Monarchy_1of6
Monarchy is more than the biographies of the kings and queens of England, it is an in-depth examination of what the English monarchy has meant in terms of the expression of the individual, the Mother of parliaments, Magna Carta, the laws of England and the land of England. In this series the eminent historian Dr David Starkey brings to life powerful individuals and colourful characters using his unique and engaging gift as a communicator.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00To many people today, monarchy seems to be merely a corrosive mixture of snobbery, ceremony
00:13and sentiment.
00:14But it's far more than that, it's the natural, universal form of government.
00:20Not all monarchs are kings, of course, they can just as well be presidents or dictators.
00:25Almost everywhere, power comes down to the decisions of one person, which is all that
00:31monarchy means.
00:32And a modern president or prime minister is a king for the time being, as powerful as
00:38any medieval monarch or Roman emperor.
00:44But in Britain, or rather, in England, this universal fact of monarchy takes on a special
00:51meaning because we still have our real monarchy.
00:55It's over 1500 years old, which means that it's the oldest functioning political institution
01:02in Europe.
01:03It's also unique because right from the beginning, the monarchy had a strong, popular element.
01:10This means that its history is more than a tale of kings and queens, of royal heroes
01:16like King Alfred and Henry V, and crowned villains like King John.
01:21It's also the story of a dialogue between king and people, in which the English learned
01:27to rule themselves and became the envy and the example of the world.
01:34So this is not another picture book story of kings and queens, instead it's a real grown-up
01:42history of how a monarchy created a nation.
01:45It starts where the monarchy and the nation did, the chaos and the violence of the Dark Ages.
02:162000 years ago, there was only one power that counted in the Western world, Rome.
02:25And Rome became the purest, most absolute monarchy the world has ever seen.
02:31And Britain, the province of Britannia, was just a tiny part of that monarchy.
02:37Rome brought Britain a civilization of extraordinary sophistication and refinement, but the politics
02:44that accompanied it were surprisingly crude.
02:49All power, in theory and usually in practice, was in the hands of the emperor.
02:55He was a god on earth whose task it was to rule and to defend the empire.
03:02The duty of his subjects, on the other hand, was to obey and to pay their taxes.
03:09The idea that there might be any limit on what the emperor could do,
03:14or that others should have a say in what got done, was simply inconceivable.
03:24For 400 years, this was the bedrock of life in Britain.
03:29It brought peace and prosperity, but already, from about 250 AD,
03:35the power was beginning to crumble.
03:39Barbarians poured over the imperial borders.
03:42Amongst the most dangerous were seaborne invaders from Germany, which Rome had never conquered.
03:48So a great ring of fortresses, like this one at Richburg in Kent,
03:53was built along the east coast of Britain to repel the raiders.
03:58But in vain. This vast fortress was overwhelmed and abandoned,
04:03and its ruins marked the ruin of Britain, or at least the ruin,
04:07even the annihilation, of everything that was Roman about Britain.
04:12The law, the language, the literature, the religion, all vanished,
04:16and all legitimate political authority came to an end,
04:20for that had been vested in the emperor.
04:24The collapse of Roman rule opened the door to a vast influx of German people.
04:30Today, they're known as the Anglo-Saxons, and we know quite a lot about them,
04:35because 300 years later, a Northumbrian monk wrote a great book about their early history.
04:42The writer's name was Bede, and he's the first great English historian.
04:48Bede describes, in what's probably a mixture of fact and legend,
04:52how in 449, Hengist and Horsa settled with their followers in Kent,
04:58and other groups under other leaders soon settled elsewhere.
05:03We rightly think of the Norman conquest as a great turning point in the history of England,
05:09but the Saxon conquest was even more important,
05:13because it created the very idea and reality of England itself.
05:18Indeed, it's scarcely possible to exaggerate the scale of the Saxon incursions.
05:24Perhaps 200,000 people flooded into a native population of only about two million.
05:32Proportionately, it's the largest immigration that England has ever known.
05:37Moreover, as most of the incomers were men,
05:40they quickly turned from immigrants into conquerors.
05:43In many areas of the country, DNA evidence shows
05:47that up to 90% of the native male population was displaced.
05:52They were driven out or killed, and their women, their villages and their farms,
05:57taken over by the incomers.
