With current debate about the stability and durability of the United Kingdom, Ian Hislop felt it was a good time to explore how it was that England, the core of that union, came to be. In this series he tells the story of four great Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex, celebrating their golden ages and trying to understand their journey from groupings of assimilated peoples from across the North Sea to powerful kingdoms, and ultimately a single entity.

In spite of a relatively limited written record, it's a period of history that is being constantly re-written, thanks to the impact of new archeological techniques and the rise of the amateur detectorists. Ian hears from authorities on the early medieval period including Michael Wood, Marc Morris, Sarah Semple, Nick Higham and the British Museum’s curator of Medieval coinage, Gareth Williams, as well as talking to people with local interests in the Anglo-Saxon story.
He's on the look out for ways in which these regional identities have left a mark beyond the occasional use of their names for utility companies or railway services, and he explores the factors that kept the Kingdoms apart but eventually drew them together; common enemies, a unifying language, the church and the residual aspiration to be as the Romans once were.

In today’s programme Ian is at the intellectual and scholastic heart of the Anglo-Saxon period, in Jarrow. It was once the home of the Venerable Bede who’s history of the Gens Anglorum - the English peoples up to the period he was writing in the early 8th century, championed the importance of his native Kingdom, Northumbria. But as well as visiting the Bede Museum at Jarrow Hall he talks to Sarah Semple, head of archeology at Durham University. Sarah is part of a major l survey of grave goods from across the region, and what they reveal, alongside the very particular nature of Northumbria’s brass coinage, is a society that differs markedly from the Kingdoms to the South. But do some of those differences, thrift, the capacity to deal with the vicissitudes of northern weather and a tough diet, hint at qualities espoused by Northerners today?
Ian also talks to the writer Bernard Cornwell, whose series The Last Kingdom, has brought the battles and strife of Anglo-Saxon England to an international audience, and who has himself ancestral roots in the northern reaches of the Northumbrian Kingdom.

Producer: Tom Alban Show less