- 31 minutes ago
Explores how the modern ethnic and linguistic identities began to take shape after the Dark Ages, and how English, Scots and Welsh nations emerged under the impact of the Viking invasions.
此时的社会基本单位是亲族团体和部落, 土地多为氏族公有,社会关系基于血缘和互惠义务, 而非中央集权的法律. 随着罗马秩序的崩塌, 来自欧洲大陆的盎格鲁-撒克逊人, 朱特人以及北方的皮克特人, 苏格兰人纷纷进入不列颠. 这些群体最初以独立的部落或小型王国形式存在, 彼此之间既有冲突也有融合...在盎格鲁-撒克逊人定居后, 不列颠南部形成了多个小王国, 历史上称为 “七国时代”, 这是从松散部落向早期国家过渡的关键阶段.
此时的社会基本单位是亲族团体和部落, 土地多为氏族公有,社会关系基于血缘和互惠义务, 而非中央集权的法律. 随着罗马秩序的崩塌, 来自欧洲大陆的盎格鲁-撒克逊人, 朱特人以及北方的皮克特人, 苏格兰人纷纷进入不列颠. 这些群体最初以独立的部落或小型王国形式存在, 彼此之间既有冲突也有融合...在盎格鲁-撒克逊人定居后, 不列颠南部形成了多个小王国, 历史上称为 “七国时代”, 这是从松散部落向早期国家过渡的关键阶段.
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TVTranscript
00:06The story of the British is one of the most extraordinary tales in history.
00:12It's a tale of invention and creativity, but of constant struggle.
00:18Against outsiders and against ourselves.
00:22Over the centuries, the British people have faced many tests and endured many hardships.
00:31And it was the people themselves who wove the fabric of our history.
00:37Often forced to start from the bottom to create communities, to make justice, rights and freedoms.
00:50Today we're many tribes, Welsh, Scots, English and Irish.
00:55But how did our modern identities as Britons emerge?
01:00In the next part of the great British story, the coming of the Vikings and the beginnings of our nations.
01:25Here on Tyneside, in the 8th century, the Anglo-Saxon monk and teacher, Bede, wrote a portrait of Britain and
01:33its people.
01:36It's our first view of Britain since the Romans, the world that was once Britannia.
01:48In his day, Bede says Britain was made up of four nations.
01:53And those four peoples and their interweaving destinies will define the history of the British isles from then until now.
02:06First were the Britons, or the Welsh, the original inhabitants of Britain, who, Bede says, once had all the island
02:15to themselves and now live in their own kingdoms to the west.
02:22In the north was another branch of the Britons, related to the Welsh, whom Bede, like the Romans, called the
02:28Picts, the Painted People.
02:35Britain's third nation, Bede called Scots, a word that originally meant Irish, the Scots spoke Irish Gaelic, and they lived
02:44in the west of Scotland and the Western Isles.
02:53The last of Bede's four nations were the English.
02:57Bede says, more precisely than we would, that they came 285 years before his day, after the fall of Rome.
03:06And the English, as he saw it then, were the newcomers to the world of Britain.
03:20Our four nations, Bede says, had very different customs, although united by their Christian faith.
03:26But they're the root of our modern societies.
03:29Their destinies intertwined, even though our identities are still obstinately distinct.
03:38In the story of the peoples of Britain, we've reached what we might call the end of the Dark Ages.
03:46Of course, they didn't see it that way at all.
03:48They weren't aware that they were living in a dark age.
03:51People of Britain lived and struggled as passionately and as full-bloodedly as any of us do today.
03:57But from around the year 700, right across the British Isles, we see the crystallization of identities, cultural, linguistic, and
04:08political.
04:10And the catalyst for that, as so often in history, is not only the natural human desire for cooperation and
04:18order, for law and justice,
04:20but also what is endemic in human nature, war.
04:32In this next stage of the story, people right across the UK will be helping us build up a picture
04:38of Bede's British world.
04:40Yeah, yeah, yeah.
04:41Gosh, so it's classic Celtic...
04:44In the far north of Scotland, the people of Old Deer are searching for their Pictish roots, shared by most
04:51of today's Scotland, and for their lost Dark Age monastery.
04:57They've raised £10,000 to fund this community dig.
05:02So while you're here, when you're in those trenches, you are going to be doing the work that we expect
05:07archaeologists to do.
05:08This is not pretend, this is real.
05:12We rather think that this was a very important place, small as it is, people coming from all over, up
05:19here.
05:19We think it was a kind of central place that people were radiating out from.
05:27Legend said it was an Irish missionary, St Columba, who converted their Pictish ancestors here in the 6th century.
05:35It's a wonderful story, isn't it? St Columba and Drosten and all that.
05:38But, I mean, how much do you think that's true? Is there a different history to be uncovered, Andrew?
05:45I think it's a lovely bit of marketing.
05:47They knew exactly what they're doing.
05:50The legend is first found in Scotland's oldest surviving manuscript, the Book of Deer.
05:57This is the oldest manuscript that we have from mainland Scotland, by a long stretch.
06:06Completely different from what you'd be used to in southern Britain and England, aren't they, with a kind of Roman
06:12influence?
06:13This is a different tradition altogether, isn't it?
06:15It's very stylised, very reduced, very geometric.
06:19It's really, really special.
06:23About 200 years after the manuscript was made, the monks at Deer had a spot of bother.
06:32There began to be disputes over the title to the land, and especially the kind of tributes or taxes that
06:39were due on the land.
06:40And so they realised that they had to come up with some kind of evidence or proof to support their
06:46claim.
06:47And so what they did was they wrote in the blank spaces around the manuscript records of these grants of
06:55land.
06:55And they wrote them in the language of the time, which was Gaelic.
