A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  In any event, Honorius had little choice. Alaric the Goth had sacked Rome and he had moved his capital, temporarily, to Ravenna from where he wrote his farewell to Britain. From now on, the empire would be run from Constantinople, and Britain, which had not been a top priority for Italy, was now no priority at all for the new Rome East. Thoughtful historians are constitutionally allergic to critical dates, preferring instead to de-dramatize ‘turning points’ into long-term developments. But 410 was, in fact, one of the genuinely fateful moments in British history. Alaric the Goth had sacked Rome, and the last two legions departed. It was not like Hong Kong in 1997, with flags flying, pipers piping and the governor in his chariot driving seven times around the courtyard pledging to return. Doubtless, many among the Romano-British hoped and even assumed that, some day, they would see the eagles back. Others – town councillors, magistrates, tax-collectors, potters, poets, musicians and, not least, the new Christian priests – who were facing the murky, uncertain future, told themselves that it was bound to happen, that they could not expect to look to Mother Rome forever, that the empire was half-infested with barbarians anyway, that they could hire themselves some barbarians to deal with other barbarians, and that, somehow, they would manage to see the crisis through. But in the meantime, just to be prudent, they would bury their treasure in a hoard – coins, gems, medals – and when the worst was over they would pull it up again and into the light of civilization.

  The best the Romano-British could do was to opt for what seemed the least evil. At first, the warriors from the north German coast – southern Denmark, Jutland and Lower Saxony – sailing upriver in their ‘wave-horses’ seemed a boon, not a curse. Some sort of force was needed to stop the Picts in the north and the Dal Riata in the west from exploiting the yawning vacuum of power left by the exit of the legions, and an enterprising local despot like Vortigern saw in the Saxons his very own private army – muscle that would be his to command – and a way to make himself supreme in his corner of southeast England. What was more, he must have reckoned that the Saxons – just a few hundred of them – could be had on the cheap. What did they know or care about ruling? So Vortigern offered them a patch of land on the isle ofThanet, and after they had duly dealt with the marauding Picts, pushing them back north, he saw no reason to go on paying them.

  This was one of the more spectacular misjudgements in British history. Around 440 the Saxon warriors expressed their displeasure at being double-crossed by going on a rampage, the likes of which made the raids of 367 look like a picnic. In 446 the distraught Britons, acutely aware of what Vortigern had unleashed on southern and eastern England, made a last frantic appeal to Rome. It was recorded in his De Excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain) by the monk Gildas, who was living in Wales in the mid-sixth century:

  To Aetius, thrice consul, the groans of the Britons . . . The barbarians push us to the sea; the sea pushes us back on the barbarians. Between these two kinds of death, we are either drowned or slaughtered.

  Gildas saw the disasters of the fifth and sixth centuries – famine, petty tyranny and the ravaging of ‘a pack of cubs [which] burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness’ – as a punishment ordained by God for the violation of his commandments by the stiff-necked and haughty Romano-British and even by Christians, who ‘should have been an example to the whole people [but who] lay about, most of them, in drunken stupor’. But in making the events of British history sound as much as possible like the plagues of Old Testament scripture and in the interest of poetic colour – ‘fragments of corpses covered with a purple crust of congealed blood looked as if they had been mixed up in some dreadful wine-press’ – Gildas exaggerated the scale and the speed of the destruction. The ‘multitudes’ of the barbarian warriors were, in fact, scattered bands, who settled (when they settled at all) rather thinly in the south and east of the country. They were tough and threatening to be sure, and were a tiny minority in a population still, in the sixth century, overwhelmingly Romano-British. And the disproportion in numbers made possible famous moments of resistance, such as the improvised action at St Albans (Verulamium), where Saint Germannus prevailed by deploying the mightiest weapon of all, war-cries of ‘Hallelujah’, or the battle in north Britain, perhaps in southern Scotland, described in the Welsh epic The Gododdin written by the bard Aneirin, where the three British kings, Cynri, Cynon and Cynrhain, and their 300 warriors, ‘wearing golden torques’ and seated on 300 fiery stallions, took on the Saxons. The most famous of all these episodes of resistance was the battle of Mount Badon, probably fought in 516, and for some time thought to be somewhere around the hills overlooking Bath. Much later, in the eighth century, the monk-historian Nennius imagined the victor of Mount Badon to have been none other than Arthur, the last of the Christian-Roman warriors to hold out against the hordes of darkness, but the holy aura of Camelot and a king given his vocation by a Celtic wise man are a poetic fantasy that lights up the sparsely chronicled emptiness of these uncertain, and perhaps unknowable, times. The hero of Mount Badon is much more likely to have been the kind of man described by Gildas as a Roman aristocrat, perhaps an ex-officer, Ambrosius Aurelianus, whose second name still has a ring of gold to it.

