Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Simon Schama begins his history of Britain with a visit to the miraculously preserved Stone Age cottages of Skara Brae in Orkney and then moves all the way to the world of Anglo-Saxon England, newly converted to Christinanity, and plagued by Vikings. He describes how a nation was conceived by war, trade, migrations of peoples, religion, and an infatuation with Rome.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
Simon Schama begins his history of Britain with a visit to the miraculously preserved Stone Age cottages of Skara Brae in Orkney and then moves all the way to the world of Anglo-Saxon England, newly converted to Christinanity, and plagued by Vikings. He describes how a nation was conceived by war, trade, migrations of peoples, religion, and an infatuation with Rome.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00From its earliest days, Britain was an object of desire.
00:20Tacitus declared it Pretium Victoriae,
00:24worth the conquest,
00:26the best compliment that could occur to a Roman.
00:32He had never visited these shores
00:34but was nonetheless convinced that Britannia was rich in gold.
00:41Silver was abundant there too.
00:44Apparently so were pearls,
00:46although Tacitus had heard they were grey,
00:49like the overcrowded sea.
00:54He had also heard that the Romans cast rain-heavy skies
00:58and that the natives only bothered to collect them
01:01when they were cast up on the shore.
01:06As far as the Roman historians were concerned,
01:09Britannia might well be off at the edge of the world,
01:12but it was off at the edge of their world,
01:14not in some howling, barbarian wilderness.
01:17And if those same writers had been able to travel in time
01:20as well as space to the northernmost of our islands,
01:23Britain and Orkney,
01:25they would have seen something much more astonishing
01:28than heaps of pearls,
01:30the unmistakable signs of a civilisation
01:33thousands of years older than Rome.
01:54MUSIC FADES
02:12DRUMMING
02:23There are the remains of Stone Age life
02:26dotted all over Britain and Ireland.
02:30But nowhere as abundantly as Orkney,
02:33with its mounds, graves,
02:35and, above all, its great circles of standing stones,
02:38like here at Brodgar,
02:40vast, imposing and utterly unknowable.
02:47But Orkney boasts another Neolithic site
02:50in this way even more impressive than Brodgar,
02:53the last thing you would expect from the Stone Age,
02:56a shockingly familiar glimpse of ancient domestic life.
03:01Perched on the western coast of Orkney's main island,
03:04a village called Skara Brae.
03:07Here, beneath an area no bigger than the 18th green of a golf course,
03:12lies Europe's most complete Neolithic community,
03:16miraculously preserved for 5,000 years
03:19under a blanket of sand and grass
03:22until uncovered in 1850 by a ferocious sea storm.
03:27This is a recognisable village,
03:30neatly fitted into its landscape between the pasture and the sea.
03:34Intimate, domestic, and self-sufficient.
03:37And although we're not going to see much of Skara Brae,
03:40we're going to have a look at Skara Brae,
03:42which is one of the most beautiful places in the world.
03:45Skara Brae is one of the most beautiful places in the world,
03:48and it's one of the most beautiful places in the world.
03:51Skara Brae is one of the most beautiful places in the world,
03:54intimate, and self-sufficient.
03:56And although we're technically still in the Stone Age,
03:59in the Neolithic period, these dwellings are not huts,
04:02they're true houses, built from the sandstone slabs
04:05that lie all around the island,
04:07and which gave stout protection to the villagers here at Skara Brae
04:11from their biting Orcadian winds.
04:18And the villagers were real neighbours, living cheek by jowl.
04:22They were protected by walled, sometimes decorated alleyways.
04:26It's not too much of a stretch to imagine gossip travelling down
04:30those alleyways after a hearty seafood supper.
04:37We have, in other words, everything you could possibly want
04:40from a village, except a church and a pub.
04:44In 3000 BC, the sea and the air were a little warmer than they are now.
04:50And once they'd settled in their sandstone houses,
04:53they could harvest red bream and the mussels and oysters
04:57that were abundant in the shallows.
05:14Cattle provided meat and milk,
05:16and dogs were kept for hunting and for company.
05:19During the Neolithic centuries,
05:21there would have been at least a dozen little houses here,
05:24half dug into the ground, for comfort and for safety.
05:28A thriving, bustling little community of 50 or 60.
05:35But the real miracle of Skara Brae
05:38is that these houses were not mere shelters.
05:41They were built by people who had culture.
05:44Who had style.
05:49And here's where they showed off that style.
05:52The fully equipped, all-purpose Neolithic living room,
05:56complete with luxuries and necessities.
05:59Necessities, well, at the centre,
06:02a hearth around which they warmed themselves and cooked their food.
06:06A stone tank in which to keep live fish bait.
06:16And since we know that some of these houses had drains underneath them,
06:20they must also, believe it or not, have had indoor toilets.
06:24Luxuries?
06:26Well, the orthopaedically correct stone bed
06:29may not seem particularly luxurious,
06:32but the addition of layers of heather and straw
06:35would certainly have softened the sleeping surface
06:38and would actually have made this bed seem rather snug.
06:43At the centre of it all, though, was this spectacular dresser
06:47on which our house-proud Neolithic villagers
06:50would have set out all their most precious stuff.
