MaryAnn Bernal's Blog, page 94

Prince Albert: The death that rocked the monarchy

History Extra



Queen Victoria with Princesses Alice and Louise and a portrait of her late husband, Albert, in 1863. (Credit: Getty Images)
When Prince Albert breathed his last at 10.50pm on the night of Saturday 14 December 1861 at Windsor, a telegraph message was sent within the hour to the lord mayor that the great bell of St Paul’s Cathedral should toll out the news across London. Everyone knew that this sound signified one of two things: the death of a monarch or a moment of extreme national crisis such as war.
People living in the vicinity of the cathedral who had already gone to their beds that night were woken by the doleful sound; many of them dressed and began gathering outside St Paul’s to share the news with shock and incredulity. Only the previous morning the latest bulletin from Windsor had informed them that the prince, who had been unwell for the last two weeks, had rallied during the night of the 13th. The whole nation had settled down for the evening reassured, hopeful that the worst was now over.
Most of the Sunday morning papers for the 15th had already gone to press and did not carry the news, although in London one or two special broadsheets were rushed out and sold at a premium. For most ordinary British people the news of Prince Albert’s death came with the mournful sound of bells, as the message was relayed from village to village and city to city across the country’s churches.
Many still did not realise the significance until, when it came to the prayers for the royal family during morning service, the prince’s name was omitted. But it was still hard to believe. The official bulletins from Windsor had suggested only a ‘low fever’ – which in Victorian parlance could be anything from a chill to something more sinister like typhoid fever. The royal doctors had been extremely circumspect in saying what exactly was wrong, not just to the public but also Albert’s highly strung wife, and very few had any inkling of how ill he was. How could this have happened, people asked themselves; how could a vigorous man of only 42 have died without warning?
The impact of Prince Albert’s death, coming as unexpectedly as it did, was dramatic and unprecedented. The last time the nation had mourned the loss of a member of the royal family in similar circumstances had been back in 1817 when Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent – and heir to the throne failing the birth of any legitimate male heirs – had died shortly after giving birth to a still-born baby boy. Public grief at this tragedy had been enormous, and it was no less with the death of Albert.
His might not have been a young and beautiful death like Charlotte’s but its impact, both publicly and politically, was enormous. It was seen as nothing less than a national calamity, for Britain had in effect lost its king. And worse, Albert’s death had come at a time of political crisis, with the British government embroiled in a tense diplomatic standoff with the Northern states during the American Civil War. This had prompted Prince Albert’s final act of public business on 1 December. Already very sick, he had amended a belligerent despatch from Lord Palmerston following the North’s seizure of two Confederate agents from a British West Indies mail packet, the Trent. The agents were on their way to Europe to raise support for the South.

The royal family in c1860/61. By championing the virtues of family life, Victoria and Albert had rescued the monarchy’s ailing reputation. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
At worst, the boarding of the Trent was a breach of British neutrality. Yet, Albert had warned that to force the issue without finding a diplomatic way out would mean war – at a time when Britain had barely recovered from the disastrous campaign in the Crimea.
His intercession had helped defuse a tense political situation, a fact that prompted Prime Minister Palmerston to observe that such had become the prince’s value to the British government that it would have been “Better for England to have had a ten years’ war with America than to have lost Prince Albert”. Yet Britain had indeed lost Albert, and the prince’s death plunged the queen into grief so profound that it would dramatically alter the shape of the British monarchy, not just for the rest of Victoria’s reign but in the way in which it has come down to us today.
The public response in the days immediately afterwards bears many parallels with the outpouring of grief that followed the death of Princess Diana more than a century later. And, in a sombre precursor of princes William and Harry following Diana’s coffin in 1997, the loss was made equally poignant by the presence at Albert’s all-male funeral at Windsor of two of his young sons, Bertie (20) and Arthur (11).
The whole country was swathed in black: shops were shuttered, blinds drawn, flags at half mast, theatre performances and concerts cancelled. The middle classes put themselves and their children into black, and trade at the funeral warehouses boomed as never before. Even the poorest rural cottager donned some form of black, if only an armband. That Christmas, 1861, was one of the gloomiest ever seen in England.
It would take time, however, for the far more significant, political impact of the prince’s death to unravel. During their 21 years of marriage Victoria and Albert had done much to rescue the ailing monarchy from the lingering dissolute reputation of the Hanoverians and reinvigorate it as a democratic and moral example for the new age. The royal family had become popular again and accessible to ordinary people, thanks to the example it set of the simple domestic virtues of monogamy, bourgeois decency and family life. It was an image that Albert had assiduously promoted, right from the first popular magazine illustrations of the royal family enjoying Christmas at Windsor, German-style, with decorated fir trees.
Once the initial shock of Albert’s death had receded, the far more pressing question in everyone’s minds, particularly those in government, was its impact on Victoria. ‘How will the queen bear it?’ they all asked themselves; how would she cope with all her onerous duties without him? No one had any doubt about the extent of Victoria’s total dependency on her late husband, not just emotionally but also in dealing daily with the mountain of official business.
Albert had been all in all to Victoria: husband, friend, confidant, wise counsel, unofficial secretary and government minister. There was not a single aspect of her life on which she had not deferred to his advice and greater wisdom. Indeed, so reliant was she on his opinion in everything that she would even consult him on what bonnet to wear.

