- 30 minutes ago
Investigating the Reformation, including the Cornish Prayer Book rebellion and the rise of industry and commerce. Michael Wood examines a unique Gaelic and English phrase book written for Elizabeth herself in the hope of better Anglo-Irish understanding.
在探寻宗教改革历程的过程中，迈克尔（Michael）造访了卡迪夫附近兰卡凡（Llancarfan）一个引人入胜的社区项目，该项目揭示了当地中世纪的壁画；他还追溯了“公祷书叛乱”（Prayer Book Rebellion）的始末——从康沃尔的一个教区起事，一直到最终在埃克塞特（Exeter）被政府军镇压。随着宗教改革的推进，工商业的兴起也正重塑着英国社会。在苏格兰，人们惊奇地发现了福斯河（River Forth）河底一条古老矿道的遗迹；在布里斯托尔，都铎王朝时期的商人开辟了大西洋贸易航线；而在伦敦的白教堂区（Whitechapel），则出现了最早的黑人聚居社区。
在探寻宗教改革历程的过程中，迈克尔（Michael）造访了卡迪夫附近兰卡凡（Llancarfan）一个引人入胜的社区项目，该项目揭示了当地中世纪的壁画；他还追溯了“公祷书叛乱”（Prayer Book Rebellion）的始末——从康沃尔的一个教区起事，一直到最终在埃克塞特（Exeter）被政府军镇压。随着宗教改革的推进，工商业的兴起也正重塑着英国社会。在苏格兰，人们惊奇地发现了福斯河（River Forth）河底一条古老矿道的遗迹；在布里斯托尔，都铎王朝时期的商人开辟了大西洋贸易航线；而在伦敦的白教堂区（Whitechapel），则出现了最早的黑人聚居社区。
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00:06the story of the British is a tale of creativity resilience and struggle the
00:16tale has been told many times and in different ways but this is about the
00:21people's experience told from all around the British Isles with the help of
00:26today's people so far in this series we've seen how our societies emerged
00:35through the trials of the Middle Ages how our people set out on their long march
00:41to make a free and just society a story that still continues today in this
00:50second half of the tale we leave the medieval world behind now we enter the
00:57age of the Tudors and the Protestant Reformation it's the next chapter of the
01:18great British story
01:19in the 16th century a Tudor poet described Britain as its own little world a
01:26sceptered Isle a precious stone set in a silver sea a fortress built by nature
01:36against infection and the hand of war but in the 16th century Britain would not be
01:52immune to war
01:53and nor especially to the infection of ideas in our story we've reached the
02:011500s in the thousand years or more since the fall of Rome through the
02:05Middle Ages the peoples of Britain have developed societies and cultures and
02:10nations and as things stand at this point in our history in the islands of
02:15Britain there are three kingdoms there are four nations five if you include the
02:21Cornish there are three parliaments in Edinburgh Dublin and in London and there
02:26are ten languages spoken including Cornish and Scots and Irish Gaelic but in all
02:32this great patchwork of cultures and identities here's the key there's only one
02:37religion the Catholic faith but in a few decades in the 1500s that situation
02:44will change so dramatically and so contentiously as to reshape our
02:50identities as Britons from then until now
03:05this is the village of land coffin near Cardiff
03:11here only recently the villagers made an extraordinary discovery from underneath
03:17layers of whitewash a lost world has come to light
03:22she's drawing a swan with a feather pen to make it show out like the paint out
03:29there deliberately defaced in the Reformation the still bright images of
03:34the old Catholic universe to which we all once belonged you can imagine late
03:40medieval painters with all their stuff out here in the church can you and all
03:44the local kids coming in to watch them and as the paintings emerge the
03:51villagers have been inspired to explore the lost world of their ancestors this is called pigment
04:08up to 1547 like every church in Britain this was a Catholic Church it's walls
04:15covered with paintings of the Christian story the Saints seven deadly sins
04:20purgatory and hellfire the world that we lost in the 16th century if you want to
04:29get an idea of what a medieval church looked like here in Wales before the
04:34Reformation an incredible new discovery here in land coffin only found a
04:41couple of years ago it's been restored at the moment and it's the story of
04:45Saint George and the dragon I was in the fox and hounds and the
04:50conservator came in and she said Sam you won't believe it and showed me the
04:56photographs of the king's head and the top of the princess she said if this is
05:02what we think it is it's going to be one of the most exciting finds ever
05:09there's the king and queen in their castle their daughter the princess she's the
05:16dragon's dinner she's been left outside the city as a human sacrifice and there to
05:20rescue her St George himself with his huge spear coming down into the dragon's mouth
05:30they're just fairy tales to us but to our forebears these supernatural stories were real
05:38and as further paintings are uncovered the villagers have been driven to find out more about them and the
05:46eggs a binding element in medieval paint so yeah they've got eggs today a tempura
05:51but that would have been used in more expensive churches and cathedrals in
05:55between there do that and but you've got a catch on these colors these medieval
06:00colors you've actually ground these from the natural elements that I mind the
06:05yellow ochre from clearwell cave you're joking you mind them yes I did with a pickaxe
06:14this was of course the center of the community in its day and it's becoming so again which is rather
06:20splendid and all around other typical pieces of medieval painting the seven deadly sins over there
06:30the virgin mary you can see and hear the gallant and death don't get too tied up with worldly things
06:39typical warning of medieval christianity these were the beliefs the feelings that once bound us all
06:47together but then in just a few years the new protestant rulers in London condemned it all as
06:54popish superstition and it was literally whitewashed away
07:02to be rediscovered only in our time
07:09the reformation is an amazing story the greatest destruction of our heritage in british history
