by Simon Schama
Not for everyone, of course. The massive audience for radio readings from This Sceptred Isle, largely based on unreconstructed readings from Churchill’s history, testifies to the continuing capacity of his text to feed the popular hunger for heroic narrative. As part of the thriving yesteryear industry, this seems perfectly acceptable to the masters of the Zeitgeist, a heritage entertainment for senior citizens, like country-house tours and costume dramas, a gently narcotic dose of nostalgia, harmless enough if not consumed while driving or operating heavy machinery.
But this is not at all what Churchill meant when he offered that American schoolboy his advice or, for that matter, put pen to paper, still less what his intellectual ancestor Macaulay wanted from his own compelling, dazzlingly crafted narratives. For both of them, it was a living instruction or it was nothing: not a spare-time luxury but a requirement of informed citizenship. Both would have been horrified to see British history and British modernity treated as if they were mutually exclusive rather than mutually dependent.
And yet they are partly to blame for the predicament of poor old Clio, History’s muse, subjected either to embalming or eviction and dragged out of the attic like a dotty aunt in eccentric dress, smelling a bit of mothballs, given an occasional airing for a special occasion and then hastily returned to her quarters, where she shares space with mildewy Gladstone bags and antimacassars. For it was the Whig historians who were so determined to insist on the insularity of British history and who took as a truism that the meaning of British history was synonymous with its separateness. In this steadfast belief they were not, in fact, invariably wrong. There are moments – significant moments, like the late Elizabethan sixteenth century or the Hanoverian mid-eighteenth century – when British (or anyway English) history is, indeed, an unmistakable peculiarity. The conviction that it was the work of history to sift from the unruly mass of past data material that seemed to signpost the way towards the ‘British difference’, towards the realization of a nation state called Great Britain or the United Kingdom, was what gave its narratives the virtues of tremendous clarity and coherence.
But now that the United Kingdom itself has become not a truism but a question – along with many other institutions that the Churchillian historians once assumed to be perpetual – that clarity looks like over-confidence, and the history that assumed the inevitability and permanence of the British difference suddenly seems misleading. Those teleological signposts were pointing, after all, the wrong way. Is it better not to read this sort of history, better not to read any sort of British history if it is going to perpetuate illusions of isolationism in an increasingly globalized world?
But to collude in the minimization of British history on the grounds of its imagined ‘irrelevance’ to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to the global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted, collective memory-loss. The damage done would vindicate Cicero’s warning that cultures without history doom themselves to remain trapped in the most illusory tense of all, the present, akin to small children who know neither whence they have come nor whither they go. And it would be a gratuitously willed amnesia, too, for the histories that presupposed a single, unchanging national personality embedded within the different periods of the past are not, in fact, the only British histories imaginable.
Imagine instead a British history in which alteration, mutation and flux, rather than continuity and bedrock solidity, are the norm; a history that does not lead inexorably to a consummation in the unitary state of Great Britain but that sees that period – only, after all, three centuries old, barely as long as Roman Britannia – as just one epoch among many in the evolution of our island nations. This would be a history in which national identity – not just in Britain, or in England, but in Scotland, Ireland and Wales – was not a fixed but a decidedly shifting and fluid quality; a history in which the allegiance that mattered might, from generation to generation, from place to place, be a matter of clan or class, town or manor, language or dialect, church or club, guild or family, rather than of flag and dynasty. It would be a history in which the ragged frontiers of regions might count for a lot more than the fixed borders of countries; in which north-south divisions within Scotland and Wales could be as profound as those between either of them and their English neighbour. It would be an elastic history of nationhood, with England or Scotland sometimes closer in spirit and interest to France and even to Rome than to each other; but at other times genuinely and wholeheartedly (for good or ill) bound together within the British union. Yet it would also be a history which does not try to abandon the necessary impurity of Britishness for some cleaner, tidier, smaller concept of nationality, but instead embraces that historical impurity as our great strength. The unity presupposed by a ‘united kingdom’ may be no more coherent, in the end, than the unity of a ‘united states’, and no less worth defending, for precisely its generous heterogeneity. Finally this history might be a history respectful of contingency, mistrustful of inevitability, indifferent to any predetermined route or destination; a history refusing to take for granted (as the victors’ texts always want) that the way things turned out was the way they were always meant to be; a history that can see, but for a happenstance – Harold not falling out with his brother;Anne Boleyn giving birth to a healthy son; Oliver Cromwell not dying when he did – an altogether different outcome. How likely, after all, was it, for a clairvoyant of the 1750s to prophesy that, by the century’s close, Britain would end up, not with colonies that spoke, for the most part, English, but with colonies that spoke, for the most part, Bengali and Urdu?
There is a risk, of course, of lost moorings in these kinds of British histories, of the familiarity of the bulldog breed, island race story going astray amid countless competing alternatives, a risk of the consoling simplicity of the old story being traded in for the bewildering confusion of the new. But Clio, properly respected, is the least straightforward of the muses. Her beauty lies in the complexity, not the simplicity, of her truth. Which is why her votaries, attentive to the sometimes difficult and winding path they must follow, are sworn to tell stories in order to make the journey easier. For in the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.