06:56Fine bone and ivory necklaces,
07:00beautifully wrought and carved stone objects,
07:03everything designed to make a grand interior statement.
07:30Given the rudimentary nature of their tools,
07:33it would have taken the villagers countless man-hours
07:36to build not just these domestic dwellings,
07:39but also the great circles of stone
07:42where they would have gathered to worship.
07:45Saskara Bray was not just an isolated settlement of fishers and farmers.
07:50Its people must have belonged to some larger society,
07:54one sophisticated enough to mobilise its people
07:57and one sophisticated enough to mobilise the army of toilers and craftsmen
08:02needed not just to make these monuments, but to stand them on end.
08:07And they were just as concerned about housing the dead as the living.
08:14The mausoleum at Maze Howe, a couple of miles from Saskara Bray,
08:18seems no more than a swelling on the grassy landscape.
08:22But this is, as it were, a British pyramid,
08:25and in keeping with our taste for understatement,
08:28it reserves all its impact for the interior.
08:35Imagine them open once more,
08:37a detail from the village given the job of pulling back the stone seals,
08:42lugging the body through the low opening in the earth,
08:46up 36 feet of narrow, tight-fitting passageway,
08:51visited only once a year by the rays of the winter solstice,
08:55a death canal, constriction, smelling of the underworld.
09:01ORGAN PLAYS
09:16Finally, the passageway opens up
09:19into this stupendous, high-vaulted masonry chamber.
09:23Some of these tombs would have been elaborately decorated
09:27in the form of circles or spirals like waves or the breeze-pushed clouds.
09:32Others would have had neat little stone stalls or cubicles
09:37where the bodies would be laid out on shelves.
09:45The grandest of these tombs had openings cut in the wall
09:49to create side chambers where the most important bodies
09:52could be laid out in aristocratic spaciousness
09:55like family vaults in a country church.
10:02Unlike medieval knights, though,
10:04these grandees were buried with eagles and dogs or even treasure,
10:09the kind of thing that the Vikings,
10:11who broke into these tombs thousands of years later, were quick to filch.
10:19In return, though, these early tomb raiders left their own legacy.
10:24These wonderful graffiti.
10:27These runes were carved by the most skilled rune-carver
10:30in the Western Ocean.
10:33I bet it thorny here.
10:36Ingegirth is one horny bitch.
10:46As for the Orcadian hoi polloi,
10:49well, they ranked a space in a common chamber
10:52on a floor carpeted with the bones of hundreds of their predecessors,
10:57a crowded waiting room to their afterworld.
11:12For centuries, life at Skara Brae must have continued in much the same way.
11:18But around 2,500 BC,
11:21the island climate seems to have got colder and wetter.
11:25The red bream disappeared,
11:27and so did the stable environment the Orcadians had enjoyed
11:31for countless generations.
11:33Fields were abandoned, the farmers and fishers migrated,
11:37leaving their stone buildings and tombs to be covered by layers of peat,
11:42drifting sand and, finally, grass.
11:48The mainland too, of course, had its burial chambers,
11:52like the Long Barrow at West Cannet.
12:04And there were also the Great Stone Circles,
12:07the largest at Avebury...
12:12..but the most spectacular of all at Stonehenge.
12:18By 1,000 BC, things were changing fast.
12:22All over the British landscape,
12:24a protracted struggle for good land was taking place.
12:28Forests were cleared so that Iron Age Britain was not,
12:32as was once romantically imagined, an unbroken forest kingdom
12:37stretching from Cornwall to Inverness.
12:40It was rather a patchwork of open fields,
12:43dotted here and there with woodland copses giving cover for game,
12:47especially wild pigs.
12:51And it was a crowded island.
12:53We now think that as many people lived on this land
12:56as during the reign of Elizabeth I, 2,500 years later.
13:01Some archaeologists believe that almost as much land
13:05was being farmed in the Iron Age as in 1914.
13:10So it comes as no surprise to see one spectacular difference
13:14from the little world of Skara Brae.
13:17Great windowless towers.
13:19They were built in the centuries before the Roman invasions,
13:23when population pressure was at its most intense
13:26and farmers had growing need of protection,
13:29first from the elements, but not from the land.
13:32And so they built these towers.
13:35Many of those towers still survive,
13:37though none are as daunting as the great stone stockade on Arran,
13:42off Ireland's west coast.
13:49The towers were built in the late 19th century.
13:52They were built in the late 19th century
13:54and were built in the late 19th century.
13:56They were built in the late 19th century
13:59and were built in the late 19th century.
14:02And they didn't just spring up around the edges of the British Islands.
14:07All over the mainland, too,
14:09the great hill forts of the Iron Age remain visible in terraced contours
14:14at places like Danebury and Maiden Castle.
14:17Lofty seats of power for the tribal chiefs,
14:20they were defended by rings of earthworks,
14:23timber palisades and ramparts.
14:32Behind those daunting walls, this was not a world in panicky retreat.
14:41The Iron Age Britain, into which the Romans eventually crashed
14:45with such alarming force, was a dynamic, expanding society.
14:50From their workshops came the spectacular metalwork
14:54with which the elite decorated their bodies,
14:57armlets, pins and brooches and ornamental shields like this,
15:02the so-called Battersea Shield.