07:17so how had it happened the story goes that it was started by henry the eighth sparked by his
07:24feud with the pope over his right to divorce catherine of aragon and marry anne boleyn to get a male
07:30heir
07:33but the beginnings of the attack on the catholic church in britain lie much further back in the
07:39middle ages here in oxford in the late 14th century an academic heresy had lit a slow burning fuse
07:48john wickliffe and his followers who became known as lolards they were against the power of the catholic
07:55church its rituals its image worship and its money making and new discoveries in the documents show
08:04they had wide support among ordinary people in cities like coventry norwich and leicester and in villages all
08:11over south eastern england wickliffe thought that his new ideas should be spread by an army of what he
08:19called poor preachers and that the law of the gospel should be the law that we were living under what
08:26about images were they they were against images were they that's right there are complaints of corruption as
08:32well aren't they well i mean what uh were those exaggerated uh no i don't think they were exaggerated
08:38i'm not one of those who thinks that no no i think there was quite a lot of uh corruption
08:44and
08:44peasants i think they wanted to know a bit more about what the religion really was to to read
08:52in their own language the bible which was at the center of their lives but the english church
08:59the bishops were very against bible translation because you couldn't have people just ordinary
09:06people reading the bible for themselves because there were lots of dangerous ideas in there
09:15the of the lullards or the wicklifites who believed in a community of property
09:21because that was something that was in the bible i mean there were some lullards and wicklifites who
09:26believed that women were entitled to go out and preach the gospel even from around 1400 these heretical
09:34views spread as far as the welsh borders and up into scotland women have the power and authority to
09:41preach and make the body of christ but any good man may be a priest or any good woman
09:52that every man may lawfully withhold tithes and offerings from priests and give them straight to
09:58the poor a lullard revolt against king henry v was crushed in 1414 but at the grass roots their ideas
10:08survived
10:13in the 1530s when henry v was refused a divorce by the pope he broke with rome and made himself
10:20head of
10:21a church of england in 1536 at the height of his feud with the pope and deep in money troubles
10:29henry
10:30then ordered the closure or the dissolution of the monasteries with wealth built up over a thousand years
10:37the church controlled 40 percent of the british economy now the monasteries were to be taken over
10:44the monks driven out and their wealth confiscated
10:51one of the abbeys targeted by henry owned the west midlands market town of hails owen near birmingham
11:02the abbot of hails owen had been an oppressive landlord and his property was ripe for the picking
11:13henry the eighth's agents came here to hails owen abbey in 1539
11:21the movable wealth was confiscated the treasure the plate the timber and lead the bells
11:28and then the abbey was sold off to a local grandee who leased it to a well-to-do farmer
11:34and he demolished the church sold off the building stone built himself a nice house
11:41and turned the rest of the buildings into barns
11:44his tudor assets stripping the sharp end of the dissolution of the monasteries
11:54the monasteries had held a third of all the land in england much of this now went to henry's cronies
12:02but a great part was sold on to a new rising middle class of merchants and entrepreneurs
12:11this huge shift in national wealth gave this new class a stake in the reformation
12:16and as we see it now it's a key moment in the rise of capitalism in britain
12:24here in bristol then britain's second city one man who rose on the profits of the dissolution
12:30was a merchant called john smith his father was a middling bristol merchant uh john smith became a
12:38much wealthier merchant in fact indeed by the end of his career he was the wealthiest merchant in
12:42bristol served as sheriff been twice mayor of the city and used his great resources to buy up lands
12:49largely ex-monastic lands from the dissolution to establish the foundations for his family which
12:56became a gentry family which lasted until the 20th century in bristol great story so he's one of the
13:02self-made men who do very well at the henry viii's reformation yes absolutely he's he's one of these
13:08people who do well in the great property bonanza which uh follows the dissolution
13:19his main locuses are the bordeaux region for wine san sebastian for iron lisbon and luthier for olive oil
13:33these are the goods he's buying in he'll take those and then he'll be marketing all those goods
13:38everywhere up as far as places like manchester coventry birmingham uh into wales uh in other
13:44parts of the west country so it's the whole west of england and this is his book yeah this is
13:51very
13:51typical of a 16th century merchant's ledger and this is his handwriting yes um i mean to be a merchant
13:59of
13:59this in this period you know you're gonna have to be numerate you're gonna have to be literate
14:03it's double entry bookkeeping it's based on the advanced italian accounting techniques of the time
14:08so it's a way of tracking your different business ventures uh establishing how profitable they are
14:14so you can know you know what's making money more what isn't and therefore what you're going to do
14:17next sounds like the beginning of our world almost yes absolutely it's a world ruled by account books
