The British (2012) s01e02 Episode Script

Over two thousand years they will forge a nation.
Dominate the globe.
And invent the modern world.
This is the story of how a small group of islands becomes a super power.
The British.
This is our story.
Christmas Day, 1066 A new king is to be crowned in Westminster Abbey.
The great monument to Anglo-Saxon power.
But this new King is no Anglo-Saxon.
The man with a claim to the throne is a foreigner.
William Duke of Normandy's path to Westminster has been swift and bloody.
Thousands of Anglo-Saxons have been slaughtered at the Battle of Hastings.
Their King, Harold, is dead.
Once London surrenders, the people of the south capitulate.
The surviving Anglo-Saxon lords are forced to watch the spectacle.
Now they have new masters.
I shall rule all the people as the best of the kings before me.
In omnibus iudiciis equitatem.
I can sympathise with how the Saxons would have felt having built up a community in England when suddenly they get seven bells knocked out of them by the Normans, in come these French-speaking people and take over the country because they're so well organised, they're so aggressive, they're so oppressive.
But many of the Anglo-Saxon people refuse to accept Norman rule.
(MURMURING) Get on with it.
It has taken William two months to secure the English crown.
But there will be years of slaughter before he has the entire country under his command.
Northallerton, in North Yorkshire.
A thriving market town.
The people here have a long history of independence from the South.
Here they resist their new Norman masters to protect their culture and common language different to that of their new King.
They will not bow down to him.
Anglo-Saxon England is a united kingdom, but it's a kingdom which is made up of a number of regions, each of which has its own strong history, culture and traditions.
There is no particular reason why the people in the North should accept the outcome of the Battle of Hastings and the crowning of William in London.
What goes in London doesn't necessarily go in York.
William has ordered his army North.
His men instructed to crush rebellion and impose Norman rule.
Whatever it takes.
(SCREAMING) The brutality seen in hundreds of towns like Northallerton becomes known as the 'Harrying of the North'.
The Norman historian Orderic Vitalis writes, "The King stopped at nothing to hunt out the enemy.
"He cut down many in his vengeance.
He made no effort "to restrain his fury and punished the innocent with the guilty.
" (SCREAMING CONTINUES) (SILENCE) Over one hundred and fifty thousand people die or flee their homes.
"I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter.
"God will punish him.
" Please, don't kill us.
Alongside murder comes the devastation of Anglo-Saxon lands.
Thousands of square miles of fertile land, farmed for a millennium, is burned.
Northallerton is completely destroyed.
Much of Yorkshire and Northumbria laid to waste for over two decades.
The savagery, the uncompromising ruthlessness with which revolution was put down, there was never a question and it was put down with such brutality, such cruelty because the one thing these monarchs would not abide was revolution.
William destroys all resistance.
But the price is a legacy of hatred between the Anglo-Saxon people and their foreign rulers.
One that will last for centuries.
I think that, as with any vanquished people, as with anybody who's ruled by someone externally, that the pain and the shame must have been, must have been unbearable.
The Normans begin to stamp their power on the land, with a new kind of building.
Norman Lords use the forced labour of their Anglo-Saxon subjects on an unprecedented scale to construct huge forts.
Large castles like the one at Rochester, the tallest in England, have walls four metres thick.
First in wood, then in stone, a network of castles appears across the land.
From Launceston in the West.
To Exeter, Southampton and Dover.
In the East - Norwich.
And North to Scarborough.
Within a generation, no village is more than a day's march from a Norman stronghold.
Suddenly the British landscape was dotted with these rather menacing symbols of Norman rule.
And they weren't just menacing, they were, from a military point of view they were a very useful technique for oppressing the countryside all around.
Now the Normans begin the exploitation of their new lands.
Across the country, estates owned by 4,000 Saxon lords are divided between just 200 Norman Barons.
It is the biggest land grab in English history.
Absolutely catastrophic that Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, which had governed England for hundreds of years, totally destroyed by the Norman conquest.
It also had a terrible impact on the peasants because it meant the Norman lords were far more demanding and oppressive than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors.
19 years after William's victory at Hastings, he commissions the most ambitious census in Europe.
Not to be matched in Britain for another 700 years The census will cement Norman ownership of English land in law.
And allow William to tax his population as never before.
Royal commissioners audit every piece of land, every head of cattle, every household is counted.
An Anglo-Saxon chronicler records the scale of the undertaking.
"There was no single hide nor a yard of land, "nor indeed one ox, nor one cow, "nor one pig which was there left out.
" Nearly every statistic recorded is in the hand of one single scribe.
Two million words, nearly 1,000 pages.
And in Latin - a language few Saxon people understand.
They are foreigners, they are there to dominate, they are there to exploit the village.
They're much more brutal and ruthless therefore with the conquered.
