Beginnings A History of Britain by Simon Schama

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'd never visited these shores but was nonetheless convinced that Britannia was rich in gold.

Silver was abundant there too. Apparently so were pearls,

although Tacitus had heard they were grey, like the overcast, rain-heavy skies,

and that the natives only bothered to collect them when they were cast up on the shore.

As far as the Roman historians were concerned, Britannia might well be off at the edge of the world,

but it was at the edge of THEIR world, not a barbarian wilderness.

If those same writers had been able to travel in time to the northernmost of our islands,

to the Orcades, our modern Orkney, they would have seen something more astonishing than heaps of pearls.

The unmistakable signs of a civilisation thousands of years older than Rome.

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

But nowhere as abundantly as Orkney, with mounds, graves and, above all, great circles of standing stones,

like here at Brodgar, vast, imposing and utterly unknowable.

But Orkney boasts another Neolithic site, in its way 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.

Here, beneath an area no bigger than the eighteenth green of a golf course,

lies Europe's most complete Neolithic community, preserved for 5,000 years under sand and grass

until uncovered in 1850 by a ferocious sea storm.

This is a recognisable village,

neatly fitted into its landscape between the pasture and the sea.

Intimate, domestic, self-sufficient.

Although technically still in the Stone Age, in the Neolithic period,

these dwellings are not huts, but true houses built from the sandstone slabs that lie all around the island

and which gave stout protection to the villagers here at Skara Brae from their biting Orcadian winds.

And the villagers were real neighbours,

their houses connected by walled, sometimes decorated alleyways.

It's not too much of a stretch to imagine gossip travelling down those alleyways after a seafood supper.

We have, in other words, everything you could possibly want from a village, except a church and a pub.

In 3000 BC, the sea and the air were a little warmer than they are now,

and once they'd settled in their sandstone houses

they could harvest red bream and the mussels and oysters that were abundant in the shallows.

Cattle provided meat and milk. Dogs were kept for hunting and company.

During the Neolithic centuries there would have been a dozen houses here,

half dug into the ground for comfort and safety -

a thriving, bustling community of 50 or 60.

But 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.

The fully equipped, all-purpose Neolithic living room, complete with luxuries and necessities.

Necessities? Well, at the centre, a hearth around which they warm themselves and cook their food.

A stone tank in which to keep live fish bait.

Since we know that some of these houses had drains underneath them

they must also, believe it or not, have had indoor toilets. Luxuries?

The orthopaedically correct stone bed may not seem particularly luxurious

but the addition of layers of heather and straw would certainly have softened the sleeping surface

and would actually have made this bed seem rather snug.

At the centre of it all was this spectacular dresser

on which our house-proud Neolithic villagers would have set out all their most precious stuff.

Fine bone and ivory necklaces. Beautifully wrought and 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 just these domestic dwellings,

but the circles of stone where they worshipped.

So Skara Brae was not just an isolated settlement of fishers and farmers.

Its people must have belonged to some larger society,

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

but this is 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 the 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 into this stupendous, high-vaulted masonry chamber.

Some of these tombs would have been elaborately decorated with carvings

in the form of circles or spirals, like waves, or breeze-pushed clouds.

Others would have had neat little 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 important bodies could be laid out in aristocratic spaciousness, like family vaults in a church.

Unlike mediaeval knights, though, these grandees were buried with eagles and dogs, or even treasure,

the kind of thing that the Vikings, who broke into the tombs, thousands of years later, were quick to filch.

In return, though, these early tomb raiders left their own legacy. These wonderful graffiti.

"These rooms were carved by the most skilled room carver in the Western Ocean."

"Aye, but it thorny here!"

"Ingegirth is one horny bitch!"

As for the Orcadian hoi polloi, well, they ranked a space in the 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.

But around 2500 BC, the island climate seems to have got colder and wetter.

The red bream disappeared, as did the stable environment the Orcadians had enjoyed for generations.

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.

And there were also the great stone circles, the largest at Avebury.

But the most spectacular of all at Stonehenge.

By 1000 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 once imagined, an unbroken forest kingdom from Cornwall to Inverness.

It was a patchwork of fields dotted with woodland copses, giving cover for game, especially wild pigs.

