Transcript for:
British Isles History Overview

Welcome to The British Isles – or maybe just The Isles. Well, Britain and Ireland? You know what, forget it: WELCOME HERE, this Atlantic Archipelago of one big island, a medium one, and several smaller islands kickin’ around north coast of Europe. It’s been known by many names to many people across the ages, and that’s a microcosm of how I like to interpret this history – these islands, whatever we choose to call them, are one gigantic exercise in how we understand Point of View. Because history is more finnicky than just facts about a thing, it’s a story: a narrative told from the perspective of a character. That character could be a king, an artist, or something bigger, like a country, a culture, or a civilization. And just as characters in a play can perceive the same scene very differently, so too can players in history experience the same world and the same events in completely distinct ways. Now this is one of those facts of life that’s always present, but we usually don’t have to think about it too hard, because we can sit back in our comfortable third-person-omniscient POV and understand the story just fine. “The British Empire from the perspective of Britain” is totally reasonable, but what about The British Empire from the perspective of Scotland, of Ireland, of Ireland specifically in the 1840s – shift that POV ever so slightly and the story can come out radically different. Again, this happens everywhere, but I think this phenomenon and the intricacies of perspective are best understood by unpacking this gaggle of islands right here. So, as we embark on a 2,000-year history of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain, I want to give each player their due, and tell the story from each of their perspectives. That will let us understand them on their own terms as well as highlight how they interact as a system. However, that means I can’t just run it front-to-back chronologically – so rather than spend two millennia jumping back and forth across four parallel tracks confusing ourselves to no end, we’re going to play each country’s story in sequence, then tie it all together when they converge into one metric British Empire. But we have to begin somewhere, so let’s start the clock in the first century BC, set our sights on England, and Do Some History! Names are hard, especially when it comes to the British Isles. The island of “Britain” is home to England, Scotland, and Wales, while the island of “Ireland” is composed of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom’s Northern Ireland. This is not only a nightmare to keep track of, but as we’ve seen, this is all subject to change, probably a little sooner than we think. I say all this to clarify what we’re actually gonna talk about in this video: England. Now, England is not only Not Britain, but its history is plenty interesting all its own. So, to see how England grew from a simple Roman province to the master of Britain and a major world power, let’s do some History! Our earliest documentation for England comes with the arrival of Julius Cheekbones Caesar, who crossed over from Gaul in 55BC. The native Celts were none too pleased with this new neighbor, so Rome stalled for a century until Emperor Claudius established the province of Britannia. Roman influence in Britannia was rather slim outside the main port cities, since it was hard enough to schlep all those armies across the channel, they were happy to delegate certain responsibilities to the local kings. In 60 AD, one such Client King bequeathed half his land to Rome, but when the empire glomped it all anyway, the late king’s wife Boudicca led a rebellion that burned through several eastern cities, including Londinium, before she was defeated in battle. Later Romans expanded outwards to the edge of Caledonia before Hadrian said “NOPE” and built a wall across the island to stop any hotshot general from getting ideas. The benefit of Britannia’s insulation was that it didn’t see much disruption from the carousel of imperial civil wars, the downside was that Britannia was the first province to be cut loose when barbarians started rolling up in the 400s. The next several centuries are marked by constant shuffling between small Romano-Britannic Kingdoms and a tidal wave of Northern European newcomers. The polite term for this is “Disorganized” and the accurate term for this is “Gross”. The Early Medieval period saw raids and migrations from Picts, Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, and while the map doesn’t stop fidgeting with its borders anytime soon, the players get a little clearer by the late 600s. Here we can see 7 major Anglisc and Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Kent, East Anglia, Mercia, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex, (those last three being East, South, and West Saxony, in case you were wondering why England sexed-up so many of its place names). These kingdoms weren’t entirely Britannic nor fully Germanic; Just like the Romans, it was a case of gradual integration between lots of small and unique groups of people; sometimes friendly, sometimes stabby. For a dash of literary context, the legendary character of King Arthur is set specifically against the backdrop of these Germanic migrations. Historically speaking, our record gets a little clearer in the Christian Monasteries of Northumbria, where the scholar Bede wrote the Ecclesiastical History of England, our best source for this period. And monasteries all across Northumbria were becoming magnificent palaces of literature and art throughout the 6 and 700s. Northumbria can have a little bit of a golden age, as a treat. The good news is that this was really shiny, but the bad news is that maybe this was a little too shiny, as the glittering attracted our old pals the Vikings, who first rolled up to the island monastery of Lindisfarne to save the priceless relics from the totally unrelated fires that started burning right as the Vikings arrived. Weird. From there, the Vikings kept on coming, raiding all up and down the coasts and even heading inland with the Great Heathen Army. This was especially bad news for the King of Wessex, who was partway through conquering Mercia when the Scandinavians glomped their way down the eastern coast. They didn’t have the means or the interest to form a single unified state, but the laws of these incoming Danes held sway over a pretty beefy stretch of land, so we call this thingy the “Danelaw” because when historians aren’t creative, they’re at least direct. While the Danelaw became a shiny mercantile midpoint between Ireland and Scandinavia, it was soon reverso-glomped by the kingdom of Wessex. By 927, King Aethelstan had conquered all the way to Northumbria, and began to style himself as King of England. So now, finally, we can actually discuss England as a single state. In the century following, Northumbria played hopscotch between English and Viking rule, and some wacky royal gymnastics resulted in the Scandinavian Canute becoming king of England Denmark and Norway for two decades. But despite the near-constant tire-fire of Scandinavian invasions and an extremely squiggly royal lineage, England had become impressively well-run for the time, as the governing bureaucracy was organized and they knew how taxes worked. Not bad! But, as will become a running theme in the next few centuries, there’s no getting over that pesky question of royal succession. After the death of King Edward in 1066, the crown passed to Harold Godwinson, but two other parties wanted that shiny headwear for themselves, namely King Harald Hardrada of Norway and Duke William of Normandy. Hardrada arrived to challenge Godwinson for the title of One True Harold, but was beaten at the battle of Stamford Bridge. However, Godwinson’s luck ran out one month later when — Omae Wa, Mou Shindeiru, NANI? And that’s the Norman Conquest in a nutshell! In contrast to the other assorted cases of England being conquered, this one had lasting significance. Firstly, William was set on keeping his hot new kingdom, so he invented this little doohickey called a Castle and built ‘em all over England to protect his armies from the odd revolt, meanwhile he replaced the English aristocracy with freshly imported Norman Barons. Now, the Normans, being from France, were French. So they spoke their native language instead of the local Old English. Over the centuries, these two languages smushed into each other to create what we recognize as English, our beautiful disaster of a language. The last significant consequence was William was still Duke of Normandy, and his supervisor, The King of France, was a little miffed that he went and yoinked himself a kingdom. And this diplomatic hiccup would embroil England and France in a casual 600-yearlong rivalry. Now, this is normally the point where English history slavishly trails along the Royal family tree through all its twists and turns, but this video is a summary, and I don’t care about Kings. Royal gymnastics are far too dull to be this needlessly confusing. I say this now so we can skip the faff later. What matters to us here in the mid 1100s is that the royal family married across the channel, so now the King of England became the Duke of Normandy, the Count of Anjou, and the Duke of Aquitaine — England has never been taller. This Angevin period rewrites Anglo-Frankish relations to the tune of “You got Chocolate in my Peanut Butter”. Anywho, with this absurdly large tax base and access to half a Franceload of natural resources up and down the Atlantic coast, the Angevin empire was an economic powerhouse. Of course, money means rich people and rich people means armed robbery, so this period is the main historical setting for the legends of Robin Hood, most closely associated with the reign of the Crusading King Richard the Lionheart at the turn of the 13th century. Speaking of Military stuff, England took this opportunity to hop westward and glomp onto the Dublin-y part of Ireland, they tried for more but didn’t really get much else. Conquest is all well and good, but it’s also expensive, and France was itching to get the rest of its France back, so the early 1200s saw Normandy, Anjou, and most of Aquitaine go poof. Meanwhile, the Barons were fed up with the monarchy, that makes two of us, so they forced a few kings to sign a contract recognizing that teamwork makes the dreamwork, as in, the Magna Carta makes Kings consult their Barons, and this puts us on track to get Parliament a ways down the line. Elsewhere in Britain, King Edward Longshanks conquered the Kingdom of Wales, and glomped Scotland for a hot second, but they broke free. The problem for England was that Scotland had allied with France, and by the mid-1300s, France was in a century-long win-streak. King Edward III was a big fan of the part where England owned half of France, so he went for broke and claimed a right to the French Kingship to justify a continental invasion. A bold strategy! It won’t work, but it took a century for that to become apparent. From 1337 to 1453, England and France were locked in a Hundred* Years’ War. Edward oversaw the first act, where the English poured across the channel and thrashed the French army at the battle of Crecy. To explain why, we’ve gotta dig into the real juicy stuff, economics. — Alright look, I minored in Econ, I have to at least pretend like this was worth something, okay? It all comes down to how they collected taxes; England had the sophistication to tax money and put it towards a professional army, while France took payment in goods and conscription, so their army was bigger, sure, but far weaker. England’s advance would have pressed on were it not for the surprise guest appearance of Plague. Soon after fighting resumed, the new French King Charles V had a much better time than his predecessor, and pushed the English out to the edges of Gascony and Calais. The third phase of the war is the spicy stuff that shows up in all the Shakespeare plays. We’re talkin’ Battle of Agincourt, Henry 5, hella longbows, take that, Frenchies! Ahem, After the loss, France fell into a civil war and almost collapsed until Joan Kickass D’Arc arrived to absolutely steamroll the English. King Henry VI had exactly zero ways to handle this, so England got swept right on out of there. By 1453 all they had left was a tiiiny little sliver of Calais. Despite the war’s overt goal of Conquer France, it inadvertently cemented a distinct English identity, through language, national heroes, and insular geography. The other major consequence was, big shock, another succession crisis. I’ve covered The War of the Roses before, – Hi, pardon the interruption, but let me stop myself there. 720P Blue is right that I did cover it in an experimental spinoff, but the audio is completely scuffed. So in the interest of thoroughness, allow me to overdub myself as I splice in this interlude: The War of the Roses is what happens when you let George R.R. Martin write real-world history. Our story begins with England and France already a 100-years deep in a classic medieval slap-fight. England’s king decides to make everything worse by bypassing his still very much alive sons to make his grandson King instead. Henry IV of House Lancaster calls BS and takes the throne in 1399, much to the annoyance of House York. Then a couple Henries later King Henry VI blows England’s lead and loses the 100 Years War, so the Yorkies sweep in to take the reigns as Lords Protectors. The Lancasters aren’t thrilled about this power-grab, so they kick the Yorkies out of court, and then proceed to get trashed by them at the battle of St Albans in 1455. This changes the game from convoluted backroom palace drama to full-on civil war mode. Advisors switch sides, nobles and royals drop in and out of exile like it's a semester abroad, and battles erupt all across the English countryside. Several stabbings later, the now clinically-insane Henry VI works out a compromise deal for peace with the Yorks and a formalized royal succession, but all of that goes out the window when the Yorks decisively kick their asses in 1471 and take the crown for keeps. This unfortunately goes south when the York King Edward dies, because it turns out all his kids are illegitimate due to his chronic condition of Having A Secret Wife, so the kids get locked in jail and mysteriously disappear forever. Convenient. Another York crowns himself King, but a Lancaster rolls into England with a French army to swipe the crown and declare himself King Henry 7, then ends the War of the Roses for good by marrying a York, uniting their families under the new royal house of Tudor – After over a century of crown shuffling, three decades of open war, a dozen major battles, and a much more satisfying ending than Game of Thrones. Man, that burn had a lot more zest in 2019. Such is the peril of referential humor. But let’s not dally, back to our regularly scheduled England! – All that matters is a king died, and two families spent a century stabbing each other over who would get the crown. Plot twist, both of them. Big ups to Henry VII for marrying the houses of York and Lancaster together to create the Tudor Dynasty and resolve that mess. The Tudors managed to accomplish quite a bit in their century-long runtime. The first order of business for King Henry 8 was to formalize the rules for royal succession, presumably because he had to read about the War of the Roses and decided never again. But he also had outside problems, as King Charles of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, coincidentally the same Charlie, was getting a smidge overpowered since he put the Pope under house-arrest. Further complicating matters was the little fact that Henry’s first wife was also Charles’ aunt, and she wasn’t bearing any Male Heirs. Henry deftly solved the three problems of Charles, the Pope, and his Wife in one move, by going diet-protestant and forming his own church. This new Church of England didn’t lean that hard into Protestant theology, but the real swerve was that the church answered only to the King. This quasi-reformist compromise wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to enforce, but the Tudors made it work. Meanwhile, back in Geopolitics Land, Henry made a new push into Ireland, and tried (and failed) to bully Scotland into uniting with England. In the second half of the century, Queen Elizabeth I held the fort against an increasingly aggressive Spain, way too hyped on Conquistador Cash to remember what Hubris means. In 1588, Spain hucked an armada at England in the hopes of conquering it, but English cannons and English Weather smashed the fleet to bits. When Elizabeth died without an heir, the crown passed to her nearest male relative, who happened to be King James VI of Scotland. So in 1603, James became King of Scotland and England. Everything after the Union of the Crowns is the Britain Plotline, where they glomp all the isles, make an empire, all that Rule Britannia jazz. So this is where we’ll wrap our History of