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.