О.М.Елина, Н.С.Маринчук - Методическая разработка к фильму The History of Britain - Part 1 (1098532), страница 5
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Dismayed, but not, I think, terrified. Though the earliest chroniclers of the comingof the Saxons thought of Vortigern’s faux pas as heralding a sort of final apocalypse, no one hadturned the lights out on Roman Britannia and declared the Dark Ages to have begun.The long process by which Roman Britannia morphed into the Anglo-Saxon kingdomswas gradual not sudden, an adaptation, not an annihilation.
For a long time the Saxons were atiny minority, numbered in hundreds rather than thousands, and they lived in anoverwhelmingly Romano-British population. As different as these cultures were, they were stillneighbors. The vast majority still tried and succeeded in living some sort of Roman life.Here at Wroxeter, in Shropshire, the Roman Veraconium, there’s wonderful evidence ofthis made-do, hybride, improvised world poised between Roman ruins and Anglo-Saxonbeginnings. When the bath house stopped functioning, the citizens here just took the tiles andused them for paving. When the roof of the great basilica threatened to fall in, the citizenssimply went and demolish the whole building themselves.
Inside the shell they put up a newtimber structure spacious and elegant enough to give them the sense they were still living somesort of Roman lifestyle, although in an increasingly phantom Britannia. Eventually theadaptations became ever more makeshift, the fabric of Roman life increasingly threadbare,until it did fall apart altogether.The island was now divided into three utterly different realms. The remains of Britanniahung on in the west.
North of the abandoned walls and forts, the Scottish tribes for the mostpart, stayed pagan. And England, the realm of the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, was planted in theeast, all away from Kent to the kingdom of Bernicia in Northumbria.The Saxons chiefs often built their settlements on the ruined remains of old RomanBritish towns, not at least of course London. Like many invaders, they hankered after whatthey had destroyed. The showier pieces of their armour often bear startling resemblances ofRoman armour and their leaders aspired to be something more than was chiefs. They wantedto be known as “dux”, a Roman duke.
But in one crucial respect, the Germanic tribal societieswere utterly different from the Romans. Theirs was a culture based on the blood feud andpunishment by ordeal. An entire social system, its plunder was the glue of loyalty. But theSaxons were no more immune to change than the Romans had been before them.To look at the relics recovered from Sutton Hoo burial site is to be teased by a powerfulquestion: Did the Saxon lord buried here find his resting place in a pagan Valhalla or in aChristian paradise? The history of the conversions between the 6th and 8th centuries is anotherturning point in the history of the British Isles.Segment 200:43:→56,615But while the legions had long gone, the shadows of Rome fell once again on theseislands. This time though, it was an invasion of the soul and the warriors were carrying Christiangospels rather than swords.
The process began in a country that had never been touched byRoman rule in the first place – the land the Romans called Hibernia – Ireland.We have to remember that the most famous of the early missionaries of Ireland, StPatrick, was in fact Romano-British aristocrat, the patrician – or Patricius – as he called himself.So there was nothing remotely Irish about the teenager who was kidnapped and sold intoslavery by Irish raiders, sometime in the early fifth century.
It was only after he escaped,probably to Brittany, and ordained, then visited by prophetic dreams, that he returned toIreland, this time the messenger of the gospel. Patrick understood that the monastic ideal ofretreat was perfectly matched with the needs of local royal clans. So monasteries like Arran, offthe gull-swept Irish coast, with their beehive cells and encircling stone walls, looked like astronghold, an encampment for God.So what about the dragon slayers on the mainland? Who converted them? One mangives us the answer.
To all schoolchildren of my generation, growing up in the 1950s, he will bethe Venerable Bede.Bede was not just the founding father of English history. Arguably he was said the firstconsummate storyteller in all English literature. He was not exactly well travelled. He spentvirtually his entire life here in Jarrow. But in a few luminous lines he could conjure up not justthe world of holy men and hermits but the world of the great timbered halls of Saxon kings,with their firelight and roasting meat, or the death ----- of a great war-horse.
