History of England 1-6

In AD 314 three English bishops, together with a priest and a deacon, were attending an ecclesiastical council at Arles in southern France. The bishops came from York, London and Lincoln; the deacon and priest arrived from Cirencester. Evidence for what may be a Christian cathedral, complete with marble and painted walls, has been found at excavations near Tower Hill. A holy well was located in the centre of the nave. This may have been the diocesan centre for Bishop Restitutus of London. There is precious little evidence for other churches of the third and fourth centuries (although one has been found at Silchester), but there is good reason for this. The earliest churches lie concealed beneath more recent ones in the long history of sacred spaces. We would find the churches of early English Christianity only if we could uproot the cathedrals and churches of the modern world.

No empire can last forever; no state can remain steady and unscathed. The frontiers of the Roman polity were steadily being threatened and, in many places, overwhelmed. The pressure of the northern tribes grew ever more insidious. The Franks had entered northern Gaul. The Visigoths were to settle in Aquitania. The threat to England was posed by the Picts and the Scots in the north, together with their tribal allies among the Franks and the Saxons. In AD 367 a force overcame Hadrian’s Wall, and then in dispersed bands moved southward to ravage the country; the commander of the forts of the Saxon Shore was murdered and the provincial leader known as Dux Britanniarum was captured. It was a notable defeat for the English. Roman intervention and rebuilding, including the refortification of key posts, helped to maintain prosperity and peace for forty years; but then the northern tribes came back.

A series of bids for imperial power by various pretenders meant that, at the beginning of the fifth century, England was effectively stripped of its military forces. They had gone off in search of glory. Civil war between the various pretenders to the imperial throne weakened the self-discipline and orderliness that had always been the sign of Roman rule. The administrative machinery was beginning to break apart. In 408 the northern tribes were emboldened once more to attack, and the Roman English had no choice but to defend themselves. A contemporary historian, Zosimus, records that they ‘took up arms and, braving danger for their own independence, freed the cities from the barbarians threatening them’. He also reports that they then expelled their Roman governors and established their own administrations.

Various levels of intrigue are embedded in this simple narrative. There would have been some Roman English who wished to retain the Roman administration from which they derived great benefits; there would have been others who wished to be rid of the burden of taxation and coercion associated with the central government. Two years later, in 410, one section of the English appealed to the emperor for arms and men; it is not clear whether they were needed against an external army of Saxons, or against an internal English enemy. In any case the emperor, Honorius, replied that the English must now fend for themselves. This was effectively the end of Roman England.

Another historian, Procopius of Caesarea, further reveals that after the disappearance of the Roman officials the various cities and regions were taken over by ‘tyrants’ or ‘usurpers’. They may have seemed like usurpers from Rome, but in actual fact they are likely to be the familiar English leaders descended from tribal chiefs or large landowning families. As the hand of Rome was lifted the English tribes and polities reacted in several significant ways. The Romanized English in the towns and cities, with the dependent estates all around them, are likely to have formed themselves into self-governing administrative units; the leaders of these small states were still known as ‘magistrates’. In the civil zone of the country – in the east and southeast – there rose small kingdoms that were defended by mercenaries. The kingdoms of eastern England, for example, were obliged to use Germanic soldiers; these troops would pose problems in subsequent years. The tribes in the more distant regions of the country, never properly Romanized, reverted to pre-Roman forms of social organization. The remaining detachments of the armies of the north were grouped under a commander who became their chieftain. One of the first Roman leaders of the north, Coelius or Coel Hen, became in English folk rhyme ‘Old King Cole’.