The Little History of England (eBook)

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IN THE BEGINNING

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

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

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

HOMO SAPIENS

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

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

CELTIC MIGRATION

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

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

ROMAN BRITAIN

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

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

Togodumnus was slain in battle, while his brother evaded capture for a few more years and the invaders seized the strategically important town of Camulodunum (Colchester) from the Catuvellauni tribe. They set it up as their capital, intending to extend Roman dominion over the whole island. Emperor Claudius himself arrived in Britain in August with war elephants and a portion of the Praetorian Guard – an elite unit of imperial bodyguards – though he...