Tribes to Nations The Great British Story: A People's History

The story of the British is one of the most extraordinary tales in history.

It's a tale of invention and creativity, but of constant struggle...

..against outsiders, and against ourselves.

Over the centuries, the British people have faced many tests

and endured many hardships.

And it was the people themselves who wove the fabric of our history,

often forced to start from the bottom to create communities,

to make justice, rights, freedoms.

Today, we're many tribes - Welsh, Scots, English and Irish.

But how did our modern identities as Britons emerge?

In the next part of The Great British Story,

the coming of the Vikings and the beginnings of our nations.

Here on Tyneside, in the 8th century,

the Anglo-Saxon monk and teacher, Bede, wrote a portrait of Britain and its people.

It's our first view of Britain since the Romans...

..the world that was once Britannia.

In his day, Bede says Britain was made up of four nations,

and those four peoples and their interweaving destinies

will define the history of the British Isles from then until now.

First were the Britons, or the Welsh,

the original inhabitants of Britain who, Bede says,

once had all the island to themselves and now live in their own kingdoms to the west.

In the north was another branch of Britons, related to the Welsh,

whom Bede, like the Romans, called the Picts - the painted people.

Britain's third nation Bede called Scots, a word that originally meant Irish.

The Scots spoke Irish Gaelic,

and they lived in the west of Scotland and the Western Isles.

The last of Bede's four nations were the English.

Bede says, more precisely than we would,

that they came 285 years before his day, after the fall of Rome.

The English, as he saw it then, were the newcomers to the world of Britain.

Treble's going. She's gone.

Our four nations, Bede says, had very different customs,

although united by their Christian faith.

But they're the routes of our modern societies, their destinies intertwined,

even though our identities are still obstinately distinct.

In the story of the peoples of Britain,

we've reached what we might call the end of the Dark Ages.

Of course, they didn't see it that way at all.

They weren't aware that they were living in a dark age.

The people of Britain lived and struggled as passionately

and as full-bloodedly as any of us do today.

But from round about the year 700, right across the British Isles,

we see the crystallisation of identities - cultural, linguistic and political.

And the catalyst for that, as so often in history,

is not only the natural human desire for cooperation and order,

for law and justice, but also what is endemic in human nature - war.

'In this next stage of the story, people right across the UK

'will be helping us build up a picture of Bede's British world.'

Yeah, yeah. Gosh, those classic Celtic...

'In the far north of Scotland, the people of Old Deer are searching

'for their Pictish roots, shared by most of today's Scots.

'And for their lost Dark Age monastery.

'They've raised £10,000 to fund this community dig.'

So while you're here, when you're in those trenches,

you are going to be doing the work that we expect archaeologists to do.

This is not pretend. This is real.

We rather think that this was a very important place, small as it is,

people coming from all over, up here.

We think it was a central place that people were radiating out from.

'Legend said it was an Irish missionary, St Columba,

'who converted their Pictish ancestors here in the 6th century.'

It's a wonderful story, isn't it? St Columba, Drosdyn and all that.

But how much do you think that's true?

Is there a different history to be uncovered, Andrew, do you think?

I think it's a lovely bit of marketing.

They knew exactly what they were doing.

The legend is first found

in Scotland's oldest surviving manuscript, The Book of Deer.

This is the oldest manuscript that we have from mainland Scotland,

by a long stretch.

Completely different from what you would be used to

in southern Britain, in England, aren't they,

with a Roman influence? This is a different tradition altogether.

It's very stylised, very reduced, very geometric.

It's really, really special.

About 200 years after the manuscript was made,

the monks at Deer had a spot of bother.

There began to be disputes over the title to the land,

and especially the tributes or the taxes that were due on the land.

And so they realised that they had to come up with

some kind of evidence or proof to support their claim.

And so what they did was they wrote, in the blank spaces around the manuscript,

records of these grants of land.

And they wrote them in the language of the time, which was Gaelic.

And this is the earliest surviving Gaelic prose that we have.

The Gaelic notes describe the boundary of the monastery at Deer,

in the land of the Picts where the book was written.

The whole idea of having a book with Gaelic instructions in it,

as to where the monastery was, but not having found the monastery,

really spurred us to say, "Right, let's dig!"

But what we're really talking about is a Pictish centre up here.

And the Picts have become much more important in understanding the roots of Scotland, haven't they?

Their skills are becoming more apparent.

No text in the Pictish language has yet been found, but their art has.

Mysterious symbols, animals, mythical beasts, stars and planets.

And the ghostly shapes of the Pictish ancestors.

The Romans said there were 40 tribes beyond the Firth of Forth

that together made up the Picts.