15:05Or the astonishing, stylised bronze horses,
15:08endearingly melancholy in expression,
15:11like so many Eeyores resigned to a bad year.
15:17And, of course, the so-called Iron Age Britain,
15:20which was built in the late 19th century
15:23and were built in the late 19th century
15:26and were built in the late 19th century
15:29and were built in the late 19th century
15:32like so many Eeyores resigned to a bad day in battle.
15:41And with tribal manufacture came trade.
15:45The warriors, druid priests and artists of Iron Age Britain
15:49shipped their wares all over Europe,
15:52trading with the expanding Roman Empire.
15:55In return, with no homegrown grapes or olives,
15:58Mediterranean wine and oil arrived in large earthenware jars.
16:08So Iron Age Britain was definitely not the back of beyond.
16:12Its tribes may all have led lives separated from each other
16:15by custom and language, and they may have had no great capital city.
16:19But taken together, they added up to something in the world,
16:22the bustling of countless productive, energetic beehives.
16:26And what the bees made was not honey, but gold.
16:32So the Romans would have known all about this strange
16:35but alluring world of fat cattle and busy forges.
16:39Evidence of its refinement would certainly have found its way to Rome.
16:47But along with the glittering metalware came stories of alarming cults,
16:52which might have prompted the usual Roman dinnertime discussions.
16:57Well, all very interesting, I dare say,
17:00but would we really want to call them a civilisation?
17:13Supposing they would have seen an ancient sculpture,
17:17like this haunting stone face with its archaic, secretive smile,
17:22the eyes closed as if in some mysterious devotional trance,
17:27the nose flattened, the cheeks broad,
17:30the whole thing so spellbindingly reminiscent
17:33of things the Romans must have seen in Etruria or on the Greek islands.
17:37Would they then have said, yes, this is a work of art?
17:41Well, probably not.
17:43Sooner or later they would have noticed
17:45that the top of the head is sliced off,
17:47scooped out like a boiled egg at breakfast to hold sacrificial offerings.
17:52And then they would have remembered stories at Rome
17:55told about the grisly brutality of the Druids.
17:59Perhaps they would have even taken note
18:02of the stories told by the northern savages themselves,
18:05of decapitated heads who were said to speak mournfully
18:10to those who had parted them from the rest of their body,
18:13warning of vengeance to come.
18:16And then they would have thought, well, perhaps not.
18:19Perhaps we don't want to have much to do with an island of talking heads.
18:34So why did the Romans come here to the edge of the world
18:37and run the gauntlet of all these ominous totems?
18:42Well, it was the lure of treasure, of course, all those pearls
18:46that Tacitus was convinced lay around Britain in heaps.
18:49But even more seductive was what Roman generals craved the most,
18:53the prestige given to those who pacified the barbarian frontier.
19:00And so, in the written annals of Western history,
19:03the islands now had not only a name, Britannia, but a date.
19:09In 55 BC, Julius Caesar launched his galleys across the Channel.
19:19Julius Caesar must have supposed that all he had to do
19:23was land his legions in force,
19:26and the Britons, just cowed by the spectacle
19:29of all those glittering helmets and eagle standards,
19:32would simply queue up to surrender.
19:35They would understand that history always fought on the side of Rome.
19:40Trouble was, geography didn't.
19:45Not once, but twice, Julius Caesar's plans were sabotaged
19:50by that perennial secret weapon of the British, the weather.
19:54On the first go-round in 55 BC, a cavalry transport,
19:58which had already missed the high tide and got itself four days late,
20:02finally got going, only to run directly into a storm
20:06and be blown right back to Gaul.
20:12A century later, Claudius, the clumpfoot stammerer,
20:16on the face of it the most unlikely conqueror of all,
20:19was determined to get it right.
20:22If it was going to be done at all, Claudius reckoned,
20:25it had to be done in such massive force
20:28that there was no chance of repeating the embarrassments of Julius.
20:32So Claudius's invasion force was immense, some 40,000 troops,
20:38the kind of army which could barely be conceived of,
20:41much less encountered in Iron Age Britain.
20:46Claudius did succeed where Julius Caesar had failed,
20:50through a brilliant strategy of carrot and stick.
20:56Yes, he would seize the largely undefended opida, or towns,
21:01and strike at the heart of the British aristocracy,
21:04its places of status, prestige and worship.
21:09But for those chieftains sensible enough to reach for the olive branch
21:13rather than the battle javelin, Claudius had another plan.
21:17Give them, or rather their sons, a trip to Rome
21:20and a taste of the Dolce Vita,
21:22and just watch their resistance melt.
21:28While they were in Rome, many of them must have begun to notice
21:32that life for your average patrician was, well, exceptionally sweet.
21:38So before long, they naturally began to hunger for a taste of it themselves.
21:43If there were sumptuous country villas
21:45amidst the olive groves of the Roman countryside,
21:49why could there not be equally sumptuous country villas
21:52amidst the pear orchards of the South Downs?
21:55Just fall in line, be a little reasonable,
21:58some judicious support here and there,
22:01and see what you would end up with,
22:04the spectacular palace at Fishbourne.
