by Robert Lacey
Also by Robert Lacey
ROBERT, EARL OF ESSEX
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HENRY VIII
THE QUEENS OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC
SIR WALTER RALEGH
MAJESTY: ELIZABETH II AND THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR
THE KINGDOM
PRINCESS
ARISTOCRATS
FORD: THE MEN AND THE MACHINE
GOD BLESS HER!
QUEEN MOTHER
LITTLE MAN
GRACE
SOTHEBY’S: BIDDING FOR CLASS
THE YEAR 1000
THE QUEEN MOTHER’S CENTURY
ROYAL: HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by Robert Lacey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue,
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, 2003
First eBook Edition: June 2004
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Penguin Classics, 1995; revised edition, 1968), translation copyright © Leo Sherley-Price, 1955, 1968;
The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978),
translator Marjorie Chibnall, © Oxford University Press, 1978;
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (J. M. Dent, 1996),
translator M. J. Swanton, © J. M. Dent, 1996;
Piers the Ploughman by William Langland (Penguin Books, 1966),
translation © J. F. Goodridge, 1959, 1966.
Illustrations and maps © 2003 by Fred van Deelen
ISBN: 978-0-7595-1161-3
FOR SASHA
Contents
Anglo-Saxon and Norman England
England's Norman and Angevin, or Plantagenet, Kings
The Angevin Empire of Henry II
Also by Robert Lacey
Copyright
Introduction: Storytelling
Cheddar Man
Pytheas and the Painted People
The Standard-Bearer of the 10th
And did those Feet? Jesus Christ and the Legends of Glastonbury
The Emperor Claudius Triumphant
Boadicea, Warrior Queen
Hadrian’s Wall
Arthur, Once and Future King
Pope Gregory’s Angels
St Augustine’s Magic
King Oswy and the Crown of Thorns
Caedmon, The First English Poet
The Venerable Bede
Alfred and the Cakes
The Lady of the Mercians
Ethelred the Unready
Elmer the Flying Monk
King Canute and the Waves
Edward the Confessor
The Legend of Lady Godiva
The Year of Three Kings
The Death of Brave King Harold
Hereward the Wake and the Norman Yoke
The Domesday Book
The Mysterious Death of William Rufus
Henry I and the White Ship
Stephen and Matilda
Murder in the Cathedral
A King Repents
The River-Bank Take-Away
Richard the Lionheart
John Lackland and Magna Carta
Hobbehod, Prince of Thieves
Simon De Montfort and His Talking-Place
A Prince Who Speaks No Word of English
Piers Gaveston and Edward II
A Prince Wins His Spurs
The Burghers of Calais
The Fair Maid of Kent and the Order of the Garter
The Great Mortality
The Bedside Manner of A Plague Doctor
The Dream of Piers The Ploughman
The ‘Mad Multitude’
Bibliography and Source Notes
Exploring the Original Sources
Acknowledgements
Anglo-Saxon and Norman England
Simplified family tree of England’s Norman and Angevin Kings
France and Normandy, showing the Angevin possessions of King Henry II (Henry Plantagenet) around 1174
STORYTELLING
THE FIRST HISTORY BOOK THAT I REMEMBER reading with pleasure was a stout, blue, exuberantly triumphalist volume, Our Island Story - A History of England for Boys and Girls by H. E. Marshall. It had a red and gold crested shield embossed on the cover, and it told tales of men, women and often children whom it dared to describe as ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’. It was accompanied by a companion volume, Our Empire Story, which was still more politically incorrect, relating the sagas of the heroes and heroines who adventured ‘across the seas’ to paint much of the globe pink. I must confess that I loved it still more - even though I discovered, at the beginning of the second chapter, that the author had a vivid imagination.
John Cabot’s ship the Matthew was described by Marshall as sailing out from Bristol harbour one bright May morning in 1497, ‘followed by the wishes and prayers of many an anxious heart . . . until it was but a speck in the distance’. Old H. E. - who, I later learned, was an Edwardian lady, Henrietta Elizabeth, living and writing in Australia - was clearly not aware that the port of Bristol is several muddy miles inland from the Bristol Channel. As a pupil at Clifton National Infants School, a few hundred yards from the Bristol docks, I could have told her that if there had been a crowd waving goodbye to Cabot in 1497, they would have lost sight of the doughty mariner as he tacked round the first corner of the Avon Gorge.
It was my first lesson in the imperfections of history. There may be such a thing as pure, true history - what actually, really, definitely happened in the past - but it is unknowable. We can only hope to get somewhere close. The history that we have to make do with is the story that historians choose to tell us, pieced together and handed down, filtered through every handler’s value system and particular axe that he or she chooses to grind.
