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A History of Ancient Britain QUOTES

A History of Ancient Britain QUOTES

1 " This is what Britain has always done - Britain the island, the mountains, valleys, lochs, lakes, forests and coastline of the place; she accepts all comers but quietly transforms them, shapes them in her own image. Britain has had a history of making things British. "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

2 " Ginger people! D'you know what they are? Our aborigines ... that's what! GINGERIGINES! Look at 'em ... they were 'ere first. All this is theirs!
Al Murray, Pub Landlord "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

3 " Just as the fingers of an old man’s hands at rest still curl inwards in memory of the time they spent balled into fists inside his mother’s womb, so our hands receive handaxes from half a million years ago as though those tools were made to fill the space left empty by all the years. "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

4 " A person might be forgiven for thinking that if we were a plant we would be some sort of smothering ivy, crawling across the face of the planet until our tendrils threatened to throttle the very life out of the place. "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

5 " The notion of communion with a loved one, by eating of his body and drinking of his blood, may be much, much older than 2,000 years. "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

6 " Key to their deeper understanding is the coinage. When some numismatists look at the coins circulating in Britain in the middle of the first century BC, they spot a clean break. After the Roman invasion of 54 BC the old Celtic coins disappear and are replaced with new – suggesting one hierarchy had been replaced by another. In his wonderfully readable Britannia: The Creation of a Roman Province, John Creighton identifies three ways in which the new coins differ from the old. Firstly there is an abrupt change in the familiar depictions of a human head on one side and a horse on the other. After Caesar’s time in Britain, the imagery suddenly mimics that of coins minted in Gaul. The second change is in the amount of gold in gold coins: where once the gold content was highly variable, suddenly it became carefully regulated and consistent. Thirdly, says Creighton, hoards featuring both old and new coinages are rare – making it likely that the old coins were withdrawn and replaced wholesale by the new version. ‘The combination of these three changes in the gold coinage, all happening at the same time, suggests a radical restructuring of the political arrangement of south-east Britain at this date, even though otherwise in the archaeology we see little alteration,’ he wrote. ‘A recoinage across all of south-east Britain required the mobilisation of a significant degree of power or authority.’ Creighton infers the ‘radical restructuring of the political arrangement’ went further than just issuing new coins. He believes the Romans also installed two Gallic aristocrats as kings of two new territories, one south of the Thames and one in the east. "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

7 " They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.’ Psalm 107: 23–24 "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

8 " Coins are viewed as evidence of increasing levels of contact between Britain and Gaul between around 125 BC and 50 BC. They are often discovered as hoards, whole collections buried in the ground either for safekeeping or as offerings to the gods. The earliest of them were Gallo-Belgic ‘staters’ – coins minted in northern France or Belgium – and crossed the English Channel either as payment for trade goods or as gifts exchanged between chieftains. It has even been suggested by some numismatists that the Gallo-Belgic staters of mid-first-century date arrived in Britain as payment for mercenaries and other supplies sent to Gaul to support the struggle against Rome. "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain

9 " A gold coin made during the reign of the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon King Offa has ‘OFFA REX’ on one side and the inscription ‘THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH ALONE’on the other. For a while it was claimed by some as evidence Offa had converted to Islam – until it was identified as a copy of an Arabic coin. Islamic gold coins of the Abbasid dynasty were the most trusted in the Mediterranean world at the time and Offa’s coin-makers were simply giving their own output the best chance of being accepted as credible tender.) "

― Neil Oliver , A History of Ancient Britain