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       Preface

      British ‘Peculiarity’

      I decided to write this book because I am fascinated by the story that British prehistory has to tell. By ‘prehistory’ I mean the half-million or so years that elapsed before the Romans introduced written records to the British Isles in AD 43. I could add here that I was tempted to give the book a subtitle suggested to me by Mike Parker Pearson: ‘The Missing 99 Per Cent of British and Irish History’ – but I resisted. In any case, when the Roman Conquest happened, British prehistory did not simply hit the buffers. Soldiers alone cannot bring a culture to a full stop, as Hitler was to discover two millennia later. It is my contention that the influences of British pre-Roman cultures are still of fundamental importance to modern British society. If this sounds far-fetched, we will see that Britain and Ireland’s prehistoric populations had over six thousand years in which to develop their special insular characteristics.

      I regard the nations of the British Isles as having more that unites than divides them, and as being culturally peculiar when compared with other European states. I believe that this peculiarity can be traced back to the time when Britain became a series of offshore islands, around 6000 BC. Those six millennia of insular development gave British culture a unique identity and strength that was able to survive the tribulations posed by the Roman Conquest, and the folk movements of the post-Roman Migration Period, culminating in the Danish raids, the Danelaw and of course the Norman Conquest of 1066. It’s in the very nature of British culture to be flexible and to absorb, and sometimes to enliven or transform, influences from outside. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by the historical hybrid that is the English language, which many regard as Britain’s greatest contribution to world culture.

      The

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