All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.01of15.Beginnings.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

From its earliest days,
Britain was an object of desire.

Tacitus declared it
"pretium victoriae" - worth the conquest,

the best compliment
that could occur to a Roman.

He had never visited these shores

but was nonetheless convinced
that Britannia was rich in gold.

Silver was abundant too.
Apparently so were pearls,

though Tacitus had heard
they were grey,

like the overcast, rain-heavy skies,

and the natives only collected them
when cast up on the shore.

As far as the Roman historians
were concerned,

Britannia may be off
at the edge of the world,

but it was off the edge of their world,
not in a barbarian wilderness.

If those writers had been able
to travel in time as well as space

to the northernmost of our islands,
the Orcades - our modern Orkney -

they would have seen something
much more astonishing than pearls:

Signs of a civilisation
thousands of years older than Rome.

There are remains of Stone Age life
all over Britain and Ireland.

But nowhere as abundantly as Orkney,
with its mounds, graves

and its great circles of standing stones
like here at Brodgar.

Vast, imposing
and utterly unknowable.

Orkney has another Neolithic site,
even more impressive than Brodgar,

the last thing you would expect
from the Stone Age,

a shockingly familiar glimpse
of ancient domestic life.

Perched on the western coast
of Orkney's main island,

a village called Skara Brae.

Beneath an area no bigger
than the 18th green of a golf course

lies Europe's most complete
Neolithic community,

preserved for 5,000 years
under a blanket of sand and grass

until uncovered in 1850
by a ferocious sea storm.

This is a recognisable village.

Neatly fitted into its landscape
between pasture and sea,

intimate, domestic
and self-sufficient.

Technically still the Stone Age
and Neolithic period,

these are not huts,
they're true houses,

built from sandstone slabs
that lie all around the island

and gave stout protection
to villagers at Skara Brae,

from their biting Orcadian winds.

They were real neighbours,
living cheek by jowl,

their houses connected by walled,
sometimes decorated alleyways.

It is easy to imagine gossip
travelling down those alleys

after a hearty seafood supper.

We have everything
you could want from a village

except a church and a pub.

In 3,000 BC, the sea and air
were warmer than they are now.

Once they'd settled
in their sandstone houses,

they could harvest red bream
and mussels and oysters

that were abundant in the shallows.

Cattle gave meat and milk
and dogs were kept

for hunting and for company.

In Neolithic times there would
have been a dozen houses,

half-dug into the ground
for comfort and safety.

A thriving, bustling
little community of 50 or 60.

The real miracle of Skara Brae

is that these houses
were not mere shelters.

They were built by people
who had culture, who had style.

Here's where they showed off
that style.

A fully equipped, all-purpose
Neolithic living room,

complete
with luxuries and necessities.

Necessities?
Well, at the centre, a hearth,

around which they warmed
themselves and cooked.

A stone tank in which to keep
live fish bait.

Some houses had drains
underneath them,

so they must have had,
believe it or not, indoor toilets.

Luxuries? The orthopaedically
correct stone bed

may not seem particularly luxurious,

but the addition
of heather and straw

would have softened
the sleeping surface

and would have made this bed
seem rather snug.

At the centre of it all
was this spectacular dresser

on which our house-proud
villagers would set out

all their most precious stuff.

Fine bone and ivory necklaces,
beautifully carved stone objects,

everything designed to make
a grand interior statement.

Given the rudimentary nature
of their tools,

it would have taken
countless man hours to build

not only these dwellings
but the great circles of stone

where they would have
gathered to worship.

Skara Brae wasn't just an isolated
settlement of fishers and farmers.

Its people must have belonged
to some larger society,

one sophisticated enough
to mobilise the army

of toilers and craftsmen needed,
not just to make these monuments,

but to stand them on end.

They were just as concerned
about housing the dead as the living.

The mausoleum at Maes Howe,
a couple of miles from Skara Brae,

seems no more than a swelling
on the grassy landscape.

This is, as it were,
a British pyramid

and in keeping with our taste
for understatement,

it reserves all its impact
for the interior.

Imagine them open once more.

A detail from a village given
the job of pulling back the stone seals,

lugging the body through
the low opening in the earth.

