History of Great Britain summary

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History of Great Britain summary

HISTORY OF ENGLAND AND GREAT BRITAIN

The history of England begins with the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded Great Britain about AD 449. They displaced the previous occupants from the southeastern part of the island and called it Angle-land, or England. Previously, the island, just like Europe, was home for a succession of peoples dating from the beginnings of the Old Stone Age.

ANCIENT BRITAIN

The Ice Age, during which Neanderthals and then Cro-Magnons inhabited Great Britain, ended about 8000 BC. The rising sea level produced the English Channel and made Great Britain an island. In the new environment of forest and swamp the Middle Stone Age came and passed, followed by the New Stone Age, during which the practice of agriculture was begun. This period brought a stream of new people to Britain. By 3000 BC the Iberians, or Long Skulls, were farming the chalk soil of southern England, and by 2500 BC the pastoral Beaker folk had established themselves. The latter, named for their characteristic pottery, are noted for their bronze tools and their huge stone monuments, especially Stonehenge. These monuments attest to their social and economic organization as well as their technical skill and intellectual ability.

In the 1st millennium BC the Celts overran the British Isles, as they did virtually all of western Europe. With iron plows they cultivated the heavy soil of the river valleys; with iron weapons and two-wheeled, horse-drawn chariots, they subdued and absorbed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands. Their priests, the Druids, dominated their society.

Roman Rule

Although it had long been known to the Mediterranean peoples as a source of tin, Britain did not enter the Roman world until Julius Caesar’s arrival in 55 BC—a sort of afterthought to his conquest of Gaul. Caesar’s contact, however, was temporary; permanent occupation had to wait until Rome had solved more pressing problems at home.

Emperor Claudius I invaded Britain in force in AD 43, but nearly two decades passed before the Romans had captured Anglesey, headquarters of the feared Druids, and put down the revolt of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni. The Roman governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola won the Battle of Mons Graupius (AD 84), somewhere in Scotland, but the northern tribes proved hard to subdue. In 123, Hadrian’s Wall, stretching 117 km (73 mi) from Solway Firth to the Tyne River, became the northern frontier.

Britain was a military outpost, taking a tenth of the Roman army to hold it. Several towns attained a degree of Roman urban civilization, boasting baths and amphitheaters, as well as people who spoke Latin and wore togas. Numerous villas—vast estates worked by slaves and featuring sumptuous noble dwellings—were also established. Beyond these, the countryside remained Celtic.

Roman Withdrawal

Britain in the 3d and 4th centuries felt the decline of the Roman Empire. An official known as the count of the Saxon Shore oversaw defenses against raids by Saxons and others along the North Sea coast. Would-be emperors stripped Britain of its occupying forces, moving the legions elsewhere to serve their own political ambitions. In 410 Rome abandoned Britain. After nearly four centuries of occupation, it left little that was permanent: a superb network of roads, the best Britain would have for 1400 years; the sites of a number of towns—London, York, and others bearing names that end in the suffix -cester; and Christianity. The Anglo-Saxons, who occupied the country after the Romans left, ignored the towns, chased Christianity into Wales, and gave their own names, such as Watling Street, to the Roman roads.

ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

Fragmentary knowledge of England in the 5th and 6th centuries comes from the British writer Gildas (6th century), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, saints’ lives, poetry, archaeological findings, and place-name studies. In the absence of Roman administrators, British warlords, nominally Christian, ruled small, unstable kingdoms and continued some Roman traditions of governance. In the mid-5th century, they revived the Roman policy of hiring Germanic mercenaries to help defend them against warlike peoples of the north (Picts and Scots). The Saxon mercenaries revolted against their British chiefs and began the process of invasion and settlement that destroyed the native ruling class and established Germanic kingdoms throughout the island by the 7th century. Later legends about a hero named Arthur were placed in this period of violence. The invaders were variously Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, and Franks in origin, but were similar in culture and eventually identified themselves indifferently as Angles or Saxons. Any man of noble birth and success in war could organize an army of warriors loyal to him personally and attempt to conquer and establish a kingdom.

By the 7th century the Germanic kingdoms included Northumbria, Bernicia, Deira, Lindsey, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, Sussex, and Kent. They were turbulent states, but all Anglo-Saxon societies were characterized by strong kinship groups, feuds, customary law, and a system of money compensations (wergeld) for death, personal injury, and theft. The societies practiced their traditional polytheistic religions, lacked written language, and depended on mixed economies of agriculture, hunting, and animal husbandry.

Reintroduction of Christianity

The dominant themes of the next two centuries were the success of Christianity and the political unification of England. Christianity came from two directions—Rome and Ireland. In 596 Pope Gregory I sent a group of missionaries under a monk named Augustine to Kent, where King Ethelbert had married Bertha (d. 612?), a Christian Frankish princess. Soon after, Ethelbert was baptized, Augustine became the first archbishop of Canterbury, and the southern kingdoms became Christian.

In Northumbria the Christianity from Rome met Celtic Christianity, which had been brought from Ireland to Scotland by St. Columba and then to Northumbria by St. Aidan (d. 651), who founded the monastery of Lindisfarne in 635. Although not heretical, the Celtic church differed from Rome in the way the monks tonsured their heads, in its reckoning of the date of Easter and, most important, in its organization, which reflected the clans of Ireland rather than the highly centralized Roman Empire. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, Northumbria’s King Oswy (c. 612–71) chose to ally himself with Rome, giving England a common religion and a vivid example of unification. Theodore of Tarsus (602–90), who became archbishop of Canterbury in 668, created dioceses and gave the English church its basic structure.

The meeting in Northumbria of Celtic and Mediterranean scholarship produced a flowering of letters unequaled in western Europe. The Venerable Bede, a Northumbrian monk, was considered the outstanding European scholar of his age. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People made popular the use of BC and AD to date historical events. It further treated England as a unit, even while the region was still divided among several kingdoms. Charlemagne chose Alcuin of York, another Northumbrian, to head his palace school.

The Process of Unification

King Alfred and the Danes

Egbert’s grandson, Alfred, became king of Wessex in one of England’s darkest hours. The Danes, part of the Viking forces that had begun to raid the English coasts in the late 8th century, had given up their primary goal of plunder and were now set on conquering England. Wessex and Alfred were all that stood in their way. Alfred at first was required to buy a respite, but after his victory at Edington in 878 he forced the Danish king Guthrum (fl. 865–90) to accept baptism and a division of England into two parts, Wessex and what historians later called the Danelaw (Essex, East Anglia, and Northumbria). By creating an English navy, by reorganizing the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, or militia, allowing his warriors to alternate between farming and fighting, and by building strategic forts, Alfred was able to capture London and began to roll back the Danish tide.

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