Great Tales From English History (2 page)

c.7150
BC

T
HERE WAS A TIME, AS RECENTLY AS NINE
thousand years ago, when the British Isles were not islands at all. After the bleakness of the successive ice ages, the south-eastern corner of modern England was still linked to Europe by a wide swathe of low-lying marshes. People crossed to and fro, and so did animals - including antelopes and brown bears. We know this because the remains of these creatures were discovered by modern archaeologists in a cave in the Cheddar Gorge near Bristol. Scattered among numerous wild horse bones, the scraps of bear and antelope had made up the larder of ‘Cheddar Man’, England’s oldest complete skeleton, found lying nearby in the cave with his legs curled up under him.

According to the radiocarbon dating of his bones, Cheddar Man lived and died around
7150
BC
. He was a member of one of the small bands of hunter-gatherers who were then padding their way over the soft forest floors of north-western Europe. The dry cave was his home base, where mothers and grandmothers reared children, kindling fires for warmth and lighting and for cooking the family dinner. We don’t know what language Cheddar Man spoke. But we can deduce that wild horsemeat was his staple food and that he hunted his prey across the grey-green Mendip Hills with traps, clubs and spears tipped with delicately sharpened leaf-shaped flints.

Did Cheddar Man have a name of his own? A wife or children? Did he have a god to whom he prayed? The answers to all these basic questions remain mysteries. Bone experts tell us that he was twenty-three or so when he died - almost certainly from a violent blow to his head. So our earliest semi-identifiable ancestor could have been a battle casualty, or even a murder victim. And since the pattern of cuts on his bones is the same as the butcher’s cuts made on the animal bones around him, we are confronted with another, still more gruesome possibility - that our early ancestors were cannibals. According to some archaeologists, the reason why so few human skeletons survive from these post-ice-age years is because relatives must have eaten the dead, cracking up the bones to suck out the nourishing marrow inside.

As we set out to explore the past, we should keep in mind the first rule of history: the things that we don’t know far outnumber the things that we do. And when we do unravel secrets, the results seldom fit in with our own modern opinions of how life should be.

c.325
BC

C
HEDDAR MAN HAD LIVED IN AN ERA OF
global warming. As the glaciers of the last ice age melted, sea levels were rising sharply, and this turned high ground like the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, and modern Ireland into separate islands. The waters flooded over the land bridge, severing the physical link with Europe.

Thus was created the great moat that we now call the English Channel. As you approached England by boat across the narrowest point where marshes had once been, you were confronted by the striking prospect of long, tall cliffs of bright chalk - the inspiration, according to one theory, for the country’s earliest recorded name, Albion, from the Celtic word for ‘white’. Europe’s great white-capped mountain chain, the Alps, are thought to have derived their name from the same linguistic root.

It was Pytheas, a brave and enquiring Greek navigator, who probably wrote down the name around 325
BC
. Nearly seven thousand years after the death of Cheddar Man, Pytheas travelled north from the Mediterranean to investigate the islands that were by now supplying the tin which, when smelted and alloyed with copper, produced the bronze for the tools and weapons of southern Europe. These offshore ‘tin islands’ were so remote that they were said to be occupied by one-eyed men and griffins. But unafraid, Pytheas followed the customary trade routes to Cornwall, and set about composing the earliest written description of this land that lay on the edge of the known world.

The Greek explorer seems to have covered large areas of the country on foot. Placing his gnomon, or surveying-stick, into the ground at noon each day, he was able to measure the changing length of its shadow and hence calculate latitude and the distance north he had travelled. He almost certainly sailed around the islands, and was the first to describe the shape of Britain as a wonky triangle. Rival geographers scorned Pytheas. But his findings, which survive today only in fragments through the writings of others, have been confirmed by time - and by modern archaeologists, whose excavations tell us of a population that had advanced spectacularly since the days of Cheddar Man.

The inhabitants of Albion by now spoke Celtic, a lilting, flexible language distantly related to Latin. They shared it with the Gauls across the water in the Low Countries and France. They still hunted, as Cheddar Man had done. But now their spears and arrows were tipped with bronze or iron, not sharpened flint, and they no longer depended on hunting for survival. They hunted for pleasure and to supplement a diet that was derived from their farms, since they had learned how to tame both plants and animals. By 300
BC
surprisingly large areas of the landscape were a patchwork of open fields - the classic English countryside that we recognise today. Iron axes had cut down the forests. Iron hoes and ploughs had scratched and cross-hatched fields whose boundaries were marked, on the uplands, by firm white furrows that, in some cases, still serve as boundaries for farmers in the twenty-first century.

