The story of the British is one of the most astonishing tales in history.
It's a tale of struggle and war...
...but also of huge achievement.
From small beginnings, Britain became a great empire, the workshop of the world.
And the real makers of our history were the British people themselves.
Resilient and creative, they built our society,
they won our rights and freedoms.
Today, we're many nations and countless tribes.
But we are still British.
And what unites us all is our history.
The Great British Story.
It was the Romans who first named us, and, in a sense, defined us.
"How lucky you are, you Britons," wrote one Roman,
"more blessed than any other land,
endowed by nature with every benefit of soil and climate.
Your winters are not too cold, your summers are not too hot.
And to make life even sweeter,
your days are long and your nights are short,
so that while to us Italians the sun may appear to go down,
in Britain it just seems to go past. "
Good to see you. How are you? You're looking suitably attired for the occasion.
In the life of nations, just as in people's lives,
anniversaries and celebrations are good times to look back.
I was a big fan of Princess Diana and I love William.
I think his mum would be really proud of him.
Good moments to reflect on what has made us.
For our history gives meaning and value to our present.
It tells us where we've come from, who we are,
maybe even gives a clue to where we're going.
And ours is an extraordinary story.
This is the story of the people of Britain over 1,500 years.
The Welsh, Scots, English...
Irish too have played a great role in the story of Britain.
Hey!
But it's also the story of the people who've come here to settle over the centuries.
From the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings,
to the peoples of Asia and the Indian subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean,
who've come in the last few decades to help build modern British society.
This small island off the shore of Europe
has played a role in the history of the world out of all proportion to its size.
From the deep past, to the continuing present, this is our story.
And the story will take us right across the British Isles.
From Merseyside to Skye,
from the Black Country to Cardiff and Antrim.
But our tale begins in East Anglia in the little town of Long Melford, in Suffolk.
Over the next few months,
the people here, along with a host of other communities across the UK,
will be sharing their knowledge, their documents, photos and memories.
- Look at these lovely seals on the bottom. - Yeah, yeah.
Unique sources which will help build our story.
He used to say that he had relatives...
The gardening club, probably Melford Hall there.
That is so wonderful, isn't it?
- These are amazing social documents, actually. - Oh, yes.
But first, they're going to put their spades into the soil on a communal dig,
led by Carenza Lewis and her team from Cambridge University.
One-metre-square test pits in as many different places as possible.
What we're hoping to find first of all is clues to the history of the community
before the documents begin.
I think it's worth trying it here, don't you?
So what brought us here to Long Melford in Suffolk?
Well, it's a classic English small town with very deep historical roots.
The people of Melford have lived through the Industrial Revolution,
civil wars, the Black Death.
Like most places in Britain, their history as a community goes back a very long way.
But don't think this is just local history.
For at the grass roots you can also find the national story.
We started yesterday, and then when we finished, we filled the hole in.
We're site number 17, there's number 8 there.
With 50 test pits, we soon began to expose the layers of Melford's past.
Bits of clay pipe.
Where you are now is about 250-300 years ago.
Ooh!
Victorian china, Tudor jugs...
- Your classic milk jug ware almost. - Oh, right.
There was Anglo-Saxon tableware.
So we've got this greyware right the way through the last half of the pit.
The three trays there and that tray at the back are all medieval.
And then we made an exciting discovery.
It's a road. I'm almost certain it's a road.
I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the original Roman road.
We looked at it on a map
and we were able to plot a line all the way through from the school
and we now feel that that's where the direction is
and we thought we'd put our pit here and it looks like we've struck gold.
Rome at the centre!
I shall probably head off East and you head off West, and I'll join you in a minute.
If you want to understand the British story,
you have to start with the Romans.
It's almost like a London Tube map or a GPS.
It was they who brought civilisation to Britain for the first time.
Athens.
I'm heading into Iraq, Mesopotamia.
This copy of a 4th-Century Roman map shows our place in their world.
Hadrian's Wall.
Here I am reaching the very end of the Roman world, the Pillars of Hercules,
the Straits of Gibraltar.
From the Atlantic Ocean in the West...
Mountains of Southern India.
...to India, 7,000 miles to the East.
Elephanti nascuntur.
The place where elephants come from. Isn't that fantastic?
This marks the moment we Britons became part of global civilisation.
Europe, Africa and Asia.
And alter orbis.
Right. It is the Roman's new world, effectively.