14:27by the mid-16th century england had only three million people by the standards of the time it was an
14:34underdeveloped country but with the discovery of the americans after 1492 the center of gravity of the
14:45world's economies was beginning to shift to the atlantic seaboard to small maritime nations individualistic
14:53commercially minded for the merchants of trading towns like bristol their time had come
15:03since the middle ages one of bristol's staples have been wine and aviaries are one of the city's
15:09oldest wine merchants by tudor times the city imported half a million gallons of wine a year
15:16in cash nearly half of all the city's imports and the younger generation are still involved today
15:22so we have various um of the finer sweet wines but beautiful colors i love my favorite bit of coming
15:30in here is the colors of the sweet wines the links with france and spain are eight centuries old we
15:36are
15:36probably in the oldest um trade um in the city and the the general prosperity of bristol would have been
15:48helped considerably by the wine and spirit trade i have to say
15:53in fact it's probably been the most consistent uh trade you know over the period where bristol has been
15:59an important uh city or town in the early days and in the 16th century all this was part of
16:06the
16:06opening up of the horizons and tastes of the british people bristol is twin with bordeaux and then
16:13interestingly of course both of them bordeaux and bristol became very involved with the trade with the
16:17americas with the new world so hard-headed merchant enterprise helped shape 16th century britain too
16:28and it had many repercussions the first africans living in bristol are recorded in the 1560s
16:39and in london too the world was changing
16:43here in the east end there have been waves of migrants throughout history flemings hugonots and jews
16:50the bengalis of brick lane
16:56but the first bengalis and the first west africans are all recorded in the mid-16th century
17:10this little-known part of tudor history features on tony warner's black history tours
17:18this was the jamaica coffee house where you come to do business in jamaica
17:23only yards from the bank of england there are surprises for those who thought britain's black
17:28history is a late 20th century phenomenon this is a really important church when it comes to
17:34black history because this church has records of the african presence in london going back to the 1500s
17:43back at the marrakesh cafe we poured over the parish registers of saint bottos to find the forgotten
17:49lives of black elizabethans this is where we are in the 1550s this is old gate that's the city crammed
17:57in in london wall there's bottles church oh we went there as well yeah you know an old gate tube
18:01then lined
18:03with inns and that's where we get hundreds hundreds of black people you see this guy here robert a
18:10servant robert aniga being servant to william matthew a gentleman he was buried in the outer church yard
18:19he had the second cloth and four bearers
18:23the ceremonial with fine funeral cloths gives a clue to how their employers and friends felt
18:29towards these black musicians workers and servants it's a very interesting indicator is the status of
18:36these people and here you've got cassango a black cassango a black a black amore servant to mr thomas barber
18:45a merchant from his house at the sign of the red cross was buried on the ninth day of october
18:531593. more surprising perhaps is the evidence of tudor mixed marriages because there's records of marriage
19:00between black and white people in these in these records isn't it here you go marriage of james currers
19:06a moor meaning an african and a christian to margaret person are made yeah i'm like i'm really shocked
19:15that um you know that marriage within different races was never illegal but in these registers there
19:22are people who are obviously marrying because they love each other yeah i'm just really interested in
19:28the aspect of that they've just assimilated into the community the things in school they don't say
19:34there wasn't any but they don't say there was any because you know growing up in school you all you
19:39you know as a black black boy all you learn about is slavery and you know martin and that is
19:43it
19:43but i got taught in primary school there was no black people here because in my primary school the
19:48teaching that we got was that we just came here there wasn't ever a presence of us but we came
19:53here
19:54yeah and that was it it would definitely change a lot of people's perspective because when i was
19:59younger i was told by the old man down the road say go back to your own countries i could
20:03say oh boy
20:03this is my own country it's probably here before your family was where are the relatives now so it was
20:09the tudor age that saw the beginnings of britain's black community
20:20so the dissolution of the monasteries opened new directions in our history
20:26at this point most of the english people were still catholic using a half protestant half catholic
20:33prayer book bequeathed them by henry viii
20:38but after henry's death the new rulers of england began their devastating attack on traditional religion
20:45itself now the dissolution of the monasteries the destruction of places like hails owen abbey had
20:52really come about through chance circumstance henry's divorce and his financial problems
21:01and there things might have ended in 1539 nobody can have imagined the huge changes that the people
21:08of britain would go through in the practice of their religion in their ideas about life and death and the
21:15afterlife the great change began a few years later with henry's death in 1547 a new government under henry's