06:00This is ethnic cleansing at its most savagely effective.
06:05But it wasn't only blood that changed.
06:08The immigrants brought with them a new language, an early form of English.
06:13They gave new names to districts, villages and rivers,
06:17names that we still use today.
06:20They even renamed the country itself.
06:23Britannia became England.
06:26Britain became England.
06:29And their political values were as different as their language,
06:32for this was a community without sharp social distinctions
06:36and a people without kings.
06:43Today, the closest we can come to the world of those early Anglo-Saxon settlers
06:49is the reconstructed village of West Stoke.
06:53It dates from about 450 AD.
06:56What was found here tells us what food they ate,
06:59what clothes they wore and what jewellery they took with them to the grave.
07:04Above all, nothing here suggests that anyone was much more important than anyone else.
07:13We're a long way here from the exact same place
07:16where the English colonists were killed.
07:20We're a long way here from the exalted autocracy of the Roman Empire,
07:25with its huge gap between rich and poor.
07:29Instead, the folk of West Stoke here
07:32seemed to have been an essentially egalitarian people,
07:35and this egalitarianism was their great legacy
07:39to the development of kingship in England.
07:44Nevertheless, such communities still needed leaders,
07:48especially in times of war.
07:50But how did they arise?
07:52Our earliest sources on the German peoples,
07:55Bede himself and the Roman historian Tacitus, have the answer.
08:03They choose their kings.
08:05The power even of the kings is not absolute or arbitrary.
08:11This is the idea of government by consent,
08:16in which the leader is chosen by the people,
08:19or, at least, is answerable to them.
08:23It was an idea taken by the Anglo-Saxons from their homeland in Germany
08:28and transplanted to their new home in England.
08:32Here, it flourished and became a central part of the English political experience,
08:37with powerful echoes in Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution,
08:42and the insistence of those Englishmen abroad,
08:45the American revolutionaries,
08:47that they would pay no taxation without representation.
08:57This was the beginning of kingship in England.
09:00Local war leaders chosen by the people of the district.
09:04War leaders like Beowulf, hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic Bowen,
09:09who, thanks to his prowess, eventually became king,
09:12reigned gloriously for 50 winters and was given a magnificent funeral.
09:24HE SPEAKS GERMAN
09:27The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf,
09:30stacked it and decked it till it stood foursquare,
09:33hung with helmets, heavy war shields.
09:36On a height they kindled the hugest of all funeral fires.
09:40Flames wrought havoc in the hot bonehouse, burning it to the core.
09:45Heaven swallowed the smoke.
09:48Beowulf's treasures were burned with Beowulf's body.
09:53Luckily, other war leaders, come kings, were not cremated, but buried.
09:59It is those burials which provide the best evidence
10:03for the origins of Beowulf's legacy.
10:06The burials are often clustered around even older, prehistoric monuments.
10:11By reusing these older sites,
10:13it seems the new men were demonstrating their importance to all their people,
10:19Britain and Saxon alike.
10:22The burials of Beowulf are one of the most important in the history of England.
10:27It is the place where the first war was fought.
10:31None of these cemeteries is more impressive than Sutton Hoo in East Anglia,
10:36where the mounds crown a ridge by the estuary of the River Devon.
10:41In 1939, attracted by some chance finds,
10:45archaeologists investigated one of the mounds here.
10:49What they found was spectacular.
10:52An entire ship had been buried in a bayonet.
10:56What they found was spectacular.
10:58An entire ship had been buried in a bayonet.
11:01The body had gone, eaten away by the acid soil,
11:05but the archaeologists were able to make out the detail of the Dark Age ship,
11:09timbers, rivets and all, and the grave goods were astonishing.
11:16There's been intense debate about who is buried here,
11:20but most scholars are now agreed that these mounds
11:23are the burial site of a family called the Woofingers,
11:27the royal dynasty of the East Angles.
11:30And this, the biggest mound,
11:32is probably the burial site of the most important member of the dynasty,
11:37a man called Redwald.
11:40Bede's history tells us that Redwald ruled in East Anglia
11:45as one of several regional leaders in the New England.
11:49He had his power as a warrior,
11:51and his legendary wealth made him stand out as a first amongst equals.
11:57But was he a true king, sanctified by rituals like coronation?
