Original subtitles

I'm Richard Rudgley.

I've made it my business to delve into our past to try to find out what makes

who we are today.

And I've explored the Dark Ages and found that our barbarian ancestors were

mindless savages.

Now I want to fill in one more critical piece of the puzzle.

We think that our lives are shaped by 2 ,000 years of Roman and Christian

tradition.

But I've never really bought into this.

For generations before the Romans came along, we all lived in a very different

world. And I believe this world still plays a major part in who we are today.

This is the world of the pagan.

If I told you that this kind of male culture, beer -drinking football

on the rampage, had its roots in our pagan past, you probably wouldn't be too

surprised.

But what about the media frenzy that surrounds our soccer heroes?

What about their celebrity lifestyle?

And what about the precarious nature of their careers?

And their here -today, gone -tomorrow managers?

Well, these too are echoes of our pagan ancestry.

There's also a direct connection between the male culture of the pagan world and

the members and leaders of that other famous men's club, the Houses of

Parliament.

On a journey across northern Europe and back through nearly 3 ,000 years of

history, I'm going to explore the lives and aspirations of the pagan men and

their leaders that have helped to make us what we are today.

It's not going to be easy. Our pagan ancestors didn't write things down.

But the evidence is there, and sometimes in the oddest of places.

I'm starting my journey in just such an unlikely place, at the grave of a man

who, on the face of it, sums up everything that's chivalrous, knightly

Christian. King Arthur.

He was said to be buried here at Glastonbury, but this Arthur is an

because the real, original Arthur was a pagan warrior king.

We know Arthur as a Christian from a world of holy grails and courtly love.

But actually, Arthur was a pagan leader.

He led a band of warriors that lived and died for one thing.

Fighting. What you have in the early sources is this barbarian king, battle

leader. And he's a very, not primitive in the sense that he isn't developed,

he certainly has these primitive characteristics of leading a band of

Not refined knights, but warriors.

So what would this original author have done during peacetime?

Well, the original author during peacetime would probably have prepared

This was a war economy.

This was not a peaceful world in the sense that we think of the ideal as an

ideal where a king rules over a peaceful land. This was a world where you're

constantly testing yourself against your enemies and sometimes even against your

friends. So there's a very strong code there, a bond between the king or the

leader and his warriors. It's very, very strong.

They're almost like foster brothers.

And of course it would have been reinforced where children would be sent

with others equivalent of their social status. So that you get this very

network of loyalties and alliances.

And this is really what kept society going.

And you fought for these people. You defended them when they were in trouble.

It was a very strong sense of we belong to a group.

For this King Arthur, there were no knights of the round table, just a band

men, living together, brought up together, for the sole purpose of

It's now possible to build up a detailed picture of daily life in this macho

warrior society.

Home was not some mythical castle.

Iron Age hill forts like this one.

are scattered across southern England, and they are the blueprints for the real

Camelot.

300 years before the birth of Christ, this was what the local band of brothers

called home.

A gated enclosure, a collection of small houses dwarfed by a number of massive

halls.

The hall was the focus of this society, the place where the warriors would meet

for lavish feasts and heavy drinking.

The archaeological finds from this time include pottery bowls and dishes,

decorative brooches alongside weapons of war.

A lifetime of studying Danebury Hillport has given Barry Cunliffe a vivid

picture of life amongst these pagan men.

One of the classical writers says they drink lots of wine, which is marvellous

for us because our traders provide it for them. They'll give us a slave for an

amphora of wine, he says.

Marvellous deal for a Roman.

He says that they're so barbaric that they drink their wine actually

We self -respecting Mediterranean dilute our wine, those barbarians just swin it

down. So it gives you a picture of really quite a drunken orgy.

Then, as now, if a group of hard -drinking northern European men got

alcohol -fuelled boasting and eventually violence was the likely result.

You can imagine a young man wanting to make a name for himself.

