The Making of an Island ― The Birth of Britain

To the northwest of the European continent, beyond a cold stretch of sea, float two great islands. One of them, the island of Great Britain, would become the stage for a nation that came to rule the world’s oceans and to shape the age we call modern. Yet the beginning of that story is by no means the tale of a great power. For a long time this was a frontier island, overwritten again and again by those who came from across the sea. Rome came and left; the Germanic peoples crossed over; raiders from the northern seas swept in; and at last a conqueror came from the far shore of the channel. Each time, the island’s map was redrawn, and its language and its rulers changed hands. The country called England took shape only at the end of all these overlapping waves. This first episode is a journey through that thousand years of layering.

Rome Came, and Rome Departed

Britain was first drawn onto the stage of history by the reach of a vast empire stretching up from the Mediterranean. In the year 43, the Roman Empire mounted a full invasion of the southern part of the island and absorbed it as the province of Britannia. Roads were laid, cities were built, baths and temples rose, and the southern half of the island was ordered as a part of the Roman world. On the northern frontier, where the empire’s strength reached only with difficulty, a wall of stone later known as Hadrian’s Wall was raised, drawing a line that marked the limit of Roman rule. The island was also a front line dividing the inside of civilization from the outside.

But even a rule that seemed eternal came to an end. As pressure from the Germanic peoples mounted on the continent and the empire itself began to waver, there was no longer strength to spare for defending a frontier island. And so, around the year 410, in the time of the Western Roman emperor Honorius, the Roman army withdrew from Britain. From then on, it is said, the island’s inhabitants had no choice but to see to their own defense.

What remained after Rome departed were cities stripped of the army that had guarded them, and a people who had lost their backing. The well-ordered roads and towns, with no one left to maintain them, slowly fell into decay. Scholars are divided on how to picture this age, for the sources are scarce; but either way, the island was left in a great void. It was toward that empty space that new peoples, from across the sea, began to stir.

Those Who Crossed the Sea ― The Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings

Into the Britain that Rome had left, from the 5th into the 6th century, came Germanic peoples from across the North Sea. Recorded as Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and others, they later came to be called collectively the Anglo-Saxons. Sometimes fighting the native Britons, sometimes mingling with them, they built small kingdoms across the island. The age in which powerful kingdoms such as Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex stood side by side is sometimes grouped together under the name of the Heptarchy, the seven kingdoms. The very name England, the land of the Angles, is said to derive from these people.

Yet just as the island had begun, at last, to settle, a new threat closed in from the northern seas. The Vikings. From around the end of the 8th century, the seafarers of Scandinavia raided monasteries and in time led armies and set out to settle. They spread their power across the north and east of England, and their domain came to be called the Danelaw. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were overwhelmed one after another, and the island was once more on the verge of being swallowed by a great wave.

The one who held firm amid this crisis was Alfred, king of Wessex. Driven for a time into the marshes, he nonetheless rebuilt his army, defeated the Vikings in 878, and, it is told, fixed the boundary between the two powers in the Peace of Wedmore. Alfred ordered the laws, encouraged learning, and strengthened the defenses, becoming one of the few rulers in the English-speaking world honored as ‘the Great.’ And in the time of his grandson Athelstan, the regions were drawn still further together, and around the year 927 there appeared, it is said, the first king to rule all of England. The scattered small kingdoms had begun to come together into a single idea of England. The Viking threat had not vanished, however, and the struggle over the rule of the island continued still.

1066 ― The Island Bound into a Single Kingdom

In the middle of the 11th century, over the throne of England, a year of destiny arrived. Early in 1066, when King Edward the Confessor died without an heir, several claimants rose to contest the succession. Within the country, Harold Godwinson took the throne as King Harold II. But across the channel, Duke William of Normandy claimed that the crown had been promised to him, and he led an army across the sea.

The two forces clashed in the autumn of that same year, in the Battle of Hastings in southern England. Harold’s army, it is told, was weary, having only just driven off another invader in the north. After fierce fighting the Anglo-Saxon host broke, and King Harold II too lost his life. The Norman victory was decisive, and William marched on to London, where he was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day of that year. Thus was born William the Conqueror, William I. This whole train of events is known as the Norman Conquest.

The Norman Conquest was no mere changing of one dynasty for another. William set aside many of the old Anglo-Saxon nobility and parceled out their lands to the retainers he had brought from across the channel. Castles of stone were raised across the land, and a feudal net of rule, with the king at its apex, was thrown over the whole island. At court French was spoken, and as it mingled with English it shaped the rich English of later ages. A distinctive language and society were born here, layered from the tongue of the conqueror and the tongue of the conquered.

Beginning as a frontier of Rome, overwritten by the Germanic peoples, shaken by the Vikings, and finally bound into one by a conqueror who crossed the channel ― the first thousand years of Britain were a history of being redrawn again and again by waves pressing in from outside, while turning every one of those waves into a foundation. When a mighty kingship took root on the island through conquest, the outline of the country called England came at last clearly into view. Yet that strong royal power would in time be called into question from a wholly unexpected quarter.