12:03He was certainly a very rich man, as his grave goods testify.
12:12The gold and garnet jewellery is unequalled in Europe,
12:16and the shoulder clasps and belt buckles are unique.
12:28From the shores of the Mediterranean Sea
12:31came richly engraved silverware from the far-off Byzantine Empire,
12:36classical and even Christian.
12:39But the burrow also contained objects which are even more intriguing.
12:46A pattern-welded sword of the finest steel,
12:49of the kind we find named and celebrated in the epic poetry of the time.
13:04The ceremonial helmet was far more than a piece of military hardware.
13:10For, in later times, the Saxon word for crown was kinnerhelm,
13:16or helmet of the kin.
13:22And most intriguingly, the burial included a decorated whetstone
13:27polished from the hardest rock.
13:30Was this perhaps a kind of royal sceptre?
13:35These are more than the grave goods of just a rich man.
13:38They're regalia, the symbols of a ritualised monarchy,
13:41and they include many objects, the sceptre there, if that's what it is,
13:45the sword and the helmet,
13:47that were later on to figure in real coronation rituals.
13:51It's clear that Redwald here is much more than just an elected war leader.
13:57He's a real king.
13:59Like Henry VIII, even.
14:01Like Henry, he's fond of music, and he's buried with a lyre.
14:05Like Henry, he's a discerning patron of the arts,
14:08and he's got a court craftsman
14:10who's able to make the finest jewellery in Europe.
14:13And like Henry, he delights in the weaponry
14:16and the accoutrements of the warrior world.
14:19But Redwald's grave goods also show something else.
14:23He had contacts beyond just the world of the North Sea.
14:27He reached out into Christian France,
14:30and beyond that, to the surviving Roman Empire in Byzantium.
14:34Because Redwald here is an English king
14:38on the cusp of a new world,
14:41the world of Christian monarchy.
14:53England at the turn of the 6th century,
14:56the world of Redwald and his fellow regional kings,
15:00was rich, strange and bloody.
15:02It was peopled with monsters and dragons,
15:05miracle-working swords, and kings who all claimed descent
15:09from Woden, chief of the Anglo-Saxon pagan gods.
15:13Periodically, by guile or military prowess,
15:17one of these petty kings would make himself first amongst equals
15:21or even overlord of most of England.
15:25One of the most successful was Ethelbert, king of Kent.
15:30Ethelbert's prestige derived from his access to the material
15:35and cultural riches across the Channel.
15:38For there, unlike here, Roman institutions had not disappeared
15:42with the political collapse of the Empire.
15:45The territory had been conquered by another Germanic people,
15:49the Franks, who gave their name to France.
15:52But under Frankish rule, Roman society, language and literature
15:57and Roman Christianity had all survived.
16:02The result was a glittering prospect
16:05for an ambitious Anglo-Saxon king like Ethelbert,
16:08and he determined to grab a share of it
16:11by marrying a Frankish princess.
16:14And in that marriage, two different contrasting worlds,
16:18the Anglo-Saxon and the Roman, were to meet.
16:27The princess's name was Bertha,
16:29and she came to England in about 580 AD.
16:33Her arrival began a process
16:35which would transform the nature of English kingship,
16:39because Bertha was a Christian, brought up in a Christian court.
16:45Her husband, Ethelbert, gave her the little Romano-British church
16:49of St Martin's at Canterbury to worship him.
16:53It wasn't long before Bertha's Frankish family
16:56got a letter telling them that the people of England
16:59wished to be converted to the Christian faith.
17:05The man who wrote the letter was Gregory, bishop or pope of Rome.
17:11Gregory was a great man in a great office,
17:15for the popes were already claiming to be heirs
17:18not only to St Peter, but of the Roman emperors as well.
17:23Gregory's power was different, of course.
17:26It consisted not of legions of soldiers,
17:29but of regiments of priests and monks,
17:32but they were organised with all the old Roman respect
17:36for discipline, hierarchy, efficiency and law.
17:41Now Bertha's marriage to Ethelbert presented Gregory
17:45with the opportunity to launch a new Roman conquest
17:49of England for Christianity,
17:52and his chosen general in the campaign
17:54was an Italian monk of good family named Augustine.
18:00The party landed in 597 AD.
