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Who was the first woman to climb Everest?
Following in the footsteps of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who was the first woman to ascent the world's highest mountain?
“I was the 36th person to climb Everest,” was how Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei once understatedly described her 1975 ascent of the world’s highest mountain, when she became the first woman to reach the summit. Read more | 100 women who changed the world Throughout her mountaineering career, Tabei scaled new heights (pun intended). In 1969, she formed the first women’s climbing club in Japan – with the slogan “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves” – partly because of the way she had been treated by some male climbers. Some simply didn’t want to climb with her, while others claimed she was only doing so as a means of finding a husband. Ironically enough, she did actually marry a fellow climber, whom she met in 1965. During her Everest ascent, using the same route as Hillary and Norgay 22 years earlier, an avalanche struck the team’s camp, knocking Tabei unconscious for several minutes. She had to be dug out of the snow by a Sherpa in the party. Injured, she persisted with the ascent and, 12 days later, made it to the top of Everest alongside Sherpa Ang Tsering. Unknown to Junko Tabei – whose first thought on summiting Everest was reportedly "Oh, I don't have to climb anymore" – another expedition with female climbers was making an ascent from the other side. They made the top 11 days later. Tabei went on to achieve a host of other firsts – including, in 1992, becoming the first woman to ascend the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on every continent. This article was taken from History Revealed
When did people start wearing sunglasses?
Fashionable as well as functional - the history of tinted eyewear stretches back centuries…
Experiments with tinted eyewear stretch back for centuries, including lenses made of smoky quartz in 12th-century China and Georgian spectacles designed to correct vision impairment. Silent film stars are also said to have used them to shield their eyes from the harsh, powerful studio lighting. Read more | Fashions of the Second World War But the man credited with taking sunglasses from specialist equipment to affordable fashion accessory is founder of the Foster Grant eyewear company, Sam Foster. He began selling his mass-produced shades by the beaches of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1929, where they caught on thanks to the practical benefits and the allure of ‘Hollywood glamour’. Drawing on new technologies pioneered for US pilots, Ray-Ban made their distinctive ‘aviator’ sunglasses eight years later. By 1938, sunglasses were fashionable enough to be described as a “new fad for wear on city streets” by Life magazine. This article was taken from BBC History Revealed
Where is William Shakespeare buried – and is there a curse on his grave?
On the banks of the river in Stratford-upon-Avon stands the burial place of the most famous playwright in the English language, William Shakespeare
Although there is no official record of his birth, we know that William Shakespeare was baptised on 26 April 1564 at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, so the date commonly attributed to his birthday is three days earlier, 23 April. It was on this same date in 1616 that Shakespeare died. He is buried at the same church in which he was baptised. It is not known what ended the Bard's life, but according to the diary of the church's vicar, John Ward, Shakespeare contracted a fever after a heavy night’s drinking with his friends Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. Read more | 8 places that shaped the life of William Shakespeare What does it say on Shakespeare's grave? Before his death, Shakespeare penned his final verse: his own epitaph. Fearing that his body would be dug up – either by someone wishing to pilfer his grave for another body or by a souvenir hunter – his four-line rhyme is a curse on anyone who disturbs his remains. It reads, Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here: Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones. It did the trick; his body has been untouched for almost 400 years. And lying next to him is his wife, Anne Hathaway – not to be confused with the Oscar-winning actress. This content first appeared in BBC History Revealed
The Gordons: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution
In 1965, Kim Gordon and his parents moved from Britain to China to see communism for themselves. At first, it was a time of excitement and adventure. But as the increasingly radical government grew more hostile to foreigners, everything changed. Arrested as they were leaving the country, the family was detained without trial and taken to a hotel room that would be Kim’s entire world for two years. Writer Monica Whitlock tells his story
When Apollo 11 touched down on the moon in July 1969, Kim Gordon was one of the few British schoolboys who knew nothing about it. Aged 13, he was mad about cars, planes and engines. But he was also shut away from the world, living in captivity in Beijing. For two long years, Room 421 of the Xin Qiao hotel was both home and prison for Kim and his parents, Eric and Marie. They had no access to a radio or telephone, newspapers or letters from home. Their relatives back in England had no idea where they were, nor even whether they were alive. Their room measured just four square metres – enough for a desk, a chair and three little beds, crammed close together. During those two years the family had no one to talk to but their interrogators, and no diversions except for a couple of books and some sheets of hotel writing paper. Read more | Reign of the Red Terror: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution Fifty years later, as we sat in his Brighton flat, Kim showed me the creations he had improvised in those endless, empty days: tiny, intricate paper buses complete with upper decks; handwritten plays and diaries; and letters to friends back at primary school in East Finchley, north London – letters that would never be posted. Kim’s long adventure in China had begun in 1965. His parents were communists who, disenchanted by the Soviet variant of the ideology they encountered on family holidays to eastern Europe, had become excited by its younger version in China. There, Mao Zedong’s revolution was just 16 years old, and the Gordons wanted to see it first hand. Eric got a job as a copy editor at the Foreign Languages Press, and the family left their basement flat in London for a new life in Beijing, then known as Peking. Kim recalls a thrilling midwinter journey from Europe across Asia, pausing in ice-bound Irkutsk in Siberia. “The whole thing was a total adventure into this strange universe,” he says. In Beijing, the family moved into a vast hostel complex built to house thousands of Soviet advisors. In 1961, Mao’s China had parted ways with Khrushchev’s Soviet Union on ideological grounds. Those Soviet advisors and their families were recalled, and the hostel complex was left empty except for a few dozen sympathetic foreigners, joined in 1965 by the Gordons. “To us kids, it’s like a kingdom!” nine-year-old Kim wrote. “You can imagine what mischief we can get up to.” He and the other children chased each other around the deserted building, discovering doors that led to a network of underground tunnels dug to enable evacuation in the event of nuclear war. This warren of subterranean passages, extending far beneath the city, was designed to allow hundreds of thousands of people to escape. “We used to play hide and seek in them,” Kim remembers. “The other thing we really enjoyed playing was ‘Kill the Americans’, because, of course, this was the time of the Vietnam War – so the Americans were the enemy. So we played ‘goodies and baddies’, and the ‘baddies’ were the American imperialists.” In the 1960s, China was one of the poorest countries on Earth. Where the megalopolis of Beijing now towers, Kim remembers fields of maize. Camels plodded in from the Gobi Desert, and donkey carts filled the dirt lanes; sewerage, clean water and decent roads were a world away. Kim attended the local Chinese school; it was strict and dull, but he quickly began to learn Chinese. He also joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist children’s organisation, along with his classmates. In a letter Kim wrote to his grandmother in December 1965, his sharp sense of