The Great Turning Points of British History (2 page)

It didn’t last long, of course. In Thatcher’s Britain the pendulum swung the other way. A pamphlet on the teaching of history by Hugh Thomas had a preface, written by Mrs T. herself, explicitly rejecting E.P. Thompson’s vision of ‘Peoples’ History’, in favour of the revival of history as the discussion of great figures and significant events. I well remember filming Thompson at the Glastonbury Festival in the high tide of Thatcherism as he implored the vast crowd to remember that British history was ‘not just the story of kings and queens and imperialists and capitalists, but of inventors and poets, of the Levellers and William Blake’.

All of which is to say that our view of the nation’s turning points is always changing; this is what makes this impressive collection so timely and so fascinating. Anyone interested in our history will want to dip into this intriguing and challenging set of twenty essays by top specialists spanning the last thousand years. There are many surprises. Half of the turning points, for example, are before 1500, which offers an enlightening long view of the nation’s story rather than an over-concentration on recent events. Second, some of the selections are refreshingly unexpected. But all ask us to look at the very idea of turning points in a new light.

Most of the turning points within this book are about events, single moments in time in which the fate of the nation might seem to have turned on the flip of a coin. To some, though, these events are what Fernand Braudel memorably called ‘surface ephemera . . . fireflies flitting across the surface of history’. To Braudel, these moments stood against the
longue durée
of climate, landscape, culture and society in all its deep-rooted attachments – the slow movement of real change within history.

In this light, the selection here of the Peasants’ Revolt or the Great Reform Bill are moments that really stand as signifiers of wider social movements, markers in the long gradual rise of the ordinary people of Britain. These points can be found more often than expected. Intensive examination of our vast archives of medieval court rolls has revealed the reality of this hidden history. Such events do not constitute turning points in themselves, but they are part of the slow tidal movement of change. In this light, ‘turning points’ are perhaps not necessarily always initiators of change but they are visible signifiers of the crystallization of the wider historical process.

There is one last observation; one that has come up a lot in recent debates over the national history curriculum. The greatest fact in our modern history is the British Empire and, it seems to me, the fact of the empire overshadows all else. Not long ago I argued in a public forum that the empire should be put at the centre of the school history curriculum. A number of commentators of Caribbean and African descent involved in the forum feared that this opinion verged on the racist. Not so. The empire is our common history; it is all our histories, whether we were passengers on the
Empire Windrush
, or came from India or Pakistan after Partition or, for that matter, are from Bede’s Jarrow.

We all share the empire for good or ill: our schoolkids should be free to interrogate the attitudes (racist or not) of our forefathers as well as the altruism of the likes of, say, A.O. Hume, the founder of the Indian Congress. A writer such as Kipling may be disparaged in some quarters these days, but he is one of the half-dozen greatest writers in English: is it better to teach a second-rate writer who is politically correct, or a first-rate one who is problematic? In the classroom I’d take the problematic every time.

This book covers a thousand-year span starting with the Danish Conquest of 1016. But of course there were many crucial developments in Britain before the eleventh century, especially in the national stories of the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish and their polities, languages and cultures in the post-Iron Age world. We could go much further back: to the core of our genetic makeup in the pre-Celtic population; to the arrival of migrants speaking early Indo-European languages; or to the Iron Age revolution in farming; and the coming of the Romans . . .

But let us limit our delving back in time to the five centuries before this book’s starting point, the so-called Dark Ages, for this is the time when the cultural identities of the Scots, Welsh, Irish and English were first shaped. Here, then – as a prequel – are a suggested half-dozen significant turning points before the eleventh century.