The queen and prince consort in 1854. (Credit: Getty Images)
With time – and with his wife continually sidelined by pregnancy – Albert had become all-powerful, performing the functions of king but without the title, driving himself relentlessly through a schedule of official duties that even he admitted felt like being on a treadmill. But it is only after he died that the nation acknowledged the debt it owed him. The laments were many and profound in the acres of obituaries that filled the British press. Many of them were tinged with a profound sense of guilt that Albert had never been sufficiently valued during his lifetime for his many and notable contributions to British culture as an outstanding patron of the arts, education, science and business.
Victoria’s descent into a crippling state of unrelenting grief rapidly created problems. It soon became clear that her retreat from public view and her intense sorrow would endure well beyond the usual two years of conventional mourning. Without Albert she felt rudderless. To lose him, as she herself said, was “like tearing the flesh from my bones”. The isolation of her position as queen was profound. “There is no one to call me Victoria now,” she wept, in response to the grinding loss of intimacy, affection and physical love that she now felt.
Albert had been Victoria’s one great, abiding obsession in life. With no strong man to support her, with a feckless heir, Bertie, who had caused her nothing but anxiety, and a family of nine children to parent alone, she retreated into a state of pathological grief which nobody could penetrate and few understood. Worse, she imposed the most rigorous observance of mourning on her family and her entourage and became increasingly intractable in response to every attempt to coax her out of her self-imposed purdah. Her observance of the rituals of mourning became so fetishistic and so protracted that there was a danger of her sinking so totally into her grief that she – and the monarchy – would never recover.
The only thing that interested Victoria now was her single-handed mission to memorialise her husband in perpetuity. She did so with aplomb, turning her grieving into performance art as she instigated a range of artistic and cultural monuments commemorating Albert that would transform the British landscape and set their visual stamp not just on the second half of her reign but on our perception today of the Victorian era.

Victoria in mourning in c1862. Her retreat from public life following Albert's death prompted a surge of anti-monarchical sentiment across Britain. (Credit: Getty Images)
As far as Victoria was concerned, her happy life had ended the day Albert died. But by the mid-1860s her ministers – and even her own children – were becoming frantic at her continued retreat from pubic view and her dogged refusal to take part in any form of public ceremonial. Anti-monarchical feeling was growing, with regular complaints that Victoria did nothing to justify her income from the Civil List. All Albert’s hard work over 20 years in educating his wife in her performance of duty was now being dangerously undermined.
By the end of the 1860s discontent escalated into outright republican challenges and calls for Victoria’s abdication. Then, just when all seemed lost, the monarchy was rescued from disaster. The near fatal illness of the Prince of Wales in December 1871 – on the tenth anniversary of his father’s death – and his miraculous recovery prompted the first piece of state ceremonial in over a decade when Queen Victoria attended a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Three days later a crude ‘assassination’ attempt against her rallied public sympathy for Victoria to unprecedented levels.
By this time the queen had begun to recover, thanks to the support of her trusted Highland servant John Brown and, in 1874, the return of her adored Disraeli as prime minister. It was by now clear that the queen would never leave off her black, but as she was coaxed back into public view, she did so as a respected figure of enduring dignity and fortitude, ageing into her familiar image of matriarchal widow, empress and ‘Grandmama of Europe’. It was only now that people started calling themselves ‘Victorians’, as the widowed queen set her stamp irrevocably on the great and final days of empire at the head of a ceremonial and constitutional monarchy that survives to this day.

Queen Victoria’s Letters: A Monarch Unveiled airs on BBC Four on Thursday 23 July 2015 at 9pm. In it, AN Wilson reveals that Queen Victoria may have led a more exciting life after the death of Prince Albert than we may have first thought.

History Trivia - El Cid captures Valencia from the Moors

June 15

1094 El Cid, the great Spanish national hero, captured Valencia from the Moors.
 

Retaining the royals: why has the British monarchy survived – and thrived?

