Britannia The Great British Story: A People's History

The Story of the British

is one of the most astonishing tales in history.

It's a tale of struggle and war,

but also of huge achievement

From small beginnings, Britain became a great empire,

the workshop of the world.

And the real makers of our history were the British people themselves.

Resilient and creative, they built our society,

they won our rights and freedoms.

Today, we're many nations, and countless tribes,

but we are still British

and what unites us all is our history.

The Great British Story.

It was the Romans who first named us,

and in a sense, defined us.

"How lucky you are, you Britons," wrote one Roman,

"more blessed than any other land,

"endowed by nature with every benefit of soil and climate.

"Your winters are not too cold, your summers are not too hot.

"And to make life even sweeter,

"your days are long and your nights are short.

"So, that while to us Italians, the sun may appear to go down,

"in Britain it just seems to go past."

How are you? You're looking suitably attired for the occasion.

In the life of nations,

just as in people's lives, anniversaries and celebrations

are good times to look back.

I was a big fan of Princess Diana

and I LOVE William, I think his mum would be really proud of him.

Good moments to reflect on what has made us

for our history gives meaning and value to our present.

It tells us where we've come from, who we are,

maybe even gives a clue to where we're going.

And ours is an extraordinary story.

This is the story of the people of Britain over 1,500 years.

The Welsh, the Scots, English, Irish too,

have played a great role in the story of Britain.

But it's also the story of the people

who've come here to settle over the centuries -

from the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings,

to the peoples of Asia and the Indian sub-continent,

Africa and the Caribbean, who've come in the last few decades

to help build modern British society.

This small island off the shore of Europe

has played a role in the history of the world

out of all proportion to its size.

From the deep past to the continuing present,

this is OUR story.

# He taught us how

# To wash and pray

# And live rejoicing

# Ooh, yeah, yeah

# Oh happy day

# I give to you, yeah... #

And the story will take us right across the British Isles -

from Merseyside, to Skye,

from the Black Country, to Cardiff and Antrim.

But our tale begins in East Anglia,

in the little town of Long Melford, in Suffolk.

Over the next few months, the people here,

along with a host of other communities across the UK,

will be sharing their knowledge,

their documents, photos and memories.

-Look at these lovely seals on the bottom.

-Yeah, yeah.

Unique sources which will help build our story.

He used to say that he had relatives...

The gardening club, probably Melford Hall, on there.

That is so wonderful, isn't it?

-These are amazing social documents, actually.

-Oh yes, yes.

But first, they're going to put their spades into the soil

on a communal dig, led by Carenza Lewis

and her team from Cambridge University

One metre square test pits in as many different places as possible.

'What we're hoping to find, first of all, is clues to the history

'of the community, before the documents begin.'

Yeah, I think, I think it's worth trying it here, don't you?

So, what brought us here to Long Melford in Suffolk?

Well, it's a classic English small town,

with very deep historical roots.

The people of Melford have lived through the Industrial Revolution,

civil wars, the Black Death.

Like most places in Britain,

their history as a community goes back a very long way.

But don't think this is just local history,

for at the grass-roots you can also find the national story.

We started yesterday, and then we were finished today,

and filled the hole in.

We're site number 17, there's number 8 there.

With 50 test pits, we soon began to expose

the layers of Melford's past.

Bits of clay pipe.

Where you are now is about 250-300 years ago.

Ooh!

Victorian china, Tudor jugs...

Your classic sort of, sort of milk jug ware almost.

There was Anglo-Saxon tableware.

So, we've got this grey ware right the way through

the last half of the pit.

The three trays there and that tray at the back are all medieval.

And then, we made an exciting discovery.

It's a road,

I'm almost certain it's a road, and I wonder

if it might be the original Roman road.

We sort of looked at it on the map

and were able to plot a line all the way through from the school

and we now feel that that's where the direction is,

we thought we'd put our pit here and looks like we've struck gold.

Rome at the centre!

I should head off East, and you head off West,

and I'll join you in a minute.

'And if you want to understand the British story,

'you have to start with the Romans...'

It's almost like a London Tube map, or a GPS.

'..because it was they who brought civilisation

'to Britain for the first time.'

We're heading into Iraq, Mesopotamia.

'This copy of a fourth century Roman map

'shows our place in their world.'

Hadrian's wall.

Here I am reaching the very end of the Roman world,

the Pillars of Hercules, the straights of Gibraltar.

'From the Atlantic Ocean in the West...'

Mountains of Southern India.

'..to India, 7,000 miles to the East.'

Elephante Nascuntur.

