The Men of the North The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

So far, on this artistic journey through the Dark Ages

we have been hugging the Mediterranean and following the sun.

But the Dark Ages wouldn't be as significant as they were

in the story of art if they had stayed in the south.

To be properly influential, they needed also to venture north.

This is Lindisfarne, high up on the north coast of Britain.

Holy Island they call it.

And this monastery you see there was founded

early in the seventh century by an Irish monk called Aidan.

What a place to build a monastery, eh?

Cut off from the mainland, beaten up by the sea.

It's so out of the way and impractical

and that's precisely why it was chosen.

The Irish monks who founded Lindisfarne weren't

looking for an easy life, they were looking for difficulties to conquer.

These were hard-core northern Christians who had isolated

themselves up here on purpose, who worked their fingers to

the bone and created something out of nothing.

As they saw it, Jesus had sacrificed his life for them

so the least they could do was sacrifice their comfort.

The hard-core determination of the Lindisfarne monks shows not

only in the miraculous building of their great monastery

but also in the stunning book art they made up here.

So intricate, so detailed, so difficult.

And that's the thing about the north's contribution to

the art of the Dark Ages.

What it achieved, it achieved by going the extra mile,

working the extra hour, adding the extra detail.

Nothing was given to it on a plate.

In this film, we are going to be looking at the Carolingians,

Dark Age expansionists from France, whose huge empire gobbled up most

of modern Europe but who made art of exquisite finesse and richness.

Also the Vikings, who, despite their terrible reputation for raping

and pillaging, were actually exceptionally inventive craftsman.

The extreme delicacy of Dark Age Viking art

is an unexpected pleasure.

Then up here in the north of England,

we'll be celebrating the Dark Age nation

whose artistic handiwork was admired across the whole of Europe.

I'm thinking, of course, of the Anglo-Saxons -

so skilled, so hard-working, so ingenious.

Speaking of hard work,

one of the things we are going to be doing in this film is following

the creation of an Anglo-Saxon jewel from start to finish.

Later on, I'll introduce you properly to Shaun Greenhalgh here.

For now, all that really matters is that he's going to be making

something exquisite - a silver disc brooch in the Anglo-Saxon manner.

Shaun Greenhalgh's Anglo-Saxon brooch

is a pleasure we are saving for later.

First, we need to confront the north's most notorious barbarians.

We've tackled some terrifying warrior nations in this series -

the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths - but when it comes to

bellicosity, no-one has quite as fearsome reputation as the Vikings.

You know, people get so much wrong about the Vikings.

They didn't wear these ridiculous helmets, for a start.

These were invented in the 19th century by a stage designer

working on a Wagner opera.

He had to make one of the singing Vikings look particularly evil

so he stuck the devil's horns on a helmet

and the Vikings have been lumbered with these helmets ever since.

This is what their helmets really looked like.

The only surviving Viking helmet in the National Museum in Oslo.

The Vikings were particularly interesting because, while all the

other Germanic tribes headed south

and became thoroughly Italianate, the Vikings stayed in the harsh

and windy north where they clung to the old ways.

So, they were a barbarian nation of a pure and exciting type.

The Vikings were a living link to an older and deeper European past.

There were forces at work in them that civilisation hadn't dimmed.

And that's what's so exciting about them.

In fact, most of the time they were simple farmers,

tending the land, keeping livestock, growing what they could.

But in the lands of the Vikings, you can't go very far without

encountering water.

And this constant presence of the sea had turned them

into superb sailors.

Exactly where they reached is still fiercely debated

but they certainly got to Greenland and then to Newfoundland.

The Vikings discovered America a long, long time before Columbus.

So, boatmanship was one of their great achievements

and another of their great achievements was art.

In the great years of Viking expansion,

roughly 800 AD to roughly 1100 AD,

the Vikings put almost as much energy

into making their own art as they did into stealing other people's.

This trefoil Viking brooch was modelled on the buckles

used by Roman soldiers on their sword belts.