Saying I'm a great hero, I can go and capture dozens of cows and women and

up our neighbours. You know, I'm that kind of hero. I can do that.

So no great surprises here. The men of our early society liked to drink, and

violence often followed.

We could write off our ancestors as antisocial lagalouts, but another look

the aftermath shows this is only half the story.

You see, there's always a grain of truth in the most colourful of legends, and

Arthur and his heroic knights are not complete fantasy.

Behind the posturing and bad behaviour, this was actually a society for heroes.

Disputes between rival communities were not settled by two armies fighting to

the death.

Instead, each side chose a champion, a hero, who would take on the enemy on

behalf of the community at large.

The heroes from each side would come out, they would fight each other,

would win, someone would die. To the death?

Fight to the death.

This seems to have been the norm.

And this would go on throughout the day until everyone had had a thoroughly good

day's entertainment.

And then normally they would go home, saving most of manhood, which is crucial

for keeping the crops and herds and society going. You don't want to

lots of people.

Warrior champions would represent their communities to prevent widespread

bloodshed. This was what the Band of Brothers trained for, lived for.

They were the cream of their society, seeking fame and fortune through their

prowess in the field.

They were the sporting heroes of their day.

And there's a noisy echo of this pagan idea of controlled aggression every

Saturday afternoon.

Today's football stars are our champions, fighting our battles for us

pitch.

So our pagan ancestors were not simply mindless thugs.

They had a controlled approach to warfare that kept casualties low. But

were essentially local disputes.

What chance did these disparate bands of warriors have against the greatest war

machine in history, the Roman army?

It's AD 60, and it's the night before a horde of unruly native Britons take on

the might of Rome at the legionary fortress of Camulodunum, modern -day

Colchester.

On paper, there should only be one winner.

The Romans were the greatest military machine the world had ever seen, and for

its occupying army, Colchester was the jewel in their crown.

The ancient Brits, although greater in number, were not a disciplined fighting

unit. They were a collection of warrior bands more used to fighting amongst

themselves than presenting a united front to a common enemy.

But their training in the hillforts did count for something, for when it came to

battle, our pagan ancestors were completely fearless.

The Britons are war -mad, and both high -spirited and quick for battle.

They are willing to risk everything they have, with nothing to rely on other

than their physical strength and courage.

It's hard to find evidence for something as intangible as physical courage

across so many centuries.

And very few skeletons have survived from these times.

But a rare find from Ireland paints a dramatic picture of the death of one

warrior.

Like a pathologist at a murder scene, Laureen Buckley has examined the remains

of this pagan warrior in minute detail.

The story that these battle -scarred bones tell is one of courage, fortitude

extreme strength of will in the face of certain death.

He was obviously in a fight.

I think it was a battle rather than a fight between two people.

He must have had a weapon, probably a sword in his right hand.

He may have had a shield and lost it, or he may not have had a shield, but he

was using his left hand almost as another weapon to parry off blows from

sword.

In the lower third of the arm, he's received a number of sword wounds, and

of them are quite savage and heavy, and they've almost cut through the two bones

of the wrist.

The sword is cut right through the radius.

Now, he may have dropped his hand then when his wrist was hanging off and left

his left side vulnerable.

He's had sword wounds on the left side, on the vertebrae, going through to the

ribs. Some of the ribs are almost broken right through.

They're really savage blows.

This ancient warrior, battle -weary, defenceless, clutching, broken ribs, and

with his left hand hanging off, still did not succumb.

It seems the reputation for exceptional courage was hard -earned and genuine.

Courageous they may have been, but they weren't immortal.

So what was it that finally finished off this soldier?

What finally finished him off, the killer blow, was a spear thrust from

the left side, which was probably from another person in the battlefield.

So the spear would have gone through into his left side, through muscle,

fight organs, and it caused a lot of damage and blood loss.

And that exactly matches the profile of the tip of his spear.

The British forces, on the eve of the battle for Colchester,

knew that a similar fate might befall them.

