An interview with Dr Marc Morris, author of The Anglo-Saxons: A history of the beginnings of England

hello everyone and welcome to the history of london with dr ian stone today we're joined by best-selling author and historian mark morris to discuss his latest book the anglo-saxons mark welcome to the show thank you for having me on could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about um your career to date yeah sure well i've um as you say uh i'm a medieval historian um i started like you ian at king's college london um long time ago now in the 1990s and very quickly i gravitated towards medieval as part of a general history degree um i then stuck around to do a masters at kings and then went on to oxford where i did a doctorate on the earls of norfolk in the 13th century which is now that's probably where the best selling bit of my introduction comes in that particular volume and i went on to i've gone on to write books more general books on medieval topics i did a book on um first a great and terrible king was the title history of the norman conquest a biography of king john and most recently um we're just about to come out as you say a history of the anglo-saxons so i've covered centuries prior to the norman conquest and after uh roman reigns i think and i think the roman britain roman london is a good place to start this because although your book is called the anglo-saxons and it's a history of if you like england or what comes to be england between around 400 and the norman conquest famously in 1066. you your work actually starts with um roman britain and you're quite good i think in the book showing just how sophisticated a society this was um there was widespread literacy a coinage economy a large urban population there are these impressive engineering projects for me as a historian particularly interested in the history of london one of the things that most struck me was just how significant a city london already was at that time you write that it was a city of some 330 acres home to perhaps 50 000 people or so that is most populous could you say a little more about london's importance in roman britain for us please well i think you've probably given all the most salient facts there i mean yeah it was the populations are of course very difficult to estimate i think that's estimated largely on its size which was very big and the the fact that sticks in my mind was at the biggest forum north of the alps london of any roman city and by the start of the third century the whole thing is walled um so you know it's big it's impressive it's full of stone buildings uh buildings which in some cases are faced with marble um and it's you know what you say whilst london is the biggest and most important i mean the reason london is where it is is because it's uh the the lowest point you can cross either by affording it or at the moment eventually building a bridge across the tent um so and obviously the other thing is you know it's the the thames is one of the three major rivers in england and it flows out towards the continent so it's the the conduit by which um the the romans can bring in um supplies from the continent and export things from britain like grain which we know they know they were exporting um to what is now um germany or the rhine frontier so yeah london very important but as you say london connects by obviously you mentioned romans you have to mention roads london connects to a network of smaller towns and cities across the whole of the roman britannia and the other thing that you've rightly stressed i think is the sophistication um that you know compared to what comes afterwards there is a very substantial uh drop in levels of sophistication for whatever better word um and i think the thing to sort of the caveat here is is that you're not you have to be careful not to make kind of uh too strong a value judgment on this because um it can seem like you're praising roman london um and by by saying how sophisticated it was you know the old cliches are kind of underfloor eating and sanitation and all these things which aren't desirable um in many cases they're only enjoyed by an elite so they might be enjoyed by a mercantile elite or an aristocratic elite and they think the people that go unrecorded and and um under reported in in roman london are the people working at some of the pile to support um all this all these nice marble fronted buildings so uh i think in in recent decades in storing the thoughts to sort of uh you know say that well you know uh whilst 19th century and early 20th century historians british historians would have been in awe of the roman empire and have nothing but good to say about it because they had an empire of their own to maintain um sort of post-colonial um historians would tend to say well you know think about the poor people toiling in fields under the the sort of the yoke of roman servitude to support this level of sophistication having said all of that you know there is a um there's a very definite sort of drop in both population and living standards as a result of the the traditional phrase would be the fall of rome or the fall of roman britannia um at the turn of the fourth and fifth century circa 400. yes i mean several good points though i i i i i quite agree on on the um the people that have been missed in this sort of if you like um great story of uh the sophistication of roman britain and roman london and i think i think that's understandable because some of that is a consequence of the evidence that we have i mean to the best of my knowledge we have a handful of written sources that tell us anything about roman london but we have these these wonderful architectural remains for example um and it's easy to to to look at this forum which was the largest one north of the alps and think oh this is this is this is clearly an important city in a very sophisticated city but as you point out okay the forum would have been used by pretty much everyone in roman london i would think but many of these buildings um also tell us more about the elites and they do about those people underneath and i think one of the things i did particularly enjoy about the book was you were very good at explaining why historians at different periods of time have reinterpreted the evidence in different ways um and i think well i was going to say another corrective i think as well so this this sort of um story of roman london being is this enormous engine of growth if you like and place of civilization is that there are there are there are some signs particularly in the third century of decline in in roman london aren't there i mean as those of you who have watched on my other videos on this channel will have perhaps seen um my video where i walk around the walls of london which were built by the romans and as you pointed out that this ward city but the romans wouldn't have put walls around london if there if there were no threat if there was no threat would they so well i mean here as i'm speaking slightly outside my comfort zone because uh you know in terms of sort of interpreting why romans put you know city walls around the cities because walls do seem to be a thing that particularly occurring in 3rd century britannia and not so much elsewhere in the western roman empire as i understand it so you have this sudden sort of you know um efflorescence of warms in britain but that isn't replicated necessarily elsewhere um but yes and you're right in the third century as a whole is a period of sustained crisis for the roman empire um i think with britain in particular though it's difficult because as you say we just don't have the written sources we've got written tortoises as i understand it from the first century of roman britain and we have um one or two people reporting on the sort of the decline of roman power in the late fourth century they're nothing like as much as we would wish but for a lot of the time we're just relying on archaeology and one of the things you can see as you move into the early fifth century uh in the early decades of the fifth century is um you know fairly dramatic collapse as the cities and towns like london are rapidly abandoned and it's not it's not true in every single sense i mean you can always find people on the other side of the argument saying well you know if you look at lincoln or if you look at you know this place you can see that there are some continued uh um evidence of of people living in these places but they're not certainly not functioning in the way they were before as you say bowman britain had had a pointed economy and that coinage ceased season minted um around the the year 400. or it is being existed to be minted in i think 383 it ceases to be imported around um turn of the fourth and fifth century so you just have the only coin that's in existence is uh is old coin um and it starts to be hoarded and it starts to be buried so very quickly you end up in a situation where the economy completely collapses and it's no good if you were you know formerly the you know um let's say paulina's the the mosaic maker you know you suddenly are out of the job because no there's no aristocracy anymore that is in is demanding you make sex and that goes for