Simon Schama - A History of Britain: "Conquest"

These notes are from the second episode from the series by Simon Schama titled "A History of Britain." Moving on from the Iron Ages to the Battle of Hastings...






It was the hand of God that decided the outcome of battles... the fate of nations... and life or death of Kings... everyone knew that.

But there are times and places that history - British history - comes at you with a rush... violent, decisive, bloody... a shot load of trouble... knocking you down, wiping out everything that gives you your bearings in the world - law,custom, loyalty, and language... this is one of those places.

The battlefield of Hastings. The site of a national trauma. Here one kind of England was annihilated and another kind of England was settled in its place. 1066



But the everyday can rub shoulders with the truly catastrophic. You lived in England but it was no longer your country.

Alfred's grandson was named Edward and became known as Edward the Confessor. He had to govern a country he knew very little about as he had grown up in exile across the English channel in a very different world in Normandy. (France) 36 years old when crowned on Easter day 1043.

1027 William the Bastard otherwise known as William the Conqueror was born.

Edward named William the bastard as his heir to keep England away from his enemies the Godwin's. The Godwins promoted Harold Godwinson instead. The relationship between Harold and William the Conqueror was complicated and when the throne became available the relationship broke creating violence and war.

The war between the Godwin brothers eventually brought Harold Godwinson down and brought an ending to Anglo-Saxon England with the rise of William the Conqueror from Normandy.

On January 6th 1066 Westminster saw the funeral of one king in the morning and the coronation of another in the afternoon. Edward the Confessor has died and Harold Godwinson seized the throne. William was incensed.

By August 10th William had his army in place along the Normandy Coast. Two great fighting forces bent on each other's annihilation face each other across a little strip of water to determine the destiny of England. There they sat... William waiting for a southernly wind that never came and Harold waiting for William who never came. On September 8th Harold de-mobilized his army and sent his soldiers home.

Harold Godwinson struggled with treachery from his brother Tostig who had an ally in Harald Hardrada of Norway. Battle ensued between the opposing groups on the river Derwent/ Stamford Bridge. One of the bloodiest battles in English history. With Harold Godwinson success came the death of Tostig and Harald Hardrada.

But he had no time to grieve or exalt over the death of Tostig. For after the battle of Stamford bridge, the Norman fleet at last felt the wind change direction. With it came William the Conqueror and his army.

Imagine yourself then on the morning of Saturday the 14th of October 1066. You're a Saxon warrior and you've survived Stamford bridge. You know your position here couldn't be better. You stand on the brow of the hill and look down hundreds of yards away at the opposition. All you had to do was defend the Normans breaking through to the London road. They have the horses. Then they have to ride them uphill. You look along the hillside and you see a densely-packed crowd of Englishmen ready for battle. Down at the foot of the hill you can hear the whinnying of Norman horses and what sounds like the chanting of psalms.

Battle took at least 6 hours to decide. The Bayeux tapestry is shockingly explicit in exposing the extent of the carnage and mutilation. but it was the English army that was slowly, very slowly ground down. Harold Godwinson was dead and the battle soon ended.

What we do know is it half the nobility of England perished on the battlefield.

William had sworn that should God give him the victory he would build a great abby of thanksgiving at the exact spot where Harold had planted his flag. And here it is... a statement if ever there was one of pious jubilation.

William continued battle throughout England until all its major cities fell. William was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. But the events was more like a shambles than a triumph. At the shout of acclamation, the Norman soldiers stationed outside thought a riot had started to which their response was to burn down every house in sight. As fighting broke out, many of those inside the abbey smelling smoke rushed outside... and the ceremony was completed in a half empty interior with William for the first time in his life seen to be shaking like a leaf.

His conquest turned the country around. Its focus away from Scandinavia and towards continental Europe. Northern England did not want to assimilate and Williams response was to stage a campaign of oppression towards the north that was not only punitive but an exercise in mass murder. Thousands upon thousands of men and boys gruesomely murdered -their bodies left to rot and fester in the highways. Every town and village burned without pity, fields and livestock destroyed so completely that any survivors we're doomed to die in a great famine. Fast on the heels of famine came plague.

Ordericus Vitalis the monk. Belonged to the conquering class and came over to England with William the Conqueror. He began to pen his account of the conquest and he never minces his words about what he thought of as a colonization. His account conveys the traumatic magnitude of what happened in England in the years following 1066. Pre-conquest England was an old country as Ordericus describes it. Afterwards it was a completely new one.

