The Great British Story: A People's History (2012) s01e02 Episode Script
Tribes to Nations
1 (Cheering) 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.
(Cheering) To make justice, rights and 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 the Britons, related to the Welsh, whom Bede - like the Romans - called the Picts: The painted people.
(Gulls cry) 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.
WOMAN: Treble's going.
She's gone.
(Bells ring out) Our four nations, Bede says, had very different customs, although united by their Christian faith.
But they're the root 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 around 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, I know.
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.
(Low chatter) 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 that 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? Saint Columba, and Drostan and all that.
But what How much do you think that's true? Is there a different history to be uncovered, 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 their Roman influence.
- This is a different tradition all together.
- 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 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.
(Man speaks in Gaelic) 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 - Pictish.
centre up here.
That's the bottom of some sort of little metal thing.
And the Picts have become much more important in understanding the roots of Scotland, haven't they? Well, 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, Forteviot - 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 Erc.
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 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 the southern boundary was, the border fluctuated.
The main site of the king's was Dunseverick, and that's where St Patrick visited King Erc.
TEACHER: This headland? This is Northern Ireland.
And he made the famous prophecy that, of course, Fergus the youngest son would become the king.
TEACHER: Perfect.
And not only the kings of the Irish territory but over Fortrenn, 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.
TEACHER: 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 Saint Carantoc.
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 and into the English Channel, the sea was not a separator, it was a unifier.
If you look at the Celtic tree, as it were, from the same tree we have Basque and Breton, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh.
- Cornish.
- Cornish.
They all come from the same base.
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 of wanting to be to hold on to that which makes you special.
How far back does the earliest Welsh poetry go? I think it goes back to about the 6th century, Llanaeron going up to Catterick 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 around and all the way up the coast, which we think dates from the 7th to the 11th century.
These are all fish bones and crab shell.
- They had crabs.
- Right.
They had all sorts of fish.
- This is a descaler of fish.
- Oh, 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.
IMOGEN: Dog! - (Both laugh) 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? Your St Morgan, you know, 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, who'd come to Britain for a better life.
By the 700s they were living in many tribes, and small kingdoms.
And at 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, so there's 15 years' work, at least, on the main Anglo-Saxon site, I would have thought.
Oh, my gosh, I'll come with my Zimmer frame.
(Laughter) (Low chatter) WOMAN: You're starving? When we were last here we found the Anglo-Saxon settlers surviving on a bare subsistence diet.
Now towards 800, things are changing.
I gently moved away the soil and it's quite clear that it had 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.
- A beautiful colour.
And the Anglo-Saxons liked that for their brooches? Oh, they did, and for their necklaces.
They were quite popular.
Rows of different shapes, sometimes circular, sometimes these sort of flattened circular.
- And this one's complete.
- Lovely.
It is gorgeous - a lovely wavy pattern there.
- They're doing more than surviving.
- Yeah.
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 4 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.
(Musical intro) Gerald was a footman Queen Victoria It was the inevitable process of nation building.
Gerald was a good man, his real name I know But even now you can pick up signs of these older regional identities.
In the Black County, 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 ain't, is he?" I said, "Well, how did that happen?" Her 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.
" Her said, "He liked that.
" Her says, "He was up a ladder painting the sailing, and he fell off when he turned round to lick his back!" (Laughter) Brian 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, cos 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 cos they were talking French.
So we stayed as we were for centuries upon centuries upon centuries.
As a region there's a massive tribalness about it.
You even say "bist" I've heard in somewhere round here.
Have I, or was I mistaken? Bist and bin and bisn't, 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, because one of the interviews I did was with a Brummie, Spoz, a Brummie poet, that 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.
- It means brilliant.
I've got things to do and folks to see.
(Woman calls out) - Hola, senoritas! - Hola.
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.
Great.
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 that 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.
Yeah.
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 here, isn't it? - Or am I being fanciful? - This is an important boundary.
I mean, later on, you've got a watch hill over there.
Who they're watching, for or against, we may not know.
- Yeah.
- But 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.
- What about the place names? Do they tell us about Welsh people living among the Anglo-Saxons? There are quite a lot of British names.
The river names are British.
The River Alne, which is a British word.
We have the River Thame, which is a British word.
They have come through, and so have the major hills.
Particularly for instance, Malvern.
Mal-Bryn - the bare 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 Bre-don 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 Northeast, 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.
- Very nice.
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.
Yes.
Amazing quantity of stuff, isn't it? 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.
And this wonderful window - tell us about the window.
Well, they are fragments of glass which were found during the 1972-'73 excavations.
And so we formed it 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 prized 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! - (Laughter) 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 that's 1300 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.
You couldn't.
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, the 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.
