The Earliest Times of England (600 B.C.

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The Earliest Times of England(600 B.C. 1066
A.D.)
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• The Earliest Britain
• 600 B.C. The Celts
• 43 A.D. The Roman Conquest
• 450 A.D. The Anglo-Saxon Period
• 800 A.D. The Danish Invasion

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The Earliest Britain

• The Ice Age, during which Neandertals and then
  Cro-Magnons inhabited Great Britain, ended about
  8000 bc.
• The rising sea level produced the English
  Channel and made Great Britain an island.
• By 3000 bc the Iberians, or Long Skulls, were
  farming the chalk soil of southern England, and
  by 2500 bc the pastoral Beaker folk had
  established themselves. (The latter, named for
  their characteristic pottery, are noted for their
  bronze tools and their huge stone monuments,
  especially Stonehenge. These monuments attest to
  their social and economic organization as well as
  their technical skill and intellectual ability)

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• Stonehenge, prehistoric monument on Salisbury
  Plain, north of Salisbury, in south-western
  England, that dates from the late Stone and early
  Bronze ages (about 3000-1000 bc). The monument,
  now in ruins, consists of a circular group of
  large upright stones surrounded by a circular
  earthwork. Stonehenge is the best preserved and
  most celebrated of the megalithic monuments of
  Europe. It is not known for certain what purpose
  Stonehenge served, but many scholars believe the
  monument was used as a ceremonial or religious
  centre.

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• The Picts, ancient and mysterious inhabitants of
  central and northern Scotland and of northern
  Ireland, , were for centuries, the most powerful
  inhabitants of the British Isles.
• They were of rather short stature and of dark
  complexion. The name Pict is believed to be
  derived from the Latin word Picti the painted
  men
• Historical records show that they were quite
  fierce warriors. Hadrian's Wall was built to
  protect the Roman colonies from their attacks.
• The Picts also fought continuously in Scotland
  with the Scots who had settled there in the 4th
  century.
• In 850 the Picts were defeated by Kenneth I, king
  of Scotland. Kenneth united the two rival tribes
  and thus founded the kingdom of Scotland.

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The Celts

• In the 1st millennium bc the Celts overran the
  British Isles, as they did all of western Europe.
• Their priests, the Druids, dominated their
  society.
• Druidism, religious faith of ancient Celtic
  inhabitants, survived until it was supplanted by
  Christianity. This religion included belief in
  the immortality of the soul, which at death was
  believed to pass into the body of a newborn
  child. According to Julius Caesar, the Druids
  believed that they were descended from a supreme
  being.
• The word Celt is derived from Keltoi, the name
  given to these people by Herodotus and other
  Greek writers. To the Romans, the Continental
  Celts were known as Galli, or Gauls those in the
  British Isles were called Britanni.
• The Britons excelled in certain fields of art,
  particularly in the making of bronze weapons and
  jewellery. When the Angles and Saxons invaded
  Britain, many Britons fled to the Roman province
  of Armorica in north-western France. This area
  was later named Brittany after the Britons, who
  subsequently became known as Bretons.

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• Celtic Cross
• In the 5th century ad Irelands Saint Patrick led
  the conversion of the Celts, the Iron Age
  invaders of Ireland, to Christianity. Although
  Christian churches and monasteries were founded
  for the Celtic people, many of the converts
  retained much of their Druidic religion. This
  Celtic cross near the Shannon River in Ireland,
  with relief of earth gods and woodland spirits,
  illustrates how the Celtic people preserved many
  of their Druidic beliefs.