There was another telling difference between the old and the new rulers of England. Anglo-Saxons didn't use surnames. They were the Cedric or Edgar of somewhere. The Normans incorporated places into their own names as an act of possession. In fact, preserving their estate intact is what the Norman nobility was all about. It was they who introduced the practice of passing on whole estates intact to one heir; to the oldest son.

William the Conqueror was the first database king. His immediate need was to raise a tax, but the compilation of the Domesday book was more than just a glorified audit. It was a complete infantry of everything in the kingdom; shire by shire, pig by pig, who owned what before the coming of the Normans and who owned what now, how much it had been worth then and how much now... when he was given the Domesday book it was like he had been given the keys of the kingdom again. That he had conquered England again. Because it's information was more pregnable than any castle. That its decisions were final as the last judgment.



Two ceremonies took place on Lammas day 1087 at old Sarum. First every noble in England gathered here to take an oath of loyalty to the king. But then came the handing over of the book The ultimate weapon to keep them in line. Now nobody could hold back anything and it was this book- the Domesday book -that made the gathering at old Sarum unique in the history of feudal monarchy in Europe. For the book ultimately was England.

At the very end, Ordericus Vitalis puts into William's mouth an extraordinary deathbed confession so utterly out of character that it seems on the face of it completely incredible. But whether William actually spoke those words or not, they clearly reflected what some- perhaps many people- felt about William the Conqueror. That when all the battles were won, that all the weapons had been laid down... he was what he had always been- a brutal adventurer. The conquest of England was not a righteous crusade but just a grand throw of history's dice.

“I have persecuted the natives of England beyond all reason. Whether gentle or simple I have cruelly oppressed them; many I unjustly disinherited; innumerable multitudes perished through me by famine or the sword……I fell on the English of the northern shires like a ravening lion. I commanded their houses and corn, with all their implements and chattels, to be burnt without distinction, and great herds of cattle and beasts of burden to be butchered whenever they are found. In this way I took revenge on multitudes of both sexes by subjecting them to the calamity of a cruel famine, and so became a barbarous murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of that fine race of people. Having gained the throne of that kingdom by so many crimes I dare not leave it to anyone but God….."



pictures from: mine, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book

Simon Schama - A History of Britain: "Beginnings"

A friend of mine gave me this amazing DVD series on the History of Britain. As I have spent the time perusing it, I took notes for future reference. Most of these notes are in the voice of the narrator and, while in order, only provide a brief summary of the episode and not a full transcription. I am really enjoying this series and intend to do a summary of every episode... although that may take me a few months. Here are my notes for the first episode titled "Beginnings."





From its earliest days Britain was an object of desire.

By 1000 BC things were changing fast. All over the British landscape a protracted struggle for good land was taking place. Forests were cleared so that iron age Britain was not, as was once romantically imagined, an unbroken forest kingdom stretching from Cornwall to Inverness. It was rather a patchwork of open fields dotted here and there with woodland copses giving cover for game -especially wild pigs.

And with tribal manufacturers came trade. The warriors, druid priests, and artists of iron age Britain shipped their wares all over Europe trading with the expanding Roman Empire. In return, with no homegrown grapes or olives, Mediterranean wine and oil arrived in large earthenware jars. So iron age Britain was definitely not the back of beyond. Its tribes may have all led lives separated by custom and language and they may have not had any great capital city, but taken together they added up to something in the world.

And so, in the written annuals of Western history, the islands now had not only a name-Britannia- but a date of 55 BC when Julius Caesar launched his galleys across the channel.

The person we usually think of who embodied British national resistance to Rome- Queen Bouducca of the East Anglian tribe of Iceni- actually came from a family of happy even eager collaborators. It only took a policy of incredible stupidity, arrogance, and brutality on the part of the local Roman governor to turn her from a warm supporter of Rome into its most dangerous enemy.... Her great insurrection ended in a gory, chaotic slaughter.







Hadrian's wall

A world of garrisons and barracks had now become a society in its own right. From the middle of the second century it makes sense to talk about a Romano-British culture. Not just as a colonial veneer imposed on a resentful natives but as a genuine fusion.


And, when in the year of 410 Alaric The Goth sacked Rome and the last two legions parted to prop up the tottering empire, that chill developed into an acute anxiety attack. This is one of the genuinely fateful moments in British history.

Eventually though the Roman adaptations became ever more makeshift; the fabric of Roman life increasingly threadbare until it did indeed fall apart altogether. The island was now divided into 3 utterly different realms. The remains of Britannia hung on in the west. North of the abandoned walls and ports the Scottish tribes for the most part remained pagan, and England, the land of the Anglo-Saxon and Judes, was planted in the east all the way from Kent to the kingdom of Bernicia.

