We are not historians. What follows is our interpretation of what we read and learned. We set it down so we can carry it with us and review it as we travel across Britain and Ireland.

This primer tells the history of Great Britain and Ireland in broad strokes, from the Iron Age to 1922. It is not a textbook. It is a companion for the road, with enough history to make sense of the walls, castles and ruins we visit and the names we meet along the way.

Today the islands hold two states: the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For most of this story none of these countries existed, so the early sections speak of “the area of modern Scotland” and so on, only as a guide on the map. Ireland is told side by side with Britain. For more than a thousand years it had its own kings, laws and church, until Norman knights from Wales landed there in 1169.

The primer has four parts:

• Part One: from the Iron Age to 793, when the Vikings attacked Lindisfarne.
• Part Two: the Vikings and the making of kingdoms, 793 to 1066.
• Part Three: the Normans and the medieval kingdoms, 1066 to 1485.
• Part Four: crowns, unions and separation, 1485 to 1922.

Part One: Before the Kingdoms

In Part One there are no countries yet, only peoples and tribes, and later small kingdoms. It has three sections: the Iron Age, Roman Britain, and the centuries after Rome.

I. The Iron Age, about 800 BC to AD 43

Climb almost any high hill in southern Britain and you may find rings of grassy banks and ditches around the top. These are hillforts, built by the people of the Iron Age, when tools and weapons were first made of iron. The Iron Age began in Britain about 800 BC and in Ireland about 500 BC.

These people did not write. We know them from archaeology, from their coins, and from what a few foreign visitors wrote about them.

The first visitors

The first was Pytheas, a Greek explorer from Massalia, today’s Marseille. Around 325 BC he sailed around Britain. He saw people mining tin in Cornwall, described the island as a triangle. He called the islands Prettanike, after a local name. The Romans turned it into Britannia, and from that comes our word Britain. His book is lost. We know it only because later writers quoted it.

Most of the tribes’ names come from a later writer, Ptolemy, a Greek geographer in Roman Egypt, around AD 150. To the Romans, Britain was Britannia, Ireland was Hibernia, and the unconquered north was Caledonia. At Hereford Cathedral we saw a copy of Ptolemy’s book printed in 1486.

The peoples

Most Iron Age people were farmers who lived in roundhouses. As our peopling primers describe, they descended mostly from the Beaker people, who arrived about 2500 BC.

• In the area of modern England and Wales, the land was shared among tribes that grew into small kingdoms, such as the Catuvellauni north of the Thames and the Iceni in Norfolk.
• In the area of modern Scotland, people on the Atlantic coast and islands built brochs, tall round towers of dry stone. Mousa, in Shetland, still stands more than forty feet high.
• In Ireland, the great monuments were royal sites. At Navan Fort, in County Armagh, people raised a huge round timber hall in 95 BC. We know the year from the tree rings in its central post. Then they filled it with stones, burned it and buried it under a mound. Nobody knows why. The Hill of Tara became the most famous royal seat in Ireland.

Rome at the door

In 55 and 54 BC Julius Caesar, busy conquering Gaul, crossed to Britain twice. The tribes fought him, then made peace and promised to pay tribute, and Caesar left. No Roman soldier stayed.

For the next hundred years southern Britain stayed free but grew closer to Rome. Wine and luxury goods arrived, and British kings put their names on their coins in Latin letters. These coins hold the oldest writing made in Britain. The greatest of these kings was Cunobelinus, who ruled from Camulodunon, today’s Colchester. Around AD 42 another British king, driven from his throne, fled to Rome for help. The emperor Claudius now had his excuse to invade.

Ireland stayed outside all of this. No Roman army ever landed there.

Key dates

• About 800 BC: the Iron Age begins in Britain.
• About 325 BC: Pytheas sails around Britain.
• 55 and 54 BC: Julius Caesar’s two expeditions.
• About AD 10 to 40: Cunobelinus rules from Camulodunon.
• AD 43: Claudius invades Britain.

Icons of the Iron Age

Learn to recognize these four things and you will find them in every museum on our list:

• Roundhouses: round homes with walls of woven sticks and clay, or of stone, under a tall thatched roof with a fire in the middle. Castell Henllys in Wales has rebuilt them on their original foundations.
• Torcs: heavy neck rings worn by the powerful, the finest made of gold. Examples are the Great Torc from Snettisham in Norfolk and Ireland’s Broighter collar.
• Hoards: treasure buried in the ground or thrown into lakes and bogs, many perhaps as gifts to the gods. Irish bogs also kept something darker: the bodies of people killed and laid there, perhaps in rituals linked to kingship.
• Celtic art: swirls, spirals and leaf shapes with almost no straight lines, as on the Battersea Shield pulled from the Thames.

Where to see it

• England:
  • the British Museum, London, for the Great Torc and the Battersea Shield;
  • Maiden Castle, Dorset, one of the largest hillforts in Britain.
• Wales:
  • Castell Henllys, Pembrokeshire, for its rebuilt roundhouses;
  • National Museum Cardiff, for the Llyn Cerrig Bach hoard.
• Scotland:
  • Mousa Broch, Shetland;
  • the Broch of Gurness, Orkney;
  • the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, for the Torrs pony cap and the Deskford carnyx.
• Ireland:
  • the National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin, for the bog bodies and the Broighter Hoard;
  • Navan Fort, County Armagh.