CHAPTER 1
AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD?
WRITING HIS BRITANNIA in the glory days of Elizabeth I, William Camden, the antiquary and historian, saw no reason to be coy. His country was, as everyone knew, ‘the most famous island without comparison of the whole world’. And what made it especially enviable, he also knew, was its weather. Britain was, he rejoiced, ‘seated as well for aires as soile in a right fruitfull and mild place. The aire so kinde and temperate that not only the Summers be not excessive hot by reason of continual gentle winds that abate their heat . . . but the winters are also passing mild.’ It was this sweet fertility, Camden thought, that had made Britain so irresistible to the ancients. In ‘Happie Britaine’, according to the Roman writer known as the panegyrist of Constantine (whom the Elizabethans believed had been born there), ‘the forests were without savage beasts and the ground voyd of noisome serpents. Contrariwise an infinite multitude there is of tame cattle with udders strutting full of milke.’ Thus blessed, the historian Tacitus conferred on Britain the best compliment that could occur to any Roman: that it was pretium victoriae (worth the conquest). For not only did it grow everything, except (alas) the olive and the vine, it was also, literally, a gold mine. Silver was abundant there too, as were pearls, although he had heard they were grey like the overcast rain-heavy skies and that the natives only bothered to collect them when they were cast upon the shore.
Remoteness, then, did not mean outlandishness. If Tacitus, or, for that matter, Camden had been able to travel back in time as well as space to the most distant of all the British isles, the place they
knew as the Orcades (which we call Orkney), and get there before the palaces of Mycenae and the pyramids of Egypt were built, before Stonehenge went up on the Wiltshire plain, they would have seen something that would have confirmed their most benign expectations: a seaside village.
From the Orcadians of 5000 years ago you expect, perhaps, ritual monuments: great columns and circles of standing stones. What you don’t expect is domesticity. Instinctively, we imagine Neolithic Britons huddled in primitive dwellings gouged out of the face of a rocky cliff. The hamlet of Skara Brae, miraculously preserved beneath a seal of dunes and grass until a great tempest around 1850 blew away the concealment of millennia, is anything but the habitat of savages clinging to a dangerous shore. Its original settlers probably migrated across the Pentland Firth from Caithness on the Scottish mainland. The sea and the air were a little warmer than they are now, and once they had established themselves a few hundred feet away from the water’s edge in sandstone houses (the slaty stone easily hacked away with antler picks), they could harvest red bream, corkfin wrasse and the mussels and oysters that were abundant in the shallows. On land that is now thought unfit for any kind of food crops, the Skara Brae villagers managed to grow barley and even wheat. Cattle provided meat and milk; dogs were kept for hunting and for company. During the Neolithic centuries there would have been at least a dozen little houses here, half-dug into the ground for comfort and safety – a thriving, bustling little community of fifty or sixty souls, with both public places and privately walled-off houses, connected by narrow, stone-lined lanes and alleys. It was, by any definition, a true village.
Its one-room dwellings were proper homes: 320 square feet of floor space, divided up into all the social activities we associate with domestic life. In the middle, clearly marked by the stones, was a great hearth, for cooking and warmth. At one end of the room was a water-filled tank to keep live bait, perhaps limpets, and against the walls were sleeping areas, the beds made snugly welcoming with layers of straw and feathers and covered, rather luxuriously, with blankets of hide and fur. The channels running from the inside to the outside of the dwellings have even suggested to archaeologists that the prehistoric Orcadians may actually have had their own loos.
But the Skara Brae houses were not just shelters. They housed culture. They had, it turns out, what we like to call ‘style’, for the dramatic visual centres of their living rooms were dominated by large stone dressers. On their shelves they displayed carved stone balls, decorated with circles and spirals, grooved clay pots and jars, with scalloped rims and zigzag patterns, or, perhaps, bone bead necklaces and costume pins. To gaze at these objects, surviving from so distant a time, is to be confronted with the great paradox of all history: that it is at all times a dialogue between the alien and the familiar. The past, especially a past as remote as prehistoric Orkney, might indeed be a foreign country, but somehow, uncannily, we feel we have been there before. So although conscientious historians must resist the temptation to imagine themselves back into the company of Neolithic Orcadians, it is hard to walk between the houses, built, with ecological economy, on the mounds of their own organic rubbish – shellfish remains and compost – and not feel in the midst of a thriving little world – well-fed, well-housed and, by the standards of the time, well-off.
Given the rudimentary nature of the available tools, which were fashioned from sharpened animal bones or the grey sandstone of Orkney, it would have taken countless man-hours to make not just these domestic dwellings but also the great ritual circles of stones like those erected at Brodgar, where the population of the villages gathered to mark the passage of the seasons and to give thanks to their gods for the harvest or for being spared from disaster. So we can be sure that places like Skara Brae were not just isolated settlements of fishers and farmers. Its people belonged to some larger society, and one that was sophisticated enough to mobilize the army of toilers and craftsmen needed to make these monuments and stand them on end.