21:25teenage son edward the sixth edward was a pious cold-hearted swat surrounded by hard-line protestant
21:35ministers who wished to put through a more root and branch reform of the religion and in 1549 they
21:43announced that all churches in the land were to destroy their imagery and their statues whitewash their
21:49walls dig out their altars and bring in a new protestant prayer book the revolution had begun
21:59and the revolution would turn out to be an attack on the very way of life of the people
22:06england then was still a traditional society especially in the countryside where most of the
22:11people lived and worked their lives were marked by the cycles of the farming year with fairs like bampton
22:24here on the edge of exmoor and bampton is a very very thriving community we have about 33 different
22:31clubs groups associations here so we like to keep these old traditions alive as much as we possibly can
22:43it's a devon tradition got to be kept going we've got several pony fairs array we've got chagford fair
22:48bampton fair there's quite a few going just keeping the tradition going
22:53hay straw a bit of farm machinery poultry ferrets ducks guinea pigs the lot really
22:59in such country communities old-fashioned country religion was simply the way things had always been
23:08the saints the feasts the festivals
23:15and so it was in the little village of moorbath under exmoor
23:23the vicar here from 1520 to 1574 was the wonderfully named christopher tricky
23:32it would be tricky's task to steer his village through four changes of religion in 20 years
23:39and his notes in the church warden's book tell the story starting in the last days of the old faith
23:45william potter gave his hive of bees to maintain to maintain a lamp burning before the figure of jesus
23:56and before saint sidwell every principal feast in the year
24:02and to saint sidwell a ring of silver which did help make saint sidwell's shoes
24:10i think one of the things that fascinates people is the fact that it is just ordinary people
24:15you know just everyday ordinary people nobody special but because they've kept these these
24:21wonderful records that story that voice of those ordinary people can come out it's just
24:27i think that's what attracts people what about tricky himself do you get any impression of what
24:32he was like as a bloke i think he must have been an incredibly tough resilient man i mean there
24:37must
24:37have been times when he he really didn't like what was going on but he still but he still stuck
24:43it out and and he didn't you know leave or do the sort of modern thing he actually just stuck
24:49it out
24:50and took care of the community in the way in which he did
24:55anno domini 1548 the warden of the church was lucy skelly and in her time the church goods were sold
25:06away and no gift given to the church but all taken from the church
25:181551 paid to john lowesmore for taking away the altars and the rude loft three shillings
25:30these things that involve the very basic human feelings on there about family and and the hereafter and
25:38how you bury your mum and dad or your child has died all these things were being in some sense
25:46attacked
25:47weren't they by the new rules you don't like change to this day particularly with the church yes
25:52and how this man ever managed the change that they went through is astounding you know we have a
25:59slight change and it it takes sort of uh you know counseling and uh yes
26:09so across the country edward's government pushed through the destruction of the medieval christian
26:15heritage from moore bath to lancarfon and from long melford to hails owen popular support for edward's
26:24reformation was strongest among the middle classes in london and the southeast where lolard beliefs had
26:30been found the century before loyalty to the old faith was strongest in the north and the west
26:36and there the changes were bitterly resisted especially down here in cornwall and devon where
26:46opposition burst out in open warfare
26:55as so often in this story you get a very different perspective on the great events of british history
27:01if you leave london and the southeast and you come out to the perimeter of britain cornwall here in
27:07the 1540s was still formerly an english county like all the others but actually everybody saw the
27:14cornish as a different race with their own language and their own customs their own religion in cornish
27:28to the people here edward's introduction of a protestant prayer book in english was the last straw
27:35here the people spoke cornish and prayed in latin to them it was an attack on their cornish identity
27:43and their traditional way of life as they tried to explain to the king himself
27:49it is not the devil's persuasion nor the temerity of the seditious which caused us to assemble it is
27:57more the responsibility that each of us owes his friend and our common displeasure seeing the religion
28:03of our ancestors now so much changed and reduced by new ways
28:12the revolt began down in the lizard peninsula and it spread like wildfire among the fishermen farmers
28:20and tin miners they formed a cornish army in what became known as the prayer book rebellion
28:30here at samford courtney the cornish army joined forces with the men of devon
28:35suddenly a threat to the tudor state
28:41you're talking you've said a conservative part of the world yeah different reactions across britain
28:46yes and this seems to be an area that's perhaps in some ways particularly remote from the main sort
28:51of swim of national life and protestantism was not at all strong in devon and cornwall and i think
28:55this particular region of devon is probably even more conservative than the other regions of the county
