4.Early Beginnings

Early England

Wot's this, you say?

And this???



Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni

The Last Celt to take on the Romans- except for the Picts





Life is tough if all you want is a few pics and some family gossip. All I can say is that history has a lot to do with it! You don't know who you are if you don't know your history. This is not intended to be a complete history, just a few choice chunks. You have been warned.

Now that historians have got away from the"Great Men" theory of History, archaelogy has become more thorough, and so has history. Excavations in West Stow and other sites suggest that the area has been populated since c5000BCE,  with the Celtic tribes being the first of which we have written record.

Julius Caesar, no less, had a look at Britannia in 55 and 54BCE. Incensed at the help the tribes were giving to their cousins over the Channel, he mounted two expeditions and decided he had more important things to do, like taking over Rome and getting himself murdered. He also remarked disapprovingly on the habit of the Celts of performing human sacrifice. I hasten to add that we have moved on.

Back came the Romans in 44 AD. The Celts were regarded just as so many underlings and slaves, and when they rose under Boudicca, they had ample cause. Forget the legends bout Roman civilisation. They were in it for the money. Their seizure of Boudicca's land, of which they had a half share anyway, their whipping of the queen and rape of her daughters bought about the burning of Roman settlements including London and St Albans, and the massacre of Roman settlers.

But the brave, disorganised Celts were no match for the Legions, and the Romans "pacified" the Celts so well that they never rose again. Those to the South of Hadrian's Wall, anyway! One look at the the wild mountains of the Highlands, and the Romans decided that civilisation ended in Northumberland.

As Empires rise, so they fall, and when the Romans left Britain in 410 CE, they left the Celts to the Germanic tribes which had been trying to bypass customs and immigration for some time.

So we have the Angles, Saxons, Frisians et al arriving to take over. As my ancestry is 40% Germanic, I have a vested interest in making them look good, but I'll try to be dispassionate.

What a fierce and bloody history we have. Anyone who says England is not as civilised as it used to be, hasn't studied its past.