The history of the conversions between the 6th and the 8th centuries is another of those crucial turning points in the history of the British Isles. While the legions had long gone, the shadow of Rome fell once again on these islands. This time though it was an invasion of the soul and the warriors were carrying Christian gospels rather than swords.

We have to remember that the most famous of the early missionaries to Ireland -Saint Patrick- was in fact a Romano-British aristocrat. (The patrician as he called himself) So there was nothing remotely Irish about the teenager who was kidnapped and sold into slavery by Irish raiders sometime in the early 5th century. It was only after he escaped (probably to Brittany) and ordained... then visited by prophetic dreams that he returned to Ireland... this time the messenger of God's gospel.





Bede was not just the founding father of English history; arguably he was also the first consummate storyteller of all of English literature. He was not exactly well-traveled- he spent his entire life here in Jarrow. It was his masterful grip on narrative that made Bede not just an authentic historian but also a brilliant propagandist for the early church.


The Viking raids that they knew could strike hard and fierce at any moment. In addition to land the Vikings were keen on one other kind of merchandise - people whom they sold as slaves. On the positive side there is one thing that the Vikings managed to do however inadvertently. They created England. By smashing the power of most of the Saxon's kingdoms, the Vikings accomplished what left to themselves the warring tribes could never have managed - some semblance of alliance against a common foe.

Through Alfred the Great, England got something that it hadn't had since the legions departed; an authentic vision of a realm governed by law and education. A realm which understood it's past and its special destiny as the Western bastion of a Christian Roman world. By the spring of 878 Alfred had managed to piece together an improvised alliance of resistance. During Alfred's lifetime the idea of a United English kingdom had become conceivable and even desirable.

Alfred's grandson would be crowned the first king of England in Bath.





pictures from: mine, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patric, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_the_Great

Did the Russian State... Part IV by Nils Johann (On the 'Miracle' of Western Europe)

A challenge that one faces when entering into the debate of an eastern or western culture dominating Russia, is the terminology itself. What is 'The West'? Is 'The West' something definable? Or rather, can it be used as a definition? It is a term that is inherently used, and it simplifies and creates order in one's mind. But does it help to understand something, or does this categorization lead us astray... or make us lazy? The suspicion arises that the category contains a lot of praise, to one self, one's own. Because it is to be understood positively, is it not? When our 'Anglo-Saxons' write about 'The West', they write about their own, their identity, and self-image. They show how they would like to portray themselves today, often at the risk of sacrificing historical fact, in favor of tunnel-vision, with regards to sources and interpretations.

The claim made by Landes and other 'Eurocentrics' (rather 'Occidentofiles') is that 'European' institutions that arose during the industrialisation, and the Industrialisation itself, can be traced back into 16th century, to their 'embryonic' state, without causing huge problems of verification. (Landes even claims the 15th century holds the 'seeds' for future industrial development.) This is best illustrated by the discussion that broke out, after David Landes and Andre Gunder Frank both brought out a book on the subject of 'world economic history' during the same year. They positioned their works extremely antithetical to each-other. In “ReOrient- Global Economy in the Asian Age” (1998), Andre Gunder Frank manifests the economical superiority of Asia for the period before the disjunction that happened around 1750 to 1850. -Something that is not widely contested. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, Adam Smith, and other Europeans in the time were well aware of this, and they idealised China as a model for copy, and a 'Europe of the East'.

David Landes in his Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) does however not want this to be true. In his grasping for straws, he alleges to have found exclusively English (and when he can't force them to be English, they are Dutch) 'seeds' for explaining the Industrial revolution, back in the 15th century. This, despite the general problem of finding or constructing data-series that reach further back than 1750. His attempt at writing a 'world economic history' must be seen as a failure, because the book is mostly about Europe. His effort at documentation for his narrative is good, but rather eclectic- we might call it a case of historical tunnel-vision. Landes, as Max Weber did in 1950, also places a lot of weight on cultural exceptionalism. But it ends with a circular argument where culture is special because it is special. Of course we can agree that culture is special. But it should be noted, that it is also highly plastic, adapting itself to, and echoing, changing material circumstances. The same goes for alleged, peculiar western institutions. They are made for fulfilling a pragmatic purpose, and the institutions that do not 'bend with the wind', will eventually 'break'. The 'sexual revolution' of the 1960's could be an example... be seen as a 'breaking down' of cultural mores by beatniks and French philosophers, and a loss of 'Christian Values'. But was it not also caused by the discovery of penicillin and 'The Pill'?