  For all the epic glamour of these tales, the fifth and sixth centuries were not, in fact, a time when the hosts of light and darkness fought over the prostrate body of the island. A tidy compartmentalization of British history, with the wholesale destruction of Roman Britain immediately followed by its violent reincarnation as Anglo-Saxon England, bears no relation to the experience of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Britain. The governing institutions of the Roman province did, indeed, fall away, but much of the social practices and culture and even the language of the old Britain persisted long after the arrival of the first few bands of Saxon mercenaries and freebooters. For many generations Romano-Britons and North Sea warriors must have lived alongside each other, as neighbours rather than implacable foes. Since the Saxons, Jutes and Angles were themselves looking for already-worked land with in situ peasantry (for they had no intention of stooping to farming themselves) and since the only interest the unfree country people had was in calculating which kind of overlord offered the more secure protection, there was an easy fit between the new and the old.

  The make-do changes that were forced on the island came about as much in response to its economic isolation from the old world of the continental empire as to the threats from Saxons. There was certainly contraction. Some towns, like Exeter (Isca Dumnoniorum) were abandoned altogether; others shrank. Roads, bath-houses, marketplaces and theatres fell into disrepair. And at some point between 490 and 550 the bread ovens at Wroxeter (Viriconium) in Shropshire were fired up for the last time. But what happened at Wroxeter is a good instance of what must have been happening in many towns in this time of transition: an adaptation rather than an obliteration. When the bath-house no longer functioned, its tiles were used for paving. When the roof of its basilica threatened to fall in, the citizens took down the building themselves and within the shell constructed a new timber-winged building in the Roman style, still commodious, whether used for private or public purposes.

  Eventually, however, the adaptations became ever more makeshift and the fabric of Roman life increasingly threadbare, until it did, indeed, fall apart altogether. Those who remained most deeply attached to the idea of Roman Britain evidently felt, by the middle and late sixth century, that they were unlikely to be able to sustain it any longer in the classic heartland of Britain – the south and east, where Jutes (in Kent), Angles (in East Anglia) and Saxons (in the south) were arriving and settling in disruptively greater numbers. They migrated to the north and west, or sometimes, in search of a remnant of the old trading and market economy of the empire, some of the British took ship for the Roman province of Gaul and Armorica (Brittany).

  Certainly by the seventh century, Britannia was truly a thing of the past and four cultures shared the islands of Britain. There was a vestigial ‘B
ritain’ hanging on in the west, southwest and Wales; these people were no longer Romano-British but spoke and wrote in Celtic. The Dal Riata Gaels, who lived in Ireland, the Hebrides and western Scotland, were part of this tradition. North of the abandoned walls and forts the loosely confederated Pictish kingdoms, for the most part still pagan and speaking a language that remains uncertain, were firmly established in Scotland. And ‘England’ – the pagan realm of the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes – was planted in the east, all the way from Jutish Kent to the Saxon kingdom of Bernicia in Northumbria, with its stronghold at Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast.

  Like many invaders, the Saxon chiefs and kings had a hankering to possess what had gone before them – the old Roman ideal of the regnum Britanniae, the kingdom of the Britons – and they often built settlements on the ruined remains of old Roman-British towns, not least, of course, London, but in no other respect did they remotely resemble that culture. Their political power rested on the spoils of war and on the unwritten custom of the clan. The blood feud and the inhumation of bodies were standard practice among them. This does not mean, however, that the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were places of subhuman brutality and ignorance, perpetrated by thugs in helmets. War was not a sport; it was a system. Its plunder was the glue of loyalty, binding noble warriors and their men to the king. It was the land, held in return for military service, that fed their bellies; it was the honour that fed their pride; and it was the jewels that pandered to their vanity. It was everything.