The Vikings adapted it and turned it into a brooch for ladies.

Much of what they made is so intricate and fine,

it's difficult to see.

So, to make it absolutely clear what adventurous creatives

they were, I've brought you to Oslo,

to one of the great Viking museums where

I wanted to show you this whopping great nautical masterpiece.

On 8th August 1903,

a Norwegian farmer called Knut Rom knocked on the door of

Professor Gabriel Gustafson of the Museum of Antiquities here in Oslo.

While digging on his farm, said Knut Rom,

he had come across a buried ship and he thought it might be Viking.

Two days later, Professor Gustafson arrived at the farm

and confirmed the discovery of this thing - the Oseberg ship.

Will you look at that, eh?

It's made entirely of oak.

Over 60 feet long, 15 feet wide

and decorated at both ends with these boisterous Viking carvings.

Inside the ship were two dead bodies -

an older woman who may have been a queen

and a younger woman, probably her slave who was buried with her.

There were also 14 horses, three dogs and an ox,

all sacrificed together and buried with their master.

In the stern of the boat was a four-wheeled cart,

the first such Viking cart ever discovered.

But no-one seemed to sure what the weather was going to

be like in heaven because there were also four sledges.

But it's the carving of these boats and carts

and sledges that makes this particular Viking find so exciting.

Look at the elegant line of this ship,

how it ends so gracefully up there with the curved head of the snake.

At either end, above the waterline where they can be seen,

are these busy expanses of carving, so active and lively.

Scores of twisting bodies, clutching hands, staring eyes,

sniffing snouts, all jumbled together excitedly.

A gymnasium of animal acrobats tying themselves into knots.

You have to get your eye in with Viking carvings otherwise

they can frighten you with all this amazing complication.

It's all based on animal shapes all interwoven and overlapping.

So, that, for example, is one animal.

There is the head and there is the tail.

And this figure eight shape here, that's the whole of its body.

And that's biting the tail of this animal here.

And that animal is biting the tail of the animal and so on.

So, imagine the 3-D vision you need to carve this,

the steady hand, the computer brain.

So, if anyone ever says to you, "The Vikings were barbarous,"

grab them by the ear and tug them here to Oslo.

Runes.

More runes.

And still more runes.

All over Scandinavia, Norway, Denmark

and particularly here in Sweden,

you find these magnificent standing stones, left

behind by the Vikings, covered in wobbly carvings

and all these runes.

Runes are the bits of writing on the twisty snakes.

You usually find them on Viking gravestones.

These ones here say,

"Gidiyor loved her husband and remembers him with her tears."

Because they're carved on these mighty stones

and not written down on handy bits of parchment or vellum,

there is a tendency to mythologise them,

to see great truths in the runes.

According to Norse mythology, the runes were found by Odin,

the supreme god of the Norsemen,

while he was hanging in the tree of life, the famous Yggdrasil.

For nine days and nights, Odin stayed in the great tree,

waiting, hoping, until eventually the runes fell into his hands

and revealed themselves to him.

Odin passed them to us.

Thus, from the start, the runes were associated with magic

and the mysteries of the cosmos.

This splendid story about Odin up in the trees

and the origin of the runes is another example

of the extraordinary power that words had in these fateful years.

Words, letters, symbols seem to mean so much in the Dark Ages.

They were so loaded, they had such resonance.

It's actually quite a simple alphabet.

So, this shape here that is a V sound, that's an A, L and so on.

So that says, "Waldemar." And in fact this whole message is,

"Here stands Waldemar in Viking land."

The runic alphabet, or Futhark as it is called,

had 24 letters in it originally.

Later on, when the Vikings attacked Britain,

they took the runes with them and the Futhark grew to 33 letters.

The new letters were needed to describe new sounds.

Every time the Vikings conquered a new territory

and new words entered their language,

they needed new letters to describe them.

So, for example, originally there was no W

and I had to use a V sound for my name, Waldemar.

So, the runes were never some cobweb-covered dead language

fit only for the museum, they were always alive,

vibrant and constantly changing.