detail is already apparent: “It is nearly winter now. In China in the winter is very very cold so you have to wear a lot of clothes. In winter the Chinese wear padded clothes that means that the clothes are stuffed with cotton wool. At the moment I wear padded shoes, hat, gloves when it gets very cold I will start wearing a padded jacket.” Kim’s many letters to his grandmother and his schoolfriend Peter document in detail his enthralling new life. He wrote about the brown-and-white kitten (“with fur about an inch long”) given to him by a Chinese boy, his stamp collection, and the propaganda dramas and slogans he absorbed at school. Kim’s keen eyes, his lively and methodical mind and his sense of drama would all come to stand him in good stead. In May 1966, Chairman Mao called for young people to denounce traditional values and “purify” the Communist Party. Students thronged to join the Red Guards in Mao’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. Schools and universities were closed, and Kim – then aged 10 – and his schoolfriends became Red Guards. “The aim of the cutl. rev. is to smash and get rid of old bourgeois ideas, let the masses criticise the bad leadership and criticise members of the government if they have made mistakes,” he wrote to Peter. “Why does the party under the leadership of Mao Tze Tung want to let the masses do this? Because they want to make sure the party is pure Marxist-Leninist.” Listen | Professor Rana Mitter explores the role of Chairman Mao in the Cultural Revolution, its impact on China’s population and its legacy today Decades later, Kim sees it differently, of course. “In our minds it was the goodies versus the baddies,” he says. “There were bad people who, in our minds, would have been against Mao’s dictums. And there were good people who wanted to enforce it. Now, obviously, it is – and was – a ridiculously childish and simplistic view, but then we were children.” Parents, teachers and other figures of authority were shamed, attacked and even killed. One of Kim’s abiding memories is seeing the lifeless body of his teacher, who had killed herself by jumping down a stairwell. Wearing a red-star cap and magnificent collection of Mao badges, Kim attended the immense Red Guard parades in Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s vast central plaza. There he stood at the front of the crowd, below Chairman Mao’s podium. He felt, he said, absolute pride: “There was Mao standing up there – the god. And… only a few metres away… millions of Red Guards were marching past, chanting their support, and these guys have been waiting probably all day and all night for these moments when Mao would appear. The amount of emotion, [the] heat and energy that comes off a million people! And you’re a small part of this huge thing…” In the autumn of 1967, the surge of nationalist feeling powering the Cultural Revolution turned against foreign “enemies”. Kim’s parents’ contracts were cut short and the family hurriedly prepared to leave Beijing. During his time in China, Eric had been taking notes for a book on Chairman Mao. Now, he hid them behind a picture, because even friendly comment on Mao could be seen as hostile. On the night of 4 November 1967, the family waved a tearful goodbye to their friends and boarded a sleeper train to Canton, the first stage on their journey back to Britain. They didn’t get far. Perhaps an hour later, soldiers boarded the train. They discovered Eric’s research papers and arrested the family. The Gordons were put into separate cars. Kim’s response shows how completely he still believed in Mao’s China. “My initial reaction was: ‘Oh my god, I’m being kidnapped by spies from Taiwan or somewhere.’ I couldn’t believe that these guys dressed up as the army were actually Chinese People’s Liberation Army [soldiers]; they must be enemies, because how could the PLA be kidnapping me? Obviously, I realised that I was wrong later on… We were driven off through the night, back to Peking. We were taken to this hotel… to Room 421. And that’s where we stayed for two years.” Throughout the years of captivity in the Xin Qiao hotel, no charge was ever brought against the Gordons. Each day, Eric and Marie were taken to the room directly opposite their own for interrogation, but their captors never explained why they had been arrested. In the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, millions of people were detained, most of them left to figure out for themselves the crimes to which they were expected to confess. The repeated interrogations were the only times Kim’s parents left their room. In this strange captivity, the family structured their days as best they could. In the mornings, Kim had study time. English exercises were based on the only two novels they had packed for the journey to Canton: Wuthering Heights and Oliver Twist. Marie improvised lessons from the poetry that she could remember, and made up drills in grammar and handwriting. Maths was less successful because neither she nor Eric had much of a grasp of the subject. On a good day, lunch comprised a few vegetables and a small amount of rice. “[Life] was,” says Kim, “very, very boring.” He reached adolescence trapped in a small room with no company but that of his parents, and with no space, nothing to do and no privacy. The family used their time to discuss how to get out. “We were a tight little unit,” Kim says. “Unlike other teenagers, [I was] part of making life-and-death decisions: whether to confess, what to confess, whether to retract the confessions, what the best strategy was. At one stage we wanted to plan my escape: the actual nuts and bolts of whether we were going out of the window or down the stairs.” All the while, the family watched from the window as the Cultural Revolution unfolded. “We would often see Red Guards parading people in trucks, with the dunce’s caps and their arms pinioned behind their backs, being harassed and beaten,” Kim says. Read more | The Chinese Civil War: a guide to the conflict and rise of Mao Zedong Each week, Kim was allowed a one-hour walk with a security guard. Speaking was not allowed, and the guards were hostile. Kim says they revealed their dislike of foreigners more to him than they could to an adult, calling him names such as “white pig” and “foreign ghost”. “All along the roads there were big posters of people who’d been condemned, people who’d been named, arrested, identified,” he recalls. “You could see [who] had been executed, [who was] going to be executed.” He also spotted workers digging metro tunnels and a ring road for this fast-changing capital. Back in Room 421, the family did their best to make the evenings fun. They made packs of cards and created a Monopoly-like game they called Happy Hunting. But “after months and months of playing the same game… you completely understand the next thing the other person is going to do”. Then they would sing. Kim’s mother, who had attended a convent school, still loved ‘Ave Maria’, despite her communist beliefs. They created little plays, too. “My father would write one, mother would write one, I’d write one… they’d be done very much like radio serials, with trailers and a bit of music,” Kim says. His tales included Attack of Giant Killer Scorpions, beautifully written in schoolboy handwriting on hotel notepaper. Each story stretched across as many evenings as possible. The following year came and went, with no trial, no charges and no news. Then one day in 1969, Kim was sent to put away some cleaning materials in the store cupboard. There he came across a stack of Swedish newspapers, which he smuggled back to the room. The family managed to decipher an article that said that there were 30 foreigners under arrest in China. “Suddenly, we realised that we weren’t alone,” Kim says. From that point, things began to move. Eric and Marie made progress in their interminable negotiations with the guards, who by now seemed keen to be rid of them. One interrogator even denied that the Gordons had ever been held captive, calling them instead “uncommon guests”. Finally, in October 1969, the Chinese authorities released the Gordon family and they flew back to London. Kim was almost 14 years old. “My abiding memory is flying into Heathrow,” he says, “and suddenly seeing a city with lights. A huge, huge city… [We saw] people with fashionable clothes and food in the shops. It was just mind-blowing.” Eric Gordon would later write a book about his family’s experiences in China, but back home in London, Kim and his parents never really talked through those two terrible years in the Xin Qiao hotel. Somehow, they buried their memories and moved on with their lives. Yet Kim never forgot how to speak Chinese, and still keeps safe his models, writings and possessions from Beijing. “It is so strange to be free,” Kim wrote in his brand-new diary shortly after his return to the UK. “It just can’t be true to be back in England. I feel as if I’m in one of my dreams and I’ll wake up and be back in the Xin Qiao.” Monica Whitlock is a writer, broadcaster and producer who works for BBC World Service This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