every kind of level of sophistication you know pottery goes out the window at least high-quality kiln-fired um um so there are huge consequences to that sort of what you might politely call um what people do call a transformation of roman britain into the fifth century but i think it's you know transformation perhaps underplays just how catastrophic it was for most people and although you know again all these things can be debated i think one of the things that's fairly clear is there is a fairly substantial drop in the population of britain in the fifth century um which can only kind of come about from kind of widespread chaos catastrophe and death yes and i think i think it was probably in the towns and cities of rome and britain the the transformation perhaps euphemism but you know transformation was most was most obvious um yeah it must have been i mean do we know anything of london let's let's let's say this is a 200 year period i think most historians are happy to think about it in those kind of terms 400 600 do we know anything about life in london in that period at all well i can't tell you anymore because i say i'm not particularly a specialist i'm not an archaeologist i'm not a specialist from london per se so i'm struggling to think of what rory nate smith said in his recent book very good book called citadel of saxon um uh anglo-saxon london or some such and he um he uh you know for for most for for i'm trying to avoid the phrase the cliche to all intents and purposes but all intents and purposes there's not much traits of people living in london uh in the fifth and sixth century um there may be you know you you may be able to point to sort of evidence of like what we found you know evidence of human um settlement here or there but it is to all intents and purposes a ghost town um and that goes for you know places like canterbury and it goes to places like siren chester that um it goes for uh what's the place uh along the same part of the world uh silk chester which is completely you know that the towns are abandoned um and there's very little evidence of anybody living there until circa 600 and what makes the change um around about 600 is the reintroduction of christianity because the roman empire was christian from the early 4th century and we have evidence of christianity in late roman britain so we find millers that have you know christian um uh scenes or christian um artwork for a better word on their mosaic flaws um not much evidence of urban christianity as i understand it occasional evidence that points to there may have been a church here or there but um and we do have mention of a handful of bishops in but um christianity as a whole in britannia disappears in the fifth and sixth centuries in a way that it doesn't in say across the the other side of the general ball and um it's only in the the late 6th century with the appearance of saint augustine famously um in kent 597 and the anglo-saxons start to revert to christianity and because these in the first case roman missionaries are sent from rome by gregory the great their idea of what a bishop should be is that they should be um urban dwellers and they are they are keen to revive that that sense that that um that notion of the city um that had you know been part and parcel of being in the roman empire so the places that they are picking out uh to base themselves as bishops our place is like in the first instance canterbury and then in the second instance london and it's to say it's it's partly a practical measure because what they want to do is build stone churches so they're importing um masons glaciers and other um craftsmen from the continent in order to create what by our standards would be very very humble stone churches or what by later medieval standards would be very small almost barn-like um uh structure or but made of stone and that's clearly an important thing a way of um reintroducing reinstating a sense of romanitas um for these bishops so roman bishops are urban bishops and that is what leads to um the first signs of of of resettlement in london is the um creation of some pauls um in the early seventh century i mean i think it's fairly clear i mean augustine comes in 597 and i think already by 600 604 there's there's a bishop of london some pauls has been founded and it's been this seat of the bishop of london ever since what's that now 1500 years almost 1400 years um yeah it does it does seem particularly in southern england i suppose in london the the the reintroduction of urban life does seem very much tied to this um roman um christianity coming back into coming coming back into britain um it's different story perhaps in the north but certainly that does seem to be the case uh in the south and in london so you know i mean look at that argument too hard i don't think it sees the reintroduction of urban life per se i think what it sees is is the beginnings of settlement within these these ancient rules so i don't it doesn't i don't think it doesn't lead to a mercantile revival in london i mean we'll come on to what what happens there it just means you have a a few um ecclesiastical communities living amongst these ruins because they see this as as you know the way that um christianity should proceed and they are they are trying to reinvoke this idea of rome in britain yes no i i i'd be happy to agree with that i'm just i'm just conscious now actually now that i think of it is that your book is um called the anglo-saxons but we haven't really mentioned angles or saxons yet so we've spoken about this this period of of retrenchment in in britain and in in in britain's towns particularly between 400 and 600 um what do we know of the people that um can i say the people that were responsible for this retrenchment or is is that to is that too much of a value judgment um what do we know of the people that did come to britain in that period mark uh so you're talking about migration from the continent of um angles saxons dukes huns etcetera yeah somewhere i think i think i think it's quite telling that when the walls are put around london you have these various bastions and sort of towers in the wall and the first ones are all on the eastern side of the walls so this to me looks like a frontier which is is looking east where the perceived threat is and you you just mentioned these various groups the angles the saxons and the jews i mean they are all off here to the east of britain aren't they um yeah so you know that we we think that there may have been a threat perhaps as early as a third century but in or certainly in the full century but but what happens from about the year 400 well i mean the short answer to your question is if only we knew and this is why it's such a contentious period and this is why um you have a range of sub opinions on the subject ranging from i mean not so much nowadays but you know uh the old argument was the late 19th century and early 20th century arguments was that there was a massive migration sufficient in scale as to displace the people who were living there prayed previously so the roman at the british or the romano british the romano britain no one believes that anymore um but uh the the question is to what extent uh you know how big the migration was um and in recent decades uh not not terribly recent but in the last you know four or five decades the argument has been developed um there is an extreme version of the argument which says there's hardly any migration at all and the reason and what happened was you had um uh reminded british people um essentially adopting the ident adopting a barbarian or germanic whatever you want to call it identity um you know i think taken to its extremes that argument collapses i think you know there is too much although although we have pitifully um a pitiful amount of evidence cumulatively the fact that um people end up speaking old english which is humanic language the fact that they end up worshiping germanic gods um the fact that um you know all of a sudden we have this this explosion of um archaeological evidence in terms of pottery and jewelry that is is has very close affinities or similarities to that stuff which is excavated at the same time in northern germany and southern scandinavia i mean you know without rehearsing the whole argument i think if you take all these plus plus the written tradition which is you know much later than we would wish but beginning with gilda and repeated by b you know the story that the anglo-saxons tell themselves and story that the the surviving british um tell themselves in the west of britain is that lots of people came over and there was um a big ethnic divide between them i mean this is one of the problems i think with the continuity argument is that it doesn't account for the british people in the west and one of the things i explore in the book is is the the i suppose how entrenched and how um how bitter really that ethnic divide between the britons in the west and the who become people who become the english in the east is uh you know and the hostility is there from the beginning so i i find it very hard to believe that you know um the you know the the minimalist interpretation of the the anglo-saxon uh migration you know