This Sceptred Isle Page 3
This book is an attempt to trace the ancestry of the British within these islands and to see the influence of institutions such as law and church on the creation of what we call Britishness. In doing so, we shall begin to see ourselves as many others see us. In a mirror, image is misleading; that is the first clue to what is, or is not, Britishness.
CHAPTER ONE
700,000 BC–AD 570
The average person may easily have difficulty in remembering what people, tribes and invaders came first to these islands. Danes before the Saxons? Saxons before the Normans? When was Alfred? When was Boudicca or as some prefer, Boadicea? (See the Timeline at the beginning of this book for the answers). What most people do remember is that the Romans came before them all. Perhaps that is why the arrival of the Romans in our islands in 55 BC is often the beginning of British taught history and so ignores the obvious point that the Britons were waiting for them and knew all about Caesar and his ilk as they had fought in the Roman armies. Here then is the simplest reminder that the active and diverse human history of the British Isles began long before the Romans.
The most obvious clue to life before the Romans is that most classrooms once had memorable images of Romans meeting savage Britons painted in blue woad. Caesar wrote. ‘Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem’ – ‘All the British colour themselves with glass, which produces a blue colour.’ There is no original source that the Britons painted themselves with leaf dye from the plant Isatis tinctoria but that is the popular story. That dye, still produced today in the British Isles, is the colouring from the same plant grown since the Neolithic period in the Middle East – about 9,000 BC. So someone brought it to these lands long before the Romans came. However, we start our story of this island and the making of its people tens of thousands of years before woad because human beings lived in Britain 700,000 years ago. Flint tools found in Pakefield, Suffolk, and voles’ teeth tell us this is so.1
Of course, our human timeline since 700,000 has been broken many times. The gaps were caused by not one but many natural phenomena including uncivilizing depths of cold in the ice ages. Yet, the debris of societies was preserved by those freezing ages. For example, we know that around 30,000 years ago the descendants of the earliest creatures of Homo sapiens were here as hunter-gatherers.
During the past one million years there have been at least ten ice ages in the northern hemisphere; they occurred approximately every 100,000 years. These phenomena appear to have been caused by changes in the orbit of the earth around the warming sun.2 Today we predict catastrophic rises in sea levels as global warming melts the polar ice caps. So it is easy to understand that during the ice ages the opposite happened; there were mountain ranges made of ice. Temperatures gradually dropped and so sea levels ebbed – perhaps by as much as 400 feet – and faces of the earth were carved by advancing glaciers that created much of the land shapes we know today. The last cold period, which we commonly refer to as the Ice Age, started about 70,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago; we say ‘about 10,000 years’ because it was not a matter of waking one morning to find the snow gone – this was no cold snap. At the same time that the glaciers receded, an important stage of human civilization was occurring in an area of the Middle East that roughly coincides with modern Syria and Iraq. It was here that farming began. People grew and harvested their food rather than nomadically hunting and gathering. When men farm they have to settle to tend the crops. Settlements provide the fundamental stability for a society to emerge as well as cultural comfort. Hence the cradle of civilization was born in the Middle East.
It took another 4,000 to 5,000 years before farming reached these shores and as societies changed from exclusively hunter-gathering to farming some therefore stayed in one area and so gradually created settled tribal regions. Of course, Britain did not overnight turn into a society that stayed put. Some were ever on the move and indeed that is how and why farming spread. Nor must we think in modern terms of change. There was nothing of the trend about the growth of farming. The gradual shift of the majority from hunting and gathering to food growing probably took as long as it is now from the growth of Christianity – easily 2,000 years.
Although people lived in these islands before the great freeze, as far as we can tell, no one lived here during that period. So when the ice went, the people who arrived in the islands were not necessarily descendants of those who lived here before. Important? Yes, because it gives us a better idea of all our origins and to even better remember that until about 8,500 years ago (so, after the Ice Age) we were not islanders. What we now call the North Sea was then dry land. By 5,000 BC the water levels had risen to create our islands. Because the British lands were surrounded by water then it followed that development of the islands was likely to be later than that of, for example, eastern Continental Europe. That is a generalization, but not out of place in our story. This period is called Neolithic which can be translated from two Greek words neos (new) and lithos (stone) – thus Neolithic is New Stone Age. Because of what was going on in settled farming, it is sometimes called the Agricultural Age and is seen as a ‘culturally more dramatic threshold than our more recent Agricultural Revolution’.3 Yet, if we look at the New Stone Age or Agricultural Age in the British Isles, we would probably date it c.5,500 BC–c.2,500 BC. But the same age in the region where Europe meets Asia started not c.5,000 BC but c.10,000 BC. The three larger reasons for this late start were the distances from the origins of change in the Middle East; climate; and resettlement that came from two distinct directions. When the migration started, it appears to have been mainly a pincer movement. One migration came along the southern European-Balkan corridors then up the western coast of Europe. The second claw in the migratory pincer was from the near neighbours of northwestern Europe.
