MARCH OF THE TITANS - A HISTORY OF THE WHITE RACE
CHAPTER 28 : THE SCEPTERED ISLE - ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, WALES AND THE UNITED KINGDOM
Part I : Ancient Britain
Even its most vehement detractors will admit that the nation of Great Britain has been one of the foremost countries of modern Western Civilization. Its achievements are legion - at one stage its empire existed on all the continents of the world except Antarctica. Its language became the second most widely spoken language on earth (after Chinese) - its writers, poets and playwrights were the greatest the world has ever seen since the days of the Greek classics - and its history and culture has become ingrained in the traditions of many people on earth.
Britain was also directly responsible for the initial mass settlement of the North American continent that, together with immigrants from the rest of Europe, created the giant that became America. The industrial revolution, which it spearheaded, shaped the infrastructure of the current world.
Yet it is a small island, barely over half the size of France. The history of this island of kings and queens is remarkable one and worthy of an overview. Unfortunately much of English history is also filled with incessant petty squabbling and infighting.
Although this was no more so than in any other European nation in the forming, these squabbles were just as often as not, to have international repercussions because of Britain's pre-eminent position in the world. To tell the story of Britain without becoming involved in the minutiae of (at best irrelevant, and at worst downright boring) historical detail, is an delicate art.
ANCIENT BRITAIN
Ancient Britain was originally populated with the Old European peoples - Mediterraneans and Proto-Nordic types. By 3000 BC, the Old Europeans had established farms in southern England and by 2500 BC, another early White tribe, known as the Beaker folk (because of an abundance of beakers and other vessels found in their grave sites) had made their appearance in that land.
Middle Bronze Age Europeans. Every detail on this reconstruction of the dress and equipment of a man and a woman of 2,000 BC is based upon contemporary material remains.
Then had come the Nordic Indo-European invaders, the Celts, who arrived before 2,000 BC. When the Celts overran Britain they brought iron working, iron ploughs and metal swords, horses, wheels and chariots - all these things gave them an instant superiority over the native tribes. The latter were soon overwhelmed and absorbed into the Celtic population, only retaining their original sub-racial characteristics in somewhat diluted form in the far west of the island.
Next came the Romans, who at their height stationed about 100,000 men in army units at York, Chester, Colchester and Carlisle.
Many of these Roman soldiers intermarried amongst the local Celts, but no substantial racial make-up change was achieved by this intermarriage - unlike in other parts of the Empire, where the White Romans intermarried with all manner of locals, in many cases Nonwhites, precipitating the downfall of the Empire itself.
Many of the Romans then settled in Britain once their period of army service was over (usually twenty years) and formed the core of the Romanized Briton population. Along with the rest of the Empire, these Roman settlers also brought Christianity to Britain once that religion had been adopted as an official philosophy by the Emperors.
UNTAMED CELTS
However, the Celts in the far north of the country - particularly a tribe of Celts called the Picts - continued to be troublesome for the Roman Britons. The Emperor Hadrian finally built a wall in 123 AD across northern Britain to try and keep the Picts out. This border was once moved slightly northwards, but was soon moved south again. Scotland never fell under Roman rule, and the Picts continued to be a thorn in the side of the Romans until the very end of Roman rule in Britain.
GERMAN INVASIONS
Throughout the fourth century, Roman Britain was subjected to ever increasing raids from Saxons and other pagan Germanics. In 367 AD, a possibly co-ordinated offensive by Saxons from the mainland of Europe, Scots from Scotland and Irish Celts, very nearly displaced the Romans: another Roman army had to be rushed to the island from Roman Europe. It took three years before the invasion was beaten off.
As time went on however, the Saxon and pagan Germanic raiders from northern Europe began to become an even more serious problem. After Rome was forced to withdraw the last of its formal army from Britain in 406 AD, the island lay open to further incursions.
The Roman legacy to Britain was huge. Apart from an infrastructure of roads and the basis of several great cities including York, Colchester and London, the Romans substantially improved the standards of education and learning. Most importantly, they left behind in the children born of unions between Roman soldiers and local Britons, original Roman genes which were taken up in large numbers into the population.