With the media in a frenzy, it would have been difficult to find someone in America in 1932 who didn’t know who the Lindbergh baby was…
Charles Lindbergh was a famous aviator – the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean nonstop. His flight aboard the Spirit of St Louis from New York to Paris in 1927 catapulted him into the public eye. In 1932, Charles was living a life of fame with his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and 20-month-old son, Charles Jr, in New Jersey. But on the evening of 1 March, Charlie was kidnapped. At 7.30pm, their nurse Betty Gow laid the toddler down to sleep in his crib. About two hours later, Charles heard a noise he thought sounded like a crate smashing, but thought nothing of it. Then at 10pm, the nanny, frantic with worry, reported that the baby had disappeared. In his bedroom, Charles found a handwritten, misspelled note: “Dear Sir! Have 50000$ redy 25000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5$ bills… We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Police. The child is in gut care.” So began one of the most lurid cases in American criminal history. The kidnapping was front-page news, with Charles and Anne receiving many offers of help and sympathy, but amid massive publicity, crowds swiftly swarmed to the Lindbergh estate, destroying any chance of finding footprints. Amateur detectives, military men and even Chicago mobsters offered their assistance. President Hoover declared he would “move Heaven and Earth” to find the child, and even mobster Al Capone sent an offer of assistance from prison. Read more about Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing An investigation was launched immediately but had little result. It was not until a retired New York schoolteacher, Dr John Condon, offered to act as a go-between that it seemed progress was being made. Condon met with a man called ‘John’ in a cemetery, who claimed to be holding Charlie and delivered the money – which had risen to $75,000. The child was never recovered however. Two months after the kidnapping, a truck driver stumbled upon the body of a toddler near the Lindberghs’ home. Half buried and with a massive head wound, forensic scientists claimed the child had been dead two months. It was positively identified as Charlie. Who killed the Lindbergh baby? It took two years for an arrest to be made: German-born carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who had a record of robbery and whose garage contained notes from the ransom money. Protesting his innocence, he went to the electric chair. But many observers were convinced that he must have had help. Journalist HL Mencken described the crime as “the biggest story since the Resurrection”. It was a tragic end for Charles and Anne Lindbergh, and the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby went down in infamy. And for the novelist Agatha Christie, the case inspired one of her greatest books, Murder on the Orient Express. This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine
What does Iron Curtain mean, and who popularised the term?
The political and ideological division between the Soviet Union and the West after WW2 split Europe in two
The barrier between the Soviet Union and the West after WW2 was the ‘Iron Curtain’, with the Communists on one side and the capitalist democracies on the other. The term referred to both the physical blockade that ran for thousands of miles across Europe – including the intimidating Berlin Wall – and the ideological barrier. Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion Why is Ukraine being invaded, and what might Russia want from its neighbouring country? To make sense of the current crisis we must understand the history of the relationship between the two inextricably linked countries. Here, Professor Serhy Yekelchyk, an expert in Ukrainian history and Russian-Ukrainian relations, highlights nine milestone moments… The term was used long before the Cold War. Elisabeth of Bavaria, Queen of Belgium, used the term to describe the political division between Belgium and Germany in 1914, and several authors employed the phrase throughout the early 20th century. Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, was concerned about an iron curtain falling if Germany lost the war. Which statesman popularised the term 'Iron Curtain' in a 1946 speech? The term only became common parlance after a speech on 5 March 1946 by former British Prime Minster Winston Churchill. Churchill had been invited to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, by President Harry Truman. In his speech, he condemned the expansionist policies of the Soviet Union: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.” It is unknown where Churchill picked up the phrase. He used it before the speech in telegrams and letters to Truman, including the ominous words in May 1945: “An iron curtain is drawn upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.” Russian premier Joseph Stalin described the speech as “war mongering”, but the Iron Curtain became an important definition in Cold War politics for the next 45 years. This content first appeared in BBC History Revealed
The British landscape is fertile with centuries of folklore, from sprites and giants to witches and ravens. These tales may bear little relation to reality – but, writes Francis Young, they continue to define British identities today
Somewhere near the town of Longtown on the banks of the river Esk, in one of the last parcels of land to be disputed between Scotland and England before the Union of Crowns of 1603, is the supposed site of the battle of Arthuret. Nothing to do with King Arthur (in spite of its name), the legendary battle is traditionally dated to AD 573, when local British king Gwenddoleu ap Ceidio was killed by a rival in a disastrous defeat. Gwenddoleu’s bard, Myrddin, was driven mad by the sight of the slaughter and fled into a nearby forest, where he lived as a wild man among the beasts. Yet by immersing himself in nature, Myrddin received the gift of prophecy. Today, he is better known by his anglicised name: Merlin, a composite figure constructed in the 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth from Myrddin and another figure of Welsh legend named Ambrosius. Read more about British myths and legends Baselisks, manticores and more: medieval fantastic beasts Robin Hood: 7 myths about the legendary outlaw The real King Arthur and his Lancelot? At Arthuret, where Welsh-speaking forces clashed in a place later disputed between England and Scotland, the national identities that would one day make up Great Britain literally and symbolically converge. The battle gave birth to a truly British figure: Merlin was claimed equally in the Middle Ages by England, Wales, Scotland and Brittany. The prophet and enchanter would go on to become a repository for countless fantasies about magic and occult knowledge. In his incarnation as the wild man of the woods, Merlin even prefigures the Green Man, who often symbolises British folklore. With its intensely local character, folklore may seem a strange place to look for “Britishness” – a sense of common national identity shared by all the peoples of Great Britain – but Merlin is an example of a character who is both genuinely and distinctively British. Britain's origin myth In the fifth century, Britain, which had been united under the Romans (with the exception of the Scottish Highlands), broke into a series of small kingdoms. This process of dissolution was accelerated by Germanic settlers, who brought a new culture and language to what became England. In the Anglo-Saxon period, the concept of Britain was all but forgotten beyond Welsh lands, only to return in the wake of an unlikely saviour: William the Conqueror. The Duke of Normandy relied on the help of a number of Breton knights for his conquest, many of whom settled in Welsh-speaking areas and became captivated by the idea of a return of British glory. A likely descendant of a Breton