History Extra


Queen Victoria with Prince Albert and their children in 1846. After a painting by F Winterhalter. Victoria’s husband Albert “carved out for the crown a moral kind of authority as the nation’s first and model family,” says Sarah Gristwood. (Culture Club/Getty Images) The royal family (so the theory used to go) ride into the 21st century atop a tidal wave of British tradition. They represent, for better or for worse, the nation’s love affair with the past. Every time we see the Queen wearing a centuries-old crown, walk through the Houses of Parliament to celebrate the even older deal struck between Commons and Crown, we reach for another digestive biscuit to dunk in our mug of English Breakfast tea.     In recent years the theory has been modified, to acknowledge the changes that have come to the British monarchy. The strength of our royals – so this theory runs – is that they are prepared to change when necessary. Yes, even their head, a queen who has just celebrated her 90th birthday. She pays taxes, she sends a token tweet, she joins her grandson Harry to play a prank on the Obamas. Remember the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games? She even took part in a James Bond movie.   
A performer dressed as the Queen parachutes into the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012. (Press Association) There is, of course, much truth in both these theories. We love tradition, especially when it is softened by a little flexibility. But maybe the real secret to the long success of the British monarchy is its connection, not to the stodgy old ways of the stately home, but to the aggressive, thrusting, young nation that we used to be.   By this theory, the reason we’ve never had a lasting revolution [against the monarchy] is that we got there so early. We executed King Charles I at a time, 1649, when the major states of Europe hardly knew an alternative to monarchy. After that we were immunised against revolution, and the immunity has lasted until the present day.  Magna Carta Looking back, of course, one sees a long chain of events that have shaped – curbed, coloured – the British monarchy. We’ve celebrated one just recently – King John’s sealing of Magna Carta in 1215, requiring the king to rule only under law. (Scotland in 1320 saw the Declaration of Arbroath, which while primarily a declaration of the nation’s independence seemed also to suggest that a monarch might be made by popular choice.)   And although in many ways the kings of England actually assumed more authority during the few centuries that followed, this is an idea that has never gone away. Even in the days of that earlier, authoritarian, Queen Elizabeth I, the bishop John Aylmer could write that England was governed by a ‘rule mixte’ of prince, peers and people – assuaging fears of a female monarch with the assurance that she did not in any case rule autonomously. The Stuart kings tried to assert their ‘divine right’ – and the end of that story is very well known. Except, of course, that the execution of Charles I was not the end. This was an age that could see little alternative to the hereditary principle: even Oliver Cromwell, while publically refusing the role of king, tried to arrange that his own descendants should succeed him. Then in 1660, little more than a decade after his father’s death, Charles II was invited once more to take up Stuart rule. 
Oliver Cromwell, circa 1645. (R Walker/Getty Images) All the same, a line had been crossed. In 1688 the country’s ruling class and ruling body could decide that the unpopular and Catholic James II and VII should be replaced by his daughter Mary; and when it was clear not only Mary but her sister Anne would die without a living child, it was parliament’s voice that invited Anne’s third cousin, the Elector of Hanover, to become George I, ignoring a host of heirs closer in blood.  The 1689 Bill of Rights placed strict limits on the monarch’s power, which continued to dwindle under successive Hanoverian kings as parliamentary reforms saw their rights of patronage whittled away. But though the French Revolution may have scared, it could not really shake the British monarchy. And after all, Britons wouldn’t want to do anything our ancient French enemy had done – not in the days of Napoleon’s threat, certainly. The model family William IV and Victoria after him were horrified to learn they could not even choose their own prime minister. It was the great Victorian Walter Bagehot who wrote provocatively that Britain was “a secret republic”. But that was the secret of the royal family’s survival, perhaps. And it was Victoria’s husband, Albert, who carved out for the crown another, a moral, kind of authority as the nation’s first and model family – one which, in spite of any evidence to the contrary, they have retained almost until the present day.  But the royal family has embarked on several major changes even more recently. It was in 1917 that the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha changed its name to the less ‘Hunnish’ House of Windsor, the same summer that saw the Tsar of Russia swept from power (to be subsequently killed, with his family). Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey all lost their monarchies with the First World War – a side effect of their having been on the losing side, maybe.  But other monarchies went, too, in the first half of the 20th century – those of Italy, Yugoslavia, Portugal, followed later by Greece. King Farouk of Egypt declared that by the turn of the century there would be only five kings left in the world – “the king of hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades – and the King of England”. He was wrong about the monarch’s gender, and Europe still boasts a handful of other monarchies, notably in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. (And in Spain, which first replaced and then recalled their monarchy.) But his basic point holds good, and there is no easy single answer as to why.  The royal family in the 20th century has seen some real downturns in its popularity, many of them during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, however eager we may be to celebrate that reign today. But somehow, whether by good judgement or good luck, the ‘firm’ (as Prince Philip has called it) retains as its trademark a blend of change and consistency that keeps it bobbing along, indomitably.  The popularity game The dawn of the 20th century had brought a new readiness among the royals to be seen – though not necessarily heard – as often as required. Before the First World War, for example, royal weddings had long been private ceremonies. After the war all that changed, and such occasions became valuable crowd-pleasers – while, conversely, its detachment from party-political affairs allowed the monarchy to remain above the Westminster fray. It allowed it to provide, in the words of the Buckingham Palace website “a focus for national unity”.  
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon leaves her home for her wedding to the future King George VI, in 1923. After the First World War, royal weddings became "valuable crowd-pleasers" says Sarah Gristwood. (Central Press/Getty Images) Not that the royals won’t change the tradition and trim the privilege, when necessary. The Queen’s decision to pay taxes and to cut down the Civil List is only part of that readiness seen in 1917 to play the popularity game. To try to be whatever we want them to be. The change in tone that followed Diana’s death may be the ultimate example – and, indeed, she may have played a role she never intended in reshaping the monarchy. While the furore around Diana’s death finally proved to the royal establishment the need to adapt, she also gave us, in her sons and now her grandson and granddaughter, royals better equipped to give the institution a successful 21st century.   Sarah Gristwood is a best-selling Tudor biographer, novelist, broadcaster and commentator on royal affairs, and the author of Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (HarperPress, 2013). Her forthcoming book, Game of Queens, will be published in the UK and the USA in autumn 2016.

