England was divided. North of Watling Street – Danelaw; but to the south – Alfred the Great’s Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. ibid.
The most famous date in the history of Britain: 1066. England in 1066 was a good place to live by the standards of the day. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 3/8: The Norman Yoke
From the start luck was against the English. ibid.
The Norman yoke – the loss of English liberties. ibid.
Domesday reveals that England in 1086 had two million people. ibid.
The Anglo-Saxons lived under a kind of apartheid. ibid.
The Barons forced King John to agree to limit his own power. ibid.
It travelled about a mile a day and by winter had infected the whole of the south. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 4/8: The Great Rising
With the tenants dead who would plough the Lord’s land? ibid.
At least half the population of Britain died. ibid.
The demand for cheap and cheerful clothing was on the rise. ibid.
In the 1370s with a series of national poll taxes which hit everyone ... the Peasants’ Revolt was an English phenomenon ... 63 women rebels were indicted in Sussex alone ... Once the rebels had dispersed, the government reneged on the deal. ibid.
The Reformation is an amazing story – the greatest destruction of our heritage in British history. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 5/8: Lost Worlds & New Worlds
A Lollard revolt against King Henry V was crushed in 1414. But at the grass roots their ideas survived. ibid.
Henry ordered the closure or the dissolution of the monasteries. ibid.
The first Africans living in Bristol are recorded in the 1560s. ibid.
Evidence of Tudor mixed marriages. ibid.
The Tudor age saw the beginnings of Britain’s black communities. ibid.
Edward VI: Edward was a pious cold-hearted swot. ibid.
The [Protestant] Revolution would turn out to be an attack on the very way of life of the people. ibid.
Up in the north, in the kingdom of Scotland, the Protestant Reformation unfolded later than in England and Wales. ibid.
There was a link between Protestantism and the rise of Capitalism and Industry. ibid.
Coal would be the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution. ibid.
Ireland – here the Protestant Reformation had made no headway. ibid.
In Ireland, England began a policy of plantations. ibid.
Four changes of religion in a single lifetime. ibid.
It was still state religion tied to the monarchy and backed by force. ibid.
In March 1625 it rang out to the death of the old king King James. Michael Wood, The Great British Story 6/8: A People’s History: The Age of Revolution
Religion and culture would divide them. ibid.
The edges of Charles’ Great Britain were burning. ibid.
The war would split regions, neighbours and even families. ibid.
These were British civil wars. ibid.
There were war crimes ... How far would the revolution go? ibid.
On the streets of Dublin, Cromwell is still a swear-word. ibid.
The monarchy was restored but with a king whose powers were now limited. ibid.
The threshold of the modern age: through civil war and revolution the nations of Britain emerged in the eighteenth century with their own identities while part of the union that made them all Britons. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 7/8: Industry & Empire
The origins of empire and the industrial revolution ... Traditional industries began to merchandise. ibid.
In the eighteenth century chains had many different uses ... As capitalism expanded it co-opted the world for its workforce and it didn’t care how it got them. ibid.
This was the great age of canals. ibid.
The steam engine – invented in England in the early eighteenth century and perfected by James Watt. ibid
The lunar men ... led by Matthew Boulton. ibid.
The Tolpuddle Martyrs – still a landmark in British labour history. ibid.
The rights of the British people were not handed down from on high but won by the people themselves – at a cost. ibid.
The Peterloo Massacre inspired new forms of social action. ibid.
A strong society with a unique and lasting culture. The Roman colonisation was supposed to have erased the ancient Britons ... But I don’t believe our ancient culture was overwhelmed as easy as that. Dr Francis Pryor, Britain AD: King Arthur’s Britain I, Channel 4 2004
Far from a dark age this was a time of huge creativity and development. ibid.
Arthur is the ultimate commodity, a ready-made hero who has been hijacked by history. ibid.
Archaeologists are starting to radically rethink the Roman invasion of Britain. ibid.
Pre-Roman Britain was in fact a collection of often feudal tribal kingdoms. ibid.
Britain turned its back on Rome and turned to an independent future. ibid.
With the departure of the Roman troops historians imagined the end of history, and from their empty pages we have conjured a desolate wasteland … We call this the Dark Ages. In actual fact, sophisticated societies developed in Britain in the Dark Ages. Dr Francis Pryor, Britain A.D.: King Arthur’s Britain II
If he existed at all, rose to power in these troubled years … Was Arthur invented to make up for a lack of real history? ibid.
Dark-Age Britain was a time of intellectual as well as economic advance. ibid.
There is no archaeological evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Dr Francis Pryor, Britain A.D.: King Arthur’s Britain III
Sutton Hoo ... This was the grave of a very rich man. ibid.
I don’t believe there was a hole in British society. ibid.
This continuously occupied landscape; there were no gaps of occupation, no war cemeteries. ibid.
Bede, like all historians, had his own particular axe to grind ... Bede invented a new race of people, the Anglo-Saxons, who came to be known as the English. ibid.
The real people of Britain A.D. did not only survive an influx of foreign influences but actually flourished because of it. ibid.
A comet wrecked Britain in the year 562. Richard D Hall, Richplanet TV, Alan Wilson forensic historian
From its earliest days, Britain was an object of desire. Tacitus declared it pretium victoriae – ‘worth the conquest’, the best compliment that could occur to a Roman. He had never visited these shores but was nonetheless convinced that Britannia was rich in gold. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s1e1: Beginnings
There are the remains of stone-age life dotted all over Britain and Ireland. But nowhere as abundantly as Orkney. ibid.
By 1000 B.C. things were changing fast: all over the British landscape a protracted struggle for good land was taking place. Forests were cleared. ibid.
So why did the Romans come here to the edge of the world and run the gauntlet of all these ominous totems? There was the lure of treasure of course. ibid.
In 55 B.C. Julius Caesar launched his galleys across the Channel. ibid.
If we can now imagine Hadrian’s Wall as not such a bad posting it’s because our sense of what life was like at the time has been transformed by one of the most astonishing finds of recent archaeology: the so-called Vindolanda Tablets. Scraps of Roman correspondence. ibid.
Bede was not just the founding father of English history, arguably he was also the first consummate story teller in all of English literature. ibid.
Canute ... he went out of his way to change nothing. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s1e2: Conquest
The Normans were descendants of Viking raiders but had long since traded in their longboats for powerful warhorses, and the Duchy of Normandy was in no sense just a piece of France. ibid.