The Story of Britain Read online

  FOR

  MARTHA & JOSEPH

  P. D.

  FOR

  THE BREEN FAMILY

  P. J. L.

  INTRODUCTION

  LONG ago, as the ice melted and continents shifted, two islands appeared on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond the Atlantic to the west lay America, although the ocean was so wide that no one on the islands knew it was there. To the north were icy seas full of fish; to the east was the North Sea, a place of storms and sandbanks; and to the south, beyond the narrow sea we call the Channel, lay the great continent of Europe.

  For thousands of years the people of the islands lived quietly, fishing, hunting and farming. We don’t know much about them, because they couldn’t write, but we do know they built the great stone circle we call Stonehenge, and became expert at metalwork, making gold brooches and silver daggers. Sometimes a ship appeared from the south to buy their brooches and daggers. The sailors told them of countries far larger than theirs, of cities far grander, of palaces made of stone. They told them of kings who conquered neighbouring kingdoms to build empires.

  “We’ll never see anything like that here,” the people of the islands said. “We live on the edge of the world.”

  Years passed. Gradually one of the southern nations conquered all of the countries around it to become the biggest empire the world had yet seen. Its capital was a city in Italy called Rome. The Romans were better organized than anyone else and their soldiers, the legions, defeated every other army until they ruled the Mediterranean Sea and all of the lands on its shores: Spain and Morocco, Libya and Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Italy itself, and the southern part of France. Of course, none of those countries had the same names in those days. The Romans called France Gaul.

  One day, a Roman general called Julius Caesar decided to conquer the rest of Gaul. He marched his army north until he reached its northern coast and gazed out across the Channel at a distant island shrouded in mist.

  “Britain,” said an officer at his elbow.

  Julius Caesar ordered his soldiers to build ships, and sailed across the Channel to Britain. In those days its people were divided into tribes. They often fought one another, and, being disunited, were easily beaten. The next year, Caesar led his legions to Britain again, and made the largest tribes sign treaties with him.

  But he didn’t stay. He went back to Rome, and the people of Britain went back to their farming. They didn’t hear until much later how Julius Caesar tried to make himself ruler of the Roman Empire and was murdered, and terrible wars were fought among the Romans until his adopted son, Augustus, became emperor.

  Nor did they hear what happened around the same time in Palestine, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, where, in the town of Bethlehem, a man called Jesus Christ was born. He said he was the Son of God, but the Romans put him to death. After his death, though, his followers, who were called Christians, began a new religion that would one day become the religion of most of Europe.

  A few years after Christ’s death, a Roman emperor called Claudius decided to conquer Britain properly. He gathered a great army with soldiers from Spain, horsemen from Holland and war elephants from Africa. The British fought bravely under their leader, Caractacus, but they had no chance against the Romans. General Aulus Plautius led his legions north until they reached a wide river, the Thames. On the far side they could see the Britons waiting, but they found a ford, marched across and defeated them. At this river crossing the Romans built a town which they called Londinium, or London.

  The Roman Empire was divided into provinces, so London became the capital of the new province called Britannia. Britain was no longer a small island on the edge of the world; it was part of the Roman Empire. The Romans built law courts where arguments could be settled fairly, a market, and docks for the ships that sailed to Britain from all over the empire. The ships brought food the Britons had never tasted before, and luxuries they’d never even heard of. The Romans built roads so their legions could march from one end of the country to the other, and towns like Chelmsford, St Albans and York. People came from Spain, Italy and Gaul to live there and built fine villas with central heating, baths and rich decorations.

  The Britons had never seen such magnificence before; they had never been so well organized. But even so, many of them hated being ruled by people from another country.

  “Foreigners!” spat Boudicca, queen of a tribe in Norfolk called the Iceni. Boudicca hated the Romans because they had killed her husband and raped her daughters. She started a rebellion, destroyed Colchester and burned London before the Romans could defeat her.

  The people of northern Britain didn’t want Roman rule either. The Romans called them Picts, because they painted their bodies with patterns and pictures. The Picts never gave in to the invaders. Once, the Roman Ninth Legion marched north to conquer them, setting off into the mountains with trumpets blaring and standards glinting. No one ever saw the Ninth Legion again. Somewhere in the northern forests it was defeated, and every man killed.

  So the Roman emperor Hadrian built a wall from one side of Britain to the other to keep out the Picts. It marked the edge of Rome’s power, and the boundary of the province of Britannia.

  As time went by, most people in Britain grew to like what the Romans brought them. They lived peacefully under fair laws, traded with people all over the world, and grew rich. Many Britons copied the Romans’ way of dressing and eating, and learned their language, Latin. After a while, the Romans took on the religion of Jesus Christ, and so did most Britons. A British-born Roman called Patrick was captured by pirates and taken to Ireland, where he taught the Irish to be Christians too.

  For four hundred years Britannia lived in peace. Its roads stretched for miles; its legions defended the borders. It seemed as if the Roman Empire would last for ever. But nothing lasts for ever. Eventually the Romans started quarrelling among themselves. A Roman general in Britain declared himself emperor, and marched the British legions to Gaul, where he was killed. German tribesmen invaded the empire. Then two German tribes called the Angles and the Saxons sailed across the North Sea and attacked Britain. The Britons wrote to Rome asking for help, but the Roman emperor wrote back saying that Rome had its own problems to deal with, and from now on they would have to look after themselves.