They may outnumber the Romans, but they did not underestimate them.

If these part -hooligan, part -hero gangs were to defeat the greatest army

earth, they would need more than blind courage.

According to their enemies, a surprisingly effective part of the pagan

plan was simply the noise they made.

The reason being that this was no ordinary noise.

The sound of the landscape reverberating to an ear -splitting clamour is down to

this strange beast, the carnix.

It's actually a megaphone. On hearing the sound coming from it, Roman

mercenaries thought the whole landscape was coming to life.

And because of its size, the carnics reached over the heads of mounted

charioteers and everybody, those same mercenaries thought that they were being

attacked by a race of giants.

And if you saw 30 of these marching out of the morning mist, making a sound to

split your eardrums, well yes, you too would believe you were about to be mown

down by a tribe of titans.

One thing that reconstructing an instrument of this sort teaches us is

sophisticated it is.

I can play it extremely loud, louder than a modern trombone. The modern

is the most powerful instrument we've got.

It plays at a volume that's dangerous to the ears.

But this instrument is louder.

Maybe a quick blast.

Sure, great. Maybe a really loud blast.

Yeah, that's loud.

It's loud.

It must have seemed even more dramatic in those times because, of course, the

world was a much quieter place then. There were no cars, there were no

No cars, no machines, no films with special effects.

So, effectively, something like this that transforms sound and transforms the

person that's playing it is taking on a truly magical function.

It's changing or heightening the experience of life.

So we usually hold it here. That's it, yeah.

That's pretty good, Richard, actually.

Time for tune? Yeah, go.

I don't think we're going to get beyond that on the first lesson.

Well done.

Outside the Roman garrison of Colchester in AD 60, the warrior Queen Boudicca

found herself leading the revolt against the hated Romans.

Charged with making a winning army out of an assortment of troops at her

disposal, she knew they could terrify the enemy with their fearlessness and

noise they would make.

But her followers had yet another weapon that they believed would secure their

victory. Woes.

All Britons paint themselves with woad, which turns the skin a bluish -green

colour, hence their appearance is all the more horrific in battle.

Woad is a plant of the mustard family.

Pagan ancestors cultivated it for its leaves, which, when dried, yield a blue

dye.

The leaves are ground into a powder, which turns blue when rubbed onto the

Grease or egg yolk was used as a base to spread the dye over the skin.

Right, well, let's start off with, I think, some lard here, some beef

You won't see this on The Naked Chef then, will you? No, you won't, no, no.

So the first thing to do is to rub it onto the skin here.

until it melts okay and we take just a few grains of wood because a little bit

goes a very long way and grab that into the body look you're going blue

yep so you've got quite a nice shade of blue there the person who i first did

this experiment on used to be a sandhurst officer and he told me that

the color used in the british army camouflage palette that would make the

soldier's face appear two -dimensional or in other words perhaps make the

look almost invisible.

We're told that the Iron Age people went into battle naked as well. Now, we may

call them naked, the Romans may have thought of them as naked, but actually

they were covered in this that turned them invisible, they wouldn't really

been naked, they would have been wearing some sort of protective, maybe even

magical substance.

Caesar may have thought that woe just made the ancient Britons look feartham.

But if it actually had made them invisible or more difficult to see in

terrains and in certain lights, then it was an incredibly effective weapon.

But Jilly Carr believes that it had even greater significance for these bands of

warriors. She has identified these objects as grinders, used to turn the

of the woad plants into powder.

And the designs on the different ornaments represent the different

agents used to apply the woad to the body.

Beef fat.

Duck eggs.

And semen.

Semen mixed with the woad and spread onto the body of the warrior before

into battle would have been of powerful, symbolic significance.

If you think about the attributes of the warrior, the warrior has to be a very

brave, courageous person, but also very manly. So attributes such as fertility

and virility would have been very important as well.

