Hugh Williams - Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History

The second, and perhaps more important reason, is the growing recognition that a proper knowledge of your country’s history is an essential part of being a good citizen. Understanding a country’s past helps to identify its strengths. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a speech in 2007, said ‘Britain has a unique history.’ British values have ‘emerged from the long tidal flows of British history – from the 2,000 years of successive waves of invasion, immigration, assimilation and trading partnerships’. There is, he went on, ‘a golden thread that runs through British history’ from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights of 1689 to the democratic reform acts of the nineteenth century. Knowing about these things builds a sense of being British, which ‘helps unite and unify us’.

In other words, a knowledge of history is a badge of citizenship. Just as you would not call yourself a fan of a football club without knowing the history of its successes and defeats; or join a social club without knowing its rules, so you cannot call yourself a citizen without knowing how the country in which you live came to exist as it does today. If you have nothing to look back on, nothing to feel proud about, nothing to provide you with the understanding of where you came from and why, the present and the future stand without foundation and are therefore more prone to collapse. Human life is part of a continuum, not a vacuum. That’s why our history is important.

At the same time, the idea of history continues to be very popular. Through watching television documentaries and historical dramas and by visiting famous landmarks many people begin to understand, and enjoy, aspects of history that were probably denied to them before. But it can also remain elusive. It may be around us everywhere all the time, but how it fits together is often much more difficult to grasp. Unless you’ve been lucky enough to be well taught, history can appear rather overwhelming – a dense mass of facts and dates that coalesce into an impenetrable fog. And nobody wants to set out into a fog if they can help it.

And so I have set out to provide a path through that fog. This book describes fifty key events in British history which, linked together, form an overview of our history. Those fifty events divide into five thematic chapters:

1 ‘Roots: The Origins of Britain’ describes where the British came from.

2 ‘Struggle: The Battles for Britain’ recounts some of Britain’s greatest conflicts.

3 ‘The Sea: Britain at Home and Abroad’ tells the story of the growth of the British Empire.

4 ‘Freedom: The Pursuit of Liberty’ is about the fight for individual freedom and the development of British democracy.

5 ‘Ingenuity: Britain’s Innovations’ lists some of the nation’s most important scientific, cultural and social changes.

So why choose these fifty things in particular? The events in this book are not the only fifty things you need to know about British history. They are what I, and the producers of the television series, think are fifty of the most important things. Some people will say that we should have excluded some and included others. That’s fine: history is not a perfect science and the differing judgements of individuals are just one of the things that make it interesting. ‘History,’ as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said, ‘is too subtle a process to be firmly seized or summarily decided.’

This book is meant for everyone who is interested in history but is frightened of the fog. The ‘Fifty Things’ it describes will, I hope, provide a clear picture of the most important events in British history and how they fit together to create the nation we live in today.

1