29:03the rebel army now marched on exeter the main center of tudor power in the southwest
29:11and news of the rising soon reached little moor bath on the edge of exmoor
29:20here vicar christopher trickey true to the old faith was on the side of the rebels
29:26moor bath has heard the call and is preparing to answer and the people of moor bath have decided to
29:32send their young men to assist the rebels and here we have an actual recording of that fact paid to
29:39william hurley the young man at his going forth to the camp on st david's down six shillings and eight
29:50pence and it's interesting this word camp was used a great deal by the rebels at the time sometimes the
29:57rebels themselves were called camp men and just this word is actually dangerous for sir christopher
30:03to have recorded it and he later goes along and scrubs this out erased three times three times yes
30:10and so do we get the names of the other boys yes we do we have here thomas borage thomas
30:16borage the
30:17younger be paid for his going to the camp six shillings and eight pence to john tywell christopher
30:25morse and robert's heir at their going forth to st david's down camp two shillings here i think
30:32and four pence they're sending several young men i think we think a total of five actually set off
30:38from moor bath that's a large number of young men from such a small place with a very small population
30:44they were sending you know probably that their bravest and best to fight alongside the rebels
30:52so moor bath's boys went to exeter
30:58behind the city's massive walls the royalist mayor refused to surrender and the siege began here we are
31:05in the castle which is sort of the strongest point of the city defenses and we know it was garrisoned
31:10by
31:10troops during the siege and looking out beyond them there would have been rebel positions all the way
31:15along here from the big camp at st david's down um stretching along the hillside here and right
31:20round to st sidwell's they'd have been taking pot shots at you there'd have been abuse and cat calls
31:25coming up from down below the rebels were very close
31:30the siege lasted six weeks eventually a government army 8 000 strong stiffened by foreign mercenaries
31:38closed in and the rebels were routed their last desperate stand took place on a windswept hill
31:49outside samford courtney over the next weeks the survivors were hunted down in the lanes around
31:57dartmoor the moor bath boys among them i suppose we should reconsider those myths which we read about
32:05certainly when i was a kid in my school books that somehow the reformation was kind of consensual and
32:10we got rid of all that superstitious stuff and moved on absolutely wasn't quite like that was it
32:14not at all i think it's remarkable really that henry the eighth succeeded in pushing through his
32:19reformation in the first place and then that edward and his government succeeded in going as far as
32:23they did because there was such bitter resistance to what they were trying to do i think the great the
32:27great surprise of the english reformation is the fact that it actually succeeded so the reformation was
32:36forced from above on a divided population in wales which had been joined to the english crown since henry
32:44the 8th the bards bitterly lamented the end of the old ways
32:49we have been changed by the faith of the english our hearts are not inclined towards it
33:19our order in the north in the kingdom of scotland the protestant reformation unfolded later than in
33:40england and wales in 1559 the great cathedral at saint andrews was stripped of its altars and images
33:49and left in ruins the reformation here was driven by the firebrand preacher john knox
33:57knox's ideals shaped in geneva by john calvin himself made scottish protestantism much stricter
34:04than england and those differences still mark the scots and the english today in these small islands
34:11we all have a lot of stereotypes about each other but these things the kirk and presbyterianism
34:17and calvinism and you know even not that long ago we had all those stories about places in the
34:22western isles who wouldn't allow the ferry to go on a sunday why did scotland become different
34:29i think it it it's partly the form of organization that is put in place and they act as a
34:35kind of
34:35moral police force the kirk session records are full of examples of people being hauled up
34:42before the the the kirk session for transgressing in terms of uh uh sabbatarianism violating the
34:50sabbath blasphemy is another one and fornication the the the number of cases of fornication which is
34:58extramarital sex basically a legion margaret reigning reported to be scandalous in entertaining the
35:05dragoons also alleged to be guilty of fornication with patrick robertson george martin isabel hardy
35:14and isabel dunbar accused of laughing in church six young boys were found playing golf in time of
35:23preaching and are convicted of profaning the lord's sabbath the effectiveness of these kirk sessions
35:29is really quite remarkable as they spread throughout the kingdom and i think it's it's that system and
35:36the the moral discipline uh godly discipline as they like to call it which they try to inculcate
35:41which in in a way differentiates the scottish situation from the english one so how long does
35:47it take them to achieve that across the whole country it's very difficult to say but we're
35:53talking at least one two three generations and perhaps because it's gradual it's able to take root
36:00in a more radical form than it does in england
36:06in both scotland and england there was a link between protestantism and the rise of capitalism and
