Dan Snow's History Hit - The 'Dark Ages' with Michael Wood

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Lasting 900 years, the ‘Dark Ages’ were between the 5th and 14th centuries, falling between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Today’s guest overturns preconceptions of the ‘Dark Ages’ as a shadowy and brutal era, showing them to be a richly exciting and formative period in the history of Britain.For more than 40 years, historian and broadcaster Michael Wood has made compelling journeys into the past, which have brought history alive for a generation. Michael joins Dan on the podcast for the 40th anniversary of his ‘In Search of the Dark Ages’ - an unrivalled exploration of the origins of English identity.Alongside portraits of Boadicea, King Arthur, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, and William the Conqueror, the story of England is expanded further to include new voices on fascinating characters such as Penda of Mercia, Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians, Hadrian the African, Eadgyth of England, and Wynflaed.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a legend on the podcast today, Michael Wood. When I was a kid, when I was a kid, not so very long ago, only about 40 years, I was an unusual kid and I used to love history shows. I loved Ken Burns' US Civil War. Curiously, my family used to like send me VHS tapes from Canada where it was on. They'd watch it in Canada, they'd send me VHS tapes to watch in the UK. And then I used to watch Michael Wood here in Britain on the BBC doing shows. And I examined the greats on the Conquistadors.

And the Ur show, the Ur show of modern TV history, the original, which was In Search of the Dark Ages that he made broadcast in 1981. And he was there in his super tight jeans, his cool clothes. And I thought, there you go. There's a historian. I want to be like. And I grew up and I'm not as like Michael Wood as I'd like to be. But you know what? I'm dealing with it. It's great to have Michael Wood on this podcast. What a pleasure. He's been on several times before. He's talked about his gigantic history of China.

He's talked about his life and career. Now he's talking about the fact that he's re-releasing, he's revised his book, In Search of the Dark Ages. He's left the title the same, though. You better watch his mentions on Twitter. I'll tell you what, The Dark Ages. The early medieval period, as we call it in the old 2020s. But he's Michael Wood.

He doesn't care. He's searching for the dark ages. And you know what? Fair play to him. It was great talking to him. It was particularly great talking to him because we've just exclusively covered this extraordinary early medieval, this dark ages dig, this 5th, 6th, 7th century cemetery that HS2, the high speed two rail link has uncovered.

And that documentary on history here has received massive attention. It's been in newspapers all over the world. the HS2, the high-speed two-rail link, has uncovered. And that documentary on History Hit has received massive attention. It's been in newspapers all over the world. Matt Lewis, whose podcast Gone Medieval covered it, and the TV show that I presented for History at TV seemed to have touched a nerve. So thank you very much, everyone, for watching that. And if you want to find out more about that dig in Wendover in the Chilterns, simply go to History at TV.

You follow the link in the notes of this podcast. You click on that little link and you can go and watch the documentary that so many people are watching about that dig and that cemetery. But Michael talks brilliantly about other recent archaeological breakthroughs at Sutton Hoo, big post-Roman villa excavations in the Cotswolds. And he reminds us that so much is left to learn about this period of our history. It's an exciting, dynamic period. It's an important period as well, as Michael Woods himself, the man, will tell you. Here he is. Enjoy. Michael, great to have you back on the podcast. It's nice to be with you.

We're still using the term Dark Ages. Only you're strong enough to do that. I'd be too scared. What's our thinking about the phrase Dark Ages? Oh, people get into a big, you know, huff about all this. I mean, I kept the title, of course, for sentimental reasons. You know, why wouldn't you? The book was called In Search of the Dark Ages 40 years ago.

But actually, I think that it still has a kind of usefulness. It was Petrarch, who is, you know, the Italian poet in the 14th century, is usually thought to have originated the term. And he's really looking back at the period after the fall of Rome, when things did indeed seem to be dark. But for a catch-all description for a popular audience of the immediate period after the fall of Rome, especially in Britain, you look at the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain, and it's the lack of source material that makes it so difficult and yet so intriguing. And actually, even people at the time thought there had been a period when things had fallen apart, if I can put it that way. You know, Alcuin, writing in Charlemagne's Court in the 8th century,

talks about a period which would be illuminated by the wisdom of Italy and Africa and Greece and so on, you know. So I don't have any problem about using it. How has your thinking changed? Because it's no history in its own right, Michael Wood. I mean, this is exciting stuff because you made that series in what, 1979 or something? The series was 1881. So it's 40 years, yeah. Amazing.