And also, if we think about the cosmetic grinder itself, the action of grinding

the pestle and mortar, the pestle and mortar would have been male and female

parts, perhaps. that grinding action as well would have had quite a bit of

significance and symbolism. So I think it's not just the finished product of

woad that's important, but the whole ritual of making woad as well.

The macho bands of brothers could epitomise the negative side of male

aggression, drunken boasting and violence.

The seamen symbolise the flip side of this, virility, fertility, potency.

On the eve of battle, the ritual of grinding the woad, mixing it with semen

applying it to the body, meant that as well as potentially making himself

invisible, the warrior felt empowered and protected.

At Colchester, Boudicca and her warriors scored an emphatic victory against the

Romans.

So devastating was their victory that it is imprinted on the archaeological

record. In the basement of a Colchester pub, the evidence is clear.

We're three metres below ground level in Colchester, and down here we have

preserved evidence of the destruction of the town in 1860.

What I want you to look at in particular...

are these red lumps.

These are the remains of buildings which were torched by Boudica.

The whole thing was destroyed in what was really a great act of ethnic

cleansing.

I think it was an outpouring of hatred for...

an alien civilisation and a desire to get shot of everything Roman.

Boudicca remains a powerful symbol of British national identity.

There's something very familiar, too, about the hatred of foreign influence

she and her followers expressed at Colchester.

She's admired because of her fierce, no -holds -barred, back -against -the -wall

stubbornness. Something she shares with other British heroes, Nelson and

Churchill. Something she shares, too, with Arthur, with the original pagan

Arthur of the earliest stories.

His greatest opponent is a spectacular monster, a kind of chaos monster, who's

called Tork Trois, and he's a boar, a wild boar.

clearly something of the outside world, which has intruded into Britain.

And its invader has to be resisted by the best of all heroes.

And Arthur is the best of all heroes.

And Arthur, for all his strength, doesn't actually kill this monster. He

him into the sea. And the last we see of Talk Twice is he's swimming away. And

the text says, and from this day to this, we know not where he is.

These earliest Arthur stories emerge at a time when England was under threat

when facts and rights had a real ending in mind.

And our greatest heroes have come to embody this combative, nationalistic

fervour. But that's not the whole story.

To be a successful leader of men, you need more than just blind patriotism.

And our pagan forebears were well aware that other, more subtle skills were

required to qualify for the top job.

Tara, the ancient fleet of power in Ireland.

142 kings are said to have reigned here since prehistoric times.

Today, when we think of monarchy, we think of the crown being handed down

father to son.

But that wasn't what happened at Tara. Here, the crown wasn't inherited.

It had to be earned.

And early Irish stories give an idea of the boxes which a successful applicant

needed to tick.

The goodness of his shape and family.

His experience and wisdom.

His discretion and kindness.

Eloquence and bravery in battle.

And the number of his friends.

This was leadership by selection, not power by inheritance.

And at Tara there still survives a stone that played a part in how the king was

chosen.

I think possibly the...

Best piece of evidence is this fantastic stone here, which I think you have to

admit is what one would describe as very phallic -looking.

It is an erect penis.

This stone symbolises the king -to -be mating with his tribal goddess.

And according to the legends, if the true potential king came near, it would

shout out.

Well, it hasn't shouted out to us. No, no. We're not doing that all here.

So this was not a rigid, static social structure.

This was a dynamic culture, arguably even a primitive form of democracy, in

which members of a warrior elite would compete for the support of their

in arms.

And it wasn't enough just to be elected.

The new leader had to prove his worth on a daily basis, in battle, in the

community, and with the gods.

If anything went wrong, it was assumed that the gods were displeased, and this

was seen as the fault of the king.

If the king either was making poor judgments or was failing in his warrior

then the assumption would be that the gods had been annoyed, and the best

to do if the gods are annoyed with your king is then to depose him.

And there were plenty of others willing to come in and take over the role.