" MAN: "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 that 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 buildings 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 coasts of Britain.
And in Ireland too - the land of saints and monasteries.
The same year here in Ulster, an Irish chronicler had heard the news that the islands of Britain had been devastated by the pagans.
And the news was soon followed by the Vikings themselves.
(Speaks Gaelic) "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.
" Saint 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, Saint 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.
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 origins.
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.
And actually, that's where I got interested in Vikings, 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.
be with you, and all who we love and care for, this day and unto eternity.
- Amen.
- 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, when you lot got called Scousers, 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 PROCLAIMERS: I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) (Chatter) The Vikings never ruled here, but the Scots got a taste for things Viking.
They even followed their styles and fashions.
And I would walk 500 more Just to be the man Just looking at the ancient history, you walk down the main street here and there, right in the middle of all this, is the most incredible sacred space from who knows, Dark Ages, maybe? Far back in time.
It would be, because at one time, there was standard stones round where the wall was.
Govan Old Church had been 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.
- Yeah.
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 to 950.
These are local Scots wanting the latest fashion in Viking funerals.
It's absolutely amazing.
Walk off the streets of Govan and come to 30 or 40 monuments from this period of the Vikings.
A Scottish princess even married a Viking.
What a party! We're up here 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 in this part of Scotland? I think you have to.
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, everybody can get in and out quite easily.
That's, if you like, a continuity which 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.
(Man speaks in Welsh) Written around 930, a prophetic poem, in which it is hoped that it would be an allegiance between the peoples of, what I suppose we would term the fringes of the Isles of Britain.
This alliance of Britons, Vikings, and the Irish will push the English back into the sea.
So there is a sense in the poem, of what has happened over the last four or five hundred 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 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 almost, 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.
I mean, they have 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 as drinkers.
They are scavengers.
They are the lowest of the low.
The word he uses is "cathwyr".
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 then had many different reactions, and many different consequences.
But the Vikings had come for the same reasons that 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.
And 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 then 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 see any evidence of the Norman Conquest here.
People just seem to carry on.
And the site changes from, you know, cemetery to bustling Victorian slum landscape fairly 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 Guthfrith.
I say produced coins, there's only one that survives at the moment.
I say one, but not even a full one.
And Guthfrith 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, yeah.
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 that 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 if he's making the sign of the cross.
So he's being more Christian than the Christians.
They're not seeing themselves as Vikings.
They see themselves as Kings of Northumbria.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Yes.
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? And a symbol of one of the evangelists.
Or is it both? He's really making the point that 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 Angles - Exactly.
- Some of them still feel that way today.
- Yes, I don't think it's 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.
Then above that this white Triassic sandstone and above that again, if you can see between those two crenulations, there's a blocked in embrasure.
The stonework blocking that in is thought to be Norman.
- The purpley stuff there? - The purpley stuff there.
So these crenulations, that one's very clear, isn't it? - Yes.
- They would be the Anglo-Saxons? That's it.
These are thought to be Saxon.
A very exciting discovery.
- It's as good as proof.
- 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 burgh 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 want and violence and theft and feud in their society.
Kings could legislate about it from the centre although 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.
Been a building on this site since 1160, 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 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 law 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 distain, the penteilu, who was the chief of the King's household.
And, of course, very importantly the "ynad Ilys", 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, of course, as a source of his authority.
That is so beautiful, isn't it? He's almost sort of gesturing with it.
Dispensing justice with one hand and holding up - In the name of the law.
- In the name of the law.
Do we see ordinary people as well as the courtiers? After the law of the court, you move into other aspects of law, like the relationships between individuals, particularly things like "sarhad", 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.
I mean, in principle.
You pay for your crime You pay for your crime with an equivalent sum.
Hywel's laws were a mix of old and new.
"If a woman is separated form her husband after seven years of marriage, all that belongs to them shall be divided into two.
" "Should her 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.
And we were the first in Europe on women's rights.
If you were a woman you could have a divorce after seven years and keep half your husband's belongings and property.
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 unfreed peasants working the fields labouring to feed our betters and only then ourselves.
I go out at daybreak, driving the ox into 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 old 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 we have water in a church and they put it over people - Christened.
- Christened.
That's right.
And does anybody know another word for being christened? - Baptised.
- Baptised.
Good.
That's right.
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.
producing documents for 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 that 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.
" (Speaks Old English) "The King speaks to his council, his wise men.
That 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.
" (Speaks Old English) "For so little.
" After consulting with his local assemblies the King raises the death penalty to 12 to 15 years.
(Speaks Old English) 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 speech, 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.
TYLER ERLICH: Over The Rainbow Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high And the dreams that you dare to - I'm Jason, mate.