And when the kingdom of Scotland was created in the 9th century,

it was a union of Irish-speaking Scots

and the majority British-speaking Picts.

As historic landscapes in Scotland go, this is second to none.

This is Strathearn, and there's the river below us.

The ancient east coast route, still followed by the road and the railway

from Edinburgh and Stirling up to Dundee and Aberdeen.

And below us, Fort Teviat. This is the place where, in the 9th century,

the Gaelic-speaking dynasties of the Scots, from Strathclyde,

assimilated the British-speaking kingdom of the Picts,

here in the rich agricultural land of the east coast,

to form the kingdom of the Scots.

So who were the Scoti, the Scots?

Well, they weren't originally from Scotland at all.

Round the time of the fall of Rome they migrated to Britain from Ireland,

and their dialect is still spoken in the Western Isles.

Bede tells us that in the 8th century

they ruled a kingdom spanning the Western Isles and Northern Ireland.

The kingdom of Dalriada,

founded in the Dark Ages by the legendary King Erk.

These children from the Dalriada School in Antrim

are doing a project on the Dalriada kingdom.

No-one knows how far it extended,

but few places show better how closely the early histories

and identities of Ireland and northern Britain are linked.

We've already got Isle of Dun.

It's a long sort of narrow kingdom along the coast.

It was about 20 miles inland, but where the sort of

north-western boundary of it was,

and where this southern boundary was, the border fluctuated.

The main site of the kings was Dunseverick,

and that's where St Patrick visited King Erk.

This headland?

This is a bendy Ireland.

And he made the famous prophecy that, of course,

Fergus the youngest son would become the king.

And not only the kings of the Irish territory, but over Forthen,

which was Scotland, and his line would be kings forever.

And, as every football fan knows,

the sons of Fergus have done quite well ever since.

Job done!

As for the Welsh in his day, Bede writes about them

with some acrimony.

They'd fought many wars with the English.

The Welsh lived in small tribal kingdoms.

Their coasts dotted with ancient Christian sites,

like this one here in Ceredigion.

Llangrannog.

It takes its name from a wandering Celtic saint in the Dark Ages.

In Cornwall, they call him St Crantog.

His wanderings took him down from Wales to the south-west

and on to Brittany, although he may have been Irish in origin.

All of which goes to show that, in the Dark Ages, whether you're

sailing in the region of Strathclyde, or down the Irish Sea,

to the English Channel, the sea was not a separator, it was a unifier.

If you look at the tree, as it were.

From the same tree we have Basque

and Breton, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh.

Cornish. They all come from the same base.

Now I don't understand Scottish Gaelic or Irish Gaelic.

I understand Cornish very well.

The language is far more for us than just a cultural medium.

It defines us in many ways.

It's almost a political expression as well.

A suggestion of being, of wanting to hold on to that what is special.

How far back does the earliest Welsh poetry go?

I think it goes back to about the 6th Century,

the Llenarian going up to Catterrick in Yorkshire.

So in the 8th century, you could travel

all the way down from north Britain to Cornwall,

making yourself understood in different dialects of Welsh.

Down in the south-west, the British people of Devon

and Cornwall had also become Christian in the age of saints.

And their biggest known Dark Age settlement has just been found,

on the seashore near Land's End.

The settlement stretched from here, all the way up

and all the way around the coast,

which we think dates from the 7th to the 11th century.

These are all fish bones and crab shell, they had crabs.

So they had all sorts of fish.

-This is a descaler of fish.

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

There's an edge for scraping the fish.

Yes, for scraping fish.

Pigs and cows and sheep.

So not a bad diet?

-Eating the kind of things that you eat in Cornwall today.

-Dog!

It obviously met an untimely end somewhere, or died.

What's very interesting is that this pottery is very, very rarely

decorated and at this excavation,

we actually found the first example of decoration, and it's a cross.

So Cornish Christianity really emerges in this Dark Age period.

Definitely.

St Ives and St Just, and the saints are everywhere, aren't they?

St Morgan, St Mellion. Wherever you go.

It's really when the society that we know actually became visible to us.

When you start getting Christianity and rectangular houses, and a diet

that you can appreciate, that we see ourselves in the past perhaps.

So Britain in the 8th century was divided between British peoples

and the Anglo-Saxons.

They'd started off as poor migrants, come to Britain for a better life.

By the 700s they were living in many tribes, and small kingdoms.

And in Sedgeford in Norfolk, a dig organised by the community itself

is uncovering the local roots of the English nation.

It's the other side of the coin from spectacular royal treasures

like Sutton Hoo and the Staffordshire Hoard.

Sedgeford is ordinary people's lives.

The site just gets bigger and bigger.

15 years work, at least, on the main Anglo-Saxon site.

