Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History

Hugh Williams

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chronology

PART 1 Roots: The Origins of Britain

Introduction

1 Stonehenge 3100 to 2200 BC

2 The Roman Invasion of Britain 43 AD

3 Saint Augustine Arrives in Britain 597 AD

4 Alfred the Great Becomes King of Wessex 871 AD

5 The Battle of Hastings 1066

6 The Dissolution of the Monasteries 1536

7 The Birth of William Shakespeare 1564

8 The Act of Union 1707

9 The Irish Home Rule Bill 1886

10 Britain Signs the Treaty of Rome 1973

PART 2 Struggle: The Battles for Britain

Introduction

1 The Battle of Agincourt 1415

2 The Battle of Bosworth 1485

3 The Spanish Armada 1588

4 The Battle of Naseby 1645

5 The Battle of Blenheim 1704

6 The Battle of Trafalgar 1805

7 The Battle of Waterloo 1815

8 The Battle of the Somme 1916

9 The Battle of Britain 1940

10 The Battle of Goose Green 1982

PART 3 The Sea: Britain at Home and Abroad

Introduction

1 Sir Francis Drake and the Circumnavigation of the Globe 1577–1580

2 The Voyage of the Pilgrim Fathers 1620

3 The South Sea Bubble 1711–1720

4 The Battle of Plassey 1757

5 The Surrender of the British Army at Yorktown, Virginia 1781

6 The Abolition of Slavery 1833

7 The Afghanistan Massacre 1842

8 The Discovery of the Victoria Falls by David Livingstone 1855

9 The Partition of India 1947

10 The Arrival of the ss Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks 1948

PART 4 Freedom: The Pursuit of Liberty

Introduction

1 Magna Carta 1215

2 The Peasants’ Revolt 1381

3 The Gunpowder Plot 1605

4 The Execution of Charles I 1649

5 The Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights 1688–1689

6 Sir Robert Walpole Becomes Prime Minister 1721

7 The Publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations 1776

8 The Great Reform Act 1832

9 The Foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903

10 The Creation of the National Health Service 1948 305

PART 5 Ingenuity: Britain’s Innovations

Introduction

1 Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales 1387

2 The Authorised Version of the Bible 1611

3 The Foundation of the Bank of England 1694

4 The Longitude Act 1714

5 James Watt Patents His Steam Engine Condenser 1769

6 The Metropolitan Police Act 1829

7 The Publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species 1859

8 The Football Association Publishes ‘The Laws of Football’ 1863

9 The Foundation of the BBC 1927

10 Frank Whittle Designs the First Turbo Jet Engine 1930

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Some years ago I was browsing in a bookshop in America. I’ve always liked American bookshops; much of what they sell reveals the differences between our two countries. So it proved on this occasion. On the history shelf I found a paperback called What Every American Should Know About American History by Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips. Intrigued by the title, I bought it.

It turned out to be an intelligent and very readable canter through American history from the days of Viking exploration to the end of the Cold War. In all it covered 200 significant events, outlining the principal facts relating to each one. Enjoyable, unpretentious and above all, simple, it presented – in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way – the story of the most powerful nation on earth. I enjoyed it immensely and felt my knowledge of American history had improved effortlessly. I also felt something else rather less heart-warming.

This book, I thought, could never be published in Britain. It was far too simplistic for all those sophisticated people who banged on about the Empire in a vague, unsympathetic way, or wrote off the whole of nineteenth-century Britain as a smoke-enveloped slum of exploitation and capitalist greed.

Disraeli once said that his wife could never remember which came first – the Greeks or the Romans. Lots of people I met didn’t know whether Henry VIII came before or after Charles I; they couldn’t put the battles of Bannockburn, Bosworth and Blenheim in a historical order; and they hadn’t a clue about events of such fundamental importance to their country as the Glorious Revolution or the Great Reform Bill. They were all happy, well-connected, successful people, and these holes in their knowledge had not hampered their lives in any palpable way. Or had they? Wasn’t that the whole point? In Britain, lack of knowledge of the country’s past was becoming a badge of honour. All that mattered was now: look forward, never back. These people, I thought, would laugh at my American history book. They would dismiss it as an oddity, a typically American piece of patriotic fluff – quite unsuitable for the more refined British way of life. I kept the book by my bed and my thoughts to myself.

