch. Trade is the key to the growth of civilizations. Trade is the motor of wars. Trade fosters technologies. Trade creates towns and cities. Certain types of sword were manufactured in western France and found their way to England’s eastern counties. Highly embellished barbecue spits were fashioned in Spain and exported to England. Metal work from the ancient city of Mycenae, in Greece, has also been found. Gold ornaments were sent from Ireland. Linen and woollen fabrics were in turn exported to Europe, together with slaves and hunting dogs. Children worked in the tin mines of Cornwall, digging out the precious ore with bones and hammer-stones; the metal was then despatched to the coastal ports for shipment.

And of course when tin was added to molten copper, the metal from which this age is named was formed. Bronze implements changed everything, from the cutting down of forests to the building of houses. They made fighting more efficient. Bronze ornaments, bronze spears, bronze shields, bronze buckets, bronze chisels, bronze skewers and bronze knives were in abundant supply; the Bronze Age Englishman could shave himself with a bronze razor, using oil as the lubricant.

There is a theory that once a new process has been discovered and utilized, it appears in many other places simultaneously. Once something has been learned, it is conveyed across the whole human species. This is likely to explain the manufacture of bronze, since it could not have emerged from one source. Bronze of the same date has been found from Switzerland to Thailand. So people of approximately the same culture met on equal terms. We imagine visitors of high status sailing to England; there may have been embassies from Troy itself or from the court of the pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt.

The Bronze Age did not come to an end; the movement from bronze to iron reflects a change in technology leading to slow cultural change. The process took hundreds of years, during which period bronze and iron were simultaneously in use. Of course none of these ‘ages’ existed in the minds of those who experienced them. The Neolithic inhabitants of England lived in the same places as the Mesolithic people. Bronze Age fields and cemeteries are on the same sites as their Neolithic forebears; Bronze Age settlements were continuously in use through the Iron Age, and the people of the Iron Age consistently respected the burial mounds and boundary lines from the previous age of the human world. They honoured the structure of the landscape around them.

From the beginning of the Iron Age in approximately 700 BC, therefore, an advanced concept of territoriality governed relations between the land and the people. It had gathered strength over thousands of years. Leaders, and tribes, were firmly and specifically associated with certain regions. We see this in the laying out of boundaries and in the location of settlements. Yet through the Iron Age there was an intensification of this natural development. Engels once described iron as ‘the last and most important of all the raw materials that have played a revolutionary role in history’. New forms of alliance, and new networks of trade, were gradually established. Objects of ritual and ceremonial value were often made out of the new metal. The trade in iron contributed to the ultimate shape of England, where the various regions were becoming more intensely organized and controlled.

Hierarchy was marked out with chieftains and sub-chieftains, warriors and priests, farmers and craftsmen, workers and slaves. Slave irons have been found at a site near St Albans. A gang chain has been discovered on Anglesey. The funereal practices for the elite dead became more and more elaborate. In the burial places of the Iron Age chieftains the body was surrounded by molten silver, cloth of gold, ivory, suits of iron chain mail, precious cups and bowls. They predate the wealth of Sutton Hoo by a thousand years. Trampled earth was uncovered around the base of one mortuary chamber, suggesting dancing. The graves of women of high status contained many ornaments, including mirrors, brooches, bangles, beads, tweezers and bowls. In one burial a great bowl of bronze had been placed over the woman’s face.

Strong regional identities were in place. In the east undefended settlements, very much like villages, lay among open fields. In the southwest small communities lived in defended homesteads, together with unenclosed settlements sited at a distance; this has been interpreted as a division between tribal leaders and their subject people. In the north-east was found a pattern of defended homesteads, while in the northwest a tradition of roundhouses known as beehive huts existed. The culture of Salisbury Plain, sometimes known as ‘Wessex culture’, demanded a pattern of large territorial groupings based around hill forts. There are of course variations on all these themes, from the pit dwellings carved out of the chalk in Hampshire to the lake villages of Somerset where round huts were built upon floating islands of logs.

The hill forts themselves are evidence of a strongly ranked society. They seem to have originated in the neighbourhood of the Cotswolds and then spread over the whole of central southern England. They demonstrated the mastery of land and resources, and were therefore a symbol of proprietorship. Linear earthworks often mark out the boundaries of the territory controlled by each fort. They became more heavily defended over the period of the Iron Age and were sometimes occupied for hundreds of years. They resembled towns as much as forts, with clusters of buildings, streets, temples, storage facilities and ‘zones’ for separate industrial activities. The houses were circular, built of upright posts, woven together with wattle and sticks of hazel; they had doors and porches, facing east, and the roofs were generally thatched with reeds or straw. The thatch was held in place with a daub of dung, clay and straw; since soot from the peat fires was a valuable manure, it is likely to have been replaced each year. Archaeologists, reconstructing the interiors of these houses, have found small cupboards in which weapons were stored. Although their populations ranged only from 20 to 200 people, we may see in them the beginnings of urban life in England. The author believes that London was once just such a hill fort, but the evidence for it is now buried beneath the megalopolis it has become. All the evidence suggests, however, the existence of many small tribes living in a state of constant alert against rivals.

There were indeed cattle raids, conflicts between warriors and large-scale wars. Some hill forts were stormed and burned. Bodies have been found in the ramparts, their bones marked and hacked. We can expect a tradition of heroic songs and tales in which the exploits of an individual warrior or leader were celebrated. They are to be found in the early Irish epics, for example, which may incorporate stories and refrains from the prehistoric age of Irish tribes. An analogy with Homer’s Iliad can be made. Indeed it has been suggested that the epic poem in fact adverts to events in England, in myths and tales that were then carried by bards eastward to Anatolia.

Yet the various tribes or regional groupings did come together in a network of alliances and ties of kinship; how else could trade in commodities such as iron and salt flourish throughout the country? Many of these smaller clans were in time integrated and, perhaps in the face of threat, became large units of territory. These were the tribes of England whom the Romans confronted in their slow progress towards ascendancy. By the end of the Iron Age certain hill forts had become dominant and assumed the role of regional capitals. As the population steadily increased, so agriculture became ever more intensive. The clearance of woodland and forest continued without a break. The farmers began to work the thick clay soils in earnest, with the help of the heavy wheeled plough. This was the solid basis for the agricultural economy of England over the next 2,500 years. Wheat was grown in Somerset, and barley in Wiltshire; that broad pattern is still the same.

A visitor sailed to England’s shores. The Greek merchant and explorer Pytheas made landfall in 325 BC. He named the island as Prettanike or Brettaniai. This is the origin of the name of Britain. The land of the Picts was known by the diminutive of Prydyn. Pytheas visited Cornwall, and watched the inhabitants work the ore and purify the metal. On another stage of his journey he was told by the natives that the mother of Apollo, Leto, was born on this island ‘and for this reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon as priests of Apollo’.

He also reports that he had seen ‘a wonderful sacred precinct of Apollo and a celebrated temple festooned with many offerings’; it was ‘spherical in shape’ and close by there was a city ‘sacred to this god’ whose kings are called ‘Boreades’ after the god of the cold north wind. The identity of this precinct, temple and city have long been a matter of debate. Some argue that Pytheas was describing the sacred landscape of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill; others believe that it refers to a temple of Apollo where Westminster Abbey now stands, and the adjacent ‘city’ of London.

It is clear, however, that Pytheas was reporting the claims of a people deeply imbued in ritual worship, with the names of Apollo and Boreas simply being used by him as tokens of holiness. The Parthenon had already been built in Athens, and all foreign gods were seen by the Greeks in classical terms. The religion of the Iron Age in England, however, has always been associated with the cult of Druidism.

It may also be glimpsed within the sacred geometries of Iron Age art (still known inaccurately as Celtic art). It was an art of vision, penetrating beyond the appearances of things. It traced living lines of energy and purpose with spirals and swastikas, curves and circles, whirling together in an intricate network of shapes and patterns. It is in no sense primitive or barbaric; on the contrary it is ingenious and complex, showing a mastery of artificial form and linearity. These intricate patterns are clearly related to the whorls, spirals and concentric circles carved upon Mesolithic passage graves several thousand years earlier; they suggest a broad continuity of belief and worship throughout the prehistoric age.

At the core of Iron Age religion were the persistent and continuing native beliefs of England, enshrined in certain sacred places. Caves were often holy. The Druids themselves are known to have congregated in sacred groves, where ancient trees provided the setting for ritual practice. Powerful gods had to be propitiated. An early Bronze Age barrow in Yorkshire yielded up certain drum-shaped idols carved out of chalk, with what seem to be human eyebrows and noses. 2,000 years after these images were carved a British writer, Gildas, was still moved to condemn the ‘diabolical idols … of which we still see some mouldering away within or without the deserted temples, with the customary stiff and deformed features’. So there was a long tradition of worship that may have had its earliest origins in the Neolithic period. The image of the horned god Cernunnos has been found at Cirencester. The horse goddess Epona has been discovered in Wiltshire and in Essex. A carving of the hammer god Sucellus has been unearthed in East Stoke, Nottinghamshire. The mysterious god, Lud or Nud, is still commemorated by Ludgate Hill and Ludgate Circus in London.

Religious sanctuaries were established all over the land, and it is safe to assume that even the smallest settlement had its own central shrine. They have been discovered in hill forts, within ditched enclosures, along boundaries, and above barrow graves; they are often marked by the subsequent presence of Roman temples or early Christian churches. Certain places were deemed to be blessed. Many English churches will be lying upon prehistoric originals. In Iron Age England, it was believed that the cock served as a defence against thunderstorms; that is why cocks are still to be found on church steeples. They became known as weathercocks.

Human sacrifice helped to sanctify the land. A male body was found in a bog in Cheshire; he had been bludgeoned in the head, and his throat cut before being deposited in the marsh. Many skeletons have been found at the bottom of pits in southern England, their bodies flexed in an unnatural posture. There is also the known prehistoric affinity for severed heads, believed to be the site of the soul or spirit. Skulls have been found lined up in a row. The bodies of defeated enemies were often beheaded, and their heads buried or placed in running water. Three hundred skulls, dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, have been found in the Thames. The river was once an English Golgotha, the place of skulls.

Caesar’s account of the high priests of England, the Druids, adverts to the practice of human sacrifice. They created images of wicker-work which ‘they fill with living men and, setting them on fire, the men are destroyed by the flames’. In his account the Druid priests are the lawmakers of the land who determine rewards and punishments. They settle disputes over boundaries and over property.

The Roman writer Pliny records that they ‘esteem nothing more sacred than the mistletoe’; the high priests ‘select groves of oak, and use the leaves of the mistletoe in all sacred rites’. The sacrificial victim was tied to the trunk of the oak tree, and his priestly killers wore chaplets of oak leaves. They practised divination, magic and astrology; they believed in the immortality of the soul that passes through various incarnations. This doctrine of immortality was considered by the Roman writers to make clear the contempt for death revealed by the native English; the English were noted for this quality of indifference in subsequent centuries.

The Druids worshipped the sun and moon also, but their solar belief persisted long after the passing of the priestly caste. A butcher from Standon in Hertfordshire was accused, in 1452, of proclaiming that there was no god except the sun and the moon. In the second chapter of Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy remarks that ‘old customs’ last longer on clay soils. The power of the Druids was retained by the bishops of the Anglo-Saxon church, just as the tonsure of early Christian monks may reflect Druidical practice.

By 100 BC, at the very latest, the eyes of Rome were turned towards England as a source of wealth and of trade. What did they see? They saw a land made up of tribal kingdoms, large and small, that had kept to the old tribal boundaries. The Dumnonii inhabited the southwest peninsula, while the Durotriges were the people of Dorset; the Cantii of Kent comprised four separate kingdoms; the Iceni were of Norfolk. The Brigantes controlled the smaller tribes of the entire northern area from the Irish Sea to the North Sea; they occupied the Pennines and their tribal name means ‘the high ones’.

There were altogether fifteen large tribes in England, now coming under the control of leaders who were being described as kings. Suetonius named Cunobelinus, the leader of the Catuvellauni in the years preceding the main Roman invasion of Claudius, as ‘rex Britannorum’. From his capital at St Albans he controlled a great area north of the Thames – including Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire – and has since entered English mythology as the Cymbeline of Shakespeare’s play. His was a fully formed elite culture of warriors and priests, with its traditions going back to the early Bronze Age. One or two more recent tribal migrations have been identified. Members of a tribe from North Gaul, the Parisii, had settled in Yorkshire at some time in the fifth century BC and created an archaeologically distinctive community. More recent visitors arrived in Kent; a tribe known as the Belgae launched a small invasion in the first century BC and eventually settled in Hampshire, Essex and Kent. The Roman name for Winchester is Venta Belgarum, or the market of the Belgae.

The population of England in the late Iron Age has been estimated at approximately 2 million, rising to 3 million by the end of the Roman dominion. It was in every respect a wealthy and flourishing country. That is why the Romans chose to invade it. They wished to exploit the surplus of corn. There was in particular a spread of settlements in the southeast and central southern regions with extensive fields, shrines, cemeteries, industries, markets, towns and villages. In his Commentarii de Bello Gallico Julius Caesar remarked that ‘the population is very large, their homesteads thick on the ground and very much like those in Gaul, and the cattle numerous. As money they use either bronze or gold coins or iron bars with a fixed standard of weight.’ Coins, in particular, facilitated trade between tribes and bore the stamp of a powerful leader. The further north a traveller progressed, however, the fainter was the evidence for these material benefits.

That is because the southern tribes were engaged in extensive trade with Rome and Romanized Gaul long before Caesar’s invasion. They had, in a sense, already become Romanized with their predilection for certain foods and luxury goods. Yet, if you look beneath the surface, you find ancient tribal ways. There seems to have been consistent inter-tribal warfare, for example, with various leaders appealing to Rome for assistance. Large earthworks were created as boundaries. The warriors came to battle in chariots, their naked bodies covered with blue woad and pierced with tattoos. ‘They wear their hair long’, Caesar wrote, ‘and shave all their bodies with the exception of their heads and their upper lips.’ They had not quite left the domain of prehistory.

Nor have we yet. The legacy of prehistory is all around us. The clearances of prehistoric farmers helped to create the English landscape, and there are still places where the division of the land follows its prehistoric boundaries. In southern England the field systems of the Bronze Age and Iron Age inform and maintain the layout of modern farming. Modern roads follow the line of ancient paths and trackways. The boundaries of many parishes follow ancient patterns of settlement, and their irregular outlines enclose land sufficient to maintain a small farming community; ancient burials are often to be found on the boundaries of such a parish, and even the orientation of the church may obey old laws. Churches and monastic communities were placed close beside the sites of megalithic monuments, as well as sacred springs and early Bronze Age ritual spaces. The churchyard of the parish church of Rudston, in East Yorkshire, harbours the tallest Neolithic standing stone in England. The pilgrim routes of medieval Kent trace the same pattern as the prehistoric tracks to holy wells and shrines. We still live deep in the past.