22:08The man who built it was Toggi Dubnus,
22:11king of the Regensis in what would be Sussex,
22:14one of the quickest to sign up as Rome's local ally.
22:18He was rewarded with enough wealth
22:21to build himself something fit for a Roman.
22:24Only the extraordinary mosaic floors survived,
22:27but the place was as big as four football pitches,
22:30grand enough to house a football team.
22:34He couldn't have been the only British chief
22:36to realise on which side his bread was buttered.
22:39All over Britain, there were rulers who thought a Roman connection
22:43would do more good than harm
22:45in their pursuit of local power and status.
22:50The person we usually think of
22:52as embodying British nationalism
22:54is the man who built it,
22:56Toggi Dubnus,
22:58one of the quickest to sign up as Rome's local ally.
23:02The person embodying British national resistance to Rome,
23:05Queen Boudica of the East Anglian tribe of the Iceni,
23:09actually came from a family of happy, even eager, collaborators.
23:13It only took a policy of incredible stupidity,
23:17arrogance and brutality on the part of the local Roman governor
23:21to turn her from a warm supporter of Rome
23:24into its most dangerous enemy.
23:29In a show of brutal arrogance,
23:31the Roman governor had East Anglia declared a slave province.
23:35To make the point about exactly who owned whom,
23:38Boudica was then treated to a public flogging
23:41while her two daughters were raped in front of her.
23:47In 60 AD, Boudica rose up in furious revolt,
23:51quickly gathering an army bent on vengeance.
23:54With the cream of the Roman troops tied down,
23:57suppressing an insurgency in North Wales,
24:00she marched towards the place which most symbolised
24:03the now-hated Roman colonisation of Britain, Colchester.
24:08It helped that it was lightly garrisoned.
24:11After a firestorm march through eastern England,
24:14burning Roman settlements one by one, it was the city's turn.
24:19The frightened Roman colonists then had to fall back to the one place
24:23they were sure that they were going to be protected by their emperor
24:27and that was the great temple of Claudius.
24:36If the terrified Romans thought they were going to escape
24:40the implacable anger of Boudica, they were seriously out of luck.
24:44With thousands of them huddled, terrified,
24:47in the temple above these foundations,
24:50she began to set light to it.
24:52They must have been able to smell the scorch and the smoke
24:55and hear the fire coming towards them
24:57as the whole of their spanking new imperial city burned down,
25:01with themselves and everything else here buried in smoking ash.
25:06Thousands died in this place.
25:09Boudica had her revenge.
25:12But her triumph couldn't last.
25:19The lightly defended civilians of Colchester were one thing,
25:23but now she would have to face a disciplined Roman army.
25:27Fully prepared for all that she could throw at them.
25:31Sure enough, when the two forces met,
25:34Boudica's swollen and unwieldy army was no match for the legions.
25:40Her great insurrection ended in a gory, chaotic slaughter.
25:49Boudica's death was the last straw.
25:52It was the last straw.
25:54It was the last straw.
25:57It was the last straw.
26:02It was the last straw.
26:08It was the last straw.
26:13Death was near.
26:18It was the last straw.
26:20Boudicca took her own life rather than fall into the hands of the Romans.
26:48Romans have been learned the hard way, at least for some.
26:51And so, when barbarians started attacking Roman forts in the north, the Romans knew
26:55exactly what to do.
26:59In 79 AD, an enormous pitch battle took place on the slopes of an unidentified highland
27:05mountain, which Tacitus calls Mons Graupius.
27:09The result was another slaughter.
27:12But not before the Caledonian general, Calgacus, delivered the first great anti-imperialist
27:18speech on Scotland's soil.
27:21Here, at the world's end, on its last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this
27:31day, defended by our remoteness and obscurity.
27:37But there are no other tribes to come.
27:41Nothing but sea and cliffs, and these more deadly Romans whose arrogance you cannot escape
27:47by obedience and self-restraint.
27:50To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire.
27:57They make a desolation, and they call it peace.
28:09Of course, Calgacus never said any such thing.
28:12This was a speech written long after the event by Tacitus, and it's entirely Roman, not Scottish.
28:19Yet this burning sentiment would echo down the generations.
28:23Like Britannia itself, the idea of free Caledonia was from the first Roman invention.
28:32There was one emperor, Spanish by birth, who understood that even the world's biggest empire
28:38needed to know its limits.
28:40And he, of course, was destined, in Britain at any rate, to be remembered by a wall.
28:49When we think of Hadrian's Wall, we tend to think of the Romans rather like US cavalrymen,
28:54deep in Indian country, defending the flag, peering through the cracks and waiting nervously
28:59for war drums and smoke signals, a place where paranoia sweated from every stone.
29:05But it wasn't really like that at all.
29:08As fantastically ambitious as this was, stretching 73 miles from coast to coast, from the Solway
29:14to the Tyne, and although Hadrian probably conceived it in response to a rebellion on
29:20the part of those people whom the Romans loftily referred to as Britunculi, nasty, wretched
29:26little Brits, almost certainly he didn't mean it as an impermeable barrier against barbarian
29:33onslaught from the north.
29:39The wall was studded with mile castles and turrets and forts, like this one, and housesteads.