And it was a crowded island.

We now think as many people lived on this land as during the reign of Elizabeth I, 2,500 years later.

Some archaeologists believe that almost as much land was being farmed in the Iron Age as in 1914.

So it comes as 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 intense,

and farmers had growing need of protection, first from the elements, but later from each other.

Many of those towers still survive,

though none are as daunting as the great stone stockade on Aran, 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

at places like Danebury and Maiden Castle.

Lofty seats of power for the tribal chiefs,

they were defended by rings of earth works, timber palisades and ramparts.

Behind those daunting walls, this 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 and 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.

So Iron Age Britain was definitely not the back of beyond.

Its tribes may have led lives separated by custom and language, with no great capital city,

but taken together, they added up to something in the world,

the bustling of countless productive energetic beehives. And what the bees made was not honey but gold.

So the Romans would have known all about this strange but alluring world of fat cattle and busy forges.

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

Along with the glittering metalware came stories of alarming cults

which might have prompted the usual Roman dinnertime discussions.

All very interesting, I dare say, 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 some mysterious devotional trance. The nose flattened, the cheeks broad.

All so spellbindingly reminiscent of things the Romans must have seen in Etruria, or on the Greek Islands.

Would they then have said, "This is a work of art"? Probably not.

Sooner or later they'd 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 grizzly brutality of the Druids.

Perhaps they'd have taken note of 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, "Well, 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 these ominous totems?

It was the lure of treasure - all those pearls Tacitus was convinced lay around Britain in heaps.

But even more seductive was what Roman generals craved the most,

the prestige given to those who pacified the barbarian frontier.

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, just cowed by the spectacle of all those glittering helmets and eagle standards,

would simply queue up to surrender.

They would understand that history always fought on the side of Rome. 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,

which missed the high tide and was 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 to be done, he thought, it had to be done in such massive force

that he would not repeat the embarrassments of Julius.

So Claudius' invasion force was immense, some forty thousand troops.

The kind of army which 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.

Yes, he would seize the largely undefended oppida, or towns,

and strike at the heart of the British aristocracy, its places of status, prestige and worship.

But for those chieftains sensible enough to reach for the olive branch rather than the battle javelin,

Claudius' plan was to give them, or rather their sons, a trip to Rome and watch their resistance melt.

While they were in Rome, many of them must have begun to notice

that life for your average patrician was, well, exceptionally sweet.

So, before long, they began to hunger for a taste of themselves.

If there were sumptuous country villas amidst the olive groves of the Roman countryside,

why could there not be sumptuous country villas amidst the pear orchards of the South Downs?

Just fall in line, be a little reasonable, judicious support... see what you would end up with.

The spectacular palace at Fishbourne.

The man who built it was Togidubnus, King of the Regenses in what would be Sussex -

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 the place 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, rulers thought a Roman connection would help in their pursuit of local power and status.

The person we think of as embodying British national resistance to Rome,

Queen Boudicca of the Iceni, came from a family of happy, even eager collaborators.

It only took a policy of stupidity, arrogance and brutality on the part of the local Roman governor

to turn her from a warm supporter of Rome into 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 exactly who owned whom, Boudicca was then treated to a public flogging

while her daughters were raped before 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 symbolising the hated Roman colonisation of Britain. Colchester.

It helped that it was lightly garrisoned.

After a fire-storm march through eastern England, burning Roman settlements, it was the city's turn.

The frightened Roman colonists then had to fall back to the one place they were sure they'd be protected,

by their Emperor and their Gods - the great temple of Claudius.

If the terrified Romans thought they'd escape the implacable anger of Boudicca, they were out of luck.

With thousands of them huddled in the temple above these foundations, she began to set light to it.

They must have been able to smell the scorch and the smoke and the fire coming towards them

as their new imperial city burned down with themselves and everything else here buried in smoking 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,

now she'd have to face a disciplined Roman army, fully prepared for all that she could throw at them.

Sure enough, when the two forces met, Boudicca's swollen and unwieldy army was no match for the legions.

Her great insurrection ended in a gory, chaotic slaughter.

Boudicca took her own life rather than fall into the hands of the Romans.

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

And so when barbarians started attacking Roman forts in the north the Romans knew exactly what to do.