conqueror, a man named Geoffrey of Monmouth, would become the father of British folklore. In his 12th-century The History of the Kings of Britain, he began fabricating a splendid origin myth for Britain, claiming that it had been founded by none other than a Trojan prince named Brutus, fleeing Troy like Aeneas, the founder of Rome in Virgil’s Aeneid. Read more | Geoffrey of Monmouth: the lost voice of Britain Geoffrey’s “history” was anything but, peopled with such outlandish characters as King Bladud, founder of Bath, who worked necromancy to give himself the power of flight. Geoffrey’s most lasting confabulations were the figures of Arthur and Merlin, both composite constructions that he put together, Frankenstein-like, from a mixture of history, myth and fiction. Exactly how he did this has baffled scholars ever since. Even in his own lifetime, Geoffrey’s writings fell under the suspicion of other historians, and by the 17th century his works had long been jettisoned from the historical canon. His influence on folklore remained, however, travelling outwards like ripples in a pond. The two great wicker giants who appear in the Lord Mayor of London’s Show every year are a case in point: they are Gog and Magog, giants whom Brutus found living on the island of Britain. These giants were, on one level, just British versions of the titans of Greek mythology. Yet Geoffrey was also faithful to a much older Anglo-Saxon tradition that interpreted Britain’s ancient monuments as enta geweorc, “the work of giants”. According to Geoffrey, the giants built Stonehenge in Ireland before Merlin transported it by magic to Salisbury Plain. This is one instance where the truth turned out to be almost as strange as the fables, as we now know that one version of Stonehenge was indeed transported from a distant land in the prehistoric west – not from Ireland, but Wales’s Preseli Hills. Invoking folklore Many British rulers have drawn on the unifying power of folklore at times of crisis and change. Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne was somewhat slender, promoted his Welsh ancestry as a supposed descendant of King Arthur. He displayed the red dragon of Wales on his personal standard and named his heir Arthur. Henry VIII oversaw the painting of the replica of the round table in Winchester, while the magician John Dee encouraged Elizabeth I to claim the “New World” as it had already been conquered by her legendary ancestor, Arthur. But it was James VI & I, more than any other monarch, who needed all the help he could get to promote his Britishness. While never his formal title, the first Scottish king to rule England styled himself “King of Great Britain”. His succession in 1603 was supposedly marked by an overflowing of the river Tweed, causing its waters to mingle with the river Pausyl at a place named Merlin’s Grave. Thus the prophecy of 13th-century Scottish seer Thomas the Rhymer was fulfilled: “When Tweed and Pausyl meet at Merlin’s grave / Scotland and England shall one monarch have.” Listen | Miles Russell offers a bold new view on the historical King Arthur based on his reinterpretation of medieval sources James’s arrival in London brought an outpouring of literary reflections on Britishness, none more spectacular than Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, the first part of which appeared in 1612. Poly-Olbion was an ambitious series of poems and allegorical maps originally supposed to consist of three parts covering every location in England, Wales and Scotland, but Drayton died before Scotland could be completed. While he took inspiration from classical literature, his work was also characteristically British, drawing heavily on Geoffrey of Monmouth and more reliable historical sources such as William Camden’s Britannia (1586), the first complete antiquarian survey of the country. What was perhaps most remarkable about Poly-Olbion was its synthesis of topographical and cartographical accuracy with the fantastical. Drayton’s maps personified every city, town, village, river and body of water as an anthropomorphic nymph or deity, but at the same time he took pains to ensure the maps were as accurate as possible. Drayton drew on pre-existing traditions and invented a new mythology that peopled Britain’s landscape with mythical beings. Poly-Olbion includes characters such as the giant Gogmagog, a figure created in the Middle Ages from the biblical giants Gog and Magog, who fell in love with the nymph Granta. Gogmagog gave his name to the Gog Magog Hills south of Cambridge, and Granta gave hers to the river that runs through Cambridge and to an early name for the town itself: Grantebrycge. In Poly-Olbion, the trend for comprehensive antiquarian surveys collided with a deep desire for meaning in the landscape: a yearning for every place to have its personified protective spirit, and its classicised origin myth involving nymphs and giants. It was almost as though Drayton’s nymphs and deities took the place of those protectors displaced by the Reformation: the saints. Obsessed with druids British folklore is immensely diverse. Every region has its distinctive characters, such as the boggarts of the north of England, the pixies of Cornwall and Devon, and the hikey sprites – a kind of fairy unique to Norfolk. Scotland’s fairies are known for “trooping” around the landscape, while England’s are largely isolated domestic helpers; Scottish witches work together in covens, while the English witch is a solitary individual. Yet some folkloric beings have become national symbols, perhaps because local cultural creations are ultimate representations of the uniqueness and character of a nation. The red dragon, Loch Ness monster and leprechaun are instantly recognisable symbols of Wales, Scotland and Ireland respectively, even if their folkloric origins are now neglected. An equivalent being that represents England or the whole of Great Britain is more elusive, although Romantic poet William Blake attempted to supply such a figure in his “Giant Albion”. Read more | 5 facts about the Loch Ness Monster Blake’s abiding contribution to a national identity was the poem “And did those feet in ancient time”, set to music by Hubert Parry as ‘Jerusalem’, which has acquired the status of an unofficial national anthem for England. This poem was inspired by folklore – in this case the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Britain and founded Glastonbury Abbey. The story’s originsare obscure, although in 1345 Edward III sanctioned a search for Joseph’s tomb at Glastonbury, where the supposed tombs of Arthur and Guinevere had been found in the 12th century. This desire to realise legend through archaeology continued beyond the Middle Ages. The Jacobean court architect Inigo Jones thought Stonehenge was built by the Romans in a “druidic” style, and was once roofed over, showcasing a lost architectural style of ancient Britain. In the 18th century, antiquarian William Stukeley grew so obsessed with the druids that he adopted a druidic name, Chyndonax, and built megaliths in his garden. Ultimately, the shared mythological figures of Great Britain will always be those created by Geoffrey of Monmouth: Arthur and Merlin, who have penetrated Britain’s collective consciousness in spite of the absence of evidence that either really existed. In the realm of folklore, questions of historical existence are secondary – it is cultural influence that matters. It is no accident that the “Wizarding World” of JK Rowling venerates the memory of Merlin. Like a modern-day Poly-Olbion, Rowling’s books are peopled by the cast of British folklore: giants, boggarts, Cornish pixies and kelpies. Yet any idea that Britain’s folklore is reserved for fantasy fiction needs to be dismissed, because there are signs that the nation’s collective lore is alive and well. In January 2021, one of the ravens of the Tower of London, Merlina, went missing. The story made national headlines, since many people still know that the ravens leaving the Tower of London betokens disaster for the country. This legend is a microcosm of the power and flexibility of British folklore. The idea that the ravens are linked to the nation’s safety is no older than the Second World War, and originated in some of the ravens being lent to a brewery to provide warning in the event of air raids. But a connection between the Tower of London and protection of the island of Britain is far older. In the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh tales, King Arthur buries the head of the giant Brân the Blessed on Tower Hill, where