英语国家概念-L2.pdf
2ChapterThe O rigins of a Nation(5000 BC-1066)I.Early Settlers(5000 BC-55 BC)Britain was originally a part of the European continent.When the last Ice Ageended 7,000 years ago,melting ice flooded the low-lying lands,creating theEnglish Channel and the North Sea,and turning Britain into an island.1.The IberiansThe first known settlers of Britain were the Iberians.At about 3000 BC duringthe New Stone Age,these short,dark and long headed people came to Britain,probably from the Iberian peninsula,now Spain.They were farming folk who keptanimals and grew crops.The long barrows which can still be found,mostly in thechalky lands of Wiltshire and Dorset,were their communal burial mounds.More dramatic monuments were the henges,the most important of whichwas Stonehenge in Wiltshire,constructed before 2000 BC.Exactly why it wasbuilt is unknown but it must have had religious and political significance.Althoughin popular mythology Druids are associated with Stonehenge,they were Celticpriests who arrived much later.2.The Beaker FolkAt about 2000 BC the Beaker Folk arrived from the areas now known asHolland and the Rhineland.These people took their name from their distinctivebell-shaped drinking vessels with which they were buried in crouching positionsin individual graves.They brought with them the art of pottery making,the abilityto fashion bronze toots and the custom of individual burial.They developed theirown farming society and built hill forts.These forts,of which Maiden Castle inDorset is one of the finest examples,became small fortified towns.3.The CeltsThe Celts,a taller and fairer race than the people who had come before,beganto arrive about 700 BC arid kept coming until the arrival of the Romans.Theymay originally have come from eastern and central Europe,now France,Belgiumand southern Germany.They came to Britain in three main waves.The first wave were the Gaels,who started to come about 600 BC.The secondwave were the Brythons,who started to come about 400 BC.The Belgae cameabout 150 BC.The Celts did not kill off the Iberians.They drove some of them tothe north and west,kept the rest as slaves,and in the end the two races mixed tovarying extent in different parts of the country.The Belgae were the most industrious and vigorous of the Celtic tribes.One ofthe most powerful of their chieftains was Cassivellaunus,uncle to Cunobelinus,Shakespeares Cymbeline,who ruled over a large area north of the Thames inwhat is now Hertforshire,Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.The Celts were practised farmers.They drained much of the marshlands andbuilt houses of wood and wickerwork with a weather-proof coating of mud.Theywere ironworkers,too.The Celtic tribes are ancestors of the Highland Scots,theIrish and the Welsh,and their languages are the basis of both Welsh and GaelicThe Celts religion was Druidism.The Druids(the wise men,astrologers andsoothsayers)worshipped and performed their rites in woods by the light of themoon.There is evidence that they offered up human sacrifices to their gods,sometimes single victims,at other times groups of men in immense wickerworkcages.II.Roman Britain(55 BC-41.0 AD)British recorded history begins with the Roman invasion.Julius Caesar,the great Roman general,invaded Britain for the first time in 55BC,partly to gather information about the island of which so lit tie was thenknown and partly to punish the Belgae who had helped their fellow tribesmen intheir fight against the conquering Romans in Gaul,the land that is now France.He landed in Kent with several thousand men but,meeting resistance and badweather,he decided to withdraw.He returned the following year.His armymarched as far as Wheathampstead in Hertforshire,Cssivellaunuss hilifort,which he captured after fierce fighting.He then withdrew with hostages andprisoners.The successful invasion did not take place until nearly a century later,in AD 43,headed by the Emperor Claudius.For nearly 400 years Britain was under the Roman occupation.But it wasnever a total occupation for two reasons.First,some parts of the country resisted.For example,Boadicea(or Boudicca),queen of the Iceni of East Anglia,attempted to drive the Romans from Britain in AD 61.She succeeded indestroying the capital of the Romans,Londinium,before being defeated.Secondily,Roman troops were often withdrawn from Britain to fight in other partsof the Roman Empire.Agricola,the Roman general and governor to Britain(77-84),couldnt make a full conquest of all the area corresponding to modemBritain.The tribes of Scotland were especially fierce.The Romans soon realizedthat they could not conquer them.They withdrew from the north in the secondcentury and built two great walls to keep the Picts,so called because of theirpainted faces,out of the area they had conquered.These were the HadriansWall running from Carlisle to Newcastle,and the Antomne Wail linking theestuaries of the Forth and the Clyde The Romans still faced 3 problems in Britain.The Picts still attacked