This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  The following year it was safe for the emperor, Claudius to cross the Channel and join the Roman legions on the banks of the Thames and so (with elephants) lead the victory – with all that meant in Rome.

  Taking command, and enjoining the barbarians who were gathered at his approach, he defeated them in battle and captured Camulodunum [Colchester], the capital of Cynobellinus. He deprived the conquered of their arms [took the surrender] and handed them to Plautius, bidding him also subjugate the remaining districts. Claudius now hastened back to Rome sending ahead news of his victory. The Senate on hearing of his achievement gave him the title Britannicus and granted him permission to celebrate a triumph.

  But back in Britain Caratacus (sometimes Caractacus) resisted and as Tacitus wrote, Caratacus had become a hero and not just among his own people: ‘His reputation had gone beyond the islands, had spread over the nearest provinces, and was familiar in Italy itself where the curiosity to see what manner of man it was that had for so many years scorned our power.’ He had resisted the might of Roman power for six years, hiding in the Welsh borders and may have succeeded if it had not been for British treachery. He was not defeated by Ostorius (the successor to Plautius) but handed over to him by the queen of the northern tribe, the Brigantes. Also, the Romans saw this man as the fierce warrior from the furthest point in their known world. That alone made him a figure of much curiosity.

  While the king’s humble vassals filed past, ornaments and neck rings and prizes won in his foreign wars were borne in parade; next his brothers, wife and daughter were placed on view; finally, he himself. The rest stooped to unworthy entreaties dictated by fear; but on the part of Caratacus not a downcast look nor a word requested pity. Arrived at the tribunal, he spoke as follows: ‘Had my lineage and my rank been matched by my moderation in success, I should have entered this city rather as a friend than as a captive. My present lot, if to me a degradation, is to you a glory. If I were dragged before you after surrendering without a blow, there would have been little heard either of my fall or your triumph; punishment of me will be followed by oblivion; but save me alive, and I shall be an everlasting memorial to your clemency.’

  And so he was. Caratacus was freed. The Romans struck his chains and those of his family but he was not to return to Britain. Caratacus, or so the chronicles tell us, remained in honourable captivity. That was hardly the end of the story of that invasion. The most gruesome slaughter and the conquest were yet to come.

  The centre of Roman Britain was Camulodunum (Colchester). The idea was that Britain, or at least part of it, should become a province within the Roman Empire. But this was difficult to achieve. The Britons were warlike and because there were some twenty-three tribal regions, it was impossible to get overall agreement, or even an understanding, with more than a few of them. The south and the east were the most easily controllable. The Romans had large forces there, they had set up their capital at Colchester and there were good trade routes through Essex and Kent. The uplands of Britain presented a bigger problem. In AD 54 Claudius died and his stepson, Nero became emperor. The death of another leader, this one in Britain, left a longer lasting impression upon British history and folklore. Her name was Boudicca and she was the widow of the King of the Iceni in East Anglia. Boudicca had been flogged and abused, as had her daughters, by the Romans. She and her tribe sought terrible revenge for this outrage.

  The Romans had no more than 20,000 men in Britain in four legions: two were thirty days’ march away on the farther side of Wales, one was not much closer in Gloucester and the last was 120 miles away, at Lincoln. Boudicca led her warriors through East Anglia to the capital at Colchester. They attacked with uncompromising fury and massacred every Roman and every person in the pay or appropriating the style of the Roman occupation. None was spared. Word had been sent to Lincoln where the Roman Ninth Legion was in camp. Their commander, Petilius Cerialis, saddled his cavalry but could only move south at the pace of his infantry. Boudicca, still covered in blood from her gruesome work at Colchester, set out to meet the Ninth Legion and fell upon the infantry. The Romans were slaughtered. Cerialis escaped with his cavalry. But when the Roman, Suetonius, whose job it was to defend London and its people, heard that Boudicca had cut down the Ninth Legion and Cerialis was in flight and was now heading south to what would one day be Britain’s capital, he abandoned London. Boudicca carried on and found London empty of troops and so her warriors butchered anyone they found. They next turned their vengeance on St Albans, then called Verulamium. No quarter was shown. The simplicity of the thirty-five words of Tacitus tells everything: ‘They wasted no time in getting down to the bloody business of hanging, burning and crucifying. It was as if they feared that retribution might catch up with them while their vengeance was only half-complete.’