the White Tower will later be built. As long as Brân’s head remains, Britain will be secure. Curiously, the Welsh name Brân means “raven”. Read more about the medieval history that inspired 'Harry Potter' Ritual behaviour It is notable, in the fevered politics of recent years, how often populist politicians invoke almost spiritual concepts such as “Blitz spirit” in place of practical proposals. They are referenced so frequently that they have almost become personalities in their own right. Similarly, while sovereignty was hitherto an abstract concept largely discussed by constitutional theorists, it has become for some a talismanic idea – unclear in meaning, perhaps, but invoked with religious fervour. It is hard, as a folklorist, not to think of the ancient personification of sovereignty as a goddess, such as Brigantia, who represented in Roman Britain what is today the north of England. Her name may lie at the root of the Welsh words brenin (“king”) and brenhinol (“royal”), a reminder of the continuing significance of sovereignty as a sacred concept in ancient and contemporary Britain. Behaviour during the Covid-19 pandemic, meanwhile, suggests that people turn to folklore in times of uncertainty and crisis. During lockdown, “votive deposits” appeared in many parts of Britain – painted stones, “love locks” attached to bridges, ribbons tied to trees – and there was an increase in the habit of throwing coins into bodies of water. Although there is likely no single explanation for these behaviours, it is intriguing that, when activities other than a daily walk were unavailable, British people reverted to ritual practices similar to those of their ancestors. Ritual interactions with trees, including tying cloth to branches, are ancient practices, as are leaving pebbles at sites of ritual significance and throwing coins into water. These activities are not unique to Britain and Ireland, but such practices seem to be a wordless ritual language that unites us, at some level, even if we have little clear idea of what they really mean. All of this points to the fact that seemingly recent folklore can have deep roots, and that folklore will sometimes transform beyond recognition over time. In spite of its huge diversity, a unifying strand of legend remains at the heart of British folklore: a common story and characters who belong equally to England, Scotland and Wales. It is no exaggeration to say that shared folklore is one of the things that holds Britain together. Francis Young is the author of Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, which will be published by Cambridge in March 2022 This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Nixon in China: a week that changed the world
Following years of icy silence between the US and China, on 21 February 1972 president Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing for an unprecedented diplomatic mission. Professor Rana Mitter explores how the two sides viewed an encounter that augured China’s entrance onto the global stage
Listen to this article: The moment has been immortalised in music – and a breathtaking piece of stagecraft. In the opening scene of the 1987 opera Nixon in China the presidential plane, named “The Spirit of ’76”, lands onstage. The door opens and out steps the singer playing US president Richard Nixon, greeted by another as Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. When John Adams and Alice Goodman wrote Nixon in China, just a decade and a half after the events it depicted, they recognised that the meeting it recreated was the stuff of grand opera. Rather than merely two politicians coming face to face, it marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new one – the moment when two great societies with very different systems finally engaged with each other after decades of silence. This year marks a half-century since Nixon’s visit. Between 21 and 28 February 1972, he met the ageing Mao Zedong, China’s paramount leader, and negotiated the first stages of the rapprochement between two countries that had no diplomatic ties in 1949, following Mao’s communist revolution. For Nixon, the mission came at a time when the complex problems of the Cold War were becoming more pressing. He had come to office in 1969 with impeccable qualifications as a Cold Warrior, having made his name as Eisenhower’s vice-president in the 1950s, sent out to do rhetorical battle with the Soviet Union. Yet as president he faced a range of difficulties. The US was in flames, its cities riven with unrest. Overseas, his country was caught in the murderous quagmire of the Vietnam War, unable to defeat its opponents or to withdraw honourably. Nixon had been elected in part because he claimed to have a plan to end that war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/02/GettyImages-1354435492_cmyk-ef3b527.png" width="621" height="521" alt="Photo of female soldiers of the People's Army of Vietnam" title="Female soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam operate howitzers, c1965. By then, US forces were mired in an unwinnable war in the region. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Meanwhile, friction with the Soviet bloc was building. In August 1968, months before Nixon was first elected president, Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to snuff out the “Prague Spring” period of political liberalisation. Nixon certainly hoped that he could reduce tensions in these hotspots for the US through a policy of detente. And his subsequent efforts to improve relations with China provided an opportunity for a dramatic turn of events that would signal an entirely new sort of diplomacy. Remote rapprochement US politicians of both parties had mooted a thaw with Beijing in the mid-1960s. However, the outbreak of the violent Cultural Revolution in 1966, during which China dramatically scaled back diplomatic relations with almost all outside powers, left little possibility of a rapprochement under Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. Over the following years, the Chinese leadership seemed to be in turmoil. Mao was old, and it was increasingly unclear who would succeed him. Yet, even in his first weeks and months in office, Nixon began to set in motion the launch of a new policy – albeit discreetly at first. The new US national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, was given the task of organising the first visit to China by a US official since the 1949 revolution. In 1971, following mediation by Pakistan, Kissinger flew secretly to Beijing for talks. And on 15 July 1971, Nixon announced his planned trip. Listen | Rana Mitter talks to Matt Elton about Nixon's visit to China in 1972 and how it changed the course of the Cold War Nixon had hoped that, on landing in Beijing on 21 February 1972, he would be greeted by crowds of cheering Chinese people. In fact, he had to make do with a small honour guard – but the significance of the moment was cemented when he shook Zhou’s hand. At a conference in Geneva 18 years earlier, Zhou’s attempt to shake the hand of then US secretary of state John Foster Dulles had been snubbed. Now Nixon made amends. Nixon’s party was driven through the city centre to meet Mao, who was in jovial mood. The communist leader observed that “reactionaries” had tried to stop the meeting – a reference to figures within China’s leadership who were still firmly opposed to opening up to the imperialist enemy. (Mao also noted slyly that he had “voted” for Nixon in the US election, explaining that he found rightwing leaders easier to deal with.) After Mao’s one and only appearance during the trip, the negotiators spent long hours in meetings to hammer out an agreement. Between those discussions, the visitors were given the VIP tourist treatment. Nixon was famously impressed by the Great Wall, and used it as a metaphor for barriers that could soon fall in the relationship between China and the US. Meanwhile, the first lady visited institutions including schools and factories, providing priceless photo opportunities to boost her husband’s campaign for re-election that year. At the end of the trip, the two sides issued the Shanghai Communique, pledging to improve relations between the countries. Richard Nixon was in no doubt about the significance of what he had negotiated. “This,” he declared, “was the week that changed the world.” Nixon in China: the US perspective The immediate reaction in the US was highly favourable. Nixon had hoped to make a major gesture of statesmanship ahead of the 1972 presidential election (about which the Chinese were very aware), and his visit to China fulfilled that aim to the letter. Nixon won by a landslide and, though the China visit was not the only reason, it certainly burnished his image. Nixon and his national security adviser (later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger took advantage of the new warmth with China to introduce other strategies to lessen tension in the Cold War – notably, the ending of the draft of US soldiers for the war in Vietnam, and a policy of detente with the Soviet Union. Nixon’s China mission is often regarded as the culmination of a process, and the end of the rift between the US and China. In truth, it was the beginning of a more protracted negotiation. Full diplomatic ties would not actually be confirmed for almost seven years; indeed, during the early and mid-1970s, much of the most visible interaction was cultural rather than political. The most famous manifestation of this was “ping-pong diplomacy”, the exhibition table tennis matches played in China and the US in the months before and after Nixon’s visit. Nixon himself had little time to develop the diplomatic opening, resigning in 1974 after the Watergate scandal exposed the darker side of his administration. His successor, Gerald Ford, visited China and tasked secretary of state Henry Kissinger with further nurturing relations. However, there were various stumbling blocks – among the most sensitive of which was Taiwan. In 1949, at the end of China’s civil war, the defeated Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek had fled to Taiwan, where they declared themselves the official government of all China. Despite controlling only Taiwan’s main island and a few offshore territories, Chiang’s government retained the Chinese seat at the United Nations until 1971. By the mid-1970s, it was clear that the US was moving toward recognition of Beijing, but Chiang’s island was a sticking point: China’s communist leaders wanted Washington to abandon his regime completely. Yet even if the administrations of Ford and his successor, Jimmy Carter, had wanted to concede this matter, there were still powerful forces in Congress who demanded that the US should permit Taiwan the capacity to defend itself. The Carter administration eventually negotiated the opening of formal diplomatic relations with China on 1 January 1979. This was dependent on the agreement in the US of a “One China” policy – though without specifying whether the rule of Beijing or Taipei over that “One China” should ultimately prevail. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, governing America’s relationship with that diplomatically unrecognised but important island, decreeing that the US should give Taiwan assistance to enable it to defend itself. To the anger of Beijing, that act is still very much in operation today. Nixon in China: the Chinese perspective Nixon’s visit did not take place at a quiet time for Chinese politics. In 1972, China was still firmly in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and there were clear divisions about the significance of the Nixon visit. One faction, led by premier Zhou Enlai, had come to realise that China’s inward-looking take on economics and culture was not sustainable; they believed that the country would have to reform if the CCP was to stay in power. A world in which China was isolated both from the Soviet bloc and the western world was unsustainable and, since relations with Moscow continued to be scratchy following China’s denunciation of Soviet policy from the late 1950s, a pivot towards the huge market that the US offered was a logical step for an economy aiming to re-enter the world of international trade. Listen | Professor Rana Mitter explores the role of Chairman Mao in the Cultural Revolution, its impact on China’s population and its legacy today That view was firmly opposed by the Cultural Revolution hardliners, most notably the leaders later dubbed the “Gang of Four”, including Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. They regarded ideological purity as the most important element of China’s politics, so the idea of opening up to the capitalist US proposed by “running dogs” (lackeys) was anathema. During Nixon’s visit, the faction in favour of opening up was in the ascendant, and Jiang Qing even greeted the Americans. But on the evening before the Shanghai Communique was released, Zhang Chunqiao – one of the Gang of Four – made a speech at the banquet for Nixon’s party, declaring that Shanghai was “maintaining independence” and “relying on our own efforts”. It was a not particularly subtle reminder that not all of the Chinese leadership was happy to see the US president enter the world’s most populous communist state. In retrospect, it sometimes seems as if China was on an inevitable path to economic superpower status after Nixon’s visit opened up the country. In fact, the years that followed were turbulent. In 1973, Zhou’s enemies launched a campaign obliquely criticising his willingness to open up to the US. By then, he was dying of cancer, passing away just a few months before Mao in 1976. Shortly afterwards, Zhou’s protege Deng Xiaoping was sidelined by the Gang of Four. Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, rapidly moved to have the Gang of Four arrested, and the Cultural Revolution was declared over. The next year, 1977, writers and artists were allowed to produce accounts of the horrors they had suffered during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution. By July of that year, Deng had used his formidable political network to return to power. From 1978, he began implementing major market-oriented reforms and pushed forward with efforts to improve relations with the US. In 1979, following Carter’s recognition of China, he also broke with precedent and travelled to the US – a visit epitomised by a moment in Texas when the diminutive Deng donned a large Stetson hat. The US-China relationship may have been secured diplomatically with the establishment of embassies earlier that year, but the emotional relationship was sealed at that rodeo, signalling a decade of closer ties. Read more | The 5 most notorious presidents in US history Liberalising culture During the 1980s, the relationship between the US and China was the warmest it had been since the latter’s communist revolution. American writers and intellectuals were invited to share their ideas to help influence China’s new, liberalising culture. That decade was also the era of Reagan’s confident US, as well as a sclerosis that augured the ultimate end of the Soviet Union and Europe’s communist eastern bloc. China wanted access to the US market, and was keen to benefit from the sense of possibility that it saw in New York and California. Despite their communist links, the Chinese saw little to tempt them in the Soviet world of Brezhnev and his successors, who were mired in a war in Afghanistan and whose eastern European allies such as Poland were increasingly afflicted by strikes and economic woes. In one of the most remarkable gestures of affinity, the 1988 television programme River Elegy, broadcast to millions of Chinese viewers, proudly showcased icons of American life including the Statue of Liberty. This wave of almost naive pro-Americanism came crashing to a halt with the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Yet despite that bloody crackdown, recent evidence reveals that president George Bush sent national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to visit Deng Xiaoping in secret just a month after the killings, to assure China that the US still wanted to keep the relationship alive. The tradition of angry rhetoric on the surface but an understanding about shared interests in private – evident in the Nixon-Kissinger visit of 1972 – was still very much alive. Is that still true today? The jury is out. The US and China are now clear rivals, rather than the “frenemies” they became during the Nixon era. In July 2020 Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, declared that the “noble” policies Nixon had attempted to implement in relations with China had failed, and that the US must now treat China as a hostile power. That visit of 1972 remains a moment of historic importance – but its significance seems very different today from how it did in that cold February week in Beijing, half a century ago. Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford This article first appeared in the March 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Roman invasion of Britain: did the Britons ignore them?
To fight or capitulate. That was the choice facing the people of Britain when the Romans invaded in AD 43. Or was it? Miles Russell tells the story of a tribe that adopted an alternative strategy: to treat the legions with utter indifference
In 1936, a group of archaeologists working at Maiden Castle, near Dorchester, made a grisly discovery. Scattered near the east gate of this ancient hillfort were at least 52 Iron Age skeletons, some with horrific injuries to the head, back and shoulders. For the excavation director, Mortimer Wheeler, the cause of these terrible injuries was clear. He interpreted the skeletons as part of a war cemetery, bodies lying “in tragic profusion, displaying the marks of battle”. To him, these were the men and women of the Durotriges tribe, who had, in the first century AD, vainly defended their hilltop home against advancing Roman troops. “What happened here was plain to see,” Wheeler was later to write. The Roman infantry, under the covering fire of missiles, had “advanced up the slope, cutting its way from rampart to rampart, tower to tower” until they got into the area of the hillfort gateway. “Confusion and massacre dominated the scene,” he went on. “Men and women, young and old, were savagely cut down, before the legionaries were called to heel and the work of systematic destruction began.” Learn more about the Romans: A brief guide to ancient Rome and the Romans, plus 9 fascinating facts Everything you wanted to know about Roman Britain The Romans in Britain: exploitation or innovation? It was a dramatic and evocative description of a battle fought 1,900 years earlier – and one that proved extraordinarily persuasive. Mortimer Wheeler’s “war cemetery” became a 1930s media sensation – one that, until recently, appeared in pretty much every account of Roman Britain. For much of the 80 years or so since Wheeler’s team entered Maiden Castle hillfort, the Durotriges have been credited with leading armed resistance to the armies of Rome, operating from a series of strongly fortified hillforts across what is now Dorset and southern Wiltshire. Their story has been presented as a bitterly contested struggle against what may have been the first professional army of the ancient world – one that ultimately saw their hillforts taken and their people killed or enslaved. With positions such as keeper of the London Museum on his CV, Mortimer Wheeler was one of the most respected archaeologists of his generation. But recent archaeological discoveries are suggesting that, when it came to the Durotriges, his conclusions may have been incorrect. These new finds are painting a very different picture of what happened within the confines of Maiden Castle hillfort almost two millennia ago. They suggest that the Durotriges didn’t fight to the death against Rome’s legions. Instead, it seems, they had a relaxed relationship with the invaders, almost to the point of complete indifference. Good for business The Durotriges weren’t the first British tribe to encounter the Romans following their invasion of Britain in AD 43. When the Roman emperor Claudius ordered the assault, target number one for his legions was Camulodunum (Colchester), capital of the Trinovantes, then one of the more powerful tribes in southern Britain. Once Roman troops had eliminated all opposition, the emperor arrived to oversee the capture of Camulodunum where, as an inscription in Rome was later to note, “he received the surrender of 11 British kings”. Sadly, neither the names of these kings, nor the tribes they ruled over, was recorded. Despite this lack of information, it’s assumed that the main tribes surrendering to Claudius were the Catuvellauni, Regni and Cantiaci, all of whose lands bordered the now defeated Trinovantes. Joining these three tribes in pledging allegiance to Rome were probably the Corieltauvi, Atrebates, Belgae and Dobunni. Their leaders must have quickly come to the realisation that Rome boasted vastly superior military forces, and that it was better to capitulate than see their people die needlessly. They must also have reflected that, with the Trinovantes, their tribal competitor, now smashed, siding with Rome would be good for business. Certainly, when we look in the archaeological record for the period, it’s clear that the Trinovantes were the ultimate losers in the immediate aftermath of the Roman invasion, suffering the indignity of witnessing a huge fortress being built over the remains of their capital. Meanwhile, the Catuvellauni, Atrebates, Belgae, Regni and Dobunni were all provided with brand new Mediterranean-style towns. The message was clear: being with Rome was a good thing; standing against them spelt disaster. Further afield, the Iceni of Norfolk and the Brigantes (a tribe that occupied much of what is now Yorkshire) weren’t immediately brought into the empire, having no new towns, temples or villas built in their territory. Instead, the Roman government seems to have paid them off, offering their leaders lavish gifts in order to keep them sweet (a policy that, in the case of the Iceni, broke down in spectacular fashion in around AD 60 with Boudicca’s rebellion). But what about the Iron Age tribes of south-western Britain – which included the Durotriges? Our understanding of their relationship with Rome’s legions is less clear, as there’s no useful written evidence to tell us exactly what happened. We do know that one legion, the II Augusta – comprising more than 5,000 heavily armed, well-trained, professional soldiers – was dispatched westwards, across an area we now recognise as Hampshire, Dorset and Devon, with orders to “conquer the rest”. Read more | What if Boudica had defeated the Romans? The commander of the II Augusta was a general by the name of Vespasian and, as he later became emperor (in AD 69), the Roman biographer Suetonius recorded the early part of his career. In Britain, Suetonius tells us, Vespasian oversaw the conquest of the Isle of Wight, fighting 30 battles, capturing more than 20 towns and receiving the surrender of two powerful tribes. The location of these battles and details of the towns the Romans captured go unrecorded, but it was long believed that the Durotriges were among the powerful tribes that the legions beat into submission – and that much of the fighting probably took place in their territory. Long time dead Prior to the invasion, archaeology shows that the Durotriges seem to have profited little in the way of trade contact with the Roman Empire. Presumably, they would have seen few benefits in joining Rome, and would have viewed the arrival of Vespasian as a thoroughly bad thing. Given that some of the largest and most impressive Iron Age hillforts anywhere in Britain are found in Dorset – sites like Maiden Castle, Hod Hill, Hambledon Hill and Badbury Rings – it was naturally assumed that these sites formed the focus of organised resistance. But there’s a problem with this theory, one that has been thrown into ever sharper focus as our knowledge of Mortimer Wheeler’s “war cemetery” – and Dorset’s Iron Age hillforts more generally – has improved. For a start, the skeletons that Wheeler’s team discovered in 1936 are not the product of a single event. Rather, it appears that they were buried over an extended time period – and, crucially, that the trauma they exhibited on their discovery was largely the result of executions rather than battle injuries. Listen | Miles Russell responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the four centuries of Roman rule in Britain Just as tellingly, the iron projectile in the spine of one skeleton – one that Wheeler believed had been fired by Roman forces – is actually an Iron Age spear. The final blow to the theory of armed conflict between Rome and the Durotriges is the discovery that the Durotriges had vacated the hillfort at least a century before the Romans arrived. In AD 43, Maiden Castle was no battle-ready fortress but an abandoned set of earthworks, its grass-covered ramparts probably undefended. It’s been suggested that a second Dorset hillfort, Hod Hill, was also the target of a Roman attack – perhaps an artillery barrage unleashed by II Augusta. A small Roman fort was indeed built inside the Iron Age hillfort, and archaeological investigations, conducted in the 1950s, found multiple projectiles fired from a Roman device known as a ballista. However, we now know that Hod Hill, like Maiden Castle, was largely empty in AD 43, and it’s likely that the bolts found were fired from the Roman fort during a period of peace-time target practice. Legions on the march So it seems that the Durotriges didn’t take the fight to the Romans. And that was probably a wise decision. Ongoing archaeological investigation is showing us that the Durotriges lived in small farming communities, rather than in large groups inside strongly defended hillforts. They were probably too few in number, too widely scattered and too politically disorganised to offer any significant resistance. Read more | The Celts in Britain: everything you need to know In fact, the idea that any of the various Iron Age tribes of southern Britain had the capability to truly test the Romans on the battlefield is a fantasy based on the modern misguided idea that they possessed large standing armies. Only when tribes pooled their resources, which rarely seems to have happened, or deployed guerrilla tactics, ambushing legions on the march, could they achieve anything. Faced with the superior numbers, training and equipment of a Roman legion, individual tribal warriors and poorly armed farmers could achieve little. Does this mean that the Durotriges surrendered to the Romans – just as their counterparts in the south-east had done? Well, actually, no. Many tribes in the south-west of Britain – such as the Dumnonii of what is now Cornwall and Devon, the Silures of today’s south Wales and the Durotriges themselves – appear to have decided that neither fighting the Romans nor capitulation was the best course of action for them. With little experience of trading with the Romans, and no chance of besting them on the battlefield, they pursued a third option: and that was to ignore them. Disposing of the dead Compared to their Iron Age neighbours to the east, the Durotriges were unusual in a variety of ways. They buried their dead in cemeteries, while other tribes practised cremation or disposed of their dead in places where modern archaeologists cannot find them, such as rivers or lakes. This Durotriges disposal practice has proved extremely informative for archaeologists, allowing them to better understand the tribe through their skeletal remains and associated grave goods. And, crucially, these finds suggest that the Durotriges’ settlements continued uninterrupted beyond the Roman “conquest”. Traditional forms of burial were maintained for many more generations, and grave goods, placed within native-style burial grounds, avoided all but the most basic of Roman artefacts. Personal possessions are relatively simple, comprising bronze brooches, bangles, rings and occasionally decorated mirrors. The Durotriges, it seems, wanted only those Roman items, such as hair-plucking tweezers and pottery drinking cups, that fitted into their existing lifestyle. They had little interest in anything that might usher in a more Mediterranean style of living. Durotriges customs may have differed from their Roman counterparts in another key aspect: gender relations. It’s perhaps interesting to note that greater numbers of artefacts are found in female graves, suggesting that women enjoyed a higher status. Perhaps the Durotriges were a matriarchal society, political power passing down the female line. Certainly, Roman writers of the time often observed that in the “barbarian” lands of Britain, women were just as likely to hold power as men, something the patriarchal Romans just couldn’t understand. Read more | The fall of Roman Britain: how life changed for Britons after the empire In the second half of the first century AD, the Roman government created the new town of Durnovaria Durotrigum (Dorchester) for the tribe, to act as their administrative and economic centre. It was never truly successful, only really developing more than three centuries later, under the patronage of a few wealthy individuals who built a series of well-appointed private houses: a sort of Roman gated community. All this evidence paints a picture of a tribe that had no desire to become Roman. Archaeology tells us that the Durotriges seem to have been unaware of the ideas, fashions and artefacts that best defined Rome, shunning the status symbols acquired by their Romanised tribal colleagues to the east. The “Roman project” was not for them. It seems that the Durotriges calculated that passive resistance was the best way to preserve their customs, their culture and their way of life. And perhaps they were right. Maybe it was this apathy towards the Roman empire that both defined them and helped them to survive. Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Where does the popular saying 'shot across the bows' come from? And what does it mean?
To give someone a warning of imminent severe action is referred to as giving them a 'shot across the bows' – a phrase that, unsurprisingly, comes from the history of warfare. The ‘bows’ in question were found at the front of a ship, essentially the ‘shoulders’ of the vessel and the phrase first appeared during the 18th century. Sending a shot across the bows was a naval technique introduced at a time when the British navy ruled the seas and wars were fought not just on land but from the decks of mighty tall ships. The idea was not to actually fire on the ship, but to send a cannon ball near enough to signal them, force them to stop or let them know you’re ready for battle. 5 facts you (probably) didn’t know about Nelson’s navy In the days before radio, ships were identified by their ‘colours’, or flags that represented a vessel’s purpose and nationality. So if their colours weren’t flying, another ship was legally permitted to fire a harmless warning shot across the bows in order to confirm their identity. An early written use of the expression can be found in an 1839 edition of The Metropolitan Magazine, which read: “In a very brief space we neared our victim, a large merchantman, whose appearance promised at once an easy conquest and a rich booty. At a signal from Stamar, a shot was fired across her bows to bring her to. She immediately hoisted a white flag, and began to take in her sails.” The expression became commonly heard on board ships and the men working the guns were familiar with the order of firing near, not at, a ship. A shot across the bows continued well into the 20th century, although instead of being a first measure against an unknown ship, it was used only after attempts to contact the vessel on the radio proved unsuccessful. This content first appeared in BBC History Revealed