What a good-looking alphabet it is, too. So energetic and upright.

It is based on vertical lines because verticals are easier

to carve, particularly in wood but also in stone.

This vertical emphasis gives the runes a spiky presence and a

mysterious relationship with time,

as if every mark is somehow counting down the days.

The Vikings were the last of the great barbarian nations to

convert to Christianity.

It wasn't until the 10th century, 1,000 years after

the birth of Christ, that paganism's hold on the frozen north was broken.

So, around here, the paganism was stubborn.

And in Viking art, it's often difficult to tell where the

paganism ends and the Christianity begins.

This is the biggest and most famous of all Scandinavian rune stones -

the Jelling stone.

It weighs over 10 tonnes.

It is two and a half metres tall and, as you can see,

the entire stone seems to writhe with energy.

What a fabulous thing.

This inscription here, which goes all the way round,

tells us that the Jelling stone was put here by Harald Bluetooth,

the energetic Viking ruler who is usually credited with

converting the Danes to Christianity.

"I am Harald," it says here,

"Son of Gorm and I made the Danes Christians."

It is carved on all three sides and on this side is

an image of a giant snake attacking a stylised lion.

Now, obviously there are no lions in Scandinavia,

it's an image they found abroad, but the Vikings identified with

the lion's fighting spirit so it pops up a lot in their art.

It is an image they made theirs.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, "What lion and what snake?"

Well, inside the visitors centre at Jelling,

there is a coloured replica of the great stone which shows

you how the lion and the snake would originally have

looked before all their paint fell off.

But the most surprising sight is here on the biggest side.

It is the culmination of the entire stone but you can't see it yet.

The light has to be exactly right.

What you have to do is wait

until the twilight begins to work its magic.

Can you see it?

It is a splendid Viking crucifixion with this stern Christ

in the centre surrounded by all these writhing Viking knots.

It's as if the whole stone can't keep still.

I like the way Christ hasn't actually got a cross,

he's just standing there with his arms outstretched.

So it is obviously another image that has been

imported from abroad and is now being misunderstood so confidently.

When the Vikings began behaving like Vikings and invaded Britain,

they encountered the most exciting jewellers of the Dark Ages -

the Anglo-Saxons.

How do we know they were exciting?

Because they have left behind this -

the Sutton Hoo treasure.

This is the finest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever dug up

in Britain, one of the great treasures of the British Museum.

Just look at it.

My legs go weak every time I see it

because it is in such excellent condition.

Much of the art that survives from the Dark Ages has been

battered by time but not the Sutton Hoo treasure.

In the finest pieces here and there is hardly a gram of gold bent

out of place or a garnet missing.

The Sutton Hoo treasure was dug up out of the ground

in East Anglia just a few

weeks before the start of the Second World War in 1939, so it

couldn't be investigated properly until after the war was over,

and what a torture that must have been for the waiting archaeologists.

The treasure dates from around 620 AD

and comes from the grave of an important East Anglian king.

The king was buried in a ship, his transport to the next world.

And all this was buried with him to serve him in the afterlife.

These bits of sword, here,

and the helmets mark him out as a mighty warrior.

You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of this man, never.

They found a lyre in his grave as well

so the king could listen to his favourite music in the afterlife.

That's a recreation of it.

He had to eat well

so this fabulous cooking cauldron was buried with him.

Look at all the intricate Celtic decoration around it.

Most important of all,

the people who buried the King made sure that he would look good in

the next world by burying him with his best Anglo-Saxon ruler bling,

which is where this gold comes in and those magnificent garnets.

If you have ever seen finer jewellery than this,

let me know where because I want to go there.

How did they do it, these Anglo-Saxon wizards?

To penetrate their secrets, I have tracked down a man who knows.

In his youth, Shaun Greenhalgh was a skilled forger

and some of the world's greatest museums have admired his output.

Shaun was finally caught and sent to prison

so he has served his time and these days puts all this expertise

to much better use as an independent craftsmen.