First: the fall of Rome and the migration of Germanic migrants into Britain. This used to be called the
adventus Saxonum
, the ‘coming of the English’, and was long the centre of the English racial myth. It was even given a precise date (
AD
449) and a place (Ebbsfleet by Richborough in Kent), as if this turning point was a single event. In fact, the arrival of the ‘English’ was a much slower process by relatively small numbers of Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians over a long period of time. The new arrivals did not alter the deep DNA of Britain, but they had a profound effect on the languages, place names and institutions. Even today the Queen claims descent from a fifth-century ‘Anglo-Saxon’ adventurer called Cerdic, whose pagan burial mound lies on a windy hill above Andover. Cerdic’s name, though, is not Old English but Celtic – a warning not to take historical myths too seriously!

My second turning point has a specific moment in time:
AD
597, the coming of St Augustine with his evangelizing mission from Rome. Christianity had survived in Ireland, and in northern and western Britain, since the end of the Roman era, but the arrival of Augustine was a real moment of change. Strangely, the event attracted little attention on its 1,400th anniversary in 1997. Christianity is in steep decline now – recent polls suggest that England is the least religious society in the world – and in 1997 no one I read seemed to get a handle on why it mattered, but matter it did. It shaped English politics and culture and ways of thought for well over a thousand years. We can’t begin to understand our ancestors without it, and not just our medieval forebears: take Shakespeare, for example, or the seventeen-century radicals. Christopher Hill, the great historian of the seventeenth century, always used to tell his students that if they didn’t know the Bible they might as well give up trying to understand the Revolution! Augustine’s arrival in 597 created the connection with Rome and European civilization that was tenaciously maintained for so long: it determined the path that our culture and civilization would take. That makes it one of the most important events in our history, though it may not appear so now because few of us take religion seriously any longer.

My third date is not so much a turning point as a landmark, a signpost:
AD
731. In that year the Venerable Bede, a monk from the north of England, finished his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
. The shape of early medieval English Christian culture was drawn by Bede in a lifetime’s work, but this book defined Britain as a kind of heaven on earth, and England as an idea: it’s the blueprint right down to Blake’s Jerusalem. Bede’s text was translated from the Latin into Old English by Alfred the Great and by Thomas Stapleton in the heated cultural politics of Tudor England. Stapleton prefaced his wonderfully vigorous version with a letter addressed to Elizabeth, begging her to read it as an exemplar of ‘the true faith of Englishmen’.

My fourth Dark Age turning point is the Vikings, whose unwelcomed visitations were the catalyst for the creation of regional kingdoms in Wales, Scotland and England. Whether the unification of England would have happened without them is a moot question. So too perhaps for Rhodri Mawr’s Wales and Kenneth MacAlpin’s Alba (the forerunner of Scotland). In addition, the Vikings had a profound effect on society, kingship and even language in these islands. There is no specific date to pinpoint the Vikings’ arrival: a medieval Canterbury tradition says the Danes sacked Thanet in 753. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the first attack was three ships on the Dorset coast in 789. But the key moment is the one seen as the turning point by a horrified contemporary, the great Northumbrian scholar Alcuin in
AD
793: the sack of Lindisfarne, the great centre of Northumbrian monasticism. A resident in Charlemagne’s Francia, Alcuin wrote, ‘It is almost 350 years since we and our forefathers have dwelt in this fair land, and never before have such terrible things happened in Britain . . . Who could have thought such voyages could ever have been made?’

The Vikings would oversee the dismantling of the old order in Britain and they paved the way for the West Saxon creation of England. They also bring me to my fifth turning point: Alfred the Great. No other English ruler is called ‘the Great’ and that is how it should be. If the idea of England, the
gens Anglorum
, was Bede’s, the English state was the creation of Alfred and his successors in the late ninth and early tenth centuries.

Alfred the man, however, is the key: in his struggle for survival when the war against the Danes was going against him; then in his subsequent dedication to the rebirth of law, social order, learning and literacy. Alfred in my view is the most remarkable figure in British history. But the England Alfred dreamed of was a family project pursued over several generations in a series of remarkable developments in state building, local organization, the construction of towns, the issuing of coinage and in the making of English law. The kingdom of England in reality was the work of three remarkable rulers: Alfred, his son Edward, and his grandson Æthelstan; together, arguably the most remarkable triad of rulers in British history.