06:58And this is the early surviving Gaelic prose that we have.
07:08The Gaelic notes describe the boundary of the monastery at Deer in the Land of the Pigs, where the book
07:14was written.
07:19The whole idea of having a book with Gaelic instructions in it as to where the monastery was, but not
07:28having found the monastery really spurred us to say, right, let's dig.
07:32But what we're really talking about is a Pictish centre up here.
07:38And the Picts have become much more important in understanding the roots of Scotland, haven't they?
07:45Well, the skills are becoming more apparent.
07:49No text in the Pictish language has yet been found, but their art has.
07:57Mysterious symbols, animals, mythical beasts, stars and planets.
08:06And the ghostly shapes of the Pictish ancestors.
08:12The Romans said there were 40 tribes beyond the Firth of Forth that together made up the Picts.
08:19And when the Kingdom of Scotland was created in the 9th century,
08:24it was a union of Irish-speaking Scots and the majority British-speaking Picts.
08:30As historic landscapes in Scotland go, this is second to none.
08:35This is Strathairn.
08:37There's the river below us, the ancient East Coast route,
08:41still followed by the road and the railway from Edinburgh and Stirling up to Dundee and Aberdeen.
08:46And below us, Forteviot, this is the place where in the 9th century the Gaelic-speaking dynasties of the Scots
08:55from Strathclyde
08:57assimilated the British-speaking Kingdom of the Picts here in the rich agricultural land of the East Coast
09:03to form the Kingdom of the Scots.
09:09So who were the Scotty, the Scots?
09:12Well, they weren't originally from Scotland at all.
09:15Around the time of the fall of Rome, they migrated to Britain from Ireland
09:18and their dialect is still spoken in the Western Isles.
09:23Bede tells us that in the 8th century,
09:26they ruled a kingdom spanning the Western Isles and Northern Ireland,
09:29the Kingdom of Dalriada, founded in the Dark Ages by the legendary King Urk.
09:40These children from the Dalriada School in Antrim are doing a project on the Dalriada Kingdom.
09:47No one knows how far it extended,
09:50but few places show better how closely the early histories and identities of Ireland and Northern Britain are linked.
10:04It's a long, sort of narrow kingdom along the coast,
10:08and it was about 20 miles inland,
10:11but where the sort of north-western boundary of it was
10:16and where the southern boundary was, the border fluctuated.
10:22The main site of the kings was Dunseverick,
10:26and that's where St. Patrick visited King Urk.
10:34And he made the famous prophecy that, of course, Fergus, the youngest son, would become the king.
10:42And not only the kings of the Irish territory, but over Fort Thren, which was Scotland.
10:48And his line would be kings forever.
10:51And as every football fan knows, the Sons of Fergus have done quite well ever since.
10:57Good job, Dan.
11:05As for the Welsh in his day,
11:07Bede writes about them with some acrimony.
11:10They'd fought many wars with the English.
11:12The Welsh lived in small tribal kingdoms,
11:16their coasts dotted with ancient Christian sites,
11:19like this one here in Ceredigion, Lankranach.
11:26It takes its name from a wandering Celtic saint in the Dark Ages.
11:31In Cornwall, they call him St. Crantop.
11:37His wanderings took him down from Wales to the south-west and on to Brittany,
11:42although he may have been Irish in origin.
11:44All of which goes to show that in the Dark Ages,
11:47whether you're sailing in the region of Strathclyde
11:50or down the Irish Sea and into the English Channel,
11:53the sea was not a separator.
11:56It was a unifier.
12:02If you look at the Celtic tree, as it were,
12:05from the same tree we have Basque and Breton,
12:11Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh.
12:14Cornish.
12:15Cornish.
12:15They all come from the same base.
12:17I don't understand Scottish Gaelic or Irish Gaelic.
12:20I understand Cornish very well.
12:22The language is far more, of course, than just a cultural medium.
12:25It defines us in many ways.
12:27It's almost a political expression as well.
12:31A suggestion of wanting to be,
12:34to hold on to that which makes you special.
12:37How far back does the earliest Welsh poetry go?
12:39I think it goes back to the 6th century,
12:42in the year one,
12:43going up to a catric,
12:45wireth, catraith,
12:46in New Yorkshire.
12:49So in the 8th century,
12:50you could travel all the way down from North Britain to Cornwall,
12:54making yourself understood in different dialects of Welsh.
12:58Down in the southwest,
12:59the British people of Devon and Cornwall
13:02had also become Christian in the Age of Saints,
13:05and their biggest known Dark Age settlement
13:08has just been found on the seashore near Land's End.
13:12The settlement stretched from here all the way around
13:16and all the way up the coast,
13:17which we think dates from the 7th to the 11th century.
13:23These are all fish bones.
13:25Oh, yeah.
13:25And crab shell had crabs.
13:27Right.
13:28So they had all sorts of fish.
13:29This is a descaler of fish.
13:32Oh, yeah, yeah.
13:32An edge for...
13:33Yes.
13:35Scraping the fish.
13:36For scraping fish.
13:37Pigs and cows and sheep.
13:40So not a bad diet,
13:41eating the kind of things that you eat in Cornwall today.
13:44Dog.
13:47From obviously met an untimely end somewhere or die.
13:51No, no.
13:51What's very interesting is that this pottery is very, very rarely decorated.
13:58And at this excavation, we actually found the first example of decoration, and it's a cross.
14:04So Cornish Christianity really emerges in this dark age period.
14:10Definitely.
14:10St. Ives and St. Just and the saints are everywhere, aren't they?
14:14St. Morgan, you know, St. Mullion, wherever you go.
14:18It's really when the society that we know actually became visible to us.