Oh gosh, I'll come with my zimmer frame.

When we were last here we found the Anglo-Saxon settlers

surviving on a bare subsistence diet.

Now towards 800, things are changing.

I've gently moved away the soil and it's quite clear that

it's been worked as a little half of a whole that's been drilled through.

Which tells me that it's half of an amber bead.

Oh, terrific.

Beautiful colour.

And the Anglo-Saxons liked that for their broaches?

Oh they did, and for their necklaces, they were quite popular.

Rows of different shapes, sometimes circular,

sometimes sort of flattened circular.

And this one's complete.

It is gorgeous, a lovely wavy pattern there.

They're doing more than surviving.

They've got their little creature comforts maybe as well.

But of course building societies

and nations is about more than creature comforts.

Even more than language, it's about shared identity,

common values, getting on with your neighbours.

And in Sedgeford there's graphic evidence

that that wasn't always easy.

This person was found in a double grave with another person

that also died from serious cranial trauma.

We think the weapon used was some kind of large axe, for we've

got injuries to the lower arms which we think are defence fractures,

from where this person was attacked and raised his arms in defence.

And then we've got a series of cuts, we've got one that came here

and took off part of the skull.

That's a big cut as well, isn't it? Right through.

We've also got a cut to the back of the skull here.

Either of these could have been the cause of death.

It's almost certain he would have been unconscious at this point,

and on the ground.

And then they carried on, and really laid into him,

and carved right into his face, at least two different angles.

It's gone right through the mandible,

taken some of the brow ridge off too.

At least seven cuts into his skull there.

So whoever killed Aethelweard really had it in for him, then?

They did, yeah.

It certainly seems they went beyond what they needed to do to kill him.

They were trying to give some kind of message.

To keep a lid on the violence, the early Anglo-Saxons had begun

to make law, at first just simple tariffs of compensation for injury.

If you cut off an ear, you must pay 12 shillings,

a finger will cost you four shillings.

If your genitals are disabled, 150 shillings.

If any of your front teeth are knocked out,

that'll be six shillings per tooth.

It was a start.

Between the 700s and 800s,

the myriad Anglo-Saxon tribes were beginning to be swallowed up

by bigger kingdoms - Northumbrians, West Saxons, Mercians.

# Gerald was a footman for Queen Victoria. #

It was the inevitable process of nation building.

# Gerald wor a gor old man, his real name I know. #

But even now you can pick up signs of these older regional identities.

In the Black Country, the area of Dudley and Halesowen

belonged to a tribe called the Hwicce.

In the Dark Ages Britain was a land of tribes, hundreds of them.

Well, it still is, isn't it?

Here in the West Midlands, dozens just in this area.

And some of them have left very long lasting traces.

Just come and listen to this.

Well it's old Liza's bloke from down the road. He's dead.

I said, "Ooh, me wench, he ay is he?" I said,

"Well, how did that happen?"

She says, "Well old Liza had been giving him cat food to eat!"

Listen to the long vowels.

The use of 'heo' for 'she'.

They come from the Mercian dialect,

which was spoken here in the 8th century,

when the ordinary people were still a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh.

Liza says, "No it wor the cat food".

Heo said he liked that.

Heo says he was up a ladder painting the sailing,

and he fell off when he turned round to lick his back!

Bryan Dakin is recording these local dialects before they go.

The Anglo-Saxons invaded,

and they made the effort to climb over our bonks and come onto

the plateau because we're like 900 feet above sea level here.

And then, after that, nobody really made the effort.

The Vikings sort of touched on the issue.

The Normans really couldn't be bothered

because they were talking French.

So we stayed as we were for centuries upon centuries.

As a region, there's a massive tribalness about it.

You even say du bist I've heard in somewhere round here.

Have I, or was I mistaken?

Oh yeah, bist and bin and bisn't yeah, costn't.

And today Black Country and Brummies are still divided

over who owns their words.

'Bostin'. Where does bostin come from?

That's a good point, that is, because one of the interviews

I did was with a Brummie, Spoz,

a Brummie poet, Richard would know.

Now Spoz reckons it's a Brummie word,

Black Country folks reckon it's a Black Country word.

He said that we borrowed it and we wouldn't give it back,

but it's actually a Black Country word, of course it is.

-But it means 'great', 'good'?

-It means 'brilliant'

-I've got things to do and folks to see.

-Like who?

Ola senoritas!

So the Anglo-Saxon past is not so far away after all.

From the 8th century the Midlands were ruled by the Mercians,

whose kings were the first to claim rule over all the English.

And close by Halesowen is the border of the Mercians

and the Hwicce, where you can see that nation building in action.