The place where elephants come from, isn't that fantastic?

'This marks the moment we Britons became part of global civilisation.'

-Europe, Africa and Asia.

-That's it.

Alter orbis.

That's right, it is the Roman's new world, effectively.

What were they looking for?

And what were the riches of Britain that attracted them?

Well the sources mention things like hides and dogs!

They know there's a bit of precious metal over here, but the riches

they're really looking for are the riches of glory, of conquest.

New land, new revenues, there's a new place to tax,

a new people to extract money from,

which is what empires are often about.

But as much as anything else, its about an individual emperor,

in this case Claudius, who's the emperor, the Roman Emperor

that begins the definitive conquest of Britain,

showing he's a real Roman Emperor by taking a new piece of the world

and making it Roman.

Brilliant!

Lovely little samian ware.

Everywhere we dug in Long Melford,

we found evidence of the Britons adopting Roman lifestyles.

More and more and more Roman.

Oh, right, now that, that is really interesting.

That is a bit of hypocaust flue tile.

It's Roman central heating systems.

We Britons then enjoyed a standard of living that we didn't get back

until the 17th century

Yes, it could be, actually.

The Emperor Vespasian.

Under the Romans, the population thrived

and grew to maybe 4 million people.

I think that's quite an impressive pile of pottery, isn't it?

You could probably say there's Romans in the vicinity somewhere.

So, over the four Roman centuries,

the ideals of Roman civilisation became ingrained in us.

And not just in the south-east.

Here at Caerleon, in South Wales,

there was a huge military and civil complex

with all the amenities of Roman city civilisation -

markets, baths and sports arenas.

And more than that -

local government, law, civic order.

And a huge dig here is uncovering new evidence

about Roman Britain's second biggest port.

A miserable day when I woke up, pouring with rain,

but it's not dampened the enthusiasm of the archaeologists.

What they're finding here is nothing less

than the Roman roots of South Wales.

It's a part of Roman Britain

which is almost forgotten about in some sense.

People think of Wales as an upland country,

as our Iron Age culture continuing through,

but the South East is really, is,

we should view it as part of the West Country,

as more in keeping with Dorset and Somerset and Gloucestershire.

I mean, it's highly Romanised, we have villas,

we've got Roman towns, Roman fortresses, Roman roads.

It's a fascinating part of the country.

A dig on this scale can only happen with an army of volunteers.

It's really exciting starting off a new project.

Yes, a lot of people unaware

the Roman heritage in South Wales is so rich.

Yeah, I think we didn't, we didn't know the site was so big,

I think it was just, you know a sort of Amphitheatre and then,

it stops and then a humpy, bumpy field.

I enjoyed the pot washing most of all,

you have these big white trays and then there's

this beautiful samian ware glowing in my hands

after a good wash, all over the white trays.

Really fantastic feeling and holding and touching and thinking,

you know, who held this last?

The thrill of finding something is quite... Gets us up.

And the mud, the mud is good.

The mud is good? Are you serious? What do you mean?

-Mud's brilliant!

-You get to be five years old again.

The Caerleon dig is guided by a huge geophysical survey.

We know from the geophys,

-there should be four walls going this way through this section.

-Right.

Where's the wall come through?

It shows the plaster underneath and the paint's been taken off

but there's some red there.

So Caerleon Isca was a big military town and port.

This is like revolutionary.

A whole new area of Roman...

There's always something new to find.

Yeah, it's just so diverse.

Next door, was the civil capital of Caerwent,

Venta, which gave its name to modern Gwent,

the whole conurbation a predecessor to today's capital, Cardiff.

Britain very quickly becomes

part of this international Roman world of wealth and style.

It's a thought that's hard for us to encompass but,

in the Roman period, if you're living in Britain,

and if you're living in Syria, you're part of the same world.

So, don't imagine the Romans in Britain as Italians in togas,

the Britons WERE the Romans.

And theirs was a cosmopolitan and multicultural world, a bit like ours.

Up on Tyneside, near Hadrian's wall, is the Roman fort of Arbeia -

the Fort of the Arabs.

And excavations here have found evidence of Roman Britons

from and amazing variety of backgrounds and cultures.

Victoris natione maurum.

He's a Moore from North Africa, he's a black man.

Don't forget,

there were black people in Britain before there were English.

20 years old, a freed man of Numerianus.

He's a cavalry officer for a Spanish regiment up here on Hadrian's wall.

And Numerianus says, "Piantissime brosucutous est."

He devotedly conducted the funeral of his former slave.

Very intimate relationship between the two men. Gay, perhaps?

Beautifully carved.