What were they looking for? What were the riches of Britain that attracted them?
The sources mention things like hides and dogs.
They know there's a bit of precious metal over here,
but the riches they're really looking for are the riches of glory, of conquest.
New land, new revenues. There's a new place to tax,
a new people to extract money from, which is what empires are often about.
But as much as anything else, it's about an individual emperor, in this case Claudius,
who's the emperor, the Roman Emperor, that begins the definitive conquest of Britain,
showing he's a real Roman Emperor by taking a new piece of the world and making it Roman.
Brilliant!
Lovely little Samian Ware bowl.
Everywhere we dug in Long Melford,
we found evidence for the Britons adopting Roman lifestyles.
More and more and more Roman.
Oh, right, now that, that is really interesting.
That is a bit of hypocaust flue tile.
It's the Roman central heating system.
We Britons then enjoyed a standard of living that we didn't get back until the 17th Century.
Yes, it could be, actually.
The Emperor Vespasian.
Under the Romans, the population thrived and grew to maybe four million people.
That's quite an impressive pile of pottery, isn't it?
We can probably say there's probably Romans in the vicinity somewhere.
So over the four Roman centuries,
the ideals of Roman civilisation became ingrained in us.
And not just in the Southeast.
Here at Caerleon in South Wales,
there was a huge military and civil complex
with all the amenities of Roman civilisation.
Markets, baths, sports arenas.
And more than that.
Local government, law, civic order.
And a huge dig here is uncovering new evidence
about Roman Britain's second-biggest port.
A miserable day when I woke up, pouring with rain,
but it's not dampened the enthusiasm of the archaeologists.
What they're finding here is nothing less than the Roman roots of South Wales.
It's a part of Roman Britain which is almost forgotten about in some sense.
People think of Wales as an upland country,
as our Iron Age culture continuing through,
but the Southeast, really we should view it as part of the West Country.
It's more in keeping with Somerset and Dorset and Gloucestershire.
It's highly Romanised, we have villas,
we've got Roman towns, Roman fortresses, Roman roads.
It's a fascinating part of the country.
A dig on this scale can only happen with an army of volunteers.
It's exciting starting a new project.
Yeah. A lot of people aren't aware the Roman heritage in South Wales is so rich.
Yeah, we didn't know the site was so big, I don't think.
I think it was just amphitheatre and then it stops
and a humpy-bumpy field.
I enjoyed the pot washing best of all.
You have these big white trays
and then this beautiful Samian Ware glowing in my hands after a good wash,
all over the white trays.
Really fantastic feeling and holding and touching,
and thinking, "Who held this last?"
The thrill of finding something is quite... gets us up.
- And the mud is good. - The mud is good? Are you serious?
- What do you mean? - Mud's brilliant!
You get to be five years old again.
The Caerleon dig is guided by a huge geophysical survey.
We know from the geophys there should be four walls going this way through this section.
- Right. - Where's the wall?
It shows the plaster underneath and the paint's been taken off but there's some red there.
So Caerleon Isca was a big military town and port.
This is, like, revolutionary.
- A whole new area of Roman... - There's always something new to find.
Yeah, it's just so diverse.
Next door was the civil capital at Caerwent - Venta -
which gave its name to modern Gwent,
the whole conurbation a predecessor to today's capital, Cardiff.
Britain very quickly becomes part of this international Roman world of wealth and style.
It's a thought that's hard for us to encompass
but, in the Roman period, if you're living in Britain, and if you're living in Syria,
you're part of the same world.
So don't imagine the Romans in Britain as Italians in togas.
The Britons were the Romans.
And theirs was a cosmopolitan and multicultural world, a bit like ours.
Up on Tyneside, near Hadrian's Wall, stood the Roman fort of Arbeia.
The fort of the Arabs.
And excavations here have found evidence of Roman Britons
from an amazing variety of backgrounds and cultures.
Victoris natione maurum.
He's a Moor from North Africa. He's a black man.
Don't forget, there were black people in Britain before there were English.
20 years old, a freed man of Numerianus.
He's a cavalry officer for a Spanish regiment up here on Hadrian's Wall.
And Numerianus says,
"Piantissime prosequtus est."
He devotedly conducted the funeral of his former slave.
Very intimate relationship between the two men.
Gay, perhaps?
Beautifully carved.
Next to them, one of the most wonderful tombstones from Roman Britain
of a woman called Regina.