Excellent, thanks Steve, fantastic. Come on Mick, come on you two.

Believe it or not, the boundary of the Mercians and the Hwicce

is still the West Midlands Metropolitan Boundary today.

You're looking at the central watershed of England.

And it could have been the northern boundary of the Kingdom of the Hwicce.

The Anglo-Saxon kingdom was to be drawn into Mercia.

But a lot of folk groups, which are the small building bricks

of the Kingdoms, were established, and some of them met near here.

Somewhere near that tower block you can see in the distance.

From Staffordshire, from the river Thame area, you have the Tomsaete.

From the Penc area you have the Pencersaete.

You also have groups from the Aro Valley, who may have been

called the Arosaete, coming into this area for the seasonal pastures.

It's almost like, the Brummies over there

and the Black Country over here, isn't it?

Or am I being fanciful?

This is an important boundary.

Later you've got a watch hill over there.

Who they're watching, for or against, we may not know.

Yeah.

There are several of them along the northern boundary of the Hwicce.

We're divided into all these little tribal groupings.

It's fantastic, isn't it?

Different dialects too are there?

Absolutely.

And some of these of course may be pre Anglo-Saxon, easily.

How long did people carry on speaking Welsh

in the West Midlands, do we know?

No, we do not know.

We've got the placenames, though.

Do they tell us about Welsh people living among the Anglo-Saxons?

Quite a lot of British names. The river names are British.

The River Alne which is a British word.

We have the Thame, which is a British word.

And they have come through, and so have the major hills.

Particularly for instance, Malvern, Malbrin, the bear hill,

Bredon is a beauty of course.

Bre is the British name for hill, Dun is the Anglo-Saxon

name for hill, and by the time we've got to the Middle Ages

people had forgotten that this was hill, and they added hill.

So we've got Bredon Hill, which means hill, hill, hill!

In time all these lowland tribes and kingdoms, with their mix

of Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, would come to call themselves English.

But not quite yet.

One mark of the Anglo-Saxons was their willingness to learn,

to borrow - ideas, technologies, craft skills.

And it was up here in the north-east,

where they mixed with Picts and Scots and Irish,

that the big leap took place.

Bede tells how the Northumbrians

sent to France to find masons who could build like the Romans,

craftsmen who could revive the lost Roman art of making glass.

Unlike Medieval glass where you get surface painting, the colours

are actually baked into the glass during the glass making process.

And there's a whole range of colours, this one's a very deep red.

With no cities yet, no urban societies,

the monasteries were the centres of industry, arts and crafts.

That's quite a nice green piece.

What they created here was a fusion of British

and Anglo-Saxon culture, with Roman ideas.

Nice little streaky red

and green pieces here seems to have been something

they quite liked and probably it was quite good for, you know, flowing

robes of evangelists and biblical figures and that kind of thing.

So Anglo-Saxon England became a centre of European civilisation.

Watch it doesn't shatter.

So this is what lies behind the scenes?

-This is some of it.

-An amazing quantity of stuff.

Well over 1,000 fragments of 7th century glass found.

Which makes it the largest collection of glass

of that date from any European site.

Tell us about this wonderful window.

Well they are fragments of glass which were found

during the 1972/73 excavations.

And so they were formed into a mosaic and placed at the end there.

And that's the oldest window glass in Western Europe.

And it wasn't just glass.

From Wearmouth and Jarrow,

they sent wonderful manuscripts to Rome itself.

Textiles made by English needlewomen were prizes across Europe.

The inspiration was the stained glass windows in the church.

Some of the pieces are longer than others.

And it all has to be cut all smooth

like as if you were cutting the lawn.

You've got to clip every long piece off,

so that's where you get "clippy mat".

Love your fingernails by the way!

It's putting part of the history onto the walls, you know.

In Wearmouth and Jarrow,

the Anglo-Saxon past has never been forgotten.

The glass has got a life.

They've taken inspiration from something 1,300 years old,

and they've given it a new lease of life.

And it's just fab, it's absolutely fab, and you know,

you just cannot, you couldn't put it in a bottle and market it.

Do you know what I mean?

That's what Wearmouth Jarrow's about.

That's what Bede was about, wasn't it?

This huge cultural centre, this centre of innovation.

In our story, we've reached the late 8th century.

Britain after the Dark Ages was still small scale

compared to the powerhouses of world civilisation.

The potential of our history, as yet unforeseeable.

Bede's four nations, still mutable, their future path as yet unclear.

But their story would be transformed now,

by the arrival of a new tribe.

Raiders from Scandinavia - the Vikings!

AD 793.

In this year, dreadful foreboding omens came over

the land of Northumbria and terrified the wretched people.

