Summary 'An Illustrated History of Britain' by David McDowall from chapters 1 to 22. Used for the course 'English Speaking World' at the University of Amsterdam during the second grade.
English Speaking World summary UK
McDowall, D. (1989). An illustrated history of Britain.
Earliest times
Chapter 1: The foundation stones
The Island
The north and west are mountainous or hilly. Much of the South and east is fairly flat, or
low-lying. The south and east on the whole have better agricultural conditions. This is why
southeast Britain is most populated and has always had the most political power.
Britain’s prehistory
Britain became an island after the end of the last ice age. First evidence of human life is a
few stone tools, dating from one of the warmer periods, about 250,000 BC. These tools show
two different kinds of inhabitant. The earlier group made their tools from flakes of flint. The
other group made tools from a central core of flint.
50,000 BC. A new type of human being arrived, the ancestors of modern British, smaller and
with a life span of thirty years.
10,000 BC. The Ice Age drew to a close and Britain was populated by small groups of hunters,
gatherers and fishers.
5000 BC. Britain becomes an island, and is heavily forested.
3000 BC. Neolithic (or New Stone Age) people crossed the narrow sea from Europe in small
round boats of bent wood covered with animal skins. These people kept animals and grew
corn crops, and knew how to make pottery. The probably came from the Iberian (Spanish)
peninsula or even the North African coast. They were small, dark, and long-headed people.
55 BC. The first arrival of the Romans.
1400 BC. The climate became drier.
After 3000 BC, the chalkland people started building great circles of earth banks and ditches.
Inside, they build wooden buildings and stone circles. These “henges”, were centres of
religious, political and economic power. Stonehenge was built in separate stages over a
period of more than a thousand years. Unwritten memories of bluestones were recorded in
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of Britain, written in 1136.
After 2400 BC new groups of people arrived in southeast Britain from Europe. They were
round-headed and strongly built, taller than Neolithic Britons. They became leaders of British
society. Their arrival is marked by the first individual graves, furnished with pottery beakers.
They were called the “Beaker” people. The Beaker people brought barley, a new cereal,
which could grow almost anywhere.
The Beaker people spoke an Indo-European language, and brought skills to make bronze
tools and these began to replace stone ones.
Stonehenge remained the most important centre until 1300 BC, when a new form of society
in southern England was overtaken, by that of a settled farming class.
The Celts
Around 700 BC, Celts arrived. They were tall, and had fair or red hair and blue eyes. They
probably came from central Europe or further east, from southern Russia. They knew how to
work with iron. The Celts began to control all the lowland areas of Britain.
,The Celts are important to British history because they are the ancestors of many of the
people in Highland Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Cornwall today. Not known whether they
invaded or came peacefully. The Celts were highly successful farmers. The Celts traded
across tribal borders and this was important for political and social contact between the
tribes.
The Celtic tribes were ruled over by a warrior class, of which the priests, or Druids, seem to
have been particularly important members.
The most powerful Celt to stand up to the Romans was a woman, Boadicea. In AD 61 she led
her tribe against the Romans.
The Romans
The name “Britain” comes from the word “Pretani”, the Greco-Roman word for the
inhabitants of Britain. The Romans mispronounced the word and called the island
“Britannia”.
The Romans had invaded because the Celts of Britain were working with the Celts of Gaul
against them. The British Celts gave food, shelter and used cattle to pull their ploughs, which
meant richer and heavier and could be farmed.
The Romans brought the skills of reading and writing to Britain. Writing was important for
spreading ideas and establishing power. Latin completely disappeared in its spoken and
written forms when the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain in the fifth century AD.
55 BC, Julius Caesar first came to Britain.
AD 43, a Roman army actually occupied Britain.
The total Roman army in Britain was about 40,000 men.
Roman control of Britain came to an end as the empire began to collapse. First were the
attacks by Celts of Caledonia in AD 367. In AD 409 Rome pulled its last soldiers out of Britain
and the Romano-British, the Romanised Celts, were left to fight alone against the Scots, the
Irish and Saxon raiders from Germany.
Roman life
The most obvious characteristic of Roman Britain was its towns, which were the basis of
Roman administration and civilisation. There were three different kinds of town in Roman
Britain.
Coloniae: towns peopled by Roman settlers.
Municipia: large cities in which the whole population was given Roman citizenship.
Civitas: included the old Celtic tribal capitals, through which the Romans administered the
Celtic population in the countryside.
The Latin word for camp, castra, has remained part of many town names to this day (with
the ending chester, caster or cester): Gloucester, Leicester, Doncaster, Winchester, Chester,
Lancaster.
, Chapter 2: The Saxon invasion
The invaders
First, the Germanic tribes only raided Britain, but after AD 430 they began to settle. Bede, an
English monk, wrote down this knowledge 300 years later.
The invaders came from three powerful Germanic tribes, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes.
The Jutes settled in Kent and along the south coast.
The Angles settled in the east, and also in the north Midlands.
The Saxons settled between the Jutes and the Angles in a band of land from the Thames
Estuary westwards.
The Germanic settlers pushed the British Celts westwards in AD 570 into Wales and Scotland.
Celts that were left behind became slaves of the Saxons.
King Offa of Mercia (757-796) claimed “kingship of the English”.
The Saxon kings began to replace loyalty to family with loyalty to lord and king.
Government and society
The Saxons created institutions which made the English state strong for the net 500 years.
One of them: The King’s Council, Witan.
By the tenth century the Witan was a formal body, issuing laws and charters. The Witan
established a system which remained an important part of the king’s method of
government. It was a group of advisers on the affairs of state.
“Shire” is the Saxon word, “county” the Norman one. Each shire had a shire reeve, the king’s
local administrator. This later became “sheriff”.
Each district had a “manor” or large house. In this house villagers came to pay taxes, justice
was administered, and men met together to join the Anglo-Saxon army, the fyrd.
At first the lords, or aldermen, were simply local officials. In the eleventh century they were
warlords, or called earl. Aldermen are elected officers in local government, and earls are
high ranking nobles.
It was the beginning of the class system: Kings, lords, soldiers and workers on the land. Also,
the men of learning, who came from the Christian Church.
Christianity: the partnership of Church and state
Christianity first reached Britain well before it was accepted by the Roman Emperor
Constantine in the early fourth century AD. Anglo-Saxons belonged to an older Germanic
religion. In the Celtic areas Christianity continued to spread, bringing paganism to an end.
In 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent a monk, Augustine, to re-establish Christianity in
England. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 601. There was little
progress, because Augustine was interested in establishing Christian authority.
It was the Celtic Church which brought Christianity to the ordinary people of Britain, by
walking from village to village.
The Celtic Church was most interested in the hearts of ordinary people. The Roman Church
was most interested in authority and organisation.
In 663, the Celtic Church retreated as Rome extended its authority over all Christians, even in
Celtic parts of the island.
By 660, most of England had become Christian.
Saxon kings helped the Church to grow, but the Church also increased the power of kings.
Bishops gave kings their support, which made it harder for royal power to be questioned.
Kings had “God’s approval”.
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