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• Maiden Castle's Trenches and Ramparts

An ancient Celtic settlement and fortress by the
Frome, Maiden Castle occupies about 50 hectares
(about 120 acres) of west Dorset countryside just
south of Dorchester. The vast earthwork is still
encircled by ancient ramparts and entrenchments.
Dorchester, founded by the Romans, is today a
small town with a noteworthy past.
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The Roman Conquest

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• Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 bc to conquer
  the native peoples, called Britons. The native
  tribes resisted for several decades.
• The Britons, maintained political freedom and
  paid tribute to Rome for almost a century before
  the Roman emperor Claudius I initiated the
  systematic conquest of Britain in ad43.
• By 47, Roman legions had occupied almost all the
  island south of the Humber River and east of the
  Severn River. The tribes, notably the Silures,
  inhabitants of what are now the Wales and
  Yorkshire regions, resisted for more than 30
  years, a period that was marked as rebellion led
  by the native queen Boudicca.
• At this time Britain became an imperial province
  of Rome, called Britannia, administered by Roman
  governors.

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• Little is known of the relations between the
  Britons and their conquerors. Shortly after 115,
  the natives rose in revolt against the Romans. As
  a result, the Roman emperor Hadrian visited
  Britain in 122 and began the construction of a
  rampart 117 km long, reaching from Solway Firth,
  on the Irish Sea, to the mouth of the Tyne River.
  Fragments of this wall, called Hadrian's wall,
  still stand.

• Twenty years later, another wall, called the
  Antonine Wall, was built across the narrowest
  part of the island, from the Firth of Forth to
  the Firth of Clyde. The region between the two
  walls was a defence area against the Caledonians,
  who were eventually driven north of Hadrian's
  Wall in the 3rd century. The wall marked the
  northern Roman frontier during the next 200
  years, a period of relative peace.

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• During the period of conquest and military
  campaigns, the people of Britain benefited from
  Roman technology and cultural influences. (legal
  and political systems, architecture, and
  engineering,numerous towns were established, as
  well as a vast network of military highways)
• In general, however, only the native nobility,
  the wealthier classes, and the town residents
  accepted the Roman language and way of life,
  while the Britons in outlying regions retained
  their native culture.
• At the end of the 3rd century, the Roman army
  began to withdraw from Britain to defend other
  parts of the Roman Empire. In 410, when the
  Visigoths invaded Rome, the last of the Roman
  legions were withdrawn from the island. Celtic
  culture again became predominant, and Roman
  civilization in Britain rapidly disintegrated.
  Roman influence virtually disappeared during the
  Germanic invasions in the 5th and 6th centuries.
  Thereafter the culture of the Angles and Saxons
  spread throughout the island. Historians refer to
  Britain after the Germanic invasions as England,
  Scotland, and Wales.

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• Roman Bath
• The Romans were originally attracted to the
  natural hot springs near what is now the city of
  Bath in England, pictured here. They founded the
  city and excavated the baths to exploit their
  medicinal value. The baths are now famous
  landmarks.

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The Anglo-Saxon Period

• In the absence of Roman administrators, British
  warlords, nominally Christian, ruled small,
  unstable kingdoms and continued some Roman
  traditions of governance, The Saxons revolted
  against their British chiefs and began the
  process of invasion and settlement that
  established Germanic kingdoms throughout the
  island by the 7th century. Later legends about a
  hero named Arthur were placed in this period of
  violence.
• The invaders were Angles, Saxons, Frisians,
  Jutes, and Franks in origin, but were similar in
  culture and eventually identified themselves
  indifferently as Angles or Saxons.

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• By the 7th century the Germanic kingdoms included
  Northumbria, Bernicia, Deira, Lindsay, Mercia,
  East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, Sussex, and Kent.
• All Anglo-Saxon societies were characterized by
  strong kinship groups, feuds, customary law, and
  a system of money compensations (wergeld) for
  death, personal injury, and theft. They practiced
  their traditional polytheistic religions, lacked
  written language, and depended on mixed economies
  of agriculture, hunting, and animal husbandry.

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Arthur, King of the Britons

• Arthur, is claimed as the King of nearly every
  Celtic Kingdom known. The 6th century certainly
  saw many men named Arthur born into the Celtic
  Royal families of Britain but, despite attempts
  to identify the great man himself amongst them,
  there can be little doubt that most of these
  people were only named in his honour
• Geoffrey of Monmouth recorded Arthur as a
  High-King of Britain. He was the son of his
  predecessor, Uther Pendragon
• The name Arthur itself appears to derive from the
  Celtic word Art, meaning "bear". Arthur could,
  like so many other Celtic gods, be merely a
  personification of the many reverred animals of
  the wild.

