Fifty Things You Need to Know About British History

Hugh Williams

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chronology

PART 1 Roots: The Origins of Britain

Introduction

1 Stonehenge 3100 to 2200 BC

2 The Roman Invasion of Britain 43 AD

3 Saint Augustine Arrives in Britain 597 AD

4 Alfred the Great Becomes King of Wessex 871 AD

5 The Battle of Hastings 1066

6 The Dissolution of the Monasteries 1536

7 The Birth of William Shakespeare 1564

8 The Act of Union 1707

9 The Irish Home Rule Bill 1886

10 Britain Signs the Treaty of Rome 1973

PART 2 Struggle: The Battles for Britain

Introduction

1 The Battle of Agincourt 1415

2 The Battle of Bosworth 1485

3 The Spanish Armada 1588

4 The Battle of Naseby 1645

5 The Battle of Blenheim 1704

6 The Battle of Trafalgar 1805

7 The Battle of Waterloo 1815

8 The Battle of the Somme 1916

9 The Battle of Britain 1940

10 The Battle of Goose Green 1982

PART 3 The Sea: Britain at Home and Abroad

Introduction

1 Sir Francis Drake and the Circumnavigation of the Globe 1577–1580

2 The Voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers 1620

3 The South Sea Bubble 1711–1720

4 The Battle of Plassey 1757

5 The Surrender of the British Army at Yorktown, Virginia 1781

6 The Abolition of Slavery 1833

7 The Afghanistan Massacre 1842

8 The Discovery of the Victoria Falls by David Livingstone 1855

9 The Partition of India 1947

10 The Arrival of the ss Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks 1948

PART 4 Freedom: The Pursuit of Liberty

Introduction

1 Magna Carta 1215

2 The Peasants’ Revolt 1381

3 The Gunpowder Plot 1605

4 The Execution of Charles I 1649

5 The Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights 1688–1689

6 Sir Robert Walpole Becomes Prime Minister 1721

7 The Publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations 1776

8 The Great Reform Act 1832

9 The Foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903

10 The Creation of the National Health Service 1948 305

PART 5 Ingenuity: Britain’s Innovations

Introduction

1 Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales 1387

2 The Authorised Version of the Bible 1611

3 The Foundation of the Bank of England 1694

4 The Longitude Act 1714

5 James Watt Patents His Steam Engine Condenser 1769

6 The Metropolitan Police Act 1829

7 The Publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species 1859

8 The Football Association Publishes ‘The Laws of Football’ 1863

9 The Foundation of the BBC 1927

10 Frank Whittle Designs the First Turbo Jet Engine 1930

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Some years ago I was browsing in a bookshop in America. I’ve always liked American bookshops; much of what they sell reveals the differences between our two countries. So it proved on this occasion. On the history shelf I found a paperback called What Every American Should Know About American History by Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips. Intrigued by the title, I bought it.

It turned out to be an intelligent and very readable canter through American history from the days of Viking exploration to the end of the Cold War. In all it covered 200 significant events, outlining the principal facts relating to each one. Enjoyable, unpretentious and above all, simple, it presented – in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way – the story of the most powerful nation on earth. I enjoyed it immensely and felt my knowledge of American history had improved effortlessly. I also felt something else rather less heart-warming.

This book, I thought, could never be published in Britain. It was far too simplistic for all those sophisticated people who banged on about the Empire in a vague, unsympathetic way, or wrote off the whole of nineteenth-century Britain as a smoke-enveloped slum of exploitation and capitalist greed.

Disraeli once said that his wife could never remember which came first – the Greeks or the Romans. Lots of people I met didn’t know whether Henry VIII came before or after Charles I; they couldn’t put the battles of Bannockburn, Bosworth and Blenheim in a historical order; and they hadn’t a clue about events of such fundamental importance to their country as the Glorious Revolution or the Great Reform Bill. They were all happy, well-connected, successful people, and these holes in their knowledge had not hampered their lives in any palpable way. Or had they? Wasn’t that the whole point? In Britain, lack of knowledge of the country’s past was becoming a badge of honour. All that mattered was now: look forward, never back. These people, I thought, would laugh at my American history book. They would dismiss it as an oddity, a typically American piece of patriotic fluff – quite unsuitable for the more refined British way of life. I kept the book by my bed and my thoughts to myself.

I also began work on my idea. As a television executive with experience in factual programmes including current affairs, history and the arts, I wanted to find a way to transfer the approach to history I’d found in that American book into a television series and a book about British history. They would have to run counter to current ingrained social attitudes. They would have more to do with the sort of history I read as a child – G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, or G. M. Young’s Portrait of an Age – than the empathetic, judgemental, why-was-everyone-so beastly? school of history that seemed to be the preferred method of teaching it today. History should be straightforward, uncluttered and exciting. Above all, it should tell stories. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the way to do this was to try to refine British history into a series of key events and explain the linkage between them. In this way I would be able to select the most interesting and exciting stories and put them into context, creating a framework so the readers and viewers would not only learn the details of a particular event, but also understand how it slotted into the progress of British history as a whole.

The idea was called ‘Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History’. Its moment has now arrived. Why?

There are two main reasons. The first is the growing realisation among many academics and politicians that the way we have been teaching history in our schools is wrong. By moving away from narrative – the broad sweep of history – to concentrating on isolated episodes we have educated a whole generation who may know quite a lot about, say, Oliver Cromwell and the Battle of the Somme, but pretty much zero about everything that happened in between. That’s not history.

Some distinguished historians have joined the debate about the way history is being taught in our schools. Simon Schama – no newcomer to television himself – argues for what he calls ‘the three Cs’: ‘comprehensive chronological continuity’. Tristram Hunt, a Cambridge academic who presented a television series on the English Civil War says: ‘What children need to learn first is a clear narrative. I’m all for empathy, but they can do that later.’ Schama agrees: ‘If empathy means weepily identifying with victims, it can be sentimental mush. The ability to put oneself in someone’s shoes requires a lot of knowledge.’