18:04Bede tells us that Augustine approached the king,
18:08singing a litany and bearing a silver cross as his standard.
18:12Fearing that Augustine might possess magical powers,
18:16Ethelbert insisted that the encounter take place in the open air,
18:21but the meeting itself was all courteousness on both sides.
18:27The pagan King Ethelbert wasn't immediately convinced.
18:31Even so, he allowed the mission to stay and start its work in Kent.
18:38Ethelbert was playing a subtle political game.
18:42He was well aware of the advantages which had accrued to the Franks
18:46after their conversion to Christianity,
18:49but he needed to be convinced that it would work for him,
18:53and the political risks of conversion were enormous.
18:57So, in effect, he was inviting Augustine to market-test Christianity.
19:04Augustine got to work right away with a mission based here
19:08in Bertha's little church of St Martin's, Canterbury.
19:15Within a few months, Augustine was claiming success
19:18with a mass baptism at Christmas.
19:21The mission built itself a new, much grander church as its headquarters,
19:26here at St Augustine's, Canterbury.
19:29Soon, even Ethelbert himself was convinced,
19:33and he was to be buried here with all the pomp that the Roman church could muster.
19:39The King had been converted,
19:41but it was not the fear of hell that convinced Ethelbert.
19:45It was politics, for Christianity enhanced his kingship
19:50with things which were very attractive to a Dark Age ruler.
19:54Roman ideas about power and Roman ways of doing things.
20:02But the Roman church borrowed much more from the Roman Empire
20:06than just ceremony.
20:08Like Rome, it used Latin,
20:10it had an elaborate system of law and administration,
20:14and it built in stone.
20:16But, above all, it was ruled by a monarch, the Pope,
20:19who claimed, like the emperors, absolute and divinely ordained authority.
20:24He even used one of the imperial titans, Supreme Pontiff.
20:29Now, all this the church made available to Ethelbert,
20:32now that he'd converted to Christianity.
20:35Could the old English idea of elective kingship
20:39survive these new trappings of imperial and divine authority
20:44and the power that went with them?
20:49From now on, English kings presented themselves not as pagan warlords,
20:54but as the successors of the emperors and the new kings of Israel,
20:59literate, godly and divinely ordained.
21:02But, despite this new elevated rhetoric of Christian kingship,
21:07the life of the typical Anglo-Saxon king remained.
21:11Nasty, brutish and short.
21:14England was still divided into a clutch of regional monarchies.
21:19To the north lay the kingdom of Northumbria.
21:22To the south were the kingdoms of Wessex, Sussex and Kent.
21:27Sprawling across the Midlands was Mercia,
21:30which was the stage for the next power play
21:33in the story of the English monarchy.
21:37In the year of our Lord, 757,
21:41the king of Mercia was murdered at Seckington,
21:45near Tamworth, in Staffordshire.
21:48The chronicle tells us that he was treacherously killed
21:53by his own household at night in shocking fashion.
22:07The king's remains were brought to Repton here
22:11and buried in this mausoleum of the Mercian kings.
22:15It was another spectacular royal funeral,
22:18like those at Sutton Hoo or St Augustine's, Canterbury.
22:22And you can still see behind me here one of the alcoves
22:26where the richly jewelled reliquaries once stood.
22:30But there's a wicked twist to this story,
22:33because the man who organised this splendid funeral
22:36was perhaps also the man behind the murder.
22:40Certainly, he was the one who profited from it.
22:43He's one of the forgotten heroes of English history,
22:47a man who operated on a European scale
22:50and dominated the England of his day.
22:53His name?
22:56The Kingdom of Mercia had formed in the marches
22:59of Frontier District of England,
23:01where the Saxons fought with the Welsh.
23:04From here, off as predecessors, and pushed their influence
23:08south and east, right down Watling Street to London,
23:12and the rich pickings of Kent and Essex.
23:15The King of Mercia was the first of his kind.
23:19He was the first of his kind.
23:22Like other Anglo-Saxon kings,
23:25Offa had to exert control through brute military power.
23:29But he also aimed to recreate the absolute autocratic authority
23:34of the Christian Roman Empire.
23:36And here, at Bricksworth Church in Northamptonshire,
23:40which Offa enlarged and built,
23:42he was the first of his kind.