II. Roman Britain, AD 43 to 410

The conquest

In AD 43 Claudius sent about forty thousand soldiers. They beat the Britons at a river crossing, probably on the Medway in Kent, and Claudius came himself, for just sixteen days, to enter Camulodunon in triumph. Britain became a Roman province, Britannia. Ireland never did.

The fighting went on for forty years. Caratacus, a son of Cunobelinus, fled west and led the hill tribes of Wales until 51. He was then beaten, and Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes in the north, handed him over in chains. In Rome, Claudius spared his life.

Boudica’s revolt

The most famous rising came in 60 or 61. When the king of the Iceni died, Roman officials seized his kingdom, flogged his widow, Boudica, and raped their daughters. Boudica led the Iceni and their neighbours in revolt. They burned Colchester, London and St Albans, and archaeologists still find a red layer of burnt earth under all three. The Roman governor was away attacking the druids on Anglesey. He raced back with about ten thousand men and chose his ground with care: a narrow valley with a forest behind him. Boudica’s much larger army charged uphill into a storm of javelins. Then the legions advanced in a wedge and pinned the Britons against their own wagons. The revolt was crushed, and Boudica died soon after. Today her bronze statue, in her chariot, stands by Westminster Bridge.

To the edge of the north

By 78 Wales was conquered and held from the legionary fortresses at Caerleon and Chester. In 83 or 84 the governor Agricola marched deep into the area of modern Scotland and beat the Caledonians at Mons Graupius. The historian Tacitus gives their leader, Calgacus, a famous line about Rome: “they make a desert and call it peace.” Tacitus probably wrote the words himself. Rome could not hold the far north, and soon pulled back.

The walls

In 122 the emperor Hadrian ordered a wall across the island from the Tyne to the Solway, seventy-three miles long, with forts along its length. It did not seal the border; it controlled who crossed. Long stretches still stand, and a national trail follows it from coast to coast. Twenty years later Rome built a second wall, of turf, farther north, the Antonine Wall, but held it for only about twenty years.

At Vindolanda, a fort behind Hadrian’s Wall, wooden letters survived in the wet ground. Among them is a birthday invitation from one officer’s wife to another, written around AD 100.

Living under Rome

Rome ruled through towns, roads and local leaders. Many cities began as Roman towns, among them London, York, Chester, Colchester and Bath. Straight roads crossed the country, and many modern roads still follow them. In the south, rich Britons lived in villas with mosaic floors, and at Bath they bathed in the hot springs around a temple. Most people still farmed and lived in roundhouses, and the north and west stayed far less Roman. Latin was the language of government, but most Britons kept their own language, the ancestor of Welsh.

An emperor made in York

The Roman army made and unmade emperors, and Britain, with a big army far from Rome, was a good place to start. In 306 the soldiers at York proclaimed Constantine emperor. He later made Christianity legal across the empire, and his statue sits outside York Minster today. Other generals raised in Britain tried for the throne and failed, and each took soldiers to the continent who never came back.

Ireland, outside the empire

Rome never invaded Ireland. Agricola boasted that one legion could take it, but none ever went. Roman coins and goods still crossed the sea by trade, and people left Roman gold as offerings at Newgrange. Late in the Roman period, Irish raiders, whom the Romans called Scotti, attacked the west coast of Britain, and some began to settle there.

The end of Roman Britain

From the late 200s, raiders came from three sides: Picts from the north, Scotti from Ireland and Saxons from across the North Sea. In 367 they attacked together. In 407 the last Roman army left Britain to fight for the throne in Gaul, and it never came back. By 410 Rome no longer ruled Britain, and the Britons had to defend themselves.

Key dates

• 43: Claudius invades Britain.
• 51: Caratacus is captured.
• 60 or 61: Boudica’s revolt.
• 83 or 84: Battle of Mons Graupius.
• 122: Hadrian’s Wall begins.
• 306: Constantine is proclaimed emperor at York.
• 367: Picts, Scotti and Saxons attack together.
• 410: Roman rule in Britain ends.

People to remember

• Roman emperors: Claudius (Julio-Claudian dynasty), who invaded; Hadrian (Nerva-Antonine dynasty), who built the wall; and Constantine the Great (Constantinian dynasty), proclaimed at York.
• Britons:
  • Cunobelinus and his son Caratacus, of the Catuvellauni;
  • Boudica, of the Iceni;
  • Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes;
  • Calgacus, of the Caledonians.
• Ireland: the kings of Tara. The early ones, like Cormac mac Airt, belong to legend. Niall of the Nine Hostages, founder of the Uí Néill dynasty, died around 450.