Next to them, one of the most wonderful tombstones

from Roman Britain, of a woman called Regina.

She's the wife of a man called Berrates,

wears a nice dress.

She's opening, what's this, a box of treasures?

You see the keyhole, the little half moon underneath?

Well-to-do Roman society

up here in South Shields, but here's the really great bit.

Her husband is "Palmyrenus Nationne."

He's from Palmyra in Syria,

famous trading city at the other end of the Mediterranean,

an Arab, if you like. And underneath to underline that,

carved in Aramaic, the old language of Syria,

"Regina, the free woman of Berrates, alas".

Roman letters found on Hadrian's Wall,

give us the voices of ordinary Britons,

We asked today's Tynesiders to read them.

Dear Lucious, just a quick note to make sure you are in robust health.

A friend has just sent me 50 oysters from the coast,

so why not get over here tonight?

I want to be clear with you,

that I refuse to withdraw my membership of the mess

or of the club.

Maybe you saw me at the Goldsmiths, and that's how the story started.

I have sent you by post, two pairs of socks from Satua,

two pairs of sandals, and two pairs of woollen underpants.

All the best to you and your messmates, from Elpis.

For the party on the 19th of June, we need three casks of British beer

and a couple of cases of Italian wine.

And vinegar, fish sauce, chicken and extra barely for the beer.

My dearest Flavis,

I wonder if you could send me a few more things for my boys?

I need six cloaks and five jerkins.

I really need to smarten up now, and become a chariot officer.

I'm on the point of getting my own wheels. Farewell.

So across lowland Britain,

the people enjoyed all the benefits of being Roman citizens.

In their minds and in their imaginations,

Rome was in their hearts.

Britons are Romans.

New diet, new luxuries,

new stuff coming in, new things to drink and eat.

You'll even find olive oil and wine in Hadrian's Wall.

I come from Birkenhead,

you couldn't get olive oil in a shop in Birkenhead until 1980!

And whether in Caerleon, Long Melford or South Shields,

as one Roman writer put it, "How fortunate the Britons were

"to live in such a delightful land."

Over the four Roman Centuries,

the people lived under the umbrella of Romanitas,

safe in the knowledge that Rome would always protect them.

But towards the year 400, the Roman world went into steep decline.

The Roman Empire found itself increasingly stretched

by barbarian attacks and separatist movements

and the new Emperor, Honorius, moved the capital from Rome to Ravenna,

in the marshes on the Adriatic coast, which is easier to defend.

And out on the edge of the Roman world,

the town councils in Britain were worried.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,

have we got any apologies for absence?

They faced mounting raids by Angles and Saxons from Germany.

Three of the reports are break-ins to garden sheds,

so that obviously something..,

Their big fear was that to protect Italy,

Rome would withdraw its garrison.

On the 24th of August, 410, Rome was sacked by the Visigoths,

first time in nearly 800 years that the city had fallen,

and it's at that electric moment in history

that the Emperor sends a famous letter to the citizens of Britain.

The contents of the letter were

recorded in the 500s by the Welsh historian, Gildas.

It is with regret that we have to inform you that we can no longer

commit precious and overstretched military resources

to continue to fight off pirates and bandits,

who cannot be pinned down by conventional warfare.

The Roman garrison was pulled out.

The Britons were told to set-up own coastal defences

and home guard.

The Romans even sent them pattern books on how to make Roman weapons.

It's very nearly 2,000 years old.

That would have been either ivory or narwhal.

This is not a gladius, this is a spatha.

He'd be a horseman, holding his sword on the right-hand side,

which is unusual.

So, he could get it and poke people.

"People of Britain," the Emperor concluded,

"you are on your own now.

"Fight bravely and defend your lives and liberty.

"It's your homeland, you must fight for it now."

And so they said goodbye, meaning never to return.

It's a wonderful symbolic moment in the story of Britain, isn't it?

The Fall of Rome. And this is a great place to imagine it.

And in the next few decades

as great swathes of the cities fall derelict,

the people revert to the old ways.

They come back to these old Iron Age hill forts

to take shelter behind their huge ramparts,

as if battening down for the dark age that will follow.

But as their world fragmented, new worlds began to coalesce.

And out of them, our modern identities as Britons will emerge.

Here on Borough Hill in Leicestershire,

a team of archaeologists, volunteers and school children

are trying to find out what happened at the end of Roman Britain,

when city life broke down.

It's really difficult to know what does happen,

because all the things we rely on in Archaeology disappear

in that early fifth century period.

The coins, the pottery.

As archaeologists, we're left really in the dark.