History Trivia - Juan Borgia murdered

June 14


1497 Giovanni (Juan) Borgia, favorite son of Pope Alexander VI, was murdered, allegedly by his brother Cesare or by his younger brother Gioffre.
 

When did our kings and queens start using surnames?

King Edward IV, who used the surname Plantagenet. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Although early British monarchs may have adopted second names, these were not hereditary and were more in the way of nicknames.

The Irish and Welsh rulers kept this system and did not adopt surnames. The first English monarch to use a hereditary surname was Edward IV. He used the surname Plantagenet to emphasise that he was descended from the elder branch of the royal family – unlike Henry VI who came from a younger branch.

The name Plantagenet refers back to Henry II who came to the throne in 1154. Although it had not been used in formal documents before Edward IV, it must have been in informal use during that period as it was clearly of practical benefit to Edward.

The first Scottish king to have a surname is generally said to have been John de Balliol, who gained the throne in 1292 after the death of Margaret, heiress to Alexander III. However, John’s surname was more of a title indicating his hereditary lordship, an objection that could also be made to Robert the Bruce (ruled 1306–1329). The first Scots king undeniably to have a surname was Robert Stewart (or Stuart) who gained the throne in 1371 and ruled for 19 years. His surname derived from the family’s traditional role as Stewards of Scotland.

This Q&A was answered by historian and author Rupert Matthews.

History Trivia - birth of Roman General Gnaeus Julius Agricola

June 13



 37 Gnaeus Julius Agricola was born. He was a Roman general noted for conquering all of England and part of Scotland (77-84).
 

First Ancient Oracle Well to Apollo unearthed in Athens

Ancient Origins

Archeologists discovered an oracle well, which is at least 1,800-years-old and may be the first ancient oracle to Apollo found in Athens. Moreover, the prophecy at the sanctuary seems to be much older.

According to Haaretz, the oracle well was found by the team led by Dr. Jutta  Stroszeck, director of the Kerameikos excavation on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. It is the first time that an oracular edifice to Apollo has been discovered in Athens. Although, for centuries it was believed that the center of Apollo's cult was located in Delphi, the most recent discovery may challenge this theory. The oracle well was located in the Temple of Artemis Soteira.
The area around the sanctuary is still watered by the Eridanos River, which flows through the city from east to west. The oracle well was used for hydromancy, a method of divination by means of water.
A woman practicing hydromancy. ‘Circle Invidiosa’ by John William Waterhouse Stroszeck explained to Haaretz:

“Water, and in particular drinking water, was sacred. In Greek religion, it was protected by nymphs, who could become very mischievous when their water was treated badly."