She's the wife of a man called Barates, wears a nice dress.
She's opening - what's this - a box of treasures?
You see the keyhole, the little half moon underneath?
Well-to-do Roman society up here in South Shields,
but here's the really great bit.
Her husband is Palmyrenus Natione.
He's from Palmyra in Syria,
a famous trading city at the other end of the Mediterranean.
An Arab, if you like.
And underneath, to underline that, carved in Aramaic, the old language of Syria:
"Regina, the freed woman of Barates, alas."
Roman letters found on Hadrian's Wall give us the voices of ordinary Britons.
We asked today's Tynesiders to read them.
Dear Lucius, just a quick note to make sure you are in robust health.
A friend has just sent me 50 oysters from the coast,
so why not get over here tonight?
I want to be clear with you,
that I refuse to withdraw my membership of the mess or of the club.
Maybe you saw me at the Goldsmiths and that's how the story started.
I have sent you by post two pairs of socks,
two pairs of sandals and two pairs of woollen underpants.
All the best to you and your mess mates, from Elpis.
For the party on the 19th June, we need three casks of British beer
and a couple of cases of Italian wine.
And vinegar, fish sauce, chicken and extra barley for the beer.
My dearest Flavius, I wonder if you could send me a few more things for my boys.
I need six cloaks and five jerkins.
I really need to smarten up now if I'm to become an officer.
I'm on the point of getting my own wheels. Farewell.
So across lowland Britain, the people enjoyed all the benefits of being Roman citizens.
In their minds and in their imaginations, Rome was in their hearts.
Britons are Romans.
New diet, new luxuries, new stuff coming in,
new things to drink and eat and new things to eat and drink.
You'll even find olive oil and wine in Hadrian's Wall.
I come from Birkenhead. You couldn't get olive oil in a shop in Birkenhead until 1980.
And whether in Caerleon, Long Melford or South Shields,
as one Roman writer put it,
"How fortunate the Britons were to live in such a delightful land. "
Over the four Roman centuries,
the people lived under the umbrella of Romanitas,
safe in the knowledge that Rome would always protect them.
But towards the year 400, the Roman world went into steep decline.
The Roman Empire found itself increasingly stretched by barbarian attacks
and separatist movements.
And the new Emperor, Honorius, moved the capital from Rome to Ravenna
in the marshes on the Adriatic coast, which is easier to defend.
And out on the edge of the Roman world, the town councils in Britain were worried.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, have we got any apologies for absence?
They faced mounting raids by Angles and Saxons from Germany.
Three of the reports are break-ins to garden sheds, so that's something...
Their big fear was that to protect Italy Rome would withdraw its garrison.
On 24th August 410, Rome was sacked by the Visigoths.
The first time in nearly 800 years that the city had fallen.
And it's at that electric moment in history
that the Emperor sends a famous letter to the citizens of Britain.
The contents of the letter were recorded in the 500s by the Welsh historian Gildas.
It is with regret that we have to inform you
that we can no longer commit precious and overstretched military resources
to continue to fight off pirates and bandits
who cannot be pinned down by conventional warfare.
The Roman garrison was pulled out.
The Britons were told to set up coastal defences and a home guard.
The Romans even sent them pattern books showing how to make Roman weapons.
It's very nearly 2,000 years old.
That would have been either ivory or narwhal.
This is not a gladius, this is a spatha.
He'd be a horseman, holding his sword on the right-hand side, which is unusual.
So he could get at it and just poke people.
"People of Britain," the Emperor concluded,
"you're on your own now. Fight bravely and defend your lives and liberty.
It's your homeland. You must fight for it now. "
And so they said goodbye, meaning never to return.
It's a wonderful symbolic moment in the story of Britain, isn't it?
The Fall of Rome.
And this is a great place to imagine it.
And in the next few decades,
as great swathes of the cities fall derelict, the people revert to the old ways.
They come back to these old Iron Age hill forts
to take shelter behind their huge ramparts,
as if battening down for the dark age that will follow.
But as their world fragmented, new worlds began to coalesce.
And out of them, our modern identities as Britons will emerge.
Here on Burrough Hill in Leicestershire,
a team of archaeologists, volunteers and school children
are trying to find out what happened at the end of Roman Britain,
when city life broke down.
It's really difficult to know what does happen
because all the things we rely on in archaeology disappear in that early 5th-Century period.
The coins, the pottery...
As archaeologists, we're left really in the dark.