the thing on top of that is you can still argue for a very substantial migration and recognize that in percentage terms it can be a fair it can be nothing like as many romano british people who are instilled in situ i mean you have to work very hard by sort of you know adjusting the variables to get it to even sort of 20 percent of the population being newcomers but if they are say the 20 of the population who are experienced in warfare and the people carrying the swords and the people who are therefore in control then they can have a very big cultural impact and that's one of the things about roman britain is that roman britain it had been illegal for you to be to bear arms as a civilian the people who did the fighting and the people who did the polluting with the army and the thing that is lost as a result of the of britain leaving the roman empire around 400 is that the there is nobody in charge you know there's nobody um uh being paid to kind of keep the barbarians out or to you know maintain this police state so you know the people who are in charge are the people who can fight for themselves and bear arms themselves and you might kind of think well surely that's just a matter of grabbing a sword you know these these um the art of war takes a few generations for a society to to re-learn and as i say if you is a civilian population that's suddenly confronted with uh barbarian invaders i'm using barbarian in a non-pejorative sense of course people beyond the bounds of the empire uh who are invading who have a society where um you know the elite your sense of sense of self-worth and your uh your power is bound up with your ability to fight and lead other people to fight and bear arms um then you know once you introduce that into the mix they are going to be the people who are calling the chops so i think we get a wonderful picture of this world in beowulf for example don't we um yeah i mean of course beowulf as you know is a much later source but nothing is more evocative of that of that sense of um you know power being bound up in sort of warbands and and an arms bearing class when this is this is this is a good picture i think of this world between 400 and 600 and we said earlier that urban life perhaps or open spirits begins to return to london from about 600. what's what's the story over the course of the next perhaps 100 years here then i mean as people i imagine that once these ecclesiastics come back to london then other people would have come as well they had that people they would have people who would want to bring them food and and and other other necessaries and trade with them and i i can easily imagine perhaps really small markets popping up is this within the roman city of london the thing that causes the takeoff of london as a mercantile center in the seventh century seems to be just in general terms um massive economic growth around channel and the north sea in say from the mid-seventh century onwards and one of the things that is is the great marker of that growth is the reintroduction spontaneous reintroduction of silver coinage now the silver coinage died of death with the in britain with the romans and all of a sudden um i think it's around about 66 17 you get coins and the the the chart for survival if you look at there's a there's a very good book on this um i'm going to embarrass myself now by uh forgetting the name of the chap who wrote it um but um you know if you look at the chart uh it's it's just suddenly coin production minting just literally rockets up uh is that within britain or is that in britain and it's all around it's all around northern europe as well so imagine all those waterways all that sort of um area of a commercial area if you like of the the the north sea and the channel um all of a sudden coinage is back and what you see at the same time are the creation of uh new settlements outside the walls of roman cities and towns which the anglo-saxons called um uh well wicks you know the plural the single is which but i'm going to say modernize it anglicize it as wicks so wic wick like uh it gives us the the the the place names which uh norwich sandwich what you get in the late seventh century is london um and it is not in the old roman city it is a couple of miles well about a mile to the west in fact um and sort of his boundaries would be um aldwich who is in the name there on the east and roughly covent garden on the west and the reason that it grows up there is because it's far easier to land your boats there on the sandy uh bit of beach as the thames curves around which for which the anglo-saxon word was strand you know the strand of people of course where the strand is that's where you're landing your boats um so these wicks emporia are growing up and they are there's a good phrase in rory nate's book he reminds us they're basically kind of like permanent markets so this isn't a rebirth of urbanism in the sense of theaters and baths and forums and you know magistrates this is literally i mean it would look to us like a shanty so it's all one-story buildings thrown up very quickly um and you've got uh you know people bringing their surpluses from the countryside in um you have got people manufacturing now i i've avoided using the word artisan in the book because it makes people think of very expensive loads of bread nowadays but you know something more traditionally artisan manufacturing leather workers you know metals yeah and of course probably filthy noisy but at the same time and ugly from our point of view so as i say it's not a sophisticated urban environment there are no churches but hugely profitable you know those those silver pennies are circulating in great numbers and even to the extent that kings sit up and start to take notice and compete for control of london and that's one of the sort of exciting things you can see in the late seventh and early eighth centuries is of course london we've already said was ideally placed uh to capitalize on trade to the continent and it's also ideally placed between the various kingdoms that have emerged um in the sixth century amongst the anglo-saxon so london is originally in essex but it's also kind of conveniently on the border of wessex the west kent south and mercia to the to the northwest um and there's a clearly an enormous bun fight between these contending powers these rival kingdoms for control of this golden goose that won't stop laying in london which um around the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries and the the the power that comes out on top the rising power throughout the seventh century is of course mercia so london is a mercian city from at least the very latest the early eighth century um but when we talk about london in that period beed has a famous description of it that i can't quote wrote but he you know it's an emporium where kind of many nations come together the mart of many peoples or something i mean yes exactly that and you know that um what he's talking about there is not the old roman city he's talking about london which it's this new uh sort of shabby looking permanent market to the west of london um which is is absolutely pointing it and and probably i think you know the estimates maximum estimates for it at its peak is about seven thousand people um well that's i mean that that's pro to urban if if not urban isn't it i mean i think it's true as i say it's it's it's it's it's probably one of the biggest concentrations of people perhaps the biggest concentration of people in britain at that point but it's not the only thing i'm trying to make sure is people don't run away of the idea that there's a rebirth of urbanism and that we're suddenly rebuilding city walls and we're laying out roads such roads as were laid out in london which were very very basic you know so it's it's uh they're sort of organically grown towns on cities rather than or organic organically grown settlements rather than um meticulously laid out urban planning of the kind you associate with rome yes and i think i think i think that's a fair distinction to draw um i mean there's a geographic distinction there's the the the kind of sense of the roman city was built in stone and brick um there was a fair amount of wood as well whereas this london witch would have been almost entirely wooden timber i should imagine um and many other many other contrasts we can draw but i think what what really strikes me is this sense that when as you said at the start roman london was founded because of its ease of access to the continent and for its trading connections along the thames and out over the north sea and when urban life does come back to london or just outside london it's the same factors that are driving that i think isn't its trade its proximity to the continent it's all of these kind of things i mean and and that that that i think is is a recurring theme of london's history isn't it it's always been this trading city oh yeah look it up like that that's absolutely true i just think i mean i can um because i you know i am a medievalist rather than an expert on the romans but my sense is that the roman cities are um that they are you know we're led to believe now there was something at london prior to the romans