In 79 AD, an enormous pitched battle took place on the slopes of an unidentified highland mountain

which Tacitus calls Mons Graupius.

The result - 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 the speech written long after the event by Tacitus, and it's 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 knew even the world's biggest empire needed to know its limits

and he, of course, was destined, in Britain, at any rate, to be remembered by a wall.

When we think of Hadrian's Wall, we tend to think of the Romans rather like US cavalrymen,

deep in Indian country, defending the flag, peering through the cracks and waiting for smoke signals.

A place where paranoia sweated from every stone.

It wasn't really like that at all.

As fantastically ambitious as this was, stretching 73 miles from the Solway to the Tyne,

and although Hadrian probably conceived it in response to a rebellion

on the part of the people whom the Romans referred to as Britunculi, nasty, 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 mile castles, and turrets, and forts, like this one at Housteads.

But as Britain settled down in the 2nd century AD,

these places became up-country hill stations,

more like social centres and business centres than really grim heavily-manned barracks.

The purpose of the forts became not to prevent people going to and fro so much as to control/observe them.

The forts became a place where a kind of customs scam was imposed

on those trying to do business on one side or the other.

It may be better to think of the wall not as a fence but a spine

around which control of northern Britain toughened, hardened and prospered.

If we can now 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 a recent astonishing find.

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 2000 years ago.

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

1,300 of them from 7 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.

"Decorian Masculus to Tribune Cerrialis, Greeting.

"Please give instructions as to what you want us to do tomorrow.

"Are we all to return with the standard, or half? My troops have no beer. Please order some to be sent."

"I've sent you two pairs of socks, two pairs of sandals and two pairs of underpants.

"Greet Epus Tetricus and your mess mates with whom I pray you get on well."

"..I implore your mercifulness not to allow me, an innocent man from overseas,

-"to have been beaten by rods..."

-"I invite you to my party on the 3rd day before the Ides of September.

"Please come as the day will be so much more enjoyable to me if you were here."

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

From the middle of the 2nd 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.

And nowhere was this clearer than here in Bath.

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 daily.

When you soaked yourself at Bath you washed your body and soul - ablution and devotion at the same time.

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

went on in this austerely grandiose great bath.

But 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 an especially constructed 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 4th century, however, Rome was in deep trouble,

attacked by barbarians and undermined by endless 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,

and a welcome mat gave way to the "Keep Out" sign

in the shape of massive walls built smack through the grand hotel's lobby.

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

This is Porchester, 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 a thousand years later, and now completely dwarfed by it.

It was one of several such forts strung out along the southern and eastern coasts.

Not even fortifications like those of Porchester or Hadrian's Wall could work without adequate troops.

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

and as Picts and Saxons, spotting the weakness, started raids from the north and east,

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

And when, in the year 410, Aleric 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.

No, it was not like Hong Kong in 1997. There were no flags flying or pipers piping.

The Governor was not driving around his courtyard, seven times pledging to return.

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

The tax collectors, and the magistrates,

and the town counsellors, poets, potters, musicians, newly Christian priests all said to themselves,

"Well, this couldn't go on forever.

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

"We can handle this. We've got the Saxon shore forts,

"we can hire barbarians to deal with 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.

But in the case of this horde of 15,000 gems, medals and 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 force was needed to stop the barbarians in the north and west

from exploiting the yawning 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 named Vortigen naively imagined he could use the imported barbarians

as his own personal 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,

and when they'd finished burning and pillaging, they took land in lieu of pay,

settling down amidst the understandably dismayed native population.

Dismayed but not, I think, terrified,

for although earliest chroniclers of the coming of the Saxons

thought of Vortigen's faux pas as heralding some apocalypse,

it wasn't as if someone turned the lights out on Roman Britannia and declared the Dark Ages had 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,

living in the midst of a strongly Romano-British population.

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

The vast majority still tried, and succeeded, in living some sort of Roman life.

Here we're at Wroxeter in Shropshire, the Roman Viriconium.

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.

And when the roof of the great basilica threatened to fall in

the citizens demolished the whole building themselves.

Inside the shell they put up a new timber structure,

spacious and elegant enough to give the sense they were still living some sort of Roman lifestyle,

although in an increasingly phantom Britannia.