Whirlwinds and fiery dragons were seen in the sky.

And in the same year, on January 8th, heathen men ravaged

and destroyed the church of God at Lindisfarne,

brutally robbing and slaughtering all.

These were the first ships of the Danish men

who sought the land of the English nation.

Rich monasteries like Bede's Jarrow and Wearmouth

were the first targets.

At some point, probably during the Viking invasions of Northumbria,

there was such a hot fire across the building itself that it

actually warped some pieces of glass, so you can see that there,

that would obviously originally have been flat.

Just look at that, isn't that astonishing?

The fire storm of a Viking attack on Jarrow, maybe,

in the late 9th century perhaps.

Across the British Isles, people entered a new age of anxiety.

Viking fleets terrorised the coast of Britain.

And in Ireland too, the land of saints and monasteries.

The same year here in Ulster, an Irish chronicler heard

the news that the islands of Britain had been devastated by the pagans.

And the news was soon followed by the Vikings themselves.

The year 802, Iona was burned by the heathens.

The year 806, the community of Iona, to the number of 68,

was killed by the heathens.

The year 832, the first plundering of Armagh, by the heathens,

three times in one month.

St Patrick's legacy of learning went up in flames.

Ireland too was engulfed by these events.

And the great centre of Armagh here, with its church

of St Patrick going back to the 5th century, was swept up in it too.

The Vikings were driven by population growth

in their own countries, by economic and political pressures,

and they soon began to settle.

The Vikings built their first permanent base in Ireland in 841.

Here on the banks of the River Liffey at a place

called the Black Pool - 'Dub Lin'!

And from that moment until today, Dublin will be a key place

not only in Irish history, but in British history.

The founding of Viking Dublin also intensified

the importance of the Irish Sea.

Back in the Age of Saints, St Patrick had called it

mare nostrum, 'our sea'.

But from now on, the Irish Sea will belong to the Vikings.

The Vikings settled right across northern Britain, married

local girls, and now scientists are literally tracking them down.

Welcome, everyone, to this year's St Olave's walk.

And here in the Wirral, a DNA project has found them.

We are here to celebrate the great Viking heritage

that we have here on the Wirral.

We're trying to find men with very old surnames

that are tied to this area.

Surnames that are found in medieval records. So, like, Matthew Lund.

So his surname from Lunder, which is the Viking name for a copse,

so that was an ideal one.

And it's also just found in The Wirral, so if you find

someone with that surname chances are their ancestry is from here.

With my name, Kemp, I may have Viking ancestry.

So I sent some DNA samples in and here I am today.

My father, who is sadly no longer with us, but I've been reliably

informed that the Y chromosome has been passed on to me.

Now I currently live in Irby, which is also of Viking origin.

So the whole thing is sort of coming home.

So Pict, Scot, Welsh, English and now Viking.

We search for our roots and in the past we find ourselves.

If you look at this badge here, Tranmere Rovers.

'Tran' comes from Old Norse, meaning crane bird, or heron.

And 'mere', 'mel' is sandbanks.

Tranmere is the sandbank with the crane birds.

Actually, that's where I got interested in Vikings,

really interested, when I found my football team was Viking.

I'll never go to Prenton Park again and see it in the same light.

Tranmere, Croxteth, Toxteth, Aintree - home of the Grand National -

Merseyside is stuffed with Viking names.

The Viking invasion of the Wirral even has its own beer mats.

Soon enough, they become like us and we become like them.

It's the British story.

Chester has even got a church for a Viking saint.

May you feel for all we love

and care for, this day and unto eternity.

Amen.

And today's Liverpudlians

even get their nickname from Norwegian - Scousers.

People have said lobscouse, you just lob stuff in,

that's why it's called such.

It's a very practical stew.

So, years ago, you lot got called Scousers

and that's where it came from.

It's another example of our great affiliation with the Norwegians.

You didn't know that, did you?

So, all round Britain, the Vikings changed society and attitudes.

And in the great shipyard town of Govan, on the Clyde,

a new layer is added to Glasgow's ancient past.

The Vikings never ruled here,

but the Scots got a taste for things Viking.

They even followed their styles and fashions.

Just looking at the ancient history, you walk down the main street

and there, right in the middle of all this,

is the most incredible sacred space.

Who knows, Dark Ages? Maybe far back in time.

It would be because at one time,

there was standing stones round where the wall was.

Govan Old Church was founded back in the 5th century, but its

astounding collection of carved stones is from the Viking age.

I remember when, as a wee boy, the humpbacked stones,

we used to use them as sort of a goalpost.

This was before they were moved inside.

And to us, they were just lumps of stone.

We did not realise they were Viking houses for their souls of the departed.