36:13industry in the black country tudor iron masters are now working the coal seams on the old monastic
36:20lands of hales owen
36:25in cornwall tudor entrepreneurs opened tin and copper mines
36:34and up here on the firth of fourth an amazing discovery has revealed the ambitions of scottish
36:40industrialists at the former monastic town of carross in five
36:47carross now became a center for the export of coal and salt to the baltic and scandinavia
36:54it's one of those places in britain where with their innovations early capitalists anticipated the
37:01industrial revolution in this case by a couple of hundred years
37:05here believe it or not they dug a coal mine in the sea
37:15coal would be the driving force behind the industrial revolution across britain
37:20and we now know that its extraction was underway if only on a small scale far earlier than has been
37:29thought and here they were pioneers of a new technology so douglas that's where the shaft is that little
37:36island peeping up is it just very much so it's just starting to show itself now imagine we were
37:42standing here in say 1590 shortly after the the pit had been constructed what we would see is a tower
37:48about perhaps 10 meters sticking out of the ground a round tower it's some 15 meters in diameter
37:54it's like a very very heavy thick chimney with a small four meter wide shaft in the middle which
38:01was traveling all the way down some 40 50 feet to the galleries of coal that were being mined below
38:05it incredible it's absolutely fantastic because we have to remember of course this is the 16th century
38:11and this is half a kilometer out to sea they're actually mining under the seabed and not only are
38:17they under the seabed that once they're actually down there they're going for another half mile or so
38:21and what i think we're seeing here is the very origins the earliest glimmerings of the industrial
38:26revolution the plan is to go out to the moat pit and to try and strip enough seaweed so we
38:34can get
38:34some really clear pictures of the site to enable us to survey it on a very low tide these local
38:43volunteers are hoping to expose the remains of the top of the shop
38:50in a minute you will be amazed when you see just how lovely this thing is
39:04for what we're actually seeing here just coming to light um just in the last few moments we can
39:09actually see this large circular enclosure this is the actual inner shaft the shaft itself
39:14i'm standing on part of the wall of the the vertical shaft that dropped 40 feet below us
39:20so below us now probably 100 meters either side we have a complex of galleries i just find it a
39:26really
39:26exciting structure we sort of know the story of the pit but you somehow can't believe it until you
39:33see the the distance it is from the shore did you realize it's tongue and groove board they put in
39:39here huh it's tongue and groove board that would be to retain the puddle clay that's incredible well
39:45that gives you a watertight line into the inside of the tower yeah now we can see very very clearly
39:52the moat pit in front of us we can see the outer wall we can see the inner wall we've
39:56exposed some
39:57structural details of the timbering which held the clay in place to keep the structure watertight and of
40:02course we've got this lovely inner shaft and this is the coal mine here in front of us um right
40:06here would the coal have been taken out from here very much so absolutely and ships would have small
40:12ships would have come alongside and the coal would have been loaded directly from the top of the actual
40:17shaft itself straight into the ships and off it would have gone
40:29by the time the carross pit was dug down in england the reformation had taken further extraordinary
40:35twists the protestant edward was followed by the catholic mary and then in 1558 by elizabeth the first
40:45who steered england and wales back to the protestant religion
40:53elizabeth was a convinced protestant but not a zealous one let alone fanatical she had no desire
41:00to open windows on men's souls she said but events in england now were no longer determined simply by
41:07what happened within the country but by the wider stage both of ireland and of europe and the threat
41:15of spain across europe the reformation had produced a deep religious divide the looming power of the
41:26spanish catholic empire which occupied the netherlands provoked english paranoia about papist invasions and
41:33plots especially in english-occupied catholic ireland here the protestant reformation had made no headway
41:44so fatefully the elizabethans began the conquest and colonization of ireland an event which has marked
41:51our common histories to this day to the english the irish were uncivilized barbarians and the irish
42:00tried to persuade elizabeth otherwise here in dublin there's an extraordinary survival from that time
42:09a presentation booklet asking elizabeth herself to see ireland as one of europe's ancient cultures
42:17wow this is it it's a very delicate almost flimsy document but it's quite it's quite beautiful
42:25it's thought to have been put together around 1563 64 in anticipation of elizabeth's visit to to
42:33cambridge the author of it is uh the baron of delvin christopher nugent and what what this is at the
42:41very start is an address to queen elizabeth thanking her for according him the honor of inviting him to
42:47supply her with an account of the irish language it's gorgeous and among the the manifold actions
42:53most gracious and virtuous sovereign that bear testimony to the world of your majesty's great
43:00affection tending to the reformation of ireland so this is politically loaded then it is indeed
43:06but of course she ignored it i don't know that it ever left the area of cambridge it was found