Many villages, and towns, are built upon the sites of prehistoric originals. Leicester and Lincoln, Cambridge and Colchester, Rochester and Canterbury – to name only a few examples – were settled in the Iron Age or earlier. Village communities endure through recorded and unrecorded history. They may begin as simple family units, surrounded by ancestral spirits, before the natural process of extension. But we cannot dig down to the prehistoric origins of most English villages precisely because they are still in thriving occupation. Many Iron Age settlements became the market towns of the twenty-first century, where surplus produce has always been traded.

Certain customs, and festivals, belong to the prehistoric past. The celebrations of the Iron Age were incorporated into the Christian calendar, with the festival of the dead or ‘Samain’ becoming All Souls’ Day, and the midwinter solstice commemorated as Christmas. The Bronze Age practice of scattering white quartz stones upon freshly dug graves was still being observed in early twentiethcentury Wales. In nineteenth-century Scotland many inhabitants still lived in stone ‘beehive’ houses from the Neolithic period. The famous public house beside Hampstead Heath, Jack Straw’s Castle, stands on the site of an ancient earthwork. The historic and the prehistoric exist simultaneously. Catterick in North Yorkshire remains a military base, just as it was when the mead-drunk warriors of the Gododdin assailed it at the end of the sixth century AD. There is scarcely one spot in England that does not contain memorials of an ancient past.

2

The Roman way

Julius Caesar’s ‘invasion’ of 55 BC was more in the nature of a preliminary patrol; he said that he wanted to acquaint himself with ‘the lie of the land’. The Romans did not like the sea, but the pull of the island was irresistible. Britain was already a trading partner, and was rumoured to be rich in metal and wealthy with wheat. Some of its tribes had allied themselves with the northern Gauls whom Caesar was fighting. So there was every reason for a visit.

Several of the tribal leaders, informed in advance of his preparations, sent emissaries to treat with him; he in turn despatched an envoy who urged them to collaborate with their putative conqueror. Then Caesar set sail with two legions, each of approximately five thousand men, transported in eighty ships; when they eventually landed near Deal, the English were watching them. A skirmish took place on the beach, in which the Romans were victorious, and once more the tribal leaders sued for peace. Yet it was of short duration. A storm blew up, compounded by the force of a high tide at a time of full moon. The Romans were not aware of the phenomenon. All the ships were damaged.

The English tribes now broke the vow of peace, and a number of skirmishes took place in the immediate vicinity of Deal where Caesar was hard-pressed. His one thought now was of retreat across the water. He managed to repair the ships, and sought material aid from Gaul. Then, taking many hostages from the English, he sailed back vowing to return.

In the following year he kept his promise. On this occasion he was more determined and more resourceful. He brought with him 800 ships, 25,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry. It was a true invasion. In the face of this threat the warring tribes of the region were animated by a single purpose and chose Cassivellaunus, king of territory north of the Thames, as their war leader. The English fought the Romans just as they fought each other – warriors on foot, warriors on horseback and warriors in chariots, each attacking and withdrawing at opportune moments. Cassivellaunus had an army of 4,000 chariots; the charioteer would drive to the front line, and the warrior would jump out while the driver retired and waited for his return. Caesar reported that, by steady practice, ‘they attain such proficiency that even on a steep incline they are able to control the horses at full gallop, and to check and turn them in a moment’. They were a difficult and formidable force, motivated by sheer courage and ingenuity.

Yet the steady and disciplined army of the Romans withstood them. After a number of battles, the English retreated into the woods. Caesar followed them, and laid waste to Cassivellaunus’ stronghold. The chieftains of the various tribes sought peace, and in the end Cassivellaunus himself capitulated. Taking hostages and exacting tribute, Caesar returned to Rome.

There was to be no subsequent invasion for ninety years, but the advent and victory of the Roman forces had left their mark. Their success, ironically, can be seen in the gradual Romanization of southern Britain where tribal leaders began to import wine and luxury goods from the Roman Empire. When old ways of life have been defeated, they begin to lose their potency. The dwellings of the elite were beginning to change their shape, from round to rectilinear; this is profound evidence of cultural transition. The tribal leaders of the south, at least, wished to imitate the victors.

Some of them changed their allegiance altogether, and became the client kings of Rome. According to one Greek historian, Strabo, they procured the friendship of the first master of the Roman Empire, Augustus, ‘by sending embassies and paying court to him’. They exported grain and iron and slaves, while in return obtaining glass vessels, amber ware and other goods on which they were obliged to pay duty to the Roman state. No better way could be found of binding them to mainland European culture.

The Romans had become well aware of the material benefits to be found on the island. They simply needed the right moment to strike. This was given to them when the leaders of the tribe or kingdom of the Atrebates appealed to Rome for assistance against one of their hostile neighbours. It is clear that certain tribes welcomed the intervention of Rome. The new emperor, Claudius, needed an opportunity to prove himself in the field. He had small military reputation and, in the words of Cicero, ‘glory in war exceeds all other forms of success’. Glory was also to be found on English soil.

In AD 43, under the leadership of Aulus Plautius, four legions comprising some 20,000 men landed in two separate locations, thus confusing any English counter-attack. The tribes dispersed in front of them, but rallied for a major battle by the Medway; the fighting lasted for two days but the native forces under the leadership of Caratacus were eventually defeated. It was one of the most significant battles in English history, but its precise site is not known. Plautius now sent for Claudius to deliver the final and triumphant coup de grâce. Two months later the emperor arrived, together with twenty-eight elephants; he stormed the native capital of Camulodunum, and Caratacus fled westward. When Claudius returned to Rome, he was celebrated for having received the surrender of eleven kings. The conquest of the country had begun. It would take almost forty years before it was complete.

Camulodunum, or Colchester, became the first Roman capital; a great fort was built on the site of the native earthworks as a token of dominion. From here the Roman army spread outwards; they advanced in three directions, north and west and northwest. The leader of the western army, Vespasian, fought thirty-three battles in his drive towards Wales and the southwest peninsula. On the banks of a hill fort in Dorset, Maiden Castle, has been found the body of a man with a Roman bolt from a crossbow in his spine. By AD 49 Roman soldiers were supervising mining operations in Somerset.

The armies to the north and northwest proceeded slowly along existing roads, such as Ermine Street, attempting to pacify or subdue the various tribes in their path. They built forts in the conquered areas, so that each tribal zone was dominated by at least one military settlement. By AD 51 the queen of the great northern tribe of the Brigantes, Cartimandua, was receiving Roman wine in Roman vessels as well as building tiles. She had become a client queen. The historians of Rome describe a smooth progress of colonization, but the natives are unlikely to have surrendered without a fight; the process was one of steady advance beset by tribal rebellions and occasional army mutinies. Ambushes, raids and battles were commonplace. All the land south of the Fosse Way, running from Exeter to Lincoln, was under Roman control; the land north of it was more treacherous. Some tribes had divided allegiances; other tribes fought one against another.

A revolt in AD 47 by members of the tribe of Iceni, living deep within the pacified zone of East Anglia, was an indication of continuing uncertainty. The uprising, over the right to bear arms, was put down easily enough; but it was a harbinger for a much more serious rebellion that occurred thirteen years later. The name of Boudicca, or Boadicea, has now become part of English folklore. She was the wife of the king of the Iceni, Prasutagus, whose death prompted the agents of the Roman provincial government to attempt a wholesale appropriation of Iceni wealth. Boudicca was flogged, and her two daughters were raped. It was a signal instance of imperialist brutality.

So Boudicca rose and fought. She gathered into her confederacy other English tribes and launched an attack upon the Roman capital of Colchester. It was a particular object of offence because it harboured hundreds of military veterans who had taken control of adjacent land. The tribal army went southward, burning and pillaging any evidence of incipient Romanization. Villas were destroyed, their inhabitants put to the sword. When the warriors descended upon Colchester itself, they were ferocious. The city was destroyed by fire, the shops looted. The veterans took shelter in the central temple but after two days they were overwhelmed and hacked to pieces. A great statue of Claudius was beheaded and thrown into the river. The temple itself was destroyed. Boudicca then proceeded to move further south in the direction of London; Chelmsford and St Albans were sacked, and an entire legion massacred.

The Roman military governor, Suetonius Paulinus, was aware of the gravity of the threat posed to his regime. He had marched quickly back from Wales, where he had been campaigning, but his arrival in London did not save the city. He could not yield to the demands and supplications of the citizens; it was his duty to save the whole imperial province by a battle at a place and time of his own choosing. Many Londoners left the city in haste, going further south to find haven with pro-Roman tribes; those who remained were destroyed. Tacitus reports that 70,000 people were killed in the attack. The city itself was razed by fire, and there still exists beneath the City of London’s streets a red level of oxidized iron. Towards the end of the twentieth century forty-eight human skulls were found embedded in the track of the river Walbrook.

Boudicca now went after Suetonius Paulinus, on the evident assumption that the time was right for a final blow against the Roman occupation. The site of the ensuing battle is not certainly known; it may have been near the village of Mancetter in Warwickshire, or at Messing in Essex. Whatever the location, it was drenched in blood. Suetonius Paulinus had 10,000 troops, but they were ranged against a force of 100,000. The legionaries had a forest behind them, a plain before them; the native warriors ran against them, across the plain, but many of them were struck down by a hailstorm of javelins. The Romans then began to move forward with their shields and short swords. Their discipline held them steady, and slowly Boudicca’s men were turned. General carnage ensued, with 80,000 of her forces dead by the end of the battle. Some 400 Romans were killed. It was one of the most bloody massacres on English soil. Some say that Boudicca then took poison, so that she would avoid capture by the enemy; other sources report that she fell ill and died. Her monument now stands on Westminster Bridge as a token of the fight for native independence.

The Romans wished to extirpate another particular enemy. The Druids, the guardians of the old faith, had to be silenced before the full work of pacification could be completed. They had been harried and pursued as they had retreated steadily westward; their last stand took place on the island of Anglesey in AD 61. The Roman historian Tacitus reports that the troops, crossing from the mainland, were confronted by a ‘dense line of armed warriors along the foreshore, while women were rushing about between the ranks garbed in black like the Furies, holding up lighted torches’. Close to them stood the Druids, offering sacrifices, holding their arms in the air and screeching terrible curses. Yet their gods did not come to their rescue; they were all cut down and their sanctuaries put to the flame.

After the east and south had been pacified the next Roman governor of the province, Julius Agricola, turned his attention to the western and northern regions. In AD 78 he conquered Wales. In the following year he sent his legions to the north-east, through Corbridge, and to the northwest, through Carlisle. He divided the enemy, and built up a network of forts to supervise those tribes that had surrendered to him. These tribes were more hostile and aggressive than those of the south, and there were according to Tacitus ‘many battles, some not unbloody’. The ultimate aim was to create and control a northern frontier, and as a result troops were sent in to subjugate what is now southern Scotland.

The general shape of militarized England was also now created; permanent fortresses, each harbouring a legion, were built at York and Chester. Manchester and Newcastle were also built around the site of Roman forts. The original name for Manchester was Mamucio, after the Latin word for a hill shaped like a breast; this was then misread as Mancunio, giving its name to the modern inhabitants of the city. A series of virtually straight roads were constructed, linking fort to fort. Garrison towns, inhabited by retired legionaries, were created at Lincoln and at Gloucester. The imposing colonial presence was emphasized by a network of encampments, forts, watchtowers and defensive walls. Posting stations were set up on the principal roads, and these staging posts eventually became villages. So the country was organized by military power into a landscape of farmsteads and villas, fields and settlements, drove-ways and enclosures. It was not unlike the vista of the Iron Age; yet it was more coherent.

This was not necessarily a benign process. One tribal chief is reported by Tacitus to have complained that ‘our goods and money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors’. The military zone, including Wales and the north of England, required a standing force of 125,000 men. It would be wrong to think of the legionnaires as Romans; in the first century of occupation 40,000 soldiers were recruited from Gaul, Spain and Germany. The English also joined the army of occupation. The troops mixed and mingled with the indigenous population so that, within two or three generations, it had indeed become a native army.

One other pertinent development took place. A great wall, dividing Romanized England from the tribes of Scotland, was built on the orders of the emperor Hadrian. Twenty years later another wall was constructed, effectively separating south from north Scotland. The Romans had no intention of venturing into the Highlands, just as they dropped any plans for the invasion of Ireland. The Roman Empire had ceased to expand, and it became necessary to protect its borders so that it might enjoy the pleasures of peace. The territory just south of the wall was intensively cultivated. A great agricultural regime was established on the Cumbrian Plain. England was no longer a province easily shaken by tribal rebellion. It became prosperous once again, as rich and as productive as it had been during the Iron Age.

The process of Romanization was gradual and local. The conditions of the Iron Age still prevailed in the countryside, where the people largely remained faithful to old customs and habitual practice. The evidence of change comes from the towns, and from the administrative elite of English leaders who worked in them. These were the men who had welcomed, or at least exploited, the ascendancy of the Roman officials in their country. With the advice of these officials they began to erect temples, public squares and public buildings; they learned the Latin language, and took to wearing togas as an indication of their new identities. They put down their weapons and attended more to the abacus. The children of the leading English families were educated in the ‘civilized arts’ and some were sent to Rome. Bathing establishments and assembly rooms were built and, according to Tacitus, the natives began to attend ‘smart dinner parties’. There were many more plates, dishes, drinking vessels and bowls than in the Iron Age. Amphorae or storage vessels were imported; they contained wine and olive oil, olives and fish sauce. Tacitus went on to write, cuttingly enough, that ‘they called it civilization when in fact it was part of their servitude’.

The old hierarchies were still in existence, but now they were wearing Roman brooches and rings. The landowner had tenants, known as coloni, who were tied to the land. At the top of the scale were the tribal leaders who owned extensive territory and property; at the bottom was the large community of slaves. The word for slave, servus, eventually became serf. So the old bonds were perpetuated through the centuries. The social patterns of the Bronze Age and Iron Age were strengthened and deepened by the rule of a strong central power.

As part of the organization of the country, the Romans converted the old tribal regions into government districts or civitates. Each district had its own central town which, in many cases, was the old tribal capital or oppidum redressed in stone rather than in wood. A forum ‘complex’ of civic buildings represented the centre where all the affairs of the town were administered. The colonial power imposed its own forms of architecture, with monumental arches, sculptures, altars and bathhouses bringing order to what were once irregular settlements. Many of these public buildings were part of a state initiative that continued well into the second century AD. The forum and the basilica, the temple and the amphitheatre, rose above closely packed shops, houses and workshops still generally built out of timber and clay and with floors of earth. Many of the houses were in fact single-room lodgings; other buildings consisted of a shop at the front, a workshop behind it, and a room for accommodation at the back. The area of settlement was pitted with wells and hearths. Beyond the streets lay the cemeteries, the kilns, the quarries and the enclosures for livestock.

The government of the towns was controlled by a council or curia of the larger landowners, with a complement of clerks and other officials. All the elements of social differentiation, and specialization, are to be found here as kinship and tribal ties slowly gave way to group relations on an economic basis. The larger towns were independent and self-governing, with the magistrates and councillors taking care of such matters as drainage, sanitation and the repaving of roads. The most common ‘find’ for archaeologists of Roman England is the writing tablet.