The second, and perhaps more important reason, is the growing recognition that a proper knowledge of your country’s history is an essential part of being a good citizen. Understanding a country’s past helps to identify its strengths. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a speech in 2007, said ‘Britain has a unique history.’ British values have ‘emerged from the long tidal flows of British history – from the 2,000 years of successive waves of invasion, immigration, assimilation and trading partnerships’. There is, he went on, ‘a golden thread that runs through British history’ from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights of 1689 to the democratic reform acts of the nineteenth century. Knowing about these things builds a sense of being British, which ‘helps unite and unify us’.

In other words, a knowledge of history is a badge of citizenship. Just as you would not call yourself a fan of a football club without knowing the history of its successes and defeats; or join a social club without knowing its rules, so you cannot call yourself a citizen without knowing how the country in which you live came to exist as it does today. If you have nothing to look back on, nothing to feel proud about, nothing to provide you with the understanding of where you came from and why, the present and the future stand without foundation and are therefore more prone to collapse. Human life is part of a continuum, not a vacuum. That’s why our history is important.

At the same time, the idea of history continues to be very popular. Through watching television documentaries and historical dramas and by visiting famous landmarks many people begin to understand, and enjoy, aspects of history that were probably denied to them before. But it can also remain elusive. It may be around us everywhere all the time, but how it fits together is often much more difficult to grasp. Unless you’ve been lucky enough to be well taught, history can appear rather overwhelming – a dense mass of facts and dates that coalesce into an impenetrable fog. And nobody wants to set out into a fog if they can help it.

And so I have set out to provide a path through that fog. This book describes fifty key events in British history which, linked together, form an overview of our history. Those fifty events divide into five thematic chapters:

1 ‘Roots: The Origins of Britain’ describes where the British came from.

2 ‘Struggle: The Battles for Britain’ recounts some of Britain’s greatest conflicts.

3 ‘The Sea: Britain at Home and Abroad’ tells the story of the growth of the British Empire.

4 ‘Freedom: The Pursuit of Liberty’ is about the fight for individual freedom and the development of British democracy.

5 ‘Ingenuity: Britain’s Innovations’ lists some of the nation’s most important scientific, cultural and social changes.

So why choose these fifty things in particular? The events in this book are not the only fifty things you need to know about British history. They are what I, and the producers of the television series, think are fifty of the most important things. Some people will say that we should have excluded some and included others. That’s fine: history is not a perfect science and the differing judgements of individuals are just one of the things that make it interesting. ‘History,’ as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said, ‘is too subtle a process to be firmly seized or summarily decided.’

This book is meant for everyone who is interested in history but is frightened of the fog. The ‘Fifty Things’ it describes will, I hope, provide a clear picture of the most important events in British history and how they fit together to create the nation we live in today.

Chronology

3100–2200 BC | Stonehenge
43 AD | The Roman invasion of Britain
597 | Saint Augustine Arrives in Britain
871 | Alfred the Great Becomes King of Wessex
1066 | The Battle of Hastings
1215 | Signing of Magna Carta
1381 | The Peasants’ Revolt
1387 | Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
1415 | The Battle of Agincourt
1485 | The Battle of Bosworth
1536 | The Dissolution of the Monasteries
1564 | The Birth of William Shakespeare
1577–1580 | Sir Francis Drake and the Circumnavigation of the Globe
1588 | The Spanish Armada
1605 | The Gunpowder Plot
1611 | The Authorised Version of the Bible is published
1620 | The Voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers
1645 | The Battle of Naseby
1649 | The Execution of Charles I
1688–1689 | The Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights
1694 | The Foundation of the Bank of England
1704 | The Battle of Blenheim
1707 | The Act of Union
1711–1720 | The South Sea Bubble
1714 | The Longitude Act
1721 | Sir Robert Walpole Becomes Prime Minister
1757 | The Battle of Plassey
1769 | James Watt Patents his Steam Engine Condenser
1776 | Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is published
1781 | The Surrender of the British Army at Yorktown, Virginia
1805 | The Battle of Trafalgar
1815 | The Battle of Waterloo
1829 | The Metropolitan Police Act

1832 | The Great Reform Act
1833 | The Abolition of Slavery
1842 | The Afghanistan Massacre
1855 | The Discovery of the Victoria Falls by David Livingstone
1859 | Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is published
1863 | The Football Association publishes ‘The Laws of Football’
1886 | The Irish Home Rule Bill
1903 | The Foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union
1916 | The Battle of the Somme
1927 | The Foundation of the British Broadcasting Corporation
1930 | Frank Whittle Designs the First Turbo Jet Engine
1940 | The Battle of Britain
1947 | The Partition of India
1948 | The Arrival of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks
1948 | The Foundation of the National Health Service
1973 | Britain Signs the Treaty of Rome
1982 | The Battle of Goose Green

1

Roots

The Origins of Britain

Introduction

When I was young we used to go on holiday to Anglesey, off the coast of North Wales. Our long drive would eventually take us across the Menai Bridge, Thomas Telford’s great feat of engineering constructed between 1819 and 1826 to speed up the journey to the port of Holyhead. When it was built no suspension bridge had been designed on such a scale before. Today it is a ‘World Heritage Site’. My father was Welsh and as we drove across he would recite a Welsh poem all about it. I cannot remember who it was by – probably the poet David Owen who wrote a number of poems about Menai – but I can remember that he tried to get my brother and me to recite it too. We never managed more than a few words. The Welsh language, despite our parentage, has remained a closed book to us. But sweeping across Telford’s beautiful masterpiece high above the waters of the Menai Straits, my parents’ ancient Austin looking forward like an exhausted horse to the end of the interminable drive, I felt a bit Welsh, a bit different and rather special. I felt I had roots. I was something more than just an ordinary little London schoolboy.

Over the past thirty years people in Britain have spent a lot of time returning to their roots. The fashion for devolution with the establishment of a parliament in Scotland and an assembly in Wales, combined with the long struggle to find political stability in Northern Ireland, have affected our sense of nationhood. Which comes first – our Britishness, our Scottishness, Welshness or Englishness? Meanwhile, beyond the shores of the United Kingdom, our national interests are being absorbed into the common objectives of the European Union and constantly tempered by increasing globalisation. Outside we are hurrying to be part of a bigger world: at home, it seems, we want to be part of a smaller one. Who we are and where we come from have become increasingly important as a shrinking world seeks to suck our national identity out of us.