14:23When you start getting Christianity and rectangular houses and a diet that you can appreciate that we see ourselves in
14:32the past, perhaps.
14:36So Britain in the 8th century was divided between the British peoples and the Anglo-Saxons.
14:43They'd started off as poor migrants who'd come to Britain for a better life.
14:48But by the 700s, they were living in many tribes and small kingdoms.
14:53And at Sedgeford in Norfolk, a dig organised by the community itself is uncovering the local roots of the English
15:00nation.
15:04It's the other side of the coin from spectacular royal treasures like Sutton Hoo and the Staffordshire Hoard.
15:13Sedgeford is ordinary people's lives.
15:16This side just gets bigger and bigger than each other's.
15:1815 years' work at least?
15:20At least.
15:20On the main Anglo-Saxon site, I would have thought.
15:22Oh, my gosh.
15:23At least.
15:25I'll come with my Zimmer phrase.
15:27LAUGHTER
15:34When we were last here, we found the Anglo-Saxon settlers surviving on a bare subsistence diet.
15:40But now, towards 800, things are changing.
15:49They gently moved away the soil.
15:52It was quite clear that it had been worked.
15:55And there's a little half of a hole that's been drilled through, which tells me that it's half of an
16:02amber bead.
16:03Oh, terrific.
16:05Beautiful colour.
16:07And the Anglo-Saxons liked that for their brooches?
16:10Oh, they did.
16:10And for their necklaces.
16:11They were quite popular.
16:14Rows of different shapes, sometimes circular, sometimes these sort of flattened circular.
16:19But this one's complete.
16:22Lovely.
16:23It is gorgeous.
16:24Lovely, wavy pattern there.
16:27They're doing more than surviving.
16:29Yeah.
16:29They've got their little creature comforts, maybe, as well.
16:34But, of course, building societies and nations is about more than creature comforts, even more than language.
16:41It's about shared identity, common values, getting on with your neighbours.
16:46And in Sedgford, there's graphic evidence that that wasn't always easy.
16:51This person was found in a double grave with another person that also died from serious cranial trauma.
16:56We think the weapon used was some kind of large axe.
17:00So we've got injuries to the lower arms, which we think are defence fractures, from where this person was attacked
17:07and raised his arms in defence.
17:11And then we've got a series of cuts.
17:13We've got one that came here and took off part of the skull.
17:16It's a big cut as well, isn't it?
17:18Right through.
17:19We've also got a cut to the back of the skull here.
17:23Either of these could have been the cause of death.
17:26We're almost certain he would have been unconscious at this point and on the ground.
17:30And then they carried on and really, really laid into him and carved right into his face at least two
17:36different angles.
17:37Gone right through the mandible, taken some of the brow ridge off too.
17:42At least seven cuts into his skull there.
17:46So whoever killed Athol Weird really had it in for him then?
17:51They did, yeah.
17:53It certainly seems they went beyond what they needed to do to kill him.
17:56They were trying to give some kind of message.
18:05To keep a lid on the violence, the early Anglo-Saxons had begun to make law.
18:10At first just simple tariffs of compensation for injury.
18:16If you cut off an ear, you must pay 12 shillings.
18:19A finger will cost you 4 shillings.
18:22If your genitals are disabled, 150 shillings.
18:27If any of your front teeth are knocked out, that'll be 6 shillings per tooth.
18:32It was a start.
18:34It was a start.
18:37Between the 700s and 800s, the myriad Anglo-Saxon tribes were beginning to be swallowed up by bigger kingdoms.
18:46Northumbrians, West Saxons, Mercians.
18:58It was the inevitable process of nation-building.
19:06But even now you can pick up signs of these older regional identities.
19:12In the Black Country, the area of Dudley and Hales Owen
19:15belonged to a tribe called the Witcher.
19:18In the Dark Ages, Britain was a land of tribes.
19:22Hundreds of them. Well, it still is, isn't it?
19:25Here in the West Midlands, dozens just in this area.
19:28And some of them have left very long-lasting traces.
19:32Just come and listen to this.
19:34Well, it's old Liza's bloke from down the road.
19:39He's Jed.
19:41I said, o' me wenchie, eh, is he?
19:43I said, well, how'd that happen?
19:45He says, well, old Liza had been giving him cat food to eat.
19:51Listen to the long vowels, the use of heo for she.
19:55They come from the Mercian dialect,
19:58which was spoken here in the 8th century,
20:00when the ordinary people were still a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh.
20:05Liza says, now it war the cat food.
20:09I said, he liked that.
20:13I said, he was up a ladder painting the sailing and he fell off when he turned round to lick
20:20his back.
20:24Brian Dakin is recording these local dialects before they go.
20:29The Anglo-Saxons invaded and they made the effort to climb over our bonks and come onto the plateau,
20:35because we're like 900 feet above sea level here.
20:37And then after that, nobody really made the effort.
20:40The Vikings sort of touched on the edge.
20:42Not really.
20:42The Normans really couldn't be bothered because they were talking French.
20:45So we stayed as we were for centuries upon centuries upon centuries.
20:49There's a region, there's a massive tribalness about it.
20:53You even say do bist, I've heard, somewhere around here.
20:56Have I or was I mistaken?
20:57Oh, yeah. Bist and bin and bin the and bist at me, cussent.
21:03And today, black country and Brummies are still divided over who owns their words.
21:08Boston. Where does Boston come from?
21:11That's a good point, that is, because one of the interviews I did was with a Brummie,
21:15Spaz, a Brummie poet that Richard would have.
21:17Now, Spaz reckons it's a Brummie word.
21:20Black country folks reckon it's a black country word.
21:23He said that we borrowed it and we wouldn't give it back.
21:25But it's actually a black country word.
21:27Of course it is.
21:28But it means great.
