Category: History

The feudal system prevailed in Britain between 800 and 1500, when a government with centralised control became the new method of ruling the country. Feudalism had served its purpose well, but after the catastrophe of the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt and the revelations being made by science and exploration of the globe, societal changes were inevitable. The growth of towns and cities gave alternatives to rural life.

The medieval belief was that there was a hierarchy of closeness to God ~ the Pope, then the King, dukes, earls, barons, knights and, at the bottom, peasants. The monarch was, and still is, the absolute owner of the country’s land and everyone below him or her was/is a tenant. The term ‘freehold’ comes from the feudal system and means that your tenancy is indefinite.

Under feudalism, peasants were given a cottage and up to five acres of farmland, usually by a baron, in return for food, taxes and membership of the baron’s private army, signified by a ceremonial oath of fealty and homage. This type of relationship was replicated up the chain to the King. At a time with no welfare state, police or judiciary, this was a sensible, mutually beneficial community arrangement.

(Images: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

The years 1348-50 saw the greatest loss of life in British and European history, when 20-50 million people died, both rich and poor. To the bewildered population, the Black Death was seen as God’s punishment for their sins. How terrified they must have been on witnessing their loved ones die horribly within five days of the first sharp tingling sensation transitioning to their rotting, putrid skin turning black.

We now know that the disease was bubonic plague, carried by rats’ fleas, but people believed that humankind was being wiped out in an apocalypse. Some of them threw morals aside and debauched themselves, while a few were heroic. Crowds flocked to the churches for salvation, but many clergy ran away or died themselves. Graveyards were extended to accommodate mass graves.

The Black Death arrived first in Weymouth, Bristol and London, where a boundary wall was built, but this failed to shield its inhabitants. Herbs and scented posies did not work either. Eventually, it was realised that it was being imported on trading ships and that homes needed to be more hygienic, but the plague returned every few decades until it culminated in the Great Plague of London in 1665.

(Image: Leo Reynolds at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-SA/2.0)

The Wars of the Roses (1455-85) was a period when the descendants of two of King Edward III’s sons – the Dukes of Lancaster and York ~ fought to the death over the throne. Eventually, an outsider overtook them all and put an end to the matter by killing King Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth and becoming King Henry VII.

In this fearful time, the kings themselves led their armies with sword in hand. In the Wars of the Roses there were eight major battles in which tens of thousands of men were killed, including nobility. Henry VI, great grandson of the Duke of Lancaster, had been king since he was a baby in 1422, but was unable to stop the power struggles, which saw:

• Edward IV, great grandson of the Duke of York, crowned in 1461
• Henry VI re-crowned in 1470
• Edward IV re-crowned in 1471, then dying in 1483
• his son Edward V due to be crowned but murdered in the Tower of London
• his uncle Richard III crowned in 1483
• Henry VII, great-great grandson of the Duke of Lancaster, crowned in 1485

This was the start of the Tudor dynasty and Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth of York finally reunited these two branches of the family.

(Image of combined Lancaster red and York white roses to form the Tudor rose: Maigheach-gheal at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Lady Jane Grey was born in 1537 in the reign of King Henry VIII (1491-1547). His immediate heir was Edward, followed by his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. Jane was related to Henry through his niece, her mother the Duchess of Suffolk. Jane had no thoughts of assuming the role of monarch, but by the age of sixteen had not only married but become Queen and been executed for treason!

These extraordinary events were engineered by her father and her father-in-law, both of whom were also executed, shortly after the beheadings of Jane and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley in 1554. Three arranged weddings had taken place on 21st May 1553 at the Dudley home, with her sister Catherine and her sister-in-law Katherine also being married off to aristocratic partners.

Her father-in-law was in an extremely powerful position as regent to King Edward VI, who died when only fifteen in 1553, naming Jane as his Protestant heir instead of the Catholic Mary. Jane had been promoted up the list without her knowledge. She was proclaimed Queen on 10th July 1553, just a few weeks into married life. Mary was having none of this and she arrived to brutally remove Jane, a mere political pawn, and her family.

(Image: InternetArchiveBookImages at Flickr.com / Public domain)

The Battle of Trafalgar was won under the inspired leadership of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson and, after he was shot dead, Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood. It took place on 21st October 1805 off the coast of Cape Trafalgar in south-west Spain and was both a show of naval supremacy and a dismissal of Napoleon’s plans to invade England.

Nelson, a brave patriot, sent the message to his side: “England expects that every man shall do his duty”. Sailing in HMS Victory, he led twenty-seven British ships and not one was lost. His French and Spanish opponents had two-thirds of their thirty-three ships either captured and plundered, or destroyed. The Battle took five hours and was distinguished by a daring new strategy, typical of Nelson’s style. Instead of going head-to-head along a line, he went at right angles in two columns.