This chapter goes in search of who the British are and where they came from. It begins with Stonehenge, an enigmatic monument to the people who inhabited the country in its earliest times, and as good a place as any in which to invest our sense of history.

The Romans were the first people to give Britain shape. They occupied it for 400 years, but after they withdrew the order they had created collapsed into chaos. Slowly, very slowly, order began to return. It came first through the messages of the Christian missionaries, particularly Saint Augustine, who brought back the ideas of Rome, by then a Christian city, to the island which had been abandoned 200 years before. It was enlarged and developed by the Anglo-Saxon kings, the greatest of whom was Alfred the Great, King of Wessex.

Britain succumbed to invasion for the last time in 1066 when the Normans became its rulers, destroyed the Anglo-Saxon way of life and started to lay the foundations of the medieval state. The Catholic Church and the monarchy held the country in their grasp until the Reformation broke them apart. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century was one of the most important acts in a process which would see the evolution of Britain into a nation state. Shakespeare helped give that nation its tongue.

In 1707 Britain joined with Scotland, but managed its relationship with its other neighbour, Ireland, far less successfully. The failure of the Home Rule movement in the nineteenth century would have disastrous consequences for both countries in the twentieth.

Today, in the twenty-first century, Britain is a part of Europe and shares its national aspirations with twenty-seven other countries. The island which carved its identity by withdrawing from the shifts and changes of a continent in turmoil has re-entered the arena from which it came. Once again Britain is replanting its roots.

CHAPTER 1

Stonehenge

3100 to 2200 BC

The huge and ancient stone monument known as Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, is one of Britain’s oldest monuments. Its origins are uncertain. It is surrounded by myth and legend. It belongs to the beginning of Britain.

Stonehenge is an island of antiquity stranded in a twenty-first century melting pot.

If you drive east to west across southern England you may well pass Stonehenge. It stands just a few hundred yards back from the A303, one of the country’s busiest main roads taking traffic to and from the West Country. Travelling westwards you are more than likely to have time to get a good view of it because it is here that the fast dual carriageway funnels into a two-lane road and the traffic queues can be enormous. Stonehenge is an island of antiquity stranded in a twenty-first century melting pot. At this point the journey west crosses a bridge of nearly 5,000 years of history as the achievements of the most ancient rites of man stare stonily towards his most recent and most frenetic.

Stonehenge was built in different phases over many hundreds of years. To begin with, in about 3100 BC, it was a circular ditch with an internal bank and fifty-six holes around its perimeter. A few hundred years later two circles of bluestone were erected. Bluestone is not native to Wiltshire but comes from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire in West Wales. After that the bluestones were dug up and rearranged and the familiar sarsen stones brought to the site. These form Stonehenge’s most famous image of the pillars with lintels across the top. The sarsen stones came from Avebury, about 18 miles to the north. In the last phase, about 2200 BC, the bluestones were put back again to form a circle and a horseshoe inside the sarsen pillars. All these different arrangements took place over hundreds of years and leave many questions unanswered. What was Stonehenge for? Who built it? How did the bluestones get from Wales to Wiltshire? Throughout the history of Britain people have tried to answer these questions, adapting their answers to suit the age in which they live.

In the twelfth century Henry of Huntingdon wrote a history of the English people from the Roman invasion to the reign of Henry II. He described Stonehenge as one of the four wonders of Britain but declared that no one knew why it had been built, or by whom. His contemporary, Geoffrey of Monmouth, came up with a rather more colourful account. Stonehenge, he said, was constructed as a memorial to nobles who had been slain in battle by the Saxon chieftain, Hengist. He dates the origin of the monument to the time of Aurelius Ambrosius, who emerged from the chaos following the Romans’ retreat to lead Britain in its war against the Saxons. According to legend, Ambrosius was the uncle of King Arthur and having decided to build the monument sought advice from the magician Merlin. Merlin told him of a stone circle in Ireland called the giants’ dance. Ambrosius sent his men to fetch it and, with Merlin’s help, they brought it back to Wiltshire. A sacred ceremony was held at Stonehenge where Ambrosius was crowned as king of his people: myth and ritual were even then part of its story.

In the seventeenth century, James I, always interested in scholarship, asked his Surveyor-General, Inigo Jones, to carry out an investigation into the reasons why Stonehenge was built. Inigo Jones was a great architect but a somewhat naive archaeologist. His love of classical antiquity influenced the design of the magnificent buildings he built for his king in London, but they got him off on the wrong foot as far as Stonehenge was concerned. He came to the conclusion that it was a Roman temple to the god Coelus. Once again the influences of the age, rather than historical accuracy, had been used to determine the origins of this ancient monument.

Later in the seventeenth century, another study of Stonehenge began to get a bit closer to the truth. John Aubrey was an antiquarian, biographer and gossip whose book, Brief Lives, is a highly entertaining account of many of the most distinguished people of the time. He was interested in objects as much as people and recorded his observations of Stonehenge in a book about British monuments. In particular he noticed the depressions or holes around the perimeter of the original ditch, which have since been called the ‘Aubrey Holes’ in his honour. He surmised correctly that Stonehenge belonged to an early British civilisation, but in trying to locate its origins more exactly he came up with the idea that it was a Druid temple. This thought fuelled the imagination of the eighteenth century. The concept of a mysterious ruin set in a quiet landscape, its eerie history of ceremony and sacrifice blending with the force of nature played perfectly into the romantic ideas of the time. Stonehenge obligingly fell in with fashion.

It was only in the twentieth century that Stonehenge started seriously to reveal at least a few of its secrets. Up until the end of the First World War it was privately owned. Back in the seventeenth century, when he had first seen it, James I had tried to acquire it but had been unsuccessful. In 1918 it belonged to a successful local livestock farmer and racehorse owner, Cecil Chubb, who had bought it on a whim for £6,600 three years earlier. He gave it to the nation and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, made him a baronet as a token of thanks. After that, the monument began to be subjected to serious examination over an extended period of time. It became the responsibility of the Ministry of Works which, worried that the property it had inherited might be unsafe because of falling stones, asked an archaeologist, William Hawley, to carry out an extensive excavation. He would be the first person to take a prolonged look at Stonehenge for many years. He replaced stones that had fallen down and secured others that were in danger of toppling over. He found human remains which indicated that the monument might have been used as a site for funerals. Most importantly, he was the first person to realise that Stonehenge was not just one monument, but the result of different activity by different groups of people over many hundreds of years. In the 1950s and early 1960s, as further research revealed how Stonehenge probably looked when it was first built, other stones were put back in their original positions. The monument we see today is therefore to a certain extent a work of restoration. Previous ages had allowed it to suffer at the mercy of time and weather, leaving it to exist as a ruin in almost any form. It is only the meticulous knowledge of our own time that has let us see it as the early people who built it in the first place might have done.