Agriculture followed by settled farmers (as opposed to herdsmen who would follow the grazing) is in evidence in East Anglia as early as 6,300 years ago. It took hundreds of years for the Agricultural Revolution to spread throughout the islands from the south, the east and the west as far north as the Orkneys.4 What is not so clear is the answer to the threefold question of the consequence of the introduction of the new society: Were the influences of the new cultures spread by the migrants from Continental Europe or by the indigenous population? Did the new farming produce a diet and a less vulnerable lifestyle that preserved the indigenous population? Is the language that we speak today developed from migrations or from what already existed? In very crude terms: did the people who lived in these islands absorb the migrants or did the visitors gradually take over?
There was also in these migration patterns an obvious source of identification: people on the move carry with them the utensils they need to cook and feed. So, from about 3,000 BC there arrived in Britain the simplest utensil: the beaker. It could be used to drink from, eat from and, in some form, to cook in. Beaker history is one of the more fruitful forms of archaeology because beakers had regional characteristics including decoration and many artefacts have survived. Even fragments tell us much about population origins, growths and progression. Beakers were brought from the near northern Continental Europe. The migrations from the Continent into the islands between 3,000 BC and 2,000 BC gave us evidence of a society that took great care in the burial of its dead. Earlier burials were communal affairs but about 3,000 BC the northern European trend for individual graves spread across the Continent and over the seas to the British Isles. With the gradual adoption of single graves came the practice of a more personal morbid liturgy that included provisions for another place. The departed took utensils for the next journey. So, in excavations in Wiltshire-cum-Wessex, the ritual centre of England during the Neolithic and Bronze ages5 there is good evidence of what have become known as beaker graves including those of travellers from north-west Continental Europe. Others arrived from Iberia, suggesting a quite different migratory passage to the north-west European visitors. For example, according to Professor Barry C
unliffe, Maritime Bell Beaker culture that may have originated in what is now Portugal brought to these shores trading networks, metal working and even language.6
Here then we have some idea that the traceable origins of the British are to be found following the big thaw in the Middle Stone Age period after 10,000 BC. The period between, say, 13,000 BC and 5,500 BC saw the migrations of hunter-gatherers crossing mainland Europe from the Caucuses, while northwards along the Atlantic coast came the Franco-Iberian travellers still besieged by the ice. As the ice melted, these islands were formed because the sea levels rose and from 5,500 BC the Neolithic or Agricultural Age people who were looking to settle and farm began arriving from as far away as the Middle East, the Balkans, across the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic Iberian coastline; eventually they were followed by the Anglo-Saxons from Germany and the Lowlands and then the Vikings. So by the time the Romans arrived, just a generation or so before the birth of Christ, the society of the Britons was established; hunter-gatherers may have lived here but the general make-up of the Britons suggested that they were farmers, people who would stick to one area and form into groups that became large groups that became communities that became regional tribes of inter-related, settled people. It was also a society that was not isolated and had even fought with the Romans on the Continent.
Julius Caesar (100 BC–44 BC) came to Britain, islands on the very edge of the known world, on 26 August 55 BC. This was not the great invasion that would govern our island society. Caesar had come prepared but not prepared enough. He had 10,000 men when he landed near Deal on the Kent coast and fought off the harassing Britons. But to properly invade, Caesar needed far more men, cavalry and all the logistical people and equipment that sustain an advancing army. Many times, these islands have been protected from invaders by the weather. So it was at the end of that July 55 BC when his cavalry tried to land without understanding tides (tides rarely happen in the Mediterranean). At the end of that month there was a full moon, which produces extreme tides.
The landing was not entirely a failure. Caesar achieved three objectives. He understood that he had the wrong sort of vessels to transport his invasion; he knew what forces he needed to beat the Britons; and his expedition was seen in Rome as a great success. He returned to northern Italy and prepared a new fleet of specially designed warships and transports that could be sailed or pulled with great oars. Caesar had, in effect, designed the first landing craft – vessels that could run right on to the beaches of Britannia and so make it simpler to get stores, men and horses ashore. The obvious question remained: did he really need to land on these islands? After all, they posed no military threat to this general who had all but conquered Gaul, as France was then called. The answer is that Caesar had to maintain his authority and ambition and so he had to command, to defend and to conquer. Caesar was vulnerable. He had many enemies in Rome who wanted him to return to face charges levied at him years before when he was a consul. Those accusations included debt even though he had paid his creditors with treasure seized when he had sacked Spain. In Rome prosecutions for crimes were rarely pursued against victorious military heroes, thus Caesar remained above the law so long as he continued to conquer. Thus, he had no option but to plot and plan to exploit his reputation and power that came from his undoubted brilliance as a general and as a politician. This was the man who shortly would be the first emperor of Rome and called Pater Patriae (Father of the Country) and the man seen by one of his more famous political enemies, Cicero, as having a ‘calm and kind nature; delight in great minds; he listens to right and just requests and doesn’t care about the careerist’s ones; he is clever and forward-looking . . . I admire his dignity and justice and intelligence’. Here was the man who came, for the second time, to conquer Britain. He would not succeed. It would take another 100 years before the real conquest under the auspice of Claudius in AD 43 would mean the Romanization of Britain. But in 54 BC the invasion under Caesar would be enough to inspire the idea for 2,000 years and more that it was indeed Julius who conquered the Britons.
