The Story of Britain by Rebecca Fraser

Whether it be a childhood love of Disney's Robin Hood, America's "special relationship" with the former mother country, or an appreciation for the brilliance of their historians, I share many people's interest in the history of England. After World War II and the ancient Egytians, English history seems the most likely subject of a History Channel feature. The Tudor dynasty comes in for special attention, with documentaries like The Six Wives of Henry VIII joined by Hollywood productions such as The Other Boleyn Girl and Showtime's The Tudors.

Over the years I have accumulated several works on specific aspects of British history, including Martin Gilbert's one-volume Churchill and Alison Weir's Henry VIII. Still, it seemed best to look for a survey that could provide a foundational understanding of history on the island. Fortunately, I came across Rebecca Fraser's recent narrative history, The Story of Britain.

Fraser is the daughter of Antonia Fraser, herself the author of numerous histories and novels, and Hugh Fraser a Conservative MP until his death. The two were nearly killed in 1975 by an IRA bomb planted under their car (while Caroline Kennedy was staying at their home), and several years later Antonia left Hugh to begin an affair with her current husband, Nobel-laureate Harold Pinter. Quite a family.

The Story of Britain is a thick book, nearly 800 pages, stretching "From the Romans to the Present." It is divided into sections by dynasty, and into chapters by monarch. Monarchs with particularly eventful or lengthy reigns, like George III and Victoria, even get sub-chapters. It is a straight chronological narrative, and the declared "aim of this history is to attempt to return to those old rules of 'who, when, what, how," with "no apology for re-telling some of the nation's best-loved stories, though the facts on which they rest may be dubious to say the least." That's one way to preface a history, but at least she's honest.

The first thirty pages are devoted to the Romans, first led ashore (but not much further) by Julius Caesar, before the rise of the Anglo-Saxons under Ethelbert of Kent. Very interesting details on the constant pressure applied by Viking aggression throughout this period:

There were three kinds of Vikings and they moved in three separate directions. While the Swedish Vikings swept east in their thousands under their chief Rurik to found the Kievan Rus or first Russian state, the Norwegian Vikings sailed west and founded Greenland. Two centuries later, about the year 1000, they would discover North America, putting in at what is now New England, which they called Vinland. They sailed down the west coast of Scotland and across to Ireland, where they founded Viking cities like Dublin and Cork and laid waste almost all the wealthy monasteries in the north of the country...

The third kind of Viking, known as the 'inner line,' concentrated their unwelcome attentions on the southern coast of England and the north coast of continental Europe. These Vikings were Danes from Denmark, whose ancestors had moved into the districts left empty by the Angles when they went to England in the fifth century... From merely being coastal raisers, who in a sense could be lived with, the Vikings of the mid-ninth century started to spend the winter in the countries they raided, showing their utter contempt for the local community.

This was happening through Europe. By the latter half of the 9th century, the Vikings "took up more or less permanent quarters on the Rhine, the Scheldt, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne." They reached Morocco and laid siege to Constantinople. Their domination of England was only ended by the heroic leadership of Alfred the Great, a prince of Wessex. Anglo-Saxon rule would continue, more or less, until William the Conqueror led his troops across the English Channel in the Norman invasion of 1066Norman invasion of 1066. This began the shift of English attention away from the North Sea and the Scandinavians, and toward the continent. English interests in France would expand further during the reign of one of England's greatest kings, William's great-grandson, Henry II, which lasted from 1154-1189:

Henry II was not a man any baron would wish to trifle with. Not only was was he in the fierce, energetic mould of the Norman kings and possessed of a powerful personality, thanks to his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitane he also ruled the whole of western France from the Loire to Pyrenees on the borders of Spain, as well as Normandy and Anjou, inherited from his mother and his father respectively... The new king of England was thus the greatest monarch in western Europe.

This from an island nation that a century earlier had paid scant attention to its continental neighbors. As the centuries pass, and the internecine battles that mark medieval English history continued to erupt, Fraser does an exceptional job providing sufficient background to the various players, and sufficient detail to understand the rise and fall of various factions. This becomes particularly complicated during the Wars of the Roses. Any work of English political history demands decent genealogical tables, and Fraser provides nine pages worth, starting with Alfred's grandfather Egbert, all the way down to Elizabeth II's great-niece, Margarita Armstrong-Jones.

The civil wars between powerful regions and families that characterized the reigns of Lancastrian and Yorkist monarchs give way to religious factionionalism after Henry VIII's break with Rome, leading most significantly to the English Civil War and the rise of Oliver Cromwell. The defeat of Cromwell's successors and the subsequent Restoration of the throne did not end religious conflict on the island, but the major scene of strife shifts first to the power struggle between the throne and Parliament, and then finally to the party politics that characterize modern democratic government. Fraser covers it all in great detail.

The work is not without faults. There are neither footnotes nor endnotes, and a mere 3 page list of suggestions for "Further Reading." This is almost entirely a political history, and is thus confined for most of the first 500 pages to the crown and the recurring battles over succession. There is little coverage of the social and cultural history of the British, little discussion of music, art, science or philosophy, and the references to religion are confined to religion's influence on the state or as an impetus for war. The appearance of Robert Walpole and the subsequent rise of the office of prime minister, moves the focus, but only to follow the shift of political power. The coverage of 20th-century Britain has more breadth, though even this seems concurrent with the expansion of the state itself.

This is also England-centric history. Fraser fails to give Wales, Scotland, or Ireland anywhere near their due attention. They are largely ignored except for when they are either rebelling or being conquered. That may be more excusable for Ireland, at least insofar as much of it is now independent of Britain. But Scotland and Wales have been part of Britain for hundreds of years, and there is worthy history in those regions beyond the occasional military or political conflict. This is hardly the end of the world; after all, I've got Magnus Magnusson's Scotland and R.F. Foster's Modern Ireland to cover that history. But those looking for one-volume covering the whole history of the Isles might be disappointed.