As a matter a fact we know 'Europe' only takes the economic lead after about 1800, and we know that this is due to the 'industrial revolution'. The exploitation of the western colonies in order to gain surplus currency to access oriental markets, had been important up to that point. (Occidental gold and silver, and shipping, because few 'Western' product were of high enough quality, to be of interest to the Asian market, until the westerners also started dealing in drugs and erotic art.) Frank does not completely decline the plausibility of 'inherit qualities' or a longer period of preparation for this jolt in European productivity, and he explains it best in his own words:

“But it was not so thanks to any of the 'qualities' and 'preparations' alleged by Weber, Marx and their many followers, including Landes still today, who observed nothing in Asia and only myths in Europe...Instead he [Vries] makes repeated references to possibly peculiarly European institutions. Since Vries does [can?] not specify or even name any, he conveniently also protects himself from any specific rebuttal. But I can assure him again, as the book already did, that every previously alleged European institutional exceptionalism has long since been knocked down as a straw man. To illustrate the point, I quoted what Hodgson wrote over thirty years ago already: "All attempts that I have yet seen to invoke pre-Modern seminal traits in the Occident can be shown to fail under close historical analysis….This also applies to the great master, Max Weber." If Vries can do better, let him.; but he would be well advised not just to refers us back to the tired old shibboleths of David Landes.”

He then proceeds to illustrate his point, by comparing the European surge by the rise of mammals, after the wiping out of the dinosaurs, meaning that the external economical factors of Indian and later Chinese relative decline, made room for European growth. Only because the surroundings changed, expansion was made possible.

“But Europeans [sic: Some European historians] have wasted nearly 200 years of time erroneously and uselessly examining their own allegedly obviously exceptional navel instead of looking for possible exceptional qualities that only became particularly useful due to an event largely extraneous to ... Europeans themselves.” In the wake of this feud, some good work was done to explore the subject further. Jack Turner's documentary 'What the Ancients knew' (2005), gathered a wealth of evidence supporting what Frank already claims, especially in relation to Chinese economic-force-superiority up until the 19th century."

An other example from the 'Occidentofile' perspective is Robert Bucholtz' lecture-series on the rise of modern western civilization. It is even more fitting for the place and period that will be discussed later in the paper. Bucholtz specialization is the English royal court, and he is therefore, quite familiar with England. Bucholtz' 'West' therefore, is a constantly eastwards growing
'West', into areas less known to him. The eastern border is at the outset of the lecture, in the period after the black death, drawn alongside the Rhine river, and, including Italy in the south. 'The West' to Bucholtz is as much a state of mind, as it is a geographical term, and as time progresses, more areas mature into this proposed (English) mindset. It is an Anglo-centric proposal, connecting to 'The West', things that are considered virtues in Bucholtz' culture today. A more critical interpretation of the lecture would give us, that what happens actually has the opposite causal effect of what is suggested by the narrative of Bucholtz. -As England integrates values and techniques from abroad, this shapes England. The protestant reformation takes place in the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation', and as we know, some of its principles are adopted in England. Suddenly the H.R.E. is party to Bucholtz' narrative of the 'West'. It is a case of 'tailor-fitting' the data to fit with a preordained result.

This poses a problem to us, because it follows that 'The West' of Bucholtz, Ferguson and Landes is seen from a tunnel, opening in the direction of what they express to hold dear. Then, the 'West' is not the dictatorships of Franco or Pinochet, even though both were situated in the the West? Is it not the slums of former 'Western' colonies? Is it not the 'antebellum' United States, where the Congressmen wrote in high-born poetic prose about freedom, to hide the fact they were owning slaves? - And something that is too often under-communicated: The situation of the African slave, is not all to unlike to the situation of the European peasant from the 16th to the 19th century. Is 'The West', not the cheap labor of children in the coal-mines of South Yorkshire, that fueled the industrialization of England, and the constant state-sponsored murder of those that opposed the exploitation? Winston Churchill may not have had Gandhi murdered, as Adolf Hitler allegedly suggested to him. But the Great British Empire surely had no problem with starving away, both the Irish, and Indians, or the inhabitants of White-chapel. The Royal Navy did in the end contribute its bit to halt the slave-trade, but only after the criminalization of the trade in 1807. It took, however, until the late 1860's, before total compliance to this act was forced through. We could go on, the examples are many, -of what 'we do not want' 'The West' to be. But what is 'The West', or rather, what would we like it to be? -In this context, it is Parliamentary systems, the rule of law, and the freedom of private enterprise and property. Liberty and justice, checks and balances, prosperity and the right to voice ones opinion. Features that Niall Ferguson in his latest book dubbed “the six killer-apps of western civilization”. A problem is of course that many of these institutions, and freedoms, first materialize much later than even 1800. Through unions and 'class-struggle' (*in a broader sense of the word). Equal voting and legal rights, never materialised during the existence of the Great British Empire, and on the mother-isle, they only became reality in 1928. In Ferguson's U.S.A., It took until 1965 for these basic civil rights to be signed into law by president L. B. Johnson.

