Great Tales From English History (26 page)

Our Island Story
by H. E. Marshall is long out of print, but an American edition of 1920 has been lovingly digitalised and put on the Net by the Celebration of Women Writers project hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. It can be viewed in its entirety, with its illustrations, on
www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/marshall/ england/england.html
.

Ackroyd, Peter,
Albion: The Origins of the British Imagination
(London, Chatto & Windus), 2002.

Brewer’s
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
, Millennium Edition (London, Cassell), 2001.

Carey, John (ed.),
The Faber Book of Reportage
(London, Faber and Faber), 1987.

Churchill, Winston S.,
A History of the English-speaking Peoples
, 4 volumes, Birth of Britain (London, Cassell), 2002.

Davies, Norman,
The Isles: A History
(London, Papermac), 2000.

Diamond, Jared,
Guns, Germs and Steel
(London, Vintage), 1998.

Dickens, Charles,
A Child’s History of England
, (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1998.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe,
Truth - A History and a Guide for the Perplexed
(London, Black Swan), 1998.

Johnson, Paul,
The Offshore Islanders: A History of the English People
(London, Phoenix), 1998.

Lee, Christopher,
This Sceptred Isle 55
BC
-1901
(London, Penguin Books), 1997.

The Oxford Companion to British History,
rev. and ed. John Cannon (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 2002.

Rogers, Everett M.,
Diffusion of Innovations
(New York, The Free Press), 1995.

Schama, Simon,
A History of Britain
, 3 volumes (London, BBC Worldwide), 2001-2.

Scruton, Roger,
England - an Elegy
(London, Pimlico), 2001.

Strong, Roy,
The Story of Britain: A People’s History
(London, Pimlico), 1998.

Strong, Roy,
The Spirit of Britain: A Narrative History of the Arts
(London, Pimlico), 2000.

Weir, Alison,
Britain’s Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy
(London, Pimlico), 2002.

Wood, Michael,
In Search of England: Journeys into the English Past
(London, Penguin Books), 2000.

FURTHER READING AND PLACES TO VISIT

Simon Schama’s landmark TV series
A History of Britain
has now been accompanied by a guidebook to the historical sites shown on screen - and to many more. It opens with Iron Age villages and the Avebury stone circles and progresses to the great castles of Edward I. English Heritage and the National Trust are the two principal custodians of our historic treasures, whose details are set out on their websites:
www.English-Heritage.org.uk
;
www.nationaltrust.org.uk
.

Davidson, Martin,
A Visitor’s Guide to A History of Britain
(London, BBC Worldwide), 2002.

c.7150
BC
: Cheddar Man

The bones of Cheddar Man can be seen at the Natural History Museum in London. There is a replica of his skeleton at Gough’s Cave in Cheddar, Somerset, part of the exhibition ‘Cheddar Man and the Cannibals’:
www.cheddarcaves.co.uk
. See
www.ucl.ac.uk/boxgrove
for details of the excavation of Britain’s very earliest human remains, the half-million-year-old legbone found at Boxgrove in Sussex. As this book went to press, English Heritage announced the exciting discovery of delicate engravings in the caves at Cresswell Crags near Worksop in Nottinghamshire, dating from around 10,000
BC
- so our hunter-gatherer ancestors, it seems, had art! Catherine Hills offers an accessible and scholarly account of our country’s earliest waves of uninvited immigrants.

Hills, Catherine,
Blood of the British: From Ice Age to Norman Conquest
(London, George Philip with Channel 4), 1986.

c.325
BC
: Pytheas and the Painted People

In
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
, Barry Cunliffe pulls together the fragments of our knowledge about this remarkable man, taking us by the hand on a delightful stroll through Celtic Gaul and Britain. If you would like to visit Stonehenge on the summer solstice in the company of modern Druids, ring the English Heritage hotline on 0870 333 1186. Paul Newman writes well about the prancing white horses on the hills.

Chadwick, Nora,
The Celts
(London, Penguin Books), 1997.

Cunliffe, Barry,
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
(London, Penguin Books), 2002.

Delaney, Frank,
The Celts
(London, HarperCollins), 1993.

Newman, Paul,
Lost Gods of Albion: The Chalk Hill Figures of Britain
(Trowbridge, Sutton Publishing), 1999.

55
BC
: The Standard-bearer of the 10th

You can’t do better than read Julius Caesar’s own story of hitting Britain’s beaches, contained in his account of his campaigns in Gaul.

Caesar, Julius,
The Gallic War
, trans. Carolyn Hammond (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1996.

AD
1–33: And Did Those Feet? Jesus Christ and the Legends of Glastonbury

Michael Wood’s poetic work of reportage
In Search of England
(see General Histories, above) tackles the fantasies of Glastonbury gently but firmly. For the sacred, visit
www.glastonburyabbey.com
. For the profane, you can find out about the annual pop music festival on
www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk
.

AD
43: The Emperor Claudius Triumphant

Barbara Levick’s recent biography paints a sympathetic portrait of the crippled emperor. You can find out how to visit the Roman remains at Colchester at
www.colchestermuseums.org.uk
.

Levick, Barbara,
Claudius
(London, Routledge), 2002.