In ancient times people used the oracle’s guidance not only to know the future. They also asked for simple everyday matters, such as solutions to problems, possibilities of healing disease, finding a lover, etc.
The oracle well was walled with clay cylinders. The researchers discovered more than twenty inscriptions in Greek. All of them included the same phrase:  "Come to me, O Paean, and bring with you the true oracle". The word ''Paean' 'is the epithet that designated the god Apollo, the male deity associated with art, purification and oracular activity.
Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, Poetry and the Fine Arts with Urania, Muse of Astronomy ( public domain )The oracle well stayed hidden for many centuries under another very important part of the ancient temple. In 2012, the researchers discovered that an omphalos had been meticulously mounted on a marble slab that, in turn, covered an opening. It was lifted carefully using a crane and the circular well was located below. According to the writer of Ancient Origins, DHWTY, ''an omphalos is a powerful symbolic artifact made from stone. Considered the ‘navel of the world’, the central point from which terrestrial life originated, an omphalos was an object of Hellenic religious symbolism believed to allow direct communication with the gods.
Although the omphalos stone at Delphi is the most famous of its kind, it is by far not the only one. Omphalos stones have been found in various sites such as Thebes and Karnak in Egypt and in buildings of the Vinca culture in Southeastern Europe. Yet, these stones probably functioned differently from the Delphic omphalos stone. For instance, many buildings of the Vinca culture contained an omphalos stone, indicating that they may have held some ritual significance to the people of that ancient culture.''
Marble omphalos (navel of the world), representing the stone Zeus threw from the heavens). Credit: Jutta StroszeckThe oracle was discovered in Kerameikos in central Athens, northwest of the Acropolis. The works there have taken a place since the 19th century. The excavation site consists of a large sanctuary, which contained thousands of precious artifacts. The name of the site, Kerameikos, comes from the Greek word for pottery or ‘ceramics’. It was a settlement of potters, vase painters and other people connected with creating famous Attic vases. Nearby the site was the ancient agora and the famous Academy of Plato. Moreover, it was a location of the most important cemetery of ancient Athens. The oldest tombs, come from the Early Bronze Age (2700-2000 BC). The burials were continued and the cemetery expanded during the sub-Mycenaean period (1100-1000 BC), Geometric period (1000-700 BC) and Archaic period (700-480 BC). It was also in use during the Early Christian period (338 BC – c. 600 AD).
Kerameikos archaeological park, Athens ( public domain )Archeologists also researched a 2,500-year-old bathhouse. The bath served the citizens of Athens and the travelers. It was discovered during the current excavation season. The researchers believe that it is the spa mentioned by the Greek rhetorician Isaios, and referred to by Aristophanes. It was in use between the 5th and the 3rd centuries BC. It was often used by the students of Plato's Academy, as well as the craftsmen.
Top image: The oracular well dedicated to Apollo. It dates to about 1800 years ago but may have been used for eons before. Credit: Jutta Stroszeck.
By Natalia Klimzcak

History Trivia - Peasants' Revolt

June 12

1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, rebels arrived at Blackheath. Although the revolt did not succeed in its stated aims, it did succeed in showing the nobility what the peasants were capable of, which helped to form a radical tradition in British politics.
 

9 places associated with the collapse of Roman Britain

History Extra

Robbie Khan © Portchester Castle in Hampshire was intended as a coastal defence
For Ken Dark, director of the University of Reading’s Research Centre for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, what happened at the end of Roman Britain is probably the biggest unanswered question in British history during the first millennium AD. “The trouble, “he says, “is that the debate is to say the least very sophisticated and subtle”.
In AD 410, after almost four centuries of Roman rule in Britain, the embattled Roman emperor Honorius seems to have issued a declaration that the Britons needed to look to their own defence. What happened next is one of the greatest enigmas in British history and archaeology. Did Roman ways of life stop suddenly and completely, did they carry on, or did they morph into something new?
AD 410 itself may be a red herring. Though the letter from Honorius does exist, some historians dispute whether it actually refers to Britain (part of Italy is another option). Regardless of the validity of the declaration, the end of the Roman period cannot be confined to a single year. “There wasn’t one day on which ‘the Romans’ said ‘we’ll up and go’ and the legions marched out, not least because the Romans weren’t an ethnically defined group,” argues Dark. “Most of them would be descendants of the local Britons who’d inhabited Britain for centuries before the Roman conquest but they would have also included a substantial multicultural population drawn from all over the Roman empire. Before, say, 400, most of that population would probably have considered itself to be Roman, in the sense of being Roman citizens.”
Whatever actually happened in 410, there was a move in the fifth century from a Roman to a post-Roman society across Europe, as imperial influence waned. Britain was part of that trend, and it may have changed in line with developments that were happening in other former imperial provinces in western Europe. Two main trends were the increasing spread of Christianity and the incorporation of ‘barbarian’ – that is, non-Roman – cultural attributes. These changes were widespread in Roman society across the empire, but the fifth century also saw the movement of ‘barbarian’ peoples into Roman territory in far greater numbers – and frequently as rulers or raiders rather than refugees or Roman soldiers.
In Britain, we usually call these fifth-century (and later) Germanic migrants ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ though neither they nor anyone else referred to them by that name in the fifth century. Nor is it known whether the Anglo-Saxons initially came as invaders or settlers, in large numbers or small groups, or to live among or to lord over the Britons. Ken Dark’s view is that they did come in large numbers, but what they did when they arrived is complicated:
“I believe that there was mass migration across the North Sea by Germanic peoples and that they settled in substantial parts of eastern Britain, most notably East Anglia. In those places they brought their own cultures very substantially intact, but there were other areas, even in the east of Britain, where Germanic and British communities lived side-by-side or together and where their cultural practices and values co-existed or merged.” To the west and north of these ‘Anglo-Saxon’ areas, British kings ruled over large independent kingdoms in the fifth and sixth centuries, with populations wholly or largely descended from those of Roman Britain.
The latter point is crucial. One of the big advances in the study of the period in the last few decades has been the framing of the debate in terms of the existing occupants and away from the previous heavy focus on the incoming Anglo-Saxons. At least until the end of the sixth century the Britons controlled the majority of what had been Roman Britain, not the Anglo-Saxons, and so the need to study the Britons for themselves rather than as a footnote to the Anglo-Saxons has been widely recognised.
Indeed, many specialists now term these centuries of British history ‘Late Antiquity’ – a term widely used in relation to the fifth and sixth-century history of the rest of what had been the Roman empire – rather than the ‘Early Anglo-Saxon period’. This shift in focus, closely associated with Dark’s work on the period, has enabled historians and archaeologists to look more closely at what happened to the remaining Britons, and to identify that some elements of Roman culture did cross over to their post-Roman world.
Gradually, however, the Roman influence waned and in the seventh century we moved into a new world where Anglo-Saxon and British kingdoms jostled for power across a land starting to forget its Roman past.