DANISH CONQUEST - ENGLAND NAMED AFTER GERMAN ANGLES
In 425, a Roman British aristocrat, Vortigen, became leader of the British, and took a decision which was to change the future of Britain - he formally invited into Britain a group of Germanics from Denmark, known as the Jutes, under their chief Hengist. Vortigen hoped to gain the Jutes as allies in his wars against the by then constant attacks by the Pictish Celts from across the northern border.
In return for their military aid, Vortigen told the Jutes, he would give them land in what is now Kent in south eastern England. The offer was accepted - but the Jutes brought with them a horde of their racial cousins, including the dreaded Saxons and a number of other Germanic tribes - the Angles from Denmark, some Franks, Frisians and other Germans from the lower Rhine area. In an act of extreme irony, large numbers of Saxons were allowed to settle unmolested in Britain - Vortigen got a lot more Germans than he had bargained on.
The Danish conquest of England. Danish Viking style ships sailing up the Humber River. For a period of nearly 500 years from 400 AD, waves of Germanics and northern Europeans swept into England, pushing the Romanized Britons into the westernmost reaches of that country.
The long standing enmity between the Romanized Britons and the Germans, who were now in far larger numbers than Vortigen had wanted, soon flared up into open war. In 442 the first clashes took place, and ten years later Vortigen was defeated by Hengist. The Germanics then started to occupy and subjugate large areas in Britain, eventually displacing virtually all the Romanized Britons.
The Angles and Saxons gave their name to the country they had won (Angle-land, or England) and to this day the White people there are known as Anglo-Saxons, although they are of course a mixture of all the White peoples who had settled the island during the course of history before the arrival of the Angles and the Saxons.
GERMANICS FLOOD ENGLAND
For the next 500 years, sporadic waves of new Germanic settlers moved into Britain, while the original Britons were either pushed into the western reaches of the country, Cornwall and Wales (welsch being the name the invading Germans applied to the Romanized Britons.) Some Britons fled across the English channel to France, settling in what became known as Brittany for that reason.
ARTHUR AND THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE
Towards the end of the fifth century, Briton resistance against the Germans flared up, and it is from this time that the legends surrounding a Celtic king, later called Arthur, date. Recent historical research points to Arthur as having been a Welshman Owain DDantgwyn, but much of the exploits of his Round Table appear to have been built up as a result of story telling, rather than any basis in historical events.
Whatever resistance occurred, was however suppressed and by 600 AD, most of the former Roman Britain (that is, modern England) had been colonized by the Angles and Saxons and their Germanic cousins. The Romano-Celtic culture - which included Christianity - was driven into the far corners of the land, and eight major kingdoms had been established, along with a host of smaller principalities. It became customary for one of these major kingdoms to be designated a supreme king, or bretwalda (or Britain Wielder) and to have primacy as leader of Britain.
DRUIDS CHALLENGED BY CHRISTIANITY
Before the Romans brought Christianity to Britain, the dominant religion had been a variant of the Celtic religions - nature worship and the existence of holy men, or druids, were the dominant characteristics. The druids had, by some accounts, less than savory practices, although the full nature of their activities have been lost in the passage of time.
With the invasion of the British Isles by the Germanic tribes, Christianity, which was the trademark of the Romanized Britons of the era, was pushed out of mainland England and corralled in the outer reaches of the land, to where the defeated Romano-Celtic peoples had been pushed - Wales, Cornwall, southern Scotland and Ireland. The Germanics brought with them their own nature worshipping religions, distant religious cousins of the original Celts.
It was only some 150 years after the last Germanic invasions, that the Christian Church dared to send any large numbers of missionaries back into Germanic occupied England. This occurred after one of the bretwaldas, King Ethelbert of the kingdom of Kent, married a Frankish Christian princess from France, and she persuaded him to allow missionaries from Rome back into Britain.
Ethelbert himself, no doubt under pressure from his wife, converted to Christianity in 597 AD and by 664 AD, the last Germanic kingdom, in Northumbria under King Oswy became Christian. By the 7th Century, the Germanic kingdoms included Northumbria, Bernicia, Deira, Lindsay, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, Sussex, and Kent.
At this stage then the lands which were later to become Britain were still formalized into three distinct units - England, Wales and Scotland, each developing their own traditions and distinctive characteristics.
Click Here for
or back to
or
All material (c) copyright Ostara Publications, 1999.
Re-use for commercial purposes strictly forbidden.