So it's a bit like a football manager being on a losing streak. If his team

doesn't win, or in this case, if he goes into battle a few times and they lose,

he's not really going to last. It's exactly that.

It was clearly a slightly dangerous thing to be an early king.

So, at a time when power was not hereditary, a time without ruling

kings, what were the skills that a man needed to demonstrate to take on these

weighty obligations?

Here in Sweden, the home of the Vikings.

It is possible to chart the path which a young man would have had to follow to

move up through the ranks to the reward and the responsibilities of leadership.

Unusually for pagan times, the Vikings wrote down their stories in runes, which

tell us a lot about how they lived.

One particular runestone gives us a unique insight into how Viking men tried

climb the ladder to power.

and the tragic consequences for one ill -fated young adventurer.

This is the stone put up by a mother in memory of her son, and he went eastwards

to find gold and fame, actually, and he just disappeared.

So they start here with the verse saying that they fared courageously far

after gold.

And in the east, they gave the eagles, and that means that they actually let

dead enemies on the battlefield to be eaten by the eagles.

And then it says, sadly enough, they died in the south.

But that does not matter.

It's OK to die, as long as you've been Croatians, isn't it? To die in the right

way. To die in the right way, and most of them, of course, did. The whole point

is, it is a rite of passage, but also a selection mechanism.

It's the most horrible ones that come home, isn't it?

So it's death or glory, really.

It's death or glory, yes.

These bloodthirsty raids were essentially Viking rites of passage.

Young men trying to prove their courage and strength, as well as their

adventurous spirit.

Because in the pagan era, these skills were what a young man needed to take the

first step on the ladder to success.

The warrior characteristics personified in Norse mythology by the god Thor.

Here on this runestone we can see Thor and his hammer. Here he's struggling

against the Midgard serpent.

He was strong and he was brave and he was true, but altogether too simple

-minded for the Viking elite.

Whilst the young adventurers on the raids needed to start by proving their

as fighters, they would have known that to move up through the ranks and go on

to lead their fellow men, they would need to add new skills.

And these were represented by the Norse god Odin.

Odin was the king of the gods, and a far more complex character.

Subtle, political, slippery, and very, very clever.

Birka, a small island near Stockholm, is the site of Sweden's first Viking town,

a town surrounded by pagan cemeteries, some 1600 burial mounds in all.

Excavations here have revealed startling evidence about the cult of Odin.

But one particular grave baffled archaeologists.

The grave had an earth floor with walls made of planks, like a room.

Inside, sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, were the remains of a man

and a woman, surrounded by various objects.

Neil Price explained to me that this was a burial dedicated to Odin.

Just before the grave was sealed up, somebody has stood on the edge of the

grave, about here.

and thrown in a lance, a really long lance.

And about this much of it has gone into the wood of the front of that platform.

So in other words, somebody's thrown it in with really a lot of force. And this

lance has passed over the people in the chair to go into the wood. And we know

from written sources that the act of casting a spear or a lance over

is the dedication of that thing to Odin, to the god.

Odin was the god of the elite, and the quality of the goods in the grave

indicate that the couple would certainly have been members of that elite.

But what made them so special?

There are some clues in the things they chose to be buried with.

The weapons here show that the man was a Viking warrior and indicate that

fighting was important to him.

But, as a follower of Odin, this was not enough.

Odin is very definitely a god of the elite.

He's also one of the gods of war.

But above all, he's the god of the mind, really, and everything that goes on

with the mind.

So he's not so much a god of physical fighting, sort of in -your -face

Like Thor.

Exactly. One of the things that we see huge emphasis on with Odin is the idea

of clear thinking.

Imagine an early medieval battlefield.

It's a huge open space full of people shouting. There's no uniforms. Everybody

looks more or less the same.

Very difficult to tell who's on your side and who isn't.

Full of men sort of bashing at each other with sharp, pointy things.