We call them hogbacks.

But, as Brian says, they're really houses, houses of the dead.

It's astonishing.

They are really representations of buildings.

That curving sweep of the roof is the gable,

and the sides have these shingles dated to about 925-950.

These are local Scots wanting the latest fashion in Viking funerals.

It's absolutely amazing, isn't it? Walk off the streets of Govan

and come to 30 or 40 monuments from this period.

Absolutely.

A Scottish princess even married a Viking. What a party!

We're in a Gaelic, British, Scottish region in the Viking age.

And this is Viking-style sculpture.

What's going on here then, in the Clyde Valley?

What's going on is that whole Viking conquest of the Irish Sea.

Dublin, the settlement of Cumbria, the conquest of the Isles.

All of that kind of eventually finds its way to Govan.

Are we allowed then,

to talk about a mixed society here in this part of Scotland?

I think you have to allow that,

at least, at the kind of dynastic level, there's intermarriage,

there are people with very Scandinavian tastes,

commissioning monuments.

Because the Clyde has such access to the sea,

everyone can get in and out quite easily.

That's, if you like, a continuity

that takes you right down to the 20th century, really.

That openness to mix society that you end up with

in a place like Glasgow.

So, in their own ways, the peoples of Britain came to terms

with the Vikings just as they had with the Anglo-Saxons.

But in Wales, the problem was not just the Vikings

but the old enemy the English.

And some here thought that the Vikings might help the Welsh

win back their lost lands.

Written around 930, a prophetic poem, in which it is

hoped that it would be in legions between the peoples of,

what I suppose we would call them, the fringes of the Isles of Britain.

This alliance of Britons, Irish

and the Vikings would push the English back into the sea.

So there is a sense in the poem,

of what has happened over the last 400 or 500 years.

And the fact that the Welsh, the indigenous people of Britain,

have lost all this territory.

And are still losing territory.

It's almost a hint, is it, that you know we've suffered

a kind of ethnic cleansing, isn't it, do you think?

That's right. Have been pushed back, all the time territorially,

and on top of all that, the icing on the cake, is all the tribute

that is then demanded for the Welsh's own lands, I suppose.

The poet has very hostile words for the English, doesn't he?

I mean they're thieves, they're traitors,

they're drunkards, a lot of reference to the English's drinkers.

They are scavengers. They are the lowest of the low.

The word he uses is "Cathmin".

These are the people of the dirt.

These are scavengers, the lowest strata of society.

Below that of slaves probably.

The coming of the Vikings had many different reactions

and consequences.

But the Vikings had come for the same reasons

the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons came for a better life.

Britain was a land of opportunity.

In England, in a few years,

most of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were swept away.

The East and North, where the Vikings ruled,

became known as the Danelaw.

There, the chief centre of Viking power the Roman and Anglo-Saxon

city of York, became Viking Jorvik.

A perfect symbol of both continuity and change in British history.

We've had everything

from a Roman cemetery, through to Viking age buildings,

through to a Medieval city dump.

17th century market gardens,

and an area that becomes heavily populated in the 19th century

cleared as a slum in the 1930s.

There quite literally is 2,000 years of people's lives

within what is now modern day York.

In the 10th century, this was a bustling, bilingual place

frequented by merchants from Ireland,

Scandinavia and the Continent.

New contacts, new ways of seeing.

We've found eight Viking age buildings, the late 10th Century.

But, at the same time, you're seeing an Anglo-Saxon influence.

There's undoubtedly characteristics that mark you out as Northern,

or Anglo-Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon,

but these start to blur in daily life.

A lot of the great events aren't really registered archaeologically.

You don't really see evidence here of the Norman conquest, for example.

People just seem to carry on.

And the slight changes from cemetery to bustling Victorian slum

landscape blends seamlessly and just keeps evolving.

In this cosmopolitan city, the Vikings soon took on

the native culture, enthusiastically embracing a money economy.

The first of the Viking rulers to produce coins is Guthrif.

I say produced coins, there's only one that survives at the moment.

I say one, but not even a full one.

And Guthrif died in 895.

We don't know an awful lot about him.

One of the things we do know about him

is that he was buried in the church at York.

-So these are Christians?

-Christians, yes.

Within a generation of settling,

they've converted to Christianity, and they're doing

what Christian kings do,

which is issue coins to tell people they're Christian.

This is a Viking king from round about 900,

and his name is Cnut.

He's really pushing home the Christian message.

Rather than just putting Cnut Rex as a continuous line around it,

he spells it out as though he's making the sign of the cross.

So he's being more Christian than the Christians.

They're not seeing themselves as Vikings, are they?

-They're seeing themselves as Kings of Northumbria.

-Absolutely.