If you're looking for a Dark Age from an archaeological point of view, it's the 5th Century.
It's a century of make do and mend.
We trying to find out where the entrance of the roundhouse is,
so we're trying to define the edges.
We want to find this edge here and hopefully it will come through over here.
History's kind of focussed on famous people, the Kings and Queens,
but no-one actually looks at the working-class people.
They're not represented, I don't think.
And as always in great crises in history,
the ordinary people are left to carry on with their lives in the face of harsh new realities.
In the early 400s, coins stopped being used.
They can't pay the town councils.
Jobs go, rubbish piles up, the cities are abandoned.
And then in the 500s, catastrophe.
A huge environmental crisis followed by famine and plague.
It was a perfect storm.
Britain's population was probably halved, maybe worse.
It's when you see what happens to our lovely Roman town at the end of the Roman period,
it is not good news.
You remember in the late Roman period we had that town, a thriving settlement.
When we go into the Anglo-Saxon period, complete Armageddon.
Nothing, absolutely nothing.
Not a single piece of pottery that could possibly predate 850.
There's nothing like the level of occupation we've got in the Roman period
for hundreds of years afterwards.
We know the sub-Roman period is a period of population decline,
there's outbreaks of plague that we hear about hazily in historical records.
It's one thing after another going wrong.
Law and order breaks down and it's a fascinating thought.
What would we do today if suddenly no-one's enforcing law and order?
How long does it take for people to realise they've got to defend their goods themselves
and all of that civilisation to collapse?
We think we're so insulated today.
In the Roman period, clearly even more so.
And you just look at that map. It's just empty.
And now, for a time in British history, there is no one clear narrative
but many regional and local histories.
But certain threads run through the tale.
Out in western Britain, Romanitas continues.
The Roman world didn't end all at one time, or in every place.
The so-called Dark Ages are not dark here.
The coast went back 400 metres only about 200 years ago,
so an immense amount of erosion had taken place
and perhaps 5,000 objects have been found along this piece of shoreline.
There've been found about half a dozen Byzantine coins.
These are 6th-Century too.
This is Justinian the First and there's Justin.
Just too much.
I cannot believe this. Look at this.
If you turn it over, you can see the...
...mint mark at the bottom there.
- Con for Constantinople. - Constantinople!
My god.
The far eastern end of the Mediterranean.
But what you're saying is, here in Western Britain,
the ancient connections are still alive?
And they still thought of themselves as Roman.
You have these Latin inscriptions still continuing in North Wales.
- In Anglesey? - In Anglesey, yes!
Which you can see from here.
So it's not a surprise that really that...
In some ways we shouldn't be surprised that these things are here.
What's been missing really in North Western England
is the archaeological evidence, but that's beginning to come to light.
Tremendous.
This is continuity of people speaking Latin,
it's continuity of people thinking of themselves as Roman
well beyond the conventional end of the Roman period.
So at the Fall of Rome, the Roman army went
but the people carried on.
In South Wales, behind its Roman walls,
the old capital of Caerwent remained the centre of local power into the Middle Ages.
Late Roman world does come to an end.
There is economic crisis, political instability,
the Western Roman Empire does fall, but the people stay put.
In 410 AD, people don't just throw down the Roman pots and run away. Life continues.
In fact, parts of Wales were the last bits of the Roman Empire to survive anywhere.
In the 5th Century, here in South Wales,
a new order rose under Christian, Welsh-speaking kings
still loyal to the memory of Rome.
This has to be one of the most atmospheric buildings in the whole of the British Isles.
Medieval wall paintings, Dark Age carvings and sculptures.
Samson posuit hanc crucem.
Samson erected this cross.
Pro anima eius. For his soul.
The Latin is a bit scruffy, not classical, but they still feel connected with it.
Great changes in history often happen like this.
Slowly and imperceptibly,
one world becomes another.
And among the bringers of change
were the saints.
Columba, David, Mungo,
and the most famous of all...
My name is Patrick.
I am a sinner, a simple country person and the least of all believers.
My father was Calpurnius.
He was a deacon.
My grandfather was a priest who lived in Bannavem Taburniae.
His home was near there and that is where I was taken prisoner.
I was about 16 at the time.
St Patrick was British, born on Hadrian's Wall,
one of the remarkable men and women who saved what could be saved
of Latin learning and Christianity.
He spent some time up around the Slemish mountain.