Up 36 feet of narrow,
tight-fitting passageway,

lit only once a year by the rays
of the winter solstice.

A death canal, constriction,
smelling of the underworld.

Finally the passageway
opens up to this stupendous,

high-vaulted masonry chamber.

Some tombs would have been
elaborately decorated

with carvings
in the form of circles or spirals,

like waves
or the breeze-pushed clouds.

Others would have had neat
stone stores or cubicles

where the bodies
would be laid out on shelves.

The grandest tombs
had openings cut in the wall,

to create side chambers
where the most important bodies

could be laid out
in aristocratic spaciousness

like family vaults in a country church.

Unlike medieval knights,
these grandees

were buried with eagles
and dogs, or even treasure.

The kind of thing the Vikings
who broke into these tombs

thousands of years later
were quick to filch.

In return, these early tomb
raiders left their own legacy.

These wonderful graffiti.

These runes were carved
by the most skilled rune carver

in the western ocean.

I bedded Thorny here.

Ingegirth is one horny bitch.

As for the Orcadian hoi polloi,

they ranked space in a common
chamber, on a floor carpeted

with the bones of hundreds
of their predecessors.

A crowded waiting room
to their afterworld.

For centuries, life at Skara Brae must
have continued in much the same way.

Around 2,500 BC, the climate
seems to have got colder and wetter.

The red bream
and stable environment

the Orcadians had enjoyed
for countless generations disappeared.

Fields were abandoned,
the farmers and fishers migrated,

leaving their stone buildings
and tombs

to be covered by layers of peat,
drifting sand and finally grass.

The mainland too, of course,
had its burial chambers,

like the long barrow
at West Kennet.

There were also the great stone
circles, the largest at Avebury.

But the most spectacular
of all at Stonehenge.

By 1,000 BC,
things were changing fast.

All over the British landscape,

a protracted struggle
for good land was taking place.

Forests were cleared
so that Iron Age Britain was not,

as was romantically imagined,
an unbroken forest kingdom

stretching from Cornwall to Inverness.

It was rather
a patchwork of open fields,

dotted here and there with copses

giving cover for game,
especially wild pigs.

And it was a crowded island.

We now think that as many
people lived on this land

as during the reign of Elizabeth 1,
2,500 years later.

Some archaeologists believe
that almost as much land

was being farmed in the Iron Age
as in 1914.

So it's no surprise to see
one spectacular difference

from the little world of Skara Brae.
Great windowless towers.

They were built in the centuries
before the Roman invasions,

when population pressure was most intense

and farmers
had growing need of protection,

first from the elements,
but later from each other.

Many of those towers still
survive but none are as daunting

as the great stockade on Arran,
off Ireland's west coast.

They didn't just spring up around
the edges of the British islands.

All over the mainland too,
the great hill forts of the Iron Age

remain visible in terraced contours
such as at Danebury and Maiden Castle.

Lofty seats of power
for the tribal chiefs,

they were defended
by rings of earthworks,

timber palisades and ramparts.

Behind those daunting walls
was not a world in panicky retreat.

The Iron Age Britain into which
the Romans eventually crashed

with such alarming force
was a dynamic, expanding society.

From their workshops
came the spectacular metalwork

with which the elite
decorated their bodies.

Armlets, pins, brooches
and ornamental shields like this,

the so-called Battersea Shield.

Or the astonishing stylised
bronze horses,

endearingly melancholy
in expression,

like so many Eeyores resigned
to a bad day in battle.

With tribal manufacture
came trade.

The warriors, druid priests
and artists of Iron Age Britain

shipped their wares all over Europe,

trading with the expanding
Roman Empire.

In return, with no home-grown
grapes or olives,

Mediterranean wine and oil
arrived in large earthenware jars.

Iron Age Britain
was not the back of beyond.

Its tribes may have led lives separated
from each other by custom and language,

and they may have
had no great capital city

but together they added up
to something in the world,

the bustling of countless
productive, energetic beehives.

What the bees made
was not honey, but gold.

The Romans would have known
about this strange but alluring world

of fat cattle and busy forges.

Evidence of its refinement
would have found its way to Rome.

Along with the glittering metal ware
came stories of alarming cults,

which may have prompted
the usual Roman dinner time discussions.