29:46But as Britain settled down in the second century AD, these places became upcountry
29:52hill stations, more like social centres and business centres than really grim, heavily
29:58manned barracks.
30:01So the purpose of these forts became not to prevent people going to and fro, so much
30:06as to control and observe them.
30:09The forts in particular became a place where a kind of custom scam was imposed on those
30:14trying to do business on one side or the other.
30:18So maybe it's better to think of the wall not so much as a fence, but rather as a spine
30:23around which control of northern Britain toughened, hardened and prospered.
30:31If we can now imagine Hadrian's Wall as not such a bad posting, it's because our sense
30:36of what life was like at the time has been transformed by one of the most astonishing
30:40finds of recent archaeology, the so-called Vindolanda tablets.
30:45They are scraps of Roman correspondence, jotting, scribblings and drafts of letters thrown away
30:52as rubbish by their authors almost 2,000 years ago.
30:57For 25 years, archaeologists here have been digging up these letters, 1,300 of them from
31:02seven metres below the ground.
31:05Up they've come, lovingly separated from dirt, debris and each other, and painstakingly deciphered,
31:13at once poignantly fragile and miraculously enduring.
31:17The voices of the Roman frontier in the windy north country, loud, clear and strong.
31:26Vicorian Masculus to Tribune Serialis, greeting.
31:30Please give instructions as to what you want us to do tomorrow.
31:33Are we all to return with the standard, or only half of us?
31:36My troops have no beer.
31:38Please order some to be sent.
31:40I've sent you two pairs of socks, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants.
31:45Greet Elpis Tetricus and your messmates, with whom I pray that you are getting on well.
31:49He beat me and threatened to pour my goods down the drain.
31:52I implore your mercifulness not to allow me, an innocent man from overseas, to have
31:56been beaten by rods as if I were a criminal.
31:59I warmly invite you to my birthday party on the third day before the Ides of September.
32:04Please come, as the day will be so much more enjoyable to me if you were here.
32:11A world of garrisons and barracks had now become a society in its own right.
32:23And from the middle of the second century,
32:24it makes sense to talk about a Romano-British culture,
32:28and not just as a colonial veneer imposed on the resentful natives,
32:32but as a genuine fusion.
32:41And nowhere was this clearer than here in Bath.
32:52Bath was the quintessential Romano-British place.
32:56At once, modcon and mysterious cult, therapy and luxury,
33:02a marvel of hydraulic engineering and a showy theatre of the waters of healing.
33:08The spa was an extravaganza of buildings, constructed over a spring
33:13that gushed out into the sea.
33:17The spa was an extravaganza of buildings, constructed over a spring
33:22that gushed a third of a million gallons of piping hot water
33:26into the baths every day.
33:47MUSIC CONTINUES
34:00When you soaked yourself at Bath, you were washing your body and your soul,
34:05iblution and devotion at the same time.
34:08Much of the bathing, as well as the flirting, the gossip and the deal-making,
34:13took place in this austerely grandiose great bath.
34:21But the spiritual heart of the place was the sacred spring,
34:25a ferny grotto where water collected,
34:28and where the devotees of the presiding goddess, Sulis Minerva,
34:33could look through an especially constructed window
34:36at the altar erected in her honour
34:39and occasionally could throw gift offerings in her way.
34:47Bath was not the only place where Romano-Britons could wallow
34:50in the well-being of the province.
34:58In Dover, the Romans built this 96-bedroom hotel,
35:02now 20 feet below street level,
35:04but the last word in luxury for any VIP disembarking from Gaul.
35:13By the 4th century, however, Rome was in deep trouble,
35:17attacked by barbarians and undermined by endless political turmoil.
35:22Britannia couldn't remain detached
35:24from the fate of the rest of the empire forever.
35:29At some point, Dover's significance for Britannia
35:32changed from a port of entry to a defensive stronghold,
35:36and a welcome mat gave way to the Keep Out sign
35:39in the shape of massive walls built smack through the grand hotel's lobby.
35:49This is the sort of wall the Romans built at Dover.
35:55This is Portchester, a Roman shore fort,
35:58a truly colossal structure that makes all too clear
36:01the scale of threat the Romans felt the barbarians posed.
36:08Inside it lies a Norman castle built 1,000 years later
36:12and now completely dwarfed by it.
36:18It was one of several such forts
36:20strung out along the southern and eastern coasts.
36:25But not even fortifications like those of Portchester
36:29or Hadrian's Wall in the north could work without adequate troops.
36:33As more and more legionaries were sucked back
36:36to fight for Rome on the continent,
36:38and as Picts and Saxons, spotting the weakness,
36:41started raids of their own from the north and the east,
36:44Britannia couldn't help but feel the chill of vulnerability.
36:50And when, in the year 410, Alaric the Goth sacked Rome
36:55and the last two legions departed to prop up the Tottering Empire,
36:59that chill developed into an acute anxiety attack.
37:08This was one of the genuinely fateful moments in British history.
37:12The legions departed.
37:14No, it was not like Hong Kong in 1997.
37:17There were no flags flying or pipers piping.
37:21The governor was not driving around his courtyard seven times,
37:24pledging to return.
