One day, I was sitting in my college rooms at Oxford when my dad arrived to visit. Dad was one of the British staff at the American Embassy in London, and he had said that a couple of American girls who were over from the States had asked if they could come too, because they had never seen Oxford. Would I mind? Sounded good: Were there any more who wanted to come? As they came through the door, one of the girls gasped and said, with a sort of breathless awe, “Gee, I can’t believe I’m in one of these old buildings!” Quite without thinking I said “Oh, they’re not that old. They’re only seventeenth century.” You should have seen their faces.
But I was right. Just round the block from where I was sitting were other students sitting in rooms nearly four hundred years older than the ones I was in. (We reckoned our college food was even older than that). And even that’s “only thirteenth century”. The Crown Jewels are in a tower that was built by William the Conqueror almost a thousand years ago. The amazing thing is not just that these buildings are old: it’s that they’re still in use. You can go to church in Britain in the same buildings where Saxons worshipped, and you can drive along motorways that follow lines laid down by the Romans. It’s silly to complain that the British somehow live in the Past: The Past lives in the British.
About This Book
If your idea of a history book is the sort of thing they gave you at school, forget it. Those books are written by people who want to get you through exams and give you tests and generally show off just how much they know and how clever they are at saying it. Believe me, I’ve written them. This book is different. Okay, it tells you the whole story, but I’ve tried to do so without making it seem like one whole slog. This is a great story: Don’t miss it.
One important thing. This book is called British History For Dummies. A lot of people think “British” means “English”. And plenty of “British” history textbooks only mention the Welsh and the Irish and the Scots when, in one way or other, they are giving the English grief. Or, more likely, the English are giving grief to them. Here I’ve tried to redress the balance a bit. In here, you’ll meet people like King Malcolm Canmore, James IV, Brian Boru, Prince Llewellyn, and a few others who deserve a bit more than a passing reference.
Can I promise that this book is objective and fair? Well, it’s my view of British history. That’s never going to be the same as someone else’s view - that’s the beauty of history. In fact, no such thing as an entirely “objective” history book exists. Every time I choose to put something in and leave something out because there isn’t space, I’m making a judgement. Every word I use to describe the events is a judgement. Americans speak of the American Revolution; for many years the British spoke of it as the American War of Independence. Do you call what happened at Wounded Knee in 1890 a “battle”, which it was in the history books for a long time, or a “massacre”? Do I call what happened in the Highlands of Scotland after Culloden “ethnic cleansing”, as some people have? These aren’t just judgements about literary style: They’re judgements about the history, and not everyone will agree with them.
If you think I’ve got it wrong, you are very welcome to write to me via my publisher, who will pass it on to an entirely fictitious address.
Not everyone in Britain feels happy being called British. Some prefer to put down “Scottish” or “Welsh” when they have to fill in a form, and many people in England routinely say “England” or “English” when they mean “Britain” and “British”. For me, I’m happy with “British”. I have a name that shows that my ancestry is a mixture of English, Irish, and Scots. No Welsh, but then you can’t have everything. So this is very much the story of my people, of where we came from and how we ended up the way we are today.
Conventions Used in This Book
As you move through this book, you’ll notice that a few words are italicised. These are key terms or important events from British history, and I give an explanation of what they mean, or what they led to.
Sidebars (text enclosed in a shaded grey box) consist of information that’s interesting to know but not necessarily critical to your understanding of British history. The same goes for text marked with a Technical Stuff icon; although interesting and related to the topic at hand it isn’t necessary for understanding the topic. You can skip it if you like - I won’t tell anyone.
Finally, when I mention dates . . .
BC? BCE? AD? CE?
You have to start your dates somewhere. In the western historical tradition the convention is to start with the birth of Jesus Christ (though actually they calculated it wrong by about four years!) so that anything that happened from then on was dated AD - Anno Domini (“Year of Our Lord” in Latin), and earlier dates were labelled BC - Before Christ. Which is fine if you’re happy using a Christian dating system, but not everyone is. Rather than come up with a different starting point (which would mean changing every date in every book) some people prefer to use CE - Common Era instead of AD and BCE - Before the Common Era - instead of BC. In the end it’s a matter of taste: it doesn’t affect the actual dates. I’ve stuck with BC and AD because I’m used to them and they tally with the dates you’ll find in most books, but if you prefer to use CE and BCE, you go right on and do it.
Foolish Assumptions
I may be wrong, but I’ve made a few assumptions in writing this book. Assumptions about YOU. I’m assuming that you probably:
● did a bit of British history at school, but found it all got very confusing
● or else you quite liked it, but your memory’s a bit hazy about who did what when
● did some English history but only touched on Wales or Scotland or Ireland when they were having trouble with the English
● enjoy a good story and want to know more
How This Book Is Organised
I’ve organised this book so that you can read if from beginning to end or by jumping from topic to topic. To help you find the information you want, I’ve divided the material into parts. Each part represents a particular period in Britain’s history and contains chapters with information about that era. The following sections describe the type of information you can find in each of this book’s parts.
Part I: The British Are Coming!
No, this part isn’t about Paul Revere. It’s about Britain’s early days - the really early days. You can find information on life in Stone Age and Iron Age Britain - or as good a guess as archaeologists can come up with from the evidence these early people left behind, This part also introduces you to the mysterious Celts and takes a look at their religion (the weird and wacky ways of the Druids), their monuments, and the opinions that others (like the Romans) had of them. Basically, this part gives you a better picture of this dim and distant and rather mysterious, but also rather wonderful, world.