The methods he uses aren't exactly the same as the methods

of the Dark Ages - the modern world has changed too much for that -

but they are about as close as you can get.

And what Shaun's work gives us is an insider's view of how

Anglo-Saxon jewellers actually made their pieces.

So, Shaun, can you tell us what it is you're going to be making?

It's an Anglo-Saxon disc brooch, silver, with some enamel gilding...

covering most of the aspects that Anglo-Saxon jewellers would use.

They obviously had lots of different techniques in the way

they made their jewellery, so which ones are you picking up here?

This is probably the 10th century, it's like a late Saxon disc brooch,

the earlier ones with the golden garnet, mostly,

but these are the ones with religious symbolism on them.

Is this based on an existing brooch?

No, it's my own design, but it kind of encompasses elements of other

things going off, so it's an original design in itself.

The centre part will be done in gold ribbon,

plus all the different coloured enamels.

And that's a picture of an Anglo Saxon king?

Yes, with just a generic long-tache beard with

a sword in his right hand,

and the element I haven't actually put in is the hand

of God over his shoulder, that will be done in white and gold enamel.

Wonderful, let's get going.

OK, let's get on with it.

MONASTIC CHANTING

The delights of Shaun's Anglo-Saxon

disc brooch will have to wait.

First, we need to cross the Channel and search out those powerful

Dark Age creatives,

the Carolingians -

rulers of the Franks.

The Franks were the ancestors of the modern French.

Originally, they were Germans,

just like the Anglo-Saxons,

but they arrived in Gaul on one of those expansionist,

barbarian waves that we saw in film two.

And early in their story,

the Franks converted to Christianity,

and they became particularly fierce defenders of the faith.

Plenty of Dark Age societies liked their art to sparkle.

A taste for gold

is one of the Dark Ages' defining characteristics.

But when it comes to religious bling,

the Frankish Christians were top of the charts.

If you have ever wondered why the French sometimes conduct

themselves as if they were the chosen people, it's

because that's exactly what they thought they were.

In 732 AD,

the Franks, led by the heroic Charles Martel,

Charles the Hammer,

defeated an invading Muslim army,

which had come up from Spain, hoping to conquer Europe.

The Franks believed that God had chosen them

to save Europe from Islam.

They were his chosen people.

And their art seems particularly aware of this special

position in God's good books.

The mightiest of the Frankish kings,

Charles the Great, or Charlemagne

as he's usually called,

came from a dynasty called the Carolingians.

He was crowned in 768,

and with typical Frankish modesty,

pushed himself right to the front of Dark Age politics.

Charlemagne was determined to expand the Frankish empire.

After all, it was God's chosen empire,

and the Carolingians were God's chosen leaders.

This expansion of Charlemagne's Christian Empire,

was achieved with deep brutality.

In Germany, the Saxons, who were still pagans,

were given a very simple choice -

convert to Christianity, or die.

If they didn't become Christians, they were killed.

That was Charlemagne's choice.

In 800 AD,

in Rome, on Christmas Day itself,

the Pope rewarded Charlemagne for his efforts on behalf

of Christianity

by crowning him as the Holy Roman Emperor.

Charlemagne was now the leader of the largest empire Europe had

seen since the fall of the Romans.

The centre of gravity of Europe had shifted,

and it had shifted to the north.

This is the chapel that Charlemagne built, here in Aachen

on the Belgian borders.

And from here, he ruled his new Christian Empire.

This is actually the marble throne on which he sat.

There's a spooky simplicity to Charlemagne's throne...

..four slabs of ancient marble,

a few metal clamps.

Six marble steps and that's it.

A gold-loving Emperor

is pretending to be a simple man.

Charlemagne began building this chapel in 786 AD.

And at exactly the same time, in Spain,

the Muslims were building the Great Mosque, in Cordoba,

which I hope you remember from the last film.

Such inventive, and dramatic architecture,

with those nimble, double arches,

and that gorgeous forest of columns.