Edward was ruthless and unsentimental, ’in learning far inferior to his father’, wrote one chronicler, ‘but far surpassing him in power and glory’. He is one medieval British ruler of whom we could hope to know much more, but probably never will. However, there have been many discoveries in recent years about his son Æthelstan – enough to show that he is one of the greatest figures in British history. In a society on a constant war footing, Æthelstan’s reign saw a series of startling innovations. They didn’t all work: his imperium was geographically overstretched; his law codes reflect the daunting gap between the ideal and reality in early medieval kingship (‘frankly, a mess’ was the verdict of the greatest modern expert, Patrick Wormald). Nonetheless his ambition, with a mitigating touch of humanity, still speaks to us.

The most famous event in Æthelstan’s reign was the defeat of a huge coalition of Scots, Celts, Norse, Irish and Vikings at Brunanburh in 937. The battle has been celebrated in poems, songs, sagas and folktales for a thousand years; but, frustratingly, the site of this epic struggle has never been pinned down. It was chosen in a recent newspaper poll as one of the top ten decisive events of British history while
The Times
, a year or two back, announced the discovery of the site, the ‘Birthplace of Britishness’, in the Wirral. The site now has a monument and a Heritage History Trail, though it is perhaps more likely that Brunanburh remains undiscovered near the Humber.

Æthelstan established the idea of royal authority law and coinage over all the lands south of Humber, and a looser authority to the north: what medievalists call the
creation of an allegiance
; still a crucial thing today, this is what all governments aspire to since it is what lies at the root of all debates about identity and citizenship.

Therefore, if you want to take one great turning point date before the eleventh century, I choose
AD
927, when the kingdom of England was created by Æthelstan. The creation of the early English state was a political and military act, accomplished by war, but fired by a big idea: Bede’s history of the
gens Anglorum
, the English people. Æthelstan had not been intended to be king of Wessex, but following the death of his half-brother, Ælfweard, the designated heir, he emerged as king out of a power struggle tilted by the Mercians, who saw Æthelstan (who had been raised in Mercia) as their man.

In early summer
AD
927 Æthelstan overran Northumbria, captured York and called the northern British kings to a pact of mutual peace and protection at Dacre, Cumbria. That July a continental poet in his entourage sent a poem back to Winchester, remodelling verses originally addressed to Charlemagne, saluting ‘this completed England’ (
ista perfecta Saxonia
). So, less than two years after his accession, Æthelstan became king of a land ‘which many kings had held separately before him’. Soon on his coinage and in his charters he would be ‘Emperor of the whole world of Britannia’: the most powerful ruler in these islands since the Romans.

Nothing was certain, however, and Æthelstan’s England might have collapsed, but the creation of an allegiance under his successors is one of the great facts in early English history: loyalty to the king (or queen) and his or her law. This is why, in the twelfth century, Æthelstan was remembered as a kind of English Charlemagne – an image distantly echoed in several Middle English romances and even on the Elizabethan stage. The Victorians idealized him and his kinsmen in stained glass and storybooks, on Gilbert Scot façades, and on the friezes at Frogmore. For us now, he presents a very different image: the ferocity of his wars and feuds, of an empire held together by ceaseless itineraries, by the taking of hostages and tribute with enforced rituals of submission. Nonetheless, in a real sense, we still live in the state that has its origin in that moment in the tenth century.

*  *  *

So, as you can see, ‘Turning Points’ is a fascinating idea: constantly throwing up new insights, asking new questions, and perhaps pointing to how a new kind of British history curriculum might be taught in our schools. It is the tale of all our histories as Britons: the narrative of a nation of ‘many races, languages, customs and clothes’, as a tenth-century writer put it. Whatever our origin, as citizens of Britain, owing our allegiance to Her Majesty’s government, it is the history of all of us.