arrival they're very good at sort of seizing a location for its um you know um strategic and and mercantile um possibilities um but then it's the state that is laying out those towns and it's doing it you know partly for reasons of state control and you know farming supplied and it's also doing it for the benefit um well doing it for the benefit of the state and there are people profiting hugely as a result as merchants but what you see in the rebirth of london as something much more organic and not just london but the other weeks much lesser though than they are in stature for in which becomes it's outside of york and which we've mentioned it twitch as well um these these places growing up um because the market kind of is creating them the market and it's not it's not being driven by kings kings aren't lying things are only kind of sitting up and noticing once they can see the profit that can be had and the way they can tap that profit is very straightforward they don't need they don't have elaborate taxation systems like the romans did where you kind of send people around demanding a percentage of people's um income you can simply tap trade at source by creaming off a percentage so when the ship's coming in you only need one or two kings officials to say right i'm here on behalf of ethel bald mercier and um you know we're entitled to 20 of your cargo or you have to pay us this much in the way of pulp so it's very easy thing to tap for these kings yes and i think i mean the romans you couldn't control a an entity as big as the roman empire from rome and they used cities although cities would control surrounding countryside and provinces and areas would be administered from these cities and i don't think there's any evidence that um the kings of mercy are in the 8th century are using london as an administrative base it's it's a cash cow it's like you said in the book it's the it's it's the goose that keeps laying these golden eggs um so it's it's it's a very it's becoming a very wealthy settlement perhaps one of the you know the kind of wealthiest places um in in seventh eighth century england and perhaps just say something a bit more if you could about society generally then i mean we're seeing numerous smaller kingdoms become fewer bigger kingdoms would that be a fair summary yeah i mean if you're talking about the eighth century the the the light motif that and the reason the way i've organized the chapter at that chapter in the book is it's the domination in in southumbrian britain so northumbria is doing its own thing the kingdom south of the humber we're told by beat who's writing in the early 730s we're told that they are all answerable to um i think they called him ethel bald or athel bald i'm having these great debates now with the audiobook narrator of the book so how precisely we could anglicize or modernize old english pronunciations but battle ball i think is where we've ended up um but bead says that they're all subject to him and of course the person who succeeds um ethel bald after a skirmish with with someone who lasts a few months the person who uh is king of mercy in the late eighth century is the much more famous king offer optimal for offers dyke and he is in particular is someone who um subjugates the surrounding kingdoms so we've mentioned some already so uh kent sussex uh east anglia essex wessex these other uh kingdoms that had emerged as the main contenders in the course of the sixth and seventh centuries um all of them are to some degree subordinate or made subordinate required to recognize the superiority of uh offer as their overlord in the course of the late 8th century um so um [Music] i'm not something that probably answers the question yeah and i think i mean the the big power in in on the continent in europe if you like obviously prison was very much part of europe is charlemagne and offers his kind of contemporary um and these seem to be quite powerful rulers i mean you know we're not we're not we're not we're going to keep going about romans here but we're not back to those kind of level sophistication perhaps but there's certainly an imagine and imagine themselves to be in that tradition um and yet it's at this time as these kingdoms become more powerful and perhaps more centralized if we can if we can use that term that a new threat arrives this time perhaps not so much from the east but from the north which which really shakes everything up does doesn't it yeah i think i think you're right i mean i think i was just going to quibble someone i still don't think these these kingdoms are particularly sophisticated or centralized i think you know competing if you're going to keep drawing the companion comparison with rome i think they are still uh very primitive in the way that lots of government takes place and they are uh you know power is very much kind of like who has the biggest retinue who can summon the biggest armies i mean one of the things that's very interesting though in that just to sort of stick on that point for a minute before we get on to the new threat is how much both these uh monarchs so you mentioned charlemagne and i mentioned bother is how much both these men are keen to draw on um roman symbols roman imagery and romanitas so in the coins they style themselves like roman emperors they have their um charlemagne himself is anointed he has his sons anointed by the pope um offer wants his son anointed by the architecture of canterbury who refuses to oblige so he creates a new archbishop at littfield who does oblige um but even i mean one of the mysteries about king offer is why he built that huge linear earthwork off the bike to separate the english from english in the east from the british in the west and you know there's no definitive answer to that question but one of the reasons might plausibly be that one of the things that roman rulers obviously did is very apparent people living in britain of all places was they built boundary walls so you have hadrian's wall the antenna wall and adrian's wall to the north charlemagne starts building um the the sort of a canal which isn't very successful um in the i think it's the 790. um and it so that's i think for these rulers um the idea of uh well of course there's the other famous thing with charlemagne an offer is as a letter and a surviving letter from charlemagne to author in which he says well you know it's a bit non-committal he says we'll see about getting those black stones you wanted but you probably wouldn't send someone to tell us the kind of size and shape you want and we'll we'll arrange the transportation these are clearly not trivial stones and the working hypothesis is that offer is trying to get hold of um of of um these kind of um black marble pothori from charlemagne bits of reused roman uh fancy masonry you know that they that are redolent of roman power so anyway having said all of that that these guys are nuts for the roman empire um i think the keynote is that eighth century um southern britain what you know will eventually become england is as you say although there is a you know mercier is is kind of um bullying these smaller kingdoms into submission um it is peaceful by and large and it is prosperous much more so than it had been in previous centuries and that prosperity that and the thing you see in london and the emergence of public it's the prosperity and the huge profit making that draws in people from the fringes of this world who are connected to it but not seeing the same level of of success not seeing the same level of reward the people who live in the cold north who are kind of you know catching the animals and removing their pelts and selling them on they're not seeing the same level of reward as the merchants in london or or paris and um and we're talking about to sort of cut to the case we're talking about the vikings we're talking about north men who start raiding in the late 8th century the coasts of britain and frankie are extracting this wealth by force yes and they didn't they didn't happen upon britain and frankie by a chance these these people who as you rightly point out in the book they weren't really known as vikings at the time the sources at the time referred to them as northmen or pagans or heathens and we might say something about that in a minute they must have been coming into contact with these um wealthier societies coming down to the wicks trading seeing the monasteries and going back to scandinavia with these stories of what would have been sort of fabulous wealth and from there i mean i think our first recorded um arrival of the vikings in britain is 793 but may well have been coming before then um and what what will you say you say mark where where do we first see viking activity in in britain and england oh i can't really say this point can i no well you can but you lose you might be no one is calling england at the time yet but you know so i mean around the coast of britain because it's not just um anglo-saxon kingdoms they target you know pickish ones to the north and irish uh you know communities in ireland so everywhere around the um you know britain and ireland and indeed uh northern franchia are all these communities coastal communities initially as you'd