The conquered Anglo-Saxons name it "Domesday Book" - the Book of Judgment.
The Domesday Book is an extraordinary snapshot of abundance.
With eight million acres of cultivated land, 11th Century England is one of the wealthiest countries in western Europe.
I think the Domesday Book is an amazing record, because it shows us the structure that existed then, and the wealth of the land and how the country worked.
13,418 places are listed.
But Birmingham, now Britain's second largest city, is a tiny hamlet with nine peasants and two ploughs.
And Manchester features in Domesday as two parish churches on unfarmed land.
Great cities like Liverpool don't even exist.
Domesday reveals the exploitative structure at the heart of medieval society.
Over two thirds of the people are bonded to the land and their new Norman lords, who control almost every aspect of a peasant's life.
You can wake up in the morning and a lord can say, "I'm doubling your rent, I'm chucking you off the land" and there's nothing in law you can do about it and so this creation of legal unfreedom is a long-term consequence of the conquest When the lord said, "This is all mine, and you are all mine," how that must've felt by the peasants, and the people who were sort of established already, I don't know.
And this is still happening now.
When we see other countries ruled by dictators and we look and think, "Imagine putting up with that.
" Well we did for a while.
Domesday confirms the Norman's vast wealth.
Of the six richest people in the whole of British history, four are Norman lords.
William, the Bastard Duke of Normandy, has become "William the Conqueror" - the most powerful monarch in western Europe.
The bounty of England funds astonishing new monuments to Norman piety.
They incorporate cutting edge materials - like stained glass.
Ribbed-vaults, pointed arches and flying buttresses appear at Durham for the first time in western Europe.
The Normans believe they have a divine right to rule.
And that these cathedrals bring them closer to their God.
It's extraordinary when we look at British cathedrals today, firstly to grasp the technology that was involved.
How did they build so big and so high? Also imagine the quantity of wealth that was invested, imagine the vision that they had to start to build a structure that might take hundreds of years to complete.
30 years after the Norman conquest, and Pain Peverel is preparing for war.
(READS ALOUD IN LATIN) The Normans - God's warriors, will join nobility from across Europe in the Crusades.
Pain is the third son of a Norman lord, his brothers have lands in England.
But he has no inheritance, and so must make his own fortune.
For him, the Holy War 2,000 miles away is an opportunity.
The crusades are a mixture of Christian piety on the one hand and feudal robbery with violence on the other.
Hundreds, thousands of armoured knights and their retinues go out to the Holy Land, in many cases, to enrich themselves with booty, in other cases to carve out for themselves fiefdoms, estates which can maintain them in their feudal nobility.
Jerusalem, 1099.
The very first attack on the Holy City.
Thousands of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants massacred.
It's just the start of a campaign that will see hundreds of thousands slaughtered.
Pain becomes an outstanding crusader.
He is made a baron and granted lands in Berkshire - his personal fortune secure.
But the Crusades leave his homeland poorer.
The Holy Wars will continue for almost 200 years.
Funded by harsh levies on the people back home.
Ultimately, of course, the Crusades are paid for by the labour of the peasantry.
It's the poor English peasant working to produce the cash and the corn which supplies all of this.
So the Crusade is to the Holy Land, the impact is in England.
Then, in 1315 - a natural disaster.
Freak weather sparks a farming catastrophe.
For two years torrential rain devastates crops.
Harvests are halved.
Half a million die as the nation suffers one of the worst famines on record.
1317 - the Royal forest of Pickering in Yorkshire.
Brothers John and William Phillips are on the run.
The price of wheat has more than doubled within a year.
Like many at this time, the brothers have been forced into poaching.
Court records show they've been caught here once before.
Now they are outlaws.
These forests are gigantic hunting grounds, at their height covering one quarter of England.
But they're governed by a hated legacy of Norman rule.
These are Royal forests, and no-one is allowed to hunt within them except the King and his court.
The poor were seen as slightly subhuman, you know, as long as the noblemen could hunt then, you know, it didn't matter if a few peasants starved because after all they were peasants.
I guess that's always the attitude - you have to see the people below you as not quite human or you wouldn't be able to get away with it.
Course I sympathise with them poachers.
You can't have people aware that in the forest there's all sorts of goods, deer and pheasants running around, then say they're only for a limited section of society, but the people know that they're there, eventually they'll smash their way into that forest if there's continued injustice.
Them poachers is just hunters by another name.
Poaching weapons are banned from the forest.
So men like the Phillips brothers must hide theirs.
Hand-crafted from flexible yew - the longbow.
The King has decreed all common men must be practiced bowmen.
Ready to fight in the King's army.
The law has spawned a generation of expert archers But the hunters are now the hunted.
Pickering Forest, 1317.
Outlaws John and William Phillips are hunting illegally.
The King's foresters patrol these woods.