Villas in the Roman style were soon rising in the countryside. The earliest of them, such as that discovered at Fishbourne in Sussex, were of very high status and were presumably designed for the convenience of Romanized tribal leaders or great officials of the empire. The fashion for luxury spread to the other leaders of the indigenous population, and more modest villas were built in the southeast; these would have been appropriate for a prosperous landowner or the chief family of an agricultural community. Villas were essentially farming establishments that enjoyed surplus wealth to be lavished upon display and decoration; they copied the Roman style, with walls of stone and costly mosaics. They might have had roofs of ceramic tiles, quite different from the thatch and wattle of the English roundhouse. Mosaics, underfloor heating and window glass, all carried the stamp of imperial civilization. Even the smaller houses might be plastered and decorated with wall-paintings; plain or painted plaster was also used as external protection from the elements. But it would be unwise to overestimate their presence in the English landscape. Hill forts were also to be found, for example, especially for the leading families of England who had remained in closer contact with their social and cultural traditions.

An Iron Age farm was still in use at the beginning of the second century AD at Keston in Kent. By the middle of that century a new wooden farmhouse had been erected, decorated with painted walls. At the beginning of the third century a house of stone rose upon the site, complete with a bathhouse in the Roman style. Wooden barns occupied part of the farmyard, and one of them was later rebuilt in stone. Ovens were in use for malting or corn-drying, and it is likely that the owner or owners of the villa also employed potters, blacksmiths and workers in bronze. An early Roman cremation cemetery has also been uncovered. A circular mausoleum was created at a later date. So by degrees a small Romanized community was created.

In the farming of the soil itself, the practices of the Bronze and Iron Ages were still maintained. In certain regions, such as the southwest, native habits persisted without change of any kind. Only in the southeast is there evidence of altering taste, albeit confined to the leaders of society. The Romans brought in cherries, mulberries and figs, previously unknown. Turnips, cabbages and peas first appeared under the aegis of Roman rule. One sticking point remained; the natives even of the Romanized areas still preferred beef to pork.

It can be said with some certainty that the majority of the people were still living in the Iron Age, and would continue to do so for several hundreds of years. One agricultural innovation, however, occurred as a direct result of imperial decree. The fenlands of East Anglia were drained, and the reclaimed soil made productive with hundreds of villages and farms planted in a pre-ordained manner. The whole area became an imperial estate, taxed for the benefit of the central government. The prosperous Salisbury Plain became another imperial estate.

Taxation, including a land tax and a poll tax, was the key of Roman exploitation. As the costs of maintaining the army, in the face of northern invaders, became ever higher so the burden of taxation increased. The Roman occupation hastened the process by which a tribal economy gave way to a monetary economy. The tribal coinage, more significantly, was replaced by imperial coinage. The Romans of course also levied taxes on the fruits of trade. Industrial centres, such as the potteries at the village of Castor in Cambridgeshire, altered parts of the landscape. Ironworks were established in all areas of the country from the coast of Kent to the banks of the Wye. Lead mines were in continuous use throughout the Roman period. Under the twin stimuli of demand and innovation, English production was never more buoyant. Coal was used for working iron and heating the bathhouses; it was also the fuel for the sacred fire at Minerva’s temple in Bath.

Two native woollen products were in demand by the subjects of the empire; one was known as the birrus Britannicus, a type of waterproof cloak and hood. The other, the tapete Britannicum, was a woollen rug. Other forms of merchandise included bears and bulldogs for the Roman arena. The men wore jackets of cattle hide and leather breeches. It was said that Caesar had invaded England so that he could get his hands on some excellent oysters.

In the early third century the country was divided into two provinces, Britannia Superior with London as its capital and Britannia Inferior with York as its centre. ‘Superior’ and ‘Inferior’ were geographical, not qualitative, terms. The two areas were later subdivided into four and then five provinces, emphasizing the fact that the country was being closely administered and exploited.

As the country became a settled part of the empire, its role changed. The armies of occupation became armies of defence; they became naturalized, with a selfconscious local or regional identity. Over one-tenth of the entire imperial army was stationed in the colony, which meant that its forces had extraordinary power over events in distant Rome. Mutinies, and uprisings, were not uncommon. In AD 268, one governor of England, Carausius, proclaimed himself emperor. He took his forces to the continent and, in his absence, the various towns and cities of the country took measures to defend themselves against possible reprisals from Rome. One hundred years later another Roman commander seized the province and declared it to be independent. He was disabused of this notion in a battle somewhere in central England, but it is a measure of the significance of the country in imperial calculations.

England was worth a fight. Its ports, its metals, its taxes, helped to sustain the vast engine of Roman commerce. Yet it remained wealthy and productive largely because of its agriculture. In AD 359 the emperor, Julian, organized a fleet of 600 ships to transport corn from England to the war zones of the Rhine. The country had become one of the bread baskets of Europe, and by the fourth century it had never been more prosperous. The villas of the grandees became larger and more luxurious, and there can be no doubt that the social stratification of the country grew ever more pronounced under the auspices of imperial rule. The Roman English controlled the Iron Age English.

The northern borders were always a source of conflict, with the weight of the Scots and the Picts pressing against them, but the general frontiers of the province soon came into jeopardy. There is a curious alignment of forts in southern England known generally as the ‘Saxon Shore’, but their purpose is not altogether clear. Were they a means of defending the coast against Saxon invaders from the northwest of Europe, or were they perhaps designed to harbour Saxon fighters and traders? They may thus have been designed to protect the seaways between England and Europe from pirates and other marauders.

Yet, as with so many aspects of England under imperial control, the evidence is fragmentary and inconclusive; we rely on chance inscriptions, the indications of archaeology and the occasional commentaries of Roman historians. The Roman governance of England lasted for 350 years – the same span of time that separates the contemporary reader from the Great Fire of London – and yet it is the least-known phase in the country’s history.

In particular we cannot see the people – the Romanized leaders in their fashionable and luxurious villas, the smaller landowners in farmsteads built of stone or timber, the townsmen inhabiting one-or two-room houses along narrow and squalid lanes, the civil servants working in offices while wearing their official togas and military belts, the landless labourers living in dormitories set well away from the villas, the whole general tide and swell of population unmoved by purges and coups and counter-purges that are evident in the pages of Roman histories.

There is much unknown, also, about the advance of Christianity. England had been introduced to that faith in the second century, but it was perforce a minority religion. The Roman English had been reconciled to the Roman gods, while the Iron Age English no doubt still venerated the ancient deities of hill and forest. Christianity was not an indigenous faith. Nevertheless, Christian vessels and plaques from the third century have been found in Huntingdonshire, close to the river Nene, and are clear evidence of a local shrine; they are in fact the earliest examples of such vessels from the whole of the empire. A Christian cemetery, of approximately the same date, has been uncovered at Poundbury in Dorset. Christianity had penetrated as far north as Carlisle by the fourth century.

Christianity only became the sacerdotal face of the empire after Constantine the Great’s conversion in AD 312; Constantine had in fact been acclaimed and appointed emperor at York in AD 306 and in subsequent years seems to have considered England to be one of the spiritual centres of his rule. York itself was refashioned in honour of his elevation, and he made three further visits to the province. He styled himself on Britannicus Maximus, and it seems likely that London itself was for a while renamed Augusta in his honour. So the Christianity of England was an important element of its later development.

It was a monotheistic faith in a period when the emperor himself aspired to single rule, and it assumed a uniform set of values and beliefs that could be transmitted across the empire. It helped to support the legislative and bureaucratic forces of the centre. Its adherents were, unsurprisingly, drawn from the governing class. There can be no doubt that in England, for example, the Romanized population were quick to embrace the delights of an institutionalized faith. That is why Christianity became associated with the culture of the villas. It was also a religion of the administrative elite in the towns and cities, where a bishop was charged with the care of his urban flock.

In AD 314 three English bishops, together with a priest and a deacon, were attending an ecclesiastical council at Arles in southern France. The bishops came from York, London and Lincoln; the deacon and priest arrived from Cirencester. Evidence for what may be a Christian cathedral, complete with marble and painted walls, has been found at excavations near Tower Hill. A holy well was located in the centre of the nave. This may have been the diocesan centre for Bishop Restitutus of London. There is precious little evidence for other churches of the third and fourth centuries (although one has been found at Silchester), but there is good reason for this. The earliest churches lie concealed beneath more recent ones in the long history of sacred spaces. We would find the churches of early English Christianity only if we could uproot the cathedrals and churches of the modern world.

No empire can last forever; no state can remain steady and unscathed. The frontiers of the Roman polity were steadily being threatened and, in many places, overwhelmed. The pressure of the northern tribes grew ever more insidious. The Franks had entered northern Gaul. The Visigoths were to settle in Aquitania. The threat to England was posed by the Picts and the Scots in the north, together with their tribal allies among the Franks and the Saxons. In AD 367 a force overcame Hadrian’s Wall, and then in dispersed bands moved southward to ravage the country; the commander of the forts of the Saxon Shore was murdered and the provincial leader known as Dux Britanniarum was captured. It was a notable defeat for the English. Roman intervention and rebuilding, including the refortification of key posts, helped to maintain prosperity and peace for forty years; but then the northern tribes came back.

A series of bids for imperial power by various pretenders meant that, at the beginning of the fifth century, England was effectively stripped of its military forces. They had gone off in search of glory. Civil war between the various pretenders to the imperial throne weakened the self-discipline and orderliness that had always been the sign of Roman rule. The administrative machinery was beginning to break apart. In 408 the northern tribes were emboldened once more to attack, and the Roman English had no choice but to defend themselves. A contemporary historian, Zosimus, records that they ‘took up arms and, braving danger for their own independence, freed the cities from the barbarians threatening them’. He also reports that they then expelled their Roman governors and established their own administrations.

Various levels of intrigue are embedded in this simple narrative. There would have been some Roman English who wished to retain the Roman administration from which they derived great benefits; there would have been others who wished to be rid of the burden of taxation and coercion associated with the central government. Two years later, in 410, one section of the English appealed to the emperor for arms and men; it is not clear whether they were needed against an external army of Saxons, or against an internal English enemy. In any case the emperor, Honorius, replied that the English must now fend for themselves. This was effectively the end of Roman England.

Another historian, Procopius of Caesarea, further reveals that after the disappearance of the Roman officials the various cities and regions were taken over by ‘tyrants’ or ‘usurpers’. They may have seemed like usurpers from Rome, but in actual fact they are likely to be the familiar English leaders descended from tribal chiefs or large landowning families. As the hand of Rome was lifted the English tribes and polities reacted in several significant ways. The Romanized English in the towns and cities, with the dependent estates all around them, are likely to have formed themselves into self-governing administrative units; the leaders of these small states were still known as ‘magistrates’. In the civil zone of the country – in the east and southeast – there rose small kingdoms that were defended by mercenaries. The kingdoms of eastern England, for example, were obliged to use Germanic soldiers; these troops would pose problems in subsequent years. The tribes in the more distant regions of the country, never properly Romanized, reverted to pre-Roman forms of social organization. The remaining detachments of the armies of the north were grouped under a commander who became their chieftain. One of the first Roman leaders of the north, Coelius or Coel Hen, became in English folk rhyme ‘Old King Cole’.

So the pattern of English life is localized and various in this period after the withdrawal of the Roman imperium. Signs of a more general change, however, can be found. The taxation system of Rome was dismantled, and the countryside was now controlled by an aristocracy of landowners. With the abandonment of taxation, the circulation of coinage diminished rapidly. By 410 the large centres of pottery manufacture had gone out of business; the demand no longer existed. Brick-making did not return to England until the fifteenth century. Villas were neglected or abandoned, becoming unused sites for later settlers.

The days of public and monumental display in the cities had gone. But this does not necessarily mean that the cities decayed or were in decline; they had simply changed their function. They remained centres of administration for the immediate area, and housed the local bishop and the local leader, but they no longer wanted or needed the imperial facades of the third century. The basilica at Silchester, for example, was converted into a centre for metalworking. The urban population remained, and there is evidence of rebuilding at York and Gloucester in the fifth century. A new water supply, with timber pipes, was introduced to Verulamium in the latter half of that century. So a civic organization was still in operation. The Roman city of Wroxeter has been unearthed from the fields of Shropshire. It did not disappear after the Romans had left. The basilica was razed, and in its place a large wooden hall was erected; this hall became the centre for a complex of timber buildings based on Roman models. A prosperous and busy life continued well into the medieval period.

Archaeologists have discovered, from the strata of the fifth century, a deposit spread over many towns and cities; they have named it ‘dark earth’. This was once thought to be evidence of abandonment and desolation. Now it is more correctly interpreted as the residue of wattle-and-daub dwellings. The towns and cities of the fifth century may have been heavily populated, maintaining a commercial life that never left them.

Self-sufficiency was established upon barter and local trading. There is evidence of hand-made pottery, and quantities of raw clay that might have been used for the building of walls. The lives of the farmers and labourers of the country were changed not at all by the dislocation of leaders.

The Confession of St Patrick, who was taken by Saxon slavers at the end of the fourth century, shows that the affluent life of the villa owner continued into the early decades of the fifth century. On Patrick’s return to England, six years after his capture, his father urged him to enter public service; local rhetoricians were employed, for example, to guide the populace. Some kind of working polity was based upon a Roman original. When Bishop Germanus came to England from Gaul in 429 he was greeted by the leading men of Verulamium in a gesture of civic unity. These are likely to have been the members of the diocesan or provincial council who had taken over the administration of the city. In the life of Germanus they are reported to have been ‘conspicuous for their wealth, fashionable in their dress, and surrounded by an adoring multitude of people’. This was not a country denuded of its prestige or affluence.

Germanus had come in part to assist the English in their fight against the Picts and Saxons, adding weight to the suggestion that there was some sudden or overwhelming Saxon ‘invasion’. But in fact the Saxons were already here. They had been in England from the third century. They were already part of the fabric of English life. The urban and tribal elites needed Saxon warriors to defend their property; many of these soldiers married native women, and settled down with their families. Germanic forces remained among the Roman army in the north. Saxon traders lived in the towns and cities. Saxon workers cultivated the lands of Kent in exchange for occasional military service.

Here we must confront questions of nomenclature. By common consent the native English, from the Iron Age forwards, have been called ‘Britons’. But the term is really only pertinent to the Atlantic English of the western coasts; these are the Britons who migrated to Gaul and established the province of Brittany. They are the people who spoke Celtic and Gaelic. The Britons were also strong in the north, as a permanent reminder of old tribal groupings. In the centre, south and east of the country were native English, too, but they inhabited the regions where Saxon settlers came to dominate, sometimes by peaceful and sometimes by violent means. It was from one band of these settlers, the Angles, that the name of England itself first emerged. ‘Engla land’ was the Viking description. It is characteristic of a country that, from the first century to the thirteenth century, was subject to almost continual foreign occupation. The ‘empire race’ was once a colonized and exploited people.