  Vortigern, leader of the Britons in Kent, knew he was not strong enough to fight the Angles and Saxons. So he made a deal with two Saxon leaders, brothers called Hengist and Horsa, offering them gold if they helped fight off the other Saxons. But Hengist and Horsa cheated him. They took the gold, beat Vortigern themselves, and made Hengist king of Kent.

  To start with, the Angles and Saxons had come to plunder and steal. But when they saw how rich Britannia was, they decided to stay. They brought their own language, Anglish, or English, and called the country they conquered Angleland, or England.

  The Britons did their best to hold out, but had no help from Rome, for Rome itself had been burnt by invaders. It was in those years that people made up stories about a king called Arthur who fought back against the Angles and Saxons, gathering the best knights of Britain to his castle at Camelot to form them into a band called the Knights of the Round Table. But there was no real Arthur to lead the Britons, and there were no Knights of the Round Table to protect them. At last they ruled only the western parts of the island of Britain, which we now call Cornwall and Wales, while England was ruled by the Anglo-Saxons.

  And so four nations took shape. Ireland was the western of the two islands at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. It had never been invaded by the Romans. Scotland was the northern part of Britain, which the Romans also never reached (it was called Scotland after an Irish tribe, the
Scots, who took part of it from the Picts). England was the part of Britain that the Anglo-Saxons conquered. And Wales was where the Britons lived on, still speaking their old language and telling their old tales.

  The Anglo-Saxons divided England into seven kingdoms. Kent was the first one they conquered. Essex, Sussex and Wessex were the kingdoms of the East Saxons, South Saxons and West Saxons. East Anglia was where the East Angles lived. Mercia was the kingdom of the north-west. And Northumbria was the north-eastern kingdom that stretched as far as Hadrian’s Wall. Sometimes one of the seven kings became so strong that the others agreed to obey him. Offa, king of Mercia, was the most powerful of all. He built a wall called Offa’s Dyke between England and Wales, just as Hadrian had built his wall across the island to mark the boundary with the Picts.

  During those years, the rest of the world seemed very distant to the people of Britain and Ireland. They hardly remembered the Romans, and almost forgot there had once been a province called Britannia. People in the north stared at the ruined wall that stretched from hilltop to hilltop, and thought it must have been built by giants. Weeds pushed through the Roman roads and choked the gates of the Roman forts. Dogs lived in the Roman law courts, whose roofs fell in and walls disappeared under mounds of ivy. The Anglo-Saxons never went to such places, which they thought were full of ghosts. They couldn’t imagine building law courts. Their own towns were little more than villages, while their villas were rough halls where warriors feasted, sang and told stories of battle.

  The Anglo-Saxons worshipped their own gods, but Christianity survived in those parts of the islands the invaders didn’t conquer. In Ireland monks still copied out the Bible and decorated its pages with drawings of saints and dragons, while Irish pilgrims voyaged to the Faroe Islands and Iceland – perhaps even to America. And Christianity still existed in Rome, where its leader, the pope, lived. A pope called Gregory sent a missionary called Augustine to England to convert the Anglo-Saxons. Augustine landed in Kent and built a church at Canterbury (which is why the archbishop of Canterbury is still the head of the English Church). First he converted the king of Kent, and then all the other kings, until the whole of England was Christian.

  Being part of the Christian Church connected Britain and Ireland to the rest of Europe again. The Anglo-Saxons started to build churches. At Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, on the Tyne, they built two great monasteries where monks could read books and study. One of the monks, Bede, decided to write the history of everything that had happened in England since the Romans left, three hundred years before. He told of the wars between Saxons and Britons, and the battles between the Anglo-Saxon kings. But now, he wrote thankfully, everyone was at peace. Britain was quiet again and the years of trouble were over.

  Unfortunately for the people of Britain and Ireland, their new-found peace didn’t last long.

  One day, some children on the beach saw a ship approaching. Its prow was carved like a dragon’s head, and its sides were hung with shields. Forty oars lifted in unison as they drove it towards the shore. As soon as it touched land, forty men jumped into the breakers, waving swords and clubs, and ran towards the nearest village to steal, burn and kill.

  The people of Britain and Ireland called the raiders Vikings. They sailed across the North Sea from Norway and Denmark, but no one could tell when they would arrive or where they would attack next. When their longships appeared on the horizon, villagers tried to hide, for Vikings killed all the men they found, and took the women away. They burned Bede’s monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow. They sailed around the north of Britain, attacked Ireland, then went down the coast of Wales, plundering and destroying.

  Like the Angles and Saxons before them, though, the Vikings soon noticed how rich Britain was, and decided to stay. They made their capital at York and, one by one, defeated the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms until only Wessex was left.