With the work of restoration distinguished scientists, as well as archaeologists and historians, have turned their attention to Stonehenge. A theory developed that the monument was placed where it was as a temple to the sun and that the individual pillars and stones could predict eclipses of the sun and the moon. Computer science was used to try to substantiate this theory and other monuments were analysed to see whether they had similar characteristics. It established that there was every reason to believe that Stonehenge and other ancient places in Britain had astronomical connections and could have been used to interpret and predict the movement of the heavens. More extravagant theories have grown up alongside these purely scientific conclusions. Some people believe that ley lines connect places such as Stonehenge with other sites in Britain, emitting psychic or mystical energy. Their magical powers are part of an old religion that in a free and tolerant world can now be reborn to celebrate its rituals in the temples from which it was driven long ago. The earliest emblem of Britain’s past still has a place in the life of the country today.

None of this of course provides final answers to the questions that still surround Stonehenge. It seems incredible, for instance, that the early inhabitants of Britain transported heavy bluestones – some of them weighing as much as 4 or 5 tons each – from Wales to Wiltshire. In 2001, a group of enthusiastic volunteers tried to see whether such a feat might be possible and, with £100,000 of lottery money behind them, constructed a replica of a Bronze Age raft with a piece of bluestone as cargo. It ended up at the bottom of the sea. A more prosaic explanation could be that the movements of glaciers carried the stones from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain, but that will not prevent the invention of other notions about the origins of Stonehenge. In March 2008 archaeologists returned to the site to begin important new excavations. Their work was organised and funded by the BBC for a television programme and they were hoping to prove that ancient man transported the bluestones from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain because of their healing properties. The archaeologists broke through to a layer which once held smaller bluestones and unearthed fragments of pottery and artefacts. Stonehenge, they said, could have been a ‘Neolithic Lourdes’. Britain’s most ancient monument once again captured the spirit of the age as television went in search of its secrets.

At Stonehenge, ancient and modern will always coalesce. It belongs to a time when the evidence of history is nothing more than a silent landscape and a few fragmentary relics beneath our feet. We know very little about it or the people who built it, but its deep, forgotten past is where our history begins.

CHAPTER 2

The Roman Invasion of Britain

43 AD

In 43 AD, Roman forces under the command of the Emperor Claudius invaded Britain and began what became a complete conquest of the country. Britain remained a province of the Roman Empire for nearly 400 years.

In his famous novel, I, Claudius, Robert Graves gives us a striking picture of the Emperor who conquered Britain. Hidden from public view by a family ashamed of his stammer and slobbering, he is dragged from hiding by the assassins who have murdered his predecessor, the mad Caligula. They make him Emperor, confident they can control him. What they do not realise is that Claudius’s behaviour is the result of illness, not foolishness: he will make a better Emperor than they think.

Graves’s portrait is based on the writings of the Roman historian, Suetonius, who described the activities of the first twelve Roman Emperors in often lurid detail. According to him, corruption, a thirst for power and lust seemed to be the principal characteristics of the men who ruled half the world. Their policies, if they deserve such a description, were designed to keep them in power by appeasing the people. The conquest of Britain fell into this category. It began because a new Emperor needed to consolidate his position: 400 years of Roman Britain started in order to give Claudius the adulation he needed from the citizens of Rome.

Claudius was not the first Roman leader to cross the Channel in an attempt to incorporate Britain into Rome’s vast foreign conquests. In 55 and 54 BC Julius Caesar, then master of all of Gaul, decided to invade. His first expedition was on quite a small scale, but his second was much larger. In 54 BC he landed with five legions (about 25,000 men) and 2,000 cavalrymen somewhere near Deal on the Kent coast, and throughout the summer successfully fought his way north until he crossed the Thames, probably at Brentford in Middlesex. The purpose of this expedition is unclear. Some time before the end of the summer he decided to return to Gaul. He never went back to Britain although he recorded, as he did in many places where he fought, his impressions of the people. The men dyed their bodies with blue woad, he said, which made them look very frightening in battle; they wore their hair long, but shaved everywhere else apart from on the upper lip; and they shared their wives among them. These were the people that he had invaded, subdued and left behind. It would be nearly a hundred years before the Romans returned.

Claudius, aware that his survival as Emperor would require something more substantial than his reputation as a fool, turned to Britain as the place where he could demonstrate military prowess. It also made some strategic sense. Unless brought under Roman control, the island of Britain could have proved a useful base for the Empire’s enemies to attack its possessions in Gaul. In May 43 AD, a large force of 40,000 men under the command of Aulus Plautius landed on the south coast, though not before their commander persuaded them to set sail in the first place. The soldiers did not like the idea of a journey into an unknown world. Once across the Channel, however, their campaign went well. They defeated the British chieftain, Caractacus, who fled to Wales, and by the autumn were ready to receive their Emperor so that he could enjoy his triumph. At Colchester eleven British tribal kings surrendered to Claudius, who was now able to return to Rome as warlord as well as Emperor. The Senate voted to build him a triumphal arch in recognition of his victory. The inscription on it read that he had ‘brought barbarian peoples beyond the Ocean for the first time under the rule of Rome’. The Roman occupation of Britain had begun.