If you're looking for a dark age,

from an archaeological point of view,

it is the fifth century.

It's a century of make do and mend.

I tried to find out where the entrance of the roundhouse is,

so we're trying to define the edges.

We want to find this edge here,

and hopefully it will come through over here.

History's kind of focussed on the famous people, you know,

the Kings and Queens, but no-one actually looks at

the working class of people.

They're not represented, I don't think.

And as always in great crises in history,

the ordinary people are left to carry on with their lives

in the face of harsh new realities.

In the early 400s, coins stopped being used.

They can't pay the town councils.

Jobs go, rubbish piles up and the cities are abandoned.

And then in the 500s, catastrophe.

A huge environmental crisis followed by famine, and plague.

It was a perfect storm. Britain's population was probably halved,

maybe worse.

It's when you see what happens to our lovely Roman town

at the end of the Roman period, it is not good news.

You remember in the late Roman period we had that town,

thriving settlement.

When we go into the Anglo-Saxon period, complete armageddon.

Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Not a single piece of pottery that could possibly predate 850.

There's nothing like the level of occupation

we've got in the Roman period for hundreds of years afterwards.

We know the sub-Roman period is a period of population decline,

that's, you know, outbreaks of plague,

that we hear about hazily in historical records.

It's one thing after another going wrong.

Central law and order breaks down

and it's a fascinating thought really,

"What would we do today if suddenly no one's enforcing law and order?"

How long does it take for people to realise they've got to,

sort of, defend their goods themselves,

and all of that civilisation to collapse.

I think, we think we're so insulated today, in the Roman period,

clearly even moreso and you just look at that map.

It's just empty.

And now, for a time in British history,

there's no one clear narrative, but many regional and local histories.

But certain threads though run through the tale.

Out in Western Britain, Romanitas continues.

The Roman world didn't end all at one time, or in every place.

The so-called Dark Ages were not dark here.

The coast went back 400 metres, only about 200 years ago,

so an immense amount of erosion had taken place,

and perhaps 5,000 objects have been found along this piece of shoreline.

There've been found about half a dozen Byzantine coins.

These are sixth century too.

This is Justinian the first and there's Justin.

Just too much, I cannot believe this, look at this.

If you turn it over you can see the

mint mark at the bottom, Con, for Constantinople.

Constantinople! My God!

Yeah, the far eastern end of the Mediterranean.

What you're saying is, here in Western Britain,

the ancient connections are still, are still alive?

And they still think of themselves as Roman.

You have these Latin inscriptions continuing in North Wales.

In Anglesey!

In Anglesey, yes! Which you can see from here.

And so, it's not a surprise that really that in some ways

we shouldn't be surprised that these things are here.

What's been missing really in north-western England

is the archaeological evidence and that's beginning to come to light.

Tremendous.

This is continuity of people speaking Latin,

it's continuity of people thinking of themselves as Roman,

well beyond the conventional end of the Roman period.

So, at the fall of Rome,

the Roman army went, but the people carried on.

In South Wales, behind its Roman walls,

the old capital of Caerwent

remained the centre of local power into the Middle Ages.

Late Roman world does come to an end.

There is economic crisis, political instability,

the Western Roman Empire does fall but the people stay put.

In 410 AD, people don't just throw down the Roman pots

and run away, life continues.

In fact, parts of Wales

were the last bits of the Roman empire to survive anywhere.

In the fifth century, here in South Wales,

a new order rose under Christian,

Welsh-speaking kings, still loyal to the memory of Rome.

This has to be one of the most atmospheric buildings

in the whole of the British Isles.

Medieval wall-paintings, Dark Age carvings and sculptures.

"Samson posuit hanc crucem,"

Samson erected this cross,

"pro anima aeus", for his soul.

Latin is a bit scruffy, not classical,

but they still feel connected with it.

Great changes in history often happen like this -

slowly and imperceptibly,

one world becomes another.

And among the bringers of change were the saints.

Columba, David, Mungo and the most famous of all...

My name is Patrick.

I am a sinner, a simple country person

and the least of all believers.

My father was Calpurnius, he was a deacon.

My Grandfather was a priest who lived in Bannavem, Taburniae.

His home was near there and that is where I was taken prisoner.

I was about 16 at the time.

St Patrick was British, born on Hadrian's Wall,

one of the remarkable men and women

who saved what could be saved of Latin learning and Christianity.

He spent some time up around the Slemish mountain.

He shepherded, or herded pigs, or swine

as they called them, and nowadays it'd be sheep, you know.

-Where's the house?