Eventually, though, 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 Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, was planted in the east,

all the way from Kent to the kingdom of Bernicia in Northumbria.

Saxon chiefs often built settlements on the ruined remains of old Roman British towns, not least London.

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

Showier pieces of their armour often bare 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.

But 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.

It was an entire social system. Its plunder was the glue of loyalty.

But the Saxons were no more immune to change than the Romans had been before them.

To look at the relics recovered from the 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 a Christian paradise?

The history of the conversions between the 6th C and the 8th C

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.

One of 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 some time in the early 5th Century.

It was only after he'd escaped, probably to Brittany, been ordained then visited by prophetic dreams,

that he returned to Ireland, this time the messenger of the gospel.

Patrick understood that the monastic ideal of the retreat

was perfectly matched with the needs of local royal clans.

So monasteries like Aran, off the Gulf-swept Irish coast,

with their beehive cells, and encircling stone walls,

looked like a stronghold, an encampment for God.

But what about the dragon slayers on the mainland? Who converted them?

One man gives us the answer.

To school children 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 also 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 lines he could conjure up not just the world of holy men and hermits,

but the world of the great halls of Saxon Kings, their firelight and roasting meat,

or the death throes of a great warhorse.

His masterful grip on narrative 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 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 here on Earth

"is as though a sparrow in wintertime should come to a house and very swiftly fly through it,

"entering in one window and straight away passing out through another,

"while you sit at dinner...in a hall made warm with a great fire,

"while outside, there 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 what has gone before, that surely we do not know.

"Wherefore if this new learning has bought us any certainty methinks it is worthy to be followed."

It's typical of Bede to put these words in the mouth of a nobleman,

for 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 the Roman, not the Irish Celtic Church, won over Britain,

for 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, though, didn't guarantee protection.

Bede himself 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 8th of 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 enough and hard enough at any culture, you're gonna find something good to say about it,

and historians of the Vikings, understandably distressed at the rape and pillage stereotype,

have asked us to think of things other than sail, land, burn and plunder to say about the Vikings.

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

So we know they did come bearing more than just a nasty attitude.

They came carrying amber, fur and walrus ivory.

But somehow, though, this vision of the Vikings as rapid transit, long-distance commercial travellers,

singing their sagas as they sailed to a new market opening

I don't think would've cut much ice with the priests here at the cathedral at Bradwell-on-Sea,

a crab scuttle from the area where I grew up as a child.

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

It had originally been built on remains of an old Roman fort,

and I can't help thinking that the priests would have found their stone defences reassuring

as they waited nervously for the Viking raids they knew could strike hard and fierce at any moment.

In addition to land, Vikings were keen on one other merchandise.

People, whom they sold as slaves.

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

A burial dated to 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, though, 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 Vikings to repair some of the damage they'd done

would need more than just a competent tribal warrior chief.

It would need someone who had a vision, and a vision not just of victory but of government.

Someone who could harness Anglo-Saxon energy and determination to Roman military discipline.

They'd need a local Charlemagne, someone with the intelligence and imagination of a truly Roman ruler.

And 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 getting 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. It's more startling, 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,

someone 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 when, despite recent victory, the collapse of his kingdom seemed imminent,

and with it the entirety of Anglo-Saxon England.

It was on Athelney Island

that the heroic legend of Alfred, 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 alliance of resistance,

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

near the site of this 19th-C folly built to celebrate it,

he took command of an army which two days later fought and defeated Guthrum's Vikings.

His victory, a holding operation, forced 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 "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 Alfred jewel, found not far from Athelney, has inscribed on its edge,

"Aelfred Mec Heht Gewyrcan" - "Alfred caused me to be made".

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 indeed

to be able to see clearly England's place in the scheme of things -

the debt of his realm to antiquity and 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.

And where did this momentous event happen? Well, where else but Bath?

We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. England's been conceived, not yet born

and to the north, Pictland has even further to go before it's recognisably a kingdom of Scotland.

But for a generation or two, it did look as though

the grafting of Anglo-Saxon culture onto the legacy of Roman Britain had produced an extraordinary flowering.

But 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.

Subtitles by Valerie Maguire BBC - 2000

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