23:45He was the first of his kind.
23:47Here, at Bricksworth Church in Northamptonshire,
23:50which Offa enlarged and beautified,
23:52we have a spectacular insight into Offa's vision.
23:56For although the church is Anglo-Saxon, it looks Roman.
24:00With its round arches of Roman brick
24:03and its lofty wall crowning a prominent hill,
24:06Bricksworth is an appropriately bombastic monument
24:10to the zenith of Mercian power.
24:18Offa's Roman-style autocracy brooked no opposition.
24:23He was determined to extend his power over the other English kingdoms,
24:28and he was ruthless in his methods.
24:34Dynasties which had lasted for centuries disappeared.
24:39Sussex, which had once held sway across the whole of southern England,
24:43was swept away.
24:48Even the kingdom of Kent, where Ethelbert had established
24:52the English tradition of Christian monarchy, was abolished.
24:58The Roman-style Roman-style monarchy,
25:01which had once held sway across the whole of southern England,
25:05was abolished.
25:17Nothing impressed a king's image on his subjects more than the coins
25:22with which they bought their daily bread.
25:28Offa was the first English king to stamp his name on his currency.
25:36Here it is, with a portrait of the king,
25:39which echoes manuscript images of the biblical King David.
25:46And, most astonishing of all, here is his name on a new gold coinage,
25:52modelled on coins from the fabulous East, the front of all wealth,
25:56but with Offa's name stamped in the middle of the copied Arabic inscription.
26:06But the greatest symbol of the king's imperial power is this,
26:10Offa's dyke, 64 miles long,
26:13and a continuous earthwork barrier along his frontier with Wales.
26:17It is a work of almost studied contempt for the wealth.
26:22This was the largest civil engineering project since the Romans,
26:26fully comparable in scale to Hadrian's Wall.
26:29And the dyke is more than a monument, it's evidence,
26:32proof that Offa could mobilise enough manpower to build it.
26:36Offa was bidding for imperial status
26:39with a fortification of an imperial kind.
26:46Finally, in 787, Offa attempted to ensure the survival of his magnificent vision
26:52by having his son anointed king.
26:55Offa was creating a dynasty which could inherit his power and status.
27:03And, in line with Offa's imperial pretensions,
27:07this was the first Christian royal consecration we know of in England,
27:12in which the whole panoply of the church was deployed to declare
27:16that the boy was God's anointed and his father's unchallengeable successor.
27:23But it was also an English ceremony invoking older royal traditions
27:28that went back to Sutton Hoo and beyond.
27:33For the boy was invested, not with a crown, but with a royal helmet.
27:43With this consecration and investiture of his son, Offa was confident
27:48the future both of his house and of mercy and power seemed secure.
27:59But it was not to be.
28:01For Offa seems to have behaved more like the godfather of a mafia family
28:06than the ruler of a legitimate state.
28:09Indeed, the English were to remember him more for the kings that he murdered
28:13than for the kingdom that he built.
28:16The result was that within 20 years of his death, in 796,
28:21the greater Mercian dominion that he'd created
28:24had dissolved back into what was then the usual state of England,
28:28a patchwork of smaller rival kingdoms.
28:32Kingdoms that were about to undergo the severest of ordeals.
28:38Invasion.
28:45Four and a half centuries after the Angles and Saxons
28:49had begun to raid the English coast,
28:51they found themselves in turn invaded by pirates from further north.
28:56The Vikings.
28:58The Vikings came from Scandinavia and their effect on England was devastating.
29:10Drawn by plunder, for three generations,
29:13their warriors had attacked the courts and the monasteries of England,
29:18almost destroying the English in the process.
29:25But by the 860s, their success had suggested new opportunities
29:30to the Viking leaders.
29:32Once mere raiders, they now determined on permanent conquest.
29:37One by one, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fell until only one remained.
29:43Wessex.
29:45Now the Viking leader Guthrie aimed to make Wessex his own.
29:51His opponent was, like all successful Anglo-Saxon kings,
29:56a man of action and a warrior.
29:58But this King of Wessex was more.
30:01Indeed, he's just about unique in medieval history.
30:04He was an intellectual, a writer, a man whose very words have come down to us.