1. Portchester Castle, Hampshire
Where late Roman Britain was to be defended
How were the people of late Roman Britain planning to defend themselves against the threat of barbarian raiders? Go to Portchester and you can see precisely what they had in mind as here is preserved a fine example of the coastal defences of Roman Britain. Though it’s often characterised as a fort of the Saxon Shore (a military command of the Late Roman empire), it may actually have been built in the third century, before that command was established.
It offers an interesting insight into the way in which Roman imperial thinking about defence had changed by the late empire. One of the symbols of that change is the massive, almost castle-like character of late Roman fortifications, which you see very well at Portchester. It’s the only Roman stronghold in Britain whose walls still stand almost complete to their 6m height. It’s had a long life since Roman days, being the site successively of a Norman keep, a 14th-century palace, an embarkation point for the Agincourt campaign and a home for Napoleonic prisoners of war. Despite that it remains a very visible signal of the defensive strategy of the late Roman Britons.
2. Lullingstone Villa, Kent
Where the arrival of Christianity is clear to see
This is a substantial late Roman villa site and the surviving fabric makes this a great place to go to consider the nature of villa life at the end of Roman Britain. The villa had been introduced as a settlement type into Britain at the start of the Roman period, and indeed Lullingstone was begun about AD 100. But most known Roman villas in Britain are actually late Roman in date. The great period of flourishing Roman villas in Britain was the fourth century, when large parts of the British landscape was divided up into estates that were centred around them.
Lullingstone is a good example of one of these late-Roman villas. They were often quite modest but they included some that were elaborately decorated and architecturally sophisticated. Lullingstone was towards the top of the range but was not a palatial example (for that, Chedworth in Gloucestershire is worth a visit).
Villas were in part built for showing off. But they also often had a religious element, firstly with links to pagan temples and then perhaps as centres of rural Christianity. The spread of Christianity in the late Roman and post-Roman period is a key part of the story of the end of Roman Britain. Lullingstone’s house-church (a room within an otherwise secular building devoted specifically to Christian observance) shows that Christianity had certainly reached this villa. House churches are hard to spot archaeologically but we know of Lullingstone because it had a splendid series of wall paintings with Christian symbols. The paintings are now in the British Museum but copies can be seen at Lullingstone, along with the layout of the villa.
3. Birdoswald Fort, Cumbria
Where frontier life carried on, in some form at least
We don’t know exactly what was happening on Hadrian’s Wall in the late Roman period. It was intensively used and still served as some sort of frontier, perhaps for taxation, symbolic and military purposes. To the north of the wall were Britons who were in many ways similar to the Britons south of it, but some of them at least were intent on disrupting life in Roman territory.
You can see a fort, turret and milecastle at Birdoswald, plus the longest unbroken stretch of wall nearby to the east. However, most interesting in terms of the end of Roman Britain is the fact that a large timber hall, now marked out with posts, has been found here, perhaps dating to the fifth century. Does this represent continuous use from Roman to post-Roman periods, or later re-use – and if so by whom? It could have been the case that the Roman period communities at the wall stayed on into the fifth century and that the forts had an ongoing military role, or they might have been abandoned for a while and then refortified by whatever new political powers stepped into the vacuum.
The site’s defensive possibilities were recognised long after the Romans left, with a medieval fortified tower and then an Elizabethan Bastle House being built.
4. West Stow, Suffolk
Where the Anglo-Saxons settled
This reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village is positioned on an original settlement site of the period and is an excellent place to go for an introduction to the life of these newcomers from the continent.
It’s a good venue to think about how different the world the Anglo-Saxons were living in was to Roman Britain, as these sort of farming settlements replaced the Roman administrative set-up in the fifth and sixth centuries in eastern Britain. There are numerous Anglo-Saxon type buildings here, constructed in different ways as experimental archaeology projects, based on the data from the excavations carried out here in the 1960s and 70s.
5. St Albans, Hertfordshire
Where Christianity lived on in post-Roman Britain
After the third-century martyrdom of Alban (who was condemned to death for sheltering a Christian), the Roman town of Verulamium became a centre for Christian activity, and there’s literary evidence to suggest that it retained that role through the fifth and sixth centuries. It’s mentioned in the fifth-century Life of St Germanus as a major Christian shrine visited by Germanus as he progressed around eastern Britain in AD 429 trying to fight off the advances of the Pelagian heresy (which essentially posited the belief that people can be good of their own account and thereby implied the denial of original sin). In the mid-sixth century, the British writer Gildas laments that he can’t get to the famous pilgrimage shrine of St Alban because the Anglo-Saxons are in the way. Move forward to the early eighth century and Bede writes about St Albans being a major Christian shrine that has remained in use since Roman times.