-It's on the Carnstroan Road there,

down near number 30-something. 33, I think it is, maybe.

How long he spent there, I don't know, you know.

Irish tradition says St Patrick worked for a while

here at Slemish, in County Antrim.

It would be sort of an enclosure for bringing them in,

the pigs at night, keep them safe.

-Is it still there?

-Oh, you could, probably see it, you know.

It seems to be near hand to where it says on the map, here.

A Christian Briton, Patrick spoke and wrote Latin.

It's fell down a bit, you know, and it's covered over with soil,

and things. It's just...

And he left the Irish an abiding respect for Latin civilisation.

It'd have been built up higher, you know.

Patrick brought Christianity to the North of Ireland

and his disciple St Columba took it back into Northern Britain.

This group of Derry sailors built a Dark Age curragh,

to follow the path of Columba, or Columcille

who sails to Iona, to begin the conversion of Scotland.

She's a modern version of the sort of boat Colmcille would have used.

A very sea-worthy boat,

so back in 1997 we made the voyage from Derry up through to Iona.

Rowing by day, and coming ashore at night, and I'm sure that's the way.

We sort of followed what we believed was

a similar route that Colmcille would have used,

-when he was banished from Ireland and sails to Iona.

-Right.

-Coasting, just going by the islands of the promontories?

-Yep.

The journey was no great challenge in a way, you know?

Quite a natural thing for them to do. And for us.

Of course, yeah, yeah. And what was the inspiration behind it?

We were celebrating the 1,400th anniversary

of the death of Colmcille,

so he died in 597, so 1997 we did the journey up through.

The very natural way.

We're down near Derry here, where his monastery was.

Quite a simple journey if the wind is in the right direction,

to go up to Iona in the south, the south-west corner of Mull.

There's a lot of the archaeology from the time of the saints,

there's a lovely cross at Kildalton, just down on the south-east corner.

There's an old monastic settlement on Texa island,

the monk sailors were there.

This is such an extraordinary age, isn't it, this so-called Dark Age?

And doing it in such a practical way

must give you a great insight into what went on then?

We shared the same blisters hands and other parts of the anatomy

that Colmcille and his crew would have experienced.

For me, the boat is about being out there, on the sea,

experiencing the nature, the wonder of where you are.

It's basically fifth century technology,

and we're all involved in modern sailing boats

and modern boats, as well,

with out jobs, and it's amazing just what this boat's capable of.

We're not a crew any more, we're a family.

# I am sailing...

And wherever the saints built their churches, settlements follow.

# Home again...

Glasgow itself was founded in the age of saints by St Mungo

in the sixth century.

# I am sailing...

With all its later histories, Glasgow too came out of this

crystallising of identities in the Dark Ages.

# Two can say... #

This is Brian here, broadcasting very loudly

from the centre and heart of Glasgow.

Oh, this is how archaeology should be.

Govan is one of the oldest continually inhabited places in the world.

The Romans arrived in the Govan area in AD 81.

The inhabitants were Britannic speaking Celts,

who, according to Ptolemy,

practised druidic rites and called themselves the Damnoni.

Later on they were recognised as the Britons

of the kingdom of Strathclyde.

This is Dumbarton Rock, on the river Clyde,

Alt Clut, the Rock of the Clyde,

the royal citadel of the Strathclyde Welsh.

It was here at the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire.

You come to a place like this and you see how history is geography

and geography is history.

The seas along the Western shores of Britain

with their islands and archipelagos and their deep-cut estuaries

have been places of contact and exchange for thousands of years.

Govan is important in a number of ways.

First, the monolithic stones

that once surrounded the site of Govan Old Church tell us that

this place was sacred to the people who lived there,

and had been for a very long time.

Govan Old Church was built for the Clydeside Shipyard workers in 1888,

but on Dark Age foundations.

My excavations found foundations of probably a timber building

with dry stone footings and some burials which had radio-carbon dates

which take you back to the sixth century.

The sixth century, fantastic. Here in the middle of Govan!

Govan's secret is a collection of Dark Age stones

that once stood among the graves in the churchyard.

It's a drawing made from a 19th century survey of the churchyard.

It's fantastic.

Just fantastic, isn't it?

You can see all the different plots all the layers are marked out here,

the names of these people are ancient names -

Govan Rowan, Anderson.

It's a real social history, isn't it?

Weavers of Govan, Weavers, Dalglish!

You can't believe it really, can you? Oh, that is too much, isn't it?

The thing that's so good about it is shows you the location of

the old recumbent stones, so these kind of pale brown rectangles.