He shepherded or herded pigs, or swine as they called them,
and nowadays it'd be sheep, you know.
Where's the house?
It's on the Carnstroan road there.
Near number 30 something. 33 I think it is, maybe.
How long he spent there, I don't know, you know.
Irish tradition says St Patrick worked for a while here at Slemish, in County Antrim.
They saw an enclosure for bringing pigs in at night, to keep them safe.
- Is it still there? - We could probably see it, you know.
It seems to be near to where it says on the map here.
A Christian Briton, Patrick spoke and wrote Latin.
It's filled in a bit, and it's got covered over with soil and things.
And he left the Irish an abiding respect for Latin civilisation.
It would've been about up here.
Patrick brought Christianity to the North of Ireland
and his disciple, St Columba, took it back into Northern Britain.
This group of Derry sailors built a Dark Age curragh
to follow the path of Columba, or Colmcille,
who sailed to lona to begin the conversion of Scotland.
It's a modern version of the sort of boat Colmcille would have used.
Yes.
And a very seaworthy boat.
So back in 1997 we made the voyage from Derry
up through to Iona.
Rowing by day and coming ashore at night. I'm sure that's the way...
We followed what we believed was a similar route that Colmcille would have used
when he was banished from Ireland to get to Iona.
Right.
Coasting, just going by the islands and the promontories?
Yep.
The journey was no great challenge, in a way.
It was quite a natural thing for them to do. And for us.
Of course, yeah, yeah.
And what was the inspiration behind it?
We were celebrating the 1,400th anniversary of the death of Colmcille.
He died in 597, so in 1997 we did the journey up through.
The very natural way...
We're down near Derry here, where his monastery was.
It's quite a simple journey if the wind is in the right direction,
to go up to Iona just on the southwest corner of Mull.
There's a lot of the archaeology from the time of the saints.
There's a lovely cross at Kildalton, just down on the South East corner.
There's an old monastic settlement on Texa island.
The monk sailors were there.
This is such an extraordinary age, isn't it, this so-called Dark Age?
And doing it in such a practical way must give you a great insight into what went on then.
We shared the same blisters on hands and other parts of the anatomy
that Colmcille and his crew would have experienced.
For me, the boat is about being out there, on the sea, experiencing the nature,
the wonder of where you are.
It's basically 5th-Century technology
and we're all involved in modern sailing boats and modern boats as well, with our jobs,
and it's amazing just what this boat's capable of.
We're not a crew any more, we're a family.
And wherever the saints built their churches, settlements followed.
Glasgow itself was founded in the age of saints by St Mungo in the 6th Century.
With all its later histories,
Glasgow too came out of this crystallising of identities in the Dark Ages.
This is Brian here,
broadcasting very loudly from the centre and heart of Glasgow.
Oh, this is how archaeology should be.
Govan is one of the oldest continually-inhabited places in the world.
The Romans arrived in the Govan area in AD 81.
The inhabitants were Britonnic speaking Celts,
who, according to Ptolemy, practised druidic rites and called themselves the Damnoni.
Later on they were recognised as the Britons of the kingdom of Strathclyde.
This is Dumbarton Rock, on the River Clyde,
alt clut, the rock of the Clyde, the royal citadel of the Strathclyde Welsh.
It was here at the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire.
You come to a place like this and you see how history is geography
and geography is history.
The seas along the Western shores of Britain
with their islands and archipelagos
and their deep-cut estuaries
have been places of contact and exchange
for thousands of years.
Govan is important in a number of ways.
First, the monolithic stones that once surrounded the site of Govan Old Church
tell us that this place was sacred to the people who lived there
and had been for a very long time.
Govan Old Church was built for the Clydeside shipyard workers in 1888,
but on Dark Age foundations.
My excavations found foundations of a probably timber building with dry-stone footings
and some burials which have radiocarbon dates which take you back to the 6th Century.
- The 6th Century? Fantastic. - Very early.
Here in the middle of Govan!
Govan's secret is a collection of Dark Age stones
that once stood among the graves in the churchyard.
This is a drawing made from a 19th-Century survey of the churchyard.
- It's fantastic. - That is just fantastic, isn't it?
You can see all the different burial plots, all the layers are marked out here,
and the names of these people are ancient names: Govan Rowan, Anderson...
It's a real social history, isn't it? Weavers of Govan, weavers.
Dalglish! You can't believe it, can you, really?
That is too much, isn't it?
