CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

Do you know your Kings and Queens of England by heart? Can you tell your Ethelred from your Ethelbert? Your Marcia from your Matilda?

Well, passionate educator Mr Gwynne is back – and this time he is taking on the entirety of British history – so you will never be in the dark again. Within the pages of this little gem – bursting with our small island’s rich past – he teaches us the history of England through her remarkable monarchs.

It is Mr Gwynne’s belief that a certain amount of what you might read in other history books may well be wrong. It is his aim to show you why.

Concise, thorough and utterly fascinating, this is the perfect book to be enjoyed by young and old, to be read at a time when, for many, harking back to our rich past seems much more preferable than living in the dreary present.

And when it comes to the benefits of education, Mr Gwynne is never wrong!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Gwynne is the much loved and passionate educator who is on a crusade. He believes in old-fashioned values, that the modern school system is hopeless – and that keen and close study is the only way to become an enlightened and better person. Now living in County Wexford, Ireland, and in his 70s, N M Gwynne was formerly a successful businessman in London and Australia. On retirement in the 1980s, he took up teaching and soon found that his traditional methods, universal up to the 1960s and refined and perfected century after century up till then, had become all but unique. Subjects he has been teaching – in classrooms, in lecture halls, and nowadays mostly privately – include English, Latin, Greek, French, German, mathematics, history, classical philosophy, natural medicine, the elements of music, and “How to start up and run your own business”. He has taught all over the world and thanks to the internet and Skype, he has sometimes found himself, at different times in a single day, teaching as far apart as India, Europe and western USA.

Also by N. M. Gwynne

Gwynne’s Grammar
Gwynne’s Latin

Preface

THIS BOOK IS intended to be useful for everyone, of whatever age and intellectual status: for children emerging from infancy at the age of about five, though only chapter 3 for them; for schoolchildren as a standard textbook; for adults in general; some of it – I dare to hope – even for the erudite.

It is intended, too, as a much more serious, and also more interesting, work on history than its size and appearance might suggest. Certainly, I have taken with the utmost seriousness the task of putting it together, and I believe for good reason. The reality is that our country’s history is a fundamental part of what we actually are. The society we live in and its institutions that affect us are the result of our country’s history up to this point of time. To know our history, therefore, is to help us to know ourselves, as well as much else besides.

For a society’s members to know its history is also important to that society, and therefore to its members. As the great nineteenth-century French scholar Gaston Paris put it, ‘There is no better measure of a people’s civilisation than its interest in its own history.’

Acquiring an adequate knowledge of the history that is part of us is therefore something that we should certainly do. This does involve considerable effort, but, in the case of England’s history, there is the compensating factor that, consistently, it is history that is absorbingly interesting. Indeed I doubt whether any other country anywhere has a history more remarkable in every way than ours.

We can now readily appreciate why the teaching of history always used to be considered an important part of education, and almost from infancy.

Regrettably, in the ‘child-centred’ atmosphere that dominates all education today, acquiring a thorough and orderly knowledge of English history is no longer considered practical or even appropriate. What is made to count overwhelmingly today is no longer whether knowledge of history is important, but whether children will find studying it interesting and enjoyable.

The result has been unfortunate, even tragic. As I know from my considerable experience as a teacher, the knowledge of history acquired by children by the time they leave school is, and has been for some decades, almost invariably minimal – only a very small percentage of what everyone used to know.

It is against that background that the position taken in this book is that the basics of the entirety of English history should be taught systematically and in reasonable depth. In the case of children, moreover, whether or not they enjoy the learning should be considered irrelevant. Ordinary common sense dictates that what is of overriding importance for children is not their immediate gratification but their long-term benefit; and that is something that responsible adults are obviously far better able to assess on their behalf than are the inexperienced human beings that children inevitably are.

~

But …

Even the best-motivated teachers and students of history are faced with a problem that they will not read about in the great majority of books dealing with general history. It is a controversial one, and I shall therefore introduce it with the help of three prominent historical figures of the past.

My first witness is the ‘founding father’ of the mass-produced motorcar, Mr. Henry Ford, in 1921:

‘History is bunk.’

My second quotation, usually attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, explains why:

‘History is written by the victors.’