It seems, every time that non-European state-formations have stability, their governments can inherently within this discussion be described as despotic or tyrannical. “Freedom” from this sort of government supposedly leads to innovation and development, caused by market-like competition and exchange. There is a different perspective on development in general. There is a certain truth to the words of Hobbes; that the 'freedom' of the 'barbarian' might be nasty brutish and short. The least developed areas of today are at the same time the most unstable and conflict ridden ones. Order was prevalent in the East, when these areas up until about 1800, also had a technical lead, on poor, war-torn, Western Europe: Stability equals surplus of capital, surplus of capital; wealth, equals innovation, because it reduces relative risk when it is affordable to take a loss. In modern firms research and development is the relatively, most costly sector, and access to capital, and a large amount of surplus-capital, distributed among a large part of a population will open the possibility for innovation to a aggregated extent. In Ferguson's narrative the end of the Ming dynasty in China and the factionalism and wars that followed, are a definitive triggers of decline and stagnation of development. But he has no quarrels with portraying this same sort of contemporary fractioning, as the institutional strength of Europe, spurring proto capitalist competition. It is a total contradiction, spurring doubts about the reliability of the competition narrative, as a European advantage.

All in all, it is a question of perspective, of focus, and of intent, when one wants to write about 'The West'. Another challenge is of course also that the 'West' has changed over time. It has not always been as ideal, as the connotations to the term may imply. As we will see, historical thinking and historical accuracy can be a huge challenge. 'The Cult of British Exceptionalism' does in this regard also overemphasize and distort the subject when handled by many 'Western' historians, forcefully superimposing present structures on the past. Davis' “Late Victorian Holocaust”, is an exception from the rule. -A rare example of the opposite, as it rather focuses on the brutal, 'despotic' manner in which the 'Victorians' of Great Britain, spread 'Western Civilization' in order to exploit and enslave the world.

It seems quite likely that the 'Cult of British Exceptionalism', is a result of non-recognition of the exceptional ceterius paribus development, that the surplus accumulation of the Industrial Revolution, the harnessing of immense amounts of natural power for human needs, caused, for what it was: A brief fluke of West-European material-wealth-superiority. Because some gentlemen had unlocked the secret of turning heat into motion, giving them and their peers a leading role for two hundred years. Of course it was extraordinary, like the locomotive suddenly speeding up, next to the horse and cart. There was a need to culturally explain it, ex post factum, so historians and thinkers started making up stories, cultivating plausible explanations for the fluke. Like Marx, writing his short essay on the positive effect of British imperialism in India. Or Weber, inventing the tasty, elegant theory about how 'Jesus and Luther caused factories to be built'. It is about as verifiable as the Book of Genesis. It is of course also a philosophical question, where the person trained in a tradition of Hegelian idealism will undoubtedly be looking for 'the emperor's new robe' cheering, while enthusiastically not seeing it.

As a last thought on this issue; maybe it was not enough, or maybe it was to vulgar, for the Europeans, starting our craft of writing histories, back during their age of industrial revolution, that the 'political power had grown out of the barrel of a gun', -that had been mass produced. For Harald 'Haarfagre', one of the first kings in Norway, it had not been enough simply to be King, by holding
a sword either. He had traced his linage back to Methusalem The Old, Jupiter, King Priamos of Troy and the Norse God-King Odin. Caesar had claimed to be the heir of Venus, and Swedish noble houses of the 17th century traced them selves back to Atlantis of legend. So why not claim to be the noblest race? Have the purest blood? And a to be in possession of a special, inventive, mind? The
best Kings and the finest state-institutions, or the best culture? Or can we content ourselves with the fact, that turning heat, into motion, into work, into wealth, is miraculous enough? Landes' friend in arms, Samuel Huntington sums it up elegantly when he writes: “The West won the world, not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

Comments? Questions? :)