"All very interesting, I daresay,

"but would we really want
to call them a civilisation?"

Supposing they would have seen
an ancient sculpture,

like this haunting stone face
with its archaic secretive smile,

the eyes closed as if in
a mysterious devotional trance.

The nose flattened,
the cheeks broad,

the whole thing
so spellbindingly reminiscent

of things the Romans must have seen
in Etruria or the Greek islands.

Would they then have said,
"Yes, this is a work of art"?

Probably not. Sooner or later
they would have noticed

that the top of the head
is sliced off, scooped out,

like a boiled egg,
to hold sacrificial offerings.

Then they would have
remembered stories

that Rome told about
the grisly brutality of the druids.

Perhaps they would have even taken note
of the stories

told by the northern savages themselves,

of decapitated heads
who were said to speak mournfully

to those who had parted them
from the rest of their body,

warning of vengeance to come.

Then they would have thought,
"Perhaps not.

"Perhaps we don't want to have much
to do with an island of talking heads."

So why did the Romans come here,
to the edge of the world,

and run the gauntlet
of all these ominous totems?

There was the lure of treasure,
of course,

all the pearls that Tacitus believed
lay around Britain in heaps.

Even more seductive was what
Roman generals craved the most,

the prestige given to those
who pacified the barbarian frontier.

And so, in the written annals
of Western history,

the islands now had not only
a name, Britannia, but a date.

In 55 BC Julius Caesar launched
his galleys across the Channel.

Julius Caesar must have supposed

that all he had to do
was land his legions in force

and the Britons, cowed by
the spectacle of the glittering helmets

and eagle standards,
would simply queue up to surrender.

They'd understand that history
always fought on the side of Rome.

The trouble was, geography didn't.

Not once but twice,
Julius Caesar's plans were sabotaged

by that perennial secret weapon
of the British, the weather.

On the first go round in 55 BC,
a cavalry transport

that had already missed the high tide
and got itself four days late,

finally got going only to run
directly into a storm

and be blown right back to Gaul.

A century later, Claudius,
the club-foot stammerer,

on the face of it, the most
unlikely conqueror of all,

was determined to get it right.

If it was going to be done at all,
Claudius reckoned,

it had to be done in such massive
force that there was no chance

of repeating the embarrassments
of Julius.

Claudius's invasion force
was immense, some 40,000 troops.

The kind of army that could
barely be conceived of,

much less encountered
in Iron Age Britain.

Claudius did succeed
where Julius Caesar had failed,

through a brilliant strategy
of carrot and stick.

He would seize the largely
undefended oppida or towns

and strike at the heart
of British aristocracy,

its places of status,
prestige and worship.

For the chieftains sensible enough
to reach for the olive branch

rather than the battle javelin,
Claudius had another plan.

Give them, or rather their sons,
a trip to Rome,

a taste of the dolce vita,
and watch their resistance melt.

While in Rome,
many must have begun to notice

that life for your average patrician
was exceptionally sweet.

Before long they began to hunger
for a taste of it themselves.

If there were sumptuous
country villas

amidst the olive groves
of the Roman countryside,

why could there not be equally
sumptuous country villas

amidst the pear orchards
of the South Downs?

Just fall in line,
be a little reasonable,

some judicious supports
here and there

and see what results -
the spectacular palace at Fishbourne.

The man who built it
was Togidubnus,

king of the Regnenses
in what would be Sussex,

and one of the quickest
to sign up as Rome's local ally.

He was rewarded with enough
wealth to build himself

something fit for a Roman.

Only the extraordinary
mosaic floors survive

but it was as big
as four football pitches,

grand enough for someone
who now gloried in the name

of Tiberius Claudius Cogidumnus.

He couldn't have been
the only British chief

to realise on which side
his bread was buttered.

All over Britain were rulers
who thought a Roman connection

would do more good than harm
in their pursuit of power and status.

The person we usually
think of as embodying

British national resistance to Rome,

Queen Boudicca of the East
Anglian tribe of the Iceni,

actually came from a family
of happy, even eager collaborators.

It only took a policy
of incredible stupidity,

arrogance and brutality
on the part of the local Roman governor

to turn her from a warm supporter
of Rome to its most dangerous enemy.

In a show of brutal arrogance,
the local governor

had East Anglia
declared a slave province.