The archaeological evidence suggests that there was something going on here in the fifth and sixth centuries, but exactly what is hard to characterise. There’s nothing visibly fifth-century in the fabric of the current cathedral, but the Verulamium Museum gives an overview of life in the Roman city, and you can still see the Roman walls, hypocaust and theatre there.
6. Wroxeter Roman City, Shropshire
Where Roman urbanism carried on
This Roman city has been a tourist destination for over 150 years. But it was only as a result of the excavations in the 1960s and 1970s that archaeologists began to truly appreciate the grand scale on which Wroxeter was rebuilt in the fifth and possibly sixth centuries. It’s hard to say when the city finally went out of use but it certainly appears to have had a long life after the end of Roman Britain. This is evidenced by the fact that timber and wattle and daub buildings were built, and then rebuilt perhaps more than once, across a large part of the city centre.
What’s interesting is that these buildings share many affinities with classical Roman architecture, and so in design, layout and size, they are essentially Roman buildings but built of wood not stone. The material culture associated with them is identical to the later fourth century, so we have the latest Roman material culture associated with buildings occupied into the fifth century. It would seem at Wroxeter that there were people attempting to keep the Roman way of life going. If you pay a visit, the great wall that divided the second-century municipal baths from the exercise hall is a reminder of what Roman Britain looked like at its height.
7. Cadbury Castle, Somerset
Where the British elite made a show of their power
Not all Britons attempted to carry on urban life like the inhabitants of Wroxeter. Others opted to reoccupy and refortify Iron Age (pre-Roman) hill-forts. The Britons in the immediately post-Roman period replaced Roman local government with kings, and these re-used hill-forts may have been the kings’ royal centres, as they were often associated with the consumption of foreign luxury goods. Cadbury Castle is an excellent example of such a place, where there was clearly some high-status activity going on – as a considerable amount of pottery and glass, imported from the Mediterranean and Gaul, has been found within its huge earthen banks. The ramparts are all that remain for the visitor to see today at this fine hill-fort, which incidentally is happily set in a pleasant corner of rural Somerset.
8. Tintagel, Cornwall
Where the new kings continued old ways
There was something very significant happening on the north Cornish coast in the fifth and sixth centuries. Archaeologists have found evidence for over 150 buildings at Tintagel, bearing decidedly Roman characteristics such as rectangular layouts and multiple rooms. They were enclosed within a hefty bank and ditch cutting off the landward approach but with access to a natural harbour below. And that harbour was probably a very busy place because an enormous amount of imported Byzantine pottery, amphorae and glass has been discovered in excavations on this site. This all suggests that the settlement at Tintagel, which was established after the end of the Roman period in the fifth century, was in many respects more Roman in its architecture, plan and finds than any other site known in Cornwall.
The recent discovery of a Latin inscription at Tintagel adds weight to the evidence that Roman influence continued to spread in Britain after AD 410. It’s thought that Tintagel was probably a royal site of the British kingdom of Dumnonia, which seems to have encompassed most of England’s south-west peninsula at this time.
Despite their historical importance, the fifth and sixth century remains are rather overshadowed today by the ruins of the 13th-century castle and of course by the pervading Arthurian associations of the place. The coastline is worth a visit in any case.
9. National Museum, Cardiff
Where the Latin language lingered
Far from dying out after the end of the Roman period, the language that the Romans imported seems to have lived and indeed spread, at least within the confines of Latin memorial inscriptions. Such things have been found widely from Cornwall through Wales and western Britain right up to the Lake District and into the British kingdoms in southern Scotland. They are probably tombstones, and many have formulaic inscriptions that say “so and so, son of so and so lies here”. The National Museum Cardiff has a collection of these stones, which are easily accessible, so it’s worth a visit to see how Latin continued to be used even after the Romans themselves had gone.
10. Deganwy Castle, Conwy
Where British resistance lived on
This imposing two-pronged rocky knoll overlooking the river Conwy was probably the leading royal site of the British kingdom of Gwynedd, which was, roughly speaking, the north-west of Wales, including Anglesey.
Gwynedd was important from at least the sixth century and formed a focus of resistance against the eventual spread of Anglo-Saxon political control as they developed more centralised kingdoms. The last major British victory against the Anglo-Saxons in the 630s was won by one of the kings of Gwynedd. In fact, the Britons of Gwynedd were never conquered by the Anglo-Saxons as such. It was not until long after the formation of the kingdom of England that the English kings took control here. Thus when, in 1282, the area fell to English rule, it was the last part of the western Roman empire to be lost to the political control of people descended from those who had at one time lived within that empire. There isn’t anything of the sixth-century occupation to see at the site today, but evidence of later castles built on the site does survive.
Words by Dave Musgrove. Historical advisor: Ken Dark, University of Reading. This feature was first published in the February 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine.