21:29It means brilliant.
21:29I've got things to do for the folks to see.
21:33Black people.
21:36Hola, signoritas.
21:38So the Anglo-Saxon past is not so far away after all.
21:43From the 8th century, the Midlands were ruled by the Mercians,
21:47whose kings were the first to claim rule over all the English.
21:53And close by Hales Owen is the border of the Mercians and the Witcher,
21:57where you can see that nation building in action.
21:59That's great, thanks Steve, fantastic.
22:02Come on, Meg.
22:03Come on, you two.
22:05Believe it or not, the boundary of the Mercians and the Witcher is still the West Midlands' metropolitan boundary today.
22:19You're looking at the central watershed of England, and it could have been the northern boundary of the Kingdom of
22:26the Whitche,
22:26the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, that was to be drawn into Mercia.
22:30But a lot of folk groups, which are the small building bricks of the Kingdoms, were established, and some of
22:38them met near here.
22:39Somewhere near that tower block, you can see in the distance, from Staffordshire, from the River Thame area, you have
22:46the Tom's Seater.
22:48From the Penk area, you have the Penker Seater.
22:51You also have groups from the Arrow Valley, who may have been called the Arrow Seater, coming into this area
22:57for the seasonal pastures.
23:01It's almost like the Brummies over there and the Black Country here, isn't it? Or am I being fanciful?
23:07This is an important boundary. I mean, later on, you've got a Watch Hill over there.
23:11Who they're watching for or against, we may not know, but there are several of them along the northern boundary
23:19of the Whitche.
23:20We're dividing all these little tribal groupings. It's fantastic, isn't it?
23:25Different dialects too, are they?
23:27Absolutely. And some of these, of course, may be pre-Anglo-Saxon. Easily.
23:32How long did people carry on speaking Welsh in the West Midlands? Do we know?
23:36No, we do not know.
23:38What about the place names? Do they tell us about Welsh people still living among the Anglo-Saxons?
23:44Yes, there are quite a lot of British names. The river names are British.
23:48The River Ulm, which is a British word, we have the Retame, which is a British word, and they have
23:53come through.
23:53And so have the major hills. Particularly, for instance, Malvern, Malbrin, the Bear Hill.
24:00Breeden is a beauty, of course. Bray is the British name for hill.
24:06Dune is the Anglo-Saxon name for hill.
24:09And by the time we got to the Middle Ages, people had forgotten that it was hill.
24:12And they added hill, so we've got Bray, Dune, Hill, which means hill, hill, hill.
24:19In time, all these lowland tribes and kingdoms, with their mix of Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, would come to call
24:26themselves English.
24:30But not quite yet.
24:32The door's closing.
24:34One mark of the Anglo-Saxons was their willingness to learn, to borrow, ideas, technologies, craft skills.
24:43And it was up here in the North East, where they mixed with Picts and Scots and Irish, that the
24:49big leap took place.
24:54Bede tells how the Northumbrians sent to France to find masons who could build like the Romans,
25:00craftsmen who could revive the lost Roman art of making glass.
25:07Unlike medieval glass, where you get surface painting, the colours are actually baked into the glass during the glassmaking process.
25:15And there's a whole range of colours. This one's a very deep red.
25:23With no cities yet, no urban societies, the monasteries were the centres of industry, arts, and crafts.
25:35That's quite a nice green piece.
25:41What they created here was a fusion of British and Anglo-Saxon culture with Roman ideas.
25:53Nice little streaky red and green pieces here seems to have been something that they quite liked.
25:59And probably it was quite good for, you know, flowing robes of evangelists and biblical figures and that kind of
26:04thing.
26:05So Anglo-Saxon England became a centre of European civilisation.
26:10Watch, it doesn't shut up.
26:13So this is what lies behind the scenes.
26:15This is some of it, yeah.
26:17Amazing quantity of stuff, isn't it?
26:19Well over a thousand fragments of 7th century glass found, which makes it the largest collection of glass of that
26:25date from any European sites.
26:30And this wonderful window, tell us about the window.
26:33Well, they are fragments of glass which were found during a 1972-73 excavation.
26:39And so we formed it into a mosaic and placed at the end of it.
26:42And it's the oldest window glass in Western Europe.
26:47And it wasn't just glass.
26:49From Wearmarth and Jarrow they sent wonderful manuscripts to Rome itself.
26:55Textiles made by English needlewomen were prized across Europe.
27:03The inspiration was the stained-fast windows in the church.
27:08Some of the pieces are longer than others.
27:11And it all has to be cut all smooth, like as if you were cutting the lawn.
27:17You've got to clip every long piece off.
27:21So that's where you get clippy mat.
27:23Love your fingernails, by the way.
27:27It's putting part of the history onto the walls, you know.
27:35In Wearmarth and Jarrow, the Anglo-Saxon past has never been forgotten.
27:42The glass has got a life.
27:44They've taken inspiration from something that's 1,300 years old and they've given it a new lease of life.
27:50And it's just fab.
27:51It's absolutely fab.
27:53And it's, you know, you just can it.
27:55You couldn't put it in a bottle and market it.
27:57You couldn't, you know what I mean?
28:00That's what Wearmarth Jarrow's about.
28:01That's what, I think, that's what Bede was about, wasn't it?
28:05This huge cultural centre.
28:08The centre of innovation.
28:15In our story, we've reached the late 8th century.
28:20Britain, after the Dark Ages, was still small scale compared to the powerhouses of world civilisation.
28:26The potential of our history, as yet unforeseeable.
28:35Bede's four nations, still mutable, their future path as yet unclear.
28:43But their story would be transformed now by the arrival of a new tribe.
28:51Raiders from Scandinavia.
28:53The Vikings.
28:58A.D. 793.