  The king of Wessex was called Alfred. To start with, the Danes (the Vikings who settled in England) beat his army as they beat everyone else. Alfred was forced to retreat until he reached the island of Athelney, in the Somerset fens. By then he hardly had any soldiers left, and no palace to live in, so he knocked on the door of a farmhouse and asked for shelter. One day – so people said afterwards – the farmer’s wife left him to watch her cakes baking while she went to market. Alfred sat down to think how he could beat the Danes and was concentrating so hard he forgot about the cakes. He didn’t notice them burning until the farmer’s wife ran in shouting what a fool he was. Only then did he see how low he had sunk. The farmer’s wife hadn’t even realized he was a king.

  But Alfred did come up with a plan. The Danes raided villages, so he made people live in fortified towns called burhs, or boroughs. The Danes came by sea, so he built a navy of his own to protect the island against them. In that way he defeated the Danes and became the first king of all the free English. The Danes still ruled the north and east of England, which was known as the Danelaw, but thanks to Alfred – who became known as Alfred the Great – they advanced no further.

  At this time, the other kingdoms of Britain and Ireland took shape as well. Kenneth Mac Alpin, the king of the Scots, defeated the Picts and made Scotland into one kingdom. The Scots were a nation of two parts. The south, where many Saxons had settled, was gentle farmland, while the mountains of the north belonged to fierce clans who spoke the Gaelic language they had brought with them from Ireland. Mac Alpin was a brave king, strong enough to keep the Vikings at bay.

  The Welsh were united by Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great), king of Gwynedd, who defeated the other Welsh kings and beat an army of Vikings that attacked from the sea. Unfortunately Rhodri’s kingdom didn’t last. The Vikings came back and killed him, and Wales broke up into smaller kingdoms again. But Rhodri’s grandson, Hywel Dda, ruled much of Wales, and gave the Welsh laws that lasted for many centuries.

  The Irish suffered from the Vikings even more than the other nations. Viking kings took over the east of Ireland and founded a great city they called Dublin.

  The four nations of Britain and Ireland don’t all have the same history. If this book could be longer, it would tell the stories of them all – of the Irish heroes, the Welsh kings, and the chieftains of the Scottish clans. Britain’s story was written by all the people of the two islands, and only makes sense if you understand that Britain has never been a simple place, but a family of four different nations.

  But in that family England was always the biggest, strongest and richest kingdom; and in time, England would come to dominate the others. So to understand how Britain came together, England’s story is the thread we have to follow most closely, always remembering that it is only one of the threads that make up the story of Britain.

  After Alfred died, English kings kept fighting the Danes, and almost drove them out of England. Unfortunately they weren’t all as wise as Alfred. King Ethelred was known as “the Unready”, because he did nothing to prepare ships or fortify boroughs. Instead of standing up to the Danes, he paid them to go away. But the Danes took his money and attacked anyway. First the Danish king, Svein Forkbeard, beat him, then Forkbeard’s son Cnut drove Ethelred out of Wessex and made himself king of England.

  By now, more than a thousand years had passed since Julius Caesar first set eyes on Britain, and one thousand and sixteen years had passed since Jesus Christ was born. That is the year we measure dates from, so the date was 1016 CE – Common Era (you also see it written AD or Anno Domini). From 1016 there were about another thousand years to go until today.

  Cnut’s son Harthacnut had no children, and after he died an Anglo-Saxon became king of England again. His name was Edward. He was Ethelred’s son and had grown up in France, at the court of the duke of Normandy. King Edward founded a great abbey at Westminster and was so devout a Christian that people called him Edward the Confessor.

  He kept England at peace, but had no sons. “Who should rule England when I die?” he wondered.

  Many kings wanted to rule England,
which was a rich country, with forests full of game and seas full of fish. The king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, said Harthacnut had promised him the throne, and he should have been king instead of Edward. William, duke of Normandy, said Edward had promised him England when he died, because Edward had been brought up at the Norman court. And the most powerful family in England, the Godwins of Wessex, wanted to be kings as well. The Godwins were so rich they already behaved like kings. Harold Godwinson had led an army into Wales, and beaten the Welsh in the king of England’s name.

  If I announce that any of them will be king, Edward thought to himself, the others will complain and attack England. And I am too old to fight them.

  So he said nothing at all.

  At last Edward the Confessor realized he was about to die. He lay in bed with priests kneeling by the door muttering prayers. Harold Godwinson, earl of Wessex, sat by his bedside day and night. He never left the dying king until Edward beckoned him closer and whispered something in his ear. Only then did Harold rise and go out.

  “King Edward has made his decision,” he announced. “I will be the new king of England.”

  The English cheered at the thought of having an Englishman as king, rather than a Frenchman or Viking. But the other candidates were furious. In Norway Harald Hardrada ordered a hundred longships to be built to carry his army to England. And in France Duke William of Normandy called his brother Odo and his advisers to a council of war.

  “Many years ago,” he told them in a voice thick with rage, “Harold Godwinson came to Normandy and promised he would help me become king after Edward died. He has broken his word, and he will be punished.”

  The forests of Normandy echoed to the sound of axes chopping down trees, of shipwrights sawing wood to build ships and armourers sharpening swords. Carts rolled in from the countryside bringing barrels of food and wine for the soldiers. And Duke William stared out across the Channel towards England.