When I was approached to do a 40th anniversary edition last year by the Folio Society, actually, who did an absolutely exquisite edition of it, I just said to them, well, I have revised it at odd times over the period because it's been in print all that time in many different editions. It had only just come out in China,

can you believe that, last year? China of all places. I said, well, I really think it should have a proper revision because many big things have happened. You know, Sutton Hoo has been re-excavated really excitingly. You know, we've had these big discoveries-excavated really excitingly. You know, we've had these big discoveries like the Staffordshire Hoard and many other hoards. Metal detecting has transformed the subjects over the last 10 or 15 years.

And huge manuscript finds, really exciting manuscript finds. I said I'd like to rewrite it. And I said I'd also like to rewrite it because women's history was thin on the ground. It existed. Eileen Power had done a medieval women book of essays back in the 70s, I think. But we hadn't thought it was possible to do really rich biographies of women. And I said, I'd really like to have a go at that. So I wrote five new chapters, including Athelflaad, the Lady of the Mercians, Eadgyth, the daughter of Edward the

Elder, the sister of Athelstan, who married Otto and became Queen of Germany. She was the most important woman in Europe. And her tomb was opened in 2008. And sure enough, they were her remains inside it. You know, when the scientists analysed the bones, it was a woman aged around 36, which is when she died, who'd been brought up not in Germany, but in southern England, on a diet of largely of fish, who'd spent a life in the saddle, you know, everything fitted. The tomb that was said to be hers was hers. So I've done her, I've done Windflood, the grandmother of King Edgar, who's really interesting on many, many counts in terms of the women's movement of the 10th century. But also because her will survives.

The first will of a woman in British history may even be the first will. So I had a lot of fun rethinking it. And plus all sorts of other interesting the rise of civil society i mean some of the big things that we've been thinking about in the 10th century the origins of parliament has come back into focus with athelstan's assemblies but also what it struck me is the the origins of civil society so i did a portrait of winchester in the age of edgar when you've got incredible data on the kind of people who came to Winchester and worked in Winchester and then finally I've added an epilogue

with my dear old favourite William of Malmesbury the 12th century historian because his commentary on the book of Lamentations was published only a few years ago and in translation very recently and it gives you a whole new take on the Norman conquest from somebody whose parents, English and Norman, lived through it. So I actually had a lot of fun revising it. You'd look at it and you'd think, oh God, book that old. But with the new discoveries, it's been a gas actually. How has your thinking changed though about women's history for sure? Let's go back to the early bits, dark ages. We tend to say 410 AD, Romans leave Britain.

And then writing records pretty much stop, right? Well, they don't stop in what we used to call the Celtic fringe. You know, the Brittonic world is still a Christian world. And actually, there's so many discoveries still to be made. actually there's so many discoveries still to be made up till the late 500s there are still British run Roman cities in what's now western England not western Britain you know Bath and Cirencester and Gloucester still have British rulers with Roman British names up to 577 and the Christian church in those parts survives. One of the really interesting things that's come out of archaeological discoveries in the last few years, and also

examining the, it sounds teeth grindingly dull, but the tenurial history of churches in that part of the world. And you realise that, for instance, Worcester, there's a cathedral of Worcester today, but prior to the cathedral, which was founded in the 680s, the mother church of Worcester was the church of St. Helen, the mother of Constantine the Great. And the land ownership in Worcestershire still shows the pattern that St. Helen's was the big church in the early period and in the late Roman period. And of course, there are great examples like St. Albans, where you've got a major cult centre that was adopted by the English, but seems to have, looking at the excavations, have survived all the way through, even in St. Albans. So the narrative's been told by the English, really. So as these English, as these settlers, Germanic settlers