29:00In this year, dreadful, foreboding omens came over the land of Northumbria and terrified the wretched people.
29:08Whirlwinds and fiery dragons were seen in the sky.
29:12And in the same year, on January the 8th, heathen men ravaged and destroyed the Church of God at Lindisfarne,
29:20brutally robbing and slaughtering all.
29:27These were the first ships of the Danish men that sold the land of the English nation.
29:37Rich monasteries like Bede's Jarrow and Wearmouth were the first targets.
29:41At some point, probably during the Viking invasions of Northumbria,
29:46there was such a hot fire across the buildings itself that it actually warped some pieces of glass.
29:52So you can see that there, but that's, you know, obviously that would have originally been flat.
29:57Just look at that, isn't that astonishing?
30:00The firestorm of a Viking attack on Jarrow.
30:03Maybe in the late 9th century, perhaps.
30:09Across the British Isles, people entered a new age of anxiety.
30:15Viking fleets terrorised the coasts of Britain.
30:21And in Ireland, too, the land of saints and monasteries.
30:27The same year, here in Ulster, an Irish chronicler had heard the news
30:32that the islands of Britain had been devastated by the pagans.
30:38And the news was soon followed by the Vikings themselves.
30:54The year 802, Iona was burned by the heathens.
30:59The year 806, the community of Iona, to the number of 68, was killed by the heathens.
31:07The year 832, the first plundering of Armagh by the heathens three times in one month.
31:16St Patrick's legacy of learning went up in flames.
31:20Ireland, too, was engulfed by these events.
31:24And the great centre of Armagh here, with its Church of St Patrick going back to the 5th century,
31:29was swept up in it, too.
31:33The Vikings were driven by population growth in their own countries,
31:37by economic and political pressures, and they soon began to settle.
31:47The Vikings built their first permanent base in Ireland in 841.
31:53Here on the banks of the River Liffey, at a place called the Black Pool, Dublin.
32:01And from that moment until today, Dublin will be a key place,
32:05not only in Irish history, but in British history.
32:12The founding of Viking Dublin also intensified the importance of the Irish Sea.
32:18Back in the age of saints, St Patrick had called it Mare Nostrum, our sea.
32:24But from now on, the Irish Sea will belong to the Vikings.
32:34The Vikings settled right across Northern Britain, married local girls,
32:39and now scientists are literally tracking them down.
32:42Welcome, everyone, to this year's St Olav Walk.
32:45And here in the Wirral, a DNA project has found them.
32:50To celebrate the great Viking heritage that we have here on the Wirral.
32:57We're trying to find men with very old surnames that are tied to this area.
33:02Surnames that are found in medieval records, so like Matthew Lund,
33:06so his surname from Lunda, which is the Viking name for a copse,
33:10so that was an ideal one.
33:11And it's also just found in the Wirral.
33:13So if you find someone with that surname, chances are there are ancestries from here.
33:18With my name, Kemp.
33:20But I'm out of Viking ancestry, so I sent some DNA samples in.
33:24And here I am today.
33:26My father, who sadly is no longer with us,
33:30but I've been reliably informed that the Wikerome sun has been passed on to me.
33:35And I currently live in Erby, which is also of Viking origin,
33:39so the whole thing is sort of coming home.
33:42So Pict, Scots, Welsh, English, and now Vikings.
33:46We search for our roots, and in the past, we find ourselves.
33:51If you look at this badge here, Tranmere rovers.
33:56Tran comes from all Norse, meaning crane bird, or heron.
34:01And Mere, Mell, is sandbag.
34:03So Tranmere is the sandbag with the crane birds.
34:05And actually, that's when I got interested in Vikings,
34:07really interesting, but I found my football team was Viking.
34:10Oh, I shall never go to Prenton Park again and see it in the same light.
34:15Tranmere, Croxteth, Toxteth, Aintree, the home of the Grand National,
34:20Merseyside is stuffed with Viking names.
34:28The Viking invasion of the Wirral even has its own beer mat.
34:39Soon enough, they become like us, and we become like them.
34:43It's the British story.
34:46Chester has even got a church for a Viking saint.
35:00And today's Liverpudlians even get their nickname from Norwegian, Scousers.
35:07People have said, lob Scousers, you just lob stuff in.
35:09That's why it's called such.
35:11It's a very practical stew.
35:15So, years ago, when you lot got called Scousers, that's where it came from.
35:20It's another example of our great affiliation with the Norwegians.
35:23You didn't know that, did you?
35:27So, all round Britain, the Vikings changed society and attitudes.
35:34And in the great shipyard town of Govan-on-the-Clyde,
35:37a new lair is added to Glasgow's ancient past.
35:44It's great. I love it.
35:46We just moved it, actually.
35:49The Vikings never ruled here, but the Scots got a taste for things Viking.
35:55They even followed their styles and fashions.
36:04Just looking at the ancient history, you walk down the main street here,
36:08and there, right in the middle of all this,
36:11is the most incredible sacred space from, who knows, dark ages,
36:17maybe far back in time.
36:18It would be, because at one time there was standing stones round where the wall was.
36:24Govan Old Church had been founded back in the 5th century,
36:28but its astounding collection of carved stones is from the Viking Age.
36:34I remember when I was a wee boy,
36:36the humpback stones, we used to use them as a sort of long post.
36:40This was before they were moved inside.
36:42Yeah.
36:43And to us, they were just lumps of stone.
36:45We didn't realise they were Viking houses for the souls of the departed.
36:52We call them hogbacks, but as Brian says, they're really houses.
36:56Houses of the dead.
37:01That's astonishing.
37:06They're really representations of buildings.
37:08That curving sweep of the roof is the gable,
37:12and then the sides have these shingles, dated to about 925 to 950.