30:09For the first time in our history,
30:11we can hear the genuine voice of an English king.
30:15His name was Alfred.
30:18The book went down on English.
30:21There is your name on Latin, Pastoralis,
30:25and on English, Heredibook.
30:38Guthrie and the Vikings' assault on Alfred's kingdom
30:42reached a climax in the winter of 878.
30:46It surprised Alfred and drove him from his hall at Chippenham in Wiltshire.
30:51The Saxon king was forced to flee to the marshlands of Somerset, to Athelmy.
30:57It was the nadir of his fortunes.
31:00Later, in one of his writings, Alfred probably recalled his predicament.
31:07HE SPEAKS IN LATIN
31:14In the midst of prosperity, the mind is elated,
31:17and in prosperity, a man forgets himself.
31:24In hardship, he is forced to reflect on himself,
31:27even though he be unwilling.
31:29HE SPEAKS IN LATIN
31:34Athelmy means royal island,
31:36and Alfred fled here because it was an island.
31:40It's difficult to find in the middle of the marshes,
31:43and the water which floods the fenland in winter makes it difficult to attack.
31:48But, at the same time, it allows for easy communication by boat
31:53with the rest of Wessex.
31:55One should imagine Alfred sending out such messengers
31:58as he plotted and planned the counterattack as the winter turned into spring.
32:03At last, after several months, he was ready, and he sent out the call to arms.
32:21Across the shires of Wessex,
32:23the message ran, calling the people to their traditional assembly points.
32:28One of them was here, in the district of Swanborough,
32:31in the Vale of Pusey.
32:36Beneath my feet is the prehistoric burial mound,
32:39known locally as Swanborough Tump.
32:42It doesn't look much, but it's got its own place in the history of England.
32:47Because this, for centuries, was actually the centre of the local community.
32:52It was here that the people came, once a month,
32:55for the moot, or assembly, of what was known as the Hundred of Swanborough.
33:00And here, in the presence of the King's Reve, or bailiff,
33:04the people received the King's justice out in the open air.
33:11The King's Reve was a royal official,
33:13responsible for law and order, taxation and the administration of justice.
33:19The Hundred Court relied, as English government would do for the next thousand years,
33:24on the distinctively English idea.
33:27The jury, a collection of local people, some quite humble,
33:31who took part, as a matter of course,
33:33in the local administration of justice and government.
33:40Above the level of the Hundred, Wessex was divided into shires,
33:44Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset.
33:47They were run by royal officials, not local magnates,
33:50in the same way as the Hundreds,
33:52so twice a year the people would come to receive the King's justice on the one hand,
33:57and to make their concerns known to the King's officers on the other.
34:03In Wessexy, rough and red egalitarianism of the earliest settlers
34:08had developed into a kind of partnership between the King and people.
34:12This partnership, unlike what happened in the rest of Europe,
34:16had been hijacked by the leading landowners,
34:19and Alfred was well aware of its importance,
34:22because this partnership, the sense of all being in it together,
34:26made it easier for Alfred to make heavy demands on his people
34:30as the invasion crisis deepened.
34:34In contrast to Offa of Mercia,
34:36Alfred's kingship combined Christian Roman authority
34:40with the traditional participation of the Anglo-Saxon folk.
34:46A man cannot work on any enterprise without resources.
34:50In the case of the King, the resources and tools with which he has to rule
34:55are that he have his land fully manned.
35:02Without these tools, no king may make his ability known.
35:15Alfred's call to arms went out.
35:17It was the test of his style of kingship.
35:20And across Wessex in their shire and hundred courts, his people responded.
35:25Alfred's army assembled at a prehistoric barrow in Wiltshire,
35:30where his grandfather had celebrated the final victory
35:33over the British people of Cornwall.
35:36But the muster didn't just evoke Wessex's glorious past.
35:40Alfred's campaign was also a kind of crusade
35:43for his call to arms coincided with Easter, the feast of the resurrection,
35:48and the parallel between Alfred's recovery from defeat
35:51and Christ's victory over death wasn't lost on his troops.
35:57When they saw the King, receiving him, not surprisingly,
36:01as if one restored to life after suffering such great tribulations,
36:05they were filled with immense joy.
36:09From there, the army advanced to a place called Eile Oak,
36:13the traditional site of another Wessex hundred court.