It's a pretty chaotic place. And the idea of losing your concentration, of

losing that... And that's where Odin comes in. He has special kinds of spells

for giving you enhanced concentration, sort of sharpening you up. And that's

way that Odin interacts in combat.

Coolness, concentration, clear thinking.

These are the qualities needed for effective leadership.

If Thor represents brawn, then Odin equals brain.

The Viking leader needed both.

And if Thor represents the macho side of the warrior chief, then Odin

characterizes the feminine side.

Odin is a god of dubious sexuality.

He often dresses as a woman.

And I think it's no accident that in this burial dedicated to him, we have

a man and a woman.

This staff found in the grave is the wand of a sorceress, symbol of a woman's

powerful magic.

There seems to be a kind of male magic and then there's female magic, which is

quite different. So did men ever sort of dabble in women's mysteries?

Yeah, there's a lot of taboos around this kind of magic.

And whenever men perform it, there's a very clear suggestion of something

improper, something unmanly, a very strong overturn of homosexuality. In

society, it was fantastically homophobic.

Why despite that are there quite a few men in the written sources that do

perform this magic anyway? I think the answer to that is that it gave these men

a particular kind of power that they couldn't get any other way.

Something that made them very powerful and very feared.

Perhaps the warrior here had dabbled in women's magic. Judging by the elaborate

burial, he was certainly powerful.

And does this mean he was gay?

I don't think so.

In the macho warrior world of the Vikings, showing your feminine side was

probably as rare as it is among certain male cultures today.

But a successful leader of these men would also require qualities we

more with women.

such as compassion, subtlety.

For the wannabe Viking celebrity, Odin represented all the talents that a man

needed to progress from fighter to leader.

He needed foresight as well as courage.

He would have to show different sides of himself in different situations, and he

needed to win the support of his colleagues, symbolically, at least, to

them.

In these respects, he was very much like a modern politician, and for a very

good reason.

These are the qualities that are required to win elections.

In the same way our political masters need the support of the voters, so pagan

leaders needed to persuade their followers that they were the right men

job.

This is Gamla Uppsala, the traditional seat of the pagan rulers of Sweden.

Rulers who had to be elected.

Rulers who went on the campaign trail to win votes in different parts of the

country. Rulers who had to keep in favor with the electorate. Sound familiar?

He had to be generous with gifts and distribute the gifts among his retinue,

among his people.

The more gifts you could bring out, the better king you were, so to say.

To be a successful leader here, you needed to court popularity, play the

political game.

You needed friends in the right places, a bit of spare cash. Oh, and you needed

to be able to talk to the gods.

Another reason the pagan leaders needed the qualities of Thor and Odin was

because it was their job to communicate with the gods on behalf of their

community.

And if you had the right communication with the gods, then you received luck.

So it must have been very stressful being the king because you've got the

breathing down your neck if the crops are not going well.

And then the gods also need to be placated with sacrifices.

And also there's other people trying to take over from you all the time. It must

have been very stressful because there were many people.

who had the ability, they had the right breeding to become a king.

So therefore, it was a constant strife.

When you're in the top job, just like today, there's only one way to go.

Down.

When your luck runs out, you're out on your ear.

A solitary warning for leaders everywhere comes from the story of King

here at Gamla of Sala.

After a bad harvest one year, he sacrificed animals to the gods.

But the next year, the crops failed again, and he was forced to make a human

sacrifice.

The following year, in the face of another poor harvest, the people took

into their own hands.

They sacrificed their king.

Though this was a world in which failing leaders could be removed, very much

like our own times, though these pagan kings would go to spend more time with

their gods, rather than their families.

In a world where people power still counted for something, what could these

pagan leaders do to make sure that they hung on to their power and to their

lives?

Here at Taplow in Buckinghamshire, is the burial site of a man who seems to

embody the ultimate in power, fame and fortune to which our ancient ancestors

could aspire.

Everything about this mound and its location tells about status, really high

status. The size of the mound itself, imagine the kind of investment in

resources it takes to get the guys together to build a mound of this scale.