37:19These are local Scots wanting the latest fashion in Viking funerals.
37:25Absolutely amazing, isn't it?
37:27Walk off the streets of Govan and come to 30 or 40 monuments from this period of the Vikings.
37:33A Scottish princess even married a Viking.
37:36What a party!
37:37We're up here in a Gaelic, British, Scottish region in the Viking Age,
37:45and this is Viking-style sculpture.
37:47What's going on here, then, in the Clyde Valley?
37:49Well, what's going on is that whole Viking conquest of the Irish Sea,
37:54the set-up of Dublin, the settlement of Cumbria, the conquest of the Isles,
37:59all of that eventually finds its way to Govan.
38:03Are we allowed, then, to talk about a mixed society in this kind of Scotland?
38:07I think you have to.
38:08I think you have to allow that at least at the kind of,
38:11in your dynastic level, there's intermarriage,
38:14there are people with very Scandinavian tastes commissioning monuments.
38:23Because the Clyde has such access to the sea,
38:25everyone can get in and out quite easily.
38:29That's, if you like, a continuity which takes you right down to the 20th century, really.
38:33That openness to mixed society that you end up with in a place like Glasgow.
38:40So, in their own ways, the peoples of Britain came to terms with the Vikings,
38:44just as they had with the Anglo-Saxons.
38:49But in Wales, the problem was not just the Vikings, but the old enemy, the English.
38:55And some here thought that the Vikings might help the Welsh win back their lost land.
39:21Written around 930,
39:24a prophetic poem in which it is hoped that there would be an allegiance
39:30between the peoples of what I suppose we would term the fringes of the Isles of Britain.
39:36This alliance of Britons, Vikings and the Irish will push the Æthmin, the English, back into the sea.
39:44So there is a sense in the poem of what has happened over the last four or five hundred years
39:50and the fact that the Welsh, the indigenous people of Britain,
39:54have lost all this territory and are still losing territory.
39:59It's almost a hint that, you know, we've suffered a kind of ethnic cleansing, isn't it?
40:04Do you think?
40:05Have been pushed back.
40:06Have been pushed back all the time territorially
40:08and almost on top of all that, the icing on the cake
40:12is all the tribute that is then demanded for the Welsh's own lands, I suppose.
40:17I mean, they have...
40:18The poet has very hostile words for the English, doesn't he?
40:22I mean, they're thieves, they're traitors, they're drunkards,
40:27a lot of reference to the English as drinkers.
40:30They are scavengers, they are the lowest of the low.
40:33The word he uses is kachmin.
40:35It is the...
40:36These are the people of the dirt.
40:38These are scavengers, the lowest strata of society,
40:41below that of slaves, probably.
40:48The coming of the Vikings then had many different reactions
40:52and many different consequences.
40:54But the Vikings had come for the same reasons
40:57the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons came.
40:59For a better life.
41:00Britain was a land of opportunity.
41:04In England, in a few years,
41:06most of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were swept away.
41:09East and north, where the Vikings ruled,
41:12became known as the Dane rule.
41:15There, the chief centre of Viking power,
41:18the Roman and Anglo-Saxon city of York,
41:20became Viking Jorvik,
41:22a perfect symbol of both continuity and change in British history.
41:28We've had everything from a Roman cemetery
41:30through to Viking Age buildings,
41:32through to medieval city dumps,
41:3417th-century market gardens,
41:37and then an area that becomes heavily populated in the 19th century,
41:40cleared as a slum in the 1930s.
41:42So it quite literally is 2,000 years of people's lives
41:46within what is now modern-day York.
41:49In the 10th century, this was a bustling, bilingual place,
41:53frequented by merchants from Ireland and Scandinavia and the continent.
41:57New contacts, new ways of seeing.
42:00We've found eight Viking Age buildings in the late 10th century,
42:04but at the same time, you're seeing an Anglo-Saxon influence.
42:07There's undoubtedly characteristics that mark you out
42:10as northern or Anglo-Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon,
42:14but these start to blur in daily life.
42:20A lot of the great events aren't really registered archaeologically.
42:23You don't really see any evidence of the Norman conquest here, for example.
42:26People just seem to carry on.
42:28And the site changes from, you know,
42:30from cemetery to, you know, bustling Victorian slum landscape
42:34fairly seamlessly, and it just keeps evolving.
42:40In this cosmopolitan city,
42:43the Vikings soon took on the native culture,
42:46enthusiastically embracing a money economy.
42:50The first of the Viking rulers to produce coins is Guthrith.
42:55I say produce coins, there's only one that survives at the moment.
42:59I say one, not even a full one.
43:01And Guthrith died in 895.
43:04We don't know an awful lot about him.
43:06One of the things we do know about him
43:08is that he was buried in the church at York.
43:11So these are Christians?
43:14Christians, yeah.
43:14Within a generation of settling,
43:17they've converted to Christianity
43:19and they're doing what Christian kings do,
43:22which is issue coins to tell people that they're Christian.
43:29This is a Viking king from roundabout 900,
43:34and his name is Knut.
43:37He's really pushing home the Christian message.
43:40Rather than just putting Knut Rex
43:42as a continuous line around it,
43:44he spells it out as if he's making the sign of the cross.
43:47So he's being more Christian than the Christians.
43:50They're not seeing themselves as Vikings, are they?
43:52They're seeing themselves as kings of Northumbria.
43:54Absolutely, yes.
43:56And when we hear about them in the written sources of this period,
44:00we hear about kings of Northumbria.
44:02We don't hear about Viking kings or even kings of York.
44:05We hear about the Northumbrians.
44:07You see a bird there and a bird with a hooked beak.
44:12Now, is that a raven?