are coming over from Northern Europe and leaving wonderful newly found graves like the Prittlewell Royal Burial on the coast of Essex. So as you're looking at these, you're looking at Romano-British continuity in the west of the island of Britain and even in St Albans, amazing, I didn't know that. How has your feelings changed about the old issue of, did these settlers arrive? Was it sort of genocide? Was it mass population replacement? Was it elite replacement? What's going on, Michael, in that all-important fifth and into that sixth century in what we would now call England, particularly eastern and southern England? Yeah, it's an absolutely fascinating question, isn't it, Dan, and a perennial question. And I think there's a long, slow process. You know,

the DNA experts, the scientists tell us that if your family origin is in Britain before 1945, for most people, your ancestry will be two thirds pre-Roman. So you're not talking about mass displacement of population. The old English migrants who come in over a long period of time maybe add 12% to the gene pool of the British. Now we all speak English in England today, with a few exceptions in the Welsh border and returning Cornish, but language isn't ethnicity. And what you're talking about is a long, slow change. Old English or Anglo-Saxon migrants were there in the late Roman Empire. What was called the Saxon shore with those great forts all the way down the east coast of southern Britain and the south coast around a Porchester and those kind of places. They weren't only defending against the Saxon invaders.

They were probably populated by Saxons, by mercenaries, by service industries, and so on. So you're talking about a very, very long, slow change. And there are archaeological sites where you can see the transformation slowly moving from one to the other. Sometimes you get bases of Anglo-Saxon and Old English mercenaries who were there hired to protect the late Roman world and who first of all live in a mini town separate from the main town and then slowly you get merging and that goes all the way through the Cotswolds you know with big villa estates and you know there have been those discoveries recently, 2021, I think, the amazing data about the remaking of Roman mosaics in the fifth century

in these vast agri-businesses in the Cotswolds, in these huge villa estates. But alongside them, you get establishments of Anglo-Saxon, old English mercenaries who are there to protect. So the big question is, once you see this slow transformation of population in southern and eastern Britain, how did the monarchies originate? The myth of the monarchies is that the West Saxon Sir Dick and these kind of people

landed in the Solent and you've got these origin myths where people cross over the wide seas. And the English themselves believe that. The great poem about Brunanbur in the 10th century says, this was our greatest victory since we first came across the broad waves. We won ourselves a kingdom. So they had this myth that the Anglo-Saxons had come from the continent, which they did, but it wasn't the way they tell it. That's the intriguing thing. And in fact, the origins of the West Saxon monarchy, and therefore of our monarchy today, don't originate with Serdic landing in the Solent at all, because Serdic is a Welsh name. And what we know now is that from new archaeological discoveries is the origin of the

West Saxon kingdom in the, probably in the 500s,s maybe even the late 400s is in the Thames Valley and these early royal centres you know Stanton Harcourt and Wittenham and places like that this is where the West Saxon monarchy originated so they've spun as a great tale of Anglo-Saxon migrations the heroic taking of the land but actually you're talking about a process that took two or three hundred years, out of which these little kingdoms crystallized. Listen to Dan Snow's history. I'm talking to the legend Michael Wood. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's deal with the cliche. So 5th, 6th, 7th centuries until these reasonably big kingdoms crystallise. What are we talking, violent? Again, has your thinking changed? The traditional interpretation might be said, it was that Rome leaves, it's not coincidental,

it's imperial apogee with British historians and thinkers were rather fond of the Roman Empire and the quote-unquote order and civilisation it brought. So we were brought up a little bit with this idea that Rome leaves and everything gets really awful and violent and anarchic and unsophisticated in many ways. Is that changing now? How's your thinking changed on that? It's not my thinking. I'm really following the experts here. But our job is to kind of popularize the latest thinking. But of course, Rome doesn't leave. You know, this is the first big misunderstanding that we still have in public history, I think, is that the kind of Romans left. Of course, the Romans were the Britons. I mean, they couldn't leave because they lived here.