We know where, at the end of the 19th century,

all the sculpture was located in the churchyard.

The stuff was never lost to be discovered,

if you like, it's always been known.

It's cathedral-like in proportion.

It is, isn't it? The cathedral of Govan.

These are Christian monuments, but their interlace and animal ornament

come from much older artistic traditions of North Britain.

They're all different.

In the sanctuary, they've placed their most precious object,

which is this sarcophagus.

It's carved all over.

Nothing really prepares you for this idea of the interlace treatment,

and there's this figurative sculpture, the hunting scene.

It's unique in Scotland, there's only one other in Britain

that's even close to it.

We have burials, Christian burials,

from the late fifth and early sixth centuries,

which are really the beginnings of Christianity in Scotland.

This wasn't meant to go in the ground,

-it's meant to be on display.

-It's a shrine.

It's a shrine, yeah, absolutely.

A great dark age, sacred place.

It is an amazing fact about Govan's history, isn't it?

And very poorly appreciated, even by many people in Govan.

You know, they are at a place where

Christianity's been practised for 1,500 years.

So, the ancestors of the Scots, Welsh

and Cornish, too, were the people of Roman Britain and Ireland.

But who were the English?

Well, their ancestors weren't British,

and they'd never been Roman.

They were immigrants from Jutland, Denmark and Germany.

And they were the Anglo-Saxons.

This is The Wash, Lincolnshire on the horizon,

and we're here on the Norfolk side.

You can see why this stretch of water was so attractive to those

first Anglo-Saxon immigrants,

it gave them sheltered anchorage after the gales of the North Sea.

Some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlements are found here along

this stretch of the Norfolk coast and this is one of them.

Snettisham. The first clue's in the place name,

the ham, or the village of Snaet.

Maybe that's the name of the first Anglo-Saxon who settled just here,

under that great hill over there.

That's where those first Anglo-Saxon's put down their roots.

They came here, one imagines, with all the optimism of immigrants

anywhere and at any time, thrown up on strange shores.

But these were the ancestors of the English.

To the native Britons, the Anglo-Saxon immigrants

were the lowest of the low, fit only for the most menial jobs.

In the 400s,

they made their way across to the beaches of Eastern Britain.

In the 500s, they kept on coming!

Only ever a minority,

they maybe added just 10% to the population of Britain.

But they brought with them a new culture,

and above all, a new language.

And when we first pick them up in written records in the 600s,

two things mark them out - their poetry, and their sense of humour.

Ic eom wunderlicu wiht, wifum on hyhte.

I am a wondrous thing, a great hope or expectation for women,

something that women look forward to.

Stabol min is steapheah.

Rooted I stand on a high bed...

Neoban ruh nathwaer.

I'm shaggy down below.

Raeseo mec on reodne.

Rushes my red skin. Her eyes will be wet.

-And the answer to the riddle is an onion!

-An onion.

-An onion.

-What else could it be?

-ALL: That Jazz!

-Thank you.

We still find them amusing today, don't we?

There's this long tradition of slightly saucy humour.

And riddles can almost undermine, or subvert conventional

views of things, can't they?

There is something more to a riddle than just a joke.

They certainly liked to explore the idea of expressing an idea

in completely different terms.

The sun is God's Candle,

the sea is the Gannet's Bath

And words carry not just meanings but values, ways of seeing.

Even now, our keys words in English for feelings

and relationships are Anglo-Saxon.

It may be the greatest legacy of the English to the world.

But they're not English yet.

There'd been Angles and Saxons in Britain before the end of Rome,

doing the menial jobs.

Security guards, labourers, cleaners.

Their first settlements were just inland from the coast,

and one of the biggest yet found is here at Sedgeford, in Norfolk.

We approached here, really, with two questions to answer.

What is the size of the settlement, and also what is the status?

And we are now getting insights that, you know,

we have got something very large that's going on here.

This is becoming a very significant site, indeed.

What's so wonderful about this, is that the community itself

is providing us with all this new information about our past.

Well, that's important to the project.

Part of the founding ethos of the project

was to have community engagement.

You know, it's their heritage.

A lot of the people that you see working on the trench,

they may have strong linkages to what they uncover.

-They probably do!

-Yeah, they probably do.

Day out with the family.

Oh, fantastic. So where have you come from? Are you local?

-Snettisham.

-Oh, Snettisham, so you are local.

-Yeah, very local.

This is all part of your past.

This bit here, yeah.

To them, it would have been, where can they get a food source?

Where can they... Survival isn't it?

Whereas we kinda pick where the nearest posh school is, or whatever.