say are coming under attack you're right in saying the earliest dateable raid is 793 there is a reference in the anglo-saxon chronicle to an attack on portland which is under the year 789 but all it says is it took place in the reign of um um bjorn red i think it is um who was king until 802. so you know it's the reason 793 is is flagged up is because it was uh widely reported and very famous because that's the point when the vikings attacked the island of lindsey which was the cradle of christianity in northern um britain uh or in northumbria incredibly symbolic attack whether that was whether that was deliberate or not you can see how this would have shaken um christian society yeah i mean that's a real kind of the risk of standing crash that's a real sort of 9 11 moment so you can have smaller attacks up to that point but when you attack something so symbolic and you scored such a a violent um raid um that is when it actually shock waves all across europe um and um yeah so that's that's viking activity sort of you know suddenly people sitting up and taking notice um it's interesting you mentioned as well you know whether it was deliberately symbolic i think perhaps it is i mean the monasteries are obviously uh undefended extremely wealthy but thanks to the generosity of of kings for the last couple of centuries um but also i mean we're just coming back to charlemagne you know charlemagne had been sort of pushing against um uh the the heathens or the pagans uh in saxony to his north and just you know and and and killing executing lots of saxons and destroying their shrines so you know there is a perhaps a sense of of pushback uh panic initially around the baltic and uh you know the the northern parts of europe uh at the expansion of christianity and but eventually this is um pagans striking back at uh sort of the soft underbelly of these christian kingdoms i think for me one of the most fascinating aspects of this period of history there are so many questions to which you know an honest answer would be well you know we don't know um you mentioned office diet for example why did offer build this this amazing earth work you know length of the border between modern england and wales if you like and there are lots of theories and some are clearly better than others but really we don't know for sure and we don't know for sure whether there was this sort of deliberate um let's hit linda's farm because it's christian and we're pagan and they're we we feel threatened by this new religion we don't we we don't know and it makes makes it such an interesting period of history i mean do we even know when the first viking attack on london was or is or is that even is is that even uncertain um that's a good question and to which i'm just struggling to think of the answer i think i mean the first recorded one from memory is in the early eight forties eight four one eight four two eight four three um there may have been ones prior to that point one of the things you can clearly see i tried in the book to give a sense of uh there's a whole chapter that takes us from the thing you've mentioned lindisfarne up into the accession of alfred the great when the tide is reversed in england um and you what you can see is a kind of a a steady escalation i mean there's a period period where it accelerates very rapidly but it goes from um opportunistic raids on defenseless communities at start or the turn of the early 8th and 19th centuries to by the time you get to the 860s 70 years later actual kingdoms falling to huge viking invading armies and one of the things you can see in the early 9th century fairly obviously is coastal communities starting to seek out abandoned roman cities precisely because they had serviceable circuits of stone walls there's a nice example down near where i live in kent there's a village not far from me called or lineage a community of nuns there who seek permission or they are granted a refuge within canterbury which is about 12 miles away from the village um and you know and that that that indicates as i say in the book that you know these vikings not liming isn't on sea it's about five miles in land and you have to get across the north towns so it shows that some of these viking raiders even in the early ninth century are becoming much more adventurous by the same token it shows they're not becoming sufficiently bold as to try and take a walled moment city that's many miles in land but they were by the 840s so you get attacks on canterbury and london um as we get into the 840s and clearly much bigger army is starting to operate um so that's the same point that we start seeing winchester coming online i mean just to have in the seat of the bishops of um uh sorry the bishops of the the west saxon um have been based there since the uh mid-seventh century but again like london you don't have a sense of there's any mercantile activity in winchester it's only an ecclesiastical community what drives the merchants it seems back into safe bosom of these roman cities is the escalation of viking attacks in the 830s and 840s and it's very plausible again we don't have the evidence to to nail it but it's very plausible that what happens with winchester is um the merchants who have been based at undefended hamwitch the west saxon equivalent of london which simply move up the river and go within the safety of the roman walls of winchester and a similar thing seems to happen in london that uh around about that point um people abandoned london because it's just vulnerable precisely the same reasons that made it attractive to merchants big big sandy beach you could sell your and if you sell your boat's up there and you're not coming to sort of with peaceful intent and you're coming to sort of take you to grab all the stuff and grab people as slaves um then it's it's very easy to do that as well so from that point on um uh london which uh is abandoned and we get a new significantly we get a new word uh to describe london from the mid 9th century which is not london so it is now it is now a borough or an enclosure a fortification um if you like uh and so from that point on the history of london from the from the middle of the ninth century onwards is the history of london um and you need to anticipate your next question perhaps um uh you know once upon a time uh people said well that doesn't really start to allow for the great uh who's the sort of the king of wessex uh who who leads the fight back against the vikings the other anglo-saxon kingdoms having perished um alfred we're told by the anglo-saxon chronicle um i can't remember the exact exact verb but he sort of um uh sort of sorts out he sort of um um sort of renews london for one of a better word in 886 people took that previously to mean that was the point of which people started to settle there again fairly clear from the archaeology and indeed just the chronology of the story that they were settling there from the 840s onwards but it's a it's in 886 clearly alfred does something fairly you know interventionist as king and and sort of you know potentially holds a meeting there of his own subjects and the mercians and and and perhaps lays out the streets anew as his predecessors are done in winchester so there's a there's an official reopening of london as it were the roman city by alfred uh in the 80s i mean i think one of the consequences i might draw from that and you know people could disagree with me on this is that london's walls i think they run for an extent of about three miles so if you are if you are going to seek safety within these walls which is perfectly understandable you need to be talking about a significant number of people because you need to be able to man those walls there's no good you know sort of 1500 people seeking safety within a settlement with three mile walls because you can't possibly defend them all and even even a viking army that doesn't seem particularly um keen on lengthy sieges or storming well defended armed uh well defended ward cities will find a way across those walls so we must be talking about the substantial number of people i think that makes sense to me why they would want to go into london we do actually have a source that tells us a bit about these birds don't they they were one of the london berg as you say that there were one of alfred's um [Music] well how much they were alfred or how much they were somebody else's alfred picked it up and made it his own but then one of his responses to the to the the viking threat as you say three of the kingdoms in england that's northumbria east anger and mercy they've all been they've all been knocked out by the vikings haven't they um so presumably london ceases to be a mercian city when when mercy almost ceases to exist as a kind of anglo-saxon kingdom if i can put it in those terms and alfred turns turns the tide it's not it's not easy it was a it was a close-run thing and one of one of his tactics techniques are these birds can you say something about those yeah well i'd say you you with your characteristically comprehensive question you've covered most of it but um no so um yeah burst simply just means it's the anglo-saxon word for stronghold and i think that's that's one of the