43:11there
43:11in in the mid-19th century i don't know if she ever even read it so it's it's it's a
43:16it's a
43:16poignant document it's very poignant isn't it but her interest in irish actually as we know now
43:21was purely in using the language as a vehicle for the propagation of of the reformed religion
43:28this is where he is uh laying out the parallels between latin greek uh hebrew and and the irish
43:36language not barbarian it's a classical language precisely that that is the subtext and then he gets
43:43around to giving elizabeth what what she wanted oh yeah yeah which is the as we said is there is
43:48the alphabet and then he finishes off with some useful phrases as you might in her in a great
43:53will you read them in gaelic if i read them yes yes so so is is how do you do
43:57which is quamodo
43:58habits how do you do conostato i'm well bene sum thongma and here's one for you god save the queen
44:08never thought i'd find myself saying this dear le rivan susten
44:14but elizabeth couldn't listen with an open mind tensions were ratcheted up as the english feared the
44:21irish catholics would make common cause with spain it was the thorn in the side of the tudor
44:28administration and it was the area over which the certainly the henrissian administration and then
44:34later the elizabethan one had so little influence and in fact it was the frustration i suppose of
44:40that that encouraged elizabeth to try to bring it under her control to a greater degree
44:50elizabeth's government committed itself to making ireland british and they met fierce resistance
44:56especially from the great ulster catholic clans like the mcdonald's and in summer of 1575 an elizabethan
45:05army besieged the mcdonald stronghold out there on the island of rathlin where the mcdonald lords
45:12had put their families for safety there was a four-day bombardment by the english commanders
45:17including francis drake and in the end the garrison surrendered believing that they had a safe conduct
45:23200 of them were massacred and so were three or 400 women and children hunted down in the caves and
45:31sea cliffs in revenge against the rebels and the mcdonald lords themselves believing that their families
45:38were safe out there stood here on the coast powerless to intervene as the tragedy unfolded
45:46it was a grim foretaste of what was to come in the 17th century
45:53in 1588 spain attempted a full-scale invasion of england the spanish armada
46:01defeated in the channel by drake and his captains the invasion failed
46:10that autumn the returning armada was destroyed here on the rocky shores of antrim and donegal
46:18the victory set the seal on elizabeth's fledgling english protestant state
46:25on the victory medal the proud inscription god blew and they were scattered
46:39in ireland the english began a policy of plantations shipping over settlers from devon and cornwall
46:45and especially from scotland the english regarded colonization as a kind of civilizing mission
47:00the english poet edmund spencer said the irish must be made to forget
47:05their irish nation and that meant a war on irish culture
47:11in traditional societies still strongly oral societies like 16th century ireland
47:19tudor wales or cornwall for that matter the bards the poets the harpers were not just entertainers
47:25they were the custodians of history and language of genealogy of the people's claim to the land in
47:32other words of the communal identity a collective memory
47:36but in queen elizabeth's reign the irish people were faced with an occupying english state that
47:43remorselessly pushed nationalistic propaganda english identity the irish didn't have that
47:51in the 1590s irish bards and poets responded by speaking of a single irish people elizabethan
48:01the government's answer was to declare war on the poets
48:08so it was in the face of this cultural oppression that the people of ireland began to form an irish
48:15national identity
48:20and by the end of the century right across the british isles
48:23these religious and national divisions had hardened and they would shape our modern world
48:35in england too national identity had been molded by reformation politics
48:42flushed with patriotic pride after the armada by the 1590s england could now call itself a protestant
48:50nation and the english people could begin to look back more calmly on the tumultuous events of the century
48:59they'd gone through four changes of religion in a single lifetime
49:03at times they can't have known what the government would tell them to believe next
49:09but now the mass of the people had accepted the changes and moved on
49:14and here in long melford a remarkable manuscript gives us a sense of what that meant written by the
49:22church warden roger martin it sums up britain's age of new worlds and lost worlds
49:29yes yes this is the so-called black book of melford this page shows his account of the contents of
49:40the book
49:41and listed here are the documents that he thought it was important to record for all time
49:49this is his characteristic hand with his r's and h's and a tendency to write uphill
49:56and then martin gets into his stride and he says item of the silver plate
50:03that did belong unto melford church before the spoil a remembrance so there's a very important dig that
50:15something pretty dramatic has happened and that this is worth recording for posterity
50:23in just a few decades the british people had been forced to leave their old world behind
50:29and many of them like roger martin with profound regret
50:35yes must have been very confusing times for ordinary people in britain wasn't it by the end of the 16th