England. At a glance, it’s a 1600-year-long Nightmare that’s stuffed with more monarchs than anybody should be forced to remember, and it’s easy to get bogged down in any one episode or to lose track entirely. But the good news is that if we zoom out a little bit, and focus on England as a unit rather than a backdrop for royal gymnastics, the important kings will make sense in context, and we avoid getting bogged down in the details. So we can clearly see the macro plot-progression from Roman province, through the Heptarchy, into the conflicts with France, and out towards the formation of Britain. So let English History show why The Big Picture is often the Clearest, and also serve as an object lesson in the Historiographic benefits of restraint. Thank you old-timey-Blue. Now, when looking at the story of the Isles, the English perspective tends to be the one we default to, since it ended up so thoroughly in the driver’s seat it’s tempting to consider it at least subconsciously as the most essential one. That of course is a touch reductive, but it does make England a great anchor-point as we begin to play with Perspective. We’re going to stick with the ol’ red and white a little while longer, but zoom in on the English Renaissance, looking at the lives of its most famous King and its most famous Bard. When presenting History in a public setting, there’s a delicate line between putting famous figures on blast for the irresponsible, immoral, or just downright meme-able, and falling into the trap of rewarding bad behavior with attention. In this regard, researching a notorious King becomes much like watching over a toddler – No hitting! Hands to yourself please! Do Not Put That In Your Mouth! Negotiating for basic manners with a baby is hopeless, and so is expecting any better from a Monarch, because they’re both playing by a completely different rule-set, and you can see it in their eyes that they know it too. And this is why I spend so few videos recounting the lives of big boy kings and their Tonka Truck wars, it’s just exhausting, and I always feel like I’m rewarding that bad behavior. But today, in the spirit of the Valentine’s season, I’m going to talk about Love… or, rather, whatever the hell Henry VIII was doing. There is some overlap, but boy is it slight. So, to learn the story of England’s most notorious Lady Killer as an object lesson what never to do, Let’s do some History. We begin in England in the 15-oughts, as young prince Hal was an extremely captivating figure. Admired in his day for his athleticism, charm, and good looks, eh, sure, he’s at once better and worse than we’re liable to give him credit for. A multilingual and multitalented king, he was an artistic patron and participant in the Renaissance tradition. He was also full of a royally insatiable appetite, for food and women alike. Those traits were only matched by his impulsiveness, arrogance, and self-obsession. He got bored easily, and was as distrustful as he was covetous. Henry’s paranoia led to the death of queens, officials, religious dissenters, and nearly every advisor who ever served him. Yet, for the first two decades of his reign, he was popular in his court and among the subjects, in large part because he played the Royal Jock while his father’s advisors and one notoriously corrupt Cardinal Wosley ran the kingdom. But even early on, he couldn’t leave well enough alone. Bored of being merely a celebrity, Henry wanted to get the blood rushing by winning glory, so, as ever, the clearest option was in France. Yet, as ever, it did not work, costing the entire treasury in one go and only proving that poor tiny England absolutely could not compete with the great powers of Europe. So with great frustration, he turned his focus back to England. And this would prove especially bad news for his wife, Catherine of Aragon, as it’s here where Henry’s reign surpasses the generically-inept and ascends into the true hallmark of his career: religion-shattering horniness. Now, before we progress, it is my Historian’s responsibility to remind you that People Are Complicated, and Memes Are Not, so we’re on the receiving end of a 500 year gossip-circle that we ourselves perpetuate every time we laugh at Old King SixWives instead of thinking through what that history meant for the actual human people who lived it. Henry certainly belongs in Horny-Jail, but we can’t pat ourselves on the back if we reduce an extremely consequential chapter of English history to the joke answer. So let’s consider: What did Henry Want? In a word, a son. Henry grew up in the wake of the War of the Roses and was acutely aware of how catastrophic the line of succession would get without a clear male heir – his Tudor dynasty was new and it was not guaranteed to stay in power. Henry was married to the stately queen Catherine of Aragon, but after two decades of marriage, no son. Lots of infant mortality and one daughter Mary who survived to adulthood, but Henry figured that wouldn’t cut it in a fiercely patriarchal society like medieval Europe. Catherine had been a good queen and a good wife, but once she was past child-bearing years, Henry had no use for her. He had plenty of mistresses, but illegitimate sons would do him no good either. What he needed was a brand new wife. And people had done this before. Divorce, per se, was not recognized by the church, but you could get an annulment, where the Pope says “oh, that marriage? yeah that never happened, you’ve actually been single the whole time”. In fact, Catherine was first married to Henry’s brother, but after he died, the marriage was annulled so she could marry Henry. But this time, the Pope was unmovable – diplomacy, bargaining, saying Pretty Please, Rome would not budge. In Europe, Henry was powerless… but in England, he was the one in charge… In 1532, a decade and a half after Martin Luther woke up and chose mayhem, Henry broke with Rome, and declared that the Church in England was answerable only to the King. Some of Henry’s advisors objected, so naturally Henry had them killed, and some Catholics in the north rebelled, so naturally Henry had them crushed as well. Everyone else carried on with their day for fear of the harsh new anti-treason laws. And with that, Henry had his church, his annulment, and his new wife Anne Boleyn. She had been a Court Lady to Catherine, and when Henry started making kissy faces at her, she refused to be a mistress and insisted he marry her properly before any slamming was to begin. Honestly, well played. A few very short months after their marriage, Anne gave birth to the future queen Elizabeth… but that was it. Uh oh. In the midst of all that, Henry was struggling to reconfigure his monarchy now that he was the head of the Church of England. He became responsible for giving alms to the poor, and happily confiscated all of the old church lands. However, he had neither time nor patience for another son-less wife. Blissfully unaware of how chromosomal genetics actually works, he concluded that this marriage was also cursed and had her annulled… and executed for adultery and treason. Zoinks. This kind of frivolous cruelty also undermines the entire hoist of Doing Protestantism in the first place, which frankly is typical Henry. Henry’s subsequent betrothal to Jane Seymour THE NEXT DAY would finally net him the son he always wanted. Nevermind what Edward VI was like as king because he would be succeeded 7 years later by Mary and Elizabeth anyway so this whole exhausting ordeal is the result of one man’s paranoia, lust, and enthusiasm for beheadings. But with the mission finally complete, do you know what happened to Jane Seymour? She died of an infection two weeks later! I don’t know whether to be sad for her awful luck or relieved that she didn’t live to see what it’s like when Henry got a whiff of someone else’s perfume. But with his beloved bloodline preserved, Henry turned back to foreign policy, and failed just as badly as he did when he was a teenager. He wanted a German protestant wife as a check against emperor Charles V, and chose Anne of Cleves in 1540, a mail-order bride he picked from a portrait gallery. But Henry McSleepsAround suddenly got all choosy, and annulled the marriage the same year because Anne didn’t look enough like her portrait. Rude. That said, this ended a lot better than it very easily could have, so let’s take the win and move on. He next married Catherine Howard – there was a religious strategy to this… I don’t care ­– and he eventually had her executed for adultery as well. Restraint? In this kingdom? Speaking of, he started some wars again. Didn’t super work, plus the treasury was back to empty. Ah well, let’s meet the last wife. Catherine Parr was a protestant widow who served as regent while Henry was at war in France, and made a point to formalize Mary and Elizabeth’s places in the royal succession, thus making Catherine Parr the actual MVP of the Tudor dynasty. In any case, it was good timing, because 4 years later, Henry died, leaving our last Catherine to live her best life. Aaaaah, what a mess. A king with his priorities so twisted in knots he wasn’t sure who he wanted to F*ck, Marry, or Kill, so he did everything to everyone and called it a day. Henry’s 38 years on the throne were some of England’s most consequential due to his sweeping reforms to church and state, but that all sprang from the remarkable women whom he called Queen. These six stick in our minds because of Henry’s distinct notoriety, but any prominence he has in English history is owed quite thoroughly to the captivating effect that they had on him, and in turn, on us. And so, we’ve come full circle to our starting comparison ­– like monarch like toddler, they want their mommy. Now while we’re having a laugh in the Meme Zone, there’s one quick tangent I am morally and professionally obligated to take us on. It’s my job, and my place. Now, trying to kill one King is enough of an endeavor, but as time goes on, administrations evolve, and power often gets distributed to a much wider base. This makes it infinitely more difficult to Off an entire government at once. But luckily, the 1600s are a wonderful time, full of such modern marvels as High Explosives, and some enterprising lads wanted to make use of this new tech. So let’s set the scene: England has been ruled by Protestants for nearly a century, and they were making life increasingly suckish for English Catholic holdouts. And since England’s Anglican monarchs kept butting heads with Very Catholic Spain and getting excommunicated by the Very Catholic Pope, adherence to the church in Rome was treated on par with being an enemy of the state. This was an extremely complex mesh of religious and political factors that would require a delicate touch to overcome… OR, or: Blow Up Parliament. No fuss, no persuasion checks, just an ass-ton of explosions. That was the logic of these fine morons: Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and 10 other Catholics conspiring to destroy the protestant government of England under the new king James I. The scariest part of this story is the plan might’ve worked if the conspirators shared more than 5 brain-cells between them. For instance, step one was renting an apartment next to the Palace of Westminster under the bullet-proof alias of John Johnson — Which must have made the landlord think “Ah yes, Mr John Johnson, he must have a respectable career of doing [Job] at [Place].” They then spent weeks hauling 36 full barrels of gunpowder into the apartment in advance of Parliament’s reopening. But boomifying an entire governing body was only part of the scheme, as they planned to start a revolt in the countryside and capture the King’s catholic daughter to install her as a puppet queen. And lastly, they’d sail over to Europe to get the Pope to support the new Catholic government and pretty please forgive us for all the murder. So that was the idea, but Parliament was closed for most of the year because of Plague, mood, and it wouldn’t reopen until November 5. That left a lot of time for the conspirators to ruminate on the moral implications of terrorism — not because murder was wrong or anything silly like that — but because they had some friends in parliament. So despite strict orders not to send any warnings to anybody, one of the conspirators sent a “hey, maybe don’t go to Parliament” note to his buddy. Now this alarm-bell wrapped in a red-flag had the easily-foreseeable consequence of getting reported straight to the chamberlain, who proceeded to search the entirety of parliament on the night before the plot. Imagine their surprise to find a lone gentleman standing next to a pile of firewood and 36 barrels of gunpowder in an otherwise empty apartment, a gentleman who insists that his name is John Johnson, esteemed doer of [Job] at [Place]. I’m sure Guy Fawkes was shocked that the constable saw through his iron-clad disguise. Fawkes was subsequently tortured into giving up the names of his co-conspirators, who were busy up in the countryside failing to start their revolt. Unfortunately, their excess storage of gunpowder had gotten soaked, so these big-brain boys laid it out to dry… in front of a fire. Which is just the most apt visual metaphor for a plan blowing up in your face. The crew was captured and executed, and for the next century and change, British Catholics were treated even harsher because of association with the plot, even losing the right to vote until 1829. Nice job ending that religious persecution, good work team. Ahhh, simply iconic… Thank you for indulging me, and now it’s Shakespeare time. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts. Nothing else quite sums up William Shakespeare’s attitudes on the power of Theater. But England’s Favorite Bard demonstrates time and time again that the reverse is also true, that one Stage can become anywhere in the World. You’ve surely spent a class or two with one of William’s works, and heck, Red started OSP as a Shakespeare channel, but today, we’ll put aside the Tragedies and Comedies we’ve handled here before, and instead focus on his relationship to History. So, to see how he became a legendary playwright and find out why he’s England’s #1 Accidental-historian, let’s do some History! William Shakespeare was born in the English town of Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1564, early into the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1. Though Shakespeare’s family wasn’t noble-born or all that rich, they lived far enough from London that they could pay the rent without going on a monthly heist. Shakespeare spent some of his early life in Stratford helping in his dad’s glove shop, so our young Bill would have been familiar with his local tradespeople. At the age of 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway and had a daughter 6 months later; I’ll let you run the math on that one. Aside from family matters, Shakespeare studied at the town’s Grammar School. It wasn’t fancy, but it was an honest education, and as we’ll see, it gave him everything he needed to succeed in his later career as a playwright. His primary instruction was in Greek and Latin, with the aim of reading the New Testament and the ancient Roman classics in their original language. On its face, this is a fairly simple curriculum, but it was radically new to Elizabethan England, as the Renaissance love for all things ancient was just making its way north. In the 1500s, a lot of things were new to England. In addition to the concept of disposable income, English theater culture was just taking shape, and it was the textbook definition of Quick and Dirty. With only a few permanent play-houses, most stages were simple wooden sets with no decoration and only a few key props. And unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans, England didn’t have a handy catalogue of material to draw from, so plays were written quickly, often in collaboration, then performed and discarded. This meant that freelancers were in high demand, and this is probably where Shakespeare got his start in the theater biz: writing with London’s other leading playwrights. Actors, by contrast, mostly went in troupes, working together over multiple productions, with the financial support of some hotshot patron who got the naming rights. In 1594, Shakespeare was a founding member of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, under the patronage of none other than the Lord Chamberlain. And this is where William worked as both an actor and a playwright for the rest of his career, writing tragic and comic fiction as well as historical plays for almost two decades. Sweet Mother of Job Security. In 1598 the city’s main Play House was closed over a landlord dispute, so our troupe took matters into their own hands by disassembling it and hucking the timber across the Thames in the dead of winter to build a New theater on the other side of London. Now that is dedication to the craft. The next year, The Globe became The home of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but despite its size, it was still