44:13And a raven, of course, is the traditional symbol of Odin.
44:17Or is it an eagle and a symbol of one of the evangelists?
44:21Or is it both?
44:22He's really making the point that he is not an Anglo-Saxon.
44:27He's not part of this expanding new kingdom of England.
44:32And I think a lot of Northumbrians of Anglo-Saxon extraction
44:36were probably just as happy about that as the Vikings.
44:39Yes, yes.
44:39We were never ruled by the South Angle.
44:42Exactly.
44:43Some of them still feel that way.
44:44Yes.
44:49So England was divided, north of Watling Street, the Danelaw,
44:53but to the south, Alfred the Great's kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons
44:57is a new force in our history, the beginnings of an English state.
45:04Here in the south, Alfred and his successors beat off the Vikings
45:08and created a small but powerful kingdom.
45:13They geared society to war.
45:16New towns were founded.
45:18And from London to Exeter, the old Roman cities were restored
45:22as centres of defence and administration.
45:26You can see at the bottom here the Roman facework, very clear.
45:30That's this stuff here.
45:31That's this stuff here.
45:32Then above that, this white, tracic sandstone.
45:35And above that, again, if you can see between those two
45:38crenelations, there's a blocked-in embrasure,
45:40the stonework blocking that in is thought to be Norman.
45:44That's the purple-y stuff there.
45:45The purple-y stuff, directly apart.
45:46So these crenelations here, and that one's very clear, isn't it?
45:49Yes.
45:50They would be the Anglo-Saxons.
45:52That's it.
45:52These are thought to be Saxon.
45:54A very exciting discovery.
45:56It's as good as proof.
45:57Yes.
46:00Saxons rebuilding on Roman foundations.
46:03There you have the story, a renewed Britannia,
46:07ruled by the English.
46:11And the great rebuilding was not just in stone,
46:14but in habits and mentalities.
46:20Safe inside their city walls,
46:22settlers were encouraged to take up housing plots.
46:25Churches were built.
46:27Markets and mints opened.
46:29The people got used to a money economy.
46:33Each chief town, or burr, had its own shire.
46:37This is where today's counties come from,
46:40our oldest units of local government, law and order.
46:45A national kingdom for all the English was on the way.
46:56And now, for the first time since the Romans,
46:59we begin to pick up signs of the kind of urban social life
47:04that we might recognise today.
47:11Governments fret about ideas like the big society.
47:15How do you create a sense of duties and obligations
47:19as well as rights in a changing world?
47:22But there's nothing new in that.
47:24Anglo-Saxon governments tore their hair out about law and order,
47:28about the horrendous level of wanton violence
47:31and theft and feud in their society.
47:35Kings could legislate about it from the centre.
47:38But what's really interesting about Viking period
47:41is what starts to happen at grassroots.
47:44And I'd almost call it
47:46the beginnings of civic society.
47:50Guilds.
47:51Guilds would become a massive thing in Britain in the Middle Ages.
47:55500 of them in Suffolk alone.
47:57And this is the great 14th century Guildhall here in Exeter.
48:03Been a building on this site since 1160.
48:06Probably the oldest civic building in Britain.
48:09But astonishingly, the story of the Guild here in Exeter
48:12goes back to around 930.
48:16Guilds were associations of friends and neighbours
48:21who got together for mutual support and protection.
48:24They held dinners on the great festivals, as they still do.
48:27They did a huge amount of work for charity, as they still do.
48:31They held funeral feasts and prayers
48:33for the departed souls of their friends.
48:36And they did all they could to cut out blood feud and even insult.
48:41And here in Exeter, the Guild statutes include
48:44a five-penny-per-member club fund
48:49to help those who went on pilgrimage to Rome.
48:51And even better, this, one penny-per-member
48:55to help all those who lost their house in a house fire.
48:59It has to be the first example of house insurance in British history.
49:05The great French political theorist de Tocqueville in the 19th century
49:09said that if you want to understand the English,
49:11and they are a funny lot,
49:13what you must understand
49:15is that they're a nation of societies, associations and clubs.
49:20And astonishingly, all that begins here in the Viking Age.
49:29In Scotland and Wales, too, national kingdoms rose in response
49:34to the Viking threat, a focus for ethnic and regional loyalties.
49:39Here in Wales, this is the time when Welsh cultural Christian identity
49:45begins to emerge.
49:48And the transformation is political, too.
49:51The small tribal groupings that emerged after the end of Rome
49:55turn into bigger kingdoms.
49:57And with them will come the idea of Welsh political unity.
50:06The compilation of Welsh lore by King Harald Dar in the 10th century
50:11marks the emergence of a Welsh nation.
50:14It's a commissioned manuscript.
50:17It's illustrated with people like the Dysdain, the Penthali,
50:22who is the chief of the king's household.
50:25And, of course, very importantly, the Unadllis, the judge,
50:29who, as you can see, is holding a small manuscript in his hands.
50:34All of the legal manuscripts are small of size, of course.
50:37As a travelling judge in the Viking Age, you had it in your pocket.
50:41A travelling judge would have brought out his little manuscript
50:44in order to refer to one or two things,
50:46and, of course, as a source of his authority.
50:48That is so beautiful, isn't it?
50:50So he's almost sort of gesturing with it, isn't he?
50:53Dispensing justice with one hand and holding up his...
50:56In the name of the law.
50:57In the name of the law.
51:00Do we see ordinary people as well as the courtiers?
51:03After the law of the court, you move into other aspects of law,
51:07like the relationships between individuals,
51:10particularly things like sarhad,
51:12the relationship between men and their wives,
51:15all governed in the law.
51:16Women had a remarkably high status in Welsh society.
51:21Therefore, they were protected.
51:23Everything had a value in Welsh law.