AD
61: Boadicea, Warrior Queen

Shrewdly separating fact from fiction, Antonia Fraser refers to the warrior queen as Boudicca when dealing with verifiable events, and as Boadicea when legend takes over. Tacitus’s
Annals
provides an almost contemporary version of the revolt. His
Agricola
tells us what his father-in-law, the Roman governor, did next, while his
Germany
describes the Germanic tribes whose descendants would eventually cross the seas to fill the void left by the Romans. The Museum of London has a standing exhibit on what happened when Boadicea came to town:
www.museum-london.org.uk
. Colchester is looking for volunteers to take part in its annual Boadicea chariot race on
www.colchesterfestival.org
.

Fraser, Antonia, The Warrior Queens: Boadicea’s Chariot (London, Phoenix), 2002.

Tacitus,
Annals of Imperial Rome
, trans. and intro. Michael Grant, rev. edn (London, Penguin Books), 1996.

Tacitus,
Agricola and Germany
, trans. and intro. Anthony R. Birley, (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1999.

Webster, Graham,
Boudica: The British Revolt against Rome
,
AD
60 (London, B. T. Batsford), 1993.

AD
122: Hadrian’s Wall

After many years of restoration, Rome’s great English pleasure palace is now open again at Bath:
www.romanbaths.co.uk
. To visit Hadrian’s Wall, consult
www.hadrians-wall.org
.

Drinkwater, J. F., and Drummond, A.,
The World of the Romans
(London, Cassell), 1993.

Potter, T. W., and Johns, C.,
Roman Britain
(London, British Museum Press), 1992.

AD
410-c.600: Arthur, Once and Future King

Enter ‘King Arthur’ in your search engine and more than a million pages will vie to take you back to Camelot. So read the man who started it all - the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, in accessible paperback. Of the real-life Arthurian sites, Tintagel Castle in Cornwall comes closest to what Hollywood would lead you to expect. For a genuine and spectacular taste of the Dark Ages, you have the choice of the British Museum or the Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk to see
Beowulf
brought to life:
www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
;
www.suttonhoo.org

Barber, Richard,
King Arthur, Hero and Legend
(Woodbridge, Boydell Press), 1961.

Carver, Martin,
Sutton Hoo, Burial Ground of Kings?
(London, British Museum Press), 1998.

Monmouth, Geoffrey of,
The History of the Kings of Britain
, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London, Penguin Books), 1966.

c.
AD
575: Pope Gregory’s Angels

Here is our first chance to sample the writing of Bede, who tells the story of the Angles in the slave market, complete with Gregory’s excruciating puns. An earlier but briefer account of the encounter can be found in the
Life
of Gregory by an anonymous monk of Whitby. According to this account, when the slaves told Gregory they were ‘
Angli
’ (Angles), he replied that they were ‘
angeli Dei
’ - ‘angels of god’.

Bede,
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
(trans. Leo Sherley-Price, intro. D. H. Farmer), (London, Penguin Books), 1990.

AD
597: St Augustine’s Magic

After describing Augustine’s arrival in Canterbury, Bede went on to relate how the pagan altars around England became Christian. Maps showing the spread of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England are among the many original features of David Hill’s indispensable atlas. The original St Augustine’s throne has long vanished, but if you visit Canterbury you can see the marble chair made in the early 1200s that stands near Thomas Becket’s shrine.

Hill, David,
An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press), 1981.

AD
664: King Oswy and the Crown of Thorns

The gothic ruins of the Abbey of Whitby will be familiar to devotees of
Dracula
- Bram Stoker wrote his famous novel looking up at it. Today you can look down from the abbey on to the bracing sea view enjoyed by the guests of St Hilda at the synod in 664. Legend has it that the migrating geese who rest on the headland on their way down from the Arctic every year are pilgrims paying tribute to her memory:
www.whitby.co.uk
.

c
.AD
680: Caedmon,The First English Poet

You can read Caedmon’s ‘Hymn’ in the gem-like anthology of Anglo-Saxon verse compiled by the poet Kevin Crossley-Holland, together with the complete text of
Beowulf
,
The Dream of the Rood
and a bawdy collection of Anglo-Saxon riddles. Seamus Heaney’s translation of
Beowulf
has been rightly praised.

Crossley-Holland, Kevin (ed. and trans.),
The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology
(Oxford, Oxford University Press), 1984.

Heaney, Seamus,
Beowulf
(London, Faber and Faber), 1999.

AD
672/3-735: The Venerable Bede

www.bedesworld.co.uk
offers a flavour of the old monastery at Jarrow, with visitor information. If you can’t get to the north-east, the British Library video,
The Lindisfarne Gospels
(written by BL experts and narrated by Kevin Whateley of Inspector Morse fame) is atmospheric on monasticism in this period. Brown and de Hamel provide well illustrated accounts of how the writing studios at such monasteries produced their masterpieces.
The Age of Bede
sets out some good contemporary sources. Bede himself would surely be delighted by the cultural renaissance of modern Tyneside - his spirit is now said by some locals to flit between Durham Cathedral, where his bones rest, and Anthony Gormley’s magnificent statue, the
Angel of the North
, in Gateshead.