To make the point about
who exactly owned whom,

Boudicca was treated
to a public flogging

while her two daughters
were raped in front of her.

In 60 AD, Boudicca
rose up in furious revolt,

quickly gathering an army
bent on vengeance.

With the cream
of the Roman troops tied down

suppressing an insurgency
in north Wales,

Boudicca's army marched
towards the place which symbolised

the now-hated Roman
colonisation of Britain, Colchester.

It helped
that it was lightly garrisoned.

After a firestorm march
through eastern England,

burning Roman settlements
one by one, it was the city's turn.

The frightened Roman colonists
had to fall back

to the one place they were sure
they were going to be protected

by their emperor and their gods -
the great temple of Claudius.

If the terrified Romans thought
they were going to escape

the implacable anger of Boudicca,
they were seriously out of luck.

With thousands of them
huddled terrified

in the temple above these foundations,
she began to set light to it.

They must have been able
to smell the scorch and smoke

and fire coming towards them,
as their new imperial city burned

with themselves and everything else
buried in smoke and ash.

Thousands died in this place.
Boudicca had her revenge.

But her triumph couldn't last.

The lightly-defended civilians
of Colchester were one thing

but now she would have to face
a disciplined Roman army,

fully prepared for all
she could throw at them.

Sure enough,
when the two forces met,

her swollen and unwieldy army
was no match for the legions.

Her great insurrection ended
in a gory chaotic slaughter.

(SHOUTS AND CRIES)

Boudicca took her own life

rather than fall
into the hands of the Romans.

Lessons had been learned
the hard way, at least for some.

When barbarians started attacking
Roman forts in the north,

the Romans knew exactly what to do.

On 79 AD, an enormous
pitched battle took place

on the slopes of an unidentified
Highland mountain,

which Tacitus calls Mons Graupius.

The result was another slaughter,

but not before
the Caledonian general, Calgacus,

delivered the first great
anti-imperialist speech on Scotland's soil.

Here at the world's end,
on its last inch of liberty,

we have lived
unmolested to this day

defended by our remoteness
and obscurity.

But there are no other tribes to
come, nothing but sea and cliffs

and these more deadly Romans
whose arrogance you cannot escape

by obedience and self-restraint,
to plunder, butcher, steal.

These things
they misname empire,

they make a desolation
and they call it peace.

Of course, Calgacus never said
any such thing.

This was a speech written
long after the event by Tacitus

and it's entirely Roman, not Scottish.

Yet this burning sentiment
would echo down the generations.

Like Britannia itself,
the idea of free Caledonia

was from the first,
a Roman invention.

There was one emperor,
Spanish by birth, who understood

that even the world's biggest empire
needed to know its limits.

He of course was destined,
in Britain at any rate,

to be remembered by a wall.

When we think of Hadrian's Wall,
we think of the Romans

rather like US cavalrymen deep
in Indian country, defending the flag,

peering through the cracks
and waiting nervously

for war drums and smoke signals.

A place where paranoia
sweated from every stone.

It wasn't really like that at all.

As ambitious as this was,
stretching 73 miles

from coast to coast
from the Solway to the Tyne,

and though he probably conceived it
in response to a rebellion

on the part of the people the Romans
loftily referred to as Brittunculi -

wretched little Brits -
almost certainly, he didn't mean it

as an impermeable barrier against
barbarian onslaught from the north.

The wall was studded
with milecastles and turrets

and forts
like this one at Housesteads.

But as Britain settled down
in the second century AD,

these places became
up-country hill stations

more like social centres
and business centres

than really grim,
heavily-manned barracks.

These forts were not to prevent
people going to and fro

so much as to control
and observe them.

The forts in particular,
became a place

where a kind of customs scam
was imposed on those

trying to do business
on one side or the other.

It's better to think of the wall
not so much as a fence

but rather a spine
around which control

of northern Britain toughened,
hardened and prospered.

If we can imagine Hadrian's Wall
as not such a bad posting,

it's because our sense
of what life was like at the time

has been transformed
by one of the most astonishing finds

of recent archaeology -
the so-called Vindolanda Tablets.

They're scraps of Roman
correspondence, jottings,

scribblings and drafts of letters
thrown away as rubbish

by their authors
almost 2,000 years ago.