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King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
The tale of King Arthur, his wife Guinevere,
and his knight Lancelot

• King Arthur
• Arthur, a medieval king of the Britons who
  historians believe may have existed during the
  6th century. According to legend, Arthur was
  raised unaware of his royal ancestry and became
  king by pulling the magic sword Excalibur from a
  stone.

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• Angles (people) (Latin Angli), Germanic tribe
  that occupied the region still called Angeln in
  what is now the state of Schleswig-Holstein,
  Germany. Together with the Saxons and Jutes, they
  invaded Britain during the 5th century ad. With
  their kindred ethnic groups, they formed the
  people who came to be known as the English. The
  name England is derived from them.
• Jutes, early Germanic tribe of Denmark or
  northern Germany that, participated in the
  conquest of south-eastern Britain along with the
  Angles and Saxons during the 5th century ad.
  These people were the inhabitants of Jutland.
  Their territory bordered that of the Saxons, who,
  with the Angles, also settled Britain and drove
  the Britons westward into present-day Wales.
  Through assimilation, the Jutes gradually lost
  their identity as a people, and by the 8th
  century the term Jute had almost completely
  disappeared from the English language
• Saxons, Germanic people, who dwelt in the south
  Jutland Peninsula in the north of what is now
  Germany. They conducted piratical raids in the
  North Sea area. Saxons invaded Britain in the 5th
  and 6th centuries. They were joined by other
  Germanic peoples, the Angles and the Jutes. At
  the beginning of the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxon
  conquest of Britain was practically completed.

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Saxon Invasions and Land Holdings
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Britain about 600 - Settlements of Angles, Saxons
and Jutes
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Saxon Control
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• 1.Reintroduction of Christianity

• The dominant themes of the next two centuries
  were the success of Christianity and the
  political unification of England. Christianity
  came from two directionsRome and Ireland. In 596
  Pope Gregory I sent a group of missionaries under
  a monk named Augustine to Kent, where King
  Ethelbert had married Bertha, a Christian
  Frankish princess. Soon after, Ethelbert was
  baptized, Augustine became the first archbishop
  of Canterbury, and the southern kingdoms became
  Christian.

• In Northumbria the Christianity from Rome met
  Celtic Christianity, which had been brought from
  Ireland to Scotland. Although not heretical, the
  Celtic church differed from Rome in the way the
  monks tonsured their heads, in its reckoning of
  the date of Easter, and, most important, in its
  organization, which reflected the clans of
  Ireland rather than the highly centralized Roman
  Empire. In 664, Northumbria's King Oswy chose to
  go with Rome, giving England a common religion.
  In 668, was the English church given its basic
  structure.

• Bede, who spent most of his life in Northumbria,
  was the outstanding European scholar of his age.
  His Ecclesiastical History of the English People
  made popular the use of bc and ad to date
  historical events.

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• 2.The Process of Unification

• By the 7th century people regarded themselves as
  belonging to the nation of the English, though
  divided into several kingdoms Essex, Sussex,
  Wessex,, Nurthambria, Mercia, and Kent, which was
  the first English kingdom to be converted to
  Cristianity.

• King Alfred (849 901)
• The most powerful king of Anglo-Saxon period
• Alfred, became king of Wessex, when The Danes,
  part of the Viking forces that had begun
  to raid the English coasts in the late 8th
  century, set on conquering England. Wessex and
  Alfred were all that stood in their way. After
  his victory at Edington in 878 he forced the
  Danish king Guthrum to accept baptism and a
  division of England into two parts, Wessex and
  what historians later called the Danelaw (Essex,
  East Anglia, and Northumbria). Alfred captured
  London and began to roll back the Danish tide.