The Romans took Britain very seriously, grasping possession of their new province with ferocious speed. Within seven years of Claudius’s triumph they had established a base at London, built a bridge across the Thames and begun to construct a road network throughout the south of England. Caractacus came out of Wales to confront them but was betrayed by a rival tribe and sent as a prisoner to Rome where Claudius pardoned him. Ten years later, Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni in the east of England, attacked Colchester, London and St Albans. Apparently tall with long, red hair, Boudicca, and her army of tribesmen, succeeded in terrifying the Roman invaders. In 61 AD her vast troop of footsoldiers and charioteers, their women and children watching from wagons drawn up around them, faced a much smaller Roman force. The site of the battlefield is not known, but it is believed to be in the Midlands, possibly near what is now Wroxeter in Shropshire. Roman discipline utterly defeated British size. Tens of thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by the victorious forces of the Empire and Boudicca herself died shortly afterwards, perhaps by her own hand.

By the end of the 70s AD most of England was under Roman control; however the Britons of Scotland remained unconquered. Agricola, who became Governor of Britain in 78 AD, decided to carry the fight into their territory and won a major victory at Mons Graupius near Aberdeen in 84 AD. He claimed that Scotland had been subdued, but in this he spoke prematurely.

At Mons Graupius the commander of the Britons made a speech to his troops in which, the Roman historian Tacitus tells us, he told his men that they were all loyal to one united race. The Roman troops, he cried, had no such glorious unity because they came from all over the world. His description of the Roman army’s origins was quite accurate, although he was unwise to assume that this was a military weakness. The Roman Empire was by its very nature cosmopolitan and the men who fought for it came from many different backgrounds. Aulus Plautius, Claudius’s commander, had been a provincial governor in Eastern Europe, in what is now Hungary and Austria. Suetonius Paulinus, the commander who defeated Boudicca, was the first Roman general to cross the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. Agricola, the victor at Mons Graupius – and, incidentally, Tacitus’s father-in-law – was born in southern France, in what is now Provence. The conquest of Britain was carried out by men whose home was where duty took them. Wherever they were – in the African desert, the German forest, the English fen or the Scottish mountain – they rigorously applied their abilities to the cause of imperial victory.

Apart from Claudius, two other Emperors stand out as having an important part to play in the history of Roman Britain. The first, Hadrian, became Emperor on the death of Trajan in 117 AD. He turned out to be a highly competent ruler, conscientious and interested in learning about the territories he controlled. Like many Emperors of Rome, he had to watch his back: he had enemies everywhere. He therefore undertook long visits to the furthest outposts of the Empire to meet the troops who defended it. This was a wise strategy. It inspired loyalty in men who, separated from central government by long tours of duty in remote corners of the world, could become tempted into revolt. Hadrian seems to have enjoyed these expeditions, taking satisfaction from the task of securing his Empire’s frontiers. In 122 AD he came to Britain at a time when, as far as we can tell, the northern part had been suffering from the invasion of barbarian tribes. Determined to put a stop to these – and to indulge in his love of building – the Emperor decided to construct a wall across Roman Britain’s northern frontier. Picking the narrowest neck of territory that he thought suitable for the purpose, he built a great stone defence system from the estuary of the River Tyne in the east to the shores of Solway Firth in the west. This was Hadrian’s Wall, 80 Roman miles long (73.5 in modern miles) with a small fort at one-mile intervals along the whole stretch of it. The size and shape of the wall changed as the Romans developed their thinking during its construction; most of it was completed within eight years. It was the biggest fortified frontier in the whole of the Roman Empire, a resolute emblem of its enormous power. After Hadrian died in 138 AD his successor, Antoninus Pius, who may have decided that he needed a military exploit to prove that he was not too mild-mannered, decided to reoccupy southern Scotland. He ordered his legions to move north and built another wall – the Antonine Wall – from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde. With an eye to economy he had it made out of turf. But the Pictish tribes of Scotland proved hard to subdue. When Antoninus’s successor, Marcus Aurelius, came to power the Romans retreated to behind Hadrian’s great edifice where they stayed until the time came for them to leave altogether. Marcus Aurelius is today remembered more for his writings as a stoic philosopher than as an Emperor, and in the rearrangement of Britain’s northern defences he seems to have taken a leaf out of his own book: ‘That which is not good for the bee-hive,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be good for the bees.’

The other great Roman Emperor inextricably caught up in the affairs of Britain was Constantine. In 305 AD he left the intrigues of the capital of the Empire behind to campaign with his father, Constantius, in Britain. Constantius was a Caesar, a junior emperor in charge of the northern provinces. Father and son fought against the Pictish tribes still untamed north of Hadrian’s Wall, but in 306 Constantius died at York. His troops then proclaimed his son Emperor, even though the Praetorian Guard in Rome had nominated a rival, Maxentius. Some historians believe that Constantine built the great Roman walls around York at the time of his proclamation. Whatever the truth there is no doubt that at a crucial moment in the history of the whole Roman Empire, this ancient British city became the centre from which its future sprang. From there Constantine would go on to defeat his rival outside the gates of Rome and, as one of the greatest Emperors in the last century of Roman power, tolerate the rise of Christianity, create a new capital in Constantinople and die converted to the Christian religion.

The country developed from a wild, barbarous land into a unified self-governing province – Britannia.

The impact of the Roman occupation on Britain was profound. The country developed from a wild, barbarous land inhabited by fierce tribes into a unified self-governing province – Britannia. A network of roads linked all corners of the land; a single currency created a coherent market for trade; and the refinements of Roman civilisation brought fine buildings and magnificent fortifications to the towns and cities. Latin became the language of law and education. The British adopted the customs and attitudes of their governors: many of them wore togas. British metals were taken back to the heart of the Empire to be fashioned into weapons and armour, and wine and exotic fruits made their way northwards in return. Britain developed into what it would become again – a trading nation. But no empires last forever. By the end of the fourth century AD, Britain, like the rest of Rome’s once indomitable possessions, was suffering from invasion on all sides. The Empire had finally cracked in two with an eastern half based in Constantine’s capital of Constantinople and a western part still trying desperately to cling to power in Rome. In 410 AD the last Emperor of the western Empire, Honorius, told the people of Britain that he had no legions left to defend them. Britannia, Rome’s most northerly outpost, the troublesome island that had over four centuries succumbed to its power and become one of its most precious possessions, was abandoned. The unity of Roman Britain broke apart and the country surrendered to the tribal ambitions of foreign marauders. The Dark Ages had begun.