For 25 years, archaeologists
have been digging up these letters,

1,300 of them,
from seven metres below the ground.

Up they've come,
lovingly separated from dirt,

debris and each other
and painstakingly deciphered.

At once poignantly fragile
and miraculously enduring,

the voices of the Roman frontier
in the windy North Country,

loud, clear and strong.

From Masculus to Tribune Serianus.
Greeting.

Please instruct as to what
you want us to do tomorrow.

Are we all to return with
the standard or only half of us?

My troops have no beer.
Please order some to be sent.

I sent you two pairs of socks
and sandals,

and two pairs of underpants.

Greet Elpus Tetricus
and your messmates,

with whom I pray you get on.

He beat me and threatened
to pour my goods down the drain.

I implore your mercifulness
not to allow me,

an innocent from overseas, to be
beaten by rods as if a criminal.

I warmly invite you to my
birthday party on the third day

before the Ides of September.
Please come,

as it will be so much more
enjoyable if you were here.

A world of garrisons and barracks had
now become a society in its own right.

From the middle
of the second century,

it makes sense to talk about
a Romano-British culture,

and not just as a colonial veneer
imposed on the resentful natives,

but as a genuine fusion.

Nowhere was this clearer
than here in Bath.

Bath was the quintessential
Romano-British place.

At once mod con and mysterious cult,

therapy and luxury,
a marvel of hydraulic engineering

and a showy theatre
of the waters of healing.

The spa was an extravaganza
of buildings constructed over a spring

that gushed a third
of a million gallons of hot water

into the baths every day.

When you soaked in a bath,
you washed your body and your soul,

ablution and devotion
at the same time.

Much of the bathing, the flirting,
the gossip and the deal making

went on in this
austerely grandiose Great Bath.

The spiritual heart of the place
was the sacred spring -

a ferny grotto where water collected

and where the devotees
of the presiding goddess, Sulis Minerva,

could look through a window
at the altar erected in her honour

and occasionally could throw
gift offerings in her way.

Bath was not the only place
where Romano-Britons

could wallow in the well-being
of the province.

In Dover, the Romans built
this 96-bedroom hotel,

now 20 feet below street level
but the last word in luxury

for any VIP
disembarking from Gaul.

By the fourth century, however,
Rome was in deep trouble,

attacked by barbarians
and undermined by political turmoil.

Britannia couldn't remain detached

from the fate
of the rest of the empire forever.

At some point, Dover's significance
for Britannia changed

from a port of entry
to a defensive stronghold.

The "Welcome" mat gave way
to the "Keep Out" sign,

in the shape of massive walls,
built through the Grand Hotel's lobby.

This is the sort of wall
the Romans built at Dover.

This is Portchester,
a Roman shore fort,

a truly colossal structure
that makes all too clear

the scale of threat the Romans
felt the barbarians posed.

Inside it lies a Norman castle,
built 1,000 years later

and now completely dwarfed by it.

It was one of several forts strung out
along the south and east coasts.

Not even fortifications
like those of Portchester

or Hadrian's Wall in the north,
could work without adequate troops.

As more and more legionaries were
sucked back to fight on the continent,

and as Picts and Saxons,
spotting weakness,

started their own raids
from the north and east,

Britannia couldn't help but feel
the chill of vulnerability.

When, in the year 410,
Alaric the Goth sacked Rome

and the last two legions departed
to prop up the tottering empire,

that chill developed
into an acute anxiety attack.

This was one of the genuinely fateful
moments in British history,

the legions departing.

It wasn't like Hong Kong in 1997,
no flags flying or pipers piping.

The Governor wasn't driving around his
courtyard seven times pledging to return.

Doubtless, many of the Romano-British
did hope and expect to see the eagles back.

The tax collectors,
magistrates, town councillors,

poets, potters, musicians
and the newly-Christian priests

all said to themselves,
"Well, this couldn't go on forever.

"We couldn't always look to Mother Rome,
and she is half-infested with barbarians.

"We can handle this.

"We've got the Saxon shore forts.

"We can hire barbarians to deal with
the other barbarians. We can handle this.

"We CAN handle this."