Is Stonehenge a Prehistoric Ancestor of the Flatpack Furniture?

Ancient Origins



Researchers believe that before Stonehenge appeared in England, it once stood as a Welsh tomb and had a special meaning to the people who decided to transport it to their new settlement.

According to the Daily Mail, millennia before flatpack furniture was invented, the inhabitants of what is now Wales and England, were able to create a huge megalithic construction and transport it 140 miles.
The theory has been put forward by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. According to him, it is finally possible to end the long speculation about the meaning behind the Neolithic construction located in Wiltshire, which dates back to as early as 3000 BC. He believes that his recent research will also help to solve the mystery of the smaller bluestone rocks, which do not originate from English quarries, but come from the ones located in Pembrokeshire, over 100 miles from Wiltshire. Moreover, the large standing circle at Stonehenge were made of sarsen stones, which are available locally.
Bluestones at Carn Menyn in Wales ( public domain )On December 2015, professor Parker Pearson commented on his theory to CNN:

"We don't make that many fantastic discoveries in a lifetime of archeology but this is certainly one them. This is the first time we've found empirical evidence of how they moved the stones. There have been all sorts of ideas from rolling them in a strange cart-like construction to skimming them across the ice. You name it, I've heard it. But we finally have real evidence."

Previously, Pearson published an article in Antiquity magazine, but during the Hay Literary Festival, which began on 26 May, he expanded on this theory. Parker Pearson claimed that Stonehenge likely started off as an ancient tomb in Wales. He believes that 500 years later, when the tribes moved into the east, to England, they brought along the stones that had been dedicated to their ancestors.
The team of researchers from UCL analyzed c. 500,000 bone fragments discovered at the site of Stonehenge. The works confirmed that 25% of the remains belonged to people who lived in the west of Britain.
Some archeologists believe that the Stonehenge was the largest cemetery of the third millennium BC in Britain. They suppose that the only reason for creating it was related to the burial traditions cultivated by these people.
Reconstruction drawing of Stonehenge as it might have appeared in 1000 BC by Alan SorrellParker Pearson also explained that the theory about using rollers to move the stones is nothing more than a Victorian myth. According to his research, people were able to transport such big stones by putting them on wooden sledges dragged on rail-like timbers.
At the end of 2015, the researchers reported about the possible scenario of transporting the elements of Stonehenge from one place to another. As April Holloway from Ancient Origins wrote: ''archaeologists have found the exact holes in a rocky outcrop in Wales from where the bluestones found at Stonehenge originated, revealing that they were quarried 500 years before they were assembled into the famous stone circle that still stands today in Wiltshire, England. The dramatic discovery suggests that the ancient monument was first erected in Wales and later dismantled, transported, and reassembled over 140 miles away in Salisbury Plain.
Archaeologists have been able to identify a series of holes in rocky outcrops that exactly match the size, shape, and consistency of Stonehenge’s bluestones at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, to the north of Preseli hills.
The holes have been radiocarbon dated – from nut shells and charcoal from the quarry workers’ campfires – to 3,400 BC at Craig Rhos-y-felin and 3,200 BC at Carn Goedeg. However, the bluestones were not assembled at Stonehenge until 2,900 BC, which raises the question as to why they were quarried centuries before their use in the famous stone monument in Wiltshire, England.''
Now the researchers will try to explore the original Welsh tomb. They believe that it will solve the mystery of Stonehenge and prove that the Welsh tribes relocated to England with their precious monument.
Top image: Stonehenge, located near Salisbury in the English county of Wiltshire. ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 )
By Natalia Klimzcak