I remember once being involved in a documentary series for the BBC with the historian, John Roberts. It was called ‘The Triumph of the West’ and in it he explained how Western ideas and values had grown to be such a dominant force throughout the world. One sequence was filmed in the Forum in Rome. Roberts talked about Charlemagne, who in the late eighth century conquered a large part of Western Europe and tried to bring some sense of order to the chaos created by the wars of its different tribes. In 800 Charlemagne entered Rome where the Pope made him Holy Roman Emperor, a title that would exist in European history for centuries afterwards. Imagine, said Roberts, what it must have been like for Charlemagne, a man who could not write but who was struggling to tame the disruption all around him, to enter the Forum Romanum – a place which he had never seen before and of which he had no conception. He must have realised that the Roman Empire, although it had been extinguished four hundred years before, created a civilisation more advanced and more sophisticated than the one in which he was living.

For Britain, as for the rest of Europe, the collapse of the Roman Empire was an extraordinary period in its history. Nearly everything it had built – its language was one exception – was eventually demolished. It would be 600 years before anything remotely comparable emerged to replace it.

CHAPTER 3

Saint Augustine Arrives in Britain

597 AD

In 597 AD Saint Augustine landed in Kent as a missionary from the Pope in Rome. At the same time Celtic missionaries were at work in Ireland, Scotland and the North of England. Britain’s beginnings as a Christian nation had begun.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is one of the greatest works in British literature. Published in six volumes over twelve years between 1776 and 1788 it surveys its subject with effortless control, its elegant prose never distracted by the mass of detail it seeks to describe. In the last chapter one short sentence stands out. Summing up his colossal narrative Gibbon wrote: ‘I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.’ In other words religion – Christianity – was for him as much a cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire as was the rise of barbarism. In the main part of the book he devoted two famous chapters to Christianity in which he displayed the sceptical attitudes of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. ‘The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity,’ he wrote; ‘the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.’ He is particularly scathing about miracles: ‘The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church.’ There is much more in the same vein. For Gibbon, Christianity sapped the strength of the Empire and so contributed to its fall.

His views were undoubtedly harsh – the barbarians would probably have sacked Rome with or without Christianity – but in today’s secular age Gibbon’s disenchantment with organised religion must still sound appealing to a lot of people. Whether or not one takes his view, the fact remains that from the start of the seventh century to the middle of the nineteenth, the history of Britain is as much about the history of religion as anything else. Today we may have abandoned Christian teaching in favour of scientific instruction, and prefer a society built on civic concepts of liberty rather than any thoughts of a duty before God, but we were not always like that. Saint Augustine’s mission ensured that Britain was eventually drawn into Europe’s Catholic Church. The Emperors might have gone, but Rome remained a powerful force in the life of Britain.

The history of Britain is as much about the history of religion as anything else.

We know very little about the development of Christianity in Britain during its early years. Rumour has it that Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave up his prepared tomb for the body of Jesus, visited Glastonbury many years after the Crucifixion, but there is no evidence for this. As Christianity developed, its organisation spread all through the provinces of the Roman Empire and by the middle of the second century AD had become established in Britain. The religion prospered as the Empire tottered. In the third century, when Rome was under threat from Asia as well as Northern Europe, Christians were able to evade prosecution as their persecutors turned their attention to more pressing matters. By the beginning of the fourth century they had strengthened sufficiently to become tolerated; by the end of it theirs was the official religion.

The British took on the role of independent thinking even at this very early stage of Christian development. A man called Pelagius, who came from Britain, began to teach a doctrine that denied the idea of Original Sin, and the bishops of Gaul became so worried about its effects that in the early fifth century they sent Saint Germanus to meet with British Christians and explain the errors of their ways. During his visit Germanus went to pay homage at the shrine of Saint Alban, a martyr who had been executed during one of the last crackdowns on Christianity in the middle of the third or possibly at the beginning of the fourth century.

Before Augustine reached Britain, Celtic missionaries had begun their work, starting in Ireland, which was never part of the Roman Empire. Saint Patrick, who in his youth had been captured by raiders and taken to Ireland as a slave, seems to have carried out missions around the early part or middle of the fifth century. Much later Saint Columba travelled from Ireland to Scotland, and had founded the monastery on the Western Isle of Iona by the time Saint Augustine arrived in Kent. Christianity had successfully survived the Roman withdrawal and was continuing its work among the people of Britain. Up until the end of the sixth century, however, this work had been concentrated in Celtic areas, among the people who had previously fled west and north when German and Scandinavian tribes invaded in the wake of the Romans’ departure. It had not yet penetrated the lives of these new arrivals who were masters of Britain’s central areas. The decision to try to convert them was the most important in the whole history of Christianity in Britain.

The man responsible for Augustine’s mission was Pope Gregory. The story goes that some years before, while still an abbot, he was walking in the Forum when he saw some English slave boys for sale. Intrigued by their blond hair he asked the slave owner where they came from. ‘They are Angles,’ he was told. ‘Not Angles, but angels,’ he is reported to have replied, ‘and should be co-heirs with the angels in heaven.’ On becoming Pontiff Gregory, remembering the Saxon children he had seen in the Forum, he decided to put into action a plan to convert them and chose Augustine for the task. Augustine collected a group of monks to help him and set off. They travelled from Rome, through southern France, and stopped to rest at a monastery on the island off Lérins of the coast of Provence. Here in the pleasant surroundings of the Mediterranean they began to hear frightening stories of the dangers of travelling through Gaul, as well as being treated to tales of the Saxons and their murderous ways in the untamed country to the north. They asked Gregory if they could come home, but the Pope refused. ‘It is better not to begin a good work at all, than to begin it and then turn back,’ he told them in a letter. Suitably reprimanded, the little band pressed on. They travelled up the Rhône valley, spent the winter in Paris and in 597 AD crossed the Channel landing at Thanet in Kent. Their whole expedition had been carefully planned. They chose Kent because its king, Ethelbert, whose territory extended as far north as the Humber, was married to a Christian.