In fact, I was never that disillusioned by H. E. Marshall’s mistake. I was in thrall to the tales that she told - and in our postmodern age it could even be considered healthy to have realised that I was reading not the truth, but someone else’s imperfect version of it. ‘History’ and ‘story’ derive from the same linguistic root, and if history can never escape its authorship, it should at least try to make the authorship readable and bright.
Unlike English, maths, and science, history is not in the core curriculum of British schools. You can give it up at fourteen, and the minority of pupils (around 5 per cent) who do choose to study history at GCSE and A level are not taken through every reign and century of their country’s development. They are offered an episodic menu of currently fashionable topics that are considered ‘relevant’ - Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia feature prominently under this heading. In fact, the apparently obscure subject of English medieval history would present students with material of much more relevance - the growth and principles of our freedoms, law and Parliamentary system, not to mention the buildings, towns, and countryside that help define our sense of who we are. It would also introduce them to some extraordinary personalities.
Heroes and heroines are judged to
have had their day. The un-teaching of history concentrates on ‘themes’ rather than personalities. But personality - human nature - is surely the essence of history, and I have deliberately made personalities the essence of this book. Brief though each chapter is, Great Tales seeks to create a coherent, chronological picture of our island story, while following the guiding principle that all men and women have heroism inside them - along with generous and fascinating measures of incompetence, apathy, evil and lust. This volume makes a start on the history of England. Later will follow the great tales of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales - which may, or may not, add up to an overall anthology of Great Britishness. There are more and richer dimensions to life than nationality, but our sense of community does rest inescapably upon the stories that we recall from our past.
Making due allowance for the Avon Gorge factor, all the tales in these pages are true. I have consulted the best available contemporary sources and eyewitness accounts, and I record my thanks in the acknowledgements to the many historians on whose modern research I have drawn. But telling stories that are ‘true’ does not exclude England’s legends - the romances of King Arthur, Hereward the Wake, or Robin Hood. You will find them examined here as myths that illustrate a truth about the age from which they spring - while also revealing how we today like our Englishness to be.
This book seeks to illuminate, but also to entertain, and looking back at Our Island Story, I find that H. E. Marshall was similarly inspired. In her foreword, she asked her young readers not to be too cross with her when they grew up, read ‘serious’ history and discovered the difference between her beguiling narrative and the less riveting messiness of reality.
‘Remember,’ she wrote, ‘I was not trying to teach you, but only to tell a story.’
CHEDDAR MAN
c.7150 BC
THERE WAS A TIME, AS RECENTLY AS NINE thousand years ago, when the British Isles were not islands at all. After the bleakness of the successive ice ages, the south-eastern corner of modern England was still linked to Europe by a wide swathe of low-lying marshes. People crossed to and fro, and so did animals - including antelopes and brown bears. We know this because the remains of these creatures were discovered by modern archaeologists in a cave in the Cheddar Gorge near Bristol. Scattered among numerous wild horse bones, the scraps of bear and antelope had made up the larder of ‘Cheddar Man’, England’s oldest complete skeleton, found lying nearby in the cave with his legs curled up under him.
According to the radiocarbon dating of his bones, Cheddar Man lived and died around 7150 BC. He was a member of one of the small bands of hunter-gatherers who were then padding their way over the soft forest floors of north-western Europe. The dry cave was his home base, where mothers and grandmothers reared children, kindling fires for warmth and lighting and for cooking the family dinner. We don’t know what language Cheddar Man spoke. But we can deduce that wild horsemeat was his staple food and that he hunted his prey across the grey-green Mendip Hills with traps, clubs and spears tipped with delicately sharpened leaf-shaped flints.
Did Cheddar Man have a name of his own? A wife or children? Did he have a god to whom he prayed? The answers to all these basic questions remain mysteries. Bone experts tell us that he was twenty-three or so when he died - almost certainly from a violent blow to his head. So our earliest semi-identifiable ancestor could have been a battle casualty, or even a murder victim. And since the pattern of cuts on his bones is the same as the butcher’s cuts made on the animal bones around him, we are confronted with another, still more gruesome possibility - that our early ancestors were cannibals. According to some archaeologists, the reason why so few human skeletons survive from these post-ice-age years is because relatives must have eaten the dead, cracking up the bones to suck out the nourishing marrow inside.
As we set out to explore the past, we should keep in mind the first rule of history: the things that we don’t know far outnumber the things that we do. And when we do unravel secrets, the results seldom fit in with our own modern opinions of how life should be.
PYTHEAS AND THE
PAINTED PEOPLE
c.325 BC
CHEDDAR MAN HAD LIVED IN AN ERA OF global warming. As the glaciers of the last ice age melted, sea levels were rising sharply, and this turned high ground like the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, and modern Ireland into separate islands. The waters flooded over the land bridge, severing the physical link with Europe.
