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From the beginnings of its national formation to the“Civil Wars”(1642—1651), Britain had witnessed waves of ethnic immigration and integration, constant conquests and naturalization by such aliens as the Romans, the Vikings and the Normans, until a unified national identity was established in the 11 th century and the national sovereignty characteristic of the modern state was accomplished in the middle of the 17 th century. While the pre-historical British wars have not been clearly recorded, the English nationality was born in a series of alien invasions and conquests, making its national identity characteristically bellicose or belligerent and a national culture inherently pathological: Conquerors has become the ethnic fathers. In 55 BCE, the Romans led by Julius Caesar sailed across the English Channel and conquered Britain, and nearly 100 years later, in AD 43, the Roman emperor Claudius invaded Britain again, making part of the island a province of their huge empire called“Britannia”. Beginning from the 5 th century and as the Roman rule got weaker, the Germanic tribes known as the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and Frisians invaded the former Roman colony with a fresh influx of foreign settlers, bringing with them their language, their paganism, and their distinctive warrior traditions. Such a national origin, as has been now claimed by the“Anglo-Saxon Britain”(AD 600—AD 900), in fact cherishes a displaced genealogy from native fathers to alien invaders.
The Anglo-Saxons are illiterate, and the earliest of their records are only inventive lists of rulers who established separate kingdoms: the Saxons in the south and west; the Angles in the east and north; and the Jutes on the Isle of Wight and the mainland opposite. It is left for the literary to restore this cultural genealogy, in which those legendary stories of King Arthur retold again and again across the British history seem to have been serving as the misplaced cure: King Arthur must be a very brave warrior around the year AD 450, or AD 500, or AD 525, though not even named Arthur, or a figure of imagination or a real person, leads the remnants of Romanized British resistance against a steady onslaught of these foreign pagan invaders, who have later become the ancestors of the British nationalities.
Conquests and being conquered constantly change their roles. What King Arthur has restored is the legacy of Romanized Britain rather than native Britain, and thus has identically inherited a misplaced“father”. So is Alfred the Great (AD 849—AD 899). When Britain was robbed by the Danish Vikings who came from Norway and Denmark, King Alfred defended as such until Britain first became one single kingdom under his great-grandson, Edgar, in 959. The next 100 years seems to be in order and stability until the Norman Conquest of 1066 that results ultimately in profound political, administrative, and social changes in the British Isles. Starting from the Battle of Hastings (1066), Britain entered one of the largest sections of the Nation, spanning over three centuries of the so-called“the Middle Ages”to the late 15 th century, which were rampant with wars with France such as the Hundred Years War (1337—1453) and the Wars of the Roses (1455—1487). From the Renaissance and Reformation to the Revolution and Restoration, Britain witnessed the Tudor Re-conquest of Ireland in the 1540s,the Defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the Thirty Years War (1618—1648), and the British Civil Wars (1642—1651). As the demarcation line from the classic to the modern period,the British Civil Wars polarised society largely along class lines: Parliament forces, called“Roundheads”, drew most of its support from the middle classes, while the king's army, called“Cavaliers”, was supported by the nobility, the clergy, and the peasantry. It greatly shook England, Wales, and Scotland with a struggle for power until its final solution by the“Glorious Revolution”.
As warfare is a constant of political and civic life during this long period of about 1000 years' history, the prevalence of war both as a theme and form has been remarkable in such national epics focusing on human-supernatural conflicts as
Beowulf
(?—the late 8
th
century),such heroic poems as
The Battle of Brunanburh
in
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(compiled in around AD 890. at the command of King Alfred the Great), such heroic, lyrical or elegiac poems as
The Battle of Maldon
(the late 10
th
century), such legendary romances as
King Horn
(c.1250)
[1]
,
Guy of Warwick
and
Beves of Hampton
(in the 14
th
century Auchinleck manuscript) and those various versions of heroic exploits of King Arthur and the Round Table, e.g.,
Morte
Arthure
(the 14
th
century).
A peculiar feature of these earliest war writing or poems is their anonymity. As the long night of medieval darkness became less dark and bright prospect of the English Renaissance loomed large along the horizon, not only did history become clearly recorded, but authorship became individually marked. Geoffrey Chaucer's (circa 1343—1400) great Trojan romance Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1382—1386) writes the war topic, and in his The Canterbury Tales (circa 1375—1400), he brings together legendary and contemporary warfare in the figure of the Knight and his tale, which has long been characteristic of the Medieval war poetry.
The English Renaissance began in about 1500 and spanned through the first few decades of the next century, characterised by increased affluence for the nation, civil unrest associated with the War of the Roses (1455—1487), and changes in popular thinking and cultural standards among the populace. Queen Elizabeth I was credited with spurring literature and theatre in the years of the English Renaissance. Homer was not known until the rediscovery of Greek texts in the Renaissance, alongside Vergil's Aeneid . Other great events include the Protestant Reformation and the establishment of the Church of England orchestrated by King Henry VIII. Renaissance philosophers and artists revisited the ideas, learning and artistic conventions of antiquity, as a more secular view of human nature and life itself began to take hold in European culture. William Shakespeare wrote his many plays, and his ten English history plays are where he engaged most profoundly with the experience and recording of early modern warfare.
The English Reformation was a series of events in the 16 th century England by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. It had begun as an assertion of English nationhood under a monarch who saw himself as head,protector, and arbiter of a national Church, but ended as a challenge to the idea of monarchy itself. The English Revolution (the English Civil Wars), also respectively categorised as the“Great Rebellion”,“Puritan Revolution”, or“English Bourgeois Revolution”, was the discrediting of the idea of the divine right of kings, the belief that parliament was supreme in political matters, and that the English monarch had to rule in a manner which was limited by the idea of a constitutional monarchy. Charles I was executed, and Oliver Cromwell (1599—1658) became Lord Protector. Oliver Cromwell led parliamentary forces in the English Civil Wars and served as the lord protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1653—1658) during the republican Commonwealth, and helped to enlarge and sustain a Puritan attitude of mind,both in Great Britain and in North America, which continued to influence political and social life until modern times.
Here in this critical anthology, the“British Classical Wars”refers to those wars before the British Civil Wars whether taking place in the British Isles or outside and with the Anglo Saxons race involved, including the Anglo-Saxons wars, Medieval and Early modern wars,characteristics of which serve as the foundation of the English national identity and its genealogy, which is, of course, evident in that war poetry before the British Civil Wars had been influenced by The Bible and Classical Greek or Roman war literature.
[1] King Horn is frequently called the earliest English-language romance, which contains about 1,500 lines,based on an Anglo-Norman romance, telling the story of a heroic Scottish prince's successful fight to regain his kingdom after his expulsion by invaders.