Charlemagne's chapel, this chapel,

was intended to be a deliberate riposte to the Muslims.

A Christian answer to the Cordoba mosque.

Look up there, at the arches,

and see how they have these alternating

bands of colour,

just like the arches in the Cordoba mosque.

But in Aachen, the stripy arches don't float or soar...

..nothing does.

This is architecture drawn with the biceps, not the wrist...

..effortful, and ponderous.

I don't like this building,

it feels brutal, clunky.

This round shape,

was based originally on a Roman mausoleum, and you can still

sense the doomy and cold atmospheres of the mausoleum in here.

Gloomy,

expensive,

intense.

Frankish Christianity bulldozes the senses.

But it doesn't really pleasure them, at least I don't think so.

In the battle of the northern Christians,

give me Anglo-Saxon art, any day.

Christianity arrived in Britain from three directions at once,

in a three-pronged religious assault.

In the south, in ancient Kent,

a team of monks led by St Augustine

were sent here by the Pope in Rome.

They brought with them the official Roman version of Christianity.

Up here, in the north of Britain, it was Irish

monks from across the sea, who came over to convert the pagans,

and they brought with them, a harsher, more basic,

more penitential form of Christianity.

locations, and where they produced glorious art with an ecstatic

and insistent tone to it, like the chanting of a great monks' choir,

The third type of Christians found in Anglo-Saxon Britain,

were the ones who were already here.

Remember, in film one, how the Romans converted to Christianity,

under Constantine, and how one of the earliest known Christian

house churches was found in Roman Britain, in Lullingstone, in Kent.

We don't know much about these existing Christians,

they were a modest Christian presence.

But perhaps, tiny droplets of this modesty were

thrown into the melting pot, as well.

So, the Anglo-Saxons would have had wood-heated kilns?

Charcoal brazier, I should imagine.

This is the stuff I'm going to make the brooch out of.

It's basically about 82% silver, a bit of copper,

quite a lot of lead,

which designates as Anglo-Saxon or Viking, a few other bits

and parts of it, all the trace elements

you don't get in modern silver.

Shaun melts down the Anglo-Saxon silver and, to turn it into

something useful, pours it into some moulds made from cuttlefish bones.

So tell me about this cuttlefish,

is this what was used in ancient times to make moulds?

It's been used for centuries,

I should imagine it's a Roman tradition, actually.

I take them out the mould, they should be relatively cool now.

Right, that's actual ingot there, that's for the pin,

and the pin mount, so I'll quench that first of all.

So that basically cools it down...

It cleans all that other stuff off.

Right...

..the next thing to do is to reduce this piece of silver

for the main body down to about one and a half millimetres,

to replicate Anglo-Saxon disc brooches

that have been in existence.

So, first of all, you have to beat from the centre to the outside.

You always go outside to inside, inside to out, reversing every time.

-So you're making it thinner?

-Yeah, basically, yeah.

On the other side, you start at the centre and work to the middle.

That's keeping a uniform thickness, because it tends to bowl,

to an actual bowl shape cos it starts to split

once you start to spread it out even further.

You hear the dull thud of it now,

because we're hammering it, it gets higher and higher, the pitch.

With the ear, you can tell when it's hard enough,

so you don't crack it.

That has more or less brought it, to the next stage,

so it's just a matter of us now repeating the process,

and as we reduce it, the area will get larger.

And once we've made a big enough piece,

and reduced it to one and a half millimetres,

or thereabouts, we'll have a large enough piece to cut the disc out of,

so this is one and a half millimetres, as you can see.

That is just the same as this, it is just the same silver,

but I've worked on it, it's taken about two days' work,

a lot of hammer-work, and a lot of earbashing.

Fallen out with your neighbours, and what have yous

to get it to that, so we'll start on with this now.

But that is the basic shape of the brooch?

That is the basic shape of the brooch.

While Shaun Greenhalgh bangs away in his lair,

back at the front line of the Dark Ages,

the Anglo-Saxon custom of burying the dead with things that would be

useful to them in the afterlife, was, of course, a pagan custom.