I also began work on my idea. As a television executive with experience in factual programmes including current affairs, history and the arts, I wanted to find a way to transfer the approach to history I’d found in that American book into a television series and a book about British history. They would have to run counter to current ingrained social attitudes. They would have more to do with the sort of history I read as a child – G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, or G. M. Young’s Portrait of an Age – than the empathetic, judgemental, why-was-everyone-so beastly? school of history that seemed to be the preferred method of teaching it today. History should be straightforward, uncluttered and exciting. Above all, it should tell stories. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the way to do this was to try to refine British history into a series of key events and explain the linkage between them. In this way I would be able to select the most interesting and exciting stories and put them into context, creating a framework so the readers and viewers would not only learn the details of a particular event, but also understand how it slotted into the progress of British history as a whole.

The idea was called ‘Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History’. Its moment has now arrived. Why?

There are two main reasons. The first is the growing realisation among many academics and politicians that the way we have been teaching history in our schools is wrong. By moving away from narrative – the broad sweep of history – to concentrating on isolated episodes we have educated a whole generation who may know quite a lot about, say, Oliver Cromwell and the Battle of the Somme, but pretty much zero about everything that happened in between. That’s not history.

Some distinguished historians have joined the debate about the way history is being taught in our schools. Simon Schama – no newcomer to television himself – argues for what he calls ‘the three Cs’: ‘comprehensive chronological continuity’. Tristram Hunt, a Cambridge academic who presented a television series on the English Civil War says: ‘What children need to learn first is a clear narrative. I’m all for empathy, but they can do that later.’ Schama agrees: ‘If empathy means weepily identifying with victims, it can be sentimental mush. The ability to put oneself in someone’s shoes requires a lot of knowledge.’

The second, and perhaps more important reason, is the growing recognition that a proper knowledge of your country’s history is an essential part of being a good citizen. Understanding a country’s past helps to identify its strengths. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a speech in 2007, said ‘Britain has a unique history.’ British values have ‘emerged from the long tidal flows of British history – from the 2,000 years of successive waves of invasion, immigration, assimilation and trading partnerships’. There is, he went on, ‘a golden thread that runs through British history’ from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights of 1689 to the democratic reform acts of the nineteenth century. Knowing about these things builds a sense of being British, which ‘helps unite and unify us’.

In other words, a knowledge of history is a badge of citizenship. Just as you would not call yourself a fan of a football club without knowing the history of its successes and defeats; or join a social club without knowing its rules, so you cannot call yourself a citizen without knowing how the country in which you live came to exist as it does today. If you have nothing to look back on, nothing to feel proud about, nothing to provide you with the understanding of where you came from and why, the present and the future stand without foundation and are therefore more prone to collapse. Human life is part of a continuum, not a vacuum. That’s why our history is important.

At the same time, the idea of history continues to be very popular. Through watching television documentaries and historical dramas and by visiting famous landmarks many people begin to understand, and enjoy, aspects of history that were probably denied to them before. But it can also remain elusive. It may be around us everywhere all the time, but how it fits together is often much more difficult to grasp. Unless you’ve been lucky enough to be well taught, history can appear rather overwhelming – a dense mass of facts and dates that coalesce into an impenetrable fog. And nobody wants to set out into a fog if they can help it.

And so I have set out to provide a path through that fog. This book describes fifty key events in British history which, linked together, form an overview of our history. Those fifty events divide into five thematic chapters:

1 ‘Roots: The Origins of Britain’ describes where the British came from.

2 ‘Struggle: The Battles for Britain’ recounts some of Britain’s greatest conflicts.

