The conventional view put forward by many modern historians and incorporated into the current UK citizenship test is that British history started with the Norman Conquest in 1066. By examining the evidence of archaeology, demography, genetics and other factors relating to the lives of ordinary people, David Miles’ talk set out to rescue the preceding 700,000 years and to counteract the popular portrayal of British history in terms of linear events (battles, treaties, royal accessions) enacted by prominent people such as kings, queens, their courtiers and counsellors. Quoting from Daniel Defoe (1701):
“In furious rapes and eager lusts begot,
Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot:
Whom gend’ring offspring quickly learnt to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough;
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name nor nation, speech nor form
In whose hot veins now mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane …
A true born Englishman’s a Contradiction,
In speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction.”,


David argued that British history has from the earliest times been formed by a series of invasions, which have contributed to a uniquely rich, open and outward-looking culture. Consequently, everyone living in Britain today is, strictly speaking, an immigrant. Descriptions of the inhabitants of the British Isles and Western Europe were first recorded by classical writers. Their clichéd portrayal of savage barbarians was designed for a domestic audience, reflecting an attitude similar to that adopted by later European explorers towards the native American Indians. Herodotus, the acknowledged father of history, writing in Greece c450BC, first used the term “Keltoi” to describe the inhabitants of North West Europe, fostering the concept of a single Celtic race, although he had no first-hand knowledge of the people he described.

In the work of Greek and Roman writers, the terms “Celt” and “Gaul” appear to be applied interchangeably to the “barbarian” peoples living to the North West of the civilised Mediterranean world. The use of such terms ignored the diversity of peoples who inhabited North West Europe at the time, perpetuating the view of the “noble savage”, and inspired the romantic ideal of Celtic nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. The first detailed account of Britain was written by Julius Caesar on the basis of his first hand knowledge of the British and European tribes and their leaders. Caesar observed that some inhabitants were indigenous and some had come to plunder but stayed to farm. The inhabitants of Kent were the most numerous and similar to the Gauls of Continental Europe. During the period of Roman occupation, the population of the British Isles expanded to include soldiers, traders and slaves from across the Roman empire. Withdrawal of the Roman troops left Britain exposed again to attack from neighbouring tribes of Continental Europe. There is little contemporary evidence of the enormous changes which took place at this time but linguistic evidence suggests that the Saxons were economically and culturally dominant. The cleric Gildas, writing in Latin in the 5th century, interpreted the period of war and pillage as divine punishment for the errant ways of the indigenous population and the moral weakness of their rulers in the face of the barbarian threat. The religious models adopted by Gildas were later followed by Bede (673-735) in his vivid portrayal of the invasions by Angles, Jutes and Saxons, whom he saw as ordained by God to inflict punishment for the sins of the British and to lay the foundations of a God-fearing Anglo-Saxon society. At this time, the term “English” starts to be used to describe the English Church.

The next wave of invasion to sweep across the British Isles came in the form of Viking raids in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Jennifer Hunt