Thus was created the great moat that we now call the English Channel. As you approached England by boat across the narrowest point where marshes had once been, you were confronted by the striking prospect of long, tall cliffs of bright chalk - the inspiration, according to one theory, for the country’s earliest recorded name, Albion, from the Celtic word for ‘white’. Europe’s great white-capped mountain chain, the Alps, are thought to have derived their name from the same linguistic root.
It was Pytheas, a brave and enquiring Greek navigator, who probably wrote down the name around 325 BC. Nearly seven thousand years after the death of Cheddar Man, Pytheas travelled north from the Mediterranean to investigate the islands that were by now supplying the tin which, when smelted and alloyed with copper, produced the bronze for the tools and weapons of southern Europe. These offshore ‘tin islands’ were so remote that they were said to be occupied by one-eyed men and griffins. But unafraid, Pytheas followed the customary trade routes to Cornwall, and set about composing the earliest written description of this land that lay on the edge of the known world.
The Greek explorer seems to have covered large areas of the country on foot. Placing his gnomon, or surveying-stick, into the ground at noon each day, he was able to measure the changing length of its shadow and hence calculate latitude and the distance north he had travelled. He almost certainly sailed around the islands, and was the first to describe the shape of Britain as a wonky triangle. Rival geographers scorned Pytheas. But his findings, which survive today only in fragments through the writings of others, have been confirmed by time - and by modern archaeologists, whose excavations tell us of a population that had advanced spectacularly since the days of Cheddar Man.
The inhabitants of Albion by now spoke Celtic, a lilting, flexible language distantly related to Latin. They shared it with the Gauls across the water in the Low Countries and France. They still hunted, as Cheddar Man had done. But now their spears and arrows were tipped with bronze or iron, not sharpened flint, and they no longer depended on hunting for survival. They hunted for pleasure and to supplement a diet that was derived from their farms, since they had learned how to tame both plants and animals. By 300 BC surprisingly large areas of the landscape were a patchwork of open fields - the classic English countryside that we recognise today. Iron axes had cut down the forests. Iron hoes and ploughs had scratched and cross-hatched fields whose boundaries were marked, on the uplands, by firm white furrows that, in some cases, still serve as boundaries for farmers in the twenty-first century.
Compared with Cheddar Man the Celts were quite affluent folk, with jewellery, polished metal mirrors and artfully incised pots decorating their homes. Some lived in towns. The remains of their bulky earth-walled settlements can still be seen in southern England, along with the monuments of their mysterious religion - the sinuous, heart-lifting white horses whose prancings they carved into the soft chalk of the Downs.
They were a people who enjoyed their pleasures, to judge from the large quantities of wine jars that have been dug from their household debris. They brewed their own ale and mead, a high-alcohol fermentation of water and honey which they ceremoniously passed from one to another in loving- cups. And while their sips might be small, it was happily noted in the Mediterranean, where the wine jars came from, that this sipping took place ‘rather frequently’ - as one ancient historian put it.
But there was a darker side. The religious rituals of these Celts were in the hands of the Druids - high priests or witch doctors, according to your point of view. Travellers told tal
es of human sacrifice in their sacred groves of oak and mistletoe, and modern excavations have confirmed their altars must have reeked of carrion. One recent dig revealed a body that had been partially drowned and had its blood drained from the jugular vein. Death, it seems, was finally administered by the ritual of garrotting - a technique of crushing the windpipe by twisting a knotted rope around the neck.
The Celts were fearsome in battle, stripping down to their coarse woven undershorts and painting themselves with the greeny-blue dye that they extracted from the arrow-shaped leaves of the woad plant. Woad was the war paint of Albion’s inhabitants, and it is thought to have inspired a name that has lasted to this day. Pretani is the Celtic for painted, or tattooed folk, and Pytheas seems to have transcribed this into Greek as pretanniké, meaning ‘the land of the painted people’. When later translated into Latin, pretanniké yielded first Pretannia, then Britannia.
Diodorus Siculus, a historian working in Rome in the first century BC, described a less ferocious aspect of these blue-painted warriors. They were, he said, ‘especially friendly to strangers’ - always happy to do business with the many foreign merchants who now travelled to Pretannia to purchase Cornish tin, wolfhounds and the odd slave. Hide-covered boats carried the tin across to France, where pack-horses and river barges transported it along the trade routes that led southwards through Italy to Rome. By the first century BC Rome had supplanted Greece as the Western centre of learning and military might. The Roman Empire circled the Mediterranean and had reached north into France and Germany. The wealth of the distant tin islands sounded tempting. As the Roman historian Tacitus later put it, the land of these painted people could be ‘pretium victoriae’ - ‘well worth the conquering’.