  But for the Romans, and the reputation of Suetonius, all was not lost. Reinforced, he marched to the Midlands where Boudicca had amassed 230,000 troops. Suetonius had 10,000 Romans. That number would be sufficient because at last the Romans were fighting in their own style, not Boudicca’s. She had been successful when her tribesmen fought as marauders and terrorists. Now, Boudicca was to fight on Roman terms, which was a foolish mistake. The Romans were at the top of a slope and they enticed the Britons on. When they came, the Romans launched their javelins, then charged with their legionaries and cavalry, then forced the Britons back on their carts and their families who were behind them. They slaughtered the cart horses so there was no escape and then massacred the Britons, the ancients, their women, their children. As for Boudicca, she was finished and could expect no sweet charity and wanted none. She is said to have poisoned herself. Her surviving followers were cut down and Nero sent extra troops across the Channel to terrorize the other tribes. The vengeance of Boudicca had unsettled the Romans so that they now took no chances. Dead Britons were relatively less dangerous. Their grieving kith and kin were philosophical in the aftermath of sword and fire.

  Diplomacy took over where military action had not always maintained the peace and the south never again rose against the Romans. There were battles to come, men to die and there were those Britons who preferred death to subjugation. But it was also true that Britain had embarked upon a civilized way of life that lasted for 350 years. The Romans ruled Britain for nearly 400 years and they gave the Britons their first written historical descriptions. They recorded their versions of what was happening and the names of people who were making it happen. But when the Romans started to leave Britain in AD 410 – recalled to defend Rome – many of those who could write went with them, as did the imperial incentive to keep records, and so there are few contemporary written accounts of what was going on in Britain for many years.

  Exactly what followed the Roman exodus is very difficult to verify. There is a long period in the history of these islands that can never be accurately written. Instead we rely on, for example, a sixth-century monk called Gildas the Wise.7 Most of what he wrote was a religious tract, but in it there is at least a sense of the story of this period. Gildas suggests that the Anglo-Saxons began arriving in the 470s because they were imported as mercenaries and that other mercenaries were bought to defend against them. Gildas tells us it was a time of misery and of the rising of a great tyrant, who was probably Vortigern – although Gildas did not name him. Vortigern was on the side of the Britons. He hired mercenaries to defend the Britons against the Anglo-Saxons who were led by Hengist and Horsa. There was a great victory at a place called Mons Badonicus. Gildas felt this victory was important because it brought peace for perhaps half a century.

  Then all the councillors, together with that proud tyrant Gurthrigern [Vortigern], the British king, were so blinded, that, as a protection to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting in among them the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations . . . What palpable darkness must have enveloped their minds – darkness desperate and cruel! Those very people whom, when absent, th
ey dreaded more than death itself, were invited to reside, as one may say, under the selfsame roof. Foolish are the princes, as it is said, of Thafneos, giving counsel to unwise Pharaoh. A multitude of whelps came forth from the lair of this barbaric lioness, in three cyuls, as they call them, that is, in three ships of war, with their sails wafted by the wind and with omens and prophecies favourable, for it was foretold by a certain soothsayer among them, that they should occupy the country to which they were sailing three hundred years, and half of that time, a hundred and fifty years, should plunder and despoil the same. They first landed on the eastern side of the island, by the invitation of the unlucky king, and there fixed their sharp talons, apparently to fight in favour of the island, but alas! more truly against it. Their motherland, finding her first brood thus successful, sends forth a larger company of her wolfish offspring, which sailing over, join themselves to their bastard-born comrades. From that time the germ of iniquity and the root of contention planted their poison amongst us, as we deserved, and shot forth into leaves and branches.8