3

Climate change

The climate of England has been characterized as generally damp and relatively sunless but, as every native knows, the weather is as various as the land. In the southeast the summers are warm and the winters are cold, while in the northwest the winters are mild and the summers are cool. In the northwest four and a half hours of sunshine light up an average July day, while on the south coast six and a half hours can be anticipated; the western seaboard attracts 40 per cent more rainfall than the eastern. The predominant wind of autumn and of winter is from the southwest; in the spring it is the east. This was the weather that created a land of damp forests of oak and ash, of marshes and heath wrapped in mist. In the north and the west lay the moors and the mountains, where the soil was thin. This was the land of pasture rather than of crops, and the local farmers grew only as much corn as they needed for themselves. The south and east were the lowlands, with gradual undulations in the rich earth; this was ground as fit for corn as for cattle. It was the territory of ‘mixed farming’.

In the history of England these patterns of climate are of the utmost importance; if there is a drop in temperature of two degrees, as in the period from 500 to 300 BC, the prospect of adequate harvests in the north is noticeably curtailed. A difference of one degree made a failure of the harvest seven times more likely. In this period, then, we see the abandonment of upland farms and settlements. The southern land was warmer, and more stable; it was the home of the plentiful harvest, and the general dampness meant that crops could even be grown on lighter soils where sand and chalk prevailed. It is a general truth, therefore, that in the southeast the land was devoted to wheat whereas in the north it was given over to oats. But important regional variations were still found. Oxfordshire and north-east Suffolk grew wheat, whereas Norfolk grew more rye. Oats were the main crop in Lancashire, while rye was dominant in Yorkshire. Wheat and barley shared the ascendancy in Wiltshire whereas, in the rainier country west of that shire, barley predominated.

The people of the south were wealthier if not healthier than their counterparts in the north. So the climate is active in human history. It may also be that the drier east creates human communities different from those of the rainier west; marked contrasts of social systems in the first millennium BC are in fact evident, with small centres of lordly power in the west and more scattered settlements in the east. The isolated farmhouse and the small hamlet were characteristic of the north and west; the village and the manorial system of common cultivation were more usual in the south and east.

At the time of the Roman occupation the weather was warmer than at any period in subsequent history, but this was succeeded by colder and wetter conditions by the end of the fourth century. For ten years, beginning in AD 536, there was a very low level of sunlight; this would have been a time of dearth and famine, hitherto unrecorded. It might also be noted that Alfred was credited with the invention of a clock that allowed him to tell the time when the prevailing fogs obscured the sun.

The climate of 1009 and 1010 was recorded by a Benedictine monk, Byrhtferth, who dwelled in East Anglia; the winter lasted from 7 November to 6 February, being cold and moist; the spring from 7 February to 8 May was moist and hot; summer from 9 May to 6 August was hot and dry; autumn from 7 August to 6 November was dry and cold. He was only one of the clerics who kept a detailed record of the conditions of the weather.

The eleventh and twelve centuries were in fact warmer than those immediately preceding them, but a deterioration of climate took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the annals of these later centuries also mention the increasing incidence of floods and droughts, suggesting greater instability. Hard frosts lasted into spring, and violent gales brought down the trees of the forests. The Thames froze in the winter of 1309–10, and the years 1315 and 1316 were marked by endless rain. The harvests failed, and the dead were buried in common graves. It was a time of epidemic disease. Crime rates rose proportionately.

The increase of rainfall, in the fourteenth century, is marked by the construction of drainage ditches and house platforms; church floors were raised, and the lower halves of some villages were deserted. The carpenter in Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ reveals an obsessive fear of another Great Flood covering the earth. The extraordinary wind of 14 January 1362 was widely believed to be a harbinger of the Day of Judgment. In the medieval period the weather is the lord of all. Outer weather creates inner weather. It would be possible to write the history of England as the history of the English climate.

4

Spear points

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, composed long after the events related, reports that in 449 ‘Hengist and Horsa, invited by Wyrtgeorn’ arrived in England; they had come to help the English against invaders, but they stayed only to fight against their hosts. Hengist and Horsa mean respectively ‘horse’ and ‘mare’. Wyrtgeorn, or Vortigern, is simply the term for an overlord or over-king. In some of the Welsh annals he is also known as Vortigern ‘of the repulsive mouth’. So, as always, there are elements of mythology embedded within the history. The dates are also wrong.

The evidence suggests that in 430 Vortigern, the leader of the confederacy of small kingdoms into which much of the country had divided, called in Saxon mercenaries to defend England against the Picts from Scotland and various marauding bands from Ireland. This was an old and familiar strategy, used by the Romanized English at various points in their history.

The Irish landed on the west coast, within easy reach of the Cotswolds; the central part of Vortigern’s kingdom lay in that hilly region, which may account for his leading role in the struggle. It is reported that the Picts had landed in Norfolk. The Pictish sailors painted their ships, and their bodies, the colour of the waves so that they could less easily be seen. So the decision to call in the Saxons was born out of fear and urgency. According to historical legend they came in three ships, holding at best only a few hundred men. There are likely to have been more ships but, in any case, these mercenaries were known for their ferocity as well as for their valour. The bands of warriors, under a war chieftain, worshipped the sun and the moon. They adored Woden, god of war, and Thor, god of thunder. They practised human sacrifice. They drank from the skulls of their enemies. The fronts of their heads were shaved, the hair grown long at the back, so that their faces might seem larger in battle. ‘The Saxon’, a Roman chronicler of the fifth century wrote, ‘surpasses all others in brutality. He attacks unforeseen, and when foreseen he slips away. If he pursues, he captures; if he flees, he escapes.’

The most significant elements of the Saxon force were stationed in Kent, and were given the island of Thanet in the Thames estuary. Other bands of soldiers were placed in Norfolk, and on the coast of Lincolnshire. The Icknield Way was guarded. London and the Thames estuary were defended. The remains of the Romanized armies, still in the north, were stationed in a strongly fortified York. Then, on the invitation of Vortigern, more Saxon mercenaries were brought to England. The show of strength seems to have been enough. The Picts abandoned their plans for the invasion. The Irish were in turn checked by the tribal armies of the west and the west midlands; the kingdom of the Cornovii, with its capital at Wroxeter, was instrumental in that repulse to the invaders.

Yet now a more insidious threat to Vortigern’s leadership emerged. His allies, alarmed at the cost of the Saxon presence, could not or would not pay them. They also refused to yield land in exchange for payment. After the immediate threat had passed, they declined to subsidize their defenders. According to the Kentish chronicles they declared that ‘we cannot feed and clothe you, because your numbers have grown. Leave us. We no longer need your assistance.’

The reaction of the mercenaries was immediate and strong. Their insurgency began in East Anglia, and then spread down to the Thames Valley. They took over many of the towns and countryside areas in which they had been stationed. They appropriated large estates, and enslaved many of the native English. They had seen at first hand the prosperity of the land and had acquired a taste for it. Thanet itself, as a granary, was a golden prize. The Saxon federates then sent out a call to their compatriots. Come and settle here. Together we can master the natives.

So the Germanic migrants kept on coming. Among them were four predominant tribes – the Angles from Schleswig, the Saxons from the territories around the river Elbe, the Frisians from the northern coast of the Netherlands, and the Jutes from the coast of Denmark. There were no such people as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ until the chroniclers invented them in the sixth century. The routes of settlement were already established by the river system. The settlers pushed along the Thames, the Trent and the Humber.

The Jutes settled in Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight; the New Forest was once Jutish land. The Saxons were established in the Upper Thames valley. The Frisians were scattered over the southeast, with an important influence in London. The Angles settled in eastern and north-eastern England; by the early sixth century the people of east Yorkshire were wearing Anglian clothes. These were small tribes, small communities under a leader or leading family. Some were resisted; some were welcomed. Others were simply accepted by a working population who had no real love for their earlier native masters. All were accommodated and, according to the best genetic evidence, eventually made up 5 per cent of the population we now call English; in the eastern regions it may have reached approximately 10 per cent, but there is no hint of deliberate genocide and replacement of the native population.

They came because they were being pushed by other tribes in the great westward migrations of that era, but they also came because their ancestral lands were in peril from the rising sea. This was the period in which the northern European coastline was sinking, as the archaeological evidence from Germany and the Netherlands testifies; there was urgent need to find land elsewhere.

The revolt of the Saxon federates was a decisive blow to the prestige and authority of Vortigern. He was overthrown by another Romanized English leader, Ambrosius Aurelianus, who led a counter-attack upon the Saxons and for ten years engaged in a series of strenuous battles. In 490 the English won a great victory at a place known to posterity as Mons Badonicus, believed to be near modern Bath. The leader of the English forces on that occasion is not recorded, but in this period the name of Arthur emerges as over-king. He is a shadow in the historical record, known only as dux bellorum or ‘leader of warfare’. He is said to have participated in twelve battles against the Saxons, but the places cannot now be identified. In the pages of the medieval romances he is a great king with a shining court at Camelot, otherwise known as Winchester; in truth he may have been a military commander whose headquarters were within the hill fort of Cadbury. 18 acres (7.2 hectares) of that hill fort were enclosed in the period of Arthur’s supposed lifetime.

The English had survived but, as part of the spoils of war, the Saxons retained their control over Norfolk, East Kent and East Sussex. There was a division in the country, perhaps marked by the construction of the Wansdyke designed to keep the Germanic people from crossing into central southern England. On one side of that barrier were small English kingdoms; on the other, Germanic tribes with their warrior leaders. What had previously been some of the most Romanized parts of the country had become the home of ‘barbarians’. The town and villa life of these regions was, therefore, in abeyance. An English chronicler of the early sixth century, Gildas, laments that ‘the cities of our country are still not inhabited as they were; even today they are squalid deserted ruins’. This was the process of the Saxon ‘invasion’.

Yet some towns and cities were still in active use, as markets and places of authority. It is well known that the Saxons set up their own trading area outside the walls of London, in the district now known as Aldwych, but the old city was still a place of royal residences and public ceremonial. In the countryside, there is even greater evidence for continuity of settlement. It is not to be expected that any change in agricultural practice took place. The same field systems were laid out by the Germanic settlers; the new arrivals respected the old boundaries and in Durham, for example, Germanic structures were set within a pattern of small fields and drystone walls created in the prehistoric past. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Germanic settlers formed groups that honoured the boundaries of the old tribal kingdoms. They respected the lie of the land. The sacred sites of the Saxons, at a slightly later date, follow the alignment of Neolithic monuments. All fell into the embrace of the past.

The Germanic settlers were kept within their boundaries by the English for two or three generations. It should not be forgotten that, in this period, the average life expectancy was thirty-five years. It was a country of young men and women, with all the energy and thoughtlessness of the young. The leaders of the country were brash, vibrant and energetic.

By the middle of the sixth century the Germanic people wished to move further west, and to exploit the productive lands that had previously been beyond their grasp. There are many reasons for this sudden efflorescence of activity, but one of the most convincing lies in the onset of deadly plague in the 540s. Bubonic, and perhaps pneumonic, plague spread from Egypt all over the previously Romanized world. It seems that it struck down the native English rather than the settlers, with a force and scope that rival the great plagues of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some actuarial experts suggest that a population of 3 or 4 million now dropped to 1 million. The land was left vacant, and fewer men were available to defend it. So the Angles, and the Saxons, moved westward. Anglo-Saxon civilization was created by a pandemic.

One of the leaders of the Saxons, Ceawlin, had reached as far as Cirencester, Gloucester and Bath by 577; seven years later his forces had penetrated the midlands. The native kings were thereby deposed. This was the pattern throughout the country. The pressure was growing on the Durotriges of Somerset and Dorset and as a result there was an exodus of native people to Armorica, on the Atlantic coast of northwestern France, where their leaders took control of large tracts of land. They may have been welcomed. They were perhaps part of the same tribe. So the region of Brittany emerged. The Bretons in fact retained their old tribal allegiances, and never really thought of themselves as part of the French state. Some of them came back. A Breton contingent was among the forces of William the Conqueror, which chose to settle in southwest England. They had come home at last.

In the end the natives would be so mixed and mingled with the new settlers that the term Saxon or Angle ceased to have any meaning. All would become English. Yet it was a slow process. Much of western England was still under the rule of native kings 200 years after the first Saxons arrived; the native kingdom of Elmet, now known as the West Riding of Yorkshire, survived until the early seventh century and the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ only came to an end with the capture of Gwynedd by Edward I in 1282. Celtic speakers were to be found in Cornwall at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the language did not wholly die until the eighteenth century.

The settlements of the Germanic tribes took the form of small folk territories, made up of groups of warriors and marked off by river boundaries. So the followers of Haesta created Hastings and the followers of Gilla established Ealing. The people of the Peak district, the people of the Chilterns, and the people of the Wrekin, were all given distinct topographical names. Jarrow means ‘among the Jyrwe’, a small tribe found in the fen district as well as in Northumberland. The immense number of small tribes was gradually aligned for the purposes of defence or warfare. Over-kings emerged as the leaders and protectors of tribal chiefs, and by 600 the recognizable kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England begin to enter recorded history. The kingdom of the East Angles was formed together with those of the East Saxons and the Mercians.

These were societies of rank, based upon a structure of burdens and obligations imposed by the warlords and their entourage. There were slaves, there were landless workers, there were ceorls or free heads of households, and there were thegns or noblemen, with all possible divisions and distinctions within each rank. The financial penalties for murder, for example, were graded according to the ‘worth’ of the victim. It was a harsh and divisive society, only made possible by the continuous exploitation of the unfree. In that respect, it may not have differed very much from any previous English polity. There never was any Rousseau-esque state of equality in nature. There always was a system of lordship and vassalage.

And what of the native English? They endured the change of leadership. Most of them worked the soil, as before, and paid tax or tribute to the local lord. The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience. The artisans and merchants were still here. It was in the interest of the Angles and the Saxons to utilize what remained of Romanized English civilization. They did not exterminate the native population because they needed it. They had no aversion to the practices of the open field and could quickly accustom themselves to working the land according to the traditional methods of the English.

In the first years, however, there may have been a form of separation or apartheid between settlers and natives. The Germanic walh means Celtic speaker or Latin speaker; it also came to mean a serf or a slave. The name of Wales derives from this. So we have Cornwall, and places known as Walton, Walsall and Walcot. We can also deduce the presence of native English in what is now north-east London in Walthamstow and elsewhere. The reader will be able to identify many other examples. The native population survived.

Christianity was not driven out of England by the invaders. Early churches have been found in London, embedded within Roman edifices, as well as in York, Leicester and Exeter. Churches were located in other towns, and of course in western England – beyond the reach of the Germanic tribes – the religion flourished with the appearance of small monastic communities. One was situated on top of Glastonbury Tor.

The eventual shape of England itself was becoming clear as the Germanic tribes continued their expansion. In the north the settlers were first confined to East and South Yorkshire; these areas may already have harboured Germanic troops, and may therefore have welcomed their arrival. They formed the kingdom of Deira, roughly comprising what is now Yorkshire from the Humber to the Tees. An Anglian community was established at Bamburgh, where the castle still stands. A great Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery is to be found by the village of Sancton, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and as late as the nineteenth century the villagers used pots and urns taken from the site. The native tribes, the Parisii and the Brigantes, tried to contain these powerful Germanic settlers, but they proved unsuccessful.