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• Alfred's Legacy -Alfred also gave his attention
  to good government, issuing a set of laws, and to
  scholarship. He promoted, and assisted in, the
  translation of Latin works into Old English and
  encouraged the compilation of the Anglo-Saxon
  Chronicle. For his many accomplishments, Alfred
  was called The Great, the only English king so
  acclaimed.
• The conquest of the Danelaw was completed by
  Alfred's son, Edward the Elder, and by his
  grandson Athelstan, who won a great victory at
  Brunanburh in 937. Most of the rest of the
  century was peaceful.

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Alfred the Great, his son Edward and wife
Ealhswith
King Alfred the Great (849, ruled 871-899)
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Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Considered the primary
source for English history between the 10th and
12th centuries, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also
contains earlier examples of prose. This page
depicts Charlemagne, king of the Franks in the
late 8th century, killing the heathen Saxons
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The Danish Invasion

• A new round of Danish invasions came in the reign
  of Ethelred II. Often called the Redeless
  (meaning unready, or without counsel or
  unwise). In 1014 he was driven from the throne
  by King Sweyn I of Denmark, only to return a few
  months later when Sweyn died. When Ethelred died
  in 1016, Sweyn's son Canute II won out over
  Edmund II, called Ironside, the son of Ethelred.
  Under Canute, England was part of an empire that
  also included Denmark and Norway.
• Following the short and unpopular reigns of
  Canute's sons, Harold I (Harefoot) and
  Hardecanute, Edward the Confessor, another son of
  Ethelred, was recalled from Normandy (Normandie),
  where he had lived in exile. Edward's reign is
  noted for its dominance by the powerful earls of
  WessexGodwin, and then his son, Harold
  (subsequently Harold II)and for the first influx
  of Norman-French influence. Edward was most
  interested in the building of Westminster Abbey,
  which was completed just in time for his burial
  in January 1066.

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The Danelaw
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Edward the Confessor (1005-1066) - King of
England 1042-1066
King Edward the Confessor restored the Saxon
dynasty to the English throne after many years of
Danish rule. He was a very pious monarch and
spent most of his time praying and building
Westminster Abbey. He didn't seem interested in
his wife or in producing an heir to the throne.
Unfortunately, he, therefore, had no obvious heir
at his death and this situation led to a series
of invasions and, finally, the Conquest of
England by Duke William the Bastard of Normandy.
Edward was buried in Westminster Abbey a few days
after its completion. He was reverred as a saint
and was the Patron Saint of England before the
introduction of the worship of St. George.
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• Edward's death without an heir left the
  succession in doubt. The royal council chose
  Harold, earl of Wessex, although his only claim
  to the throne was his availability.
• Other aspirants were King Harold III (the Hard
  Ruler) of Norway and Duke William of Normandy.
  Harold II defeated the former at Stamford Bridge
  on September 25, 1066, but lost to William at
  Hastings on October 14. William was crowned in
  Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day.

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English Sovereigns The first unified government
of England came with the conquest of the Danish
in northern England by Edward the Elder. The rule
of succession to the throne is primogeniture, or
the passing of the throne to the oldest son (or
daughter when there are no sons).
West Saxon Kings West Saxon Kings West Saxon Kings
899-924 Edward the Elder son of Alfred the Great
924-39 Athelstan son of Edward I
939-46 Edmund half brother of Athelstan
946-55 Edred brother of Edmund
955-59 Edwy son of Edmund
959-75 Edgar brother of Edwy
975-78 Edward the Martyr son of Edgar
978-1016 Ethelred II son of Edgar
1016 Edmund Ironside son of Ethelred
Danish Kings Danish Kings Danish Kings
1016-35 Canute II son of Sweyn I of Denmark who conquered England 1013
1035-37 Harold I and Hardecanute sons of Canute II (each ruled a part of England as decided by the royal council)
1037-40 Harold I son of Canute
1040-42 Hardecanute son of Canute
West Saxon Kings (restored) West Saxon Kings (restored) West Saxon Kings (restored)
1042-66 Edward the Confessor son of Ethelred II
1066 Harold II son of Godwin
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