The mission was a great success. Ethelbert was converted and by December of that year over 10,000 of his people had been baptised. The missionaries found the ruins of an old Romano-British church in Canterbury which they rebuilt. By the end of the seventh century it had become the spiritual headquarters of the leader of the Christian Church in England – and remains so to this day. Pope Gregory sent Augustine reinforcements from Rome and with them letters explaining how he saw Christianity spreading through the country. He laid out in considerable detail the future organisation of the Church, recommending that the country be split into two halves, north and south, as it had been in Roman times, with the northern section based in York. Augustine failed to complete this part of his task, mainly because the Celtic bishops refused to cooperate with him. Augustine had been less than tactful in his second important meeting with the Celts, refusing to rise from his chair when they approached him. They were naturally suspicious of him and his Roman ways: this sort of behaviour convinced them that he was not to be trusted. The Christian religion had its divisions then as now. But the planning and care with which Augustine approached his task ensured that Roman ideas prospered, and eventually triumphed, in the way in which the English Church was organised. Pope Gregory was a wise guide. He knew how easy it was to lose people after they had been converted: they needed your constant attention. He urged Augustine not to abandon the old pagan rituals completely, but to incorporate them into new forms of worship. The heathen midwinter solstice, for instance, was slotted in to coincide with the birth of Christ. Old temples were consecrated as new churches, and Christianity embraced rather than uprooted the practices it intended to replace.

Early in the sixth century, long before Pope Gregory planned Augustine’s mission to England, a monk called Saint Benedict wrote a rule book for the monastic life. He described a monastery as ‘a school for the Lord’s service’, and set out the qualities a monk needed to have. ‘Idleness,’ he said, ‘is the enemy of the soul.’ Work, obedience and humility were essential to a life of devotion. Monks should own nothing and share everything. Saint Benedict told them what they should eat, what they should drink, what they should wear and when they should worship. His book became the basis upon which monasteries all over Western Europe were run: the discipline of the early Christian monks made them a powerful force capable not only of putting down deep roots in a single place, but also going out into the world as the persuasive agents of conversion. In Britain the growth of monasteries proved to be an important part of the country’s submission to the Christian message. Lindisfarne, founded by Saint Aidan in 635, became the centre for wresting Northumbria – which in those days made up the whole of the North of England – from pagan worship.

The date of Augustine’s death is not known but he seems to have died very early in the seventh century, probably around 604 AD. The English Church prospered but arguments continued about the proper days for feasts and important celebrations. In 664 AD the King of Northumbria, Oswy, called a synod at the abbey in Whitby to resolve the disputes between the Celtic and Roman Churches. The southern kingdoms of Wessex, Kent and Essex were following ritual according to the teachings of Rome, but the north preferred the Celtic way that had been taught them by Saint Columba and his missionaries from Iona. Oswy, influenced as much by a desire to form political alliances with his fellow princes in the south as he was by religious convictions, listened to the debate and pronounced in favour of Rome. ‘Peter is the guardian of the gates of Heaven, and I shall not contradict him,’ he is supposed to have said and, mindful of his own salvation, added: ‘otherwise, when I come to the gates of Heaven, he who holds the keys may not be willing to open them.’ All bishops and monasteries were brought under the authority of the Archbishop in Canterbury where Saint Augustine had built his church nearly seventy years before. The mission sent from Rome had finally triumphed and the long, troubled history of the Catholic Church in Britain had begun.

CHAPTER 4

Alfred the Great Becomes King of Wessex

871 AD

Alfred the Great was the most important Anglo-Saxon king to rule in Britain between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman invasion of 1066. By protecting his kingdom against conquest by the Vikings, he ensured the survival of the English language and English laws.

‘Rule Britannia!’ is one of Britain’s favourite patriotic songs. Even those who find its expressions of national superiority a little hard to take can find themselves jolted into acquiescence when it is belted out with gusto at events like the Last Night of the Proms. It has been a hit ever since it was first performed in the grounds of Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire in 1740 where it was the last, rousing number in a masque composed by Thomas Arne for the daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The masque tells the story of a wise, brave king who has fled from his enemies to live anonymously in exile among his people. He is visited by a spirit who tells him not to despair. He rallies, rounds up his troops and leads them to victory. The plot ends as the King’s son announces that British values have triumphed – ‘See liberty, virtue and honour appearing’ – and then comes the song that tells us ‘Britons never will be slaves.’ The masque is called Alfred.

Alfred was a good subject for Thomas Arne’s entertainment. The Prince of Wales was the centre of opposition to the King’s prime minister, Robert Walpole. He and his followers called themselves ‘patriots’ – so it suited their purposes to make a connection between their beliefs and those of Alfred, the patriot king who had saved his country from the tyranny of the Viking invaders. In the early eighteenth century, Alfred came to be seen as the perfect representation of British liberty and justice. The gardens at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, one of the great ornaments of the English landscape, contain a ‘Temple of British Worthies’ designed in 1734 by William Kent in which King Alfred is described as the ‘mildest, justest, most beneficient of kings’. He ‘crush’d corruption, guarded liberty and was the founder of the English constitution’. He is the only king in British history to be called ‘Great’. He looms out of the Dark Ages like a beacon of safety. He is seen as an image of courage and common sense around which the British can build the continuity of their history. Without Alfred all might have been lost. He is the link to our true past.

By the beginning of the ninth century Britain was broadly divided into the Celtic areas of Wales, Scotland and Cornwall and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. The highly successful King of Mercia, Offa, who ruled in the second half of the eighth century, had built a fortification along the length of his boundary with the Celtic tribes to the west. Offa’s Dyke effectively created the outline of the country which has been known as Wales ever since. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had emerged through battle and conquest between rival warlords. Since the middle of the seventh century they had fallen under the command of the Roman Church and their monks and clergy held enormous power. The Church was divided into parishes which supervised the needs of the people in their immediate vicinity. The abbots and monks could read and write, but many of the people to whom they preached could not. The clergy became the administrators of many aspects of everyday life, making wills and apportioning land. Superstitious kings, anxious to save their souls, were often only too happy to grant estates to the abbeys and monasteries that were growing up everywhere, and the Church was equally happy to benefit from this need for spiritual insurance. Already the very early signs of feudal society were beginning to emerge, a world in which each man had his place and was expected to keep to it. The Anglo-Saxons were farmers and woodsmen. They lived in clusters in small townships or in groups alone in the forest. They were suspicious of each other and did not take kindly to strangers. Then, into this quiet, inward-looking, agricultural world came the Vikings.