For the less confident,
there was only one thing to do:

Bury their treasure
and head for the hills...

planning, as refugees always do,

to return when the worst was over
and dig it all up again.

In the case of this particular
hoard of 15,000 coins,

gems, medals, and this exquisite
silver tigress, they never did.

It was instead discovered
in 1992 at Hoxne in Suffolk

and is now kept
in the British Museum.

Some sort of force was badly needed
to stop the barbarians

in the north and west
from exploiting the vacuum of power

left by the exit of the legions.

At first, the warriors
from north Germany and Denmark,

sailing up-river in their wave horses,
seemed a boon, not a curse.

When one local despot,
Vortigern, naively imagined

he could use the imported barbarians
as his own military muscle

but neglected to pay them
as per the contract,

he made one of the more spectacular
blunders in British history.

Furious at being stiffed,

the Saxons turned on the local population
they'd been hired to defend.

After burning and pillaging,
they took land in lieu of pay,

settling down amidst the understandably
dismayed native population.

Dismayed,
but not, I think, terrified.

Though the earliest chroniclers
of the coming of the Saxons

thought of Vortigern's faux pas
as heralding a sort of final apocalypse,

no one had turned the lights out
on Roman Britannia

and declared
the Dark Ages to have begun.

The long process by which
Roman Britannia morphed

into the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
was gradual not sudden,

an adaptation, not an annihilation.

For a long time the Saxons
were a tiny minority,

numbered in hundreds
rather than thousands,

and lived in an overwhelmingly
Romano-British population.

As different as these cultures were,
they were still neighbours.

The vast majority tried and succeeded
to live a sort of Roman life.

Here at Wroxeter, Shropshire,
the Roman Veraconium,

there's wonderful evidence of this
make-do, hybrid, improvised world

poised between Roman ruins
and Anglo-Saxon beginnings.

When the bath house
stopped functioning,

the citizens took the tiles
and used them for paving.

When the roof of the great
basilica threatened to fall in,

the citizens went and demolished
the building themselves.

Inside the shell they put up
a new timber structure

spacious and elegant enough
to give them the sense

they were still living
some sort of Roman lifestyle,

although in an increasingly
phantom Britannia.

Eventually the adaptations
became ever more makeshift,

the fabric of Roman life
increasingly threadbare,

until it did indeed
fall apart altogether.

The island was now divided
into three utterly different realms.

The remains of Britannia
hung on in the west.

North of the abandoned
walls and forts

the Scottish tribes
for the most part, stayed pagan.

England, the realm
of the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes,

was planted in the east,
all the way from Kent

to the kingdom of Bernicia
in Northumbria.

The Saxon chiefs
often built their settlements

on the ruined remains
of old Roman British towns,

not least of course London.

Like many invaders, they hankered
after what they had destroyed.

The showier pieces
of their armour often bear

startling resemblances
to Roman armour

and their leaders aspired to be
something more than war chiefs.

They wanted to be known as "dux",
a Roman duke.

In one crucial respect,
the Germanic tribal societies

were utterly different from the Romans.

Theirs was a culture based on
the blood feud and punishment by ordeal.

An entire social system,
its plunder was the glue of loyalty.

The Saxons were no more immune
to change than the Romans before them.

To look at the relics recovered
from Sutton Hoo burial site

is to be teased by a powerful question:

Did the Saxon lord buried here
find his resting place

in a pagan Valhalla
or in a Christian Paradise?

The history of the conversions
between the sixth and eighth centuries

is another crucial turning point
in the history of the British Isles.

But while the legions had long gone,

the shadow of Rome fell
once again on these islands.

This time though,
it was an invasion of the soul

and the warriors were carrying
Christian gospels rather than swords.

The process began in a country
that had never been touched

by Roman rule in the first place -

the land the Romans called
Hibernia - Ireland.

We have to remember
that the most famous

of the early missionaries
to Ireland, St Patrick,

was a Romano-British aristocrat,

the patrician - or Patricius -
as he called himself.

So there was nothing remotely
Irish about the teenager

who was kidnapped and sold
into slavery by Irish raiders,

in the early fifth century.

It was only after he escaped,
probably to Brittany,

and ordained,
then visited by prophetic dreams,

that he returned to Ireland
as a messenger of the gospel.