And, unfortunately,

when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity,

that custom was stopped.

For a Christian burial, you buried the body and that was it,

so nothing as sumptuous as the Sutton Hoo treasure

has survived from the Christian era.

Instead, we get another kind of Anglo-Saxon treasure.

It's a treasure made of granite and limestone...

..the resilient,

spiritual treasure that is the Anglo-Saxon funeral cross.

Earlier on, we saw how the Vikings commemorated their dead,

with these mighty standing stones covered in runes.

This idea, that stone is somehow eternal,

and lasts much longer than you,

is something that was shared by all the voyaging tribes of the north.

There's something splendidly basic about these Anglo-Saxon crosses.

They're supposed to be Christian, but somehow, their Christianity

feels superficial and confined to the surface.

Underneath, you can still sense the atmospheres of Stonehenge -

a connection with the faraway past,

and the central mysteries of Creation.

See all this decoration here? It's called interlacing, it's

Celtic in origin, you get it on the Anglo-Saxon crosses, but also the

great manuscripts written later in the monasteries like Lindisfarne.

A lot of people have written a lot of books on the subject

of Celtic interlacing -

what it means, why it was used.

It's so beautiful to look at, but also, so intrinsically mysterious.

They say that its origins lie in basket weaving and plaiting,

and we'll never know for sure,

but my guess is that this is also an attempt by the Dark Age mind

to grasp and mimic the rhythms of Creation, to convey the sense

that the cosmos goes on and on,

and that everything in it is interrelated.

This is a rather wonky specimen, which is why I like it so much.

It's not quite right, so you just want to hug it.

but because it's so wonky, the interlacing on the Lonan cross

in the Isle of Man, is particularly clear.

We're going to be seeing a lot of this Celtic interlacing

in the marvellous manuscripts that are coming up,

so I just wanted to show you quickly how it was done.

It looks immensely confident, but it's actually relatively simple.

So first, you need to mark out a grid.

Say we want to do a decorative border on a Gospel book,

so, if here's the border, and we know from unfinished

bits of manuscript the monks have left behind that the way

he did it was to make this grid with dots to guide them.

So, three dots, two dots, three dots, three dots, two dots,

two dots.

They're like the dots on a dice. Three, two, three, two.

Then you start filling in the spaces in-between.

Now the big rule in interlacing is that one line goes over...

..and the other line goes under.

Over, under, over, under, over, under - all the way along.

And when you're about to get to the edge, you stop,

because you need to work out how you're going to do the edges.

Now I'm just going to square them off,

that's the simplest way of doing it.

But they also did all these elaborate things,

they'd leave out bits of the pattern and create this

kind of asymmetrical symmetry.

That's too complicated for me, I'm afraid.

And once you got your over, under, over, under -

then you start to fill in the bits of the background.

Red and black.

There you are. A bit of Celtic interlacing.

So I've done this very big,

because I've got insensitive and stubby fingers.

But if you're a Dark Age monk,

poring over a precious manuscript, then the borders you made were tiny.

I mean, these people must have had extraordinary eyesight.

Of course, if you're a sculptor on the other hand,

once you've designed your interlacing,

you need to carve it into stone.

And it is mightily difficult, too.

And with this cross, the Lonan cross,

you can see that the interlacing, it's OK when it begins up here,

but as it comes down, it gets wonkier and wonkier and wonkier.

HAMMERING

Back in Bolton, Shaun Greenhalgh has engraved the symbols

of the Four Evangelists round the edges of his silver brooch.

And he's now ready for the really difficult bit in the middle,

the Anglo-Saxon king, created so carefully, with cloisonne enamels.

The cloisonne enamel technique is a very old technique,

practised by the Romans, and the Celts even, before them.

It's just powdered glass, ground up,

and mixed in with water and just fired in the kiln.