The Romans would not have understood the people of Britain as the English. The English came very much after the Romans; the people they knew were Celts with a common language: Celtic. Celtic place names were so well established that the Romans simply Romanized them. Also, this was not a land of savages although the people were capable of behaving what we would think of as savagely. By 54 BC many had farms and therefore settled into hamlets and even villages. Hedges and boundaries suggest a form of regular and marked ownership of land and the river valleys were becoming more populated because of this organized agriculture. The beginnings of industrial pottery, a common language and what are now called Gallo-Belgic coins suggest that Caesar was right when he said that the people in the lowland areas, broadly what are now called the South-East and Midlands, were infiltrated by those from the Continent. At the end of July 54 BC Caesar was also ready to infiltrate from the Continent. Across the narrow seaway, the Britons knew he was coming. These Britons had fought in Gaul alongside Caesar’s men. They knew of what he was capable, and what he might do with that capability. Some of the tribes sent envoys to Caesar; they didn’t want to fight. Also, many of them were at war with each other so there was much to gain from making peace with the Romans and even promising to
Caesar returned to Britain with 800 warships of troops, cavalry and supplies. It was a well-structured invasion and occupation force but not without opposition. The Britons, or some of them, had united under a leader called Cassivellaunus, who may have been the King of the Catuvellauni. The Catuvellauni were the strongest of the southern tribes and had settled in what is now Hertfordshire. They were resilient and inventive, especially in the way they deployed their chariots when fighting. Cassivellaunus had many enemies. There were other tribes who hated his tribe; there were other leaders who hated him. It is thought that one of these tribes, the Trinovantes who lived in Essex, entered into a pact with Caesar. Other tribes joined this arrangement and so Cassivellaunus now fought Romans in front of him and treachery behind. Eventually peace was negotiated and Britons were taken hostage. Victory for Caesar? It was never to be as simple as that. Winter was approaching: there was no way in which an invading army could in those times find ready-made shelter and the Romans had no way in which they could resupply the huge cohorts needed to maintain the territory they had taken. Worse still, there was a revolt in Gaul. So Caesar left Britain taking his British prisoners with him. And that was it. Caesar’s flirtation with Britain was just that, a flirtation. In ten years he would be murdered, and a century would pass before the Emperor Claudius would once more attempt to subjugate the tribes of Britain.
But the time between Caesar’s withdrawal in 54 BC and the Roman return in AD 43 was not a dark age for islanders. From the top of what is now Scotland south to the Kent coast there were more than twenty large tribes. Some of the names became famous: the Iceni in East Anglia, the Catuvellauni in the East Midlands and Essex, the Parisi in Yorkshire, the Silures in Wales and the Brigantes, probably in the Pennines. Strabo, writing in the first-century BC in the fourth of his seventeen-volume Geographica, tells us that the Britons exported cattle, hides, grain, slaves, gold and silver and, apparently, hunting dogs. In return, they imported wine and oil and glass. And most of this trade was with the prosperous South-East. So, even 2,000 years ago, there was a north-south divide in Britain.
Some ninety years after Julius Caesar’s departure, the Emperor Claudius was persuaded by an exiled Briton that it would be politically to his advantage to return to Britain. His name was Bericus. This was nearly a century after Caesar’s campaigns – seen as triumphs. Yet if ever there were to be an example of how the British Isles were believed to be on the edge of the world and mysteriously dangerous then, at about the time of Christ, the proposed invasion showed this ignorance and fear. Plautius was ordered to prepare and execute the invasion of Britain from his base in Gaul, France. Cassius Dio, in his early third-century AD version of R
oman history, describes what happened: ‘Plautius undertook this campaign, but had difficulty in inducing his army to advance beyond Gaul, for the soldiers were indignant at the thought of carrying on a campaign outside the limits of the known world and would not yield in obedience.’
Even after 100 years and much trading beyond their shores, these islands were still at the edge of the ‘known’ world. But the Romans invaded once more and this time they found that the Britons weren’t expecting them. Tacitus wrote that although the Britons had many military strengths, they were not a cohesive force:
Once they owed obedience to kings; now they are distracted between the warring factions of rival chiefs. Indeed nothing has helped us more in fighting against their very powerful nations than their inability to co-operate [with each other]. It is but seldom that two or three states unite to repel a common danger; thus, fighting in separate groups, all are conquered.
But the Britons did fight back in a way that Churchill might have applauded men when another darkest hour had been reached. They had learned there was little point in taking on the Romans at their own game. Instead, they hid in the forests and the swamps. Cassius Dio suggests that the resistance was not long lived.
Plautius had a great deal of trouble searching them out; but when at last he did find them, he first defeated Caratacus and then Togodumnus . . . After the fight of these kings, he advanced father and came to a river. The barbarians thought that the Romans would not be able to cross it without a bridge and bivouacked in rather careless fashion on the opposite bank; but he [Plautius] sent across a detachment of Germans who were accustomed to swim easily in full armour.