Yeah, it's like my kids always ask me when the Normans left and I go, yeah, it's so difficult. They're still here. Nobody leaves. That's the story of Britain, isn't it? Nobody leaves. They come. And as the great Roman panegyrics said, what a lovely place it is, you know, beautiful climate, beautiful, fertile soil. They don't leave. The Romans simply withdrew military support and said to the civitate, the city local administrations in Roman Britain, well, you're going to have to look after yourselves. And what we see is that from recent stuff

is that Romanitas survives a lot longer than we ever imagined. And in some places, it doesn't really end. I mean, Bede has a story of St. Cuthbert visiting Carlisle and the locals proudly show him the still working aqueduct. And somebody talks about a temple of Mars still being intact even later. So it depends where you are. But as I said before, the cities like Bath and Cirencester and Gloucester

in the late 500s still have civic authorities and rulers with British Roman names. But what happens in the 5th century is there's clearly a series of kind of civil wars. you know, led by the dictator Vortiga, who's obviously a real person, and other rulers who are also contesting the hegemony after Roman authority has gone. And there's shreds of evidence in later sources, like the Nennius, the early 9th century Welsh chronicler, he's kind of unreliable in many respects, but he records battles between somebody called Vitalinos and somebody called Ambrosius Aurelianus. Now, this guy Ambrosius, who was a leading person in southern late Roman, if you like, post-Roman society, he was real. He's referred to in Gildas, who's a contemporary

writer, really, as the leader of the Britons in a battle that he calls Mons Badonicus. as the leader of the Britons in a battle that he calls Mons Badonicus. Mount Badon fought against the Thames Valley Saxons. So I think you've got to imagine a rather confused situation. Now, Gildas, who's writing in the early 6th century, he does describe a lot of violence and a lot of destruction. There was a revolt of mercenaries, and the flames swept from one coast of the island to the other. And you can see he's writing polemically, but he is obviously, something

happened. There was a major explosion of violence. And the DNA people, they don't think there was at all an annihilation of the original population. That's not how history works. The original population survives and slowly they adopt the language of the ruling elites who have now come to dominate them, who are what we call Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. But there is a path of DNA from the Norfolk region across to the Trent Valley, which looks as if the British DNA is heavily reduced in that path. And you do wonder whether there was some kind of violent destruction of the local population there, or maybe they migrated out of the way of an invading force, which eventually founded the Kingdom of the

Mercians. So it's very, very complicated. Don't ask me for a straight narrative, Dan. In this 40-year gap, what's it like looking at your own words over 40 years ago? Did you say, God, I was a clever kid? Yeah, there are times when I go, did I know that? And there are times when I go, God, why did I say that? The funny thing is, of course, course 40 years ago there was no internet and really scrutinizing it you think oh god it was rather hastily written it was rather wishy-washy you can see that was written in a few hours in the middle of the night it needed improvement as well you see so but at the same time there's a kind of youthful panache about it, which matches the programmes, actually. The programmes are insane when you look at them now, you know.

I remember those leather jackets and tight jeans, Michael. I mean, we all thought you were cool. Where are the breakthroughs going to come in early medieval slash dark ages history over the next 40 years? Is it more archaeology? Is it osteology, skeleton analysis? What's exciting? Or are we going to find caches of documents and inscriptions on rock? Don't think we're going to find more documents, but you never know. But the archaeology, of course, is going to be major.

I mean, the number of hordes that have been discovered. You think recently, not just the Staffordshire Horde, but the Watlington Horde, the Harrogate Horde. And some of these have such interesting collections of material that you can date them almost to the month. The Watlington Horde, deposited by Guthrum's army as he retreated to East Anglia after his defeat at Eddington in May 878. Or the Harrogate Horde, deposited by some wealthy Anglo-Scandinavian Yorkshire person in the immediate turmoil of Athelstan's invasion of Northumbria in 927. And there's just going to be more of these. Metal detecting is absolutely stunning.

There may be more manuscript finds. I mean, all manuscripts that have survived from Anglo-Saxon England and fragments have now been catalogued. That's another major thing. It happened about six years ago, the publication, and it's a staggering resource. But that's not to say that every word of those manuscripts has been properly scrutinised and understood. So these can be big discoveries. The discovery which marks my chapter on what Bede called the happiest time, which was in the late 600s when Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, who was a Syrian, and Abbot Hadrian of Canterbury, who was a Libyan.