misconceptions that it's good to put to bed early on is i was certainly taught not just at school but i think at university i had this idea that the burr was in some sense a miraculous fusion of fortress and you know and town so my impression was that from the off these were kind of like well you wanted to protect the townsfolk so you built a bur and you sort of simply transplanted the town folk into it that's not clearly not the case in the vast majority of instances i mean whilst you do have fortified towns like winchester and london what alfred is concerned to create in the first instance of fortresses so places from which um you know that he can his people can resist the vikings now the other misconception i think that is easy to run away with is that there had never been such a thing as a burn and there was a revolutionary concept introduced by alfred which is clearly not the case if you look at the charters the land grants being issued by kings of mercier kings of of wessex in the 8th century from the middle of the 8th century kings of mercia are insisting that their subjects whatever other privileges or freedoms may have been granted people they are insisting that even if they have been granted freedom from all kinds of other royal duties that everybody must contribute to fortress everybody must contribute to the rebuilding of bridges or the repair of bridges and the defense of fortifications but they're talking about fortifications and clearly concerned about their upkeep from the mid-8th century in murcia and i think from the early 9th century in wessex the same clauses appear so it's not like all of a sudden alfred says i've got a great idea lads we should build fortifications what alfred is successfully doing is seizing i mean he does build some birds from scratch almost certainly places like crick blade and wallingford along with thames oxford as well but what he's very adept to doing is looking at looking for existing fortifications so iron age hill forts old roman cities old roman coastal forts and um bringing them back into service perhaps by uh reducing their their you know the the the um the total um length of the circuit of their walls you know but um bringing them pushing them back into service and making them function as a network and it's that sort of organizational genius i think which is the key to alfred's success as a as a military commander and as ultimately as a king the document you were talking about is called was called by historians urgal heidage right it's a remarkable document because um not only does it list the birds it lists the number of heights hence burgle heidage number of hides that were allocated to defend them and not only that it gives us a formula a very complicated formula which i can't remember which basically says you need this many you need one man to hide so every hide of land every standard measure of land supply one heart one man to defend a bird and this is the number of hides you need to say to defend winchester and i think it's kind of like one man is responsible for about four and a half feet of wall and the remarkable thing is in lots of instances where you can where you can recover or where you can measure the extent of say the roman defenses of winchester or the the the circuit of of of of earthworks that say whereum um there is a very very close correspondence between the number produced by the burglar hideage and the actual um surviving defenses so it seems it wasn't just an academic exercise that this was something that was being used to defend these these fortifications you'll correct me if i'm wrong but i think a comparison with a much more famous later administrative document the doomsday book is so frustrating that london's excluded i don't think someone's included in a burglar how did you know it's not behind it historians tend to have their cake and eat it and say well it only applies to wessex and yet it applies it does apply to the birds that are built in what used to be western mercia i mean because those places are mentioned oxford quickly wallingford they so it sort of applies to those bits of alfred kingdom but um it doesn't extend its kent which is you know you can come up with any number of justifications because kemp was ruled as a separate sub-kingdom um you know it doesn't mean that and as you say it doesn't mention london um but there's no question i mean as i say the key thing with alfred in london is is the year 886 and that's the point where he's supposed to sort of renew it and restore its defenses yes i think i think asa says he restored it splendidly and i i i i quite agree with your conclusion about with a bounce outfit there's always that famous sort of question alfred how great and i come down with you on this one i think i think he does deserve that name and he does save if you like the last anglo-saxon kingdom the story over the story over there the following century the 10th century is very much one of the kind of time the anglo-saxons if we like roll in back to the games that the vikings have made north of london now you know it's a very complicated picture we won't worry too much about that here you know um the extreme rivalry between wessex and mercy how much these people in mercy would have seen the people of wessex particularly better than the vikings these are all open questions but presumably this is a time of relative peace and prosperity at the 10th century again in london the the viking raids have stopped and you've got these powerful um kings who now actually do think of themselves as kings of england don't they they're that they imagine a single country a single nation with a single coinage single law codes perhaps although how widely they're interpreted is another open question um so presumably this is a this is a relatively good time to be living in london yeah i think so broadly i mean the the the kind of the unified kingdom that you mentioned just in the last things with the you know one one coinage certainly with one you uh one um image on it minted to one particular weight standard that doesn't occur until the late 10th century and the from the term england that doesn't appear until 1990 so it's the very end of the 10th century and as you said at the beginning um you know the the first few decades of the 10th century are one where are ones where um the king or let's say alfred's alfred's children um alfred's successor edward the elder and his daughter um i'm going to struggle with the name um you know those those two children of alfred she as ruler of of of mercier after the death of her husband and and edward as as alfred's direct successor as king of king of the anglo-saxon disease damage himself um they are pushing against the as you say the scandinavian settlers in what we would later call the dane law so east anglia uh lincolnshire um the east midlands with great success in the space of a few years um they they don't of course drive every single scandinavian out of these regions what they do is they get these people to submit because we're in charge now if you're paying tribute you're paying it to us you're recognizing us as your overlords um but what that means is with the fall of northumbria to athelstan um in um 97 i think um and and the you know the struggle for the north that goes on for the next generation by let's say by the middle of the 10th century the sort of the lordship of the southern kings the former kings of wessex their claim to be rex anglorum kings of the english is uncontested from the mid 10th century onwards and i think from that point it's one of the things that i sort of unpacked towards the end of the book in the ultimate chapter it's from that point that you can see all kinds of um significant uh measures of economic stability and growth you suddenly see the building of um for one of a better word parish churches you see the emergence of church charge you see the sudden reintroduction of domestic architecture i mean it's one of the sort of most frustrating things about the anglo-saxons is if we look if you look at john blair's recent book uh building anglo-saxon england there's almost no trace of buildings in the sort of eighth ninth mid 10th century all of a sudden we start to see clearly the houses of the gentry you know these these long ranges with sort of uh indoor bathrooms for heaven's sake i mean how much more sophisticated do you want so um you've got um so you've got that as well you've got um you know as you say a burst of of of uh or rather trying to say something about the coinage that's not idiotic um you suddenly see uh the the amount of coin in circulation increasing from the 1960s 1970s so by all these mergers and what on the other thing the other thing crucially for the purposes of your your um your uh show is that you see these birds lundenburger in particular uh all of these birds that had previously been conceived of as fortifications suddenly becoming a lot more um uh market orientated and you start to see areas within them that have previously been if you the way i imagined these is kind of because the phrase i think john blair used is kind of like you know they're sort of military aristocratic compounds so i kind of see them just like you know sort of fortresses