The Anglo-Saxons and other people in the Dark Ages,

and into the Middle Ages, would use Roman glass tesseras,

ground up, the kind of thing you see in wall mosaics

in Ravenna and such places, Constantinople,

and such like, because although they had the technology to make

glass, they didn't have the oxides to get the various

colours, as you can see, of the yellows and greens and blues.

The first stage is to lay down the king's outlines in a delicate

framework of itsy-bitsy bits of pure gold.

So fiddly, these little bits, you know...

..the eyes and the nose.

'Then the really tough work begins.

'Getting the powdered glass into this labyrinth of gold cells.'

Just filling in the background now, the dark blue.

It's always better to get the background in,

the largest area, to fill the largest area,

and it kind of holds most of the wires in position,

so, you know... pushing everything about.

Careful you don't drop any into the other cells,

otherwise it all has to be washed off if you do that.

Start again.

Right, just got to work out the colour schemes now.

I think the yellows can go in next, so I'll mix some yellow. Right.

Here we go.

Now.

The difficult part, to fill the small pieces,

cos just touching them, the surface tension tends to glue them

to the damn brush.

So...

Slowly does it, I think.

Then we'll put the tache in that. Long droop here.

Edward the Confessor tache.

That's the hair. Bit yellow.

A General Custer hair-do.

It's just slow, fiddly work, you know,

always fighting the surface tension with it because...

Now some pale green into the cloak itself

and then we're ready for firing when we've dried it out.

All right.

'While Shaun prepares to pop his Anglo-Saxon king into the kiln,

'I'm thinking that his brooch reminds me strongly of the most

'famous of all Anglo-Saxon jewels - the so-called Alfred Jewel.

'They say that originally it was the top of a reading implement,

'sent out to the bishops by King Alfred himself.

'It's now found in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,

'and what a beautiful thing it is.'

So this style of brooch was obviously a late Anglo-Saxon...?

Yeah, probably 10th century, I imagine, in the design.

A lot of people always say that the Anglo-Saxon jewellery

was at its peak earlier than that. They think of the Sutton Hoo horde.

The garnet stuff and the garnet jewellery,

the gold or what have you.

Fashions change, I suppose. I prefer the later stuff.

I think it's more elegant and there's far more to it.

-Any way, that's the cloisonne finished.

-Beautiful.

So that's obviously an echo, if you like, of the Alfred Jewel, isn't it?

Yeah. It's kind of like a mishmash of various things,

but it's all of its time and period.

-Can I have a look at that?

-Yeah.

-I see, yes.

Beautiful. And who is this figure you've put on here?

It's King Alfred, is it?

No, just a generic...figure of a Saxon king, I suppose,

with the long tache and the pointy beard

and the blond hair and blue eyes,

kind of how they liked to portray themselves, I imagine.

-Anyway, we just have to get on now and assemble it.

-Yes.

-We'll do that next, shall we?

-Yes.

-Right.

First thing to do is put the crystal into the silver gilt collar.

Then that just drops into there.

And then this piece will be riveted on the back

with these little rivets.

So I'll put them in now so we can have a bit of fiddle with this.

-And there we have it.

-That it?

-I'm finished.

-That's beautiful!

-Thank you.

-The Shaun Greenhalgh Jewel.

Move it about in the light,

you can get the edges of the actual gold cloisonne and it sparkles.

Beautiful.

I love cloisonne work. Love it.

SEAGULLS CRY

WATER SPLASHES

Up in the harsher corners of the Anglo-Saxon world,

the Irish monks who converted the north of Britain

were deliberately cutting themselves off from life's little comforts.

Exiles for Christ, they called themselves.

Lindisfarne up there,

where the monastery was founded by St Aidan in 635 AD,

was deliberately out of the way, secluded.

When the tide was out, the only way across was along this path here,

The Pilgrim's Way, it was called, marked out with these wooden stakes.

But if you were coming from the other side of the island,

from the sea, then Lindisfarne wasn't cut off at all.

In fact, it was very tempting.

MEN SHOUT

'The Viking raids on Britain, which did so much to tarnish

'the reputations of the Norse men, began with a raid on Lindisfarne

'in 793, and for the next century or so,

'the Vikings kept coming back.'

