Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (7 page)

T
he legend of the Round Table dates from the 11th century when an Anglo-Norman poet called Wace, who was born in Jersey, suggested that King Arthur, the legendary Celtic warrior who supposedly resisted the Anglo-Saxon invaders before retreating to Cornwall and Wales, created a round table to prevent disputes amongst his knights over who should sit at the head of the table. The ‘Round Table’ in Winchester castle dates from about 1300 when the legend of Arthur was revived by Edward I and his sons. The date of the table was established by dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, by comparing the timbers of the table with some taken from Nelson’s flagship HMS
Victory
whose dates could be given with some confidence. A more recent suggestion is that the Round Table was in fact a reference to a Roman amphitheatre close to the Welsh border in Chester, a structure capable of holding 10,000 people where conferences could take place between a Celtic leader and his followers. The legend of Arthur was given further impetus in the 15th century by Sir Thomas Malory, whose
Le Morte d’Arthur
was one of the first texts published by William Caxton. Malory, who died in 1471, is a mysterious figure who, though a Justice of the Peace, wrote the account of Arthur’s deeds while in prison for rape, theft and violence. The legend underwent a further revival with the 19th century artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose romantic images of Arthur and his companions are those which are most familiar. An iron age hill fort at Queen Camel in Somerset has as good a claim as anywhere to be the original Camelot but no table was found there when it was excavated in the 1960s.

A
lfred, who reigned 871–99, is remembered for burning the cakes (for which there is no evidence, as they were eaten anyway) and for defeating the Danes. He certainly drove them from his kingdom of Wessex in a succession of savage battles but his achievement was not in fact to expel them but to confine them to the eastern half of England, which became known as the Danelaw, and to convert them to Christianity. Alfred united most of the rest of England under his rule by marrying the daughter of the king of Mercia, though England was not finally consolidated under one king until Alfred’s grandson Athelstan (924–39). Alfred does however have a good claim to have founded the Royal Navy by creating a fleet designed to intercept Viking raiders. Above all he helped to shape the English language by sponsoring the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He is the only British king to be called ‘the great’.

A
ethelred the Unready (968–1016) was king at a bad time in British history, as the Danes renewed their attacks on England in the century following the death of Alfred in 899. Ten years old when he became king, Aethelred had a very efficient system of tax collection which enabled him to pay Danegeld, in effect a bribe to deter the Danes from attacking his beleaguered kingdom. He had a bad press even among contemporaries, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
criticising him for being indecisive – though the Anglo-Saxon word unraed which has become attached to his name actually meant ‘ill-advised’: that is, lacking good counsellors. At the time of Aethelred’s death the Danish king Canute was invading England and eventually defeated Aethelred’s son, Edmund Ironside, at Ashingdon near Southend in Essex. Edmund himself died in 1016 within a few months of his father. Like Aethelred, Canute (985–1035) has also been ill-served by historians. Having married Aethelred’s widow Emma, Canute eventually became King of England and if, as is possible, he really did tell the advancing tide at Bosham in Sussex to turn back it was only to demonstrate to his flattering courtiers just how foolish they were to suggest that the tide would obey him.

B
ritish novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) once quoted the following verse, author unknown.

Here lies poor Fred who was alive and is dead,

Had it been his father I had much rather,

Had it been his sister nobody would have missed her,

Had it been his brother, still better than another,

Had it been the whole generation, so much better for the nation,

But since it is Fred who was alive and is dead,

There is no more to be said!

‘Poor Fred’ (1707–1751) was Frederick, Prince of Wales, eldest son of King George II, and a man who continued the Hanoverian tradition of sons quarrelling with fathers. George II objected to Frederick’s extravagance and womanising; Frederick occupied himself by running up debts, maintaining a separate court in opposition to his father on the present site of Leicester Square and to patronising, and occasionally playing, cricket. Cricket, however, was to be the death of him. He died of an abscess which arose from a blow to the head by a cricket ball in 1751. Since Frederick died before his father, Frederick’s eldest son George III succeeded George II in 1760. Frederick was very popular in his lifetime and greatly mourned.

T
he Scottish king Macbeth, who reigned from 1040–1057, shares with Richard III the great misfortune of having had his character smeared by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s demolition of Richard III was prompted by a desire to please Elizabeth I whose grandfather, Henry VII, had defeated Richard. Macbeth owed his misfortune to the legend that Banquo, whom Macbeth supposedly killed, was the ancestor of the Stuart dynasty and Shakespeare wished to please Banquo’s descendant James I. By all accounts Macbeth was a man of charity who, when he visited Rome in 1050, ‘scattered money like seed to the poor’. He lived at a bloodthirsty time when feuds and assassinations were a way of life in the fractured land which was less a unified kingdom than a collection of warring clans. As Shakespeare claimed, Macbeth did assassinate King Duncan and succeeded him in 1040 and was replaced by Duncan’s son Malcolm in 1057. Nothing is known of his wife, the infamous Lady Macbeth. Although it is one of the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays it is surrounded by more superstition than any of the others amongst actors who are themselves a superstitious tribe. It is regarded as unlucky to mention the name of the drama which is consequently routinely referred to as The Scottish Play.

Macbeth and Banquo meet the three witches. An illustration from Holinshed’s Chronicles

F
ar more is known of Robert I – The Bruce – than of Macbeth. Edward I of England, having subdued Wales, turned his attention to Scotland and became known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’, a phrase engraved in Latin
(Malleus Scotorum)
on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. Having failed to install a submissive candidate, John Balliol, as Scottish king, Edward removed from Scotland the Stone of Scone (also known as the ‘Stone of Destiny’) on which Scottish kings were traditionally crowned, took it south and had it incorporated into a specially designed Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. One legend claimed that the sandstone block had once belonged to the Old Testament prophet Jacob. An Irish origin is more likely. In the centuries that followed it featured in coronation ceremonies though it was damaged by suffragettes in 1914, and stolen and possibly broken by four Scottish students in 1950. It was returned to Westminster for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and restored to Scotland in 1996 by the government of John Major.

Robert Bruce did not advance his claim to the Scottish throne until Edward I was ill in 1306 and Bruce took little part in the insurrections led by the Scottish hero William Wallace. Bruce was crowned Robert I in 1306 and Edward died the following year. Edward II waited until 1314 to attempt to assert his authority and suffered defeat at the Battle of Bannockburn, perhaps the most famous year in Scottish history. Robert succeeded in uniting his country against English threats and the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 asserted the right of Scotland to exist as a separate kingdom, which it remained until the Scottish king James became sovereign of both countries in 1603.

W
hile Robert Bruce bided his time and waited for the approaching death of Edward I, William Wallace had no such inhibitions. In 1297 he emerged from rather obscure origins as leader of the resistance to the English takeover of the Scottish kingdom when he won a notable victory over English forces at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. While many Scottish leaders made terms with the powerful English king, Wallace continued to lead the resistance but was defeated by a powerful English army, led by Edward I himself, at the battle of Falkirk in 1298. Wallace travelled to France to try to gain support from the French king, returning to Scotland in 1303 by which time Edward had succeeded in defeating or reaching terms with other Scottish leaders. In 1305 Wallace was captured, tried for treason (a trumped up charge since he had never owed allegiance to Edward) and executed at Smithfield in 1305 which now bears a monument to Wallace who has a claim to be the greatest of Scottish heroes. The 1995 film
Braveheart
suggested that Wallace fathered Edward II’s son, the future Edward III. Since Edward II did not marry Queen Isabella until three years after Wallace’s death this must be attributed solely to the imagination of the film’s producer.