  Although the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, written at some point between the seventh and the tenth centuries, is an epic fantasy of a monster-slaying hero, its vision of ceorls (free warriors) feasting in the great timbered hall of their ‘ring-giver’ lord could not have been far from the truth. The ‘breast mail’, helmet and golden standard presented to Beowulf are exactly reminiscent of the body-jewellery and armour taken from the Sutton Hoo ship burial. And if the spectacular quality of the Sutton Hoo artefacts is anything to go by, it is no wonder that warriors would be willing to devote their lives to a lord who could deliver such glittering prizes. One such lord was Raedwald of East Anglia, who died around 625 and who is the best candidate to be identified with the king who was laid out in the 85-foot-long Sutton Hoo ship, along with his splendid, rather Roman-looking armour – helmet, mailcoat, sword, shield and spears. The ship was then dragged from the river Deben in Suffolk, up an embankment and sunk into a custom-dug trench. In the middle a huge coffin contained the king and his treasure, and when the proper obsequies had been done, the boat was settled in its grave and earth mounded over it so that it stood out on the horizon, a wave-horse riding to the afterlife. The origin of the pieces discovered in the ship and in separate burial mounds made clear the astonishingly global reach of the Anglo-Saxon raiders and traders: silver from Byzantium, gold coins from Gaul, Romano-British enamels, yellow silk from Syria and a North African bowl with carvings of a camel and a lion. But the most spectacular item of all may well be a great gold buckle, alive with writhing serpentine creatures over its massively wrought surface.

  Was the Sutton Hoo warrior’s resting-place to be pagan Valhalla or the Christian paradise? Among the treasure was a pair of spoons, one with ‘Saul’ engraved on its shaft, the other with the Christian ‘Paul’. And although it seems that Raedwald himself had been dissuaded by his wife from making the leap to Christianity, it was not long before many of his contemporaries among the five kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England did. The history of the conversions between the sixth and the eighth centuries is another of those crucial turning points in the history of the British isles, but it is not just an episode in the history of religion. Just as much as the exit of the legions marks the isolation of Britain from Rome, the age of the conversions marks its return. And, paradoxically, the process began in a country that had never been touched by Roman rule in the first place: the land the Romans called Hibernia, which was populated by the Gaelic tribes of the Dal Riata.

  It is important to remember that the most famous of the early missionaries to Ireland, St Patrick, was, in fact, a Romano-British aristocrat, the patricius or patrician, as he called himself. His father was a pillar of the ruling class – a town councillor and landed gentleman, with servile peasants at his beck and call – and like so many of his class trying to cling to the Roman way, he was deacon in the Christian Church. So there was nothing remotely Irish about the teenager who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, probably from a home somewhere in southwestern England, by Dal Riata raiders some time in the early fifth century. By his own account, until this disaster Patrick had been idle and callow, but during his six long years of servitude as herdsman in the ‘forest of Foclut’ (by tradition believed to be Slemish in County Antrim) he had time to consider and repent of his former life: ‘My faith grew and my spirit stirred and . . . I would say up to a hundred prayers a day. I would wake to pray before dawn in all weather: snow, frost or rain and I felt no harm as I now realize the Spirit was within me.’

  After he had escaped, probably to Brittany, had taken instruction and been ordained, Patrick spent years in the places where Christianity had sunk the deepest roots – Gaul, and in particular the cathedral city of Auxerre. So to the image of Patrick the Romano-Brit we must now add Patrick the European Christian. He was then visited by prophetic dreams. The first told him to return home to Britain. The second, once he was in Britain, was a vision in which a man came from Ireland bearing a letter from the people of Foclut imploring him, the ‘holy boy, to come and walk among us’. So some time around 460 Patrick became the Paul of the Dal Riadic western isles, a wanderer, putting his life at risk and doing, in fact, what no other Christian evangelist had ever dared to do by going beyond the limits of the old Roman Empire, to Ultima Thule, ‘the ends of the earth’, to preach the gospel to the heathens. It was not an easy mission. In Ireland he seemed to the local kings to be an enemy, a spy from Rome; to the fathers of the Roman Church he was wasting his time on incorrigible heathens. But despite hostility and spells of captivity, Patrick took the good fight to the foe, targeting traditional pagan sites and festivals at which to do his preaching.