Under the leadership of their king, Aethelfrith, according to the history of the Venerable Bede, the settlers conquered many territories and many peoples by the end of the sixth century; they ‘either drove out their inhabitants and planted them afresh with their own people, or subdued them and made them tributary’. That was the familiar process of colonization. Aethelfrith became king of both Deira and Bernicia, the kingdom to the north of Deira that stretched from Durham to Edinburgh and from Derwentwater to Ayrshire. He can thus be truly considered the first king of Northumberland.

The native tribes and kingdoms were divided among themselves, and could not arrest the momentum of the invaders. The old kingdoms – Rheged (northwestern England), Strathclyde (southwestern Scotland), Gododdin (north-eastern England and south-eastern Scotland) – fell. The warbands slowly moved northward and westward. The Germanic settlers may have been few in number, but they eventually controlled a huge territory of moorland and hill with scattered farmsteads and cottages. Yet the old traditions survived in the fastness; that is why Yorkshire and Northumberland retained much of their ancient organization and custom.

Out of these battles between invaders and native tribes emerged the pure poetry of war. Aneirin’s poem Gododdin has made him the Homer of the north. Written in the language of the Britons, it records the defiance of the natives in stern cadences:

Swift horses and stained armour with shields,

Spear shafts raised and spear points honed,

Sparkling chain mail and radiant swords.

It records a world of warriors, wearing beads and collars of amber, and of councils of war; it is a world of battles, with banners held high by the opposing forces; of crows and ravens waiting for the slaughter, climbing like clouds in the sky; of feasting with cups of mead and sweet wine; of hounds and hawks; of drinking horns passed round in candlelight; of a landscape of wolves and seaeagles; of a lord, decked with jewels, sitting at the head of a table. It is a poetry of assonance and internal rhyme. It is avowedly and unrepentantly aristocratic. It is not as fearful or as mournful as Anglo-Saxon poetry, with the latter’s longing for a haven and the safety of the hall against the forces of a wild world.

On the death of Aethelfrith his rival, Edwin, became the king of Northumberland. Towards the end of his reign he was powerful enough to conquer the Isle of Man, to invade North Wales and to occupy Anglesey. He aspired to over-kingship of the entire country, and according to Bede ‘in the days of Edwin a woman with a baby at her breast might have travelled over the island without suffering an insult’. Along the principal highways of the country he also instituted a system of stone cisterns, designed to collect water from the nearest fountains, together with cups of brass. The drinking fountain has a long history.

Two memorials of his reign survive. Edwin’s fortress, Edwin’s burgh, is now known as Edinburgh. And, in recent years, evidence of Edwin’s palace has been recovered. At Yeavering, in Northumberland, have been found the traces of a great hall with other buildings clustered around it; this suggests the presence of a king with his warriors and councillors. A temple was later converted into a Christian church. Since the palace was built upon a Bronze Age cemetery, it must always have been considered a sacred site. An open-air wooden theatre or meetingplace, with concentric rows of seats before a raised platform, has also been recognized; this was used for regional assemblies where the over-king could address 300 of his followers. It was the place of public pronouncement and public judgment. There was a large enclosure, where animals were herded before being killed and eaten in elaborate feasts. Other such palaces, with the complex of attendant buildings, have been found in other parts of the country.

They represent a life of feud and warfare, of lordship and dynastic marriage. Young warriors would congregate around the king and enter his service; the good lord would distribute land and gifts. It was a rich and intense culture based upon violence and covered with a sheen of gold. The clothes worn by the noblemen were opulent in the extreme, and the men as well as the women were lavishly bedecked with jewels. The men wore linen tunics, fastened at the wrists and waist with shining clasps; their cloaks were ornamented with brooches. Gold was the key. In the early Christian Church statues of the saints, larger than life-size, were covered in gold. There were thrones of gold, and great crucifixes of gold. It was in no sense a barbaric culture, but one based upon formal ostentation.

The territory of the East Angles also had great kings. Their land was large, taking within its compass what are now Norfolk, Suffolk and the Isle of Ely. It was all of a piece, the invaders having overlain the kingdom of the Iceni from which Boadicea had come. There are no annals of this people, but Bede records that one of their early kings claimed dominion over the whole of southern England. Redwald reigned in the early seventh century, and at a burial site in Sutton Hoo have been found relics of his magnificence. It is presumed to be Redwald’s tomb, based upon the elaborate funereal rites of the Germanic tribes of Sweden.

This was a boat burial. The boat itself was 90 feet in length (27.4 metres) and within its central space were found a helmet of Scandinavian style, a coat of mail, a battleaxe, a sword with gold fittings, several spears and a shield ornamented with the shapes of birds and dragons; there seems to have been a sceptre crowned with a bronze stag, as well as a great gold buckle. Relics were also found of a tunic with gold clasps in the Roman fashion, as well as silver bowls, coins, cauldrons and a lyre. This was the resting place of a king. We have the words of Beowulf as an epitaph. ‘There they laid the dear lord, the giver of rings, in the bosom of the ship, a marvellous prince by the mast. Men brought from distant lands a trove of treasure and ornament.’ In another mound upon the site (there are seventeen of them) were uncovered the skeletons of a warrior and his horse. They are the tokens of a society of force and conquest.

Yet no body was found within the boat. It may have been a cenotaph, an empty tomb erected as a memorial. But it is more likely that a wooden coffin and its occupant have been eaten by the acid sand all around. There is one memory of Redwald, however. It resides in the helmet; it is silver plate on a base of iron, with ornamentation of bronze. It is monstrous, savage, a thing out of nightmare.

The life of the people under his rule was harsh and unremitting. It was, for the poor, one of incessant labour; their food was coarse and their clothes were made out of rough woollen fabrics. They lived in earth-floored cottages of wicker or wattle. They knew only the rake and the sickle, the plough and the pick and the spade. The rich engaged in a life of hunting and of warfare. They ate voluminous quantities of pork and venison. They drank to excess and were celebrated for doing so. Their faces were often painted or tattooed. Men as well as women dyed their hair; blue, green and orange were the colours favoured by the male. Both sexes were heavily adorned with gold bracelets. Young boys were trained in bravery by being placed on steep sloping roofs; if they held fast, without screaming out in fear, they were deemed to be fit for purpose. The sports were those of leaping, running and wrestling; at the age of fourteen a boy had the right to bear arms.

The kingdom of Mercia occupied what is now known as the midlands; the East Saxons gave their name to Essex, the Middle Saxons to Middlesex and the South Saxons to Sussex. The West Saxons created Wessex, of course, but that territory has not survived as an administrative entity. Mercia was until the time of Alfred always a mixture of kingdoms, and the tribal name of the West Saxons was Gewissae, meaning ‘confederates’. These allied tribes moved further westward, conquering Devon and Cornwall. But the Germanic tribes did not move against the native kingdoms alone; they fought among themselves, and there were some ferocious struggles between the tribes of Wessex and the tribes of Kent.

Kent offers an interesting case of continuity. It was the first part of England to be settled by Germanic mercenaries and traders, who may have obtained a permanent presence there as far back as the time of Roman rule. That is why the administrative structures set up by the Romanized English survived intact. The settlers and natives did not need to confront one another. So the native name for the area was maintained even after the Jutes and others had acquired supremacy. The people were known as ‘Cant-ware’, but the origin of ‘Cant’ lies somewhere in prehistory. The names of Canterbury and Dover date back at least to the Iron Age. There is abundant evidence for continuity of use, in settlements and in sacred sites, from the Iron Age to the Jutes; the churches of many Kentish neighbourhoods are linked by prehistoric roads. They are also characteristically associated with holy wells, springs and female saints, all of which point towards prehistoric worship.

Another continuity can be noticed. When the first Germanic settlers came they were planted as freeholders, following the custom of their country. That is why the land of Kent is marked by individual farmsteads and hamlets rather than manorial villages; no tradition of cooperative farming under a lord existed. There was no room in Kent for powerful magnates or great mansions. There are few of the ‘common fields’ found throughout the rest of the country. The county bears all the signs of the ‘free folk’ whom Tacitus recognized among the northern peoples.

That tradition was maintained over the centuries. In The Perambulation of Kent, written in 1570, William Lambarde wrote that ‘the Yeomanrie, or common people is no where more free and jolly than in this shyre … in manner every man is a freeholder, and hath some part of his own to live upon. And in this their estate they please themselves and joy exceedingly.’ In fact the legal custom of Kentish land tenure was not abolished until 1926, the only known example of specifically county law surviving into the twentieth century. That independence has taken other forms. In the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 ‘the men of Kent’ were the first to take up arms behind Wat Tyler. Seventy years later, under the leadership of Jack Cade, they provoked a popular revolt against unfair taxation; their petition was entitled The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent. The men of Kent were the first to rise against Richard III. In the miners’ strike of 1984 the miners of Kent were the most militant and vociferous. The old history still manifests itself. It still matters.

These continuities underlie the changing patterns of lordship. Small kingdoms gave way to greater kingdoms. The earliest fiscal document for the whole of England, dated to the early seventh century, lists nineteen kings and fifteen peoples. Yet even the great kingdoms were based upon English originals. The Jutes of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight took over the prehistoric lands of the Belgae; the East Saxons held the ancient territory of the Trinovantes; and the South Saxons established themselves within the prehistoric borders of the Regnenses. They even retained the same capitals. There are many other examples testifying to the fact that the roots of the country go very deep.

The great king of Kent, Aethelbert, who ruled from the end of the sixth century to 616, is prominent in English history as the king who greeted Augustine and supported his Christian mission among the Germanic tribes. Aethelbert was aligned with the Frankish kings of the continent, and it may be that he welcomed Augustine in deference to them. He was in any case what the Venerable Bede called ‘rex potentissimus ’, an over-king of English lands stretching to the Humber. He was also the first English king to become converted to Christianity; he was followed by the king of Essex and, more ambiguously, by the king of East Anglia. But his example was crucial to the success of Augustine’s mission. Augustine converted the king’s household, and thus the area under the control of Aethelbert’s lords. The people came creeping to the cross under the twin pressures of deference and emulation. They flocked to the rivers of Kent, where they were baptized en masse.

It should be remembered that this saint had not come to convert the native English, the large majority of whom were already Christian. He had not come to evangelize the whole island; he had come to baptize the Germanic settlers and their leaders. In 597 he landed at Thanet, and then led a solemn procession singing hymns behind a silver cross. Aethelbert duly obliged with his conversion. He could see the advantage of being associated with the institution that had succeeded Roman imperium. The important part of the Christian contribution to England was in fact the re-imposition of old forms of authority. After Augustine had converted Kent and Essex his fellow missionary, Paulinus, brought the gospel to Northumberland. With the conversion of heathen Sussex and the Isle of Wight, in the late seventh century, all England had entered the Christian communion. Many of the old native churches were extended or rebuilt in Anglo-Saxon style, and many large churches were erected in the walled towns inherited from Rome. The same sacred sites were still in use, with a continuity of worship that goes much deeper than the choice between a native or a Roman affiliation. Many of today’s cathedrals will retain at their core a small Anglo-Saxon church superimposed upon a temple used by the Romanized English.

The leaders of the native Church did not look kindly upon this usurper who had come to convert their Saxon-Jutish-Frisian oppressors. When Augustine summoned the Welsh bishops he did not rise to greet them, and his arrogance struck them as characteristic of the old Roman ways. The native priests had in any case come to despise the Germanic leaders; they did not attempt to convert them. They were monks and missionaries who had been educated in the worship of the Celtic saints (think of all the small churches in Cornwall), and saw no authority or beauty in what was essentially a church of bishops and administrators – administrators, indeed, who were willing and prepared to work for the alien kings. Priests on the other side of the Severn would not eat from the same dishes as the Romanized priests; they would not even let their dogs lick them. Yet they lost the battle of faiths. The Roman Church became England’s Christian Church, and the old faith of the English withered on the vine. It is not the first, or the last, example of cultural amnesia.

For their part the kings were aware of all the advantages of the Roman faith. Christ was a more powerful support in war than Woden, and the Christian God offered more effective lordship than Thor. One hitherto pagan priest went to the trouble of destroying his own temple to prove the point. The Roman Church preferred the rule of strong kings and unified governments; it made the work of religious control much easier. The priests were the literate members of the kingdom and, at a time when legal documents and title deeds and proclamations of every kind were being published, they became the indispensable administrators of the state. Almost as soon as the first missionaries set foot on Thanet, the kings of the vicinity began to issue laws. ‘If anyone kills a man, he is to pay as ordinary wergild 100 shillings. If hair-pulling occurs, 50 sceattas [silver pennies] are to be paid as compensation.’

The kings were also happy to adopt a quasi-liturgical role as the embodiment of the people in public ritual. This was a way of enhancing authority. It was a way of enforcing respect and ensuring obedience. Kings and saints appear, in England, within the same period. And they are often the same thing. King Edwin and King Aethelbert are known to posterity as St Edwin and St Aethelbert. There were occasional reactions. King Sigeberht of Kent was killed by two of his kinsmen for the tiresome practice of forgiving his enemies.

Yet on the whole Christianity helped to bring unity to a kingdom. To adapt the old Catholic motto, a people who pray together stay together. The encouragement of moral discipline, by the priests, had a material effect upon the social discipline of the country. In the graveyard remains of great ladies in the seventh century, from Kent and Wessex, from Mercia and East Anglia, there is a much greater uniformity of ornament. The various regions of the country were slowly coming together. A single English Church seemed to require a single English nation as its stage. It was the time of the Christian conversion that turned all the people of the country, in the words of Pope Gregory the Great, into ‘Angelcynn, of English race’. Soon after a list was compiled of ‘the Saints of God who rest in Engla lond’. Bede wrote of ‘the Holy Church of the English nation’, implicitly excluding the Welsh and the Picts. England, as we understand it today, was created by the Christian Church.

So the Church was an essential aspect of government. That is why the boundaries of the dioceses followed the frontiers of the old tribal kingdoms. Worcester followed the same area as the district of the Hwicce, for example, and Hereford of the Magonsaetan. The lines of authority had been passed on. The diocesan synods were like parliaments, where laws were debated and where kinfolk could meet. Bishops were in any case aristocrats, members of the various royal families of the land. When the king called a Church synod in London, secular as well as spiritual lords would attend.

The king’s edicts invariably took an ecclesiastical tone. The archbishops, of York or of Canterbury, drew up the national law codes in consultation with the king. Only after the arrival of the Normans in England was there any formal separation between Church and State. In a similar spirit abbots and bishops were often part of the warbands of the great magnates; one bishop of Sherborne, Heahmund, was killed in a bloody battle against northern invaders. He may have fulfilled the former role of the pagan high priest guiding companies of warriors.

There existed large organizations known as minsters, communities of priests and monks that, as the word suggests, ministered to their surrounding areas. Between the seventh and ninth centuries many hundreds of such foundations were planted so that every district had its minster. They represent the original expression of Christian England, with all the energy and power of first things. They acted as centres of patronage and learning; they maintained trade and agriculture. They organized the surrounding countryside with their constant demand for food rents. They were essentially royal courts, their abbots and abbesses an integral part of the aristocracy, where Christ was overlord. They housed golden treasures, and the relics of the saints. The priests would travel through their areas, preaching; that is why England is still dotted with stone crosses that mark the places of worship.