37:26Now, doubtless, many of the Romano-British
37:29did hope and expect to see the eagles back someday.
37:33The tax collectors and the magistrates and the town councillors
37:37and the poets and the potters and the musicians
37:40and the newly Christian priests all said to themselves,
37:43well, this couldn't go on forever.
37:46We couldn't always look to Mother Rome
37:48and Mother Rome is half infested with barbarians anyway.
37:52We can handle this. We've got the Saxon shore forts.
37:55We can hire barbarians to deal with the other barbarians.
37:59We can handle this.
38:01We can handle this.
38:10For the less confident, of course, there was only one thing to do,
38:14bury their treasure and head for the hills.
38:19Planning, as refugees always do,
38:22to return when the worst was over and dig it all up again.
38:28But in the case of this particular horde of 15,000 coins,
38:32gems, medals and this exquisite silver tigress, they never did.
38:38HORN BLOWS
38:44It was instead discovered in 1992 at Hoxney in Suffolk
38:49and is now kept in the British Museum.
38:55HORN BLOWS
38:59Some sort of force was badly needed to stop the barbarians
39:03in the north and west from exploiting the yawning vacuum of power
39:08left by the exit of the legions.
39:13At first, the warriors from North Germany and Denmark
39:16sailing upriver in their wavehorses seemed a boon, not a curse.
39:22When one local despot named Vortigern naively imagined
39:25he could use the imported barbarians as his own personal military muscle
39:30but neglected to pay them as per the contract,
39:33he made one of the more spectacular blunders in British history.
39:38Furious at being stiffed,
39:40the Saxons turned on the local population they'd been hired to defend
39:44and when they finished burning and pillaging,
39:47they took land in lieu of pay,
39:49settling down amidst the understandably dismayed native population.
39:55Dismayed, but not, I think, terrified,
39:58for although the earliest chroniclers of the coming of the Saxons
40:02thought of Vortigern's faux pas as heralding some sort of final apocalypse,
40:07it wasn't as though someone suddenly turned the lights out on Roman Britannia
40:11and declared the Dark Ages to have begun.
40:14The long process by which Roman Britannia
40:17morphed into the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was gradual,
40:20not sudden, an adaptation, not an annihilation.
40:26For a long time, the Saxons were a tiny minority,
40:30numbered in hundreds rather than thousands,
40:33and they lived in the midst of an overwhelmingly Romano-British population.
40:38As different as these cultures were, they were still neighbours.
40:42The vast majority still tried and succeeded
40:46in living some sort of Roman life.
40:51Here at Roxeter in Shropshire, the Roman viriconium,
40:55there's wonderful evidence of this make-do, hybrid, improvised world
41:00poised between Roman ruins and Anglo-Saxon beginnings.
41:04When the bathhouse stopped functioning,
41:06the citizens here just took the tiles and used them for paving.
41:10And when the roof of the great basilica threatened to fall in,
41:14the citizens simply went and demolished the whole building themselves.
41:18Inside the shell, they then put up a new timber structure,
41:22spacious and elegant enough to give them a sense
41:25they were still living some sort of Roman lifestyle,
41:28although in an increasingly phantom Britannia.
41:34Eventually, though, the adaptations became ever more makeshift,
41:39the fabric of Roman life increasingly threadbare,
41:43until it did, indeed, fall apart altogether.
41:49The island was now divided into three utterly different realms.
41:54The remains of Britannia hung on in the west.
41:58North of the abandoned walls and forts,
42:01the Scottish tribes, for the most part, stayed pagan.
42:05And England, the realm of the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes,
42:09was planted in the east,
42:11all the way from Kent to the kingdom of Benicia in Northumbria.
42:19The Saxon chiefs often built their settlements
42:22on the ruined remains of old Roman British towns,
42:25not least, of course, London.
42:27Like many invaders, they hankered after what they had destroyed.
42:32The showier pieces of their armour
42:35often bear startling resemblances to Roman armour,
42:38and their leaders aspired to be something more than warchiefs.
42:42They wanted to be known as dukes, a Roman duke.
42:46But in one crucial respect,
42:48the Germanic tribal societies were utterly different from the Romans.
42:53Theirs was a culture based on the blood feud and punishment by ordeal.
42:58It was an entire social system.
43:01Its plunder was the glue of loyalty.
43:17But the Saxons were no more immune to change
43:20than the Romans had been before them.
43:24To look at the relics recovered from the Sutton Hoo burial site
43:28is to be teased by a powerful question.
43:31Did the Saxon lord buried here find his resting place
43:35in a pagan Valhalla or in a Christian paradise?
43:40The history of the conversions between the 6th and the 8th centuries
43:44is another of those crucial turning points
43:47in the history of the British Isles.
43:56But while the legions had long gone,
43:58the shadow of Rome fell once again on these islands.
44:02This time, though, it was an invasion of the soul,
44:06and the warriors were carrying Christian gospels rather than swords.
44:14The process began in a country
44:16that had never been touched by Roman rule in the first place,
44:19the land the Romans called Hibernia, Ireland.
44:24We have to remember that the most famous of the early missionaries
44:28to Ireland, St Patrick, was in fact a Romano-British aristocrat.
44:34The patrician, or patricius, as he called himself.