3 ‘The Sea: Britain at Home and Abroad’ tells the story of the growth of the British Empire.

4 ‘Freedom: The Pursuit of Liberty’ is about the fight for individual freedom and the development of British democracy.

5 ‘Ingenuity: Britain’s Innovations’ lists some of the nation’s most important scientific, cultural and social changes.

So why choose these fifty things in particular? The events in this book are not the only fifty things you need to know about British history. They are what I, and the producers of the television series, think are fifty of the most important things. Some people will say that we should have excluded some and included others. That’s fine: history is not a perfect science and the differing judgements of individuals are just one of the things that make it interesting. ‘History,’ as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said, ‘is too subtle a process to be firmly seized or summarily decided.’

This book is meant for everyone who is interested in history but is frightened of the fog. The ‘Fifty Things’ it describes will, I hope, provide a clear picture of the most important events in British history and how they fit together to create the nation we live in today.

Chronology

Introduction

When I was young we used to go on holiday to Anglesey, off the coast of North Wales. Our long drive would eventually take us across the Menai Bridge, Thomas Telford’s great feat of engineering constructed between 1819 and 1826 to speed up the journey to the port of Holyhead. When it was built no suspension bridge had been designed on such a scale before. Today it is a ‘World Heritage Site’. My father was Welsh and as we drove across he would recite a Welsh poem all about it. I cannot remember who it was by – probably the poet David Owen who wrote a number of poems about Menai – but I can remember that he tried to get my brother and me to recite it too. We never managed more than a few words. The Welsh language, despite our parentage, has remained a closed book to us. But sweeping across Telford’s beautiful masterpiece high above the waters of the Menai Straits, my parents’ ancient Austin looking forward like an exhausted horse to the end of the interminable drive, I felt a bit Welsh, a bit different and rather special. I felt I had roots. I was something more than just an ordinary little London schoolboy.

Over the past thirty years people in Britain have spent a lot of time returning to their roots. The fashion for devolution with the establishment of a parliament in Scotland and an assembly in Wales, combined with the long struggle to find political stability in Northern Ireland, have affected our sense of nationhood. Which comes first – our Britishness, our Scottishness, Welshness or Englishness? Meanwhile, beyond the shores of the United Kingdom, our national interests are being absorbed into the common objectives of the European Union and constantly tempered by increasing globalisation. Outside we are hurrying to be part of a bigger world: at home, it seems, we want to be part of a smaller one. Who we are and where we come from have become increasingly important as a shrinking world seeks to suck our national identity out of us.

This chapter goes in search of who the British are and where they came from. It begins with Stonehenge, an enigmatic monument to the people who inhabited the country in its earliest times, and as good a place as any in which to invest our sense of history.

The Romans were the first people to give Britain shape. They occupied it for 400 years, but after they withdrew the order they had created collapsed into chaos. Slowly, very slowly, order began to return. It came first through the messages of the Christian missionaries, particularly Saint Augustine, who brought back the ideas of Rome, by then a Christian city, to the island which had been abandoned 200 years before. It was enlarged and developed by the Anglo-Saxon kings, the greatest of whom was Alfred the Great, King of Wessex.

Britain succumbed to invasion for the last time in 1066 when the Normans became its rulers, destroyed the Anglo-Saxon way of life and started to lay the foundations of the medieval state. The Catholic Church and the monarchy held the country in their grasp until the Reformation broke them apart. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century was one of the most important acts in a process which would see the evolution of Britain into a nation state. Shakespeare helped give that nation its tongue.

In 1707 Britain joined with Scotland, but managed its relationship with its other neighbour, Ireland, far less successfully. The failure of the Home Rule movement in the nineteenth century would have disastrous consequences for both countries in the twentieth.

Today, in the twenty-first century, Britain is a part of Europe and shares its national aspirations with twenty-seven other countries. The island which carved its identity by withdrawing from the shifts and changes of a continent in turmoil has re-entered the arena from which it came. Once again Britain is replanting its roots.