51:26If you broke a man's arm,
51:27it had a value for compensation purposes.
51:31So everything had its monetary value
51:33or its equivalent in animals or whatever.
51:36So those compensations are similar in English law,
51:39I mean, in principle, aren't they?
51:40But you pay for your crimes...
51:42You pay for your crime with an equivalent sum.
51:47Howell's laws were a mix of old and new.
51:50If a woman is separated from her husband
51:53after seven years of marriage,
51:55all that belongs to them shall be divided into two.
51:59Should her husband be leprous or have fetid breath
52:02or be incapable of marital duties,
52:05she is to have the whole of her property at any time.
52:10Brothers are to share their patrimony between them.
52:15Illegitimate sons are to receive a share equal to legitimate sons.
52:19The father's sin should not be said against the son.
52:27There is a continuity, isn't there, in terms of...
52:30Absolutely.
52:31You don't realise it until you look back after you've passed the law.
52:34For example, how will they recognise the rights of children?
52:38And here, we have a children's commissioner.
52:40I know we were the first in Europe on women's rights.
52:42If you're a woman, you could have a divorce after seven years
52:45and keep half your husband's belongings and property.
52:50And we're still leading the way,
52:51because here at the Assembly,
52:52we have more women representatives than any other UK parliament.
52:58To be a nation above all, you need law.
53:01And to make law then was to take a stand
53:03against almost overwhelming forces of disorder and violence.
53:10Let's face it, these were bleak times.
53:13Most of us Britons were still unfree peasants working the fields,
53:17labouring to feed our betters, and only then, ourselves.
53:22I go out at daybreak, driving the oxen to the field.
53:28I must plough a full acre a day or face the anger of my lord.
53:35Lord, it is hard work, because I am not free.
53:46Lord, when we first leased our land from you,
53:49it had been stripped bare by Viking raids.
53:54Now, after this terrible winter,
53:56we have nine oxen left and little seed.
54:01We beg for the love of God,
54:03but ask no more tax from us,
54:05as it is very hard to time for the people.
54:13But change was on the way.
54:16For with bigger kingdoms, the old law was not enough.
54:20With such huge poverty and inequality,
54:23the great question for them was,
54:24how do you create a just society?
54:28The answer was with law.
54:31When we think about the creation of our rights,
54:34we think of Magna Carta or the 18th century Enlightenment.
54:38But the key time was the 10th century.
54:42When we have water in a church and they put it over people,
54:47christened, that's right, and another word for that,
54:49does anybody know another word for being christened?
54:52Baptised.
54:52That's good, that's right.
54:53The impetus came from Christian ideas,
54:56charity, forgiveness, redemption.
55:00But the people, too, were making their voice heard now,
55:04high and low,
55:05and in their consultations with the kings
55:07are the early origins of Parliament.
55:10...producing documents for creating copies of the Bible,
55:13prayer books,
55:13and also legal documents.
55:16One of the documents they wrote here in Rochester
55:18was the Textus Refensis.
55:20Now, you probably haven't ever heard of the Textus Refensis.
55:24You've probably heard of the Magna Carta,
55:26but the Textus Refensis is actually really
55:28even more important than the Magna Carta.
55:31It may sound a big claim,
55:34but along with our language and literature,
55:36English ideas about freedom and law
55:39are their greatest legacy to the world.
55:41Very exciting moment.
55:43And this is the book of English law.
55:47The Textus Refensis,
55:50which really means Rochester's book.
55:53It's a compilation of law starting in the 600s
55:57with an eye for an eye and a tooth for six shillings.
56:00The earliest texts in English.
56:05Making law was part of what marked you out as a civilised people.
56:11And then as you turn the pages,
56:13and it's turning the pages of English social history, really,
56:17through the centuries,
56:18law becomes real legislation,
56:21flexible response to the times.
56:25This is from about 9.30.
56:29The people are talking to the king,
56:31and the king is listening to the people.
56:33He's worried about the morality of capital punishment.
56:41The king speaks to his council, his wise men,
56:45that he thought it was profoundly distressing
56:49that so many young people,
56:51young Naman,
56:52are being executed,
56:54as he sees is happening everywhere,
56:57for such small crimes,
57:00for so little.
57:04After consulting with his local assemblies,
57:06the king raises the death penalty
57:08from 12 to 15 years.
57:18Still harsh, you might say,
57:19but remember,
57:21children of 9 and 10 were hanged for theft,
57:23even in Charles Dickens' childhood.
57:27It's the tentative beginnings,
57:29you might say,
57:30of a social contract.
57:37By the 10th century,
57:38in the Viking Age,
57:39the kings who claimed to rule all England
57:41were now ruling Welsh speakers,
57:44Cornish speakers,
57:46Cumbrians,
57:47Danish speech,
57:48along with Angles and Saxons.
57:50So no one code of law
57:52could really accommodate all that.
57:54They had to be flexible.
57:57As regards my Danish subject,
58:00says one 10th century English king,
58:02with secular law,
58:04I leave it to them,
58:05which good laws they judge
58:08as being best for their people.
58:11So in the brutal 10th century,
58:14the peoples of Britain,
58:15with all their tribal differences,
58:18come into the light of day as nations,
58:20as people with hopes,
58:22aspirations and a voice.
58:24and the dialogue has now begun
58:26between the rulers
58:28and the people.
58:46And the people.
58:50dreams that you dare to fancy.
58:53I'm Jason.
58:54I'm Jason.
58:54I'm Jason.
58:55See you.
58:55See you.
58:57See you around.
58:58See you around.
58:59See you around.
59:00See you around.
59:01See you around.
59:01See you around.
59:01See you around.
59:01See you around.
59:01See you around.
59:01See you around.