Theirs would have been like, "How can we survive?"

Yeah, yeah.

Our first clue to the early Anglo-Saxons is their diet.

Well, we've got so many now,

what we do is we count them and weigh them,

and we can't actually archive them all, because there's so many.

They lived a bare, subsistence life.

The oysters we eat now are really small and tender

but these would have been really meaty

and actually quite disgusting,

so I'm not too sure why they were eating them, in my opinion,

just from a modern point of view.

So, while the Christian Britons were still writing Latin

and importing goods from the Mediterranean,

pagan Saxon immigrants survived on oysters cooked in crude pots.

It's complete. There's only a fragment out of the rim.

It's hand-fired but also you can see, it's very,

very crudely made, very hand-made.

Characteristic shape for an early migration period Anglo-Saxon pot.

It's a very rough and ready fabric, made and fired

in the same sort of way as Iron-age pottery,

and this is one of the things

that makes early Anglo-Saxon pottery really difficult to date.

You really need a good big chunk,

especially if you've got something that's plain like this,

to be able to work out the actual vessel shape of it.

And a rough guess at the date?

We won't hold you to it, of course.

A rough guess, I'd say this is

probably fifth century, rather than sixth.

Are we talking about a small migration?

Oh, don't give me that!

This is the eternal question, isn't it?

Are there a few people coming over? Or a lot of people coming over?

Where do things stand at present among you experts, I mean?

I think we're perhaps veering back to more people coming over,

but it's still exceptionally difficult to tell,

and I think there is still a big amount,

an elite takeover, followed up by large scale migration.

But large scale migration brought conflict, fights over land.

The Anglo-Saxon poets remember one savage battle

with the Britons, Welsh as they called them, here at Stoke Wood,

in Oxfordshire, behind Charwell Valley services on the M40.

It was fought with great fury

and heavy losses on both sides, said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, later.

But the Saxons won and took many villages and great booty.

And they pushed on, westwards, into the lands of the Britons.

And in the end, says the British historian Gildas,

the Saxon fire licked Britain from sea to sea.

But what of the Britons,

or the Cymry, as they called themselves?

They never forgot the loss of

lowland Britain to the Anglo-Saxons.

The earliest Welsh poetry also tells of wars with the English,

what the Welsh later called, "The matter of Britain."

Dygogan awen dygobryssyn. Maraned a meued a hed genhyn.

A phennaeth ehelaeth a ffraeth vnbyn.

A gwedy dyhed anhed ym pop mehyn.

That's from looking at it.

The language, it defines us.

It's that which makes you special or different.

Our children criticise myself and my wife,

for being born in Shrewsbury, in England.

And they say, why didn't you move to Welshpool or Newtown for our birth?

I said "Just a minute," and I put an old map

of the West on the table,

and I said, "Look, Shrewsbury and Shropshire

"used to be part of Pengwenn."

Welsh territory, we've loaned it to England for the time being.

They were satisfied that they were born

on a piece of Welsh land, in Britain, Brudein.

It would take a long time to learn to live together.

In truth, we're still learning.

But from around the year 600,

the Anglo-Saxon tribes began to be converted to Christianity

by missionaries from Rome, and Saints from Ireland and the West.

And now, small English Kingdoms arose - Mercians and East-Angles,

and up hear in the North-East, the Northumbrians.

This is a great place to sense that mysterious process

by which part of Roman Britain became Anglo-Saxon England,

and the low-land Britons became the English.

The mouth of the Tyne, after the Romans,

became the heartland of a small, Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian Kingdom.

You can see the ruins of the priory on the promontory.

There, inside the ruins of the Roman settlement,

a stone church became the burial ground

of the early Northumbrian kings,

and their royal residence stood on this promontory.

The Roman fort of Arbeia, the fort of the Arabs, had new masters.

And I suppose, for early Anglo-Saxon rulers, a great,

defended, stone walled centre like this was a very useful place?

Yes, and also just the prestige of stone buildings,

especially when you have the church coming in, and they're re-importing

Roman methods of construction, way of life, and so on.

We've got a mixture of different objects here.

This is a gaming piece which has been made out of antler,

but this one's been dyed green.

Gosh. And Anglo-Saxon, you think?

Yes, probably sixth century, or later.

How intriguing.

Then this is possibly Anglo-Saxon,

I would like it to be Anglo-Saxon, it is a bone stylus.

For when they sort of reintroduce writing on tablets with the church.

Gosh, what a beautiful artefact that is, isn't it?

Beautiful, isn't it?

Board games and writing in the Anglo-Saxon period

might suggest a high status.