44:37So there was nothing remotely Irish about the teenager
44:40who was kidnapped and sold into slavery by Irish raiders
44:44sometime in the early 5th century.
44:50It was only after he'd escaped, probably to Brittany,
44:54been ordained, then visited by prophetic dreams,
44:57that he returned to Ireland, this time the messenger of the gospel.
45:04Patrick understood that the monastic ideal of retreat
45:08was perfectly matched with the needs of local royal clans.
45:15So monasteries like Arran, off the gull-swept Irish coast,
45:19with their beehive cells and encircling stone walls,
45:23looked like a stronghold, an encampment for God.
45:28But what about the dragon-slayers on the mainland, who converted them?
45:39One man gives us the answer.
45:44To all schoolchildren of my generation growing up in this country,
45:48I would like to say,
45:51To all schoolchildren of my generation growing up in the 1950s,
45:55he will always be the venerable Bede.
46:00Bede was not just the founding father of English history.
46:04Arguably, he was also the first consummate storyteller
46:08in all of English literature.
46:10He was not exactly well-travelled.
46:12He spent virtually his entire life here in Jarrow.
46:16But in a few luminous lines,
46:18he could conjure up not just the world of holy men and hermits,
46:22but the world of the great timbered halls of the Saxon kings
46:26with their firelight and roasting meat,
46:29or the death throes of a great warhorse.
46:32It was this masterful grip on narrative
46:35that made Bede not just an authentic historian,
46:38but also a brilliant propagandist for the early church.
46:43Bede sees, without any starry-eyed sentimentality,
46:47what could overcome the deep mistrust of the pagan kings
46:51when asked to abandon their traditional gods.
46:55According to the most touching speech in Bede's entire history,
46:59the clinching moment of persuasion for one noble
47:02was nothing more than a gambler's bet.
47:06It seems to me, my lord,
47:08that the present life of men here on Earth
47:11is as though a sparrow in wintertime should come to a house
47:15and very swiftly fly through it,
47:17entering in at one window
47:19and straightaway passing out through another,
47:21while you sit at dinner with your captains
47:24in a hall made warm with a great fire,
47:26while outside there are the raging tempests
47:29of winter, rain, and snow.
47:31For that short time it be within the house,
47:34the bird feels no smart of the winter storm,
47:37but soon it passes again from winter back to winter
47:41and escapes your sight.
47:43So the life of man here appears for a little season,
47:47but what follows, or what has gone before,
47:50that surely we do not know.
47:52Wherefore, if this new learning has brought us any certainty,
47:56methinks it is worthy to be followed.
48:05It's typical of Bede to put these words in the mouth of a nobleman,
48:09for the church in Anglo-Saxon England
48:11was just really a branch of the aristocracy.
48:14St Wilfrid, the aristocratic Bishop of York,
48:18deliberately used part of Hadrian's Wall
48:20to build at Hexham a basilica worthy of Roman authority.
48:26For Bede and St Wilfrid, it was crucial that it was the Roman,
48:30not the Irish Celtic church, that won over Britain.
48:34For what they passionately desired
48:36was the reconnection of a converted country with its Roman mother.
48:41A true homecoming.
48:45The authority of the Roman Saxon church, though,
48:48didn't guarantee protection.
48:50Bede himself had had forebodings before he died in 735.
48:55Sure enough, half a century later, in 793,
48:59the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports...
49:02Diaport hence appeared over Northumbria.
49:05Immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning
49:08and fiery dragons were seen flying through the air.
49:11A great famine followed.
49:13And a little after that, on the 8th of June,
49:16the ravages of heathen men
49:18miserably destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne.
49:24The heathen men were, of course, the Vikings.
49:30HEAVY WIND
49:40If you look long enough and hard enough at almost any culture,
49:43you're going to find something good to say about it.
49:46And historians of the Vikings,
49:48understandably distressed at the rape and pillage stereotype,
49:52have asked us lately to think of things other than
49:55sale, land burn and plunder to say about the Vikings.
49:58They've said, look at their metalwork, look at their ships,
50:01look at the great poetic sagas.
50:03So now we know that the Vikings did come
50:06bearing something other than a nasty attitude.
50:09They came carrying amber and fur and walrus ivory.
50:13But somehow, though, this vision of the Vikings
50:16as rapid transit, long-distance commercial travellers,
50:20singing their sagas as they sailed to a new market opening,
50:24I don't think would have cut much ice with the priests
50:27at the chapel at Bradwell-on-Sea,
50:29just a crab scuttle away from the area
50:32where I grew up as a child on the Essex shore.
50:40There'd been a church here at Bradwell-on-Sea for over 200 years.
50:44It had originally been built on the remains of an old Roman fort.
50:48And I can't help thinking that the priests
50:51would have found those stone defences reassuring
50:54as they waited nervously for the Viking raids
50:57that they knew could strike hard and fierce at any moment.
51:07In addition to land,
51:09the Vikings were keen on one other kind of merchandise.
51:12People whom they sold as slaves.
51:171,000 such slaves were taken from Armagh in one raid alone.