Because nothing seemed more important than to give their dead a fitting resting-place, Neolithic architects and their masons kept their most phenomenal achievement for their collective tombs, palaces of the defunct, which are as majestic and darkly beautiful as anything you might find in Minoan Crete or pre-Roman Etruria. These are, as it were, our British pyramids, and in keeping with our taste for understatement, they reserve all their impact for the interior. Outside, from the air, the mausoleum at Maes Howe is no more than an unassuming mound, a swelling on the landscape.
When a new body needed interment, the stone plug sealing the tomb entrance would have been pulled away by a detail from the village. The body was then carried or dragged through the opening in the earth. The builders made the 30-foot passageway narrow and so low that the bearers of the body would have had to stoop sharply, perhaps in an attitude of respect, as they made their awkward way down a stone corridor, lit only once a year by the wan rays of the winter solstice and smelling dankly of the underworld, a death-canal constriction, before they were able to stand erect at last in a lofty chamber, tapering upwards towards an indeterminate vault, black like the northern sky. Some of the tombs were elaborately decorated with swirling circular patterns like waves or the breeze-pushed clouds. Before the Vikings robbed these tombs in the ninth century, they would have been loaded with jewels and ornaments, laid down to garland the dead on their passage to the beyond, and sometimes with the cadavers of dogs and eagles. In some tombs, like those at Midhowe, on the nearby island of Rousay, the dead were laid on stone shelves in neat cubicles, their knees drawn foetally up to their chests as if waiting to be reborn; in other places, like Maes Howe, those rating special treatment were buried in side-tombs opening on to the main chamber, while the hoi polloi of the Orcadians would have been dumped into a common ossuary, packed with the bones of countless predecessors, a crowded waiting room to the Neolithic afterworld.
Life at Skara Brae must have continued in much the same way for centuries. New houses were built on the midden dumps of their predecessors, and the little colony gradually rose above sea-level. But around 2500BC the island climate seems to have got colder and wetter. The red bream disappeared, and so did the stable environment the Orcadians had enjoyed for countless generations. Fields were abandoned, and the farmers and fishers migrated, leaving their stone buildings and tombs to be covered by layers of peat, drifting sand and, finally, grass. Until the Vikings – with an extraordinary nose for loot – burrowed or hacked their way in, the great burial chambers lay undisturbed and carpeted with bones.
Over the centuries that followed a protracted struggle took place for good land, not just in Scotland but all over Britain. Forests were cleared at such a rate that around 1000BC Iron Age Britain was not, as was once romantically imagined, an unbroken forest kingdom stretching from Cornwall to Inverness but rather a patchwork of open fields, worked with rudimentary ploughs to harvest beans and grains, dotted here and there with woodland copses giving cover for game, especially wild pigs, and intensively worked to stoke forges and supply timber for the building of the circular huts and houses in which most of the population lived. It was, in fact, a countryside already beginning to resemble, in outline, the landscape you can see from your aeroplane seat three millennia later.
There was, however, one big difference. In the centuries before the Roman invasions, when the pressure of population on available land was at its most intense, farmers were in increasing need of reliable protection. They got it from the great hillforts that dominated Iron Age Britain, like those visible (especially from the air) in terraced contours at Danebury in Hampshire and Maiden Castle in Dorset. Lofty seats of power for the clan chiefs, they were defended by concentric rings of dug earthworks, timber palisades and ramparts, or, if there were ample supplies of easily quarried stone nearby, by bristling walls, several feet thick, or, as in the brochs of Scotland and Wales, by great windowless towers, many feet high, which still survive in remote places like Mousa in Shetland or Gurness in Orkney.
&n
bsp; Behind those daunting walls and terraced stockades, however, the world was not in panicky retreat. The Iron Age Britain into which the Romans eventually crashed was a dynamic, expanding society. Protected by the hillforts, arable and pastoral farms established themselves beyond the walls. Inside, the military character of many of the sites was fading, as they became instead true embryonic towns, some of them undefended, and most with recognizable street patterns, places of ceremony and worship and rich with forges and workshops. From these workshops came the spectacular metalwork with which the elite decorated their bodies – armlets, pins and brooches, carved mirrors and, not least, the heavy gear without which no self-respecting British warrior would step into his war-chariot: sword hilts and horned helmets figured with curling patterns like unfurling ferns or the astonishing stylized bronze horses, endearingly melancholy in expression like so many Eeyores resigned to a bad day in battle.
These tribal cultures were not just warring, but trading with each other. It used to be thought that these finely wrought works of art had been brought by a great Celtic migration, travelling from central and northern Europe around 500BC and awakening the sleepily primitive natives of the islands to a higher state of culture. But we now know that this sophisticated culture of warriors, druid-priests and artists developed spontaneously within Britain itself, importing – and also exporting – within trade zones that divided the island longitudinally: western Scotland and Wales south all the way to Brittany; southeastern England with northern Gaul and the Low Countries. So this was, in all important ways, an indigenous British culture, which had evolved in contact with, rather than having been conquered or settled by, continental Europe. Iron Age Britain, after all, had grown up on sites that had been occupied for thousands of years. Although the stone henges and burial barrows that marked its landscape had been built at least a millennium before, it seems likely that ritual practices still took place on these ancient sites.