Outlaws resisting arrest can be killed.
But these poachers have years of skill and practice on their side.
At 6 foot - the height of a man, drawing this bow is the equivalent of pulling 35 kilos.
It fires an arrow at over 100 miles per hour.
It's pinpoint accurate over seventy metres.
Forest outlaws like the Phillips brothers fuel a legend.
A hero of the common people.
The good thief - Robin Hood.
Robin Hood is a metaphor for fairness of how things should be.
He's an abstract, he's a force, he's something very pertinent to the British character, this sense of fair play, that's something we have as a nation.
We've always wanted fairness.
Not long after the famine subsides, the resilience of the British people will be tested again.
May, 1348.
A merchant ship from France nears the Dorset coast with a deadly cargo Black rats.
Stowaways from the continent.
The fleas they carry are agents of death for a disease that has left over 25 million dead across Europe and Asia.
A disease that's about to land in Britain.
October 1348 - Titchfield, Hampshire.
A village of around 500.
It's just two miles from the coast.
Isabella and John Swein are local tenant farmers, who work for the lord of the manor, tending the fertile lands between the rivers Meon & Hamble.
They have no idea that these black rats are anything more than a nuisance.
A single flea bite is all it takes to infect John with the Bubonic Plague.
Within days, large pus-filled lumps, or buboes, appear at his lymph nodes.
Blood clots can block capillaries in fingertips and toes.
The gangrenous flesh will later give the plague its name, "the Black Death.
" If the plague attacks the lungs, it can go airborne.
Passing directly to the next victim in a cough.
This is now the Pneumonic Plague.
Quicker to spread.
Even more lethal.
For John, internal bleeding and organ failure lead to an agonizing death.
Isabella's fate is already sealed.
She will join him within days.
Dying from the Black Death was horrible, it was painful, it was ugly.
The only good thing about it is that it was quick.
Which was no doubt a merciful relief for the sufferers, but was terribly shocking for the survivors.
It must've been appalling to think that you were likely to get a contagion, even though it wasn't clear how the thing was spread.
And therefore the lack of trust that would've been between people.
Any kind of normal travel would have to stop really, one would be looking at one's children incredibly anxiously.
This would've been, I think, something quite devastating.
Through the autumn, the village of Titchfield begins to die.
Court records from October 1348 announce the death of John Carruck, a professional ploughman.
Johanna Gay dies, along with her daughter Matilda - the last of their family line.
Roger Gilbert and the widow, Isabella Osmond, also dead.
Six months after the disease arrives, almost three quarters of the village are gone.
It's a scene repeated.
House after house visited by the Black Death.
Village after village lose up to half their population.
The disease spreads, leaping down Britain's busy trade routes and rivers.
Now, the plague's deadly highways.
Across the sea to Ireland.
By Christmas Day, 1348, half of the friars in Drogheda are dead.
At the monastery in Kilkenny, Brother Clyn believes he may be one of the last men alive on earth.
He writes - "I leave parchment for continuing the work, in case anyone "should still be alive in the future and any son of Adam "can escape this pestilence and continue the work thus begun.
" In another hand, the next line reads - "Here it seems, the author dies.
" The effect of the Black Death is absolutely appalling.
Records, actual records of manors show that 30, 40, sometimes 50% of the population was killed by it.
It's like a nuclear holocaust.
Protests about the unburied bodies turn into bloody riots Thousands of decaying corpses are tossed into makeshift pits.
But in London, where it's said 200 souls a day are dying, it's a different story.
Over 600 years later, archaeologists working in the city of London make a poignant discovery.
A mass grave.
Over 2,000 bodies in pits up to 125 metres long.
These bodies are laid out in reverence.
Children between adults, facing the Christian Holy City of Jerusalem.
Astonishing evidence of medieval London's compassion and fortitude.
The fact that they were laid to rest, pointing in the same direction tells us that in each of those bodies there was a human soul which was capable of salvation, and that it would rise from the body and be received into heaven, this was what they believed.
And therefore, the body was not something to be treated with disrespect.
Half the population may be dead.
But survivors of the Plague gain new opportunities.
A transformation begins across the landscape.
Vacant land is taken up by the Plague survivors.
These farmers can now produce more food than they need and sell the excess for profit.
A prosperous "middling class" emerges, who can build aspirational homes on two floors.
Over 350 of these houses still stand in the Kentish countryside today.
Evidence of a new, ambitious, breed of Englishman who has the power to transform society forever.
Fobbing, in Essex.
Thomas Baker makes bread for his village.
A generation has passed since the Plague killed half the population.
Life is changing.
With a shortage of labour, the wages of bakers like Tom have risen substantially.
So have those of a blacksmith, a labourer, a brewer.
Instead of being tied to his village for life and a serf of the lord, he suddenly became somebody who could look for the highest price, or perhaps the best working conditions.