  All England, it would have appeared, was leaves and branches. In this period, the middle of the fifth century, there were great forests almost everywhere. The Weald at that time ran from Kent to Hampshire: 120 miles long and 30 miles deep. Where there wasn’t forest, there were often marshlands. There were roads, almost 5,000 miles of them, left by the Romans yet the towns were crumbling. It would be called urban decay today and it had started before the Romans left. The Britons, and the Saxon invaders, were rarely stone masons; they left no record of knowing much about repairing the buildings and cared even less. The great Saxon churches, many surviving today, came much later.

  If we have doubts about Gildas, we have fewer doubts about the importance of the clues to this period found in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede – the first British historian. Here, and among archaeological records, are found the few traces of Saxon heritage and the names that make up the history of these islands: Hengist, Horsa, Penda, Æthelberht slaughtered by Offa, St Augustine, Eric Bloodaxe, Edward the Confessor, his son Harold and, the greatest mystery of all Saxon history, King Arthur and Camelot. If we have an ounce of romantic history then, along with Robin Hood, Arthur is the one we really want to believe in. There was a warrior king, or chieftain, who did great deeds but no one is quite sure who he was. In the fifth century mercenaries came from northern Europe, supposedly to help the Britons. But they started to help themselves to Britain. Later, according to, among others, the ninth-century Welsh scholar Nennius, they were sent packing. And Arthurian hopefuls would say that it may have been Arthur who defeated them. He is found in early bardic literature collectively called Mabinogion and developed in the late twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes – he gave us Lancelot. Writers usually relied upon hearsay. Even if Arthur was a minor king who fought twelve battles that defeated the barbarians, it may not have been so important in sixth-century Britain. In a country which accepted raiding, violence and its dreadful consequences as a matter of course, twelve battles over a couple of years would not have been remarkable.

  According to Nennius, who was writing c.830 (see the Historia Brittonium), Arthur’s last battle took place on Mount Badon and although its location remains unknown, by cross-checking other events, including the birthdays and the deaths of chroniclers, it seems that this final – the twelfth – battle took place between 490 and 503. So hopefully for Arthurians, a mighty knight did live and fight towards the end of the fifth century who defeated invaders and was seen as a chivalrous saviour.

  The Venerable Bede (673–735), an altogether more reliable chronicler, provides an exact date for another figure of the time, Columba, in his Historia Ecclesiastica.

  In the year of our Lord 565, there came into Britain a famous priest and abbot, a monk by habit and life, whose name was Colomba, to preach the word of God to the provinces of the northern Picts; who are separated from the southern parts by steep and rugged mountains.

  Bede’s steep and rugged mountains are the Grampians and Columba was sent to convert those who lived to the north of them. It seems that the southerners had already been converted by a Briton, Bishop Ninian, who had learned his theology in Rome. Columba’s arrival coincided with the beginnings of what became the Ionan community. Bede is quite certain of Columba’s origin.

  Columba came into Britain in the ninth year of the reign of Bridus [accession 557 according to Bede],9 who was the son of Meilochon, and the powerful king of the Pictish nation, and he converted the nation to the faith of Christ, by his preaching and example. It is true they followed uncertain rules in their observance of the great festival [Easter], wherefore they only practised such works as piety and chastity as they could learn from the prophetical, evangelical, and apostolical writings. The manner of keeping Easter continued among them for the space of 150 years, till the year of our Lord’s incarnation 715.

  So a carefully crafted journal gives us the dates of a Scottish king: Bride (Bridius), the son of Meilochon. Ninian and Columba measured men in their God’s image and there were none who could not be saved and Easter, whether or not it was celebrated according to synodical decree, was the most important event in their year and preached forgiveness of sins. Perhaps there was spiritual and temporal fairness abroad in these islands but there was wickedness and violence too. There was also a new conflict that would end, once more, with the defeat of the Britons. This time, the English, who did not come from England, would be the victors.