High status, yes. Yes, yeah, definitely.

Tantalizing.

Yes.

And here in the 600s,

the first Christian, English civilisation develops,

especially in two place famous in the British story -

Jarrow and Wearmouth.

It's just a lovely church, you know.

It's just so full of history.

I know a lot of churches are full of history,

but you've got to remember, this dates back to the seventh century.

-This was one of the first stone churches built.

-Yeah.

It would have only been up to the pillars,

so it would have been a long, narrow church when it was built.

Victorians came along later and added that side on.

This gives you a wonderful idea

of what a seventh century church looked like.

You see the great long, tall, narrow buildings

modelled after those early Roman basilicas

that you can still see in Rome.

Small windows, not these huge ones that the Victorians liked.

And to do it they brought in architects, masons,

I suppose that's what they mean by sementarii,

craftsmen of all kinds.

And the men and women who made that first English golden age,

like Ceolfrith, Biscop and the historian Bede,

are still local heroes here.

And the one who does the donkey work,

Ceolfrith, the one who builds the churches.

I'm a little bit in awe of Biscop, he was a wonderful man,

and he had a vision.

There would have been no Bede without Biscop.

-And Bede was a Sunderland man?

-Yes, he was.

-Bede came to this church at the age of seven,

stopped at the age of 13, and spent the rest of his life in Jarrow,

so really, who does he belong to?

You know, really, he belongs to two of us.

Well, there's the wonderful discovery that the plaster,

the original plaster that was on the monastery walls

around Jarrow was red and white stripes.

Yes, it was. Yes, it was.

Well, there you are you see,

these local, tribal identities are still so strong.

A few miles up the coast from Wearmouth

is it's sister church of Jarrow, where Bede was buried.

The dedication of the church of St Paul,

15th year of King Eggfred, and the fourth year

of Ceolfrith, the Abbot, and founded under God's name of the same church,

one monastery in two halves.

My story is, he's still here.

He lived here, and he's buried here.

He died on the steps there, didn't he?

And I think to myself, "No, I think he's still here."

So, really, what I'm looking forward to,

whether I'm still alive or not,

they're talking about lifting up this floor and I think to myself,

"Yes, lift that floor and I bet you, he's still here."

And that's my story.

And of course, Bede is still here,

for he's one of the people who made us who we are.

And we still carry him with us. That's how history works.

From Bede's time, right down to the shipyards

and collieries of Tyne and Wear, and the memories of the Jarrow march.

That's why this is one of the key places in the British story.

For it was here that Bede wrote the first great book

on British history and identity,

and this is it.

It's not exaggeration to say that this is

one of the most important books in The Story of Britain.

It's one of the two earliest manuscripts of Bede's history,

it may be the earliest, even, around 737.

And Bede calls his book a Historia Ecclesiastica Of The Gens Anglorum.

An Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation or People.

Bede uses this word, "Anglie," for English,

all the way through the book,

and it comes to include all the people living within roughly

what we now call England. It's a very, very important idea,

the idea that there was a single gens Anglorum, an English people.

It's going to be a defining idea in English history.

But it's really much more than that.

As you can see, when you turn to...the opening,

the first word of the book, it's not England, but Britain!

Britain.

Britannia oceani insula cui quondam Albion nomen fuit.

Britain is an island in the ocean, formerly known as Albion.

And then, lying off the shores of Europe, across from Germany

and France and Spain, and the greater part of Europe.

Gives the length at 800 miles width of 200,

not including the deep promontories

and bays that stick out into the ocean.

Oceano infinito, faces out to the boundless ocean

where the Orkney Islands are situated.

Bede then gives us a description of Britain,

"A land rich in forests and fields,

"natural resources and rivers full of fish."

The model for this description is in late Roman historians,

but the real model is the Bible, the book on Genesis.

Britain is an earthly paradise.

At this time, he says,

five languages are spoken in the island of Britain.

Anglorum, English

British, by which he means Welsh,

Scottish, by which he means Irish,

Pictish and Latin, which is the language that links us in communus.

At the very end, he describes the book simply

as the history of OUR island and its people.

We found a floor which was mainly flint and clay.

Really, really good, yeah, a real achievement.

A little rim of a samian ware goblet, or something like that.

2,000 years old.

Did you find any interesting things?

Lots of interesting things.

Lots. We found masses of pottery of the Romans.

-A Stepford ware!

-Oh, wow!

Thanks very, very much.

You were great and we'll be back, I'm afraid.

# Somewhere over the rainbow

# Way up high

# And the dreams that you dare to

# Once in a lullaby... #

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