The religious power of the minsters was gradually lost, as villages and parish churches became the pattern of the land. But the minsters survived. Some of them became great churches and cathedrals. Others took on new life as burgeoning towns. Their names are part of the fabric of the country, in Axminster, Kidderminster, Westminster and a thousand others. Many other towns – Hexham, Barking, Godalming, Oundle, Reading, Woking – are also the direct survivors of these early foundations. England is still filled with minsters.

5

The blood eagle

By the beginning of the ninth century there were in general terms three predominant kingdoms in England; Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria vied for mastery, while around them struggled the smaller kingdoms of East Anglia, Kent, Sussex and Essex. Northumbria was pre-eminent in the seventh century, Mercia in the eighth century, and Wessex in the ninth century. These were sophisticated states with complex systems of administration and taxation, capable of huge communal enterprises such as the building of the 98 miles (158 kilometres) of Offa’s Dyke. In that sense, they resembled their prehistoric forebears. A mass currency was in circulation, with the ubiquitous silver penny or sceat, as a result of voluminous trade.

These three kingdoms were eventually forged together by fire and slaughter, and the growth of a unified kingdom can in part be seen as a desperate response to an external threat. In 790 three boats of Norwegian men landed upon the Dorset coast at Portland; an official rode from Dorchester, believing them to be the familiar merchants of that country, and prepared to escort them into the town. They turned around and killed him. They were warriors, not traders.

Three years later men from Norwegian ships attacked the monastery of St Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne. The attacks were as unexpected as they were unwelcome. The monastery was ransacked and many of the monks were put to the sword. ‘Never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘nor was it thought that such an inroad could be made from the sea.’ A year later the monastery at Jarrow was attacked. No one had feared such an invasive force because the people of the north had previously come as peaceful traders. They were masters of commerce, as their later settlements in York and Dublin would testify. Long before the raids commenced, there had been Scandinavian settlers in East Anglia. The location of the eighth-century poem Beowulf is to be found in southern Scandinavia.

The men of Norway were better known at the time as Norsemen or, in the English sources, as Vikings; the name was also applied to the men of Denmark, but at the beginning the Norwegian warriors were the dominant force. The víkingar were ‘the men from the fjords’. They came because their own territories were unsettled by the emergence of new and centralized kingdoms; these kingdoms in turn encouraged the formation of warrior bands ready to kill and pillage. The land of Denmark was also being threatened by Charlemagne, king of the Frankish Empire, further undermining the powers of the ruling elite. It takes only one moment of fear to launch a hundred ships. This was the period, too, when the design of the longboat was perfected. The wind was literally in the sails of the Norsemen.

Another cause can be found for these bloody expeditions. The monasteries of Lindisfarne and Jarrow were not attacked at random; they were chosen as examples of revenge. The onslaught of the Christian Charlemagne on the ‘pagans’ of the north had led to the extirpation of their shrines and sanctuaries. The great king had cut down Jôrmunr, the holy tree of the Norse people. What better form of retaliation than to lay waste the foundations devoted to the Christian God? The Christian missionaries to Norway had in fact set out from Lindisfarne. So its destruction was nicely calculated. It was the beginning of what might be called an antiChristian crusade. In the year the monastery burned, premonitions passed across the tremulous English sky. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 793 ‘terrible omens appeared over the Northumbrians and miserably distressed the people: there were immense lightning flashes, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky’.

Yet these early raids were really only a warning, a seismic shudder before the fire burst forth. The English people were becoming more nervous, and the archaeological evidence suggests that more of them chose the safety of the walled towns. The earliest monastic chronicle was written at this time, to be incorporated later into the first version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The hand of the monk may have been guided by a sense that the world was changing for the worse.

In 830 the raids began once more. The forces of ‘heathen men’ had come for land and slaves and women. They fell upon the island of Sheppey, off the coast of North Kent, in 833. As its name implies, it was filled with sheep and good pasture. That was the prize. The Norsemen were well known for their skills in stock-breeding. Over the next thirty years a score of other attacks took place, from the men of Denmark in particular. Kent and East Anglia were an attractive target; the first sea battle in English history took place off Sandwich, in Kent, when the invaders were rebuffed. But the port at Southampton was ravaged by them. London and Rochester were attacked. The army of Northumberland was defeated in battle. The threat came from all sides.

Some of the warriors were known as ‘wolf-coats’ from their mode of dress and from the howls they sent up in battle. They brandished long kite-like shields, and wielded ferocious battleaxes against their prey. Others were known as ‘berserks’ because they wore no armour and charged the enemy in the throes of blood frenzy. The sagas tell of one warrior known as ‘the children’s man’; unlike his companions, he refused to impale children on the tip of his lance. These men were the terror of England.

The raids were simply the prelude to a true invasion. In 865 a great host of Danes descended upon East Anglia. This was the region their ancestors knew best and where many of them already lived. These men had not come to raid; they had come to settle. It is no coincidence that in this period there was a marked increase in the population of Scandinavia, where land was becoming more scarce.

They came in their thousands, aboard hundreds of ships; each ship could carry no more than thirty men. They dwelled in East Anglia for twelve months, taking command of the local resources and in particular marshalling a regiment of good horses. They established fortresses, or defensive encampments, from which they ruled the surrounding land. In 866 they rode against York, and took the city. Their control lasted for almost one hundred years. From York they gained mastery of Northumberland. Then they rode south and captured Nottingham. The king of the Mercians appealed to the king of Wessex for assistance, but eventually he was obliged to buy off the enemy.

The Danes had now acquired the two kingdoms of Northumberland and East Anglia. The kings of these territories were executed in the ritual of the ‘blood eagle’, whereby the lungs were ripped out of the body and draped across the shoulders so that they resembled an eagle’s folded wings. The charters, the ornamented books, the diocesan records, of the two kingdoms disappear. It was a time of devastation for the landed proprietors of the soil.

In 870 the Danes set up a great camp in Reading, and began preparations to invade the kingdom of Wessex. At this stage in the history of England there emerges Alfred. He had encountered the Danes before, when his older brother came to the aid of the Mercians. Now he was king. It cannot be said, however, that his first actions were entirely heroic. After a series of defeats, he bought off the Danish forces with coin and treasure. He incurred the wrath and hatred of the monks at Abingdon for purloining their wealth in the process; in their history he is named as a ‘Judas’. The Danes retired to London which they now also controlled. For a period Alfred was reduced to the role of a tributary king, and was obliged to take silver from the Danes to coin his own currency.

Further attacks and incursions were organized by the invaders, who were still intent upon complete mastery of Wessex; it was the largest surviving English kingdom, and thus the key to supremacy. For the most part Alfred’s army seem to have shadowed the forces of the Danes as they conducted raids or acquired more territory and, after one particularly bloody defeat at Chippenham, Alfred was forced to take refuge in the Somerset marshes. Here at Athelney he built a fortress; from his sojourn in the marshes springs the story of his burning the cakes, once known to generations of English schoolchildren, but it is an eleventh-century fiction designed to emphasize the wretchedness of his plight before his final victory. And a victory came.

In the spring of 878 he rallied the forces of Somerset,Wiltshire and part of Hampshire at a place known as ‘Egbert’s Stone’. He fought a great battle at Edington in Wiltshire against Guthrum, the Danish leader, and the Danes were defeated. Guthrum accepted the outcome, and with several of his commanders was baptized into the Christian communion. Alfred stood as his sponsor in this signal act of conversion, where Guthrum took the Wessex name of Athelstan. In the battle between the pagans and the Christians, Christianity had won. This had become a war about faith as much as land.

Why was it that Alfred and Guthrum could enter such a holy or unholy alliance? They were both of the same blood. Guthrum and the Saxon, Alfred, were great kings in the same sacred tradition. Alfred may have been a Christian leader but he also traced the descent of his royal house from Woden. The Germanic and Scandinavian peoples were deeply related. They had much more in common than anything they shared with the men of Cornwall or of Devon. They were, in a sense, relatives. So they came to an agreement to divide England between them.

Alfred was not in a position to dictate terms. The negotiations took place in the shadow of the Danish forces that were still within Wessex. Guthrum was already king of the land in the east, from the Thames to the Humber, and had no intention of abandoning England. So he kept what he had conquered by force of arms. No doubt Alfred also gave him money. One phrase of the treaty establishes that ‘all of us estimate Englishman and Dane at the same amount’. Equality reigned between them, in other words.

So was set up the region of the country known by the eleventh century as ‘the Danelaw’. This essentially comprised the largest part of northern and eastern England, with a colony of Norwegians in northwestern England. The process of settlement was made more intense, with successive waves of immigration from the coastline of northwestern Europe being organized by the leaders of the Danish army in England. The chronicles use the phrase of the lands being ‘shared out’, suggesting some high authority. The later settlers were obliged to take up poorer land than that of their predecessors; but land in England was still available. The Danish farmers were situated by fortified towns or ‘burghs’ manned by the Danish army, from which we derive the term for borough. These forts could be used for the purposes of defence or of public assembly.

The most important territorial divisions of the Danelaw were the five boroughs of Nottingham, Leicester, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln. Those boroughs of course still survive, all except Stamford becoming county towns. Yet the evidence of Scandinavian loan-words suggests that the entire region of north and east was assimilated by the new settlers. There are hundreds of place names of Danish and Swedish origin, the most notable being those that end with -by or with -thorpe. Streoneshalch was renamed as Whitby, and Northworthig became Derby. The plethora of Kirbys or Kirkbys in the area of the Danelaw suggests that ‘settlements by the church’ were recognized by the invaders. The survival of English place names, however, sometimes in close proximity to the newly named settlements, suggests that the native people of humble stock were left undisturbed.

The Danes brought trade and prosperity to the areas under their control. It is not at all surprising that in the eleventh century the three most wealthy shires were Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, which had all been part of the Danelaw. York itself was one of the richest and most flourishing cities in the kingdom. It was guarded by strong walls, and excavations have revealed streets of narrow and tightly packed wooden houses complete with workshops and warehouses. Jewellers and metalworkers lived beside workers in wood and in textiles. And everywhere there were merchants, trading with Ireland, with France and, of course, with Scandinavia. They were engaged in the business of pepper, and of vinegar; of fish, and of wine; of salt, and of slaves.

After the treaty was concluded with Guthrum, Alfred had the opportunity to rebuild the defences of his kingdom against any further incursion. Throughout southern and western England he set up a system of fortified towns similar to those established in the Danelaw. An elaborate network of these towns was created to ensure that no one lived more than 20 miles (32 kilometres) from a refuge. It was the beginning of the first true or systematic urbanization within England, springing from the urgent military necessities of the moment, since the Roman epoch. Within a hundred years most of the burghs had become fully ordered towns with courts and markets.

Iron Age hill forts such as those at Hastings and Southampton, and early Romanized settlements like those at Bath and Winchester, were restored with stronger walls. New towns were built, employing a grid system of streets that still survives in towns such as Wallingford and Cricklade that are sited by the Thames. Alfred knew the importance of guarding the major rivers that flowed through his land. Each burgh had a large force of defenders, placed there with their families. In addition Alfred began the formation of a permanent navy to deter any further hostilities from Scandinavian warbands. An early warning system of beacons, set on hilltops, was put in place. His territories, therefore, were militarized in a great programme of public works.

But, for a while, Alfred’s protection did not seem enough. In 896, six years after the death of Guthrum, another Danish king invaded East Kent with a force of 4,000 or 5,000 warriors; they had brought their women and children with them, and their purpose once again was to settle. Alfred led his army into the region and forced them to retreat to their encampments. But he then became aware of a greater threat. The arrival of these new settlers destroyed the uneasy peace between the English and the people of the Danelaw; ships from East Anglia and from Northumbria sailed around the coast and attacked the northern reaches of Devon. Another Danish contingent besieged Exeter. All the parties of the Danes colluded. The plan was to force Alfred to concentrate in the west, while the new invaders took over Kent and Essex.

In the course of the next few months Alfred defeated the Danish forces in the west, while sending reinforcements to the support of southeast England. The chronology of what became known as Alfred’s ‘last war’ is not entirely clear, but the result is not in doubt. The invading Danes gave up their attempt to acquire the territories of the southeast and instead settled among their compatriots in East Anglia and Northumbria. They may have been bribed to leave Essex and elsewhere. They may have bowed to the inevitability of the strong defence set up by the system of burghs. In any event, Alfred had defended his kingdom.

Yet he also defined his kingdom. He generally termed himself ‘the king of the Angles and of the Saxons’, but one of his newly minted pennies uses for the first time the legend ‘Rex Anglo’. With the pagans settled on the very borders of his land, he did his best to assert English identity. He was a Christian king in the face of heathen warlords. The Danes had attempted to extirpate the spiritual civilization of the English; Alfred would do everything within his power to cultivate English learning and the study of English history. Even as he was creating the system of burghs and building a navy, he was fostering a programme of translating major Latin texts into the West Saxon vernacular. He wished to commission books ‘which are most necessary for all men to know’. He is one of the very few kings of England who himself wrote books. He translated Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius and the Soliloquies of St Augustine; he caused to be translated Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Histories against the Pagans by Orosius, thus defining the context for his devoted scholarship. The English, at least according to their sacred historians, were the people of God.

In the reign of Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, the English began to conquer the territories of the Danelaw and to absorb its people into the larger society. The Danes were more vulnerable because they had settled; they were no longer the roving warbands that had threatened Alfred, and they had always been more skilled at attack than at defence. In 917 and 918 Edward’s soldiers marched out into the Danelaw, building fortresses as they moved forward. They seized Derby and Nottingham; then the men of Lincoln submitted to King Edward. By 920 all of the country south of the Humber had recognized him as overlord. This was a true conquest, since the rulers of Wessex had never before been lords of the eastern lands. The battles were remembered for many centuries, and it was said that the purple pasqueflower grew in the meadows where Danish blood had been spilled.

The people of the Danelaw were converted to Christianity within two or three generations, and their old burial customs were forgotten. They were in any case so close to the Angles and the Saxons in custom and character that they effortlessly mingled with them. The English language is filled with Scandinavian words such as ‘sky’ and ‘die’, ‘anger’ and ‘skin’ and ‘wing’, ‘law’ and ‘birth’, ‘bread’ and ‘eggs’. There is scarcely a phase of human activity that has not been deeply influenced by Danish nomenclature.

The memory of the Danish occupation survived. The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English. In the middle of the nineteenth century the people of Northamptonshire, according to a local historian, maintained ‘a traditional remembrance of their oppression’. In Cornwall, at the end of the same century, a colony of red-headed people were called ‘Danes’ with whom the local population would not marry. Samuel Pepys was informed that the west door of Rochester Cathedral was covered with ‘Dane-skins’. All this suggests that the viciousness of the early invasions and battles had left a deep and abiding mark.