It was thismasterful grip on narrative that made Bede not just an authentic historian but also a brilliantpropagandist for the early church. Bede sees without any starry-eyed sentimentality what couldovercome the deep mistrust of the pagan kings when asked to abandon their traditional gods.According to the most touching speeches in Bede’s entire history, the clinching moment ofpersuasion for one noble was nothing more than a gambler’s bet. “It seems to me, my Lord,that the present life here on earth is as though a sparrow in winter time should come to ahouse and very swiftly fly through it, entering at one window, and straight away passingthrough another, while you sit at dinner with your captains in a hall made warm with a greatfire, while outside there are the raging tempests of winter rain and snow.
For that short time itbe within the house, the bird feels no smart of the winter storm, but soon passes again fromwinter back to winter and escapes your sight. So the life of a man here appears for a littleseason, but what follows or what has gone before, that surely we do not know. We areforeigners if this new learning has brought us any certainty, makes think it is worthy to befollowed.”It’s typical, Bede put these words in the mouth of a nobleman, for the church in AngloSaxon England was just a branch of the aristocracy. St Wilfred, the aristocratic Bishop of York,deliberately used a part of Hadrian’s Wall to build at Hexham a basilica worthy of Romanauthority.
For Bede and St Wilfred, it was crucial that it was the Roman, not the Irish Celticchurch, that won over Britain. What they passionately desired was the reconnection of aconverted country with its Roman mother, a true homecoming.The authority of the Roman Saxon church though didn’t guarantee protection. Bede hadhad forebodings before he died in 735. Sure enough, half a century later, in 793, an AngloSaxon chronicle reports…”Dire portents appeared over Northumbria. Immense whirlwinds andflashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying through the air. A great famine followed.A little after that, on the 8th June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’schurch at Lindisfarne.” The heathen men were of course, the Vikings.Segment 300:49:39,495→If you look long enough and hard enough at almost any culture you’ll find somethinggood to say about it.
The historians of the Vikings understandably distressed at the rape andpillage stereotype., have asked us lately to think of things other than sail, land, burn andplunder to say about the Vikings. They’ve said, “Look at their metalwork, look at their ships,look at their great poetic sagas.” So now we know the Vikings did come bearing somethingother than a nasty attitude. They came carrying amber and fur, and walrus ivory. But somehow,though, this vision of the Vikings as rapid-transit, long-distance commercial travellers, singingtheir sagas as they sailed to a new market opening, I think it wouldn’t have cut much ice withthe priests here at the cathedral of Bradwell-on-Sea, just a crab scuttle away from the areawhere I grew up as a child, on the Essex shore.There’d been a church here at Bradwell-on-Sea for over 200 years.
It was originally builton the remains of an old Roman fort, and I can’t help thinking how the priests would havefound those stone defences reassuring as they waited nervously for the Viking raids that theyknew could strike hard and fierce at any moment.At addition to land, the Vikings were keen on another kind of merchandise …- people –whom they sold as slaves. Thousands of slaves were taken from Armagh in one raid alone. Aburial dated 879 contained a Viking warrior with his sword, two ritually murdered slave girls,and the bones of hundreds of men, women and children, his very own body count, to take withhim to Valhalla. On the positive side, there was one thing that the Vikings did manage to do,however, inadvertently – they created England.By smashing the power of most of the Saxon kingdoms, the Vikings accomplished what,left to themselves, the warring tribes could never have managed – some semblance of allianceagainst a common foe.
To push back the Viking onslaught, to repair some of the terribledamage they’d done, we’d need more than just a competent tribal warrior chief. It would needsomeone with a vision, not just of victory, but of government; someone who could harnessAnglo-Saxon energy and determination to Roman military discipline. It’s got to need, in fact, alocal Charlemagne, someone with the intelligence and imagination of a truly Roman ruler. Andhe, of course, was Alfred.Segment 400:52:48,295→Our cherished image of Alfred is of the hero on the run, up against steep odds, muddlingthrough, taking it on the chin when scolded for burning the cakes.
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