When we hear about them in the written sources of this period,

we hear about kings of Northumbria.

We don't hear about Viking kings or even kings of York.

We hear about the Northumbrians.

And you see a bird there. A bird with a hooked beak.

Now, is that a raven?

A raven, of course, is the traditional symbol of Odin.

Or is it an eagle?

The symbol of one of the evangelists.

Or is it both? He's really making the point he is not an Anglo-Saxon.

He's not a part of this expanding new Kingdom of England.

And I think a lot of Northumbrians, of Anglo-Saxon extraction,

were probably just as happy about that as the Vikings.

We were never ruled by the South Angle, in one sense.

Exactly.

And some of them still feel that way!

I don't think things have changed much.

So England was divided.

North of Watling Street, the Danelaw

but to the South, Alfred the Great's Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons.

It's a new force in our history.

The beginnings of an English State.

Here in the South, Alfred and his successors beat off the Vikings

and created a small but powerful Kingdom.

They geared society to war. New towns were founded.

And, from London to Exeter, the old Roman cities

were restored as centres of defence and administration.

You can see at the bottom here, the Roman face work, very clear.

That's this stuff here.

That's this stuff here. Above that, this white Triassic sandstone.

And, above that again, if you see between those two crenellations

there's a blocked in embrasure.

The stonework blocking that in is thought to be Norman.

-That's the purple stuff there?

-The purple stuff directly above.

-These crenellations here, and that one's very clear, isn't it?

-Yes.

They would be the Anglo-Saxons?

These are thought to be Saxon. A very exciting discovery.

It's as good as proved!

Yes.

Saxons rebuilding on Roman foundations.

There you have the story a renewed Britannia, ruled by the English.

And the great rebuilding was not just in stone,

but in habits and mentalities.

Safe inside their city walls,

settlers were encouraged to take up housing plots.

Churches were built. Markets and mints opened.

The people got used to a money economy.

Each chief town, or burh, had its own shire.

This is where today's counties come from,

our oldest units of local government, law and order.

A national kingdom for all the English was on the way.

And now, for the first time since the Romans,

we begin to pick up signs of the kind of urban social life

that we might recognise today.

Governments fret about ideas

like the Big Society.

How do you create a sense of duties

and obligations as well as rights in a changing world?

There's nothing new in that.

Anglo-Saxon governments tore their hair out about law and order.

About the horrendous level of wanton violence

and theft and feud in their society.

Kings could legislate about it from the centre,

but what's really interesting about the Viking period

is what starts to happen at grass roots.

And I'd almost call it the beginnings of civic society, Guilds.

Guilds would become a massive thing in Britain in the Middle Ages.

500 of them in Suffolk alone.

And this is the great 14th century Guildhall here in Exeter.

There's been a building on this site since 1160.

It's probably the oldest civic building in Britain.

But, astonishingly, the story of the Guild here in Exeter

goes back to around 930.

Guilds were associations of friends and neighbours who got together

for mutual support and protection.

They held dinners on the great festivals, as they still do.

They did a huge amount of work for charity, as they still do.

They held funeral feasts and prayers

for the departed souls of their friends.

And they did all they could to cut out blood feud and even insult.

And, here in Exeter, the Guild statutes include

a five-penny per member club fund

to help those who went on pilgrimage to Rome,

and even better, this one penny per member

to help all those who'd lost their house in a house fire.

It has to be the first example of house insurance in British history.

The great, French political theorist, de Tocqueville,

in the 19th century, said that if you want to understand the English,

and they are a funny lot, what you must understand

is that they are a nation of societies, associations and clubs.

And, astonishingly, all that begins here in the Viking age.

In Scotland and Wales too, national kingdoms rose in response

to the Viking threat, a focus for ethnic and regional loyalties.

Here in Wales this is the time

when Welsh cultural Christian identity begins to emerge.

And the transformation's political too, the small tribal

groupings that emerged after the end of Rome turn into bigger

kingdoms and with them will come the idea

of Welsh political unity.

The compilation of Welsh laws by King Hywel Dda in the 10th century

marks the emergence of a Welsh nation.

It's a commissioned manuscript.

Illustrated with people like the distine, the pentelane

who was the chief of the King's household

and very importantly, the judge who, as you can see,

is holding a small manuscript in his hands.

All of the legal manuscripts are small of size, of course.

As a travelling judge in the Viking age, you had it in your pocket.

A travelling judge would have brought out

his little manuscript in order to refer to one or two things

and as a source of his authority.

It's so beautiful, isn't it?

He's almost sort of gesturing with it.

Dispensing justice with one hand and holding it up his book.

In the name of the law.

Do we see ordinary people as well?