After the partial unification of England by Edward there followed a line of powerful kings whose names have faded from the collective consciousness of the English; yet the memory of one of them, Athelstan, was revered for many centuries. His name means noble stone, like the throne in Kingston upon which in 924 he was crowned and anointed with holy oil. In the fourteenth century he was still invoked when land was granted:

This land and twig I give to thee,

As free as Athelstan gave it to me,

And I hope a loving brother you will be.

He was the son of Edward the Elder, and became heir to a great dynasty; he was intent, however, upon augmenting the kingdom that he had inherited. He defeated in battle the king of York and his ally, the king of Dublin; Dublin and York were the twin engines of a Norse trading empire that was now coming to an end. Athelstan seized York, and subdued Scotland. The forces of the north then launched a counter-attack, but in 937 were decisively beaten at a place known only as Brunanburgh. ‘From this period,’ a chronicler wrote, ‘there was peace and abundance of all things.’ Many years later the period of Athelstan’s struggle was still known as ‘the great war’, just as the First World War is now remembered.

Alfred had been generally characterized as king of the Angles and of the Saxons, but Athelstan was hailed as king of England. His family became linked by marriage with the kingdom of France and the province of Aquitaine as well as the empire of Germany. Poets and scholars flocked to his court; he established one coinage for the entire realm; he refurbished many of the towns. He called truly national assemblies of bishops and lords. He imposed strict controls over buying and selling; he set out a code of laws. ‘I have learned that our peace is worse kept than I should like it,’ he wrote, ‘and my councillors say I have borne it for too long.’

There is a painting of him in the company of St Cuthbert, the holy man known as ‘the wonder-worker of England’. It is the first English royal portrait, and shows Athelstan wearing an imperial crown. Towards the end of his reign he styled himself monarchus totius Britanniae, and the Annals of Ulster declared him to be ‘the roof-tree of the dignity of the western world’. The tomb of this now forgotten king is to be found in Malmesbury Abbey. In life he wore his hair in ringlets entwined with threads of gold.

By the tenth century the polity of the Anglo-Saxon realm had taken an enduring shape. If the monarch was to guarantee order and stability, it was necessary for him to act in a formal and deliberate manner. He assembled a council of religious men and of wise men. He created structures of authority to supervise the exploitation of royal land and the dispensing of royal justice. A bureaucracy already existed, issuing what became an unbroken succession of charters and writs. (The charters can still be used in unravelling the English landscape.) They came in the first place from the king’s scriptorium, staffed by a handful of priests, but the emergence of a centralized monarchy prompted the growth of new institutions and procedures. So from this foundation there would spring a civil service, a judiciary and a parliament. The nation was becoming conscious of its own identity. That is part of the story of this volume.

It was taken for granted that every man must have a lord. Lordship was no longer dependent upon tribal relations, but on the possession of land. Mastery was assumed by those who owned the most territory. No other test of secular leadership was necessary. Land was everything. It was in a literal sense the ground of being. Land granted you power and wealth; it allowed you to dispense gifts and to bend others to your will. It was inevitable that, under the reign of a strong king, the hierarchy of the country would also be strengthened; the divisions would be sharper, the evidence of status more pronounced. When in 1086, according to the chronicles, ‘all men of property in England’ swore an oath of allegiance to William the Conqueror they were following an established procedure.

The landless man was either a slave or a pauper. He was not to be trusted. This represents the crucial difference between medieval and early modern England. The names of slaves are given for the first time within a document of 880; ‘Almund, Tidulf, Tidheh, Lull, Lull and Gadwulf’ are being transferred to land belonging to the bishop of Winchester. Slavery was in fact a legal punishment inflicted on those, for example, who could not pay their fines. A penniless farmer might sell his children. It has been estimated that 12 per cent of the English population were slaves. So land created economic subjection. Slaves, like oxen and sheep, were known as ‘live money’.

By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient.

The shire was originally a military district, but it also served royal purposes as a centre of taxation and a source of justice. Each shire had a court, and a burgh or major town; it could muster its own army, and was ruled on behalf of the king by a shire-reeve whose name became sheriff. The shire was then divided into ‘hundreds’; each hundred was supposed in theory to support one hundred households or to supply one hundred fighting men in times of war. The hundreds were further subdivided into ‘tithings’ made up of ten households. The administration of the entire country could be devolved upon small groups of individuals who led the ‘hue and cry’ against thieves and who were responsible for each other’s conduct. It was the essential basis of local government in England for at least the next thousand years.

The men of the hundred met in the open air at ancient places of assembly, and some of the hundreds are named after a prehistoric tumulus or barrow in the immediate neighbourhood. Hundredsbarrow and Loosebarrow, for example, are to be found in Dorset. The hundred of Doddingtree in Wiltshire is ‘Dudda’s tree’. The hundred of Brixton is derived from ‘Brihtsige’s stone’. This suggests that the roots of the hundreds go very deep, and that they reflect the primeval organization of the country. Since they still survive unaltered, although now rarely used for administrative purposes, they are another indication that we live in a prehistoric landscape. The rural district council is very old indeed.

In the tenth century the lie of the land was being changed. The country had been generally divided into very large estates governed by king, noble, or bishop; these estates of many thousands of acres are likely to have been the original territories of a tribe, their boundaries preserved by the burial mounds of ancient leaders. Yet in the reign of Athelstan they were being fragmented. Parcels of land were being granted to the clients of the king, or noble, in reward for service; an approximate size of the grant was 600 acres (243 hectares), upon which the new proprietor built his residence and organized his agricultural workforce. In the tenth century the new lords were known as thegns; they became the lords of the manor in the fourteenth century, the squires of the eighteenth century, and the country gentlemen of the nineteenth century.

The thegns had a much more direct relation to their land than had the great absentee landlords of the previous epoch. They created villages on their estates, taking the place of scattered farms and hamlets, so that their workers could be more easily housed and controlled. Villages were in existence in the period of Roman dominance, and similar settlements could be found in the Iron Age. Continuity is once more the key. But the village became the defining feature of a large part of the English countryside only in the ninth and tenth centuries. There is no village still in existence (except for those formed during the Industrial Revolution) that was not established by the twelfth century. If you dig deep into the village soil, you will find its ancient roots. Some of them, not the majority, have been in existence for thousands of years. But they are absent from certain territories. Down the middle of England, from Northumberland to Wiltshire, numerous villages are to be found; beyond that great expanse, in the north and in the west, the Iron Age landscape of scattered farms and hamlets survived.

The thegn built his wooden halled residence with smaller outbuildings; this manor was defended with a bank and ditch together with a palisaded fence. He built a small church, also of wood, with a bell tower to call his workers to prayer and to divide their day. Eventually he set up his own court. A well was sunk and before long a mill was built for grinding corn. The country village was not some comfortable and affable idyll; for its poorest residents it was a form of outdoor prison. The agricultural workers lived in buildings that were little more than wooden huts that they shared with their livestock. The ploughman, in a text of the eleventh century, laments his cruel life; he lives in fear of ‘my lord’ and must plough an acre or more in even the coldest weather. The boy who drives the oxen with his goad is hoarse from shouting.

The labourers were slowly reduced in status; for two days each week they performed services for the lord in return for a house and for a smallholding of land from which they could feed their families. Their duties included harvesting and ploughing, carting and haymaking, shearing sheep and constructing the stalls for oxen. Somebody would be ordered to uproot the weeds or to dig a ditch, to run an errand or mend a hedge. Independent farmers still existed, of course, but a large section of the peasantry was ground down by need, misfortune, or misjudgment. Taxes had to be paid. The threat of murrain, to the crops and to the oxen, was constant. Life, for small farmers, was very uncertain. Undoubtedly many of their farms were bought up by the larger landowners. It would be impossible to convey the sheer complexity of the grades and divisions among the working population. It is enough to understand that this was a society of intricate divisions with nice variations in degrees of freedom and unfreedom, where every single person was susceptible to certain claims from superiors.

The history of the village is so entwined with the history of the fields that they cannot be separated. As villages replaced hamlets, so in many shires large fields divided into strips supplanted the older rectangular fields. The lord of the manor had the most land, of course, but the rest was assigned by lot to the individual villagers. This was the most just and methodical way of sharing out the territory. It was also the only way that the land could be efficiently ploughed, by being made available to large plough-teams. The interest of the community, and of the lord, came before that of the individual. The procedure was also accompanied by a form of crop rotation, so that land left fallow for one year was sown the next. This system of common fields lasted until the passing of the Enclosure Acts in the eighteenth century, maintained by the force of custom and communal arrangement.

Other aspects of English life were also being more sharply defined. Towns, small and large, were acquiring unique identities. Some of them grew out of the Romanized towns, and some of them emerged from the burghs established by Alfred; others occupied the sites of large trading settlements on the coast or along the routes of the rivers, while yet more were simply part of the expansion of the large Christian minsters. By the last three decades of the tenth century they were bursting into life, taking advantage of a general rise in population and prosperity throughout the country.

The towns were crammed with buildings and with workshops. In Canterbury the houses stood 2 feet (0.6 metres) apart, enough room for the rain to drip freely from the eaves. The evidence of glassware and pottery, of metalworking and leatherworking, suggests a true urban community. The populations of Norwich and Lincoln were approximately 6,000, while those of London and York were appreciably higher. The people of other towns may be numbered in hundreds rather than thousands. Yet they were living together without agricultural or proprietary ties; this is nowhere more evident than in the fact that the inhabitants of the towns were deemed to be free. They had no lord except the king. The hand of the monarch is in fact evident everywhere, since most towns were royal creations with their streets and defences laid out by royal command. They became engines for making money from taxes and trade. Where there is money, there is power and hierarchy. The towns became self-governing, with the administration of their courts and markets in the hands of ‘elders’ or ‘seniors’ who formed themselves into guilds. It was a new form of kinship in a country that was redefining its tribal nature.

It is no accident that the English parish emerges in this period. It is part of the same appetite for definition and control – for discipline – that accompanied the growth of a united kingdom under a powerful king. You cannot separate religion from social restraint. The chapel of the thegn became the parish church, and the parish system itself arose directly out of the manors and villages that had spread across the country. By the twelfth century, the organization was complete. The parish became the centre of communal action. It survived unchanged until the last decades of the nineteenth century. The great minsters and monasteries decayed, or changed their function, and by the ninth century little churches had begun to fill the countryside. They were generally built of timber, unplastered, and enclosed a rectangular space divided into one or two ‘cells’. In the eleventh century the wood was replaced with a fabric of stone, and the interiors of the small churches began to be ornamented and painted.

The church was not always used for sacred purposes. The contemporary literature suggests that it might be used as a meetingplace, a covered market, or even as an alehouse. The parish priests themselves were often illiterate, and many complaints were made about their drunkenness and violence. They were often married. They might be slaves employed by the lord of the manor. They were in any case little better than the lord’s servants, who worked in the fields when they were not in their churches. They carried knives. They exercised control over the villagers in every sense. These ‘Mass priests’, as they were known, were supposed to catechize children, administer the sacraments and repeat the rudimentary truths of the Christian faith. But in many parishes they also were treated as ‘cunning men’ who practised rural magic. They were as experienced in pagan customs as in Christian practice. It is hard to realize the sheer earthiness of life in these centuries, where people and cattle slept beneath the same roof and where the priest might be an unshaven scoundrel.

The men of the ninth and tenth centuries wore their hair long. If you pulled it you merited a fine, and forcible cutting of the hair was considered to be as criminal as cutting off a nose or ear. The clothes were simple, consisting principally of cloaks and tunics made of woollen cloth; yet the wealthy were heavily adorned with rings and brooches. When some Englishmen were imprisoned in Syria, during the eighth century, the native inhabitants came to see them and to wonder at the beauty of their clothes. The arms and faces of both men and women were tattooed. The richer women wore long flowing tunics, ornamented with gold, and their heads were covered with silk or linen that was wrapped around the neck. Both sexes loved bright colours such as scarlet and green and pink. And both sexes delighted in perfume. Heavy drinking was commonplace, as it has been in all stages of English history. 50 per cent of the people died before the age of thirty, and 90 per cent before the age of fifty. Death was always close at hand.

6

The measure of the king

At the beginning of the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry I, it was declared that the measurement of the yard (0.9 metres) should be ‘the distance from the tip of the king’s nose to the end of his outstretched thumb’. Yet what gave the kings of England such significance and control? They represented the country in a physical, as well as a spiritual, manner. They embodied the country, in its coinage and in its judicial process, in its land tenure and in its religious life. The history of England cannot be written without a careful account of its sovereigns. For many centuries it was impossible to imagine a country without a king. It was believed that a king’s health would affect the health of the kingdom as a whole, and that the private vices of the king could provoke a public calamity. The image of England might be that of the king outstretched.

The origins of kingship cannot be found. We may deduce from the evidence of the Neolithic monuments that there was power in the land from the fourth millennium bc. Who once lay in the great works of Sutton Hoo or Avebury? The kings of the dead have also gone down into the earth.

And then we begin to see flashes of regal pre-eminence. The early Saxon kings claimed that they were descended from the gods, in particular from Woden, and it was believed that they possessed magical powers. Even the supposedly saintly Edward the Confessor traced his descent from pagan Woden. In some more remote age of the world the king might also have been the high priest of the tribe. It is likely that, his true wife being a goddess, he was allowed to have intercourse with whomever he chose. This may help to account for the excessive promiscuity of later English kings; even until recent times they were always permitted and even expected to keep mistresses.

The Saxon kings were violent men, warlords in all but name, but they clothed themselves in the panoply of divine power. Their banners were carried before them wherever they walked. From the tenth century the kings took on classical and imperial titles such as caesar, imperator, basileus and Augustus. In their magnificence we may see traces of ancient British kings, combining wrathfulness and vengeance with spells and rituals. In essence it was the same authority wielded by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

The continuity is there. The promises made by King Edgar at his coronation in 973 were repeated in the coronation charter of Henry I, beginning with the words ‘In the name of the Holy Trinity! I promise three things to the Christian people subject to me! First, that God’s Church and all Christian people of my dominions shall keep true peace!’ The ceremony, devised by Archbishop Dunstan to crown Edgar at Bath, has been at the centre of every subsequent coronation. Much of it was employed, for example, at that of Elizabeth II in 1953. In his writings, particularly in his preface to the soliloquies of St Augustine, King Alfred reflects upon the divine power of the king, who is closer to God than anyone else in the realm; indeed, God Himself can be seen as ‘an exceedingly powerful king’. The damned souls of doomsday are compared to men ‘condemned before some king’.

From generation to generation the same message has been passed. The monarch has been anointed with holy oil, and is invested with divine power; he or she has been elected by God, rather than the people, and has been blessed by the Holy Spirit. That is why, from the tenth century, the king organized and controlled both the monasteries and the bishoprics; the strength and unity of the nation were materially assisted by the union of secular and ecclesiastical authority. The leading clergy were the king’s servants, assisting him in times of peace and war. He was a Christus.

The main task of the king was indeed to lead his people into battle. By the aggrandizement of land and wealth he rendered the country more powerful and more worthy of God’s grace. All the land was his. He owned all highways and bridges, all monasteries and churches, all towns and rivers, all markets and fairs. That is why from the earliest times England was controlled by a minute and complex system of taxation. The coin itself was minted in the king’s name. The voice of the king was the voice of law; it could be said that he held the laws of the land in his breast. This was also the claim of Richard II, many centuries after his Saxon ancestors.