  CHAPTER TWO

  570–886

  English is the most common international language of the twenty-first century. It remains a living language whose origins tell us so much about the earliest years of our identity. Equally, discovering the story of those early years is made complicated by the unfamiliar styling of what became common English and the context in which it might have been used – and therefore its sometimes obscure meaning. So when thinking of the Venerable Bede, we have to see how difficult it is for some of us to read the English words. But were they English? Also, what clue does the language or the dialect give us to the make-up of the peoples of these islands during this important period after the Romans and before the Normans?

  To judge a nation from a collection of societies it is useful to turn to the list of languages spoken in that ‘country’. So it is with our story of the early Middle Ages. We would like to see if there are clues to modern English which has more words than any other language and is the second most spoken language in the world (three-quarters of letters are addressed in English). In Bede’s seventh- and eighth-century England this was far from so. The earliest language that we know about in the British Isles was Celtic. That does not mean that all of the people in these islands spoke Celtic. Certainly the northern (Scottish and Cumbrian) and western (Irish, Welsh and Cornish) peoples have spoken Celtic or Celtic dialogues for 2,000 years. Surviving inscriptions suggest this is so. Clearly, a form of Celtic may have been spoken more broadly across the whole of the British Isles, but with the arrival of the German tribes during the fifth century, many if not most of those Celts were pressed further and further to the west until the Celts and their language survived only in the far west – Wales, Cornwall, the north-west (Cumbria), Ireland and Scotland. After the fifth century, there is not much evidence that Celtic was a strong language in the rest of England. Then what replaced it?

  The Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons crossed into England during the fifth century. Because they overpowered the indigenous population, their languages survived and were used wherever they settled and ruled. Because the Angles came from Engle and because these Germanic people were the dominant invaders of the time, their language was adopted more easily. It was called Engllisc, and so English. The obvious geographical connection with the Angles today is East Anglia. The realm (if that is not too grand a title) of the East Angles was established by bringing together the ‘north
fulk’ and the ‘suth fulk’; this was between AD 550 and AD 600, about 150 years after the Roman armies had been recalled from Britain to defend Rome. It was not virgin soil upturned or grazed. The Saxons were in what are now the eastern counties before the arrival of the Angles; they were there with the Romans and existed by an understanding and sometimes by treaty or covenant (Latin: foedus) who were expected to respond to a Roman call to arms. A tribe that had this responsibility (and the protection of the Romans) was known as a Foederatus. From this and its Latin root we get the modern word federation. We also see the origin of feudal (feodum – fee). Is this important to an understanding of the British? The answer must be yes because we then begin to see something of our origins that we can identify in the twenty-first century.

  Language always suggests that the group (not necessarily a nation) speaking that language dominates a region and, importantly, shows us what influences press themselves on that group. So when we come to English, we have to think in terms of Old English, Middle English and Modern English. When we see where (roughly) these groups start, then we can also recognize some of the man influences on our ancestors.

  Celtic was spoken in parts of these islands before the Romans arrived. Celtic did not survive as a dominant language because the people who spoke it did not survive in sufficient numbers to dominate the islands and all the people. Old English had its origins in the Indo-European languages that produced the mixture of Germanic dialects and languages. So we start with the thought that Old English did not appear from tribal languages already in the British Isles but from the invasions and migrations from Continental Europe. That language, Old English, was spoken and, importantly, written by about AD 700. But there was not one language. There were four main dialects: Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian and, perhaps most interestingly, West-Saxon. Old English is sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon and early West-Saxon was the language that would have been used by Alfred the Great (849–99). Alfred was a great warrior but we should not forget that he was a considerable scholar. During times that his sword was still, Alfred translated Latin texts including those of Bede and particularly Liber Regulae Pastoralis (‘Pastoral Care’ or ‘Pastoral Rule’), written by Pope Gregory the Great sometime in the 590s. Maybe this scholarly reputation is one – if not the main – reason that West-Saxon became the regular form of written language of that period.