That's William.
- See you.
See you around.
February 2017
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.
(Cheering) To make justice, rights and 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 the Britons, related to the Welsh, whom Bede - like the Romans - called the Picts: The painted people.
(Gulls cry) 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.
WOMAN: Treble's going.
She's gone.
(Bells ring out) Our four nations, Bede says, had very different customs, although united by their Christian faith.
But they're the root 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 around 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, I know.
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.
(Low chatter) 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 that 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? Saint Columba, and Drostan and all that.
But what How much do you think that's true? Is there a different history to be uncovered, 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 their Roman influence.
- This is a different tradition all together.
- 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 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.
(Man speaks in Gaelic) 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 - Pictish.
centre up here.
That's the bottom of some sort of little metal thing.
And the Picts have become much more important in understanding the roots of Scotland, haven't they? Well, 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, Forteviot - 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 Erc.
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 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 the southern boundary was, the border fluctuated.
The main site of the king's was Dunseverick, and that's where St Patrick visited King Erc.
TEACHER: This headland? This is Northern Ireland.
And he made the famous prophecy that, of course, Fergus the youngest son would become the king.
TEACHER: Perfect.
And not only the kings of the Irish territory but over Fortrenn, 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.
TEACHER: 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 Saint Carantoc.
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 and into the English Channel, the sea was not a separator, it was a unifier.
If you look at the Celtic tree, as it were, from the same tree we have Basque and Breton, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh.
- Cornish.
- Cornish.
They all come from the same base.
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 of wanting to be to hold on to that which makes you special.
How far back does the earliest Welsh poetry go? I think it goes back to about the 6th century, Llanaeron going up to Catterick 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 around and all the way up the coast, which we think dates from the 7th to the 11th century.
These are all fish bones and crab shell.
- They had crabs.
- Right.
They had all sorts of fish.
- This is a descaler of fish.
- Oh, 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.
IMOGEN: Dog! - (Both laugh) 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? Your St Morgan, you know, 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, who'd come to Britain for a better life.
By the 700s they were living in many tribes, and small kingdoms.
And at 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, so there's 15 years' work, at least, on the main Anglo-Saxon site, I would have thought.
Oh, my gosh, I'll come with my Zimmer frame.
(Laughter) (Low chatter) WOMAN: You're starving? When we were last here we found the Anglo-Saxon settlers surviving on a bare subsistence diet.
Now towards 800, things are changing.
I gently moved away the soil and it's quite clear that it had 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.
- A beautiful colour.
And the Anglo-Saxons liked that for their brooches? Oh, they did, and for their necklaces.
They were quite popular.
Rows of different shapes, sometimes circular, sometimes these sort of flattened circular.
- And this one's complete.
- Lovely.
It is gorgeous - a lovely wavy pattern there.
- They're doing more than surviving.
- Yeah.
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 4 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.
(Musical intro) Gerald was a footman Queen Victoria It was the inevitable process of nation building.
Gerald was a good man, his real name I know But even now you can pick up signs of these older regional identities.
In the Black County, 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 ain't, is he?" I said, "Well, how did that happen?" Her 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.
" Her said, "He liked that.
" Her says, "He was up a ladder painting the sailing, and he fell off when he turned round to lick his back!" (Laughter) Brian 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, cos 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 cos they were talking French.
So we stayed as we were for centuries upon centuries upon centuries.
As a region there's a massive tribalness about it.
You even say "bist" I've heard in somewhere round here.
Have I, or was I mistaken? Bist and bin and bisn't, 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, because one of the interviews I did was with a Brummie, Spoz, a Brummie poet, that 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.
- It means brilliant.
I've got things to do and folks to see.
(Woman calls out) - Hola, senoritas! - Hola.
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.
Great.
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 that 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.
Yeah.
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 here, isn't it? - Or am I being fanciful? - This is an important boundary.
I mean, later on, you've got a watch hill over there.
Who they're watching, for or against, we may not know.
- Yeah.
- But 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.
- What about the place names? Do they tell us about Welsh people living among the Anglo-Saxons? There are quite a lot of British names.
The river names are British.
The River Alne, which is a British word.
We have the River Thame, which is a British word.
They have come through, and so have the major hills.
Particularly for instance, Malvern.
Mal-Bryn - the bare 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 Bre-don 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 Northeast, 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.
- Very nice.
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.
Yes.
Amazing quantity of stuff, isn't it? 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.
And this wonderful window - tell us about the window.
Well, they are fragments of glass which were found during the 1972-'73 excavations.
And so we formed it 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 prized 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! - (Laughter) 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 that's 1300 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.
You couldn't.
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, the 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.
" MAN: "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 that 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 buildings 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 coasts of Britain.