pretty simple; flat stage, no roof or fancy sets, standing area below and three balconies above; The Globe didn’t faff around. And with room for the lower-class groundlings as well as the high-rolling aristocrats, everybody had a place, so Londoners of all stripes could enjoy the plays. To that end, Shakespeare wrote to the high-brow and to the low. So if your local Shakespeare production skips over the dirty jokes, then you have been duped, because that’s not the authentic Shakespeareance. Before too long, Shakespeare and friends performed at the royal court for Queen Elizabeth herself. And when the crown passed to King James in 1603, he was so fond of the troupe that he became their patron and redubbed them The King’s Men. Classy. And speaking of Kings, let’s zoom out for a minute to look at how England was doing in Shakespeare’s day, because it was quite a busy time. Before James Stuart became King, Elizabeth was the last reigning monarch of the Tudor dynasty. The Tudors are best known for ending the War of the Roses, telling the Pope to scram, and converting the Spanish Armada into a subaquatic lumber yard. In Shakespeare’s day, life was pretty good, England was peaceful — finally — and the arts had never been more popular. Ancient Greek and Roman texts were getting translated into English for popular consumption, and Raphael Holinshed had just finished up a mammoth Historical Chronicle of England, Scotland, and Ireland. With English patriotism flying higher than ever, people wanted to hear stories about English greatness. Now, most Englishmen knew how to read, sure, but Holinshed’s history was about 1,000 pages too-doorstoppy to be accessible to the average lad. So this is where Shakespeare comes in. He lures you with the promise of entertainment, keeps things exciting with pathos and murder, dazzles you with snark and low-brow jokes, and then when you leave you realize he duped you into learning. This might sound familiar, because this is how we teach you stuff. Disregarding the fact that he was extremely good at writing plays, Shakespeare’s mere choice of subject matter gave countless Englishmen their first glimpse at their own history. In making popular the genre of the History Play, Shakespeare inadvertently became the most influential Historian in England. Shakespeare’s early work is loaded with histories, and his first focus was on The War of the Roses; where he covered the life of Henry VI in 3 plays, and concluded with the “bloody” reign of Richard III. Afterwards, he jumped back in time to show the rise of the Hero King Henry V. This was a 4-play sequence starting with King Richard II, through Henry IV, and finishing with Henry V. Now, all of these plays are self-contained, but they share characters, conflicts, & some key themes. Plus, when we put the 8 plays together into a macro-story, this Henriad becomes a century-long Epic of English History’s greatest hits, culminating in the ascension of Henry 7 and the new Tudor Dynasty. So, with our proverbial stage set, let’s summarize some Shakespeare… quickly, and quietly, before Red catches me trespassing on her turf. We begin in the late 1300s with Richard II, who’s been asked to settle a dispute between two nobles over some misplaced cash and a murdered uncle. Richard dawdles and avoids doing his job, so Henry Bolingbroke takes the opportunity to coup his way into becoming King Henry IV. Now Henry had wanted to absolve his usurpation guilt by going on a crusade, but there’s turmoil at home with the nobles, so it’s too risky to leave. Worse yet, his son Hal is too busy partying in the tavern to be a helpful prince. But he eventually decides to Do His Job and fights the rebels. Now Hal might be a decent Prince, but being a good King is a much harder Ask. Unfortunately, this takes the entire runtime of the play and an earful from his dying father. But by the end he’s shaped up, apologized for his misdeeds, and is ready to take on the world as King Henry V. Now this is the spicy play. Our Prince Hal is all nice and Kinged, and England is done civil-warring, so he lays a renewed claim to the throne of France. In return, the French Prince sends him a very rude letter and some tennis balls as concession, so Henry, quite toasty by the slight, sets off to go a-conquring and starts the Hundred Years War back up. He first takes the port of Harfleur with a hearty Once More Unto the Breach, and pushes onto Agincourt, heavily outnumbered. The night before the battle, he treks around his camp to ruminate on how being King is effort, ugh. And the next day, the English army surprise the French and themselves by longbow-spamming their way to victory. Cut to several years later, and Henry is negotiating a treaty with France as well as wifing up Princess Catherine of Valois. The End. EEeeeexcept for the part immediately after this where Henry 6 whiffs it and loses the war, but that’s where the second 4-parter comes in. So, timeskip forward 2 years and Henry V unexpectedly bites it, so little beeby Henry 6 is now King. From here, everything goes south. France starts throwing hands at Orleans with the help of one Joan of Arc, while English Nobles are too busy scheming against each other to stop it. A rift opens up between the Lancaster family and the Yorks, which becomes a big mess later. Several timeskips later, Joan is captured and killed by England, and Henry marries Margaret of Anjou. Despite some initial success, England lost the war and got the boot out of France, so Richard of York is rather miffed with Henry’s leadership, and lays a claim to throne. This comes to a head at the battle of St Albans, where York smashes the King’s forces and sends Henry into disarray. With defeat in sight, Henry marks York as next in line for the throne, but Henry’s wife Margaret and the Lancastrian faction think that this is stupid, so they take the fight to the Yorkies. They win for a little bit, lose for a little bit, win a little more, but then they start losing again, and eventually Henry is captured, and killed in prison by Richard Jr of York. Once again, the last play in the set is the spiciest one. Edward IV of York is King, again, long story, and his brother, Richard Jr, wants the hedgear for himself, because it’s civil war allll the way down. So Richard jails his younger brother and drowns him in a vat of wine, which makes Edward die of shock, leaving the crown to his two kids, with Richard as their regent. Clearly his work isn’t done, so he convinces the nobles that the princes are illegitimate, so that he can get the crown from his dead brother. But then to seal the deal he has the kids killed anyway because Loose Ends Sink Royal Claims. Richard takes the throne but rebellions break out immediately, and the Earl of Richmond leads an army against the king. Before their battle, Richard is haunted by the ghosts of all the people he’s killed. He gives the Kingdom for a Horse speech, Richmond kills him, and takes the throne as Henry 7. England’s troubles are over, the Tudors have arrived! Now, in a stage performance, there’s not much room to investigate the big-scale dynamics of national conflict like you’d see in a typical history book, but Shakespeare does focus in on the nuances of Kingship, and how their character affects the way they rule a state. That said, these plays can get flak for retroactive Tudor Bias, especially in the case of Richard 3. Historically, Richard was unremarkable, but he was guilty of Being The Last King Before The Tudors, so clearly he just has to be awful. As such, Shakespeare condemns him to a murder-frenzied reputation, and shows rumors like the killing of the young princes as fact. The play explicitly sets up Richard as a Pure Evil villain to contrast with the heroic arrival of Shakespeare’s present Tudor dynasty. So while Richard 3 makes for Great Drama, it pulls double-duty as Political Propaganda. And this isn’t the last time Shakespeare fiddles with facts to make a narrative more exciting, as MacBoy and Wife are fully rewritten to be more murderous, and Cleopatra is… alright, listen up BILL — *Rant Removed, Profanity Limit Reached*. But outside those three glaring exceptions, Shakespeare tells his history pretty straight. And the benefit of a multi-person drama is that diverse perspectives can be portrayed, especially with stories like Julius Caesar, where competing rhetoric weighs the morality of tyrannicide and civil war. Shakespeare is at his best when characters and ideas are in conflict onstage, and that’s just as true for his Histories as it is for his dramas. Ignoring for a second how Shakespeare has made life tricky for later historians, let’s appreciate the effect he had on his contemporary audience. When history is distilled from its thousand-page write-ups and presented in a way that people can actually appreciate, suddenly an entire share of the population can understand their national history for probably the first time ever. This kind of storytelling was powerful then and it’s powerful now, I mean, just think of how much better you know revolutionary American history since Hamilton came out. Though Shakespeare didn’t intend to publish his plays, because a script is lifeless without actors, his friends in The King’s Men compiled a folio of his works for distribution, which is why we’re able to enjoy the brilliance of his plays even today. And that’s actually where some get hung up on his story: Because surely, our talented William couldn’t really have been some countryside plebeian. Only a gentleman of Refinement could possibly have written these masterpieces. So there’ve been theories that Shakespeare was just a pen-name for Edward de Vere or Sir Francis Bacon, or some secret guild of writers. But alas, Shakespeare was indeed a kid from Stratford who got a decent Grammar-School education and really enjoyed reading the classics. Perhaps the greatest Shakespeare Conspiracy of all, dare I say, a Shakespearacy, is that William could be smart without being rich. Some interesting notions here of how History and Theater interact, not just using the stage as a medium for recounting the past, but touching on these very ideas of perspective, and characters. Keep that in mind as we progress along. But while we’re thinking of literature: Let’s get a little abstract with it, and pick apart the very language I am speaking to you in right now. The English language is downright weird. I don’t think that’s an especially controversial statement, but it’s one that warrants some explanation. Sure, much fuss gets made over the nonsensical pronunciation schemes we follow – Today I present you with this video, but if I present you, you’d worry about getting stuffed in a box with a bow on it. I may be a joker, but I am not The Joker – and you can tell the difference by my use of The. Weird indeed, huh, but ultimately pretty surface level. No, the English wackiness goes far deeper. Despite the language’s ancestry in Germanic cultures from Northern Europe, half of the words in English instead come from French and Latin. Weird. We can partly explain this by pointing to that time William the Conqueror and his Norman French buddies took over England in 1066, but that’s just one plot-point in a much longer story. So come with me today on a tour of English – not the English, but English itself – as we piece together how our beautiful mess of a language came about. Now let’s do some Linguistics! First, a bit of scene-setting. Languages don’t appear in a vacuum, they come in families. Romance, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic are families of languages that share similarities and origins. Sometimes they can be mutually intelligible – say, within the Romance group, a Spanish speaker can ask a question, get an answer back in Italian, and both participants understand it – but in most cases, there’s distance and friction between a family’s languages, with some farther apart than others. English is a Germanic Language, meaning it’s related to languages from Northern Europe and Scandinavia, but the average English speaker won’t comprehend German, Frisian, Yiddish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, or Afrikaans if it’s spoken to them. And as a student, an English speaker will have the hardest time trying to learn any of the others. Among that group, English is the odd one out. Why? Well, the simplest account is that “English was a Germanic language, but then the French showed up.” The notion being that English changed after getting sat on by a Norman French monarchy for 150 years. This is true, and it fits cleanly into popular understandings of English history overall, but it’s not our main culprit. As I’ve discovered while researching this video, Linguistics is very complicated, so we won’t be swimming through all the technical details of how languages work, and we’re gonna keep this story as clear as possible by building it in layers. Germanic plus Normans was the simplest version, now here’s one layer deeper: Old English was a Germanic language brought to Britain by migrating tribes called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and their language picked up new vocabulary in 3 major rounds. First was Old Norse words from Scandinavian Viking raiders and settlers in the 8 & 900s. Second was French words from Monsieur Guillaume le Conquérant and the Normans in 1066. As the language of the royalty and aristocracy, French vocab was for upper-class topics, so the animal Cow comes from the Old English Cu, but the delicacy Beef comes from the French Boef. But England and France wouldn’t stay buds forever, so from the 13 and 1400s when the Hundred Years War was going on, English sought to distinguish itself from French by turning to Latin as a source of vocabulary. This continued into the Renaissance era, as Latin words infused English like, for instance, infuse, from the Latin Īnfundēre. This also gave us a few quirky rules like not ending a sentence with a preposition or not splitting infinitives because that’s how it works in Latin. Thus to barbarously split an infinitive is, uh, barbaric. Those were the three main sources of vocabulary over the centuries, but other words sprinkled in from trade with the Dutch, Spanish, and Germans, plenty of science vocab comes from Arabic, and some extra Greek words gave English that touch of class… He said, in the most non-biased way possible. That’s more or less how English got its words, but borrowing words from visitors and neighbors is essentially how every language acquires vocabulary. English speaks its imports proudly, but it’s not an outlier for having them. This story suitably traces the history of English Etymology, but it doesn’t explain how English uses its words, how it spells and says them, how it puts them together with Grammar. Grammar gets less attention than etymology because rules are more complicated than disparate little words, but we can put this in context all the same. Consider the evolution of Modern, Middle, and Old English through the sequence of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Beowulf – a juxtaposition so handy it’s come up on OSP before! Shakespeare’s poems and plays are just an early version of our Modern English. It has some word order that feels wacky to us, plus your classic Thees and Thous and some spiffier words we may need to look up, but the rules for how words fit together and sentences get built are the same core rules we have today – the same core grammar. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are Middle English. The macro-level grammar is similar enough that we can understand the original text, but the words themselves appear very odd. He comes after the Norman French influence, but well before we got our modern spellings. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote” is close enough to “When that April with his showers sweet”, but it’s undeniably different. You kinda have to unfocus your eyes and feel the words rather than read them, because the rules for how we spell words today are different. Then there’s Beowulf, which is functionally unintelligible to modern readers. This is post-Viking and pre-French, but there’s a lot more different about this than just a piece of French vocabulaire here and there. We’ve got letters out of Old Norse like thorn (þ) and eth (ð) and æsc (æ), and words that are entirely unrecognizable. The poem opens with lines I’m not even gonna try – It means “Lo, we have heard of Spear-Danes in days of yore, of folk-kings' prowess, how the princes wrought deeds of valor.” But just trying to compare them… What? Sorry, what I actually meant to say was HWÆT? It’s only a jump of a few hundred years from Chaucer, and yet this is an English so distant from us that it may as well be a different language entirely. Is it even the same language? Now that’s the interesting question – by lineage, yes, but practically, no it is not! So, let’s dig deeper to explore the third layer of English through the lens of grammar. Comparing English to its Germanic relatives, it has some weird linguistic omissions. For one, the Germanic languages all have Grammatical Gender and Case. If those terms sound odd, it’s because we don’t have them in English. By Gender we don’t mean distinguishing between He or She, Mister or Miss, but what’s the gender of a cup? A table? A tank? Gender typically sets the ending of a word and the article that goes in front of it. In French, the cup is la tasse, feminine. English fully does not do that. Nor does it have Case, which sets the function of a noun in a sentence, and the word ending changes to reflect that. In English, we do it with word order: I throw an alligator to my friend. You know the thrower, the object being thrown, and where it’s going just by its position in the sentence – If I say To my friend an alligator throw I, the word order isn’t helping us make sense of it, so it takes a second to sort out what’s being thrown to whom. And if you’ve ever tripped up on the difference between Who and Whom, that’s because it’s a vanishingly rare example case in the wild. We do mark the possessive case by putting an apostrophe-s on a word’s ending or throwing Of in front of it – but by and large, cases elude our understanding. English is the outlier among the Germanic gang for the two big features it doesn’t have, but what it does have might be even weirder. Namely, do. Do you know why we put the word do in our sentences? Before my research, I did not. It doesn’t do any essential lifting, but it is nonetheless essential to not sounding like a madman. And what’s with that -ing ending? On paper, the present form of To Listen is I listen, but if someone asks what you’re doing and you say I listen to the silly history man, they’ll look at you funny because the natural response is I’m listening. This continuous present tense and do-verbs make English quite the oddball among the Germanics, so now let’s learn why. Walk with me, viewers, as we reminisce about the cool autumn days of 450 AD: the Roman armies have left Britannia, and Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes have come across the North Sea to reside in their new home – I remember it blissfully. The newcomers spoke a descendant of Pro-Germanic we can call Old English, while the pre-existing locals held onto their Celtic languages: Common Brittonic, which was a Latin-influenced form of Celtic, plus Old Welsh and Cornish in Wales and Cornwall respectively. And wouldn’t you know, those Celtic languages have early equivalents of an -ing present tense and those goofy little do-verbs. Ah, a match! Frustratingly, we don’t have good written evidence for this in English until several centuries later, but we can be confident it was there from early in the linguistic contact, on the basis that writing is a fundamentally conservative medium. We know with confidence that spoken Latin was diverging from the written standard since the 400s AD, yet it’s not until the 10-1300s that those romance vernaculars get widely circulated in writing. Similar deal here: after the Celts were subjugated, little linguistic influences seeped into colloquial Old English over the centuries, but even by the 8 or 900s, works like Beowulf would stick firmly to a traditional literary register, no Celticisms allowed. In every language in every era, there’s a disconnect and a lag-time between formal writing and common speech. So that’s what Old English gained after its trip to Britain, but what about the features it lost? For that, we look to the Vikings, who didn’t just import a bunch of words, but handily slimmed down Old English by, well, not being the best at speaking it. See, when the Danes & Norwegians came to England, they spoke Old Norse, the ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages. Both it and Old English had case and gender at the time of the Viking Age, and overall the languages were similar enough for Vikings and their new English wives to roughly understand each other, but not quite pick up those finnicky word endings. In a few generations of speaking and raising children in a mix of both languages, Old English and Old Norse hybridized – so plenty of words crossed over, that’s the easy stuff, but grammar is harder – so gender, case, and verb conjugations got dropped. Now we do actually see a bit of document evidence for this, as Northumbria shows these changes first, and just so happened to be the heaviest area of Norse settlement. So at the end of the millennium, we have a conservative register of Old English demonstrated in Beowulf, yet the implication of a significantly different spoken English. How then did we jump to Chaucer’s English 3 centuries later? I invite you to join me as we blame France. See, when the Normans came to England, there were not very many of the guys, yet French became the spoken language of the aristocracy and written language of state, replacing written English and sending it into a century-long blackout. French left its mark on English vocabulary, but was otherwise so insular that it didn’t affect English grammar. Then in the early 1200s, geopolitics happened, and England politically decoupled from France, so English asserted itself as the language of state. But here, the literary chain to Beowulfy Old English was broken, so their new starting point for Written English was simply Spoken English, and suddenly hundreds of years of Celtic and Scandinavian influence crashed onto the page at once. From there, the linguistic path through Chaucer, Shakespeare and onto the modern day is quite straightforward in comparison. That is, with one planet-sized caveat. For everything we may tell ourselves, standard English is not standard. The processes that brought English new words and reorganized its grammar are happening all over the world in over a hundred dialects and languages related to English. Not just American or Australian or regional accents, but African American Vernacular English, Hawaiian pidgin, Singlish, Jamaican Patwah, Naijá, Hinglish, and countless others – a startlingly vast wealth of culture spread around the world that is an essential piece of the English lineage. English is a mess of a language, of course – but the sooner we realize it, the sooner we get to have fun with it. If we have to speak the damn thing we may as well enjoy ourselves! Naturally, we’ve so far spent a lot of time talking about states, kings, and a legendary bard, but language is fascinating because this thing exists in the voices of actual people: the farmers, tradespeople, sailors, and endless stream of newcomers to the Isles. This is the kind of story that’s difficult to tell because we have so little from them, as most of our documentation is written from the halls of power about the people in those halls. But this is a great reversal, because it’s the true everyday voices, from the small places, the otherwise quiet places, that move the narrative the most. Not the easiest story to tell, but essential. So with all that sorted, we’ve left England in a good spot, so we can now look wide and start tackling the other constituent kingdoms, and this is where we’ll really start to see alternate and conflicting perspective. But where to next? Alas, no director’s commentary of an OSP mega-compilation is complete without the proverbial “ice-bath” – that plunge from a fresh new video scarcely a year old into the absolute oldest one of the set. So following up on this pristine look at the English language, it’s only right and just that we plunge into the Scotland video, and that means we’re going back to the Armchair Room. God help me. In researching this video, I learned a valuable lesson about how little the Scots mess around. “Okay,” I thought, “The Scots and the English hate each other, but it can’t be that bad.” So then I took a little peruse to see how many times the two actually fought each other and SWEET MOTHER MARY THAT’S A LOT OF STABBING! Scotland, who hurt you? Trick question — ENGLAND. So be warned: The Scots are every bit as bonkers as their Twitter makes them out to be. With that said, Let’s do some history. Around 2,000 years ago, Scotland was inhabited by various tribes of Pictish Celts, living up north, herding, and minding their own business. So when the Roman Empire swaggered up to try and conquer them, they gave those Romans a walloping so bad that emperor Hadrian built a wall to make sure nobody ever tried to conquer them again. So even though these Celts weren’t anything like modern Scots, it’s refreshing to see the national character demonstrated so well at such an early stage. Rome eventually collapsed, but Europe reintroduced itself to Scotland via Christianity and Anglo-Saxon migrations, which coalesced through the 7th century into a few main groups: for our purposes the most relevant two are the Picts and the Scoti, where we get the name Scotia AKA Scotland. In 843, Kenneth Mac Alpin united the Scots and Picts in to create the Kingdom of Alba. The early kingdom had to deal with the Vikings and English in the 8 and 900s, as land from every corner got yoinked. But beyond outside threats, there were also constant internal fisticuffs over the crown. The quintessential example of the early Scottish King is MacBeth, whom hereafter shall be referred to exclusively as MacBoy because that play is haunted. Trouble is, nearly everything you might know about him from Shakespeare is wrong. Here’s why: See, the Scottish crown didn’t follow a strict succession, but claimants came to debate who was best fit to rule, and this caused constant disputes. So MacBoy actually killed King Duncan in a battle in 1040, and he ruled for the next 17 years peacefully, generously, and successfully. In 1057 he died in another battle against Duncan’s son Malcolm Canmore, who then assumed the throne. All the stuff about conspiracies got added by Scottish historians centuries later, but civil wars over the throne were already a matter of protocol since the Kingdom got started. MacBoy’s real-life path was actually quite standard. But speaking of wonky royal succession crises, the next decade brought the Norman Conquest of England, and William the Conqueror’s second son Henry married King Malcolm’s daughter. The family relations are confusing now and they stay that way for the next thousand years so I’ll try to avoid specifics for the sake of my sanity, but bottom line is that the King of Scotland exchanged notes with his Sister the Queen of England about culture and statecraft. So in the following two centuries, Scotland picked up some Norman tricks, like central bureaucracy, a church hierarchy, and a curious new language derived from the Norman French, called Scots. The native Gaelic was still the dominant language in the Highlands especially, but the Lowlands trended slowly towards the customs of their southern neighbors. The 11 and 1200s saw a steady back and forth between Scotland and England along the borders in Northumbria, but not a whole lot of drama. Until, the king of Scotland died in 1286 without a clear heir, and rather than have all 13 possible cousins duke it out the old fashioned way, they called in the English king to mediate the dispute, which, I don’t know, seems kind of like a terrible idea? Unsurprisingly, King Edward installed the weakest, most pliable puppet who would let him treat Scotland like a vassal state. And then when even that guy got fed up with forfeiting Scottish land, paying tribute, and kneeling to English superiority, King Edward invaded Scotland, dethroned the king, and yoinked the Scottish coronation stone back to Westminster, dragging Scotland firmly under the English heel. This was frankly terrible, so the Scots duly rebelled against England under the command of the famous William Wallace, who won a victory at the battle of Stirling bridge in 1297, but lost horrendously at Falkirk the next year, and he was later executed by England. Quick fun fact, of the many reasons the movie Braveheart sucks, the blue war paint everyone wears is a thousand years out of style for Scots. I mean come on, that’s like dressing the cast of the Godfather in togas. It was after Wallace died that Robert the Bruce took up the mantle of Guardian of Scotland. He had to kill a rival claimant to earn his title, and also earned an excommunication from the Pope because apparently murdering someone in a church is “impolite” and “a mortal sin”, whatever. He was defeated early by Edward in 1306 and went into hiding for a year before returning to win the battle of Loudon Hill. From there, he stomped out local rivalries and united Scotland fully against the English at the decisive battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Though the treaties weren’t signed for another 15 years, Robert the Bruce won Scotland 3 centuries of independence in that battle. Quick OSPro-Tip: Skip Braveheart, watch The Outlaw King — it’s better, and more accurate. Having fulfilled his dreams for his kingdom, Robert died the next year, but this was exceptionally poor timing, because the throne passed to a series of useless kings from the house of Stuart for the next several decades. Through the 13 and 1400s, Scotland had no real leadership, and the local lords started throwing hands, or more accurately claymores. In this case, the warring states were actually the dozens of Clans scattered across the lowlands and highlands. Mercifully, England had just gotten sucked into the 100 Years War with France, so Scotland was free to be its own antagonist. And although the Stuart Clan still held the crown, other families like the Douglas Clan were regularly challenging them for land and power. Some progress came with King James I in 1406, who sent 12000 Scotsmen to fight with France against England in the 100 Years War, winning big and returning home in a strong position to consolidate many of the Clans under his crown and reform the kingdom. Unfortunately, he got assassinated and it was right back to the see-sawing balance of power between kings, regents, lords, and clans. Even after James, the Highlands largely still spoke Gaelic, and paid little heed to the culture or politics of the Anglicized royal court. The King could say whatever he wants down in Edinburgh, but unless he personally marches up to Inverness to tell clan Fraser in person to pay their taxes, it’s not gonna happen. And one king even tried that, but still nothing happened. It’s just all very Game of Thrones-y for a couple centuries, and I mean, heck, it’s at this time that the War of the Roses is raging on just down the street! And you know what, since it’s a big mess anyway, I’m just gonna to speed-round through the next 300 years, so get ready for a game of Monarchy Is Volatile! Let’s meet our players: One king was really cool and helped reform the government to work for more of Scotland while making Edinburgh into a renaissance capital of learning and culture. One Queen got the short end of the stick when Scotland’s parliament voted to convert to Protestantism while she was on vacation in France, and then she got the shorter end of the stick when England imprisoned her for two decades and executed her. Her son played his cards right and inherited the throne of England from his cousin, the childless Elizabeth, and then became king of England and Scotland. His son was so inconceivably bad at being king that his abuses of power brought England and Scotland into open rebellion for entirely separate reasons, and his reign ended with the British Isles locked in 12 years of civil war before everyone called a do-over and gave the crown back to his son. One King became king because parliament literally invited him from the Netherlands to replace their current monarch, and then he proceeded to strangle Scottish trading rights. And the last Queen on our list tried to be a pal by offering Scotland a national union with England to open up trade avenues in exchange for the bargain price of nearly all of their sovereignty. I originally went way in depth about how all of this stuff went down, but then I realized “Royal politics is dumb and I hate it, so I’m not going to talk about it… is kind of the dullest and most arbitrary thing in all of history. So I don’t wanna talk about it One standout event from the mid 1500s is when the King of England tried to drive a wedge between a longstanding alliance between Scotland and France in the hopes to endear Scotland to their southern neighbors. They did this by pillaging the lowlands and burning Edinburgh to the ground. You may find that this is a bad way to make friends. The Scots came to call this 7-year campaign the Rough Wooing, as they didn’t appreciate being bullied into love. This sentiment persisted for centuries, way up to the Act of Union in 1707. Scotland was suspicious of the Queen’s offer of partnership, and while they’d get one metric British Empire out of the deal in the long run, the immediate result was England deciding they now had a constitutional right to treat Scotland like a colony. As you can see, this is a recurring problem, and it led to two revolts for Scottish independence in 1715 and in 1745. Both failed, but the second one spooked England into being slightly less despicable about everything. In the next century and a half following the