Where to see it

• England:
  • Hadrian’s Wall, especially Housesteads, Vindolanda and Chesters;
  • the Roman Baths at Bath;
  • Fishbourne Roman Palace, near Chichester, for its mosaics;
  • Colchester Castle, built on the Temple of Claudius;
  • the amphitheatre at Chester;
  • the British Museum, for the Vindolanda tablets and the Mildenhall silver;
  • the statue of Boudica at Westminster.
• Wales:
  • Caerleon, for its fortress, amphitheatre and Roman Legion Museum;
  • the town walls of Caerwent.
• Scotland:
  • the Antonine Wall at Rough Castle;
  • the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, for the wall’s carved distance slabs.
• Ireland:
  • the Hill of Tara;
  • Navan Fort.

III. After Rome, 410 to 793

Britain on its own

With Rome gone, the Britons ruled themselves in small kingdoms. Raiders from across the North Sea now came to stay: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the coasts of modern Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. Together we call them the Anglo-Saxons. A British monk, Gildas, writing around 540, tells of a British victory at Badon Hill around 500 that gave the Britons years of peace. Over two centuries, though, the newcomers took most of the area of modern England, in rival kingdoms such as Kent, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.

Their kings could be very rich. In the 620s one of them, probably Rædwald of East Anglia, was buried in a ship at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, with a helmet, a sword and gold. The helmet is now one of the treasures of the British Museum.

The Britons in the west

The Britons held the west: the area of modern Wales, Cornwall and parts of the north. In Wales they formed kingdoms such as Gwynedd and Powys and kept their language, which became Welsh. The English called them Wealas, “foreigners,” and that word became Wales. The Welsh call themselves Cymry, “fellow countrymen.”

Ireland and the saints

Ireland, never Roman, kept its own kings. The strongest were the Uí Néill, kings of Tara. What changed Ireland was Christianity. Its best-known missionary, Patrick, was a Briton carried off as a boy by Irish raiders. He escaped, then came back in the 400s to preach. Monasteries such as Clonmacnoise, founded in 544, became centres of learning. The Irish also began to write, in ogham: notches cut along the edges of standing stones, many of which still stand in the south west.

The north

From Ireland, the monk Columba sailed to Iona around 563 and founded the monastery that became the heart of the church in the north. Four peoples then shared the area of modern Scotland:

• the Picts in the north and east;
• the Gaels of Dál Riata in the west, close kin of the Irish, whom the Romans had called Scotti, the name that later gave Scotland its name;
• the Britons in the south west, on the rock of Dumbarton;
• the Angles of Northumbria, pushing in from the south east.

The English become Christian

The Anglo-Saxons arrived as pagans, and Christianity reached them from two sides. In 597 the pope sent the monk Augustine to Kent, and Canterbury became the seat of the English church, as it still is. In Northumbria, King Oswald, who had grown up in exile among the Gaels, invited Aidan, a monk from Iona, who founded a monastery on Lindisfarne around 635. In 664, at a meeting at Whitby, Northumbria chose Rome’s way over Iona’s.

Northumbria and Mercia

For most of the 600s Northumbria was the leading kingdom. Its push north ended in 685, when the Picts lured its king into the hills at Dun Nechtain and destroyed his army. A carved stone at Aberlemno, in Angus, may show the battle. Northumbria’s monasteries still shone. There the monk Bede finished his history of the English church around 731. He also made popular the counting of years from the birth of Christ, the AD we still use. In the 700s the lead passed to Mercia and its king Offa. He gave his name to Offa’s Dyke, the great earth bank along the Welsh border that walkers follow today.

Still, no king ruled all of England. Then, in 793, raiders from the sea attacked Lindisfarne. The age of the Vikings had begun.

Key dates

• 400s: Patrick preaches in Ireland.
• About 500: the Britons win at Badon.
• About 563: Columba founds Iona.
• 597: Augustine reaches Kent.
• 620s: the Sutton Hoo ship burial.
• About 635: Aidan founds Lindisfarne.
• 664: the meeting at Whitby.
• 685: the Picts defeat Northumbria at Dun Nechtain.
• About 731: Bede finishes his history.
• 793: Vikings attack Lindisfarne.

People to remember

• England:
  • Æthelberht of Kent (house of the Oiscingas), the first English king to become Christian;
  • Rædwald of East Anglia (Wuffingas dynasty), probably the man buried at Sutton Hoo;
  • Oswald of Northumbria (house of Ida);
  • Offa of Mercia (Iclingas dynasty).
• Scotland: Bridei, king of the Picts, victor at Dun Nechtain.
• Wales: the kings of Gwynedd and Powys.
• Ireland: the Uí Néill kings of Tara.
• Saints: Patrick, Columba, Augustine, Aidan.

Where to see it

• England:
  • Sutton Hoo, Suffolk;
  • the British Museum, for the Sutton Hoo treasure;
  • Lindisfarne, reached by a tidal causeway;
  • St Paul’s Church, Jarrow, Bede’s church;
  • Canterbury, for its cathedral and the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey.
• Wales: the Offa’s Dyke Path.
• Scotland:
  • Iona Abbey and its carved crosses;
  • Dunadd, the royal fort of Dál Riata;
  • the Aberlemno stones;
  • Dumbarton Castle.
• Ireland:
  • Clonmacnoise;
  • the National Museum of Ireland, for the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch;
  • the Hill of Tara;
  • the Dunloe Ogham Stones, County Kerry.