them periodically;Saxon pirates attacked them in thesoutheast;and control was only effective in the south-eastern part of the country,a small section from Exeter to Tees.The Romans built a network of towns,mostly walled,many on the sites ofCeltic settlements or their own military camps.The suffix-caster or-Chester inEnglish place names-Lancaster,Winchester and Chester itself-deriyes fromcastra,the Latin word for camp.The Roman capital was London(Londinium).York had been created as a northern stronghold and Bath rapidly developed because of its waters.f Between the large towns the Romans constructed a networkof major and secondary roads,not always as straight as tradition would havethem but of remarkable solidity as the surviving road across the moors atBlackstone Edge,Littleborough,still shows From London,roads radiated all overthe country along mutes which for much of their length are still in use as modernthoroqghfares:to the north by way of Watling Street and Ermine Street;to theeast by way of the Cole hester road;to Chichester in the south by Stane Street;to the west by the road that passed through Silchester then on to Cirencester(Corinium)and GloucesterThe Romans made good use of Britains natural resources,mining lead,ironand tin and manufacturing pottery.They built baths,temples,amphitheatres andbeautiful v川as.The Romans also brought the new religion,Christianity,to Britain.This came atfirst by indirect means,probably brought by traders and soldiers,and was quitewell-established before the first Christian Emperor,Constantine,was proclaimedin AD 306.The Romans remained in control of Britain for nearly 400 years.Then,withbarbarians from Eastern Europe at the gates of Rome,under repeated attacksfrom Picts and also from the Scots(the tattooed ones who invaded from thenorth of Ireland)and needing to set up a new military front on the east coast tohold off the Germanic Saxon tribes invading from Europe,they pulled out in AD410.Although Britain became part of a vast sophisticated Roman Empire all aroundthe Mediterranean,the Roman impact upon the Britons was surprisingly limited.The Romans always treated the Britons as a subject people of slave class.Neverduring the 4 centuries did the Romans and Britons intermarry.The Romans hadno impact on the language or culture of ordinary Britons.However,otherinvasions of far less sophisticated peoples had far greater cultural impact uponBritainIII.The Anglo-Saxons(446-871)In the mid-5th century a new wave of invaders,Jutes,who fished and farmed inJutland(now southern Denmark),came to Britain first.According to Welshlegends,the British King of Kent,Vortigern,invited two Jutish chiefs namedHengist and Horsa to help him drive out Picts and Scots.They came to his assistance,but having driven back the Picts and Scots turned upon Vortigern,andafter a series of battles overpowered him.Hengist became the King of Kent in449.Then the Sixons,users of the short-sword from northern Germany,established their kingdoms in Essex,Sussex arid Wessex(which covered mostof the West Country)from the end of the 5th century to the beginning of the 6thcentury.In the second half of the 6th century,the Angles,who also came fromnorthern Germany and were to give their name to the English people,settled inEast Anglia,Mercia(which covered the Midlands and the Welsh borders)andNorthumbria,which reached to the Scottish border.These seven principalkingdoms of Kent,Essex,Sussex,Wessex,East Anglia,Mercia and Northumbriahave been given the name of Heptarchy.The Ango-Saxon tribes were constantly at war with one another,each trying toget the upper hand,so that the kingdoms were often broken up and often piecedtogether again.By the end of the eighth century Offa,the King of Mercia(AD757-797),who built the great earthwork known as Offas Dyke along his westernborders to keep out the Welsh controlled for a long time virtually all central,eastern and south-eastern England.But,after his death,Wessex became thedominant kingdom.It controlled Devon and Cornwall as well as the lands of theSouth and East Saxons;and at the beginning of the ninth century,under theirKing,Egbert,the West Saxons defeated the Mercians.When the Northumbrianssubmitted to him and took him for their master in 829,Egbert actually be-camean overlord of all the English.The Anglo-Saxons brought their own Teutonic religion to Britain.Among theirgods were Tiu,the god of war,Woden,king of heaven,Thor,the god of Storms,and Freya,goddess of peace.The-names Tusrlay,Wednesday,Thursday andFriday derive from these gods.Christianity soon disappeared,except among the Celts of Cornwall,Wales,Scotland and Ireland.In AD 563 on the island of Iona,off the west coast ofScotland,a monk called Columba established a monastery which was to beresponsible for much of the Christian conversion of the people of the north.Under its influence a monastery was founded at Lindisfarne in Northumberlandand another at Kells in Ireland,and many smaller ones sprang up through-out theCeltic areas.Even so,Christianity remained a fringe belief.In 597,Pope Gregory I sent St.Augustine,the Prior of St.Andrews Monasteryin Rome,to England to convert the heathen English to Christianity.The Pope hadbeen attracted by the fair faces of some beautiful English boys exposed for salein the stave-market at Rome.So,he decided to send a party of his priests to helpthe English people.Ethelbert,King of Kent,soon became a Christian himself.Heprovided St.Augustine with a house for his followers in Canterbury and in 579 St.Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.Augustine was remarkablysuccessful in converting the king and the nobility,but the conversion of the common people was largely due to the missionary activities of the monks in the north.Monasteries sprang up throughout the country and became places of learning.There was disagreement between the Ro-man missionaries and the Celticmissionaries.The Roman mission-aries held that the Popes authority wassupreme,and the Celtic missionaries held that Christian belief did not require afinal earthly arbiter.Then the two factions held a conference at Whitby in Yorkshire in 664.At this Synod of Whitby,the Roman missionaries gained the upperhand.Although the Anglo-Sxons were ferocious people,constantly quarrelling,theylaid the foundations of the English state.They divided the country into shires,which the Normans later called counties,with shire courts and shire reeves,orsheriffs,responsible for administering laws as comprehensive as any in the earlymedieval world.They devised the narrow-strip,three-field farming system whichcontinued until the agricultural revolution in the 18th century.They alsoestablished the manorial system,whereby the lord of the manor collected taxes,and organized the local army.And they created the Witan(council or meeting ofthe wisemen),to advise the king,the basis of the Privy Council which still existstoday.IV.The Viking and Danish InvasionsThe Norwegian Vikings and the Danes from Denmark attacked various parts ofEngland from the end of the 8th century.They became a serious problem in the9th century,especially between 835 and 878.They even managed to captureYork,an important center of Christianity in 867.By the middle of the ninth century,the Vikings and the Danes were posing a threat to the Saxon kingdom of Wessexwhose capital was at Winchester.Alfred,King of Wessex(AD 871-899),wasstrong enough to defeat the Danes and came to a relatively friendly agreementwith them in 879.The Danes gained control of the north and east of England(the Danelaw),while Alfred would rule the rest.Alfred also persuaded theirleader,Guth rum,and several of his leading warriors,to be baptized asChristians.Alfred is known as the father of the British navy as he founded a strong fleetwhich first beat the Danes at sea,then protected the coasts and encouragedtrade.He also reorganized the fyrd(the Saxon army),making it more efficient.Alfred,who is said to have taught himself Latin at the age of 40,translated intoEnglish Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English People.A learned manhimself,he encouraged learning in others,established schools and formulated alegal system.This,as well as his admirable work with the army and the navy,makes him worthy of his title Alfred the Great.After Alfreds death,trouble broke out again.His successors re-conquered theDanelaw,but in 980 Viking invasions renewed.King Ethelred the Unready(978-1016)tried paying the invaders to stay away by imposing a tax,called thedanegeld,on his peopie.To his great disappointment,the Danes did,not goaway but grew greedier.When Etheireds death left no strong Saxon successor,the Witan choseCanute,the Danish leader,as king in 1016.Canute made England part of aScandinavian empire which included Norway as well as Denmark.Canute provedto be a wise ruler.He divided power between Danes and Saxons and,to protecthis northern border,compelled Malcolm H,king of the Scots,to recognize him asoverlord.After Canutes death in 1035 his sons,Harold and Ha rd i Canute reignedsuccessively.After Hardicanutes death the succession passed to Edward theConfessor,son of Etheired the Unready,who had spent most of his life inNormandy,the part of France set-tied by the Vikings.V.The Norman Conquest(1066)King Edward(1042-66),known because of his piety as the Confessor,seemed more concerned with the building of Westminster Abbey than with affairsof state.He was far more Norman than Saxon and soon upset his father-in-law,Earl Godwin,by filling his court with foreign favourites and appointing a Normanpriest Archbishop of Canterbury.He is also said to have promised the Englishthrone to William,Duke of Normandy.When Edward was on his death-bed,four men laid claim to the English throne,the King of Norway,the Duke of Normandy,and two brothers of Edwards Queen,Edith,one of whom,Ibstig,the deposed Earl of Northumbria,was living in exilein Flanders.The other of these two brothers was Harold Godwinson,the hereditary ruler or Earl of Wessex.When Edward