After the law of the court you move into other aspects of law

like the relationships between individuals,

particularly things like Serhad,

the relationship between men and their wives,

all governed in the law.

Women had a remarkably high status in Welsh society,

therefore they were protected.

Everything had a value in Welsh law.

If you broke a man's arm, it had a value for compensation purposes.

So everything had its monetary value

or its equivalent in animals or whatever.

-So those compensations are similar in English law.

-In principle, yes.

You pay for your crime with an equivalent sum.

Hywel's laws were a mix of old and new.

If a woman is separated from her husband after seven years

of marriage, all that belongs to them shall be divided into two.

Should a husband be leprous or have fetid breath

or be incapable of marital duties

she is to have the whole of the property at any time.

Brothers are to share their patrimony between them.

Illegitimate sons are to receive a share equal to legitimate sons.

The father's sin should not be set against the son.

-There is a continuity, isn't there, in terms of...

-Absolutely.

You don't realise until you look back

after you've passed the law. For example,

Hywel Dda recognised the rights of children.

And here we have a Children's Commissioner.

We were the first in Europe on women's rights.

If you're a women you could have a divorce after seven years

and keep half your husband's belongings and property.

And we're still leading the way because here at the Assembly,

we have more women representatives than any other UK parliament.

To be a nation, above all you need law,

and to make law then was to take a stand

against almost overwhelming forces of disorder and violence.

Let's face it, these were bleak times.

Most of us Britons were still unfree peasants working the fields,

labouring to feed our betters, and only then ourselves.

I go out at daybreak, driving the oxen to the field.

I must plough a full acre a day, or face the anger of my lord.

It is hard work because I am not free.

Lord, when we first leased our land from you,

it had been stripped bare by Viking raids.

Now after this terrible winter, we have nine oxen left and little seed.

We beg, for the love of God, to ask no more tax from us

as it is a very hard time for the people.

But change was on the way

for with bigger kingdoms, the law was not enough.

With such huge poverty and inequality,

the great question for them was,

"How do you create a just society?"

The answer was with law.

When we think about the creation of our rights

we think of Magna Carta or the 18th-century Enlightenment

but the key time was the 10th century.

-When they have water in a church and put it over people...

-Christened.

Christened, that's right. Another word for that?

Does anyone know another word for being christened?

-Baptised.

-Baptised, good.

The impetus came from Christian ideas -

charity, forgiveness, redemption.

But the people too were making their voice heard now,

high and low, and in their consultations with the kings

are the early origins of Parliament.

..documents, creating copies of the Bible, prayer books,

and also legal documents.

One of the documents they wrote here in Rochester

was the Textus Roffensis.

Now you probably haven't ever heard of the Textus Roffensis.

You've probably heard of the Magna Carta

but the Textus Roffensis is actually

really even more important than the Magna Carta.

It made sound a big claim,

but along with our language and literature,

English ideas about freedom and law

are their greatest legacy to the world.

A very exciting moment.

'And this is THE book of English law.'

The Textus Roffensis,

which really means "Rochester's book".

It's a compilation of law starting in the 600s

with an eye for an eye and a tooth for six shillings -

the earliest texts in English.

Making law was part of what marked you out as a civilised people

and then as you turn the pages

and it's turning the pages of English social history, really,

through the centuries, law becomes real legislation,

flexible response to the times.

This is from about 930.

The people are talking to the king

and the king is listening to the people.

He's worried about the morality of capital punishment.

"Se Cyng cwaed nu eft aet Wittan."

The king speaks to his council, his wise men.

But he thought it was profoundly distressing

that so many young people, "yeongne man,"

are being executed, as he sees is happening everywhere

for such small crimes,

"for swa lytlan." For so little.

After consulting with his local assemblies,

the king raises the death penalty from 12 to 15 years.

"Man naenne yngran manne

"ne sloge ponne 15 wintre."

Still harsh, you might say,

but remember, children of nine and ten were hanged for theft,

even in Charles Dickens' childhood.

It's the tentative beginnings, you might say, of a social contract.

By the 10th century, in the Viking age,

the kings who claimed to rule all England were now ruling

Welsh speakers,

Cornish speakers, Cumbrians,

Danish speakers, along with Angles and Saxons.

So no one code of law could really accommodate all that.

They had to be flexible.

"As regards my Danish subjects,"

says one 10th-century English king,

"With secular law, I leave it to them

"which good laws they judge as being best for their people."

So in the brutal 10th century,

the peoples of Britain with all their tribal differences

come into the light of day as nations,

as people with hopes, aspirations and a voice.

A dialogue has now begun between rulers and the people.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

-I'm Jason Lee, that's my younger brother.

-See you.

See you round.