And in Ireland too - the land of saints and monasteries.
The same year here in Ulster, an Irish chronicler had heard the news that the islands of Britain had been devastated by the pagans.
And the news was soon followed by the Vikings themselves.
(Speaks Gaelic) "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.
" Saint 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, Saint 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.
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 origins.
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.
And actually, that's where I got interested in Vikings, 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.
be with you, and all who we love and care for, this day and unto eternity.
- Amen.
- 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, when you lot got called Scousers, 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 PROCLAIMERS: I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) (Chatter) The Vikings never ruled here, but the Scots got a taste for things Viking.
They even followed their styles and fashions.
And I would walk 500 more Just to be the man Just looking at the ancient history, you walk down the main street here and there, right in the middle of all this, is the most incredible sacred space from who knows, Dark Ages, maybe? Far back in time.
It would be, because at one time, there was standard stones round where the wall was.
Govan Old Church had been 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.
- Yeah.
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 to 950.
These are local Scots wanting the latest fashion in Viking funerals.
It's absolutely amazing.
Walk off the streets of Govan and come to 30 or 40 monuments from this period of the Vikings.
A Scottish princess even married a Viking.
What a party! We're up here 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 in this part of Scotland? I think you have to.
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, everybody can get in and out quite easily.
That's, if you like, a continuity which 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.
(Man speaks in Welsh) Written around 930, a prophetic poem, in which it is hoped that it would be an allegiance between the peoples of, what I suppose we would term the fringes of the Isles of Britain.
This alliance of Britons, Vikings, and the Irish will push the English back into the sea.
So there is a sense in the poem, of what has happened over the last four or five hundred 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 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 almost, 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.
I mean, they have 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 as drinkers.
They are scavengers.
They are the lowest of the low.
The word he uses is "cathwyr".
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 then had many different reactions, and many different consequences.
But the Vikings had come for the same reasons that 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.
And 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 then 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 see any evidence of the Norman Conquest here.
People just seem to carry on.
And the site changes from, you know, cemetery to bustling Victorian slum landscape fairly 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 Guthfrith.
I say produced coins, there's only one that survives at the moment.
I say one, but not even a full one.
And Guthfrith 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, yeah.
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 that 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 if he's making the sign of the cross.
So he's being more Christian than the Christians.
They're not seeing themselves as Vikings.
They see themselves as Kings of Northumbria.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Yes.
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? And a symbol of one of the evangelists.
Or is it both? He's really making the point that 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 Angles - Exactly.
- Some of them still feel that way today.
- Yes, I don't think it's 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.
Then above that this white Triassic sandstone and above that again, if you can see between those two crenulations, there's a blocked in embrasure.
The stonework blocking that in is thought to be Norman.
- The purpley stuff there? - The purpley stuff there.
So these crenulations, that one's very clear, isn't it? - Yes.
- They would be the Anglo-Saxons? That's it.
These are thought to be Saxon.
A very exciting discovery.
- It's as good as proof.
- 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 burgh 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 want and violence and theft and feud in their society.
Kings could legislate about it from the centre although 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.
Been a building on this site since 1160, 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 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 law 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 distain, the penteilu, who was the chief of the King's household.
And, of course, very importantly the "ynad Ilys", 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, of course, as a source of his authority.
That is so beautiful, isn't it? He's almost sort of gesturing with it.
Dispensing justice with one hand and holding up - In the name of the law.
- In the name of the law.
Do we see ordinary people as well as the courtiers? After the law of the court, you move into other aspects of law, like the relationships between individuals, particularly things like "sarhad", 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.
I mean, in principle.
You pay for your crime You pay for your crime with an equivalent sum.
Hywel's laws were a mix of old and new.
"If a woman is separated form her husband after seven years of marriage, all that belongs to them shall be divided into two.
" "Should her 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.
And we were the first in Europe on women's rights.
If you were a woman you could have a divorce after seven years and keep half your husband's belongings and property.
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 unfreed peasants working the fields labouring to feed our betters and only then ourselves.
I go out at daybreak, driving the ox into 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 old 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 we have water in a church and they put it over people - Christened.
- Christened.
That's right.
And does anybody know another word for being christened? - Baptised.
- Baptised.
Good.
That's right.
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.
producing documents for 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 that 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.
" (Speaks Old English) "The King speaks to his council, his wise men.
That 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.
" (Speaks Old English) "For so little.
" After consulting with his local assemblies the King raises the death penalty to 12 to 15 years.
(Speaks Old English) 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 speech, 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.
TYLER ERLICH: Over The Rainbow Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high And the dreams that you dare to - I'm Jason, mate.
That's William.
- See you.
See you around.
February 2017