In consequence, according to a third expert on the subject, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, writing during the period when he was confined as a prisoner on the island of St. Helena in the closing years of his life:

‘History is nothing but the lies that are no longer disputed.’

What follows from what those three knowledgeable authorities are telling us is that history is an exceptionally interesting subject.

~

How, though, are we ordinary folk going to acquire the ability to recognise real history, which means, amongst other things, identifying errors of any significance where they exist?

We need at least the following: enthusiasm; good judgement, which comes from sound reasoning and plenty of practice; and the skills – which we need painstakingly to acquire if we do not already possess them – of a reasonably competent professional detective.

The most difficult of those three requirements is the last one. Let us ask ourselves, therefore: what is it that detectives principally look for in cases where there is no direct evidence?

Identifying motivation, whether the motivation of historians themselves or of the compilers of the sources they use, is an obvious starting point. If, for instance, a particular author were to take a position on a historical subject that is significantly contrary to the positions of other authors, and especially recognised authorities, on that subject, it would be as well to search for evidence that could indicate why, on the one hand, that author has taken up his position and why, on the other hand, the generality of other authors have taken theirs.

Further, if an otherwise credible author taking a position in opposition to that of most other authors has, in consequence, been subjected to scornful attacks damaging to his reputation, we can consider it likely that his love of truth and sense of justice were such that he was impelled even to make sacrifices on behalf of truth and justice.

I do not suggest that evidence of good faith needs to be as dramatic as indifference to assaults on an author’s reputation, in order to earn our interest. Perfectly adequate would be evidence that a writer had noticed that a gap existed in the arena of historical knowledge that he thought it worth filling or a distortion that he thought it worth correcting. What is fundamental in every such case is that a serious author has thought it worth taking a lonely or relatively lonely stand, even, if necessary, in defiance of experts.

~

Against the background of this introduction to researching history, a practical question arises. How can the history of England best be presented in order to achieve the ambitious goal of a book that is both useful and, in the manner of its presentation, suitable for everyone? – and, as indicated earlier, I really do mean everyone. The following are the principles governing what I am including in this book and how I am organising it. Although the results of applying them conscientiously will sometimes prove to be controversial, I believe that the principles themselves can be seen to be a matter of common sense as soon as stated.

• First, the main events of the reign and their dates are listed. This will be all that is needed by children at the very outset, and will be the basic background for all other readers, whatever the level of their historical knowledge.
• Secondly, a treatment of that reign labelled ‘Of special interest’ is given. This will include a discussion of any matters of historical controversy together with the conclusion I myself have arrived at and why. This ‘secondly’ is arguably this book’s most important feature.

~

Normally, and justifiably, historians of the English monarchy devote approximately the same amount of space to each monarch. This would be my own preference, all other things being equal, but the nature of this book makes it impractical. Where what I say is in contradiction to other historians, it would be unreasonable to expect my readers to accept it on my authority alone. Following the principle audi alteram partem – ‘hear the other side’ – they have a right to expect any such position to be adequately defended, which in turn means defended at whatever length is needed in order to carry conviction. The treatment of some monarchs, in consequence, inevitably takes up more space than the treatment of others, and sometimes considerably more space.

~

By the time I had brought this book to the verge of completion, I had reached the conclusion that it is unlikely that there is any more difficult kind of book to put together on any subject than one dealing with an extended period of history.

First, there is the factor already mentioned and indeed – with the help of Ford, Churchill and Napoleon – stressed: the continual falsifications of history by some historians and the frequent failure by at least many other historians to recognise most such falsifications.

Secondly, there is the sheer quantity of facts that need to be identified and weighed up, both as to whether they are indeed facts and also as to whether they are important enough to justify inclusion. Thirdly, and far from least, the history of any period needs to be looked at under a number of very different headings: for instance, succession-of-events history, political history, religious history and social history. What falls under each such heading needs to be taken fully into account, since an inadequate or mistaken knowledge of even only one of them can easily lead to a representation of history that is gravely wrong.

Yes, compiling a book such as this is a demanding task. And it is against the background of this reality that I say that, although I and several people who have assisted me have laboured to make sure that there are no errors in what follows, I cannot guarantee complete freedom from error. As in the case of my two previous books published by Ebury Press, therefore, readers who have any queries to put, corrections to make or criticisms to offer are welcome to contact me, and even, with important ones, urged to do so.

N. M. Gwynne,
nmgwynne@eircom.net
www.gwynneteaching.com

May 2018

CHAPTER ONE

The Mystery of Monarchy

THE CONCEPT OF hereditary monarchy is mysterious.

What is mysterious is the concept of a family whose members are set apart from the rest of us as eligible to be king or queen. Rather extraordinarily, in today’s egalitarian climate, there are those who favour the preservation of hereditary monarchy in our country and those, still a relatively small minority, who oppose it, but what is unimaginable on both sides is the notion of a non-royal family starting up a new Royal Family. At least in England and other countries where the House of Windsor reigns, such an idea would be thought ridiculous in a way that continuation of the existing Royal Family is not.

At this point, religion must force its way into the foreground of our discussion, even though, in our present age, which is easily the most non-religious era in history, religion tends to be kept well in the background in any discussion of England’s history.

As even the most cursory investigation will show, it is a clear fact that, from the dawn of recorded history, virtually every sizeable group of people everywhere in the world has had kings from the outset.

No less clear is that it was claimed by and on behalf of at least most of these kings, with the acceptance of their subjects, that they had some divine connection in their origins. Sometimes the kings have been said to have been directly appointed by God, sometimes they have been said to have been descended from gods, sometimes they have even been recognised as gods. Always, however, there has been a supernatural element.

Just a few out of many examples:

• The Bible’s Books of Kings record several kings of the Israelites of that time as being directly appointed by God.
• In ancient Egypt the monarchy was based entirely on the concept that the king was an embodiment of a god.
• Homer refers to his kings in Greece as divine.
• In India, the works of Manu and the two great Epic poems, Ramayana and Mahabharata, clearly state the theory of divine kingship.

And so on in Asia Minor, Malaya, Japan, the countless islands everywhere in the Pacific Ocean, the Native American tribes of North and South America.

When, starting in the fourth century Ad, Christianity became the official religion throughout Europe, monarchy not only continued but became much more precise in its meaning and implications. There officially arose an institution recognised as a ‘Royal Family’, a family intrinsically different from all other families in the world – so different indeed that, in every country on the continent of Europe, members of its Royal Family were legally allowed to marry only members of other Royal Families.

~

The mystery is twofold:

• The concept of the divine establishment of monarchy still survives, at least instinctively.
• Even though the Queen of England is no longer ruling as well as reigning, she is still technically the fount of law.
• Much more so than any mere president of a republic, she is still above the law in the sense that the laws of England do not apply to her as they do to the rest of us.
• Indeed even today she, uniquely, cannot be prosecuted for any crime whatsoever. This is of course logical. Since she is the fount of justice, prosecutions are necessarily made in her name and, in a sense, by her; and for her to, in effect, prosecute herself would be self-contradictory.
• When we go to war, we still fight ‘for Queen and country’ in that order, while it would, for instance, never occur to Americans to fight for ‘President and country’.
• The National Anthem, despite attacks on it by people favouring republicanism and others, is still ‘God Save the Queen’, rather than anything resembling ‘God Save our Country’.
• The wording of the National Anthem is mysterious throughout. ‘Send her victorious, happy and glorious … Confound her enemies, and make them fall’ (my emphases, of course) is an extraordinarily roundabout way to wish ourselves victory in warfare. Nor indeed would it occur to people living in republican countries to sing anything similar about their head of state.
• On the side of our coins carrying the Queen’s portrait, we see her name immediately followed by the abbreviation of, Latinised, ‘By the grace of God’ – ‘DG’ for Dei gratia.
• Members of both Houses of Parliament, on taking their seats, swear an oath of allegiance expressly to the Queen and her heirs and successors.
• So too do the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Privy Seal, the Lord Chamberlain, the President of the Board of Trade, all Secretaries of State, all judges, all police officers, everyone enlisting in the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, and people becoming naturalised citizens of England.

The further we look into the mystery, the more it deepens. When a practice is the result of pressure and superstition, it can easily be exposed by anyone who is intelligent and independent-minded; and as soon as it is exposed, it soon ‘feels’ wrong to everyone. This has never happened to any significant extent to the concept of monarchy and of a family which is intrinsically different in many respects from any other family in a kingdom. To those of us who are monarchists, which is still most of us although the increasing weight of counter-propaganda during recent times has been reducing our number, this concept of such a family is good, wholesome, romantic, tastefully glamorous, and in every way appealing and attractive, and quite independently of the personal qualities of the royal persons in question. This is so much so that many countries that have become independent from what was the British Empire have retained the Queen as their head of state, with their officials and citizens pledging allegiance to her in much the same way as the British ones do; and this is despite insistent republican arguments to the effect that countries that have at last become ‘grown-up’ are being demeaned by having as their head of state someone who does not live there.

And all this is clearly contrary to what would be expected of an institution that originally came into existence through power-grabbing.

Then, too, there is the way in which we conduct ourselves in the presence of the Queen, as also do foreigners who meet her. We bow or curtsy, according to our sex, both when we meet her and when we depart. We address her as Your Majesty and subsequently Ma’am, never by any name. We refrain from touching her person other than her hand at the greeting. If we write to her, we do so, not directly, but to her Private Secretary.

Perhaps even more remarkably, much of this applies also to other members of the Royal Family, to whom, for instance, we also bow or curtsy, and whom we also address only indirectly in correspondence.

~

Even a single one of the details given above would make monarchy a mystery of extraordinary interest, let alone all of them in their accumulation. The subject will be further examined when we come to the reign of King James I, when the nature and rights and duties of monarchs became a topic of urgent discussion.

CHAPTER TWO

Basic Principles

IN TODAY’S WORLD, a book setting out to be a useful contribution to the acquisition of valuable historical knowledge would hardly be complete without the inclusion of some traditional education philosophy of the kind that seems now to be needed, however seldom included, in any book on education intended to be helpful.

Earlier in these pages, I dwelt on the importance of history as a part of education. I now emphasise that the purpose of learning it is not fulfilled by simply reading about it or being talked to about it. Starting as early as possible, and preferably even before it is possible for the child to understand fully what is being learnt, the main outlines – the essential framework – of what in due course will be tackled in gradually increasing detail should be learnt by heart.

Please note the term ‘learning by heart’. What those three words imply is that what is thus learnt becomes a part of us, just about as much a part of us as our own bodily organs, and scarcely less irreversibly.

Along with so much else in education that has changed in the last five or six decades, this wording has changed as well. ‘Learning by heart’, which speaks to the soul, has been replaced by ‘rote-learning’ and ‘learning by rote’, which are disparaging and off-putting terms that have the effect of making memorising into a matter of using the brain as a piece of machinery. I really beg parents and teachers to oppose this term whenever they hear it, which will undoubtedly be often, and always to insist on the traditional one.

CHAPTER THREE

Starting to Put the Principles into Practice

HERE ARE THREE examples of what the generality of English children used to know by heart and still should. For preference, the learning should start as soon they are capable of understanding clearly what it is that they are learning.

For our immediate purpose at this point, however, we shall open, as many other books do, with the invasions of Julius Caesar. And let the learning-by-heart begin wherever the student or teacher thinks best.

~

During this third century Ad, Rome became progressively weaker. Its borders in the south of present-day Europe were invaded by hordes of barbarians, and the time came when the Roman legions were unable to withstand them.

As time went on, some of the barbarians invaded Britain, namely:

As we shall be seeing, in AD 597 a monk, Augustine, was sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great and converted King Ethelbert of Kent and most of his subjects.

The records of Caledonian, Scots and regional Saxon invasions are insufficiently reliable for it to be worth setting down any dates. From this point on, however, the dates are certain and worth memorising.

Early Kings in England

Kings of England and Wales

Kings and Queens of England, Wales and Ireland

Kings of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland

Kings and Queens of Great Britain and Ireland

Kings of Great Britain and Ireland and Emperors of India

Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Head of the Commonwealth of Nations

All that having been learnt by heart, the next step is to examine each individual reign in sufficient detail to learn its effect on our history. Before we make a start with the reign of King Offa, however, there is much else of great interest for us to look at.

CHAPTER FOUR

Introducing Geoffrey of Monmouth and His Historia

ALMOST EVERY GENERAL treatment of English history opens with the invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar in 54 bc. The first British name mentioned is Cassivellaunus, who was the leader of the military opposition to Julius Caesar in Caesar’s second invasion in 54 bc. Strangely, and not typically of ancient European nations, the list of English kings starts some 900 years later than 54 bc, in the Ad 800s.

During most of the period stretching from the Norman Conquest in 1066 up until the present day, English historians held a different position about when England’s recorded history started. What they believed was based on a literary work put together by a learned cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was born about two generations after the Norman Conquest and lived in Oxford for much of his life. The work in question, purporting to be a work of history, was originally called De gestis Britonum and is usually referred to in modern times as History of the Kings of Britain, or simply the Historia.

In this work Geoffrey included two prefaces by himself. In the first, he said that he had long been pondering over the mystery that, in various excellent works of history that existed in his day, there appeared to be no records either of the kings of the period before Christ or of those of some centuries after Christ, when he was presented by a certain Walter – the Archdeacon of Oxford at the time – with a very ancient book written in Welsh. He went on to set out, in the form of a consecutive and orderly narrative, the names and deeds of those missing kings, from Brutus, the first King of the Britons, onwards. And at Walter’s request he had taken the trouble to translate this book into Latin.

In a second preface, which he put in the middle of his book, Geoffrey added that, while he was in the process of doing this, he was asked by many of his contemporaries to translate into Latin a book, called Prophecies of Merlin, which had recently been generating much interest. He was now inserting the prophecies featuring in that book into the Historia where they naturally belonged chronologically, while making it clear that they were not part of the original book that he had been translating for Walter of Oxford.

The two books of which the final book is made up are very different from each other in nature, and even without the second preface there would be little difficulty in distinguishing between them. The Historia presents itself as a work of history, and is punctilious in its attention to practical detail. The Merlin insertions are ‘other-worldly’ throughout.

A truly dramatic feature of the Historia is that it traces the earliest settlers in the British Isles back, generation by generation, to someone whom it claims to have been Britain’s very first king, King Brutus, and then further back still to his great-grandfather, Aeneas. And this Aeneas was none other than the Aeneas who is the titular hero of Virgil’s Aeneid. Important for our purpose in a history of England’s royal families, Aeneas was of royal blood, related to King Priam of Troy, and one of the few nobly born survivors of the disaster that had taken place after the Greeks, at the end of a ten-year siege of Troy, had built a huge wooden horse, concealed a force of soldiers inside it, and pretended to sail away abandoning the siege. Deceived, the Trojans then brought the horse into their city as a victory trophy, a decision which, when the soldiers hidden inside it emerged during the night, at last brought about the end of the war together with the complete destruction of Troy – all as described by Homer in The Iliad.

~

How much credence is Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain – apparently dealing with well over half of the entirety of British history, about 1,900 years and ninety-nine monarchs – entitled to?

According to any academic today and most general historians during the last 150 years and more, the Historia has no connection at all with real history and at least very much the greater part of it is pure fiction. Interestingly, when such historians move from that to more detailed discussion, they often disagree with each other. Some say that Geoffrey partly lifted his material from three sources well known today – The Ruin and Conquest of Britain by Gildas, a British monk writing in the sixth century, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by St. Bede of Jarrow, an English monk writing in the eighth century, and The History of the Britons by Nennius, a Welsh monk writing in the ninth century, all of whom are referred to in the text – and invented the rest in its entirety. Others think that Geoffrey did indeed borrow from those three sources but in addition drew sometimes on genuine Welsh oral or literary sources, which he was well able to do because of having been brought up on the border of Wales and England. There are other variations as well.

Should we be satisfied with these judgements?

In this book’s Preface, I argued that we should always be ready to adopt the mental attitude of a professional detective. What should certainly at once put us on the alert in this particular instance is that the Historia has not in fact been completely without defenders – and, by any reasonable standards, credible defenders – during the last two centuries.

In 1718, for instance, a Mr. Aaron Thompson undertook the first translation of the Latin into English, and included with it a lengthy preface in which he firmly defended the authenticity of the history given in that book. That preface had little effect on his contemporaries, however.

In 1917, Professor Flinders Petrie, who in 1923 was to become Professor Sir Flinders Petrie, exposed something that he considered shocking: that a large body of historical documents that were evidently important sources of material was being, perhaps wilfully, overlooked by modern historians. Further, with particular reference to an ancient document that obviously sheds light on it, and is still available for examination in the Bodleian Library in Oxford today, he maintained that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain had by then for a long time been wrongly disparaged.¹

Petrie was the leading and best-known archaeologist and Egyptologist of his time, and by any standards a deeply learned man. Even though the subject-matter of this topic that he addressed was outside his specialist field, no one was more worthy than he of the respectful attention of his fellow scientists. Nevertheless, his address and article were slammed as worthless by the few contemporary critics who even made mention of them, and otherwise ignored as completely as if they had never existed.

Twelve years later, in 1929, the gist of what Petrie had said was taken up by another impressive scholar, Acton Griscom. In a book titled The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, he mounted by far the most complete defence of Geoffrey’s Historia as authentic history ever to have been published in English. Part I of it consists of 216 closely argued pages in which Griscom deals in the minutest detail with every aspect of the Geoffrey of Monmouth dispute, and:

Let it be granted that this ‘dogmatic and hostile’ opposition is not without good reasons to support it. Do we not, even so, owe it to Thompson, Petrie and Griscom to give open-minded consideration to the arguments put forward by them?

Relevant to this question is what a leading academic opponent of the Historia’s authenticity, Dr. J. S. P. Tatlock, in his 545-page book on The Legendary History of Britain published in 1950, had to say about it:

‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia is one of the most influential books ever written.’

Yes, ‘ever written’, by anyone, ever.

Tatlock had good reason to say that. The Historia had been respected by everyone across the whole of Western Europe. It had been consistently treated as a decisive authority to authenticate claims for kingship in England, with both the Tudor and the Stuart dynasties using it to justify their succession to the throne. It was the single most popular book in the Middle Ages, and indeed, aside from books on religious matters, the very first best-seller since classical times. It continued to feature with some prominence in every relevant piece of writing on British history right up to the eighteenth century. Moreover, it was respected just as much overseas as in England, for instance being used as a decisive authority in Rome in a controversy involving King Edward I for which the reigning Pope was asked to act as arbiter.

In the light of the effect of Geoffrey’s Historia, politically, culturally, socially and in other ways, not to give it its evident due, and, in a general work of English history, to omit to represent it as deserving of further investigation by any serious-minded reader, would, I submit, be to leave a gaping hole in history’s mission of recording the reality of the past.

It is worth remembering too that many distant legends of the past thought to be fictitious have subsequently been found by scholars to be firmly based on reality. Examples are the biblical city of Jericho, the remains of which have been unearthed by archaeologists of relatively recent times, and the city of Troy, the site of which was established in the second half of the nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann, who was a firm believer that Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid reflect historical events, as many scholars now agree.

~

One important consequence of what has emerged in this chapter, and also of what will be following in the next chapter, is that it can be argued that the list of kings and queens given here is incomplete, indeed very incomplete. This is remedied here, where is given a family tree starting with Britain’s very first king and ending with Queen Elizabeth II, and showing how the various monarchs are related to each other.

CHAPTER FIVE

1104–55 BC

As related by Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth

What now follows is a summary taken from two sources. The main source is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia published in Ad 1139. The other is Nennius’s The History of the Britons, published, as already mentioned, some 300 years earlier, in around 830, and which, unlike Geoffrey’s book, gives the same origin of Britain as one of two alternatives rather than as definite. The two overlap at the very beginning: both give descriptions of the foundation of Britain by Brutus, called Britto by Nennius; both record the ancestry of Brutus as far back as Aeneas; and both explain how it came about that Brutus finally arrived on the island that was then named Britannia after him. Moreover, wherever the two books overlap, they confirm each other, though with enough small variations of detail to show that, contrary to what is often claimed, Geoffrey did not use Nennius directly as a source.

I do stress that the summary just given is only a very bare one, intended to include what is likely to be of most interest to readers.

Because the facts outlined in this chapter and the next three chapters are more in number and less in familiarity than those given everywhere else in this book, I am, in these four chapters only, high-lighting in bold print at least the first mention of any person or place of any significance.

1104–1081 BC. The Trojan prince, Aeneas, after fleeing from the burning ruins of Troy with his son Ascanius, eventually arrived on the west coast of what is now Italy and settled on the banks of the River Tiber, where Rome was later to be built. There he was honourably received by the local king, Latinus, whose name was to be memorialised as that of the language of the Romans. He married King Latinus’s daughter, Princess Lavinia, and with her had a second son, Aeneas Silvius, who thus was the half-brother of Ascanius.

Aeneas’s marriage to Lavinia provoked the envy of another king in Italy, Turnus, king of a local tribe called the Rutuli, and war resulted. Victorious, Aeneas became King of Latium.

On the death of Aeneas, his son Ascanius was elected King. Ascanius’s son Silvius married a niece of Lavinia’s, and this niece, Silvius’s wife, gave birth to a son, Brutus. Brutus was thus the great-grandson of Aeneas: Aeneas – Ascanius – Silvius (not Aeneas Silvius) – Brutus.

Two tragic features marred Brutus’s early life and drastically affected his future life. First, his mother, unnamed in the Historia, died when giving birth to him. Secondly, fifteen years later, he had the misfortune to kill Silvius, his father, in an accident while they were out hunting together. Since he was in a sense responsible for the death of both of his parents, even though only indirectly in the case of his mother and innocently in the case of his father, his relations expelled him from his homeland, with long-term effects that are still with us today.

His journey in exile took him first of all to Greece, where he came across descendants of Trojan soldiers who had fought against Greece in the thirteenth century bc and had been enslaved by Pyrrhus, in vengeance for the death of Pyrrhus’s father Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors that featured in Homer’s Iliad. Learning that Brutus was descended from their own ancient kings, and in awe at his military skills, the Trojan slaves successfully begged him to be their leader, and under his command successfully rose up against their captors, whose leader, Pandrasus, was descended from one of the Greek royal families. During the process of overthrowing their captors, they took Pandrasus prisoner.

After debating among themselves what the future of Pandrasus should be, the Trojans ended up offering him his life if he would give his daughter, Ignoge, to Brutus to wed, together with as much gold and corn as they would all need to travel elsewhere to start up a new life. This the royally born Pandrasus was delighted to do, and Brutus and the victorious Trojans, led by Brutus with his future wife Ignoge, then set sail in search of a land in which to settle peacefully and in freedom.

After leaving the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules, the present-day Straits of Gibraltar, and after undergoing many adventures, Brutus and his new companions met other Trojans escaping from their captors, under the leadership of Corineus. The two groups combined forces, with Brutus being acclaimed as king of all of them, and in due course landed in Gaul, present-day France, in the part then and now known as Aquitaine. There they fought and won two battles and then set sail again, finally arriving at an island called Albion, our Britain.

They came ashore just south of what is today Exeter in Devonshire. There Brutus solemnly named the exact place where he landed ‘Totnes’, the word ‘tot’ meaning ‘sacred mound’ and the word ‘ness’ or ‘naess’ meaning ‘promontory’ or ‘headland’. Totnes is still there today, now a thriving town with the same name; and set into the pavement of its street called Fore Street is a small granite boulder called the ‘Brutus Stone’, onto which, according to local legend, Brutus first stepped from his ship, declaiming as he did so: ‘Here I stand and here I rest. And this town shall be called Totnes.’

Finding the island inhabited only by a small number of giants, whom they drove off into mountain caves, Brutus and Corineus, the original leader of the Trojans, divided Albion up between them. Brutus, wishing to perpetuate his name, called the whole island after himself and called his companions Britons; and, some time after his death, the language they spoke was renamed British, having until then been known as Trojan, or ‘Crooked Greek’.

As soon as Brutus had gained control of his new kingdom, he looked for somewhere to found a city. A particular part of the main river in the south appealed to him as especially suitable, and thus came into existence, on what would in due course be named the River Thames, what was to become, as of course it still is, one of the greatest cities there have ever been. He called it New Troy.

The Historia at this point interrupts itself to mention that a later king, King Lud, the brother of King Cassivellaunus, would in due course rename New Troy as Kaerlud, or Lud’s City, whence eventually came the name London. That was far into the future, however. The new city was to keep the name New Troy for some ten centuries.

‘Kaer’, meaning city, incidentally, is attached to the names of most of the cities of the Britons.