Compared with Cheddar Man the Celts were quite affluent folk, with jewellery, polished metal mirrors and artfully incised pots decorating their homes. Some lived in towns. The remains of their bulky earth-walled settlements can still be seen in southern England, along with the monuments of their mysterious religion - the sinuous, heart-lifting white horses whose prancings they carved into the soft chalk of the Downs.

They were a people who enjoyed their pleasures, to judge from the large quantities of wine jars that have been dug from their household debris. They brewed their own ale and mead, a high-alcohol fermentation of water and honey which they ceremoniously passed from one to another in loving- cups. And while their sips might be small, it was happily noted in the Mediterranean, where the wine jars came from, that this sipping took place ‘rather frequently’ - as one ancient historian put it.

But there was a darker side. The religious rituals of these Celts were in the hands of the Druids - high priests or witch doctors, according to your point of view. Travellers told tales of human sacrifice in their sacred groves of oak and mistletoe, and modern excavations have confirmed their altars must have reeked of carrion. One recent dig revealed a body that had been partially drowned and had its blood drained from the jugular vein. Death, it seems, was finally administered by the ritual of garrotting - a technique of crushing the windpipe by twisting a knotted rope around the neck.

The Celts were fearsome in battle, stripping down to their coarse woven undershorts and painting themselves with the greeny-blue dye that they extracted from the arrow-shaped leaves of the woad plant. Woad was the war paint of Albion’s inhabitants, and it is thought to have inspired a name that has lasted to this day.
Pretani
is the Celtic for painted, or tattooed folk, and Pytheas seems to have transcribed this into Greek as
pretanniké
, meaning ‘the land of the painted people’. When later translated into Latin,
pretanniké
yielded first
Pretannia
, then
Britannia
.

Diodorus Siculus, a historian working in Rome in the first century
BC
, described a less ferocious aspect of these blue-painted warriors. They were, he said, ‘especially friendly to strangers’ - always happy to do business with the many foreign merchants who now travelled to Pretannia to purchase Cornish tin, wolfhounds and the odd slave. Hide-covered boats carried the tin across to France, where pack-horses and river barges transported it along the trade routes that led southwards through Italy to Rome. By the first century
BC
Rome had supplanted Greece as the Western centre of learning and military might. The Roman Empire circled the Mediterranean and had reached north into France and Germany. The wealth of the distant tin islands sounded tempting. As the Roman historian Tacitus later put it, the land of these painted people could be ‘
pretium victoriae
’ - ‘well worth the conquering’.

55
BC

S
O FAR IN OUR STORY ALL THE DATES HAVE
been estimates - much better than guesses, but not really precise. Radiocarbon dating, for example, measures the rate of decay of the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which is found in all living things but which starts to decay at the moment of death at a precisely predictable rate. Using this method, scientists have been able to calculate the age of Cheddar Man to an accuracy of one hundred and fifty years.

But now, in 55
BC
, we can for the first time set a British date precisely in months and days. Two centuries after the travel jottings of Pytheas, our history finally collides full tilt with the culture of writing - and what a writer to start with! Gaius Julius Caesar not only shaped history - he also wrote about it. Reading his vivid account of his invasion of Britain, we can feel ourselves there with him in the early hours of 26 August 55
BC
, rocking in the swell in his creaking wooden vessel off the white cliffs of Albion - and contemplating the unwelcome sight at the top of them.

‘Armed men,’ he wrote, ‘could be seen stationed on all the heights, and the nature of the place was such, with the shore edged by sheer cliffs, that javelins and spears could be hurled onto the beach.’

The Roman force had sailed from France the previous night, cruising through the darkness with a fleet of eighty ships bearing two battle-hardened legions - about ten thousand men. Trying to control the western corner of Europe for Rome, Caesar had found his authority challenged by the Celtic peoples of Gaul, and he had a strong suspicion they had been receiving help from their cousins in Britain. He had tried to get to the bottom of it, calling together the merchants who traded with the Britons across the channel , but he had received no straight answers. His solution had been to spend the summer assembling his invasion fleet, and now, here at the top of the cliffs, was the reception committee.

Caesar ordered his ships to sail along the coast for a few miles to where the cliffs gave way to a sloping beach, somewhere near the modern port of Deal. But the Britons kept pace with him along the cliff top on horseback and in chariots, then coming down to mass together menacingly on the beach. The Roman legionaries faced the unappealing prospect of leaping into chest-high water in their heavy armour and battling their way ashore.