The Vikings were seafarers: the Anglo-Saxons were landsmen. Towards the end of the eighth century and into the beginning of the ninth, Viking sailors began to cross the North Sea from Denmark and Norway to loot monasteries and churches positioned on the British coast. Throughout the ninth century the Vikings fanned out all over Europe in search of treasure to steal and land to conquer and some went further afield, across the Atlantic to the coast of North America. The British invasions came mainly from Denmark. Great armies of Danes, different bands of warriors who had agreed to unite behind a single leader for the purpose of carrying out a raid, landed on the shores of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. Their numbers grew as they learned more about the prizes Britain had to offer. By the end of the ninth century they had created ‘Danelaw’, the rule of Vikings over Anglo-Saxons, across the whole of Northumbria, Mercia and most of Wessex. Only the western end of Wessex, Somerset and Devon, the furthest point in England from their Danish base, had not yet fallen under Viking control.

Alfred became King of Wessex in 871. He had the foresight to get a friend and confidant of his, Bishop Asser, to write his biography and much of what we know about him comes from this. His four elder brothers, three of whom had served as Kings of Wessex for a brief period of time, had died, perhaps killed in fights against the Danes. He was only twenty-one when he succeeded to the throne but experience of fighting the Vikings meant that he was an ideal choice to take over. He was not in good health and his natural temperament seems to have been for scholarship rather than war. He was a devout Christian.

In 878 the Danes mounted a surprise attack. Alfred was nearly captured and had to retreat into the Somerset marshes. The apocryphal story of his burning the cakes probably stems from this period: the lonely, troubled King so lost in thought while he shelters amidst his people that he forgets to watch the cakes before the fire as the farmer’s wife has told him. We have no evidence for this incident. What we do know is that this was a time of crisis for him. ‘King Alfred, with a few of his nobles and some knights and men of his household, was in great distress leading an unquiet life in the woods and marshes of Somerset,’ Bishop Asser tells us. ‘He had no means of support except what he took in frequent raids by stealth or openly from the pagans, or indeed from Christians who had submitted to pagan rule.’ From this position he managed to regroup and defeat the Danish leader, Guthrum, at Edington in Wiltshire. This decisive victory led to the Treaty of Wedmore in 878 in which Guthrum agreed to be baptised and to withdraw to behind the lines of existing Danelaw, leaving Wessex free. Alfred consolidated this victory eight years later when he recaptured London from the Vikings, and succeeded in beating them off when they attacked again in the mid-890s AD. This was a heroic achievement. The wars against the Vikings had left the Saxons demoralised and recalcitrant. They often resented royal orders and sometimes deserted to the other side. Alfred must have displayed impressive qualities of leadership to maintain an army capable of defeating the Danes. He knew he had no choice: it was the Vikings’ custom to kill the leaders of the forces they defeated in battle.

Alfred’s victory against Guthrum temporarily preserved the Anglo-Saxon tradition in a foreign world, but it might not have lasted had the victorious King not then demonstrated that he was as good a governor as he was a general. He ruled Wessex for another twenty-one years after the Treaty of Wedmore, a period in which he set about trying to improve the standards of education at his court. He recruited scholars from across the Channel where, following the civilising efforts of Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century, standards of literacy were higher. He was determined to resist the encroachments of the pagan Vikings and encouraged his clergy to improve both their teachings and writings. Most significantly he translated books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon, including Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also introduced the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the first record of historical events to be written in English.

Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come.

He also turned to the administration of his kingdom laying out laws, as other Anglo-Saxon kings had done, in his Doom Book. He wanted to protect weaker members of his disheartened country pronouncing: ‘Any judgement should be even, not one judgement for the wealthy and another for the poor.’ He provided a structure for rents and taxes, regulating how much people had to pay and to whom. He also introduced a system of fines – wergild – the money to be paid by those who committed crimes. Women enjoyed greater rights in Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon world than they would for many years to come under other rulers of Britain. They could own land in their own name; there was no natural right for a first-born son to inherit; no woman could be sold or forced into marriage; and wives were entitled to divorce their husbands.

Alongside all of this Alfred strengthened his country’s defences, copying the earthwork forts which the Danish used very successfully. He built a strong administrative system and, aware of how vulnerable his kingdom had been from attacks from the sea, created a fleet. Taken together these things gave his people a primitive nationhood. Alfred knew they needed an army for protection, and laws for their administration, but he also realised that these on their own would not be enough to keep them safe forever. To survive Wessex needed things that it believed in, that were worth fighting for. Alfred wanted his people to understand the value of their own history and the importance of their Christian learning. The importance of their past was their best defence against the uncertainties of their future. The little nation of Wessex was an embryo from which grew ideas and methods which would heavily influence the future course of British history.

In 1693 an Anglo-Saxon jewel was found in Somerset, not far from Athelney where Alfred hid before his successful counterattack against the Danes. It is made of gold and enamel and covered with a piece of rock crystal. The purpose of the jewel is unclear, but some believe it to be an aestel, a book pointer, which Alfred intended to send to his bishops with his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Another theory is that it might have been a symbol of office for Alfred himself, or for one of his officials. The face of the jewel has a figure on it which may be Christ representing the incarnate ‘Wisdom of God’, or possibly the spirit of Sight. Whatever its use might have been, it is a beautiful relic from a time more than eleven hundred years ago when the Anglo-Saxon people of England faced the possibility of virtual extermination at the hands of a savage enemy. The jewel, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, bears the inscription, in Anglo-Saxon: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’

Alfred died at the age of about fifty in 899 AD. In the biography that he commissioned from Bishop Asser he comes across almost as a saint, and succeeding ages have not demurred from that opinion of him. It was not only the eighteenth century that held him up as an icon of liberty. In the next century Charles Dickens in A Child’s History of England called him ‘the noble king … whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance nothing could shake’. Today we tend to take a more objective view. Alfred’s achievements were momentous, though we probably feel they fell short of sainthood. But then a man does not need to be a saint to inspire affection or gratitude. When we think of the plight of Wessex in the second half of the ninth century and reflect on the King who rose out of the marshes of Somerset to rebuild his kingdom in such an extraordinary way, we realise that, saint or not, we owe a great deal to Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon King, and for the things he did. We might even say: ‘Alfred ordered me to be made.’

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