Patrick understood
that the monastic ideal of retreat

was perfectly matched
with the needs of local royal clans.

So monasteries like Arran,
off the gull-swept Irish coast,

with their beehive cells
and encircling stone walls,

looked like a stronghold,
an encampment for God.

What about the dragon slayers
on the mainland?

Who converted them?

One man gives us the answer.

To all schoolchildren of my generation,
growing up in the 1950s,

he will always be the Venerable Bede.

Bede was not just the founding
father of English history.

Arguably, he was the first consummate
storyteller in all of English literature.

He was not exactly well travelled.

He spent virtually
his entire life here in Jarrow.

But in a few luminous lines
he could conjure up

not just the world
of holy men and hermits

but the world of the great
timbered halls of Saxon kings,

with their firelight
and roasting meat,

or the death throes
of a great war-horse.

It was this masterful grip
on narrative

that made Bede
not just an authentic historian

but also a brilliant propagandist
for the early church.

Bede sees without any
starry-eyed sentimentality

what could overcome the deep
mistrust of the pagan kings

when asked to abandon
their traditional gods.

According to the most touching
speech in Bede's entire history,

the clinching moment
of persuasion for one noble

was nothing more
than a gambler's bet.

It seems to me, my Lord,
that the present life of men on earth

is as though a sparrow in winter
should come to a house

and swiftly fly through it,
entering at one window

and then passing out through another,
while you sit at dinner

with your captains in a hall
made warm with a great fire,

while outside are the raging tempests
of winter rain and snow.

For that short time
it be within the house,

the bird feels no smart of
the winter storm, but soon passes again

from winter back to winter
and escapes your sight.

So the life of man here
appears for a little season,

but what follows or has gone before,
that surely we do not know.

If this new learning
has brought us any certainty,

methinks it is worthy
to be followed.

Typically, Bede put these words
in the mouth of a nobleman.

The church in Anglo-Saxon England

was just really
a branch of the aristocracy.

St Wilfred, the aristocratic
Bishop of York,

deliberately used part
of Hadrian's Wall to build at Hexham

a basilica
worthy of Roman authority.

For Bede and St Wilfred,
it was crucial

that the Roman, not the Irish Celtic
church, won over Britain.

What they passionately desired
was the reconnection

of a converted country
with its Roman mother.

A true homecoming.

The authority
of the Roman Saxon church

didn't guarantee protection.

Bede had had forebodings
before he died in 735.

Sure enough,
half a century later, in 793,

the Anglo-Saxon chronicle reports...

Dire portents
appeared over Northumbria.

Immense whirlwinds
and flashes of lightning

and fiery dragons were seen
flying through the air.

A great famine followed.

A little after, on the 8th June,
the ravages of heathen men

miserably destroyed
God's church at Lindisfarne.

The heathen men
were of course, the Vikings.

If you look long and hard enough
at any culture

you'll find something good about it.

Historians of the Vikings,
understandably distressed

at the rape and pillage stereotype,

have asked us lately to think
of things other than sail, land,

burn and plunder
to say about the Vikings.

They've said, "Look at their metalwork,
their ships, the great poetic sagas."

Now we know the Vikings did come

bearing something
other than a nasty attitude.

They came carrying amber,
fur and walrus ivory.

Somehow, though,
this vision of the Vikings

as rapid-transit,
long-distance commercial travellers,

singing their sagas as they sail
to a new market opening,

wouldn't have cut much ice with the priests

here at the cathedral
of Bradwell-on-Sea,

just a crab scuttle away
from the area

where I grew up, on the Essex shore.

There'd been a church
at Bradwell-on-Sea for over 200 years.

It was originally built
on the remains of an old Roman fort.

The priests would have found

those stone defences reassuring
as they waited nervously

for the Viking raids
that they knew could strike

hard and fierce at any moment.

In addition to land, Vikings were keen
on another kind of merchandise...

people -
whom they sold as slaves.

A thousand slaves were taken
from Armagh in one raid alone.

A burial dated 879
contained a Viking warrior with his sword,

two ritually murdered slave girls

and the bones of hundreds of men, women
and children, his very own body count,

to take with him to Valhalla.

On the positive side,
there was one thing

that the Vikings did manage to do,
however inadvertently.