William the Conqueror did not need to create the role of a powerful and centralizing king, therefore; he simply had to take up the part acquired by him. He adopted his crown three times a year at a ceremony known as the festal crown-wearing; we may imagine a tableau in which the king, in silent possession of his majesty, receives the homage of his great lords. There had been such crown-wearings in the eighth century but the practice may lie further back. These three days of the year – Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – were also the days when the pagan kings of the north used to perform a ritual sacrifice for the sake of the people. So kingship had very ancient roots. It has been said that William borrowed from the customs of the Frankish or Roman or Byzantine civilizations; yet it may be that his true ancestors are to be found in those who ordered the building of Stonehenge.

The Angevin kings, the line of Henry II, Richard I and John I, chose instinctively to espouse and even to exaggerate the sense of divine kingship. They were all wilful and ruthless sovereigns who systematically exploited the resources of the country to bolster their own sense of significance. Richard was the first king to use the plural ‘we’ in the composition of royal charters. John was the first to call himself the king of the land rather than the king of the people. The premise of absolute power was of course challenged by the barons in the course of John’s reign, but it did not disappear with his death. It lay beneath the confused inheritance and dynastic struggles of the later generations; royal power was still a question of what was possible rather than what was just or right. In the thirteenth century the principle of primogeniture or the hereditary right of the eldest son was first advanced. The power of the Crown was secure in the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Edward IV. Richard II was the monarch most inclined to emphasize the divine rights of kingship.

There was no progress towards a more liberal or benevolent concept of monarchy working in partnership with the great magnates of the land. As soon as the conditions were right, at the beginning of what has become known as the Tudor period, the king reasserts all of his authority and power with as much forcefulness as any Norman monarch.

The belief that the king’s touch could cure the skin disease of scrofula emerged at some point in the twelfth century, although Edward the Confessor was accredited with miraculous powers at an earlier date. It is possible that Henry II was the first king to make a ritual out of healing those afflicted by the disease, and one of his courtiers wrote that the ‘royal unction’ was manifest ‘by the diminution of groin disease and the cure of scrofula’. The tradition continued until at least 1712, when Queen Anne touched the three-year-old Samuel Johnson for the latter disease. Johnson remained a staunch royalist for the rest of his life.

7

The coming of the conquerors

By the end of the tenth century England was a rich and prosperous country. So the men of Denmark still came in search of treasure and of slaves; they fought against naturalized Danes as well as Englishmen. Sporadic raiding took place in the 980s, and in the course of one attack London was put to the torch. It was one of the many great fires of London. In 991 a Danish army overwhelmed a native force in Essex, giving rise to a great English poem of lament entitled ‘The Battle of Maldon’:

Our thoughts must be the braver, our hearts the steadier,

Our courage the greater, as our strength grows less.

It is a poem containing all the stoicism and valour of the tenth-century warrior. He rode to the battlefield and then dismounted in order to fight on foot; he killed, rather than captured, the enemy. The English monarch Ethelred II was obliged to sue for peace after the signal defeat at Maldon. The Vikings wanted money, and Ethelred agreed to buy them off with £22,000 of silver and gold. The negotiations were helped by the fact that the English king could understand Old Norse. The taxation system of the nascent state was put into operation to provide what has become known as Danegeld or ‘the Danish tax’.

This had been precisely the method used by Alfred when faced with victorious foes, but Ethelred was not so fortunate or perhaps as sagacious as his ancestor. He was given the nickname ‘unready’ or more precisely ‘ill-advised’, and it may be that his real fault lay in taking bad counsel. The leaders of the realm, the earls who controlled the shires, were divided among themselves on the best way of confronting the Danish threat. In legal and administrative affairs he was better served, however, and his reign is notable for its law-codes and charters. His was also a court of poetry and music as well as of war. We might call him Ethelred the Unlucky, with the proviso that kings are obliged to make their own luck.

The king of Denmark was in that fortunate position. When he laid siege to London in 994, Ethelred again poured money into his purse. This was getting to be a habit. And the Danes now knew that England was as craven as it was wealthy. That is why all their attacks were now aimed against it. The raids continued over succeeding years, until the time came when a Danish king gained the throne. Ethelred materially affected the history of England in another sense, when in 1002 he married the daughter of the count of Normandy. It was a way of securing the protection of the southeast coast but, by that union, the fate of the English became inseparable from the fate of the Normans.

In the early years of the eleventh century a storm of blood fell across England. The chroniclers write of nothing except the savagery and violence of the Viking raiders, of monasteries ransacked and towns put to the torch. In the same year as his marriage Ethelred ordered a general massacre of the Danes in England in retaliation for the attacks; it was said at the time of the slaughter that ‘every parish can kill its own fleas’. Ten years later the archbishop of Canterbury was murdered by a Danish force, and became one of the first martyrs of the English Church.

In 1013 the king of Denmark, Swein Forkbeard, deemed that England was on the point of chaos and collapse. The various shires were in disarray, with their leaders unable to agree on a coherent strategy. Ethelred himself seemed to waver between paying and killing the enemy. One English bishop, Wulfstan, who called himself ‘Lupus’ or the Wolf, delivered a sermon to the nation in which he declared that ‘soldiers, famine, flames, and effusion of blood, abound on every side. Theft and murder, pestilence, disease, calumny, hatred, and rapine, dreadfully afflict us.’ It was the punishment of God on a sinful people. The nobles had squandered their strength in luxury.

So Swein Forkbeard sailed with his son, Canute, in a great fleet. They came in splendour, their ships ornamented with gold and silver, their shields brightly burnished; when the sun shone on them, the eyes of the spectators were dazzled. Admiration, and dread, were mingled. All the people of the Danelaw submitted to him, and Ethelred fled to the protection of the walls of London before taking refuge in Normandy. He came back to England, on the death of Swein, but the young Canute proved too much for him and his sons. On their prone bodies Canute climbed to the throne in 1016. With the death of Ethelred and of the son who succeeded him, Edmund Ironside, the long lineage of the early English kings came to an end. The descendants of Alfred, the sons of Woden, had ruled the country for 145 years. Not one of them was ever proclaimed to be a tyrant.

The first acts of King Canute were bloody indeed. He slaughtered the leading nobles of England, together with their children, so that his own sons could retain their dominion. When he took hostages, he often mutilated them before releasing them. He was as cunning as he was cruel; power often uses piety for its own deep purposes and, after his conversion to Christianity, he gave unstintingly to churches. When he entered the great monasteries, according to a chronicler, his eyes were fixed on the ground and he overflowed with ‘a true river of tears’. The tears were not idle ones. He needed the English Church as a way of maintaining his spiritual authority as a legitimate king. He also strengthened an already strong position by marrying Ethelred’s widow, Emma from Normandy. But he had acquired a country that had suffered almost continual warfare and raiding for more than thirty years, and the universal call was for peace at any price. The price was vast. Canute exacted more than £82,000 from the shires of England in order to pay off his army.

Then he began to set his kingdom in order. He divided the country into four military districts, and scattered his chosen men – his housecarls – over the shires in place of the English thegns. The English were once more a subject race. Canute was now a great emperor in his own right. He claimed to be the overlord of Scotland, of Ireland and of Wales. One of the Scottish nobles who paid homage to him was Maelbeath, better known to posterity as Macbeth. Canute was also lord of Denmark and of Norway, thus forming a Scandinavian empire of which England was a part. He married his daughter to the German emperor, whose coronation he had attended in Rome. He was known as Canute the Great, but he knew where his greatness ended. The setting for the story of the king failing to command the waves was the bank of the tidal Thames at Westminster, where his palace was situated. He died in the winter of 1035, and it is believed that his bones still lie buried somewhere within Winchester Cathedral.

The reigns of Canute’s two sons, Harold Harefoot and Harthacanute, were short and inglorious, reinforcing the perception that the sons of a powerful father are often weak and insecure. Harthacanute was half a Canute. He and his brother serve only as a prelude to the longer rule of Edward, known as ‘the Confessor’. The new sovereign was the son of Ethelred and Emma; he was therefore part English and part Norman. He was related to King Egbert of Wessex, grandfather of Alfred, but he was also a Viking; the Normans had once been Viking settlers.

In any case his real sympathies lay with the duchy of Normandy, in which he had lived for twenty-eight years. He arrived in London with a Norman escort, thus marking the true beginning of the Norman invasion. Within a few years of his coronation on Easter Day 1043, three Norman clerics were given English bishoprics, and Edward also planted a number of foreign magnates on English soil; they followed their native tradition and built castles rather than halls. The new king granted the Sussex ports to Fe´camp Abbey, situated on the coast of Normandy, and gave the merchants of Rouen their own London port at Dowgate. The first act of the eleventh-century drama had begun. The invasion of 1066 was the end of a long process.

The earls of England, however, the powerful magnates who controlled the shires, were instinctively hostile to the Norman interlopers. Among their number were Godwin, earl of Wessex, and Leofric, earl of Mercia; Godwin was married to a Danish noblewoman, while Leofric had been connected by marriage to the wife of Canute. The Danes and the English were close to becoming one people. It is a pertinent fact that the Danes fought alongside the English at the battle of Hastings.

The two earls have long passed from memory but, curiously enough, the wife of Leofric survives in legend. Lady Godgifu is better known as Lady Godiva; her ride through the marketplace of Coventry, naked but with her long hair covering her honour, has become one of the most famous of English stories. She essayed the journey on condition that her husband alleviated the taxes of the citizens. It was also said that she commanded all windows to be closed and covered, so that she would be heard but not seen; one person disobeyed the rule, and he became known ever afterwards as ‘peeping Tom’. So another phrase has entered the vocabulary. There is no truth in the legend, of course, except for the fact that Godiva was indeed ‘lady of Coventry’ in the eleventh century. Almost a thousand years later, the ‘black eagle’ of Leofric is still part of the city’s coat of arms.

If the earls of England were hostile to the Normans in their midst, they were also averse to war and disorder. When Godwin of Wessex led an insurgency against Edward, the other magnates joined forces with the king and obliged Godwin to flee to Bruges. The leaders of the nation feared open civil war, and they also feared another Viking invasion. That is why they would not fight one another. This bond of shared loyalty helped to stabilize the realm, and to ensure Edward’s survival. When Godwin died his son, Harold, took the earldom of Wessex; he would become one of England’s most short-lived kings.

As a monarch Edward the Confessor made singularly little impression on the English chroniclers. He also made hardly any impression at all upon the course of English life. Of his character and nature, very little is known. The fact that he survived at all in such a ruthless and violent society suggests that he possessed shrewdness as well as resilience. He was called ‘the Confessor’ because he was deemed to have borne witness to the efficacy of the Christian faith, but in life he was not a particularly pious king. In one eulogistic poem he is described as ‘claene and milde’: he was ‘claene’ because he was not licentious, and he had no child; he was ‘milde’ because he was merciful. But he was not devout. His grants to the abbeys and monasteries were no more than what was expected. He showed no particular talent for diplomacy or administration. He had no grand plan; he worked by hazard and necessity, responding to each crisis in a measured manner. He had no principles other than those of self-interest and survival. Chance, and fortune, were his mentors. In this he was not unlike any other English king. It is perhaps the most important lesson of the nation’s history.

With his death the life of England passes to a new stage. In the period from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, the identity of the nation was formed. Edward the Confessor had been rex Anglorum, ‘king of the English’, and his people were the anglica gens; he controlled Anglorum exercitus, ‘the army of the English’, and anglicanum regnum, ‘the kingdom of the English’. In this period, too, the fundamental components of the English state – the shire, the hundred and the tithing – were complete. England was unique and distinctive in its possession of a strong state. English law was propounded and drawn up in elaborate codes, with laws on property and inheritance that remained fundamentally unaltered for many hundreds of years. The art and literature of the period, including Beowulf (tentatively dated to the eighth century) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (early eighth century), have become part of the English heritage. Most importantly, the customs of the land were maintained and its traditions were preserved. The essential continuities of the English nation were passed on.

To whom did Edward leave his crown? The question has never been satisfactorily resolved. It is reported that on his deathbed he pronounced Harold, son of Godwin, as his successor. Harold was not in fact the rightful heir; that honour was held by the king’s great-nephew, Edgar Atheling, who was only fourteen years old. In turn William, duke of Normandy, claimed that Edward had offered him the crown and that Harold had sworn on the relics of the saints to submit to William. Since history is written by the victor, that account became generally accepted. It is likely to be completely untrue.

In any case Harold believed himself to have the greater claim, even though he was not part of any royal dynasty. He was the senior earl in the country, earl of East Anglia and earl of Wessex, possessed of vast estates and a great fortune. He was brother-in-law to the dead monarch and in Edward’s lifetime he was deemed to be a sub-regulus or ‘under-king’. The chroniclers report that he was of a free and open nature, and his own acts prove that he was skilful and brave in matters of war. With his brother, Tostig, he subdued Wales in 1063. So on 6 January 1066, the day of Edward’s burial, Harold was crowned as king of the English; it was the first coronation in the newly consecrated Westminster Abbey. Yet this happy precedent did not necessarily augur well. His reign, lasting nine months and nine days, was one of the shortest in English history.

Two threats were raised against his kingdom. One came from the Scandinavian kings of northern Europe, eager to restore Canute’s empire, and the other now came from Normandy, where Duke William seems to have felt himself slighted or humiliated by the choice of Harold as king. It is alleged that, on hearing the news, he was much agitated. He could not sit still. He raged. He was driven by greed and desire for power.

William was a child of violence and of adversity. In his earlier years he was known as William the Bastard, being the illegitimate child of his father’s relationship with the daughter of a tanner. He himself said that ‘I was schooled in war since childhood’, when he succeeded to the duchy at the age of seven or eight. He came to power in a region that was noted for private feud and vendetta with ensuing public disorder. But by force of character he subdued his enemies. He won his first victory on the battlefield at the age of nineteen, and reduced the neighbouring regions of Maine and Brittany to feudal dependency. He was a man of formidable power and ruthlessness, greedy for lands and for money. But he had one great gift; he had the power of command and was able to bend men to his will. If they refused to be persuaded, he broke them.

That is why he was able to recreate the Norman state in his own image. It was still essentially a Norse state, fashioned from the early tenth century when Norwegian invaders forced their way into the territory and were allowed to settle there. The Normans were indeed the North men. They were part of a warrior aristocracy, their culture and society far less sophisticated than those of England. But they were learned in the new arts of war, which the English armies had not yet mastered. Duke William took the disparate regions of his duchy and, through a potent mixture of bellicosity and cunning, forged them into a centralized state under his leadership. He is a pre-eminent example of the ‘strong man’, the maker of the state, who emerges in all periods of the world’s history. He was 5 feet and 10 inches in height (1.7 metres), corpulent by middle age, with a harsh and rough voice. He had enormous strength and physical stamina. It was said that he could bend on horseback the bow that other men could not even bend on foot.