like you would imagine a sort of a us army cap in the middle east camp in a middle eastern country but there's nothing particularly mercantile about them and that you have these kind of i like the word compound it's kind of very evocative and that that that that appear their appearance from the mid 10th century exclusively some places earlier some days later but you know the watershed moment seems to be the mid 10th century is that you are starting to see uh merchants setting up shop literally setting up shop in these um uh burrs and those much larger compounds being subdivided into much smaller carefully laid out plots with their frontages on street so in other words kind of high streets appearing in these boroughs and that again it's this urban takeoff it's it you know it's even a stretch to call it urban at this point but it's point of of takeoff that point us towards the development of later medieval uh towns and cities and their sort of commercial grids of streets yes i mean for me it's incredibly frustrating that's that we know from the archaeological record and obviously the coins and everything that there was this building work going on but there's so little of it that survives in london i mean we really are talking about your doorway here and there um i can't think of much else besides and you know there are numerous reasons for that i mean you know one one thing that cities do all the time is they constantly rebuild themselves and take down what was there and and build again and everybody knows about the great fire of london in 1666 but that's just one of three or four devastating fires in in london's history so there's so little of this this built environment left for us to see but it all sounds it all sounds wonderfully stable mark and you know it's a nice time to be living in london yet early in the 11th century i mean it's not a collapse in the way that that that there was at the end of roman rule but i mean did this powerful king of england if you like uh as a kind of insta this powerful monarchy it just falls apart doesn't it and and we all know about the the norman conquest of 1066 but in fact in sort of the period leading up to 1016 there's a danish conquest the vikings do come back if i could yes they spend they spend many decades trying to achieve it i mean to the vikings uh you know if we're still calling them i think we can um you know the the vikings the um norwegians and danes etc they are again raiding from you know last two decades of the 10th century and again similar reasons because you know it's not that the the english as i think we can start referring to them from this point onwards um it's not because they've let the guard down in any way it's just that it's just too irresistible at target you usually look at all this wealth you look at all circles being generated and um you know so once again we have we have um scandinavian raiders troubling the coasts of um england during the reign of a very long reign of a very unsuccessful king uh ethel read the unready and like as in as in uh the the first wave of viking attacks 150 years before um you can see a steady escalation perhaps a more rapid escalation um from initial raids of two or three ships too much bigger armies ultimately as you say ending in the conquest of england by king knut in 1016. i think the difference there's there are important differences to sort of to highlight here though in the first place although you know they are you know i won't say vikings took no prisoners but of course they're stupid this is one of the things they tend to be looking out for prisoners to send us slaves but although although they are still savage in their warfare as indeed everyone was in this period one of the things that they didn't seem to have like reigned in somewhat they are not deliberately torturing churches at this point canoe himself is a christian he's already been baptized before he begins his war against uh england um the same was true of his grandfather um harold bluetooth so so although you know they're still predatory and they're still seizing slaves and they're still seen in plunder they're not this is probably the churches do um not quite so badly out of it uh in the sense of being raised to the ground by pagans um and the other thing is um you know by let's say a few years into the 11th century once their mission becomes to um not sort of just to sort of plunder but to take over england i'm not quite sure where i'm going with it whether i fully believe my answer but i think i'm trying to come up with a reason why i think it's less ultimately less destructive and i think because it's slightly less protracted and if the end game is to kind of say well i'm in charge now and i'm your new christian ruler as knute does then you are not you know you are not you're presenting yourself as the uh the bringer of peace and the preserver of austerity and the person who's you know now in charging is going to you know be a good christian king how much of you know how much people swallowed that if if viking armies have been sort of sieging them and you know raising their building to the ground i don't know um so i think i think you know backpedaling a bit there's clearly vast amounts of suffering and destruction as a result of that renewed viking activity in the late 10th early 11th century but ultimately um the cities um london in particular which is the one we're after we're talking about weather that storm and i don't see it there's a huge bit in their um economic fortunes possibly if anything once the vikings have taken over uh a boost to their economic fortunes because you know now once the vikings are in charge the viking raids end you know it's kind of that's i think that's the sort of the way people have to look at it come to look at it by 1016 and they are able to trade across the north sea you know uninterrupted um not minutes by um viking fleets anymore yes i think i'm happy to still call them vikings but there is a there is a qualitative difference here between our vikings of the earlier period i mean that not just that many if many of them are perhaps not all of them are a christian but also just kind of developments that they have been in scandinavia you know we might think of the viking leaders of the 9th century calling themselves kings but they're not kings of kingdoms in the way that we would understand it but knut undoubtedly is you've seen the emergence of kingdoms that look more like everything else in europe in this period and they come over and okay let's call them vikings but they're christian and they've they've kind of crumbs these sound really subjective but they kind of caught up if you like um with with with sort of developments in in in britain and frankie and they're very powerful rulers who come over i think one one one one thing actually that tells us was kind of useful of the viking activity at this point is huge sums of money are raised to pay off these vikings aren't they the the famous dane guild where one of the responses about ethereum was just give them money and go away and this was a this was an old response and i suppose it doesn't it doesn't it's not necessarily a bad policy if you use that time constructively but whether ethel red did or not it that that that that's for other people to decide but i think at one point and i'd have to check my dates here i think there's a there's a danegeld of 80 000 pounds which is levied and i think london contributes 10 000 pounds to that um extraordinary picture of just how important london was in in this anglo-saxon kingdom of um uh of england that's right i mean i think i have to as someone who sat at the feet of professor john gillingham who wrote famous articles saying you know can we really believe this these large figures or a series of articles in the reliability of those figures um yeah i mean there are there are there are um administrative documents that make clear that there were you know five figure some so let's put it that way being extracted from um from the kingdom of england in ethel red's reign and at the start of community we've spoken about this coinage and one of the reasons we know there was there was such a good coinage and there was so much coins swirling around because we find so much of it in scandinavia exactly we turn up more english pennies in scandinavia than we do in england now i mean that that whether it was 80 000 or 50 000 whether london was 10 000 or 6 or 7 000 i mean proportion was probably still the same huge amounts of of coin were leaving england and they were leaving london to go to scandinavia and as you write the point out once knut sort of takes charge and he's king of denmark and norway sweden and england that would have stopped i suppose and i just well it becomes a slightly more peaceful free trade area doesn't it with one person who's in control and emotionally in control of all of it and i think one thing that we can say that just come back to my point about the buildings of anglo-saxon london and how few of them do survive well perhaps the buildings themselves don't survive but their names do and i think i think there were like three churches dedicated to some olaf um in the medieval city of london and you know we