Part Two covers the Vikings and the making of kingdoms, from 793 to 1066. It has three sections.
The first covers the Viking raids and settlements on both islands: the Danelaw in England, the Norse isles and the birth of Alba in Scotland, Rhodri the Great in Wales, and the founding of Dublin.
The second covers how the kingdoms answered. Æthelstan made the first kingdom of England, Constantine II ruled Alba, Hywel Dda joined much of Wales, and Brian Boru became High King of Ireland and died at Clontarf in 1014.
The third covers the last century before 1066: Cnut’s North Sea Empire, Macbeth, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the only king ever to rule all of Wales, and the year that ended the Viking Age.
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.
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 Ireland.
This is a companion to the Peopling of Britain post (read it here). That post follows on from the Peopling of Europe post (read it here). The Europe post told how the continent was built from four great waves of people. Ireland is the far western edge of that story. The waves that reached Britain also reached Ireland, but they arrived later, in smaller numbers, and always by sea. Here we will not explain again who the hunter-gatherers, the farmers or the steppe herders were. We will follow them onto the island and say what they did once they got there.
This post covers the whole island of Ireland. That includes the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The peopling of the island happened long before today’s border, so we treat the island as one.
Ireland’s story shares its early chapters with Britain. After the Iron Age, the two stories split. Rome never came to Ireland. The Anglo-Saxons never settled there. Instead, Ireland kept much of its older population and its Gaelic language for far longer. It also saw one later arrival that Britain never did: a large planned settlement of English and Scottish people in the 1600s.
Like the Britain post, this one crosses the line into written history. Wars appear only to explain who ended up where. The battles themselves belong to the history primers.
A large archipelago lies off the northwest coast of mainland Europe. It is composed of two main islands (Island of Great Britain and Island of Ireland) and thousands of smaller islands surrounding them. The Atlantic Ocean lies to the west and north. The North Sea lies to the east, between Great Britain and Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. To the south, the English Channel separates Great Britain from France. At its narrowest point, the Strait of Dover, the Channel is about twenty one miles wide. The Irish Sea separates the two larger islands. The Celtic Sea lies to the south, between the southern coast of Ireland and the southwestern tip of Great Britain.
Five countries share these islands. Three smaller islands, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, govern themselves and are not part of any of the five. Many names are used for all of these, and some of the names sound alike but cover different areas and have different meanings. This primer explains what each name includes today. It also shows how they are grouped in international organizations, in sport, in money and in travel. History and politics are not the topic of this post.
We spent the day on a sightseeing walk from the royal palaces of St James’s to Parliament Square, then took the Tube east and crossed the river to Southwark. This was a day of looking from the outside. Several of the places we passed are closed to visitors, among them Clarence House, St James’s Palace and Downing Street. Others are streets, parks, squares and bridges rather than buildings to enter. The places we plan to visit we saved for other days. In a few hours on foot we passed five centuries of kings, a royal execution site, the seat of government and the London of Shakespeare.
Dover Castle stands on the white chalk cliffs above the narrowest crossing of the English Channel. France lies about twenty one miles away, and on a clear day you can see it. For almost two thousand years, whoever held this hill guarded the shortest way into England. Romans, Saxons, Normans, medieval kings, Napoleon’s enemies and Churchill’s admirals all used it. In 1217 its constable called it the key of England.
Canterbury lies in Kent, about 55 miles southeast of London, on the old road to Dover. Christianity in England was reborn here in 597. The cathedral, the ruins of St Augustine’s Abbey and the small church of St Martin were listed by UNESCO in 1988 as a World Heritage Site.
Westminster Abbey stands beside the Houses of Parliament, in the heart of London. It’s official name is Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster. Kings and queens are crowned here, many of them are buried here, and so are some of the greatest scientists and writers in Britain. A minster is a large church tied to a monastery. London has two of them. This one, west of the old city, was the west minster, to tell it apart from Cathedral Church of St Paul the Apostle, the east minster in the City of London.
Hereford is the market town of a farming county. We reached it by driving through Worcestershire and then Herefordshire, in the far west of England against the Welsh border.
Worcestershire gave its name to a sauce. In 1837 two chemists, John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, began making it in the back of their shop at 68 Broad Street in Worcester, and it was the first sauce sold under the Worcestershire name. Where the recipe came from is unclear. The first bottles said it followed the recipe of a nobleman in the county, and the company later claimed that Lord Sandys, a former Governor of Bengal, had brought it back from India. It is still made in Worcester today.
Herefordshire is mostly farmland, known for its orchards, its cider and its cattle. The Hereford breed began here in 1742, when a farmer named Benjamin Tomkins started a herd with a bull calf and two cows inherited from his father’s estate. The farmers wanted cattle that turned the local grass into beef efficiently, to feed the growing towns of the Industrial Revolution. The red cattle with white faces became the first English cattle recognized as a breed, and today more than five million pedigree Herefords graze in some fifty countries. The county’s orchards supply its other famous product. H. P. Bulmer founded his cider company in Hereford in 1887, and its Bulmers and Strongbow ciders are now sold around the world.
The city stands on the River Wye. A church has stood on the cathedral site since at least the eighth century, and the cathedral close holds a map of the world drawn around 1300. We came to see the cathedral and the map.
The Lovell Telescope stands in the fields of Cheshire at Jodrell Bank, a white dish 250 feet across. When it was finished in 1957, it was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Today only two are larger, at Green Bank in West Virginia and Effelsberg in Germany. It exists because of a war, a machine built to find enemy aircraft and a man that decided to point it at the sky.