rebellions, things turned markedly for the better as the Enlightenment came north. Writers like Walter Scott and Robert Burns helped rekindle the Scottish identity, and thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume radically changed European perspectives on rational thought and economics. Hume claimed that reason was the core of human thought, and Smith described the benefits of letting people act in their own self-interest. This all sounds very profound, but don’t be fooled, the clear Scottish subtext to these ideas are “The English don’t make a damn lick of sense” and “We’d be better off making our own decisions” — and you can’t expect a Scottish enlightenment thinker to not bury snide comments at England under two tons of hard academic theory. Though Scotland had long been an educational powerhouse, in the following two centuries they also became the industrial heart of the British Empire, producing such famous doodads as the steam engine, the telephone, radar, a mechanical television, and also most of the ships in the Imperial Navy. Nice! Other happy beneficiaries of the 18th and 19th centuries were the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, which built up substantially in the neoclassical style, and they just look really damn pretty. Neat thing about the Edinburgh castle, instead of firing off 12 cannon shots to mark the passing of Noon like the English do, they wait an hour and save 11 rounds. That’s Scotland, baby. Quickly approaching the modern day now, Scottish attitudes towards the Union grew more suspicious as England seemed to care less and less by the decade about what happened up north, and the hard-forged British identity faded with time and the decline of the British Empire. After years of campaigning, Scotland gained greater autonomy and the right to hold their own parliament in 1999. The first words spoken there were, quote “The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th of March, 1707, is hereby reconvened” And if that’s not some Big Scotland Energy then wrap me in a tartan plaid and throw me in loch ness because I dinnae know what is. – Okay funny man easy on the accent, your Scottish audience are taking psychic damage. Now I certainly hope we can clock the improvement between then and now, a healthy six years of bi-weekly uploads has to count for something, but watching this back, I’m pleased to be only slightly mortified. And as far as our exercise in perspective, this works exactly as intended – just one alternate angle adds a ton of depth to the story. A side-plot among England’s civil wars and fighting the French can become nearly the whole narrative when we put the camera over Scotland’s shoulder instead. So while we’re doing this big experiment on perspective, let’s make me a good-bad-example of how a framing device can get out of hand. I opened the story on the idea of this eternal rivalry, and that colored several aspects of my telling – from the topline coverage of wars and political movements down to even my reading of Enlightenment philosophy. Not strictly incorrect, but the Hand Of The Author is a little too visible for comfort. Now what is missing outright is any recognition of Scotland’s role in the British Empire. Sure I mentioned that they made all the ships, but they were also the merchants and soldiers on the front lines of colonization and perpetuating the Empire. That all began in the Isles themselves, with Scots colonizing Ulster in North Ireland in the 16-oughts on the order of Scotland’s own King James. Later in the century, Scotland’s attempt at an American colony in Darien ended in complete disaster, with 80% of the colonists dead and Scotland’s finances utterly ruined by the venture. This in turn contributed to Scotland’s interest in the 1707 Act of Union, marrying England officially to open a joint bank account. And this is where the perspective gets fractal – from the viewpoint of the urbanized lowlands Scots in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the British Empire was a party. Scots enjoyed disproportionate representation in the Imperial military, with entire Scottish regiments doing the dirty work of Empire in China, India, Africa, and, plot twist: Scotland again. Because up in the Highlands, when Scottish Jacobites revolted in the 1700s in hopes of putting a Scottish king back on the British throne, lowlands Scots fought right alongside the English in combatting those uprisings. And in the century after 1750, lowlands Scots benefitted mightily from the mass evictions and forcible dismantling of traditional highlands society known as the Highland Clearances. Hilariously enough, I think my core mistake here was not committing enough to the idea of perspective, because my overarching narrative of the eternal England-Scotland rivalry ironically puts England in the driver’s seat of Scottish history. That in turn paints Scotland as a monolith, diminishes their agency in the story, and absolves their willing hand in perpetuating the Empire. The Scottish urban power centers knew exactly what they were doing in the 16-1900s, the deal only started to go sour when the British Empire dismantled itself after the Second World War and Scotland stopped getting the same material benefit from the arrangement. So yes, the surface-level dynamic is England conquering and oppressing Scotland, but this kind of relationship is never binary, there are strata – and some Scots were all too happy to oppress others in the Isles and around the world for the good of the empire, climbing the ladder by stepping over the Irish, the colonized, and even their fellow Scots. SO, with this exercise in perspective and the befit of way more practice over the last five years, the picture gets a lot fuller. Now let’s keep this train rolling by hopping west to the history of Ireland! On the surface, the History of Ireland seems like a tale of one island getting beat up for over a thousand years straight, and, well, that’s not incorrect. But, from another perspective, it’s a story of a unique civilization rising from the intersection of two very distinct worlds, and then remarkably enduring through centuries of subjugation and hardship. When it’s all too common to see entire cultures wiped from existence because of colonial oppression, Ireland is a hard-fought counterexample. To see what makes Ireland’s history so special, and to learn how Irish culture survived to the present day, let’s do some history. Our story begins with the migration of the Celts from Central Europe sometime in the 5th to 3rd-ish centuries BC — It’s an ancient migration, okay, dates are finnicky — and they settled on this little island here, which they named Éire after the goddess Ériu, which is where we get the name Ireland. Speaking of languages, they spoke an early version of Irish, which is a subset of the Gaelic language family, which is a subset of the Celtic language family, not confusing at all. Though Ireland didn’t have a literary tradition, the culture venerated storytelling bards as well as druids, priestlike figures who doubled as historians, judges, and even doctors. Another popular profession in Ireland was, surprisingly, king, because there was no overarching central authority, so Ireland usually had somewhere around 150 local Tuatha (*people, tribe*) that each had their own king. And there were no cities at this point, so people just clustered into groups on available farmland and got to it. Though Ireland wasn’t politically unified, they shared many elements of art and religion, from Celtic Knots to Cú Cullen. Irish Mythology is rad, and you can see some examples here (*Red’s videos*), but there’s also all manner of gods, heroes, and some pretty bonkers magic too. Sadly, we don’t have as much information on them as we might like, because the Irish mythological cycle wasn’t codified until centuries later, and parts of it have since been lost. Plus, the stories themselves sometimes conflict with one another on account of how regional these oral traditions were. Though we today only know so much about early Celtic Ireland, the picture gets clearer and the culture gets richer with Ireland’s second big arrival: Christianity. Ireland got the good end of the deal on this one, because their conversion was peaceful, and it didn’t involve them getting invaded by Rome. Quite the opposite in fact, as Irish pirates often found their way to the western coast of Roman Britain. In one instance, a captured young Roman lived in Ireland for 6 years before escaping back to Britain. After some soul-searching, he trained in France to become a priest and set back out to Ireland in the hopes of converting the people to Christianity. Though he wasn’t the first missionary to Ireland, this Saint Patrick as you’ve probably guessed was certainly the most consequential. The dates for his life and career are all over the place, and there’s even a theory that “Saint Patrick” is actually an amalgamation of two different characters (but this show is “History Summarized” and I am super not qualified to settle very-much ongoing debates in the academic historical community), BUT, what we can say for certain is that he didn’t drive the Snakes out of Ireland. – Hi, me again, pardon the interruption, but quick addendum: he didn’t kill any pagans either. That’s all propaganda from centuries later out of a medieval dynasty who sought to leverage Patrick’s clout for their own political ambitions over Ireland. The snakes, the pagans, and even his prominence in Irish Christianity is a wacky side-effect of medieval Irish politics. Bottom line: he didn’t drive anything or anyone outta anywhere – because Celtic culture didn’t just go away. It’s a classic example of Syncretism, where the goal is to make two disparate cultures coexist rather than have one completely supplant the other. Latin was introduced, but it was spoken right alongside Irish Gaelic. Monasteries were built all around the island, but they were regionally autonomous. Jesus was the new #1, but the old Irish mythology remained firmly in the popular conscience. And the timing of all this couldn’t have been luckier, because while mainland Europe was splintering out into dozens of Gothic kingdoms in the wake of the Western Roman Empire, Ireland just got a jolt of new culture to play with and about 400 years of peace to refine it. The strongest literary tradition in Europe was made in Irish monasteries, often called Scriptoria, where accounts of Old Irish mythology were written alongside beautifully decorated manuscripts of the Bible. All around, Ireland was known as the Isle of Saints and Scholars, and it’s because of their hard work that so much ancient Latin work survives today. Irish Missionaries to Europe laid the groundwork for Charlemagne’s 9th century Renaissance in France. It’s also during this golden age that we see and hear two core symbols of Irish culture — the Celtic Cross and the Harp. The cross appears in stone all over Ireland, and it’s a perfect visual metaphor for how Irish Celtic culture is literally woven into Irish Christianity. Again, all this while the rest of Europe was having some serious, let’s call it growing pains. Although Ireland was decentralized in both government and religion, it enjoyed over 4 centuries of peace between the numerous Tuatha and no threat of invasion. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and all shiny things must get raided by Vikings. And speaking of Vikings: VIKINGS. Though Ireland didn’t get hit quite as bad as the English and Scots one island over, Ireland saw its fair share of coastal looting and burning. Monasteries were an easy target because of their abundance of treasures like gemstone-covered manuscripts and their non-abundance of defensive fortifications. The Vikings did, however, contribute Ireland’s first cities of Dublin, Cork, Waterford, and others settled along the island’s coasts. As the Vikings got comfortable in their cities and chilled out enough to stop with the raiding, their cities became hubs for trade and production. Ultimately though, Ireland’s much bigger problem for the next thousand years would come from right across the channel. Oh gosh would you look at the clock, it looks like it’s time to COMPLAIN ABOUT ENGLAND WOO! Ahem, sorry, professionalism. So while Ireland was having a good time minding its own business, the Anglo-Normans came over to establish the Lordship of Ireland, which sounds a lot more, uh, complete, than it actually was. England held onto the urban population centers in the east, but because of stuff like wars and plague, it was pretty patchy for the next 5 centuries. But in 1509 Henry VIII became king and decided he wants to be a really big deal, so it’s here that things start getting rough. See, Henry converted to Protestantism after he got tired of killing his wives and wanted to just divorce them instead, but Ireland stayed firmly Catholic. This displeased Henry, so he made a new push to colonize Ireland, and England made steady progress in Beating Up on the Irish, taking more and more of their land, and busting down their monasteries and churches. Unsurprisingly, the Irish rebelled, multiple times. In the decade after the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603, King James confiscated Irish land in the northern region of Ulster to make way for Scottish colonists to start private plantations. And this marks the start of a couple defining trends for the next three centuries: first is the treatment of Ireland as a subservient colony and the steady seizure of Irish land, and also the persecution of Irish Catholicism through strict social laws. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish farmers became tenants in their own island, and this process only accelerated with the advent of Anti-Royalist-and-Civil-War-Extraordinaire Oliver Cromwell, who murdered his way across Ireland during his War of the Three Kingdoms. More land was confiscated, Catholic Irish were forcibly evicted and also barred from certain jobs, and for the next 300 years, Ireland was regarded as little more than a conquered colony. Although the anti-catholic laws were largely repealed by the turn of the 19th century, Ireland was poorer going into the 1800s than it had arguably ever been, as its production and wealth were systematically siphoned off to Britain. Only the British pockets of the island in Dublin and Ulster saw much improvement, and it was these “Ulster-Irish” who spoke for Ireland in the new United Kingdom’s Parliament. If this all sounds short-sighted, exploitative, and extremely fragile, you’d be correct. But wait, it only gets worse. See, Ireland’s agriculture was, well, dangerously precarious. Most of their food production was beef exports to Britain, and that didn’t leave a whole lot of available farmland on Ireland for feeding the Irish. So the tenant-farmers turned to potatoes, which had by far the most nutritional value for the space they took to grow. Not super great that the systematic exploitation of their land forced Catholic Irish to subsist entirely on a single food staple for generations, but at least they’re not starving. SO, anyway, in 1846 the Potato Blight hit Ireland and all of the crops failed, and then people started starving. … COOL. Sigh. Thing is, potato crops were going rotten across America and Europe, Ireland was just the only place where potatoes were the only option. But with the crisis at hand, Parliament acted swiftly to provide rations and relief to— No I’m just kidding, parliamentarians in London insisted that the reports of famine were overblown and refused to divert resources for aid. Help did slowly arrive but it was predicated on putting Ireland through economic reforms to modernize their infrastructure. Yeah, because that’s what Ireland was asking for: not food, god no, Laissez-Faire Mercantilism. Way to read the room, guys. Eventually the blight passed and things slowly returned to normal, but not before 1 in 7 people died of starvation, and 1 in 4 fled to places like America (This is why places like New York and Boston have big Irish communities that materialize out of nowhere in the late 1840s). And real quick before we move on to the 1900s, it’s not a coincidence that the areas least affected by the famine were the Protestant parts. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Britain was also busy shutting down the last remaining Hedge-Schools that taught Greek and Latin to Catholic kids. Ireland’s Catholicism produced the longest continuous tradition of Greek and Latin anywhere on earth, but god forbid kids who aren’t Anglican be allowed to learn. So, what to do from here. If you’re the population of Ireland in the early 1900s, the answer was “literally anything else,” and that echoed in a call for Home Rule and their own independent government. However, Ulster was still fiercely unionist, and it almost looked like pro-union and pro-home-rule paramilitary groups were going to start fighting about it when World War I suddenly became a much more pressing issue. But on Easter of 1916, Irish insurgents occupied government buildings in Dublin, so the British army shelled them into surrender and then executed the rebel leaders. This you may guess, didn’t sit super great with the Irish public, so as soon as the World War was over, Ireland fought a guerrilla War of Independence, and in 1922 it was granted Home Rule as their own Free State under the British Crown. In the late 30s and 40s, Ireland transitioned into a fully independent republic. Ulster, however, opted to stay in the UK and became known as Northern Ireland. The split between north and south came to a head in the latter part of the century, as Northern Irish Catholics still faced discrimination, and their peaceful protests met violent opposition. This erupted into “The Troubles”, 3 decades of insurgency, terrorism, and police brutality in Northern Ireland, as IRA irregulars fought against Ulster Volunteer forces and British police to end British rule in Northern Ireland. After some 3,500 casualties, most of them civilian, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 mandated that Northern Ireland could vote to unify with the Republic of Ireland at any time they liked, and that there would never be a hard border on the island between north and sou—Euuuugh oh god not again Jeez, even when Irish history lets up, it doesn’t let up. Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland enacted a series of economic and political reforms to lift the country out of hundreds of years of poverty, and today the people of Ireland are safer, richer, better fed, and freer to express their religion than they’ve been in centuries. It’s distressing to see Ireland so cruelly oppressed for so long, but it’s inspiring to see the past century’s reclamation of Irish culture and their long-deserved independence. In Ireland, history is never far away — the legacy of their centuries-long Golden Age is everywhere from the Celtic Cross to the Irish language, and the painful memory of the Great Famine has transformed Ireland into a world leader in international food aid. And I’ll gladly raise a pint to that. Yeah, compared to the cushy cities of lowlands Scotland, Ireland has a significantly longer list of grievances to air. But I do want to follow this idea of perspective and ladders of oppression with a brief tangent to the Irish experience in America. As mentioned, the Potato Famine of the 1840s and ‘50s precipitated a migration of over a million and a half Irish to America, hoping for a better life, or at least some food. But once there, they encountered similar kinds of Anti-Catholic discrimination from the overwhelmingly Protestant population. Before the famine, the Irish presence in America was a roughly-even mix of Protestant Scots-Irish from the Ulster region up north and Catholics from the other regions of Ireland. Now, on paper, all this distinction is mainly Religious, but it spilled out to a whole construction of ethnicity that categorized the industrious Anglo-Teutonic population as an entirely separate stock from the lowly brutish Hibernians, providing a quasi-scientific justification for ethnic discrimination. In the 16 & 1700s, Irish migration largely landed in the countryside, but the famine brought in a very large and very Catholic population very quickly, and they clustered heavily into America’s cities. This in turn triggered a fierce nativist backlash against foreigners and Catholics, with parties like the so-called “Know-Nothings” fighting against what they perceived as a foreign conspiracy by violently terrorizing Irish migrant communities. Bad time. The Irish found themselves very far down on the social ladder – they weren’t suffering a famine but they weren’t meaningfully more accepted by American society than they had been by the British. However, the difference here was they weren’t at the bottom of the social ladder, and they ultimately gained mainstream acceptance by pushing down against other vulnerable groups. First was against America’s Black population, as the Irish arrived right on the eve of the Civil War. In the south, Irish supported the Confederacy to gain favor with native southerners, separated by religion but unified in their whiteness. Up in the Union, Irish considered the freedom of Black people a direct threat to their jobs and their communities, resorting to violence just as the Know Nothings had done against them a decade earlier. In the century following the Civil War, they further climbed the social ladder as they grew in numbers and became a fixture in society. But discrimination remained, and so did the strategy of playing on in-groups and out-groups. Irish-Americans preyed on fears about growing immigration from even more foreign places like China, and appealed to a shared ancestry from the Isles to win mainstream acceptance in American culture. It worked, but the cost of escaping their oppression was further perpetuating it below them. So just as we saw Scotland’s complexities with the lowlands and highlands and its own role in the British Empire, likewise Ireland also has its nuances. In fact, that same century as Irish Americans were deep in the cycle of discrimination, Ireland was working to break it, as their 100 newly-added members of the UK Parliament were instrumental in voting to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself while simultaneously pushing to end the harsh Anti-Catholic laws. One liberation did not preclude the other – Both is good. SO, Juggling multiple perspectives is already tough, but as we investigate deeper, perspectives become fractal. Every history will be guilty of omitting something, but we can at least appreciate the scope of the challenge a little better. Now, we’ve got one more Constituent Kingdom to uncover, so let’s hop back across the water and over to Wales! The history of the British Isles is an uneven affair, to put it mildly. We’re familiar with how Scotland and Ireland drew the imperial short stick and enjoyed the pleasure of being sat upon by England. But perhaps the shortest stick of the bunch was drawn by Wales, who is often left out of the discussion entirely! And while I’m shocked that anybody could gloss over the country that has a freakin’ Dragon Flag, Wales has been tragically sidelined from the historical narrative of the isles, and I will not stand for it. Wales has impressively and improbably maintained a distinct Celtic culture since the very start, and it is far too cool for historians to be doing them dirty like that. So, to see how Wales did the hard-carry for Great Britain’s culture for 2,000 straight years, Let’s do some History. A proper understanding of this whole “Wales” business requires us to go wayyy back in British history — Nope, too far — yeah there we go! See, Celtic culture in Britain is the foundation of what will eventually become Wales, but these guys aren’t the easiest to get a handle on. The Celtic or Gallic people stretched out from Central Europe towards Gaul, Iberia, and the British Isles, but also went southeast towards the Black Sea, and one problem for us loser historians is that it’s unclear how and even kinda “IF” they settled in Britain. There are competing theories for Who When Where and Why, ranging from the standard Migration models to the possibility that very few Celts actually settled in Britain. Logic being that oversea trade was key to the Bronze Age economy, and Britain’s tin deposits made them a big export hub. Since tin is half the chemical structure for bronze, that meant people from all over Europe and the Mediterranean came to the Atlantic coasts to get their bronze on, and this includes our Celt-bois. So it wasn’t mass migration that brought Celtic people to Britain, but rather local Britons who buddied up with Celtic traders by speaking their language and copying their swirly La Tène art. So according to this “Meme” model, the local Britons thought Celtic culture was LOL So Relatable XD that they adopted it all up and down the isles. Whether or not this model is fully accurate, it would account for some weird archaeological and linguistic discrepancies in the traditional migration theory, and it also foreshadows the prestige placed on bards and literary prowess by later Celtic cultures. Because it’s equal parts cool as all hell and existentially horrifying that a culture can, basically by itself, take hold of an entire population by willing itself into existence. This would be our first indication that Wales has Big Eldritch Energy. Other civilizations, however, would not follow this lead, because the Romans found that culture was best delivered by spear-point. While on their way to fill out their pan-imperial punch-card and get their 10th new province free, Roman emperors in the mid-first-century campaigned into Britain. Most Roman settlements were in the south and east where all the easy agriculture was, and although Goods, Coins, and Roman Legions did make their way west, the cultural and linguistic impact on so-called Britannia Secunda was only slight. Perhaps the most transformative thing the Romans did in Wales was leave, because the Post-Roman migrations from central Europe into Britain totally upended the island’s demographics. Frustratingly, it’s nigh-impossible to show this kind of thing clearly on a map, which is why turbulent centuries in history with slim documentation make Blue a sad boy, but here’s the gist. We know the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from northern Europe arrived and displaced many of the Romano-Britons, but over in the west there was also an influx of Irish Celts coming in to settle. This Age of Migrations was much more overtly migratory than the Celtic arrival in Britain the millennium before, though, again, the native Britons didn’t really leave. After a few decades of raiding gave way to much more peaceable settlement, most Britons were happy to start speaking Germanic and make friends with their new Saxon neighbors than to up and book it for the hills. Still, the end result was the confinement of native Celtic culture to the far west in Wales and Cornwall. And that split explains why it’s called “Wales” — it comes from the Germanic word Walha, meaning Foreigner, while the Welsh call it Cymru, from the Celtic word for Countrymen. It’s also in this migratory shuffle that the legend of the Romano-British King Arthur first pops up, though it’ll be a couple centuries before he’s labeled as Arthur, or a King. Honestly, the whole early medieval period in Wales has this pseudo-mythic, Age-of-Heroes vibe to it. Good documentation is Bleh, what else is new, but the oral traditions that will later become the core of Welsh epic literature get their start in this era. So as far as we can tell, what was going on in medieval Wales? Well, isolation from Germanic-majority England was good for preserving a unified Celtic culture, but the politics were much more wibbly. Various local princes vied for hegemony over the many disparate realms, but succession always proved their undoing, as sons would squabble and big kingdoms would shrink back to where they started. The princes of Gwynedd and Powys were the most successful of the bunch, and as a result, King Offa of Mercia built a dyke across his border in the late 700s to try and keep Powys out. But that worked about as well as any frontier walls have worked throughout history, which is to say, barely. So despite the best attempts of Saxon Kings and the Irish Sea, Wales wasn’t entirely cut off from the rest of the world, as they had gotten onboard with Christianity thanks to the Missionary St. David back in the 6th century. They might not have been the most consistent of pen-pals with the Pope in Rome, but they were mostly on the same page. Wales’ early medieval history of relative chill was aided by England’s near-constant Viking tire-fire, which pushed “conquer Wales” wayyy down the To-Do list. But that changed when our old pals the Normans Kite-Shielded their way to conquering England. Because suddenly this new Norman England had a much stronger army, and they proceeded to point it right at Wales. Norman lords pushed into Wales along the northern and southern coasts, and made some but not a lot of progress. Since Wales was made of small principalities, the Normans could play the Welsh off each other, but then all of their gains were only incremental. Not so easy as winning Hastings and calling it a day. While casual war was the standard for the next two-hundred years along the borderland Marches, elements of Anglo-Norman and Welsh culture made their way across. The princes of Gwynedd, Powys, and Deheubarth picked up some Norman political structures, and England learned about Welsh Longbows the hard way. Although Wales didn’t form into a unified nation, they did get close a couple times. Llywelyn Fawr fought off his family members to become prince of Gwynedd and proceeded to bap all of his enemies out of the way so that he could assert his hegemony over Wales. He also tried to streamline the rules for royal succession so every interregnum didn’t immediately explode into a civil war. He then pushed eastward into the March and defeated King John of England so handily that his Barons made him sign the Magna Carta to stop being such a royal knob. Llywelyn’s military successes weren’t quite matched by his grandson, uh, also Llywelyn. Though he did the Biggest Prince In Wales routine again, he was defeated by England’s King Edward Longshanks. The next year, in 1283, Edward pushed into Wales and stomped out the princes, using the old Norman trick of building a buttload of castles in newly conquered territory to stop the locals from getting ideas. In a twist that should surprise no one. England needed more than a few of these to do the trick, so Wales has the highest castle-density of any country in Europe, with over 600 built and 100 still standing today. That is, and I really cannot stress this enough, a stupid amount of castles. That’s the density-equivalent of twenty-three castles in New York City, with a less-impressive but still formidable two castles just in Manhattan. Good Lord. In any case, the Post-Conquest period was a weird century for Wales. Suddenly they were subordinate to England, but soon they got tied up in the 100 years war and then everybody had Plague to contend with. So while it was a real wacky time, it was also surprisingly indicative of the history still to come, as England goes about its business while holding a pillow over Wales’ face, gently shushing them and hoping nobody notices. Forgive me for speed-running the next several centuries but I’ve already done the England plotline once and that was painful enough. A century after a thwarted independence uprising in 1400, Wales had the good fortune to pull a reverso and put a Welshman on the English throne. The man in question was one Henry 7, notable ender of the War of the Roses, and he set Wales up for greater integration with England and way more rights than they had before. This all became official via the Laws in Wales Acts passed by Henry 8 in the mid 1500s. He drew up county borders, standardized laws, gave Welshmen equal status as Englishmen, and gave Wales representation in parliament. And as an added bonus of Henry’s hop over to Protestantism, the church translated the Bible into Welsh. This protection of the Welsh language coincided with a new interest in medieval culture and ancient literature, and Language became a defining feature of the Welsh identity. While all this was going on, the political story of Wales got folded into the larger English narrative, what with the Spanish Armada-ing, the Union-Of-The-Crowns-Of-England-And-Scotland-ing, and the Creation-Of-A-Globe-Spanning-Empire-ing. Despite playing second fiddle… eh, well, maybe closer to fourth — in the history of the British Empire, Welsh literature was rising in prominence during the Romantic movement, thanks in part to some shiny new editions of classic works. Specifically, Lady Charlotte Guest compiled and published the four branches of the Mabinogi; and doubly translated too, so Welsh and English readers could both enjoy the medieval folklore. In contrast to Scots Gaelic going kaput and Irish Gaelic suffering a steep decline in the 1800s that they’re only recently bouncing back from, Welsh literature and poetry came in clutch for the long-term endurance of the language. But while the Romantic era was in full swing, so too was the Industrial Revolution. So all these fancy new machines and choo choo trains needed coal if they wanted to do anything, and Wales happened to have a crap ton of the stuff. Southern Wales swiftly became the mining capital of the empire, and while coal and slate may have been big busines, they were also hellish jobs to work. So Wales ended the century more urbanized than it had ever been, but the Welsh probably weren’t so thrilled about why, especially as British attitudes towards them soured and Wales got the dingy reputation shared by all other regions doing heavy industry. Although the 1900s started out pretty rough, what with the coal mining and a nasty spell of discrimination against the Welsh language in schools and work, Wales turned a corner after the Second World War. Industry diversified, and politicians campaigned for more regional autonomy and protections for the language. The Welsh Language Acts of 1967 and ’93 elevated Welsh to par with English: granting bilingual signage, the right to use Welsh in legal proceedings, and Welsh-language broadcasting. So now, a third of Wales can speak the native language. And in 1999, Wales (and also Scotland but that’s a different story) got its own national assembly, later promoted to Parliament. And that’s Wales! Far too often sidelined in the history of the isles, Wales has an enchanting historical vibe the other 3 countries lack. Maybe it’s the ancient Celtic language and the dragon flag getting to me, but Wales feels older, like you can wander slightly too far off a hiking trail and stumble into Narnia. As anybody who knows Welsh can confirm, it just sounds like the language Dragons would speak. And I know better than to disrespect the Dragon-Lords. Of all the accomplishments and legacies of the medieval world, few things capture the popular imagination like Castles. These stone-built cities in miniature at once reflect the staggeringly long history of warfare as well as the splendor of royalty and the remarkable brightness of these cultures. From kings and their knights to governing officials, visiting dignitaries, traveling merchants and agricultural locals, medieval life at every level unfolded within their towering walls, and these great citadels stand as a built record of that history. And they’re the kind of multipurpose structures where functions overlap – a wide scenic view is a strategic asset for spotting incoming armies, so most castles are smack in the middle of the most beautiful vistas imaginable, and that aesthetic spiffiness in turn becomes a point of prestige for the castle’s owner. Power, peril, and more than a little prettiness are all wrapped up in these castles. But perhaps the simplest reason they captivate us is because we just don’t make them anymore. Old cities are gorgeous, but we still have cities, churches and temples are plenty impressive, but those are everywhere, and even the grandest civic buildings have an air of normalness to them because people go to the place for their jobs. But castles are a relic of a time we do not live in, and that otherworldliness makes them fascinating. The reasons they were built, the shapes they took, the decorations they had, the ways they fell into ruin, all these factors are so distant to us that we see castles more as strongholds of fantasy than a living system where society and warfare converged. And I likewise struggled to wrap my head around these things until I came to Wales and saw a few for myself. Welsh castles are so numerous compared to the modest size of the place that Wales is the most castle-dense country on earth. Given England is right next door, we can guess they weren’t built for fun. Now most of these castles have survived, albeit in different states of functionality or completeness, so to better understand how they worked and what they meant for the story of Wales, let’s do some History. The tale of Castles in Britain goes back to Roman times and their abundant need of them to deal with those rowdy Celts. At a minimum, most every town with -Chester or Caer- gets its name from the Latin Castrum, and was originally built as a Roman military fort. Roman Britain was a “forts first, towns later” kind of place. But while the England-y bits were full of spiffy cities by the height of the empire, Roman presence in Wales was one maybe two towns and forts for days. Much like Hadrian’s Wall for Scotland, this amount of historical troublemaking is a dear source of Welsh pride. One millennium later, some of these spots got repurposed after the Norman Conquest for a new age of castle-building. See, in 1066 William the Conqueror won the entire kingdom after a single battle, but he needed some new strategies in order to hold onto it. What followed was the heftiest single wave of castle-building in British history. With a whole kingdom to pacify and not much time to do it, William and his nobles started by locking down key cities and protecting lines of supply and communication along rivers or old Roman roads – By the end of the century they’d built several hundred castles across England and South Wales. A small handful of these were made of stone, but the rest were built from wood as a Motte and Bailey: an earthwork hill with a central keep on top and a fortified garrison below with stables, storehouses, and anything else the castle-owner would like to have behind a wall. These first castles may not conjure all the Dramatic Medieval VibesTM, but they were quick to build and plenty effective at stopping mass uprisings against the new Norman government – even an architecture gremlin like myself can’t fault their definitely-correct priorities. English castles transitioned to stone over the next century, with new and newly-refurbished castles opting for a more permanent material than wood – In Wales, however, Norman rule was substantially less established, so the ease and versatility of timber castles kept them in use well into the 1200s. But even from the Normans’ first arrival, the key difference from England is Wales did not come pre-conquered, so castles were built offensively rather than defensively, and in practice that meant they were built faster, far more often, much closer together, and against an organized enemy also building castles. Both the Norman lords in the southern borderlands – called the “Marches” – as well as the Welsh princes themselves were castling seemingly every river and valley in Wales. These offensive castles often skipped the motte completely and just built a fortified earthwork bailey, what we sometimes call a Ringwork castle; and as the frontiers shifted over the 10-to-1200s, old castles were abandoned while new ones were built to suit the current strategic needs. And that is exhausting to catalogue at scale, so let’s zoom into Caerphilly Castle, one of the most consequential and best preserved castles in the country. Originally the site of a Roman fort, Caerphilly began construction all the way in 1268. Cardiff castle, by contrast, was built just 7 miles south along the coast two centuries earlier – Conquering Wales, clearly a fraught process. Timetables notwithstanding, this castle was built by the noble de Clare family, who added the Welsh county of Glamorgan to their already impressive portfolio of estates in 1217. In the 1260s, the young Gilbert de Clare helped win a civil war between the King and his Barons, and then turned his focus north to the alarming threat of the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. To protect his inland holdings and defend Cardiff itself if things got really bad, Gilbert de Clare began work on Caerphilly castle in 1268. It was built entirely of stone, but seeing as that takes more time, it was still vulnerable enough for Prince Llywelyn to attack and possibly even destroy the castle in 1270. Construction resumed the next year in the new Concentric style with nestled layers of fortifications; in this case, two rivers and three outer walls. Thanks to a brief peace, the castle was finished in the mid 1270s, just in time for the new English king Edward to launch a final campaign to conquer Wales. And with the prince defeated in 1282, Wales was no longer a constant warzone, so Gilbert swiftly reassessed the purpose of his castle, converting it into a fine country estate in the following decades. The fortifications on Caerphilly remain gorgeous in their scope and complexity, and de Clare recognized the prestige to be had from a swanky castle, as even though the Welsh threat had passed, he continued renovating and expanding the defenses for seemingly aesthetic purposes alone. There’s no strategic reason to make outermost walls symmetrical except matchy shapes make happy brain go brr. By his death, Caerphilly had turned from a wartime fortress into a palace fit for a minor royal. The castle’s story continues through decades of aristocratic escapades, but in the 1640s, Caerphilly’s peaceful quiet turned to ruin during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, when hundreds of castles across The Isles were battered by a new and very unsporting tactic called “torrential canon-fire”, and many of the castles that survived were deliberately wrecked after the war to render them useless. Such was the case with Caerphilly, hence the dramatic lean on the southeast tower, and so it remained until the 1920s and ‘30s when the Marquess of Bute launched a contentiously thorough reconstruction project, one of several in Wales around this time. Spectators in the historical community as well as the British government had and still have deep misgivings about the scope of the transformation and the irreversible damage to the original ruins, but man is it something else to be able to walk over a drawbridge, through a gatehouse, out to the courtyard, into the great hall, and up along the walls and towers. It’s the rare chance to engage with a complete medieval castle. It conflicts me, yet it compels me. The history of Castles in Wales continues up north, where king Edward cemented his victory by stuffing the place with more castles, just like the first Normans had done after their conquest; and the royal castles of the north are the grandest and most impressive in Wales on account of all that Crown Money. Here too, they shifted to luxurious residences over time as royal power solidified and warfare in Britain became the exception rather than the rule. Wales got its last new castle at Raglan in the mid 1400s, and aside from a handful renovated by the Tudor monarchs, Welsh castles retreated to the background – a legacy of conquests and an older, distant era. By the time Caerphilly was ruined, nobody knew who built it or when, with explanations ranging from ancient Roman forts to a legendary pre-christian king of Britain. Wildly off-base, but when an air of fantastical mystery winds through every hall and tower, it’s hard to fight that reflex. Wales is not defined by its castles, but they are the most potent physical relic of a winding, lively history, and the simple act of walking into one rockets you back to a time when that story was being written; river by river, valley by valley, castle by castle. With Wales now neatly wrapped up, that rounds out our set of four national histories in the Isles. The last big tale left to tell is the British Empire, where the nations don’t just intersect with each other, but starting in the 1600s they begin to operate, willingly or unwillingly, as one cohesive unit. But before we tackle the Isles as a whole, I want to play with our perspective again, keeping our focus on each of the 4 countries, but zooming in, below the state level, down to specific centers of power in the form of their cities. If you want to scope out all of modern history from a single vantage point, you can do a heck of a lot worse than London. The capital of England got itself an involuntary fresh start in 1666 when the old medieval city burned to the dust. So with a blank canvas and a hefty allowance from the ever-expanding British Empire, London rolled out a flurry of shiny new buildings, fancy church spires, and the Neoclassical Colossus that is St Paul’s Cathedral. that’s a good dome. As the empire grew and London became even more prosperous, public mega-works continued with a new seat for the British Parliament at the Neogothic Westminster Palace. In the 1800s, London was sporting some of Europe’s hottest architecture, but soon came the industrial revolution, which literally upended the entire city: coal-burning factories blew smoke into the sky, railway stations the size of cathedrals transported people goods and materials, the world’s first subway system carved tunnels underneath the city, and the population swelled by a factor of seven with newcomers from the isles and across the worldwide empire. Such vast and rapid transformation gives London a fair claim to being the first Modern City. And all the while, London was the driving engine of the world’s biggest empire — heck of a vantage point indeed. When Scotland signed the Act of Union with England in 1707, their old capital city of Edinburgh was in rough shape. The hilltop castle was a scenic reminder of Scotland’s famously combative medieval history, but the city around it was small, dark, cramped, and unimaginably filthy. The one ace up Scotland’s sleeve were the Scots themselves, who took the Protestant Reformation as an excuse to whip up one of the most free-thinking and robust education systems you’d find anywhere. This kicked up an intellectual whirlwind in the 1700s, as Scottish philosophers, economists, historians, poets, and scientists made Edinburgh the cerebral capital of Enlightenment Europe. Before too long, Scots were relived and probably a bit impressed to see their city finally catch up with their heads. Starting in 1767, Edinburgh drained the Nor Loch and built a gridded, orderly, and oh-so-NeoClassical New Town on the other side. Not to be outdone, Victorian architects in the late 1800s remodeled the Old Town in a gorgeous NeoGothic, so I see this as an absolute win. Edinburgh prospered off of a ballooning British Empire, but it largely sidestepped the Industrial Revolution, instead remaining the academic, architectural, and administrative heart of Scotland: a city shaped by the very ideas it represents. Not only did Wales play Second-Fiddle to England for the millennium since its conquest by the Normans, but Wales had never been one for big urban centers. Architecturally, it was better known for the absolute ass-ton of castles the Normans built to keep Wales in line, such as Cardiff Castle, set on top of an old Roman fort from a thousand years earlier. But in the 1800s, Cardiff suddenly became an integral link in the chain of British cities because of a little old thing called coal. During the Industrial Revolution, this precious rock let all the trains go choo choo and made all of Britain’s fancy new machines actually do anything, and southern Wales happened to be loaded with the stuff. After some initial upgrades to the dockyards in the early 1800s, Cardiff became one of the busiest ports in the world by the middle of the century, with all Welsh coal flowing through their docks and railyards to reach the rest of Britain and beyond. In the Victorian period, Brits poured into Wales in general and Cardiff in particular, ratcheting up the city’s population from 2,000 to over Eighty times that (170k) by 1900. While the city took new shape, it also polished up Cardiff Castle and other original structures. At the turn of the millennium, Cardiff became the seat of the new Welsh Senedd, and built itself a lovely parliament building. From one castle to the capital is quite the glow-up. Dublin is the city that dragged Ireland kicking and screaming through its history. It was first founded in the 800s by Viking traders (raiders), and after the initial Norman conquests of 1169, nice, it was the main English foothold in Ireland for the next 5 centuries. Holding the dubious distinction of being England’s first colony, Dublin was the biggest urban center on the island. And it would receive quite the makeover following its hammering in the British Civil Wars. Replanned basically from scratch, the new Dublin was packed with enlightenment ideals: wide streets, classical designs, and splendid public buildings. Built by and for British protestants with boatloads of Empire Money, the native Catholic Irish population was distinctly among the lower of Dublin’s classes, and this caused some tension. In 1798 the Irish rebelled (again), tried to capture Dublin, but succeeded only in antagonizing the British for another straight century. Don’t worry, they kept on rebelling, culminating in the Easter Rising in 1916, Ireland’s three-year war for independence in 1919, and a brief civil war ending in ‘23 — all of them fought in the streets of Dublin, which became the capital of the Irish Republic. Buildings like its post office capture the city’s history: a grand Georgian edifice, riddled with bullet holes from the Easter Rising. A beautiful city… kicking and screaming. As British architects throughout history have bragged, the monument to their empire is the cities they left behind. The numerous faults of the British Empire notwithstanding, those architects had a point. These cities didn't just find cool new ways to stack up stone, but they set the model for how modern cities interacted and meaningfully reinforced each other, both ideologically and industrially. With any of these pieces missing, Britain wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as it was. But what might be most impressive is how rapidly they all redefined themselves, basically from scratch, inside of only a century or two. But critically, they kept the castles! Are they practically useful? Mostly not. Are they sick as hell? Yes. Credit to the Brits, they make some damn fine cities. And now, with the context established from