have some clement danes um i mean i think the names of these churches for example do give us a good idea of just how london would have been home to people who perhaps sorted themselves as scandinavian whether that was first generation second generation people who saw themselves as anglo-saxon and people who no doubt were sort of born to a sort of danish mother and a and an english father um and i think the names of of the churches particularly in london and of course the husting court which is a which is a sort of scandinavian name that they do give us a sense of that and then i suppose there's there's there's another influence that that comes into 11th century london and it's very much from the top i think although you feel free to disagree with me that's a norman french influence as a result of the confessor's time in normandy well yeah i mean i i think what you've just said about the the um the danish conquest is very true i mean one of the things i i try to fight against in the book is any sense of the 1066 is very definitely an end point for me and for anglo-saxon england and i think it is still you know very important watershed and the thing i was very anxious to get away from is the idea that anyone at the time could have seen this this ending coming what they were doing in 50 years between 1016 and 1066 was trying to work out their identity as a result of the danish conquest of 1016. and one of you said you know some people have a danish mother and an english father that's that's most famously true of harold godwinson who ends up becoming king dick his mother english father and and that you know they're trying to um you know work out where their identity lays are they you know english are they scandinavian the scandinavians are the people in charge the first half of that 50-year period then they have a king in the shape of edward professor who represents the line of wessex going back as far as um you know kurdish so it's um it's it's it's a very challenging time to be an english person uh in that in that period you know with scandinavian kings in charge for some of it um to answer your question about um normal influence i don't see a great deal of norman influence prior to the conquest i think the english were very resistant to it really the english people who are in power like the godwin who have been made to power in the land because their fortunes have been literally been made as part of the anglo-scandinavian connection um what what the interesting thing about edward the confessor is although he's english by birth he was in exile from his early teens and spent all of his adult life 25 years living in northern frankie in normandy um learning you know speaking french at court absorbing their ideas about architecture uh about fortification about you know the way society should be regulated in general when he is unexpectedly elevated to be king of england in 1042 um he obviously brings or is suffered to bring back a certain small entourage with him one of whom is his best chum uh robert of zhumiage abbott of junior age who he quickly appoints as ship of london and superintends the building of edward's brand new church or it's not it's a brand new building it's not it's an existing monastery at westminster so that's the major sort of uh sort of island literally an island of of norman influence in england prior to that i mean apart from that i don't see a lot of uh norman influence ahead of the conquest i mean he has one or two other um uh friends who hail from northern france um but um i think it's the prospect that they're gonna get more of this i mean one very easy way for me to quantify it's called i i have a dutchly old metaphorical hat that's a cartel expert that i occasionally like to bust off and don and if you measure castles as a gauge of normal influence prior to the conquest there are about four parcels four or five castles uh almost all of them uh along the the western marches of england and wales created by edward's french friends if you look at what happens after the conquest within a generation or two of the conquest there are about a thousand castles in england and wales a characteristically new norman or french way of doing war and fortification and so you know if you're using that as a yardstick there's clearly very little normally from five to 1066 but after that deluge you know that's that's why i think 1066 is still such an important terminal point for the anglo-saxons perhaps a terminal point for us now yes i i think i think i think that would be a um we should we should look at uh perhaps bring this to a close i i absolutely agree this was a society that still if you'd have stopped an anglo-saxon street in london 1063 or something and said you know there's going to be an invasion in three years he would have told you it would have come from scandinavia they were still looking that way i i mean i what i had in mind when i thought of normal influences was this very very elite and ecclesiastic if you like influence particularly in london where we have a norman bishop of london and edward builds his famous um abbey at westminster which was it looked like jumier it was romanesque but i mean we do say london but we should we should be careful here because westminster wasn't quite london at that point no i think it's it's but i think people did that at the time but you're right it's it's it's several miles separating westminster which is a separate settlement from from london hence westminster as opposed to some cause did you eat yeah yeah absolutely i think there's one more tantalising piece of evidence which is that first child of the conqueror issues to london which is on you know it's late 1060 late 1066 early 1067 he issues his charter to the londoners and he addresses it to all his all his faithful subjects in in london both english and french and that's just this tantalizing glimpse that there may have been a small french community in london already it's hard to imagine that would have happened within two or three months of the conquest but you know this very very slight evidence to to build a case i think 1066 does you know historians like clean dates and and act and actually very rarely are them you know when did the middle ages end for example you know it didn't end at 1480 in 1485 on the battle of bosworth field but i think we can say that anglo-saxon england very much came to an end on the battlefield of hastings on the 14th of october 1066 i think well that's that's certainly a line i use in the book i was parodying monty python the idea that it ended up on that day about tea time but um but um i think you can hedge it about with all kinds of qualifications and caveats and that's the job of responsible historians but i i think there's a reason that you know it reverberated so much and that you know it's seen as a a turning point in english history and it's it's it's for all kinds of reasons i think that though is probably you know best explored in another book which i've already written um you know the normal conquest book yes so i mean i've spent i've spent 450 pages unpacking that somewhere else yes and i i i did enjoy that book and i've spoken to you about that previously and i i found again this this chapter on pre-conquest england with which you open that box be particularly compelling and persuasive um so anyway we've come to the end we've come to the end of our interview today is a good exploration of anglo-saxon and britain and london the book's out in may yeah may 20th may 20th and after that what in what's next yeah i don't know uh play some tennis play the guitar a holiday i mean it's been five years graft i don't honestly know i think my my intention when i had when i finished the previous book which was on was to do something um sort of uh like a miniature you know something that was narrow narrowly focused and um concentrating on one obscure individual and of course what i ended up doing was writing a history that spanned about seven centuries so i'm quite keen having stretched for the epic go back to doing something about you know just some some woman or some man who just lives a quiet life and doesn't do very much you know sort of much more narrow book and not try and sort of write the history of the middle ages or something because big books are big books are hard graphed an an ambitious target perhaps the history of the middle ages no they are very hard and i i very much did enjoy the book and i i i like the way almost you set out the star and you said look this is a six seven hundred year period of history you can't possibly say everything so i'm just going to say what i can and it's accessible to the general reader yet it's also scholarly and academic and i hope it does really well well that's very kind of you thank you for that incoming finish and when you're talking ian and you too mark and when you do um settle on your next project be sure to come back and talk to us about that you

Channel: The History of London with Dr Ian Stone

Views: 3,683

Keywords: medieval london, the history of london, vikings, anglo-saxons, the middle ages, medieval england, Marc Morris

Id: AioY18t3K4E

Length: 79min 12sec (4752 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021