And so you see something which clearly is the beginning of a more modern relationship between employer and employed man or woman.
But the lords are threatened by this new power and prosperity.
They try to fix wages at pre-plague levels.
Even to pass laws telling peasants what to eat and wear.
It doesn't work.
When demands are sent out for a harsh new poll tax, the people of Essex refuse to pay.
I certainly can relate to that feeling of "No-one else tells us what to do "and we can do it together as a group, we won't be told.
" I see that in people who I grew up around.
I think the traits are still there.
And I think that's a, that's a very uplifting and a great thing to have inside you.
This is what we're paid, what we're all paid.
They're coming! They're coming! On the 30th of May, 1381, Royal stewards arrive in Brentwood to collect the King's Poll Tax.
You know why we're here.
We're not paying another penny! Arrest them.
Arrest them all! The balance of power has shifted.
The peasants weapon, the longbow, is once again turned against the King's authority.
You tell him what we think of him! Tell him to get the hell out of here! Maybe because Britain's an island, there is a sort of ecosystem of rebellion that flourishes here, that alongside every act of oppression there has always been an equal reaction of rebellion.
It is always inspiring to hear of people overcoming their docility to confront power, "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
" So yeah, I'm into them peasant revolutions.
News of Brentwood's rebellion spreads.
It sparks the first great popular uprising in British history - The Peasants' Revolt.
But these men and women are anything but peasants.
They are professional, literate and organised.
Coded letters are sent to gather support for the uprising.
Their aim - an end to serfdom.
Within a fortnight, the Essex rebels are joined by others from Kent to march on London.
At the tower, the guards simply stand aside.
Inside is Robert Hales, the treasurer loathed for the poll tax.
He's described at the time as, "As high-minded and energetic a knight as any, "but who was not pleasing to the commons.
" Robert Hales is shown no mercy and beheaded outside the tower gates.
From London, revolt spreads to towns and villages across the country.
And sets in progress the first steps to a modern, working life.
Within two generations, serfdom has all but collapsed The people become free to work where they like, negotiate their wage, choose their own masters.
But Thomas Baker will not live to see this brave new nation.
Within a month, the rebel leaders are rounded up and executed.
30 are from Essex, five from Fobbing.
The revolt's leaders pay the highest price, but what the English people fought for, they, in time, will win.
You've got to feel that everything is going to be different in the future, you know, if the people rise up for whatever reason, you have to say that when the dust settles things will be different.
They risked everything for a principle.
I don't know if I've got the guts to do that.
The Peasants Revolt sets England apart.
A land of personal freedoms where men now fight for their kings through choice.
Agincourt, France.
October 25th 1415.
England is at war.
The latest offensive in a century of conflict with France.
Henry V has brought 7,000 archers.
From all over England and Wales.
The grandchildren of the Peasants' Revolt generation.
Among them, a Welsh archer, Einion Gethin.
A local leader from the small Welsh village of Caerwedros.
He's one of a new breed of soldier - a willing professional He even has a contract which gives him rights.
He earns twice as much as a farm labourer.
And he is fighting for a people's King, who speaks not the French of the court but English - the language of the common man.
But today the English will face twice their number on the battle field.
The French force is 15,000 strong.
Over half are knights and noblemen.
Against them - the English longbow.
More than three quarters of the English army are archers.
This peasants' weapon has come of age.
In the hands of trained archers like Gethin, it is now the most feared weapon on the battlefield.
A trained archer can accurately launch 12 arrows a minute.
Thousands darken the sky.
Specially-developed to pierce a knight's armour.
No enemy soldier will face a comparable rate of fire for over 400 years.
Until now the history of Britain has been dictated by royalty, nobility and clergy.
But the 14th century finally writes the common man into the history books.
When the chips are down and the enemy arrives at the door, it's strange how class and people's ranks suddenly dissolves a little bit.
It doesn't matter if you're a colonel or I'm a private or whatever, we have to stand against the enemy.
Though vastly outnumbered, men like Gethin are victorious.
The common man gives England its greatest military victory to date.
So what I think is born at Agincourt is this spirit of defiance, of resistance, of being the underdog, of being willing to die on the battlefield in defence of England.
If we look at Britain in a world context - we're free! And that is not an accident, that happened because people fought for it - our ancestors, our grandparents and great grandparents and so on.
They fought battles! We are a nation of not only fighters but brave fighters.
We are not scared easy, a nation of big hearts and big ambitions.
And big goals and big dreams.
England is transformed.
Society is no longer rigidly divided between the conquerors and the conquered, the lords and the serfs, the free and the unfree.
The English embrace a new identity.
Freeborn men and women living in a land of opportunity.
With a mobile workforce and a respect for independent thought.
But this same free spirit will trigger a century of religious mayhem and civil war.