The BBC'sA History of Britain

Abstract

In summer 1995, I was invited to a lunch hosted by the controller of the TV channel BBC2 in a fashionable West London restaurant. Although I did not know who the lunch partners were to be, I was told what we would discuss. With the millennium only five years away, the national broadcaster-mindful of its duty to offer improving and enjoyable nourishment-was thinking both backward and ahead. It seemed fitting to offer the nation a gift on the occasion: a story of its past, a history of Britain. Though we were given few details about their ideas in advance, it was clear that the BBC chiefs wanted a comprehensive biography, a cradle-to-grave affair. So they collected historians of all periods and diverse affiliations for consultation. Among us were a charismatic people's historian, a distinguished journalist and historian of Scotland, an expert on Tudor kingship, a Victorianist of great panache, a historian of Britain's eighteenth-century global empire, and a medieval historian. That was me. To give shape and purpose to our meeting, a political journalist and interviewer, Brian Walden, acted as chair. With a blend of the skepticism born of experience and boyish charm born of enthusiasm, he presided over the unscripted event. As I walked through the elegant street leading to the restaurant, I planned how I might sell the Middle Ages, how I might convey the dynamism of the period. I feared that its place in the enterprise might be in peril. True, no maker of a history of Britain would wish to exclude the Norman Conquest, the Becket Affair, the Magna Carta, Parliament, or the Black Death; that was sure. But I also sensed that a history of Britain made in 1995 would strive to be inclusive: of regions, peoples, genders, occupations, cultural milieus, dialects; in sum, of the great variety of experiences of the people of Britain. My task-as I understood it-was to convince the program makers that it was possible to do that for the Middle Ages, too. I expected to have to persuade the program's planners that the earlier centuries need not be doomed to a treatment through kings, knights, and bishops alone-that society could be made accessible and interesting to millions of future viewers. As I prepared my case, I imagined it to be one of advocacy, of reassuring the man who held the purse strings that the history of the Middle Ages could be made visually pleasing but also socially inclusive: with women and peasants, artisans and Welsh people, northerners and southerners, Flemings and Jews-the lot. A historian of the Middle Ages in 1995 could rightly celebrate almost a halfcentury of exciting new research on the patterns of life, work, and death of people in villages and small towns alongside the burgeoning cities; of vernacular literatures