The bicentennial was celebrated in 2005 by various events, including the A30 from Falmouth to London being dubbed ‘Trafalgar Way’. This was to mark the journey taken by the messenger who had the first news of the victory and Nelson’s death. Trafalgar Square in London was so named in 1830 and Nelson’s Column, standing 169ft. 3in. high, was completed in 1843.

(Image: Louis-Philippe Crépin (1772-1851) at Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Up to the early ninth century, the Scots and the Picts had not yet unified to form the country of Scotland, but the king of the Picts, Kenneth MacAlpin (in modern spelling), began the process and is generally regarded as the first king of Scotland. It is said that he killed his seven rivals to the throne in one fell swoop. King Kenneth I reigned from 843 until his death from disease in 858. He lived in Forteviot and  is buried on the isle of Iona.

Unfortunately, a sideways system of inheritance that prevailed in Scotland at that time meant that successive monarchs did not reign for very long, as they were either killed in battle or by skullduggery. An heir was not the child of the outgoing monarch, but the nephew or the brother or the uncle, since the family line ran through the female blood relatives rather than the wives.

After many kings had been slain, including King Donald II who reigned for just one year, eventually King Malcolm II changed the succession rules so that offspring were first in line. He remained on the throne for twenty-nine years from 1005 to 1034, though he was still killed in battle.

(Image of Scone Palace where Scottish monarchs were crowned: G. Laird at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

It has long been taught in UK schools that the Romans transformed the country with their civilising influence and were here for four hundred years, after which we fell into the so-called Dark Ages. Today, archaeologists and historians are uncovering quite a different picture of pre-existing Iron Age farming and skilled crafts continuing during and after the ‘Roman Britain’ period.

The Romans first attempted a landing in 55BC, then 54BC, but were beaten back by the clever tactics of a smaller army. The rest of Europe was in Roman slavery but the British stood firm until 43AD. However, the invaders did not enter Wales until thirty-one years later and never took Ireland or all of Scotland. Initially, they faced fierce opposition, not least from Queen Boudica‘s army, but wealthy Britons would later intermingle and avail themselves of exotic Roman artefacts, such as mosaic flooring.

Until 409AD there were varying levels of Roman presence, including lengthy absences. Whilst here, they murdered Druids and Christians for fear of them emboldening the proletariat with their fancy talk of immortal souls. On the plus side, they introduced many new vegetables, constructed two-horse-width road lanes, and  brought us the magnificent domestic cat!

(Image: Derek Harper at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

In the term ‘d-day’ the ‘d’ simply stands for ‘day’, emphasising its importance. It means the day on which something significant is going to happen. The D-Day of 6th June 1944 acquired that name due to it being the beginning of the Allies taking back German-occupied France with the biggest seaborne and air invasion in known history. Over a million troops landed in Normandy in the weeks following D-Day, while the Germans were outmanoeuvred and their air force utterly outnumbered.

Britain and her Allies, after a tricky start to WW2, were gaining victories in the south ~ in North Africa, Sicily and Italy ~ and in 1943 they began planning a north-western attack from the shores of England. The date of 5th June was carefully chosen to take into account the tides but bad weather actually delayed it by a day, to the 6th.

The British General Montgomery and the American General Eisenhower led the Allied forces and in a few months they and the French army had succeeded in recapturing Paris, with the French President de Gaulle parading triumphantly through the streets. Many veterans and their relatives visit Normandy each year to see the museums, memorials and cemeteries of this monumental military operation.

(Image of British troops on D-Day: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

The Welsh are the original Britons (evidenced by a 2015 study ‘The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population’ from Oxford University). While England has endured many upheavals in its history, the Welsh have their mountainous terrain to thank for deterring invaders. Apart from the odd incursion like the Romans’ obsessive mission to murder the last Druids in Anglesey, Wales had not suffered any outside aggression until the Normans made an appearance in the 1090s.

King Edward I (1239-1307) conquered the north and west of Wales in 1277-83. He gave some land to his supporters, so Wales was divided up between dozens of ‘lords’, each with their own governing systems and castles. By the time of King Henry VIII (1491-1547), the disparate codes of justice and general civil unrest caused him to ask Thomas Cromwell (c.1485-1540) for a solution.

This was the Laws in Wales Act of 1535 ~ ‘An Acte for Laws & Justice to be ministred in Wales in like fourme as it is in this Realme’. This also meant that Wales could now send MPs to Parliament in London. The Welsh gentry were in favour, as many already spoke English and they foresaw that the linking of the two countries would increase their wealth.

(Image: sodacan at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)