British History For Dummies
Part II: Everyone Else Is Coming! The Invaders
Suddenly everyone wants to conquer Britain. Romans, Saxons, Angles,
(maybe Jutes), Vikings, Normans. What was the attraction? It can’t have been the weather, and I don’t believe it was the food. The Romans made Britain part of their great Empire, and then left them at the mercy of Picts who invaded from the north and the Angles and Saxons who came from over the sea. Then came the Vikings, who plundered and raided, and eventually settled down in Ireland, in England and in the Scottish islands. Finally, Britain began to form into the units we recognise today - Wales, Scotland, and England. And then, just when you thought it was safe, a new breed of Vikings - the Normans (these guys were of Norse descent, they weren’t French) - conquer Anglo-Saxon England. And it’s not just England that reels.
Part III: Who's in Charge Around Here? The Middle Ages
Knights in armour, fair maidens, and all that. Welcome to the Middle Ages, a time period when England finds herself in a great power game fought across Europe and in the Holy Land. We begin with one big, unhappy family who just happened to be ruling an empire that included England: the Plantagenets, who were on the English throne for some time and who took over a few other thrones. Ireland for one, and then, when Edward I stormed through Wales, the Welsh throne, too. Edward came pretty close to getting the Scottish throne as well. In fact, the Plantagenets did take the Scottish throne - they took it all the way down to London. In this part, you meet some colourful characters like Thomas a Becket, who was murdered in his own Cathedral; Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt who was killed before the king’s eyes; William Wallace, a freedom fighter (yes, the movie Braveheart is set during this time); and the ordinary people who lived and prayed and died far away from the world of knights and kings, and whose lives we glimpse in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Part IV: Rights or Royals? The Tudors and Stuarts
In this part, you find out about the Tudors in England (and Wales and Ireland) and the Stuarts in Scotland, two families who had such power yet were let down by that oldest of problems: getting an heir. Here you meet Henry VIII,
who was to become history’s most famous serial husband; Queen Elizabeth, who became history’s second most famous virgin; Mary, Queen of Scots; who was driven from her kingdom by religious zealots and scandal; and others, like Oliver Cromwell, who shaped the political and religious landscape of the time. This part also examines religion, as Catholics burned Protestants, Protestants tortured Catholics, and the Reformation raged through England and Scotland. It also explains how the power struggles between Parliament and Charles I pushed the country into a violent and bloody Civil War. Yet, despite the horrors of civil war, revolution, fire, plague, and long wigs on men, this era was also the one that brought the Renaissance to Britain, and with it new ideas that changed the way people saw and understood their world.
Part V: On the Up: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
When the eighteenth century opened no-one would have believed it that the British were on their way to creating the most powerful nation the world had ever known. No-one planned it, no-one was even particularly wanting it, but that’s what happened. The British created their own country, a strange hybrid affair with a long and clumsy name - the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland - by passing Acts of Parliament, crushing the life out of the Highlands of Scotland, and fighting the French all over the globe. Even seeming set-backs (like when the British-over-the-sea in America decided that enough was enough and declared their independence) only made the country stronger. Not all the momentous changes during this period took place on the world stage, however. Several remarkable people were busy solving practical problems - like how to spin thread more efficiently and where to build a canal - and, in the process, changed not just Britain but the world for ever. By the time the Victorian age began, Britain had become the world’s first industrial superpower, with a global empire to match.
Part VI: Don’t Look Down: The Twentieth Century
Boy, were the British in for a shock. All that confidence in themselves, all that self-belief - it all fell apart in the trenches, literally. This part is where you can find out about Britain in the twentieth century, already troubled as it went into the First World War, deeply scarred and shell-shocked at the end of it.
But the events of the Great War weren’t the only ones that left Britain reeling.
Back at home, Ireland rose in rebellion, the country succumbed to the global Depression, and another world conflict loomed on the horizon and then arrived before Britain was in a position to handle it. But fight it did, standing alone against the might of Hitler’s Germany. Yet even as the RAF won the Battle of Britain, the sun was finally setting over Britain’s mighty Empire. This part ends by bringing the story up to date, as Britain searches for a new role - in the Commonwealth? In Europe? Or shoulder to shoulder with the USA?
Part VII: The Part of Tens
Want to impress strangers with the depth of your knowledge and insight? Read this part. If someone talks about turning points in world affairs, you can say, “I know all about them” - and then offer one (or more) of the ten turning points that helped shape Britain (you can find them in Chapter 23). Then you can go on to ten major British contributions to world civilisation, or ten documents that helped shape Britain as much as, if not more so, than any of the battles that had been fought. In this part, you can find lists like these and more. And, for those times when you want to experience British history rather than merely read about it, I’ve listed a few (okay, ten) places you may want to see for yourself.
Where to Go from Here
“Begin at the beginning” says the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” Which is usually good advice for dealing with a book, but for this book, you don’t have to follow it. If you want to know about the Tudors, head straight for Chapter 11, or if you want to know about the Georges, read Chapter 15 and don’t you worry about Chapters 13 or 14 along the way. But of course, history connects in all sorts of ways, and you may find that information in one chapter links up with something in another chapter. If you want to read that other chapter you can, and if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Did they give this much choice at school?
If you’re still not sure where to plunge in, have a read of Chapter 1. It’s a sort of survey of the whole scene, to give you a good sense of what you’re letting yourself in for. And I bet you didn’t get that at school.