  This may, in fact, have been a less confrontational tactic than it first seems, since it was common (if controversial) for missionaries to ‘lead’ the pagans to Christ by grafting the ancient animist cults of water and woods on to Christian purposes. The Dal Riata kings, after all, still liked to boast of their descent from pagan gods, so it made sense to co-opt sacred springs as sites of baptism, venerated, spirit-inhabited groves of trees as temples of the living cross, and traditional hillforts and burial mounds as places of preaching. And there were other ways in which Patrick and his successors used the circumstances of Celtic Ireland to further their mission. The rigid organization of the Roman Church, with its disciplined hierarchies of bishops and its stress on a single centre of authority, might have been a hard sell to take to the passionately parochial 150 kings of Ireland. Patrick was determined to establish his own independence from the Roman-dominated British Church, with its insistence on obedience to territorially organized bishops. He understood that the monastic ideal of retreat, which he had learned in Gaul, perfectly matched the needs of local royal clans and that it could be presented to them as a family matter.

  Columcille, the ‘holy dove’ (Columba, in the more familiar Latin form of his name), had an even better grip on the convergence between secular and spiritual purposes because he (like his biographer St Adomnan) came from the exceptionally powerful Antrim clan of the Ui Neill. The clans were, after all, first and foremost tribal communities, presided over by the father figure of the ri tuach, and Columcille would certainly have understood that for the king, the founding and endowment of a monastery could be thought of as the kind of gift that, like the donation of land or horses to a loyal warrior, established obligation; it was a gesture from which the donor was sure to get something in return – cattle, wealth or good fortune in battle, and perhaps not least a literate class, who mig
ht give written form to his commands. This was probably what the king, Conall mac Congaill, had in mind when, in 563, he granted Columcille land on the small fertile island of Iona, off the coast of Mull. The island rapidly became the headquarters of Columcille’s missions, both west to the Irish Dal Riata and east through the Hebridean isles and Argyll. Throughout these lands and islands the local kings would supply the land for the monks, peasants who could supply them with barley and honey, the labour to build their cells and work in the forge and sons for an abbot and monks and daughters for nuns. It was as if they were building a holy cashel – feathers in their caps, grace for their soul. So monasteries like Aran off the gull-swept Irish coast, with their stone walls, circular beehive cells and encircling stone cashel walls, almost look like strongholds: encampments for God. And this coming together of the kingly and the sacred realms must have seemed consummated when, around 574, Columcille actually ordained one of the Dal Riata kings, Aedan mac Gabhrain, as a Christian priest.

  At some point in the early seventh century one of the Bernician kings, Oswald, asked Iona to send a mission to preach in his kingdom, and St Aidan’s arrival in the northeast shortly after is properly seen as the beginning of a momentous epoch: the gathering-in of all the peoples of Britain within the Christian flock.

  The chronicler of that extraordinary work was the Jarrow monk, Bede. To all schoolboys of my generation he was always the ‘Venerable Bede’, and that venerability, smelling a bit of the hairshirt and the cloister, not to mention that daunting title of his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of England), was enough to suggest that Bede might not be a page-turner. In fact, however, Bede is the first consummate English story-teller; an artful retailer of wonders, a writer of brilliantly imaginative prose, capable of conjuring up the fire-light and roasting meat of the timbered halls of the Saxon kings or the death throes of a great war-horse. Although he spent virtually his entire life in the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow, where he had been deposited by his parents when he was seven years old, Bede’s was one of the least cloistered minds of early medieval England. He was a clear-eyed observer of the earthiness of the Anglo-Saxon world, of its bloody feuds, its unpredictable, sometimes infantile, dynastic quarrels, as well as its credulous enchantment by magic. It is his acute understanding of the foibles of sinners as well as the virtues of saints and his lack of illusions about the difficulty of keeping the converted to the straight and narrow that make him so persuasive a narrator.