The thing that's so good about it is it shows you the location of the old recumbent stones,
these kind of pale brown rectangles.
We know where, at the end of the 19th Century, all the sculpture was located in the churchyard.
The stuff was never lost to be discovered, if you like.
It's always been known.
It's cathedral-like in proportion.
It is, isn't it? The cathedral of Govan.
These are Christian monuments
but their interlace and animal ornament
come from much older artistic traditions of North Britain.
They're all different.
In the sanctuary, they've placed their most precious object, which is this sarcophagus.
It's carved all over.
Nothing really prepares you for this idea of the interlace treatment
and then there's this figurative sculpture, the hunting scene.
It's unique in Scotland.
There's only one other in Britain that's even close to it.
We have burials, Christian burials, from the late 5th or early 6th centuries,
which really are the beginnings of Christianity in Scotland.
This wasn't meant to go in the ground. This was meant to be on display.
- It's a shrine. - It's a shrine, absolutely.
A great Dark Age sacred place.
It is an amazing fact about Govan's history, isn't it?
And very poorly appreciated, even by many people in Govan.
You know, they are at a place where Christianity's been practised for 1,500 years.
So the ancestors of the Scots, Welsh and Cornish, too,
were the people of Roman Britain and Ireland.
But who were the English?
Well, their ancestors weren't British, and they'd never been Roman.
They were immigrants from Jutland, Denmark and Germany.
And they were the Anglo-Saxons.
This is The Wash.
Lincolnshire on the horizon and we're here on the Norfolk side.
You can see why this stretch of water was so attractive to those first Anglo-Saxon immigrants.
It gave them sheltered anchorage after the gales of the North Sea.
Some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlements are found here
on this stretch of the Norfolk coast.
This is one of them - Snettisham.
The first clue's in the place name - the ham or the village of Snaet.
Maybe that's the name of the first Anglo-Saxon who settled just here,
under that great hill over there.
That's where those first Anglo-Saxons put down their roots.
They came here, one imagines,
with all the optimism of immigrants anywhere and at any time,
thrown up on strange shores.
But these were the ancestors of the English.
To the native Britons, the Anglo-Saxon immigrants were the lowest of the low,
fit only for the most menial jobs.
In the 400s, they made their way across to the beaches of Eastern Britain.
In the 500s, they kept on coming.
Only ever a minority, they maybe added just 10% to the population of Britain.
But they brought with them a new culture, and above all, a new language.
And when we first pick them up in written records in the 600s, two things mark them out.
Their poetry, and their sense of humour.
Ic eom wunderlicu wiht, wifum on hyhte.
I am a wondrous thing, a great hope or expectation for women,
something that women look forward to.
Stabol min is steapheah...
Rooted I stand on a high bed.
Neoban ruh nathwær.
I'm shaggy down below.
Ræseð mec on reodne...
Rushes my red skin.
Her eyes will be wet.
An onion.
- An onion. - An onion.
What else could it be?
That jazz!
Thank you.
We still find them amusing today, don't we?
There's this long tradition of slightly saucy humour.
And riddles can almost undermine or subvert conventional views of things, can't they?
There is something more to a riddle than just a joke.
They certainly liked to explore the idea of expressing an idea in completely different terms.
The sun is God's candle,
the sea is the gannet's bath.
And words carry not just meanings but values,
ways of seeing.
Even now our keys words in English for feelings and relationships are Anglo-Saxon.
It may be the greatest legacy of the English to the world.
But they're not English yet.
There'd been Angles and Saxons in Britain before the end of Rome,
doing the menial jobs.
Security guards, labourers, cleaners.
Their first settlements were just inland from the coast
and one of the biggest yet found is here at Sedgeford, in Norfolk.
We approached here really with two questions to answer.
What is the size of the settlement, and, also, what's the status?
We are now getting insights that we have got something very large that's going on here.
This is becoming a very significant site, indeed.
What's so wonderful about this
is that the community itself is providing us with all this new information about our past.
Well, that's important to the project.
Part of the founding ethos of the project was to have community engagement.
It's their heritage.
A lot of the people that you see working on the trench,
they may have very strong linkages indeed to what they're uncovering.
- They probably do! - Yeah, they probably do.
- Day out with the family. - Oh, fantastic.
- So where have you come from? - Snettisham.
- Oh, right, so you are local. - Very.
- This is all part of your past. - This bit here, yeah.
To them it would have been where can they get a food source, where can they...
It's survival, isn't it? Whereas we pick where the nearest posh school is or whatever.
Theirs would have been like, "How can we survive?"
Yeah, yeah.
Our first clue to the early Anglo-Saxons is their diet.
We've got so many now, what we do is we count them and weigh them.
We can't actually archive them all because there's so many.
They lived a bare, subsistence life.
The oysters we eat now are really small and tender
but these would have been really meaty and actually quite disgusting,
so I'm not too sure why they were eating them, in my opinion, from a modern point of view.
So while the Christian Britons were still writing Latin
and importing goods from the Mediterranean,
pagan Saxon immigrants survived on oysters cooked in crude pots.
It's complete. There's only a fragment out of the rim.
It's hand-fired, but also, you can see, it's very, very crudely made, very hand-made.
Characteristic shape for an early migration period Anglo-Saxon pot.
It's a very rough-and-ready fabric,
made and fired in the same sort of way as Iron Age pottery.
And this is one of the things that makes early Anglo-Saxon pottery really difficult to date.
You really need a good big chunk,
especially if you've got something that's plain like this,
to be able to work out the actual vessel shape of it.
And a rough guess at the date?
We won't hold you to it, of course.
A rough guess, I'd say this is probably 5th Century, rather than 6th.
- Are we talking about a small migration? - Oh, don't give me that!
This is the eternal question, isn't it?
Are a few people coming over or are there a lot of people coming over?
Where do things stand at present among you experts?
I think we're perhaps veering back to more people coming over,
but it's still exceptionally difficult to tell,
and I think there is still an elite takeover followed up by large-scale migration under them.
But large-scale migration brought conflict, fights over land.
The Anglo-Saxon poets remembered one savage battle with the Britons -
Welsh as they called them -
here at Stoke Wood in Oxfordshire,
behind the Cherwell Valley services on the M40.
"It was fought with great fury and heavy losses on both sides, "
said The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle later.
But the Saxons won and took many villages and great booty.
And they pushed on, westwards, into the lands of the Britons.
And in the end, says the British historian Gildas,
the Saxon fire licked Britain from sea to sea.
But what of the Britons, or the Cymry, as they called themselves?
They never forgot the loss of lowland Britain to the Anglo-Saxons.
The earliest Welsh poetry also tells of wars with the English,
what the Welsh later called "The Matter of Britain".
The language, it defines us.
It's that which makes you special or different.
Our children criticise myself and my wife, for being born in Shrewsbury, in England.
And they say, "Why didn't you move to Welshpool or Newtown for our birth?"
I said, "Just a minute," and I put an old map of West Mercia out on the table
and I said, "Look, Shrewsbury in Shropshire used to be part of Pengwern.
Welsh territory. We've loaned it to England for the time being."
They were satisfied that they were born on a piece of Welsh land, in Britain - Prydain.
It would take a long time to learn to live together.
In truth, we're still learning.
But from around the year 600,
the Anglo-Saxon tribes began to be converted to Christianity
by missionaries from Rome and Saints from Ireland and the West.
And now small English Kingdoms arose - Mercians and East-Angles
and up hear in the Northeast, the Northumbrians.
This is a great place to sense that mysterious process
by which part of Roman Britain became Anglo-Saxon England
and the lowland Britons became the English.
The mouth of the Tyne, after the Romans,
became the heartland of a small Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian kingdom.
You can see the ruins of the Priory on the promontory.
There, inside the ruins of the Roman settlement,
a stone church became the burial ground of the early Northumbrian kings
and their royal residence stood on this promontory.
The Roman fort of Arbeia, the fort of the Arabs, had new masters.
And I suppose, for early Anglo-Saxon rulers,
a great, defended, stone-walled centre like this was a very useful place?
Yes, and also just the prestige of stone buildings,
especially with the Church coming in.
They're re-importing Roman methods of construction and way of life and so on.
We've got a mixture of different objects here.
This is a gaming piece which has been made out of antler,
but this one's been dyed green.
Gosh.
And Anglo-Saxon you think?
- Yes, probably 6th Century or later. - How intriguing.
Then this is possibly Anglo-Saxon.
I would like it to be Anglo-Saxon.
It's a bone stylus.
For when they reintroduce writing on tablets with the church.
Gosh, what a beautiful artefact that is, isn't it?
Beautiful, isn't it?
Board games and writing in the Anglo-Saxon period might suggest a high status.
High status, yes. Yes, definitely.
- Tantalising. - Yes.
And here in the 600s,
the first Christian, English civilisation develops,
especially in two places famous in the British story -
Jarrow and Wearmouth.
It's just a lovely church. It's just so full of history.
I know a lot of churches are full of history
but you've got to remember this dates back to the 7th Century.
This was one of the first stone churches built.
It would have only been up to the pillars,
so it would have been a long, narrow church when it was built.
Victorians came along later and added that side on.
This gives you a wonderful idea of what a 7th-Century church looked like.
You see the great long, tall, narrow buildings modelled after those early Roman basilicas
you can still see in Rome.
Small windows, not these huge ones that the Victorians liked.
To do it they brought in architects, masons...
I suppose that's what they mean by cementarii.
Craftsmen of all kinds.
And the men and women who made that first English golden age,
like Ceolfrith, Biscop and the historian Bede, are still local heroes here.
And the one who does the donkey work, Ceolfrith.
He builds the churches.
I'm a little bit in awe of Biscop.
He was a wonderful man and he had a vision.
There would have been no Bede without Biscop.
- And Bede was a Sunderland man? - Yes, he was.
Bede came to this church at the age of seven, stopped till he was 13,
and he spent the rest of his life at Jarrow, so really who does he belong to?
Really, he belongs to two of us.
We have the wonderful discovery that the plaster,
the original plaster that was on the monastery walls, was red-and-white stripes.
Yes, it was.
Well, there you are, you see.
These local, tribal identities are still so strong.
A few miles up the coast from Wearmouth is its sister church of Jarrow
where Bede was buried.
The dedication of the church of St Paul, 15th year of King Ecgfrith,
and the 4th year of Ceolfrith, the Abbot
and founder under God's name of the same church.
One monastery in two halves.
My story is, he's still here.
He lived here, and he's buried here.
He died on the steps there, didn't he,
and I think to myself, "No, I think he's still here."
So, really, what I'm looking forward to,
whether I'm still alive or not,
they're talking about lifting up this floor
and I think to myself, "Yes, lift that floor and I bet you he's still here."
And that's my story.
And, of course, Bede is still here,
for he's one of the people who made us who we are.
And we still carry him with us.
That's how history works.
From Bede's time right down to the shipyards and collieries of Tyne and Wear
and the memories of the Jarrow march.
That's why this is one of the key places in the British story.
For it was here that Bede wrote the first great book on British history and identity
and this is it.
It's no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most important books in the story of Britain.
It's one of the two earliest manuscripts of Bede's history,
maybe the earliest, even, around 737.
And Bede calls his book a Historia Ecclesiatica
of the gens Anglorum.
An Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation or People.
Bede uses this word "the Angli" for English all the way through the book
and it comes to include all the people living within roughly what we now call England.
It's a very, very important idea,
the idea there was a single gens Anglorum, an English people.
It's going to be a defining idea in English history.
But it's really much more than that.
As you can see, when you turn to the opening,
the first word of the book.
It's not England, but Britain.
Britain.
Britannia Oceani insula cui quondam Albion nomen fuit.
Britain is an island in the ocean, formerly known as Albion.
Lying off the shores of Europe,
across from Germany and France and Spain
and the greater part of Europe.
Gives the length at 800 miles, width at 200,
not including the deep promontories and bays that stick out into the ocean.
Oceano infinito,
faces out to the boundless ocean
where the Orkney Islands are situated.
Bede then gives us a description of Britain.
A land rich in forests and fields, natural resources, and rivers full of fish.
The model for this description is in late Roman historians
but the real model is the Bible, the book on Genesis.
Britain is an earthly paradise.
"At this time, he says,"five languages are spoken in the island of Britain."
Anglorum - English,
British, by which he means Welsh,
Scottish, by which he means Irish,
Pictish and Latin,
which is the language that links us "in communus".
At the very end,
he describes the book simply as the history of our island and its people.
We found a floor which was mainly flint and clay.
Really, really good.
A real achievement.
The rim of a Samian Ware goblet or something like that.
2,000 years old.
- Did you find any interesting things? - Lots of interesting things.
Lots.
We found masses of pottery of the Romans.
That's Thetford ware!
Oh, wow!
Thanks very, very much. You were great.
And we'll be back, I'm afraid.
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll February 2017
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll March 2017 - Released on www.Addic7ed.com