These were Syrian and Libyan refugees, unbelievably, who came to England and taught for 40 years and instituted the most important educational programme in our history, probably. The staggering discovery in a manuscript in Milan was of the teaching notes of their students in Canterbury. And they are literally taking the students, this set of notes is from the Bible, it's a massive text, and they're looking at the Bible text and they're saying to the students sitting there in the 60s, 80s, 90s in Canterbury saying, well, yeah, the Euphrates is a river in Iraq and blah, blah, blah. You know, one of the students says, well, what is a melon?

And Theodore goes, well, melons like a cucumber, only much, much bigger. In the city of Edessa in Syria, where he'd been educated, he said, they get so big that sometimes you can only fit two on one camel. You can almost imagine one of his students at the back going, excuse me, sir, what's a camel? These are fantastic. Abbott Hadrian talking about the Arabs and how they can never at peace with anybody. They were warlike because, of course, both Hadrian and Theodore had been driven from the eastern Mediterranean by the Arab invasions. And sometimes the glossing of texts. And these are now being discovered all over Europe.

There's a dozen other libraries where these teaching notes are being picked up. They were diffused over the whole of Europe. They were such a useful tool in post-Roman world for education. So there's not only biblical commentaries, but there are grammatical commentaries and historical and so on. There's even a wonderful little line where they're arguing over what the exact meaning of the word larum, larum. And the conventional gloss on this in the text that they were studying was it means a heron. It's a bird and a heron, you see. it means a heron. It's a bird and a heron, you see. And Abbot Hadrian, who was obviously a genius linguist, Libyan, fluent in Greek, fluent in Latin, probably a translator and diplomat as well

before he became abbot in Canterbury. And he goes, no, they thought it was translated by the word which means a heron. And he said, no, it's not a heron. It's, and he uses an old English word, it's a mule, which means a seagull. And it still means a seagull in Northern dialect in the North of England in some places. And so there you have him in a tiny little exchange, which a student dutifully scribbled down, where sometimes you catch them riffing off Greek, riffing off Latin. No, actually his old English is good enough to say, no, it's not that word, riffing off Latin. No, actually, his Old English is good enough to say, no, it's not that word, it's this word. So it's just absolutely mesmerizingly fabulous, these kind of discoveries. And there may be more of things like that, but archaeology is going to

be the big thing, I think. I mean, the Sutton Hoo re-excavation by Martin Carver was really, really interesting. They haven't excavated all of Sutton, of course. They've left some of Sutton ready for some future time when the science is even better. But they excavated, for example, among the many grave mounds there, they looked at the flattened mound of another big ship burial, the size of the famous one, which had been looted, perhaps in Tudor times.

And it's an incredible piece of work because they stripped the whole thing, discovered through a mass of fragments, tiny fragments, that the ship had been almost as big as the one that we know. And from the shreds of evidence, even though it had been looted of everything, they could reconstruct the metalwork, the treasures and everything else that were in it that were littered in tiny fragments of gold. A wonderful late Roman bathing tureen with an inscription on had been dug up by ploughmen near to Sutton Hoo, I think in the 1980s. And obviously the spread of destruction of the burial ground

had gone some way away and that had survived. It was a diplomatic gift, a beautiful piece of metalwork. And obviously it had come from the big ship burial. So that's another of the great East Anglian kings. So the whole sequence of kings has probably been worked out now for Sutton Hoo. So we should watch this space, the early medieval period, the post-Roman, the Dark Ages. It's all still happening, and it will go on happening.

It's the business. It's the business. There's websites now where people argue which is the most interesting century, and people will fight over whether the 9th or the 10th. Well, the answer to that is so obvious, which is the most interesting century, you know, and people would fight over whether the 9th or the 10th. Well, the answer to that is so obvious, which is the 18th, there's no point even going on those websites, Michael. Thank you very much indeed for coming on. The book is still called In Search of the Dark Ages. Go and get it, everyone.

Yes, In Search of the Dark Ages. You've got Alfred Athelstan, new take on Athelstan, the greatest English monarch. Correct. It's impossible to argue that. Thank you very much indeed, Michael. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Danston's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval,

with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods