О.М.Елина, Н.С.Маринчук - Методическая разработка к фильму The History of Britain - Part 1 (1098532), страница 3

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Some of these tombs would have been elaborately decorated with carvingsin the form of circles or spirals, like waves or the breeze-pushed clouds. Others would have hadneat little stores or cubicales where the bodies would be laid out on shelves. The grandest ofthese tombs had openings cut in the wall, to create side chambers where the most importantbodies could be laid in aristocratic spaciousness like family vaults in a country church. Unlikemedieval knights there, these grandees were buries with eagles and dogs, or even treasure.

Thekind of things that the Vikings who broke into these tombs thousands of years later were quickto filch. In return, though, these early tomb raiders left their own legacy. This wonderful graffiti.These runes were carved by the most skilled rune carver in the western ocean: ”I beddedThorny here.” “Ingegirth is one horny bitch.” As for Orcadian hoi polloi, they ranked space in acommon chamber, on a floor carpeted with bones of hundreds of their predecessors. Acrowded waiting room to their afterworld. For centuries, life at Skara Brae must havecontinued in much the same way.

But around 2,500 BC, the island climate seems to have gotcolder and wetter. The red bream disappeared and so did the stable environment theOrcadians had enjoyed for countless generations. Fields were abandoned, the farmers andfishers migrated, leaving their stone buildings and tombs to be covered by layers of peat,drifting sand and finally grass. The mainland too, of course, had its burial chambers, like thelong barrow at West Kennet. There were also the great stone circles, the largest at Avebury. Butthe most spectacular of all – at Stonehenge.Segment 200:11:12,375→By 1,000 BC, things were changing up fast. All over the British landscape, a protractedstruggle for good land was taking place.

Forests were cleared so that Iron Age Britain was not,as it was once romantically imagined, an unbroken forest kingdom stretching from Cornwall toInverness. It was rather a patchwork of open fields, dotted here and there with corpses givingcover for games, especially wild pigs. And it was a crowded island. We now think that as manypeople lived on this land as during the reign of Elizabeth I, 2,500 years later. Some archeologistsbelieve that almost as much land was being farmed in the Iron Age as in 1914.So it comes as no surprise to see one spectacular difference from the little world ofSkara Brae.

Great windowless towers. They were built in the centuries before the Romaninvasions, when population pressure was out most intense and farmers had growing need ofprotection, first from the elements, but later from each other. Many of these towers stillsurvive but none are as daunting as the great stockade on Arran, off Ireland’s west coast. Theydidn’t just spring up around the edges of the British islands. All over the mainland too, the greathill forts of the Iron Age remain visible in terraced contours such as at Danebury and MaidenCastle.

Lofty seats of power for the ribal chiefs, they were defended by rings of earthworks,timber palisades and ramparts. Behind those daunting walls this was not a world in panickyretreat.Segment 300:14:42,415→The Iron Age Britain into which the Romans eventually crashed with such alarming force wasa dynamic, expanding society. From their workshops came the spectacular metalwork withwhich the elite decorated their bodies. Armlets, pins, brooches and ornamental shields like this,the so-called Battersea Shield. Or the astonishing stylized bronze horses, endearinglymelancholy in expression, like so many Eeyores resigned to a bad day in battle.With tribal manufacture came trade. The warriors, druid priests and artists of Iron AgeBritain shipped their wares all over Europe, trading with the expanding Roman Empire. Inreturn, with no home-grown grapes or olive, Mediterranean wine and oil arrived in largeearthenware jars. So Iron Age Britain was definitely not the back of beyond.

Its tribes may haveled lives separated from each other by custom and language, and they may have had no greatcapital city but taken together they added up to something in the world – the bustling ofcountless productive, energetic beehives. What the bees made was not honey, but gold.So the Romans would have known all about this strange but alluring world of fat cattleand busy forges. Evidence of its refinement would have found its way to Rome. Along with theglittering metal ware came stories of alarming cults, which may have prompted the usualRoman dinner time discussions. “All are very interesting, I dare say, but would we really want tocall them a civilization?” Supposing they would have seen an ancient sculpture, like thishaunting stone face with its archaic secretive smile, the eyes closed as if in sun, mysteriousdevotional trance.

The nose flattened, the cheeks broad, the whole thing so spellbindinglyreminiscent of things the Romans must have seen in Etruria or the Greek islands. Would theythen have said, “Yes, this is a work of art”? Would probably not. Sooner or later they wouldhave noticed that the top of the head is sliced off, scooped out, like a boiled egg for breakfast,to hold sacrificial offerings. Then they would have remembered stories that the Romans toldabout the grisly brutality of the druids. Perhaps they would have even taken note of the storiestold by the northern savages themselves, of decapitated heads who were said to speakmournfully to those who had parted them from the rest of their body, warning of vengeance tocome.

Then they would have thought, “Well, perhaps not. Perhaps we don’t want to havemuch to do with an island of talking heads.”EPISODE IISegment 100:18:33,855→So why did the Romans come here, to the edge of the world, and run the gauntlet of allthese ominous totems? Well, there was the lure of treasure, of course, all the pearls thatTacitus believed lay around Britain in heaps. Even more seductive was what Roman generalscraved the most, the prestige given to those who pacified the barbarian frontier. And so, in thewritten annals of Western history, the islands now had not only a name, Britannia, but a date.In 55 BC Julius Caesar launched his galleys across the Channel. Julius Caesar must havesupposed that all he had to do was to land his legions in force and the Britons, just cowed bythe spectacle of the glittering helmets, and eagle standards, would simply queue up tosurrender. They’d understand that history always fought on the side of Rome.

The trouble was,geography didn’t. Not once but twice Julius Caesar’s plans were sabotaged by that perennialsecret weapon of the British, the weather. On the first go round in 55 BC, a cavalry transportwhich had already missed the high tide and got itself four days late, finally got going only to rundirectly into a storm and be blown right back to Gaul.A century later, Claudius, the club-foot stammerer, on the face of it, the most unlikelyconqueror of all, was determined to get it right. If it was going to be done at all, Claudiusreckoned, it had to be done in such massive force that there was no chance of repeating theembarrassment of Julius.

So Claudius’s invasion force was immense, some 40,000 troops. Thekind of army that could barely be conceived of, much less encountered in Iron Age Britain.Claudius did succeed where Julius Caesar had failed, through a brilliant strategy of carrot andstick.

He would seize the largely undefended oppida or town and strike at the heart of Britisharistocracy, its places of status, prestige and worship. But for this chieftains sensible enough toreach for the olive branch rather than the battle javelin, Claudius had another plan. Giventhem, or rather their sons, a trip to Rome, a taste of the dolce vita, and watch their resistancemelt. While in Rome, many of them must have begun to notice that life for your averagepatrician was well exceptionally sweet. So before long they naturally began to hunger for ataste of it themselves. If there were sumptuous country villas amidst the olive groves of theRoman countryside, why could there not be equally sumptuous country villas amidst the pearorchards of the South Downs? Just fall in line, be a little reasonable, some judicious supportshere and there and see what you would result with – the spectacular palace at Fishbourne.The man who built it was Togidubnus, king of Regnenses in what would be Sussex, andone of the quickest to sign up as Rome’s legal ally.

He was rewarded with enough wealth tobuild himself something fit for a Roman. Only the extraordinary mosaic floors survived, but theplace was as big as 4 football pitches, grand enough for someone who now gloried in the nameof Tiberius Claudius Cogidumnus. He couldn’t have been the only British chief to realize onwhich side his bread was buttered.

All over Britain were rulers who thought a Romanianconnection would do more good than harm in their pursuit of power and status.Segment 200:23:00,015→The person we usually think of as embodying British national resistance to Rome, QueenBoudicca of the East Anglia tribe of the Iceni, actually came from a family of happy, even eagercollaborators. It took only a policy of incredible stupidity, arrogance and brutality on the part ofthe local Roam governor to turn her from a warm supporter of Rome to its most dangerousenemy. I a show of brutal arrogance, the local governor had declared East Anglia a slaveprovince.

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