They created England.

By smashing the power
of most of the Saxon kingdoms,

the Vikings accomplished what,
left to themselves,

the warring tribes
could never have managed -

some semblance of alliance
against a common foe.

To push back the Viking onslaught,

to repair some of the terrible
damage they'd done,

would need more than just
a competent tribal warrior chief.

It would need someone with a vision,

not just of victory,
but of government;

someone who could harness
Anglo-Saxon energy and determination

to Roman military discipline.

It was going to need, in fact,
a local Charlemagne,

with the intelligence and imagination
of a truly Roman ruler.

He, of course, was Alfred.

Our cherished image of Alfred
is of the hero on the run,

up against steep odds,
muddling through,

taking it on the chin
when scolded for burning the cakes.

But the story which really tells you
all you need to know about Alfred

isn't set in the swamps of Somerset

but on the Palatine Hill of Rome

and is more startling and illuminating -
and it happens to be true.

As a small boy, Alfred's father,
King Aethelwulf,

sent him on a special mission
to Rome to see Pope Leo IV,

probably to ask the Pope's help
in the struggle against the Vikings.

In a ceremony,
the Pope dressed the little fellow

in the imperial purple
of a Roman consul

and wound a sword belt
around his waist,

turning little Alfred into a true
Roman Christian warrior.

On a second trip, Alfred spent
a whole year in the Eternal City,

along with his father, walking the ruins
of the empire and the sacred sites.

It was surely this experience
which made him what he was -

a philosopher prince,
who, in more than a literal sense,

translated the works of Roman wisdom
for Anglo-Saxon consumption.

Through Alfred, England
got something it hadn't had

since the legions departed:

An authentic vision of a realm
governed by law and education,

a realm which, since Alfred commissioned
a translation of Bede into Anglo-Saxon,

understood its past
and its special destiny

as the western bastion
of a Christian Roman world.

First, he had to win those battles.

He took the throne of Wessex
at a time when,

despite a recent victory, the collapse
of his kingdom seemed imminent,

and with it the entirety
of Anglo-Saxon England.

It was here amidst the reeds
of Athelney Island

that the heroic legend of Alfred,
the fugitive on the run,

finally turning the tide
against his enemies, was born.

By the spring of 878, Alfred
had managed to piece together

an improvised
alliance of resistance.

At King Egbert's stone on the borders
of Wiltshire and Somerset,

near the site of this 19th-century
folly celebrating it,

he took command of an army
which two days later,

fought and defeated
Guthrum's Vikings.

Alfred's victory
was a holding operation,

forcing the Vikings to settle
for less than half the country.

But when in 886
Alfred entered London,

rebuilt over the old Roman site,

something of a deep significance
did happen.

He was acclaimed
as the sovereign lord

of all the English people
not under subjection to the Danes.

So it appears
that during Alfred's lifetime

the idea of
a united English kingdom

had become conceivable
and even desirable.

The exquisite Alfred Jewel
found not far from Athelney

has inscribed on its edge:
"Aelfred mec heht gewyrcan" -

"Alfred caused me to be made."
And the same might well be said

of his reinvention
of the English monarchy.

The enormous haunting eyes
which dominate the figure

are said to be symbols
of wisdom or sight,

apt qualities for a ruler
whose ambitions were so lofty.

Alfred's special gift
was to be able to see clearly

England's place
in the scheme of things,

the debt of his realm to antiquity
his bequest to posterity.

With his realm transformed,
Alfred made possible

a true Anglo-Saxon renaissance
in the 10th century,

creating stunning works
of Christian art and architecture.

But the long shadow of Rome
still fell over all this brilliance.

Alfred's grandson would be crowned
the first King of England

in a great Roman-style coronation.

Where did this momentous event happen?
Where else but Bath?

We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves.

England has been conceived,
not yet born.

To the north, Pictland
has even further to go

before it's recognisably
a kingdom of Scotland.

For a generation or two
it did look as though

the grafting of Anglo-Saxon culture
onto the enduring legacy of Roman Britain

had produced
an extraordinary flowering.

The shoots were still green,
the buds were tender and vulnerable,

and before this new kingdom
had a chance to mature,

it would be cut down by the devastating
blow of an invader's axe.