51:23A burial dated to 879 contained a Viking warrior with his sword,
51:28two ritually murdered slave girls
51:31and the bones of hundreds of men, women and children,
51:34his very own body count, to take with him to Valhalla.
51:48On the positive side, though,
51:50there was one thing that the Vikings did manage to do,
51:53however inadvertently.
51:55They created England.
51:57By smashing the power of most of the Saxon kingdoms,
52:00the Vikings accomplished what, left to themselves,
52:03the warring tribes could never have managed.
52:06Some semblance of alliance against a common foe.
52:12To push back the Viking onslaught,
52:14to repair some of the terrible damage they'd done,
52:17England would need more than just a competent tribal warrior chief.
52:21It was going to need someone who had a vision,
52:23and a vision not just of victory but of government,
52:26someone who could harness Anglo-Saxon energy and determination
52:30to Roman military discipline.
52:32It was going to need, in fact, a local charlemagne,
52:35someone with the intelligence and imagination
52:38of a truly Roman ruler.
52:41And he, of course, was Alfred.
52:45Our cherished image of Alfred is of the hero on the run,
52:48up against steep odds, muddling through,
52:51taking it on the chin when getting scolded for burning the cakes.
52:56But the story which really tells you all you need to know about Alfred
53:01isn't set in the swamps of Somerset
53:03but on the Palatine Hill of Rome
53:06and is much more startling and illuminating.
53:09And it happens to be true.
53:14As a small boy, Alfred's father, King Aethelwulf,
53:17sent him on a special mission to Rome to see Pope Leo IV,
53:21probably to ask the Pope's help in the struggle against the Vikings.
53:26In a ceremony, the Pope dressed the little fellow
53:29in the imperial purple of a Roman consul.
53:32And wound a sword belt around his waist,
53:35turning little Alfred into a true Roman Christian warrior.
53:43On a second trip, Alfred spent a whole year in the Eternal City,
53:47along with his father,
53:49walking the ruins of the empire and the sacred sites.
53:53It was surely this experience which made him what he was,
53:57a philosopher-priest, a scholar,
53:59and someone who, in more than a literal sense,
54:02translated the works of Roman wisdom for Anglo-Saxon consumption.
54:07Through Alfred, England got something it hadn't had
54:11since the legions departed,
54:13an authentic vision of a realm governed by law and education,
54:17a realm which, since Alfred commissioned a translation of Bede
54:21into Anglo-Saxon, understood its past and its special destiny.
54:26As the western bastion of a Christian Roman world.
54:33But first, he had to win those battles.
54:36He took the throne of Wessex at a time when,
54:38despite a recent victory, the collapse of his kingdom
54:41seemed all but imminent,
54:43and with it the entirety of Anglo-Saxon England.
54:48It was here, amidst the reeds of Athelney Island,
54:51that the heroic legend of Alfred the Great
54:54that the heroic legend of Alfred, fugitive on the run,
54:58finally turning the tide against his enemies, was born.
55:05By the spring of 878,
55:07Alfred had managed to piece together an improvised alliance of resistance,
55:11and at King Engbert's Stone, on the borders of Wiltshire and Somerset,
55:15near the site of this 19th-century folly built to celebrate it,
55:19he took command of an army which, two days later,
55:22fought and defeated Guthrum's Vikings.
55:31Alfred's victory was a holding operation,
55:33forcing the Vikings to settle for less than half the country.
55:39But when, in 886, Alfred entered London,
55:42rebuilt over the old Roman site,
55:44something of a deep significance did happen.
55:48He was acclaimed as the sovereign lord of all the English people,
55:52not under subjection to the Danes.
55:55So it appears that, during Alfred's lifetime,
55:58the idea of a united English kingdom
56:01had become conceivable and even desirable.
56:09The exquisite Alfred jewel, found not far from Athelney,
56:12has inscribed on its edge
56:15Alfred caused me to be made,
56:19and the same might well be said of his reinvention of the English monarchy.
56:24The enormous haunting eyes which dominate the figure
56:28are said to be symbols of wisdom or sight,
56:31apt qualities for a ruler whose ambitions were so lofty.
56:37Alfred's special gift was indeed to be able to see clearly
56:41England's place in the scheme of things,
56:44the debt of his realm to antiquity and his bequest to posterity.
56:52With his realm transformed,
56:54Alfred made possible a true Anglo-Saxon renaissance in the 10th century,
56:59creating stunning works of Christian art and architecture.
57:03But the long shadow of Rome still fell over all this brilliance.
57:09Alfred's grandson would be crowned the first king of England
57:13in a great Roman-style coronation.
57:16And where did this momentous event happen?
57:19Well, where else but Bath.
57:28Well, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves.
57:30England has been conceived, not yet born,
57:33and to the north, Pickland has even further to go
57:36into what's recognisably a kingdom of Scotland.
57:39But for a generation or two,
57:41it did look as though the grafting of Anglo-Saxon culture
57:45onto the enduring legacy of Roman Britain
57:48had produced an extraordinary flowering.
57:51But the shoots were still green, the buds were tender and vulnerable,
57:56and before this new kingdom had a chance to mature,
57:59it would be cut down by the devastating blow of an invader's axe.
58:06SINGING IN ITALIAN
58:36SINGING CONTINUES