four countries, their capitals, several kings, a playwright and a very messy language, let’s tie it all together for the history of the Empire. British History is famously kind of impossible. The individual sagas of the Isles up to 1600 were already plenty complex on their own — but after England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland become a geopolitical megazord, those stories interlock, and then things get really tricky. But that’s just the British part, because we also have the little subject of their Empire, as the following four centuries see a globetrotting whirlwind of exploration and colonization that culminates in the single most cartoonishly-humongous empire in human history. So, in a noble but fundamentally doomed attempt to recount the interwoven stories of Britain and her Empire, [oof], Let’s Do Some History. When last we left the Isles, Scotland’s King James inherited the English Crown in 1603, and luckily avoided being exploderized by the diabolical John Johnson and his fellow Gunpowder Junkies. Their plan was certainly extreme, and their idiocy was correspondingly immense, but their religiously-motivated discontent was broadly reflective of the public’s mood. The Protestant Reformation took various shapes across Europe, and this very-recently-albeit-loosely-unified Britain was running the full spectrum. Ireland was still majority Catholic, Scotland’s was Presbyterian Protestant, and England was a right mix. The Anglican Church was firmly protestant, but maintained Catholic-style ceremonies and administration. This sat poorly with England’s Catholic and Nonconformist Protestant minorities as well as almost all Scots and Irish. A century earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem, but now that Ireland Scotland and England were ruled by the same king, they needed to play nice, and none of them wanted to. Add to this tension that the King and Parliament were now openly antagonistic, as in 1629 King Charles dismissed parliament entirely, for 11 years, and when he begrudgingly brought them back to raise taxes to finance a war against Scottish Protestants, Parliament allied with the Scots against the King, defeated him in war in 1646, and executed him on charges of treason in ‘49! Parliament then abolished the monarchy, and for the next decade they governed the isles as a Republic. Catholic Ireland disliked the fiercely protestant English Government, and Scots were understandably upset to hear that the English Parliament had Murdered their Scottish King, so another round of war ensued. Scotland was straightforwardly beaten into submission but Ireland was devastated, with between 10 and 25% of the population killed and all but Connacht fully confiscated by England. And this was not the first such conquest, as King James sent British colonists to Northern Ireland to establish the Ulster Plantations in 1609. By the late 1600s, Ireland was blatantly treated as a colony: not protestant, not Britain, very exploitable. And we see that same logic applied to the Virginia colony in 1607 and other new-world endeavors thereafter. Back in Britain, Lord Protector Cromwell died in 1658, and in his absence, the Republic started floundering. So, here’s a swerve for you, they asked the King to come back. In 1660 the Stuarts returned, but they wouldn’t stay for long, because King James II was, uh oh, Super Catholic, so in 1688 parliament swerved a-yet-again by extending an invitation to the King’s Anglican daughter Mary and her very protestant husband Prince William of Orange, to, uh, throw a coup! A coup is better than an outright civil war, but Scotland and Ireland did rebel in discontent, and England brought the hammer down hard. Meanwhile, in deposing and replacing a monarch, Parliament had all-new leverage over the state, and essentially invented the concept of Constitutional Monarchy. The hefty political implications of that will unfold over the next few centuries, but an immediate consequence was Dutch-boy William’s hometown rivalry with France becoming England’s business. And this geopolitical Deja-Vu will define the “Long 18th Century”, as France and Britain compete in a Second Hundred Years’ War, both in Europe and all across their brand-new empires. Inspired by the maritime mastery of Spain and Portugal, Britain sailed across the Atlantic to snag some colonies of their own, founding Virginia in 1607 and continuing with a flurry of expeditions from the Caribbean all the way up the Atlantic coast and around Hudson’s Bay. In 1664 they captured the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, renamed it New York, and by the end of the century Britain was running a solid operation — London and west-British ports were bustling with imported furs, tobacco, cotton, and sugar. Seeing the opportunity to literally grow money, Britain took a page out of Portugal’s colonial playbook, and began buying up vast amounts of Africans to work as slaves over in the new world. And this was the infamous Triangle Trade: British guns and textiles pay for slaves, who then staff increasingly massive plantations, and those crops sell in Europe for boatloads of money, rinse, repeat, buy more slaves. Africans were treated as little more than the Raw Materials of Empire: overworked, given nothing, and brutally abused. A fifth would die crossing the Atlantic, and the average life expectancy upon arrival was just 7 years. This was almost abhorrent enough to make people think twice before they remembered how obscenely rich it was making them. Slaves made money, money made armies, and armies made empire, rinse, repeat, buy more slaves. In Britain, this cycle paid for improvements in government bureaucracy and overhauled all of finance with innovations like the Central Bank, and during the 1700s, these early successes just kept on compounding. 1702: France tries out for the Spanish crown and Britain makes them pay for it with Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, plus they take Gibraltar from Spain, so now Britain decides who gets in and out of the Mediterranean. 1740: Britain dunks on the French Navy because they can. 1754: British and French colonists fight over who gets North America, and two years later all of Europe is throwing hands at each other. Britain’s massive pocketbooks let them throw infinity money at the problem, so they take French Quebec and the Mississippi river valley, push France out of India, and with this field to themselves, begin steamrolling all of India. The 7 Years War doubled the size of the British empire and knocked out every outside threat, so now they just needed to keep it together… and naturally they didn’t. See, when the British imposed new taxes on stamps and tea to pay for the ludicrously expensive war they just fought, American colonists were furious to be treated like, gasp, a colony! So they started asking the philosophical questions at the core of self-determination, such as: “Hey, King George, what’s the opposite of Tea? Y E E T.” Worse yet, France was egging them on. And then, they got ideas. Of course, the French Revolution is a philosophical and political doozy all on its own, but what matters for us is that France threw down the gauntlet with basically everyone and conquered nearly all of mainland Europe. Britain withstood a continental trade embargo and even blocked an attempted invasion, but their greatest weapon was Napoleon’s own hubris, as his empire evaporated in 1815 and the Second Hundred Years War was firmly in the books. Point: Britain. While the empire was gearing up to become the master of the world, Britain still needed to be the master of itself, and that was a tricky prospect. After the revolution of 1688, Catholic and pro-Stuart uprisings Ireland and later in Scotland threatened to untie the delicate knot that kept the kingdoms together, so England solved the issue by two means: legal mechanisms, and violence! In 1707 England formally unified with Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain, and again in 1800 to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. What was once a complex web of personal unions and technically independent states were now just the same kingdom. Nice and easy. This was enforced forcefully, as a slew of Penal Laws in Ireland systematically deprived Catholics of property, religious freedom, and political rights. These laws were repealed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, but as we see with the unchecked devastation of the potato famine in the middle of the century, the government still didn’t really… care, all that much? As is the case from earlier, Scotland got off quite a bit easier. While the agriculture of the highlands was entirely overhauled, with mass evictions, the complete disassembling of the Clan system and a lil titch of cultural erasure, the cities in the south had a grand ol time, as Edinburgh was the brains of the empire and Glasgow’s ships were the heart of Britain’s maritime power. And speaking of power, the turn of the century brought the Industrial Revolution, which gave Britain the tools and the technologies to single-handedly dunk on the entire rest of the planet. The advent of mechanized industry and steam power changed the lives of everyday Britons by bringing them affordable consumer goods while cramming them into cities and (in the case of the poor) factories, but that in turn made Britain the manufacturer to the world, and, increasingly, its owner. With cool new gizmos like Steam Ships, Britain could hold a network of colonies no matter how far they were. To reach the vast riches of India, British sailors could pass along Sierra Leone, St Helena, the Cape Colony, Mauritius, and the Maldives; but by the end of the century after the Suez Canal opened, you could pass Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, Aden and Somaliland, and then keep going past India to Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand without once making port on a coast that didn’t belong to Queen Victoria. In 1921 you could walk from South Africa to Mesopotamia and never leave British territory. The raw scope and diversity of locales at play here is frankly absurd, as it’s dizzying to distinguish what’s behind this blanket of Red draped over a quarter the world: and while that diversity found its way into Britain itself through communities and art and food from all over, it raises some rather thorny questions about Belonging and Ownership. There was a tangible dissonance between the idea of all these disparate cultures coming together and the reality of Britain sitting at the top. Still, British and other European empires knew that outright colonization was not necessary to squeeze out wealth, and the prime example is China: which Britain ransacked in the Opium Wars to get better trading rights and a tiny little island called Hong Kong. Because why bother colonizing all of China when you can just smack them into letting you trade whatever and wherever you want? Of course, keeping these far-flung territories safe from other prying empires produced a cycle of “take it now so no one else can”, leading the Europeans to carve up all of Africa in just 20 years. As we know, it wasn’t long before they pointed those carving knives at each other, and so the World Wars happen. Yes they’re very important, we’re not getting into it. What matters to Britain is that although it did win both wars, it lost heavily in that process. Despite scoring some prizes from the losing empires along the way, it became clear that these colonies which fought so hard for the British cause and were sometimes in the theaters of war themselves needed the Big Reward. Much of the British public was for this, as the wheels of national sovereignty had been turning since Canada Australia New Zealand and South Africa became self-governing Dominions around the turn of the century, and the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1922. But after the Second World War, those ideas were finally trickling out to the other colonies. So over the next few decades, the empire dismantled itself, mostly nonmilitarily, but very irresponsibly: as a rule, Britain didn’t care where they drew the borders nor how bad of a mess they left behind. Exhibit A: India. This continued through the 1900s and culminated, somewhat tragically, with the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Built from the ground up in the span of a century and a half, Hong Kong had an international identity and a true blend of cultures that, despite centuries of lofty ambitions, no other colony had ever achieved. Far be it from me, of all people, to bemoan the death of the British Empire, but I will mourn Hong Kong. Meanwhile, in the closing hours of the century, the United Kingdom allowed Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to form their own parliaments and govern themselves more directly. What that means for the future of Britain, hmmmm? We’re not there yet! And THAT, [whew], is the History of the British Empire! What it all meant and what we should take away from it are subjects of vigorous academic and public debate. I can go on and on from my comfy top-down perspective, but the consequences of this history play out in the lives of billions of people, in the Isles and around the world: it’s constitutional government, industrialization, global networks, bitter post-colonial rivalries, treasures missing from their home cultures, and a very very contested picture of “British” identity. Who belongs? Who benefits? Even just inside of Britain that is a lot to unpack, and with a topic as broad The British Empire, there are no universal answers… [sigh] What can I say, that’s empire for ya. And so our winding, multi-lane story finally arrives at the modern day, just in time for history to not let up in the slightest. But as we lift our eyes up from the kaleidoscope of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Britain, the Isles, the Empire, and the world – what have we learned? On paper, a lot: a lot of kings, a lot of dates, and a lot of stabbing. As a system, the Isles are so dang intricate, demonstrating just how much causes in one corner can have effects on the far opposite end. And when we look at the handful of really big arcs that play out over the last 2,000 years, it’s impossible to find a pocket that isn’t affected in some unique way. For the sake of perspective on just how much we’ve covered, let’s quickly run it back: first there was the arrival and departure of Rome, then the advent of Christianity, the Germanic migrations and the Viking menace in the early medieval period, and the transformation of Britain by the hands of the Normans. Every society across Britain and Ireland played out those plot-beats, but each experienced them very differently. Then, the next thousand years saw the Isles as the incubation chamber for what would become the modern world, in no small part because of what was going on here up north – with the slow development of Parliamentary government, the Reformation giving rise to a new kind of church and a new kind of State, plus the dodgy dynamics those religious differences created downstream, and of course the shaping for better and worse of a truly global society, first tentatively in the 16 & 1700s then very intensely in the 1800s before unraveling in the century after. The British Empire fell, as all do, but not without transforming the very face of the world through Industrialization, again, for better and worse. The raw history alone is essential to understanding the world of the past and the world of today, but the story becomes far more fascinating when we deviate from that overriding English perspective, looking laterally to appreciate Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as full characters in the drama; zooming in to see the scale of regions, cities, and remarkable individuals; then getting weird with it by investigating from the viewpoint of literature, architecture, and language. With something so complex, our temptation is to streamline it and simplify it down, but the history of the Isles cannot be one narrative – It’s not a monologue, it’s a play. The big twist is that the best writer in British history offers us the best lens to understand British history. Shakespeare’s medium of choice encourages us to consider how stories are made through the interaction of characters: their motivations, collaborations, and conflicts. This history challenges me, and at times I’ve let it get the better of me, but I’ve come to appreciate it so much more through this exercise in perspectives. Shakespeare said All the world’s a stage, and as in his Globe so too in our globe – the audience is an essential part of the show. Thank you so much for watching! This is a winding, overlapping narrative that unfolds in truly fascinating ways, but I think we can all agree that none of this works without the binding glue, the keystone story that is John Johnson doing Job at Place. Without that, nothing matters. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta pass the hell out, so I’ll see you in the next video.