The Great Turning Points of British History Read Free

wonderfully vigorous version with a letter addressed to Elizabeth, begging her to read it as an exemplar of ‘the true faith of Englishmen’.
    My fourth Dark Age turning point is the Vikings, whose unwelcomed visitations were the catalyst for the creation of regional kingdoms in Wales, Scotland and England. Whether the unification of England would have happened without them is a moot question. So too perhaps for Rhodri Mawr’s Wales and Kenneth MacAlpin’s Alba (the forerunner of Scotland). In addition, the Vikings had a profound effect on society, kingship and even language in these islands. There is no specific date to pinpoint the Vikings’ arrival: a medieval Canterbury tradition says the Danes sacked Thanet in 753. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the first attack was three ships on the Dorset coast in 789. But the key moment is the one seen as the turning point by a horrified contemporary, the great Northumbrian scholar Alcuin in AD 793: the sack of Lindisfarne, the great centre of Northumbrian monasticism. A resident in Charlemagne’s Francia, Alcuin wrote, ‘It is almost 350 years since we and our forefathers have dwelt in this fair land, and never before have such terrible things happened in Britain . . . Who could have thought such voyages could ever have been made?’
    The Vikings would oversee the dismantling of the old order in Britain and they paved the way for the West Saxon creation of England. They also bring me to my fifth turning point: Alfred the Great. No other English ruler is called ‘the Great’ and that is how it should be. If the idea of England, the
gens Anglorum
, was Bede’s, the English state was the creation of Alfred and his successors in the late ninth and early tenth centuries.
    Alfred the man, however, is the key: in his struggle for survival when the war against the Danes was going against him; then in his subsequent dedication to the rebirth of law, social order, learning and literacy. Alfred in my view is the most remarkable figure in British history. But the England Alfred dreamed of was a family project pursued over several generations in a series of remarkable developments in state building, local organization, the construction of towns, the issuing of coinage and in the making of English law. The kingdom of England in reality was the work of three remarkable rulers: Alfred, his son Edward, and his grandson Æthelstan; together, arguably the most remarkable triad of rulers in British history.
    Edward was ruthless and unsentimental, ’in learning far inferior to his father’, wrote one chronicler, ‘but far surpassing him in power and glory’. He is one medieval British ruler of whom we could hope to know much more, but probably never will. However, there have been many discoveries in recent years about his son Æthelstan – enough to show that he is one of the greatest figures in British history. In a society on a constant war footing, Æthelstan’s reign saw a series of startling innovations. They didn’t all work: his imperium was geographically overstretched; his law codes reflect the daunting gap between the ideal and reality in early medieval kingship (‘frankly, a mess’ was the verdict of the greatest modern expert, Patrick Wormald). Nonetheless his ambition, with a mitigating touch of humanity, still speaks to us.
    The most famous event in Æthelstan’s reign was the defeat of a huge coalition of Scots, Celts, Norse, Irish and Vikings at Brunanburh in 937. The battle has been celebrated in poems, songs, sagas and folktales for a thousand years; but, frustratingly, the site of this epic struggle has never been pinned down. It was chosen in a recent newspaper poll as one of the top ten decisive events of British history while
The Times
, a year or two back, announced the discovery of the site, the ‘Birthplace of Britishness’, in the Wirral. The site now has a monument and a Heritage History Trail, though it is perhaps more likely that Brunanburh remains