36:19There, in the woods, they made camp.
36:25In the morning, they would march out to meet Guthrum and his Vikings.
36:31Military experts have calculated
36:33that this was probably the site of the battle.
36:36We can't know for certain, as there have been no systematic excavations.
36:40But Charles Fiennes have turned up remains of the right period,
36:44some of them heavily mutilated.
36:46This isn't surprising, because the battle was both savage and bloody.
36:51Both sides had too much at stake for it to be anything but.
36:55Guthrum knew that for his takeover of the Kingdom of Wessex to succeed,
36:59he had to kill Alfred outright.
37:02As for Alfred and the men of Wessex,
37:04they knew that this was probably their last chance of independence.
37:09If Guthrum won, the Viking takeover of England would be complete.
37:15On the brow of the hill above Eddington,
37:17Guthrum stationed the front rank of his shield war.
37:23Alfred's men were forced to attack.
37:26Fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall against the entire Viking army,
37:30he persevered resolutely for a long time.
37:38The battle was fierce.
37:40It was a fierce battle.
37:42It was a fierce battle.
37:44It was a fierce battle.
37:46It was a fierce battle.
37:48It was a fierce battle.
37:50It was a fierce battle.
37:52He persevered resolutely for a long time.
38:11At length, he gained the victory through God's will.
38:14He destroyed the Vikings with great slaughter.
38:23Alfred had established himself as a great war leader
38:27at the head of the shires,
38:29and Wessex was saved for the time being at least.
38:34But the future of the rest of England still hung in the balance.
38:53At Eddington, in 878, King Alfred had vanquished an enemy
38:58who had threatened the very existence of his kingdom.
39:02But winning a battle wasn't the same as winning a war.
39:06To do that, Alfred had to put all Wessex on a full-time war footing.
39:12He created a navy with bigger and better ships.
39:17Most effective of all was the chain of fortresses
39:20he built across his kingdom to deny the Vikings a free passage.
39:25Winchester, the capital, was one of the first,
39:28and their true significance was much greater than their general strength.
39:33King Wessex was a man of great ambition.
39:36He was a man of great ambition.
39:38He was a man of great ambition.
39:40He was a man of great ambition.
39:42These burr fortresses weren't private castles
39:46owned by some lord or bishop and manned by his retainers.
39:51Instead, they were fortified communities
39:55founded by the king and defended by his people.
39:59And, as Alfred had intended from the beginning,
40:02they quickly became the most important fortresses in England.
40:07And, as Alfred had intended from the beginning,
40:10they quickly became real towns, boosting trade and, with it, taxes.
40:17As a result, the king got rich and his people grew prosperous,
40:21whilst the word burr, as we pronounce it today,
40:25started to assume its modern meaning as well,
40:28of a self-governing urban community under royal patronage.
40:33And the first and greatest of those royal patrons was Alfred himself.
40:43The burrs were so important to Alfred
40:46that their names often replace the names of the moneyers
40:50on the reverse of his coins.
40:52This one displays the monogram of the mint at London.
40:57For London was the burr of burrs.
41:00Nevertheless, as the Viking tide ebbed in England,
41:03Alfred pushed forward beyond his kingdom's traditional frontiers.
41:08But it was his capture and re-fortification of the city of London
41:12that marked a new direction in his kingship.
41:19London was already the largest town
41:22and the commercial powerhouse of England,
41:25and it had been the jewel in King Offa's crown.
41:29All that mattered was Alfred's and the prestige that went with it.
41:33So, following his capture of the city and its re-fortification in 886,
41:39Alfred inflated his title and his ambition.
41:44Hitherto, he'd only been king of the West Saxons.
41:48Now he called himself king of the Angles and the Saxons.
41:54It would be a shame for Alfred to be king of all the English be far behind.
42:03For that's how he's described in this vital document.
42:07This is that frith that Alfred King and Guthrum King...
42:12It's the peace treaty Alfred made with Guthrum
42:15which formalised Viking control of eastern England.
42:19But in the treaty, Alfred describes himself
42:22as being king of all the English, not ruled over by the Danes.
42:27Alfred, in fact, ruled only part of England,
42:30but already there's the beginning here of a national political idea.
42:35And Alfred's books tell the same story.