Monasteries were easy pickings.

They were basically undefended, manned by peaceful monks,

and they were packed with sumptuous religious treasures

and excellently positioned for Viking raids.

'The monasteries of the Dark Ages were Aladdin's caves of treasures.

'Jewel-encrusted relic boxes...

'golden crosses studded with rubies and pearls.'

'We live in a world in which Louis Vuitton luggage

'and Jimmy Choo shoes seem precious.

'In the Dark Ages, they knew better.'

For the Vikings, the main attraction of the monasteries

was obviously all that fabulous Christian gold in them -

the rubies, the pearls -

but it's recently been suggested that there were other reasons

why they targeted the monasteries.

Religious reasons.

Remember, in 793 AD when they raided Lindisfarne, the Vikings

were still hardcore pagans,

stubborn believers in Odin, Thor and Freya.

'For these Pagan Vikings, the fierce missionary

'enthusiasm of the Irish monks and the brutal conversion

'tactics of Charlemagne constituted an assault on their religion.'

The Vikings liked being pagans.

They didn't like being told they were worshipping the wrong gods,

so when they attacked the monasteries,

it wasn't just to grab all this fabulous Christian loot,

it was also a form of religious payback.

"You think our religion's wrong, we think your religion's wrong."

'The monks on Lindisfarne were also fighting a religious war.

'Their monastery was a hive of busy missionary activity.

'But unlike the Vikings the preferred weapon of the monks

'wasn't the sword, but the word.'

You must have noticed that all the way through this series,

I've been harping on about the power of words in the Dark Ages.

I'm like a stuck record on the subject.

'Words, letters, inscriptions. They keep appearing in this story.

'And wherever they appear, they seem to glow with Dark Age urgency.'

If you controlled the word in the Dark Ages, you controlled the world.

For me, the most captivating evidence of this immense power

that words had was the great book created here

by the monks of Lindisfarne...

..the Lindisfarne Gospels.

'This isn't just one of the great masterpieces of British art,

'this is one of the great masterpieces of all art.

'Written and decorated on Lindisfarne

'by a monk called Eadfrith,

'the Lindisfarne Gospel contains a calligraphic cosmos

'of exceptional vitality.'

It contains the four Gospels of the New Testament -

the story of Christ as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

and each of these evangelists gets a portrait to himself.

So there's St Matthew writing his Gospel, and it says,

"Matteus", Matthew, up here.

All the portraits in here are rather traditional.

They could easily be Italian or Byzantine.

But then you turn the pages...

and you come across this.

This certainly isn't traditional or Italian.

This is a uniquely British contribution

to the art of the Dark Ages.

Look at all this amazing Celtic inter-weaving that's filling

all the letters,

and all these cosmic swirls and twirls and spirals.

It's like a magnificent garden of paradise

that's erupted across the pages.

And yet, it's got this pagan kick to it as well.

This is St John, the writer of the fourth Gospel. That's his portrait.

And there above his head, the eagle.

That's his sign, just so we know who it is.

And this is the actual beginning of John's Gospel,

and look how astonishingly beautiful it is.

Do you know what this says,

what all this amazingly complicated interlacing

and all this cosmic calligraphy, do you know what this says?

It says, "In principio erat Verbum.

"Et Verbum erat apud Deum."

"In the beginning was the Word.

"The Word was with God."

In the Lindisfarne Gospel, Christian energy and Celtic inventiveness.

Pictures and letters have come together

in cosmic adulation of the word.

So that's the story of the Dark Ages. They weren't dark at all.

The Christians' struggle to imagine their god

was one of the most exciting struggles in art.

The barbarians were inventive peoples who made glorious bling.

Islam spent these years reaching for the stars,

while the Anglo-Saxons were magnificent goldsmiths

and brilliant wordsmiths.

When William the Conqueror invaded Britain in 1066

and brought the Dark Ages to some sort of official end,

he brought to an end one of the great ages of art.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd