Dan Snow's History Hit - Everything You Need to Know about the Anglo-Saxons

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

The Anglo-Saxon period is vital for the formation of England and the UK as we know it but is a difficult era to fully understand. The departure of the Romans left a power vacuum that was filled by warlords with violence, foreign invasion, occupation and religious strife being endemic. But out of this turbulent period the foundation of what we now call England came into being. Dan is joined by Marc Morris one of the most distinguished medieval historians in the world and author of a new book called The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England. Marc guides us through these difficult centuries separating truth from legend and illuminating this dark period in history.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I am Dan Snow, talking to you. This is now happening. A few years ago, I was out drinking with Mark Morris, who's one of the most distinguished medieval historians, I think, in the world. We're out drinking. I said, what are you doing next? He said, I've got a plan. He said, bear with me, bear with me. I'm going to write a history of the Anglo-Saxons. And you could see the look of mixed terror and admiration, admiration for his bravery that passed across my face. And let me tell you, folks, the book's now landed. It is a masterpiece. You know, in The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves is like, I need to learn Kung Fu. And so Morpheus just runs that program. And then he just knows Kung Fu. I've always felt like I

just need to get my early medieval British history sorted. So the Romans leave, William the Conqueror arrives, I need to get those intervening centuries sorted out. And I've always wanted to be able to recite the English king list all the way from Alfred and his successors through to Edward the Confessor and William, where obviously it becomes easy. And you know what? This book allowed me to do that.

This book is the equivalent in the matrix of someone plugging something into your head. It just sorts you out, sorts you right out. I now know who Edward the Elder's sons were. After Athelstan, you get Edmund, you get Edred, then you get Edwig. I know that I'm so happy with myself and it's all because of Mark Morris. It's all because of this brilliant book. This is everything you need to know about early English history. Go and get this book. Go and read it. It's wonderful.

It's everything you need to know about early English history. He's coming on the podcast now to talk about it. It's a great pleasure to have him on. It's a big episode, this, folks. We're going to get everyone up to speed. If you want to go and watch some early English history, don't worry. We've got some on History Hit TV. You may have heard me mention it before, but it's the world's best history channel.

It's like Netflix, but just for history. You're going to love it. Head over to historyhit.tv. I think we might have a Mark Morris project coming, actually. It's in the works. So head over and subscribe, and your money will be spent on Mark Morris getting out and about. You're going to love it. But in the meantime, everyone, here is the man himself talking about the Anglo-Saxons, talking about early English history. Enjoy.

Mark Morris, thank you as ever for coming back on the podcast, returning champion. It's always good to be here. You have just written a gigantic history of the Anglo-Saxons. In fact, it's a gigantic history of the bit in British history between the Romans leaving and William the Conqueror arriving. Yeah. I mean, they're the conventional dates, kind of circa 400 to 1066. It was an interesting one to write, and I've been thinking about it a lot in recent months

because obviously we're trying to summarise six and a half centuries in 30 minutes or so. But what's fascinating about it is people's misapprehensions about it. Because when you do this at school, you do it when you're nine or 10 or earlier. Both my kids now are towards the end of their primary school days, and I've done it with them. And I remember doing it when I was that similar age, nine or 10, and you carry those simplistic explanations of this whole period throughout your whole life. I found myself doing the same thing with the Normans and the Romans. And it's only when you go back as an adult and you start to sort of read around the subject in general, you realise that it's obviously a very complicated period, but a very difficult period to examine because the source material is

so sparse compared to later periods, which is why I think it ends up being done with younger children, not just because it's chronologically early, because there's very little you can say to younger children about it. You say they lived in houses like this and they wore trousers like that and they ate food like this. And then you move on to something where you've got a more clearly delineated narrative and more in-depth sources. And yet it's a period in which the political geography of Britain as we understand it today is basically thrashed out. This idea that this archipelago has got people called Scots and English and Welsh living on it. This is the seedbed of our modern world. Yeah, I mean, certainly it is the formative.

I mean, the subtitle of the book is History of the Beginnings of England. And before anyone gets too carried away with the idea that we might be examining Picts and Scots and Irish and whatnot, they come into the book in as much as they interact with the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, etc. in what becomes England. At the start of the book, let's start there. jutes, et cetera, in what becomes England. At the start of the book, let's start there, the premise is the two most famous things that spring to mind when I ask people on Twitter, what comes to mind when you say Anglo-Saxon? And they said, by a very long margin, the two most popular answers were Harold at the Battle of Hastings and the Sutton Hoo ship burial.

Now, I imagine that Sutton Hoo would be even more ahead now because of the dig of the Netflix film. But I thought it was very interesting because they could hardly be further apart chronologically, those two things. We put them in the same category. And yet, if you look at what England was like in 1066, I mean, it was called England. It was called England from the end of the 10th century, the beginning of the 11th century. And it was a familiar world, quite familiar to us. So you had things in it like shires and sheriffs and boroughs and prosperous market towns and ports and a silver economy and bishops and cathedrals and abbeys. And this was all sort of recognizably medieval or even high medieval, late medieval. I said Harold would

probably be happier or more familiar, more at ease in a world of the late Middle Ages than the period of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, which is early 7th century, at a time when most people were still pagan and England didn't exist, that it was a galaxy of smaller competing polities, that all of these things that I've just talked about, all these things that we associate with later medieval England, had not yet been invented. And so that the narrative course of the book, such as it is, is how do you get from that one state of affairs to the other? In other words, how does England come to be? You mentioned earlier the lack of source material for the 5th, 6th centuries. Can I be very naughty? No serious historian uses the term Dark Ages anymore. But how opaque,

how dark was the period after the Romans left? Well, this is the thing. You say no serious historian uses it until they need to. You'll still see Dark Ages appear in the subtitles of very serious historians' books because their publishers advise them to do that. So it's a term that's fallen out of favour since the early 1970s because it was applied generally to the post-Roman period, no matter where you were in Europe or in what was the Roman Empire. And of course, large parts of the Roman Empire continue to sort of, you know, muddle on quite well, thank you very much. So the eastern part of the Roman Empire continues as Byzantium for another thousand years. The more Romanised parts of the Roman Empire, if you like, so obviously places like Italy and the Balkans and to a much lesser extent, Gaul, there are different levels of continuity of Roman, for want of a better word, civilization. So technology, sophistication, the economy, you know, all those things you might wrap up in that term. Whereas in Britannia, it seems that we are looking at a much greater degree of collapse,

almost kind of all systems collapse, you know, where once the empire pulls out, or once the empire is sent packing, that the economy goes into freefall. And what replaces the political structure is basically warlordism. Because as you say, the source material is so meagre for this period. Historians will debate the speed of that collapse and the scale of that collapse. But there's no doubt that just in terms of the written record for the, you said the fifth and sixth centuries, we've got a British writer in the West of Britain called Gildas. And that's about it. We've got no other native voices. We've got some continental sources that occasionally mention in passing what's going on in Britain, but how much reliance

can we place on one sentence written in the Balkans about what's going on in Britain? So it's very hard to know what's going on and therefore opaque. Now, whether you want to call that the Dark Ages or not is up to you, I think. But there's no question that Britain in this period is very hard to make out what's going on. And the lack of written sources isn't just an unfortunate library burning down in which lots of sources were lost. I mean, it seems to me those sources weren't being written down because no one was around with the time and the money and the support staff to write them down, right? That's an indication of breakdown itself. Yeah, you've got two things. You've got one, Gildas, who, as I say, the only written source

we have. I mean, we've got the life of St. Patrick, but Gildas is the principal source people think of as a written source, and he has all kinds of problems. But one of the things he says is, I'm having to kind of make this up on the hoof because all the books I might have had were destroyed. All the libraries basically have gone. And of course, the people who Gildas is complaining about as the enemy in this period are the Saxons, people coming from overseas and settling in the east of Britain and struggling against the Britons who were in it. east of Britain and struggling against the Britons who were in issue. He complains about the destruction by sort of war and fire of any records he might have had. And the people coming in, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc., many, many other peoples from southern Scandinavia and northern Europe, Germania, are illiterate. So they're not writing anything down. The first written sources kick in in the early

7th century, once Christianity returns, and with it, literacy, the power of the book. Archaeology is interesting in this period in your book, because you also point out that people were burying things in enormous quantities, particularly in the 5th century. Are you talking about hordes? Yeah. It starts off with a discovery made in 1992, which is the Hoth century. Are you talking about hordes? Yeah. It starts off with a discovery made in 1992, which is the Hoxham Horde in Suffolk. And hoarding does seem to be something that's going on increasingly

as Rome and Britain starts to decline. So in the late 4th century and into the 5th century, people are putting hordes in the ground at a rate of knots and putting really substantial treasures in. And again, because we have no written sources, the motivation for putting things in the ground at a rate of knots and putting really substantial treasures in. And again, because we have no written sources, the motivation for putting things in the ground is debated. And some people latterly have suggested, well, perhaps this was ritual. Well, ritual basically is the cover all explanation when you don't know what they're doing. But it seems to me there's one

thing that makes people put their valuables in the ground across all centuries. And that motivation is fear, fear that someone else is going to take them off you if you don't conceal them. And I think that's clearly what's going on in the case of the Hobson hoard. So there's that. Moving forward a bit into the centuries that follow, we've got archaeology in the form of grave goods, because the newcomers are burying people with valuables. And it's not just the newcomers as well. I mean, this is where I'm going to sort of tie myself into knots because I'm not an archaeologist. But as I understand it, the old interpretation was you found people buried with grave goods and you said,

all these grave goods look to be Saxon, all these grave goods look to be Anglian. And therefore, all the people in these graves must be newcomers. And there's absolutely no trace of the Romano-British population. But that doesn't take into account the fact that Romano-British people could have been using the same goods and being buried with Saxon artefacts, and they could have just taken these new cultural items on quickly. So it's very difficult to determine the identity of the people in the graves just from the artefacts. So it's fraught with interpretive difficulties this period. And let's ask the other big one, which is this extraordinary pendulum that seems to swing back and forth and has now been made even more interesting and important by genetics, which is,

did these Germanic peoples genocide everybody and ethnically cleanse the eastern and then central part of this archipelago of this island or was it elite replacement and all the romanized britons who found themselves living in a place called england eventually adopted the english tongue and these burial customs for example and it's in the book you know you talk about wales and that's the same root word as walton or wallingford is it wally or something means foreigner means basically British. Yeah, Wallace is stranger, foreigner. Stranger, yeah.

So big question there. So the question is essentially, what's the scale of the immigration? And the answer is, we don't know. Traditionally, it was a vast tidal wave. And clearly, the answer to the first part of your question, is it genocide? Is it total extermination? No.

And the more modern arguments would say, well, it's virtually none at all. And again, I don't think that's a particularly convincing argument. And I do think the, not quite a consensus, there's no consensus in this period, but I think there's this kind of a broad agreement amongst historians that is a very substantial immigration, hundreds of thousands of people coming across, but nothing like as large as the existing population of Britain that's already in place. So the question is, how does these newcomers become the dominant culture? My two cents for what they're worth on this is that the people who are coming in have a much, much simpler way of life. I mean, when you look at the Roman Empire, there's people within

the empire and there's people on the fringes of the empire. And the people on the fringes of the empire are quite in themselves, quite Romanized because they interact across the frontier. But these aren't people who are brushing up against the Roman Empire. These are people far, far away in the cold north who are coming into Britain and altogether less sophisticated or put it more politely. They have a simpler way of life. So they build their own houses, they make their own tools. When you look at late Roman Britain, it's very sophisticated, and you have all these people living in towns, and you can go into the shops and buy things, and everything is very specialised. So, you know, I could have been Marcus the Mosaic Layer. Then when that economy collapses, my skills, the sort of specialist

skills, you know, that people would have today, they're worthless. What you need to be is basically a survivalist. You need to be able to kind of raise your own pigs and kill your own pigs and eat your own pigs and build your own house and fight for yourself. That's a very crucial thing. In the Roman period, as a civilian, you weren't allowed to bear arms. So the army would do the fighting for you and the army would protect you when people started to menace Roman Britannia. So when Pictish armies or Saxon raiders started to attack, the army would defend you. Once the army disappears and you're left to fend for yourselves, it's very difficult if you are from a long line of mosaic layers or potters. Whereas the people coming in are much better at fending for themselves. And I think

that's why they end up as the people in charge, because they're the people who are basically ruffians, if you like. But it is so remarkable. One of the interesting things about England is how the ancient British language, the Brynthonic, Welsh, Cornish language, as we would understand it today, it doesn't survive anywhere in England, does it? When was the last time any community could be identified as speaking ancient British anywhere within what is now, well, apart from Cornwall, what is now considered to be England? I don't think we have the source material for that. I mean, I saw it suggested somewhere recently that there's an 8th century source suggesting Brittonic was spoken in the Fens, but that's not the case. It's a misinterpretation of

that source. The honest answer is I don't know. Two centuries is a whole chunk of time. All we have is stuff we dig out the ground. So when you're saying, what were they speaking? The archaeology can tell us a lot of stuff, but it can't tell us what language they were speaking. So you're looking at written sources. The earliest written sources are 7th century. And then you end up looking at things like Bede and saying, well, how many Brittonic place names are there in Bede? So there's a lot of clever people who write a lot of stuff about this. But the fundamental answer is we don't know where there were British speaking communities in, say, the middle of the 6th century. And if there was a cultural line where it was drawn. Well, you come to this podcast for answers, folks. Well, do you know what, Dan? We've talked

for God knows how long about chapter one. We should point out there are nine other chapters in the book. Okay, no, you're absolutely right. Let's move on to the, as you say, warlordism. I was very struck reading your book, how absolutely insecure these ruling dynasties were. Actually, I was struck by the fact that Alfred, I knew he'd inherited from his older brother and from their father, but even that dynasty was pretty box fresh. Like there were virtually no dynasties in your book that go beyond about two or three generations until you get to Wessex in the ninth century, right? It's amazing. Yeah, put it this way, I didn't bother putting any family trees in the book until we got to the 9th century. Because a lot of older family trees,

of course, this is what people like to do with their families. They like to say, oh yes, well, I can trace my family all the way back to Woden, and I can trace it all the way back to whatever. And that's what they were doing in the 8th century. We've got 8th century genealogies that claim descent all the way back to Hengist and Horser or, you know, their founding fathers. And in order to present yourself, it seems, as a credible candidate for the throne, you claim descent from one of those lineages. But it's pretty clear that it was a bun fight when any of these leaders died, especially in the earlier period. I don't think it's quite as unstable all the time. I was thinking about this recently, and the 7th century and the 8th century strike me

as kind of reasonably stable. The bit that's really kind of exciting not to live through, but to read about, is the period when kingdoms are emerging. So if you go back to the sort of late 6th, early 7th century, a period that's pretty well narrated by Bede, when you've got these kingdoms suddenly kind of exploding and coalescing so whereas you start off with 20 30 god knows how many kingdoms the big players are starting to emerge in that period described by bead so this is where you suddenly start to see mercia and northumbria and east anglia and kent etc wessex as well suddenly emerging and loggerheads with each other I think it calms down a bit into the 8th century and you get that big hegemony of Mercia in the south but then of

course you get into the 9th century you get the Vikings who sort of upset the apple cart again so yes there's a certain itchy and scratchy quality to the narrative of these years which is hard to avoid when you're describing them. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, I'm talking to Mark Morris, like the Anglo-Saxons, more after this. Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, I'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belefgeth to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower.

Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. why do those big kingdoms coalesce the heptarchy is that to do with christian ideas scribes scholars bureaucracies romanitas being reintroduced are they the key kind of civil servant engine rooms of these larger kingdoms that are coalescing? Again, the answer is we don't know. I mean, there's another question about continuity in some parts. I mean, Kent, Lincolnshire, places like that.

They seem to have similar contours to the Roman administration that have been there in the past. And also similar names. I mean, Kent is a survival that goes back to the pre-Roman period. Why geography, probably? I mean, it's the physical geography. East Anglia is kind of like, there's a lot of marshland to its west, so it's more of a sort of difficult region to access. So that isolates East Anglia. Mercia, for example, Mercia starts off small and it's the Trent Valley, the upper Trent Valley. And it's just the ability to expand in every direction until you're resisted. So Mercia and Wessex, the divide between them is the Thames.

It's contested. At some points, Mercia waxes strong and they cross over the Thames. At other points, Wessex, particularly in the 10th century, as we know, 9th century for that matter, Wessex is pushing against the Thames into Mercia. But the watersheds of the major rivers is probably as good an answer as any as to why power stops and starts in certain places. What about Englishness? At what stage is there a sense that these kingdoms are often at war and yet they are English. And does that mean there is a sense of fraternity between them in a way that doesn't exist when the Northumbrians, for example, are looking out over the Pictish people to the north? I don't know about fraternity. I think

one of the key things for dividing up peoples in this period is language. And when you look at what Bede says, when he's writing in his present day of the early 8th century, he says in Britain, there are, I think there's five languages. There's the Irish language, there's the Pictish language, there's the English language, there's the Brittonic language, and there's Latin. And that's the way he's lumping peoples together. And Bede sees a community amongst all the English, as he calls them. So it's interesting. Sometimes he uses Anglorum or Angle and has a narrow sense of it as meaning people in Northumbria. And other times he uses it as a catch-all. I mean, basically, in this period, especially the early part of the period, they call themselves Angles and Saxons.

By and large, in the South, it's Saxons that Saxons give us the names of the kingdoms like Wessex, the West Saxons, Essex, the East Saxons, Sussex, the South Saxons, etc. And as we move on through the period, the notion that people are English starts to win out. It takes a while. It's interesting that there's a part when Athelstan is conquering everything, basically, that later is known as England in the 920s. There's a poem, a celebratory poem, written about his conquest of Northumbria. And the poet says, this was done by a Saxon army, by a Saxon king. And now all the Saxon peoples are together. And he talks about Ista Saxona Perfecta, this Saxon land made whole.

And yet, if you look at Athelstan's charters, he starts describing himself at that point as Rex Anglorum, which becomes the default king of the English. So there's still a sense even into the 10th century in which are we Saxons, are we Angles? But Englishness increasingly, certainly by the 10th century, if not the 9th century, wins out. And I guess like many national identities, that is then reinforced by massive foreign threat in terms of the Vikings. That process takes place alongside, or perhaps because of, this gigantic existential threat to Englishness. One of the things that helps to define you as a people, as you say, is external threat. Who are

we not? So in the first instance, and this is one of the things that really struck me actually as someone who was new to the early period. I'd done the late Anglo-Saxon period by virtue of doing Norman conquests a lot earlier in my career. But looking at the immediate post-Roman period, one thing that's very clear is the antipathy between the English or the Anglo-Saxons on the one hand and the Britons or the Welsh on the other. My sense is the English and the Welsh now rub along pretty well in the modern period. That's my sensation. But when you go back to the origins of that ethnic divide between English and the Welsh, stuff Bede says, I mean, Bede seems to be quite a sort of laid back guy until you get him onto that subject.

When he's talking about a pagan Anglian king making war on the Britons in the late 6th century. And the Britons, of course, are Christian. Bede is a very big advocate of Christianity, talking about an Anglo-Saxon pagan king attacking British Christians. And his attitude is basically, in regard to the Britons, serves them right. They had it coming. And the vitriol in that divide. I mean, that's why you get offers dyke. There's no strategic reason for building that barrier. It might stop cattle rustling, but would you build 150 mile long linear earthwork, the biggest linear earthwork in Europe, in order to stop cattle rustling? No. But if you wanted to make a point about this is where our people end, we're keeping out you guys,

that seems to be very striking. So in the first instance, what I'm saying is the English define themselves, I was saying, well, we're not British. We don't speak this incomprehensible tongue that they speak. So they're categorizing people in that way. And then in the ninth century, with the advent of the Vikings, it's, we are Christian, and these guys are pagans. These are heathen men. They never described them as Vikings. They're describing them as Danes or heathen men is the constant thing. So that, again, is building a sense of not national identity yet, but certainly Christian English identity. It helps Alfred to say, Alfred styles himself king of the Anglo-Saxons. He starts saying, you know, well, Angles, Saxons, but we have this community and we are not heathens. So it's again,

that sense of corporate identity is born out of the adversity of struggling against another. Was it just a product of the pattern of Viking invasion that Wessex just happens to luckily be the furthest westerly English kingdom and therefore was sort of the last place, or actually it was the first place to be attacked by Vikings, but it was also the last. I don't think it was the first. I think that first place thing is a red hair. Sorry, it always gets my goat. I think the first place to be attacked was clearly not the first place because there are mentions in charters, but it's the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Northern Annals say that Lindisfarne was attacked. And then later you get the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says, oh no, no, there were some guys who attacked Portland. But they don't say 789. They say in the reign of King whatever his name was, Biotric,

which could be any point in the 790s. But I think that's Wessex kind of saying, no, no, no, we were attacked first. Anyway, I digress. Okay. Well, that's useful because it's a lot neater if it is, in fact, the bit closest to Scandinavia. That would make sense. But clearly there is raiding going on before that because we have mentions of raids in the charters of King Offa. There's certainly one, at least, before 793. But to go back to your actual important question as to why Wessex. Well, Wessex was under attack, no question. I think Wessex acquitted itself well in the first half of the 9th century. But then again, we've only got the account of the Wessex Kings. We've only got the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There might have been an equally heroic tale of resistance in Mercia or East Anglia

until you get to 866 and the arrival of the Great Heathen Army, as the Chronicle calls it, when those kingdoms start falling like dominoes. And I think in that sense, it was Wessex's good fortune that they went for East Anglia first and Northumbria second, Mercia third, which they topple. And I think by that stage, for all the kind of reputation that the Vikings have for fury and skill in battle, et cetera, they're running out of steam and they're already settled in those areas, those kingdoms I've just described. And at some point in the mid-870s, the great heathen army splits up

and starts to settle in the mid-870s, that the great heathen army splits up and starts to settle in various parts of those kingdoms. So although let's not run Alfred down, he does very well in retrieving Wessex after Wessex itself is conquered in the beginning of 878. But by that stage, bits of what had been a huge horde had started to settle places like Northumbria and East Anglia. So Alfred is not in quite the same boat as, say, King Edmund of East Anglia, later Saint Edmund. Is the political state of England another name for Wessex? Is it a successful rebranding exercise by Alfred, Edward and Athelstan? No, I don't think so. It's not the case that they go into these areas and have nothing to work with.

The nice, interesting question is, to what extent are these areas that they go into Scandinavianised, if you like? To what extent have they been settled by Vikings? Again, unknowable question, unknowable because we don't have the data, but tens of thousands of Scandinavian settlers. But those people becoming the elite in those areas. What's lost in the course of the creation of what's later known as the Dane law? Christianity, at least organised Christianity. So all those famous monasteries, minsters that Bede talks about being founded in the 7th and 8th centuries, they're all destroyed in the Dane law. Organised Christianity in the form of bishoprics disappears in the Dane law. So one of the things that's happening as the kings of Wessex advance into the

former kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria is a process of re-Christianisation, of founding new minsters in the 10th century, new monasteries and reviving bishoprics in those areas. I'm trying to think of your original question, to what extent are they imposing their ideas of Englishes? I don't think there's that particularly. I think throughout the whole period, there is a sense of, we speak the same language, and they have this common history of, we came over in the 5th century and beat the Britons. One of the things in the Brunanborough poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, again, a poem that's deliberately trying to present Mercians and men of Wessex as brothers in arms. It says at the end

of that poem, there was no greater victory. I can't remember quite what the line was, but they hadn't won such a great victory since they came over as Angles and Saxons in the 5th century and defeated the Britons. So there's that sense of like, we have this shared heritage. That's what the kings of Wessex are able to work with. They impose new things. They impose shires on the Midlands. The Midlands hadn't previously been shired. They impose a single coinage on the whole kingdom. So there's a later chapter of the book about St. Dunstan, it's called The Pursuit of Uniformity. And that period in the 10th century is crucial in giving these common institutions and common standards, governmental institutions and legal institutions

across the whole of England. So that's a crucially important period, 10th century. And I noticed in your book that many of the eventual earls, these royal deputies in a place like Northumbria, they are often locals. Yes. I mean, not all the time. That sort of waxes and wanes. It depends whether you want someone there to sort of do your bidding or whether you're exercising a softer power. One example I'm thinking of, you might be thinking of, is when Alfred annexes Western Mercia in circa 880. This is clearly not popular in Western Mercia. I mean, Western Mercia doesn't want to have the Vikings terrorising them or ruling them, doesn't want Danish rulers. At the same time,

they would rather be independent from Wessex. They don't want Alfred annexing the West Midlands. So what Alfred does is he promotes, if you like, or recognises, perhaps it's a better word, a chap called Æthelred. I've had to struggle with all these names because, of course, some of them you want to say in the original Old English pronunciation, and other times we have kind of modern Victorianised pronunciations. So we call him Æthelred. We have to call his wife Æthelflad, even though we might call it... Anyway, blah, blah, blah. He's called Æthelred. And Alfred recognises him as Ealdaman, Earl, as he would later be known, of Mercia. This man might have been king in a different set of circumstances, but Alfred treats him with as much dignity as he can give him.

He's a local Mercian guy, clearly a bigwig. He's married to Alfred's daughter. So Alfred showers him with rewards and promotions, and yet he's not allowed to be king of Mercia. So that's an example of using Rene Alderman as a local person. There are other times, I mean, towards the end of the period, when it goes badly wrong, when the Godwin family are in charge, Edward the Confessor starts appointing people to the North who have no experience of the North. So Tostig Godwinson is the opposite of that example. The only thing that's Northern about him is his name. He's a Southerner by upbringing, and he doesn't go down well as an imposed governor of the North. As I asked that question, I did think, oh no, Tostig's a terrible counter-example of this.

Well, as I say, it depends on the time period. It depends on the circumstances, whether you want to wave the big stick or appease the local magnates. We've done so much in the 11th century with you in the past. I'll just skip over the Norman conquest, but I guess I want to finish by saying, why do we in this country feel that 1066 is such a discontinuity? And one of the best manifestations, of course, is that all the king lists start with William the Conqueror. You know, you still go to shops and museums and buy postcards and posters and tea towels of William the Conqueror as number one. There's a sense of a refounding, a dramatic disconnect, which as I've learned in your books about the 11th century, William the Conqueror indeed never wished. He wanted to

portray himself as a continuity candidate. And many of his descendants, for example, one of the reasons that Edward the Confessor was such a useful royal saint. Why do we feel somehow we teach it as a kind of distinct and isolated part of our history land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Okay, I thought you were going to finish that question by saying why do we teach it at such a break. I mean, I think the short answer to the question is because 1066 is a real important, significant break, no question. I would say that, wouldn't I, as the author of a book on 1066, to say it's a really big rupture. To me, there's no argument about that. In terms of the landowning elite, it's the biggest devastation they ever suffer.

By any kind of measure, 1066 is this great rift with the past. And that was felt at the time. I mean, when you say, well, why do we treat 1066 as like a starting point? Because not quite the first English historians, but the first English historians after the conquest. So you've got people like Bede writing beforehand in the early 8th century. But the sort of founding fathers, if you like, or the great original English historians, people like Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, to a lesser extent, John of Worcester, writing in the early 12th century, in the second quarter of the 12th century, they realised that 1066 is such a rupture and the sources are so inadequate, they start to write these really full histories, the history of the English people or the history of the kings of

England, in the case of William of Malmesbury. And William of Malmesbury had this great sentence about wanting to mend the broken chain of our history, because there's a sense that the conquest is such a rupture. So the idea that the Norman conquest is kind of a great gulf is not the invention of, say, 19th century historians or even 16th century Tudor historians. You know, the way that certain national myths kick off as a result of the Civil War or the Reformation. This is a narrative that goes right back to the generation after it happened. People going, whoa, the world rocked off its system, didn't it? Let's see if we can fix that. So I think there's good reason to have a book that begins in the 5th century and ends in

1066. Having said all of that, the point I conclude the book on is there are deep continuities, that it is just the end of another chapter. And there are lots of things that are established in the course of the period that the book covers that continue to the present day. The fact that the head of the English church is based at Canterbury is due to the fact that St. Augustine, when he arrived to convert the English or the Saxons or the Jutes or whoever they were in Kent in 597, Canterbury was the capital of Athelbert of Kent. Why is the political heart of the United Kingdom Westminster? Because Edward the Confessor decided he wanted an abbey, a Westminster, on that spot and he wanted a palace beside it. Why are English place names, why do they end in ing and ham, etc.? Because those communities were created

originally in the 6th or 7th centuries. So there's huge political change in 1066. It's a very good point to stop a book. You've got to stop a book somewhere. But as I say, there are continuities that go right back into that early period. And it is a fascinating period to try and find out about. Well, I think like William of Malmesbury, you have tried to fix the broken chain of history. So thank you very much for doing that. And we didn't even scratch the surface of your wonderful book, but thanks for coming on the podcast and talk about it. As always, a true pleasure. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I'm here to make a podcast I'm here enduring

weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys in return I've got a little tiny favour to ask if you could go to wherever you get your podcasts if you could give it a five-star rating if you could share it if you could give it a review I really appreciate that

then from the comfort of your own homes you'll be doing me a massive favour then more people will listen to the podcast we can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. you