42:39It was Alfred who commissioned the national book of record,
42:43the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
42:45It's called Anglo-Saxon not only because of its subject matter
42:49but because of its language,
42:51which the chronicles produced elsewhere in Europe.
42:54It's written not in Latin, but in the vernacular, Anglo-Saxon.
42:59This means that it's not written by churchmen for churchmen.
43:04Instead, it's a king talking to his people
43:08in the language that they understand,
43:10and his people talking to themselves.
43:13And there's no doubt that this use of Anglo-Saxon, the vernacular,
43:17the language of the people,
43:19is part of the policy of consciousness raising on Alfred's part,
43:23because not only does Alfred himself
43:25make many such translations into Anglo-Saxon,
43:28he also, in the letter which introduces the pastoral care,
43:33tells us why.
43:36We too should turn into the language that we can all understand,
43:42certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know,
43:47so that all the free-born young men now in England
43:50who have the means to apply themselves to it may be set to learning
43:54until the time that they can read English writings properly.
44:02When Alfred died in 899, he still ruled over only part of England,
44:08but his legacy was to be the permanent unification of the country.
44:13Much of his work was the task of his sons and grandsons,
44:17but it was Alfred who, in the crucible of the Viking invasions,
44:21had forged an idea of England
44:24that was more than simply cultural or linguistic.
44:28It was political, or rather, uniquely in Europe at the time,
44:32it was a combination of all three.
44:37In the years after his death, his successors pushed back the Vikings,
44:42and took all the land they had settled, and as they did so,
44:46they created shires on the Wessex pattern
44:49across the whole of England up to the Humber,
44:52and this political geography is with us today.
44:55The creation of England was almost complete.
44:59But the House of Wessex did not stop there.
45:02In two generations, English kings had established their lordship
45:06over the whole of the rest of Britain,
45:09including Scotland and the Western Isles.
45:12It was time for them to celebrate.
45:20Here was Edgar, lord of the English, hallowed to king,
45:27at Akemanchester, the ancient city,
45:30whose modern sons the island dwellers have called Bath.
45:40GULPING
45:45About 70 years after Alfred's death,
45:48his great-grandson Edgar came here to Bath
45:51for what was probably his second coronation.
45:54He'd already been crowned as king of the English,
45:57but meantime he'd established his authority over all Britain.
46:02Hence the choice of Bath for another, bigger ceremony,
46:07because in Bath there was a unique combination
46:10of a Christian abbey next door to the largest,
46:13the most impressive ruins of Roman Britain.
46:17It was an incomparable setting for Edgar's coronation
46:21as king of the first British Empire, 10th-century style.
46:38Let thy most sacred unction flow upon his head
46:42and descend into his heart and enter his soul,
46:46and let him by the grace be worthy of the promises
46:49which the victorious kings have obtained,
46:52that in this present life he may reign with happiness
46:55and finally attain to their fellowship in the kingdom of heaven.
47:02Receive this ring, the seal of the crown,
47:05receive this ring, the seal of the holy faith,
47:08the strength of thy kingdom and the increase of thy power,
47:12whereby thou mayst learn to drive back thy foes with triumph,
47:16destroy heresies, unite those whom thou hast conquered
47:20and bind them firmly to the Catholic faith.
47:27Unlike Saxon kings of an earlier age,
47:30Edgar was invested with a crown, not a helmet,
47:34and the service conducted by his archbishop
47:37deliberately compared the king to Christ.
47:42This coronation was so spectacular
47:45that when in 1910, more than 1,000 years later,
47:48the king, Emperor George V,
47:51was eager to emphasise his imperial status,
47:54he turned to Edgar's coronation service as one of his models.
48:00And he was right to do so,
48:02for his kingship was the lineal descendant of Edgar's and of Alfred's
48:07and of that participatory monarchy
48:10which had been first pioneered in England over a millennium before.
48:15Out of the chaos of post-Roman, Dark Age Britain,
48:19the English had created the world's first nation-state.
48:24One king, one country, one church, one currency, one language,
48:29and a single, unified, representative national administration.
48:34Never again in England would sovereignty descend to the merely regional level.
48:40Never again, despite disagreements and troubles, wars and even revolutions,
48:46would the idea of England and the unity of England ever be challenged.