A symbolic statement of terrific power and intensity for the people who lived

under its shadow and for the wider world to see.

But it's what was found inside this mound that's really interesting, because

sums up everything about men and heroes in the pagan world.

And strangely enough, at the same time, it also points the way to how things

will be in the future, in the Christian world.

Inside there were the remains of a pagan leader surrounded by the trappings of

leadership.

There's a sword laid across his body, beautifully crafted ornaments and

collections of weapons and drinking vessels to represent his loyal band of

brothers.

So even though we can't even be sure what this man's name was, We can tell

a lot about him, build up a kind of profile of him from the artefacts that

found with him.

Absolutely. They tell a very interesting story about the man himself and about

the lifestyle of the warrior class in the early 7th century.

There are a number of spears, and there were certainly four seals, which is an

exceptional number for an Anglo -Saxon grave.

And we suspect that these are not so much the personal possessions of the

man, but that they symbolise the warrior troop who depended on him, who were

there as a visible sign of his power, and, of course, whom he entertained and

looked after and fed and watered for his part of the bargain. So they're there,

I think, as symbolic offerings within this grave and a representation of his

status as the commander of a band of warriors.

The weapons and the echoes of the feasting and drinking society are

from the early bands of warriors, the original Knights of the Round Table.

But other finds of Tatlow require more explanation.

For example, this lyre.

Lyres had long been played in the warrior halls, but why would a powerful

such as Tatlow Man have one buried with him?

Liars have been found in several graves of the poet musicians who sang the

praises of their masters.

But here in Suffolk, the poet burials are practically next to the large burial

mounds of their masters, an indication of the importance attached to their

So where exactly are we now?

We're just about here where the tumulus is marked there. The cemetery stretched

out in this general area around here.

And in the smaller grave was the grave with the poet -musician buried in it.

He's one of a number of these people who we found buried across this general

landscape. They're buried with their large lyre in their arms in the grave.

Their principal role clearly was the role that's identified by the lyre,

is the role of musician and poet and recorder of events.

So they'd be a mixture of a war correspondent and a spin doctor and an

Precisely. He was able to communicate with people on behalf of the local

aristocracy who were sponsoring him and carry their message across, and that was

a very powerful position to be in.

So the lyre in the Taplo burial represents another weapon in the

armoury.

Spin.

Rulers like Taplo Mann employed spin doctors to talk them up as they

their followers with what sounds suspiciously like corporate hospitality.

But for all the conspicuous consumption on show here, it's what's missing that

tells us most about leadership.

at the end of the pagan era.

Taploman's sword, rusted over the centuries, would have been another

possession, with an elaborate scabbard and a glamorous bejeweled handle, or

hilt. But the hilt is missing.

Swords are in themselves very high -status things, of course, and normally

had very elaborate precious metal hilt mounts.

But, strangely, there's no trace of those here, and...

A very likely possibility is that they were removed before burial, so that the

very precious hilt mounts were taken off to be remounted on a new sword for his

heir or successors or whatever.

They're part of the power that you're conferring on the next generation.

I think that what was happening at Taplow was the beginnings of hereditary

and the end of more democratic forms of leadership.

From now on, kingship would be a birthright rather than the reward for

excellence.

The world of our pagan ancestors was coming to a close, but did it disappear

altogether?

21st century hooligans certainly drink, boast and fight like their pagan

forebears, but it looks like they've lost the pagan code of honour.

And I'm not sure about their physical and moral courage either.

Our pagan ancestors knew how to channel male aggression into a force for good,

for the good of everybody.

It was a society of heroes, and I suppose we still need heroes today, role

models and champions.

We also need leaders, political or otherwise, but leaders of our own

So remember, when we build up our celebrities only to knock them down

that's the pagan in us.

And lest our leaders forget it, we may not sacrifice them to the gods anymore,

but we still have the power to vote them out.