Brilliant Isles

Art That Made Us

James Hawes

• Publisher: Old Street Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781913083045
• eBook ISBN: 9781913083298
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: History

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES THROUGH 80 EXTRAORDINARY CREATIONS, FROM BEOWULF AND THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY TO BANKSY, STORMZY, AND BEYOND
A companion book to the landmark BBC series, Brilliant Isles tells the story of these islands through art, music, buildings and literature – the creations of visionaries, mavericks and rule-breakers who responded to their times and shaped the future. Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into, this is a vibrant, surprising and witty guide to a unique culture, by one of our sharpest writers
'Hawes's view of English history is sharp and vivid and extremely persuasive'
PHILIP PULLMAN
'At last a chance to get to grips with the entire history of England, and all in a few hours!'
MAIL ON SUNDAY
'An engaging, informative sprint through the story of our little island'
INDEPENDENT
'thorough and absorbing... [Hawes] brings the story right up to date, able to step back from the current madness with admirable clarity
NEW EUROPEAN
'A fantastic read. I would recommend it to anyone.'
PAT KENNY, Newstalk Ireland
'Such a thought-provoking read...

2

1. LIGHTS
IN THE DARKNESS

Spong Man

Y Gododdin

The Staffordshire Hoard

Aberlemno Stones

The Lindisfarne Gospels

Beowulf

Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi

The Bayeux Tapestry

4

Spong Man

Unknown artist | ca. 420 ad | Norwich Castle Museum

He’s on a chair that is maybe a bit like a throne. He has a place in the world – but he is confronting a place where none of that has meaning anymore.

antony gormley

The moment we see this, we know it’s some ancestor of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’. When we learn that it stopped up a cremation urn, it’s hard not to see some god of the dead, contemplating eternity. One Cambridge scholar has argued that he may be none other than Woden/Odin himself. For this is pagan Germanic art – but not from Germany.

Spong Man, from Norfolk, is the first known three-dimensional, 5 figurative art created here by the people who migrated from Germany into late Roman Britannia. They came as mercenaries, and the first tribe to come in numbers were the Saxons. By the time Spong Man was made, the fortified coast of south-eastern Britannia was officially called the litoris Saxonum – the Saxon Shore – and to this day every other culture here calls the English the Saxons (Saeson/Sassenach/Sasanach).

Germanic warriors were a common sight in the late Roman Empire: by 400 ad, ‘Roman’ armies were largely made up of them. When the Western Empire fell in 476 ad, such warriors took over, from modern-day France to North Africa. It happened here too, but with a vital difference that would change the whole story of these islands, indeed of the world. That difference was the Channel – not as a barrier, but as a great sea-road.

Elsewhere, the new rulers stayed a Germanic warrior elite. Their own tribes never joined them: infants, nursing mothers, and the elderly could not survive great land-treks across the ravaged former Empire. So the new elites married local women from the old elites. Since language and culture are transmitted by mothers, a sub-Roman world endured all over Western Europe. The pagan Germanic Franks, old allies of the Saxons, soon turned into the Christian, sort-of-Latin-speaking French.

Here, though, the pagan Germans, already manning the Channel forts, could easily invite their entire clans to cross by ship in a day or two, women, culture and all. The early sources speak clearly of messages home to Germania and successive waves of migrants. So, in lowland Britannia, and there alone, the new elite stayed pagan and kept their own language.

This is the real beginning of our story, the original parting of the ways from Western Europe. It is why Woden, god of the obscure tribes who made Spong Man, is still unthinkingly honoured around the world, every time someone says Wednesday. And it was the birth of a tension between the English and non-English on these islands that still haunts us all.

explore further | Silver amuletic pendant, poss. Woden (7th c. ad; Brit. Mus; 2001,0902.1) • ‘The Thinker’ by Auguste Rodin (1904; Musée Rodin) • ‘Another Place’ by Antony Gormley (1997; Crosby Beach)

6

Y Gododdin

Aneirin (attrib.) | ca. 7th c.

The fact that a story like this, a poem that was probably spoken for the first time 1,400 years ago, is still here – that I can stand here and say those words and be in that chain – is a miracle. It was about their identity, about who they were, their very existence.

michael sheen

The further the English (as in, German) newcomers advanced from their bridgeheads, the stiffer grew the resistance from the Romano-British, whom the English called (and still call) the Weahlas. At times deals were cut: one early Saxon king had at his command an elite cavalry unit, the cyninges horsweahl, which translates handily as ‘The King’s Welsh Horse’. Yet though modern nationalism was still centuries away, some of the 7Romano-British felt they were battling these illiterate pagans not just for local power or status, but for cultural survival. That feeling, then as now, is the most potent recruiter.

Y Gododdin, written around 600 ad and preserved in a 13th-century manuscript, where it’s ascribed to the poet Aneirin, lives on in a very different way from The Battle of Maldon, a similar Anglo-Saxon tale of warriors who die heroically resisting an invader. English speakers today would need months of training before attempting to decode The Battle of Maldon, but any modern Welsh-speaker can make some sense of this tale about doomed young warriors from south-western Scotland, which was then still joined with Cumbria, Wales and Cornwall in a western continuum.

The fighters who perished in the vain attempt to resist the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon tide (after a whole year of solid feasting, according to the bard) have no physical monument, nor is it even agreed where they died. Yet these unknown soldiers of the Dark Ages are remembered in Wales to this day, thanks to the power of art. For glorious though the deed may be, it is creative artists who mould it and confer immortality.

a boy with a man’s heart,

on fire for the front

restless for war…

as the singer of this song,

I lay no blame

but only praise for him,

sooner gone to the battlefield than to his marriage bed,

sooner carrion for the crow,

sooner flesh to feed the raven…

Meanwhile, Northumbria extended its power northwards to Edinburgh and beyond, bidding for supremacy right across Britain – until it ran into an unlikely and deadly alliance.

explore further | ‘The Battle of Maldon’, poem, author unknown (10th c. ad?) • Book of Aneirin, various poets (13th-c. copy of 9th-c. original; Nat. Library of Wales) • ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, poem by Alfred Tennyson (1854)

8

The Staffordshire Hoard

Unknown artists | 570–650 ad

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Museums have approached modern-day jewellers and asked, Can you do this? And some of the best jewellers in the world have said, No, we just can’t. We don’t know how they did it.

heather pulliam

This is the greatest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, and the most mysterious. It consists of priceless weapons, armour and warriors’ accoutrements, some of them with obvious Christian elements, which were deliberately destroyed before b...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS
• 2. REVOLUTION OF THE DEAD
• 3. QUEENS, FEUDS AND FAITH
• 4. TO KILL A KING
• 5. CONSUMERS AND CONCIENCE
• 6. RISE OF THE CITIES
• 7. WARS AND PEACE
• 8. BRILLIANT ISLES
• Image Credits
• About the Author
• Also by James Hawes
• Copyright