50:43century towards the end of elizabeth's reign you're dealing with a nation which religiously was fractured
50:51and never the same again with various bodies of opinion there were those who decided
50:59either by conviction or out of caution to conform to the new established protestant church of england
51:07but as we know from the case of roger martin and others others remain true to the old faith and
51:14roger
51:15martin was true in that way right up to his death in 1615 he'd survived the whole of the reformation
51:23across five reigns of different monarchs but he still remained true to his faith on the other hand of
51:31course there were plenty of people who were far more liberal and unlikely to conform to anything who
51:41were much more convinced about the personal relationship between the individual and god
51:47and the importance of the word the word in the scriptures and as expounded from the pulpit
51:54far more than you know tradition and the theater and the color of old worship
52:03i suppose the dust has the dust settled has the dust settled probably not
52:10for after all even today across the british isles and ireland we're still negotiating the fallout
52:17of these great events and again as always in history there were unforeseen consequences
52:26for once pandora's box had been opened out came pandora's protestants
52:40this is scrubby in nottinghamshire here late in elizabeth's reign events began that would lead to the
52:47triumph of the puritans in england the overthrow of the british monarchies and even the founding of
52:54america by now elizabeth's government thought the reformation had gone far enough
53:02but up here there were many who didn't agree we're very proud of our history we really are
53:09the residents of screwby i think see themselves as part of the british history because it was a
53:15fundamental change in british religion and of course it affected the americans as well
53:21and i think we see ourselves as almost a small republic today you know fighting against the evils of
53:29oppressive government but in a funny way don't you think that's what they were about too they were
53:34against being told what to do in a sense absolutely and you know they suffered for it it was the
53:41freedom
53:42that they desired that they couldn't get here
53:50out of these villages came sturdy puritan separatists far more radical in their politics
53:56than the tudor governments could ever have foreseen when they started their reformation
54:01lives so difficult question but why was did it happen here i mean this tiny little area this side
54:10of the trend this cluster of villages are the people in this area certainly very spirited
54:16they are maybe it's just that by chance you have this clump here of like-minded people able to
54:24support each other and thank goodness that they did because they changed the world really when you look
54:30at what they did ladies and gentlemen the raffle will now be drawn in the tent
54:42the movement gathered momentum and this part of the east midlands became a hotbed of non-conformity
54:49secret religious services were held in the surrounding villages this is the path that was used by
54:56those early separatists from scruby on their journeys to listen to charismatic preacher another core
55:06member of the group richard clifton was vicar in a tiny church in the woods here at babworth
55:17and here today you'll still find both memories and physical traces of this radical religious past
55:26in babworth a remarkable discovery was made only recently as the workmen went down
55:34they came across this old tin can as they thought they they realized it was something more important so
55:41this would have been used for communion 1593 but 1593 yes clifton's here preaching in this church and
55:51doing the rituals yeah and to realize that clifton's hands all those years ago held that it is quite
56:02humbling in a way i suppose really it must have been a great preacher because he attracted people
56:07to come to this church from villages round about and farther than villages and he collected this
56:14rather dedicated band of people who were willing to follow him but when james the first heard about
56:21it they were reporting to him saying well you know the thing there should be uh no bishops
56:28in the church he said what no bishop no king so get them out and uh he did
56:34the other the other way of looking at it is that the people of badworth were just bloody minded
56:39yeah yeah and to a certain extent we still are those in the church here yeah i mean the last
56:46parson said separatists what makes them think they went away yes yes
56:56these ideas now spread out from the villages of the trent valley
57:01to towns like gainsborough where they were supported by wealthy puritan patrons
57:07and from here they went to europe and america you have to remember these ideas have been running
57:15under the surface of society for a long time indeed that idea of intensive private reading of the
57:25religious text would be as important to the religious separatists here as it had been to the
57:31lollards those ideas didn't go away the lollards battle had been against the pope in rome and the catholic
57:37church now there was an established protestant church of england but it was still state religion
57:44tied to the monarchy and backed by force so the issue was still the same
57:50by whose authority is my personal path to god to be mediated
58:02so in the 16th century the british people went through a tremendous psychological rupture
58:07at the hands of their own government
58:14but resilient and adaptable they came out of it with new energies
58:21with new ideas about personal freedom ideas which will lead to the age of revolution
58:39in the world
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