THE BISHOPS STORTFORD HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY BRIDGING UNIT

1 Contents

Contents ...... 2 How to: Cornell note-taking ...... 3

PART A - Tasks to complete BEFORE Results Day (June/July ...... 4

PART A – Anglo-, Task 1 ...... 5 PART A – Anglo-Saxons, Task 2 ...... 9 PART A – Russia 1894-1941, Task 1 ...... 11 PART A – Russia 1894, 1941, Task 2 ...... 11

PART B - Tasks to complete AFTER Results Day (August/September) ...... 24

PART B – Anglo-Saxons Tasks ...... 25 PART B – Anglo-Saxons Reading and Viewing ...... 26 PART B – Russia 1894-1941 Tasks ...... 27 PART B – Russia 1894-1941 Reading and Viewing...... 37

2 How to: Cornell note-taking

You will need to make use of the Cornell note-taking technique for some of the reading tasks for this Bridging Unit.

The technique was devised by Prof. Walter Pauk of Cornell University (part of the ‘Ivy League’ in the US of elite universities) in the 1950s.

Science has proven that it is not only more efficient, but also makes it a lot easier to review notes, for example when preparing for an exam.

1. Make sure that every piece of work has a title: 2. Put a date for every piece This should relate specifically to the topic of work. (This will help you to (e.g. don’t just put keep work in order) “History” or “Classwork”) 6. Leave some space (approximately a fifth of the page) down the right hand side of the page. After a lesson/activity, you should cross-reference your notes with your textbook (or some other 4. In the margin put resource – an online lecture/an key words/key article from Modern History Review questions (you may do etc) this as you go, or add In this space, you can add them later, after the additional material/ideas that were lesson not covered in class to build up your understanding and subject knowledge.

5. Between each lesson, you should read back over your notes, to consolidate your knowledge and prepare for the next lesson. As you re-read your work: (i) highlight your notes (you could use different colours e.g. orange for key words/terminology, yellow for evidence, green for quotes) (ii) Write a brief summary of the most important points from the lesson at the bottom of your page (e.g. three bullet points or 100 word)

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PART A - Tasks to co mplete BEFORE Results Day (June/July Tasks to complete BEFORE Results Day

(June/July

4 PART A – Anglo-Saxons, Task 1

Introduction to the Viking Wars

Adapted from Whittock, M. & H.; The Viking Blitkrieg: AD 789-1098

Read through the below extract. Summarise the “Key features of early Anglo-Saxon and Viking Raids”, in no more than four pages of A4. You must decide which information is most important. It is recommended that you use the Cornell Note-Taking Method (see information in the work pack).

The Viking Wars are more than just a feature of the second half of that period of time we call ‘Anglo- Saxon England’ – they radically altered its entire landscape. Indeed, it can be argued that, unintentionally, they helped to create the united ‘England’ from a patchwork of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which characterized the ninth century. The Viking Wars made ‘England’, and did so as much in people’s heads as in their institutions and archaeology.

For twenty-first century readers these wars strike familiar chords: there are debates about the ‘clash of civilizations’; we see the stresses and strains inherent in the formation of a multi-cultural society; national identities are questioned, forged and challenged; religion, economics and power-politics intersect, interact and, at times, explode; immigrants and native inhabitants both clash and cooperate; and propaganda is created and re-created in a battle for hearts and minds.

So how did the Viking Wars begin? And, more importantly, what kind of ‘England’ did they explode into?

‘England’ before the

First of all, it is important to gain some context and understanding about what the Anglo-Saxon ‘England’ actually looked like at the outset of the Viking Wars. For one thing, it was barely an ‘England’ at all.

The Romans ruled our island, at the time called the province of Britannia, for almost 350 years – almost as long as between our own time and that of the English Civil War in the 1600s. The Roman period in Britain is often said to have ended in the year AD 410, when the Roman emperor Honorius supposedly told the native Britons (or ‘Celts’) to look to their own defences, as he and his troops were needed to return and defend Rome itself from barbarian attacks. Once the last Roman legions had left, Britain, and its wealth, became vulnerable to external invasion.

Britain, or ‘Britannia’, had never been entirely subdued by the Romans. In the far north – what we now think of as modern Scotland – there were tribes who defied the Romans, especially the . The Romans built a great barrier, Hadrian’s Wall, to keep them out of the civilised and prosperous part of Britain.

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However, as soon as Roman power began to wane, these defences were degraded, and in AD 367 the Picts smashed through them. Gildas, a monk and Briton who wrote a history of his times in around the AD 540s, says that Saxon war- bands were hired to defend Britain from these onslaughts when the Roman army had left. So, the Anglo-Saxons were invited immigrants.

Who were these men, who would eventually give their name to the land, and from where did they come? They were a hard people, excellent seamen and fighters, who proved themselves to be good farmers. There were , who may have come from Denmark and given their name to Jutland, Saxons from and north Germany, and who occupied the land called Angle between the Saxons and the Jutes.

Initially, these mixed groups of Germanic warriors fought on behalf of the Britons, protecting them from their Pictish neighbours. However, quickly realising that their employers could not protect themselves, they raised their demands for food and pay. When they were not met, they turned their swords against them.

Resistance to the invaders by the native Celts and Britons was irregular; but we know it existed, even if the details are vague. Legendary heroes such as the Romano-British chief Arturius (King Arthur) fought bravely and at times successfully; but they could do little more than check the invaders.

Eventually, after the native Britons were completely crushed, seven major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were carved out of the conquered areas: (lands north of the River Humber), (the East Angles), Essex (East Saxons), Sussex (South Saxons), Kent, (West Saxons) and . All these nations were fiercely independent, and although they shared similar languages, pagan religions, and socio-economic and cultural ties, they were absolutely loyal to their own kings and very competitive, especially in their favourite pastime – war.

At first they were pre-occupied fighting the Britons, who were gradually pushed back into what we now think of as Wales (from the ‘wealas’ – meaning foreigner). However, as soon as they had consolidated their power-centres they immediately commenced armed conflict with each other.

In the ensuing years, these ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms would become Christian - one reason why they converted was because the church said that the Christian God would deliver them victory in battles.

6 It was into this island of distinct Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that the Vikings would explode onto the scene in the late eighth century, and force them to gradually unite into one, single country by the 900s – ‘Angle’-land, or England.

Lindisfarne: A 9/11 moment?

Every educated Anglo-Saxon – whether monk, nun or noble – would probably have been able to recall where they were when they first heard the news that the monastery of (Northumbria) had been sacked, in 793. Situated at the end of a causeway, off the coast of the northern Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, Lindisfarne was a spiritual, cultural and intellectual powerhouse. Not for nothing is it still known as Holy Island.

Then, in 793, the place was trashed by a band of seafaring, pagan, Scandinavian pirates – Vikings.

We know a great deal about what happened during the raid from the later historian Simeon of Durham (AD 1060 – AD1129), who in his chronicle ‘Historia Regum’ writes that:

‘…They came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in chains, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea…’

A carved stone found on the island, known as the ‘Viking Raider Stone’ or ‘Doomsday Stone’, could also potentially represent the Viking attack on the monastery, or conversely, Anglo-Saxon warriors defending Lindisfarne from attack.

This Viking raid was not the first in England. A few years before, in 789, ‘three ships of northmen’ had landed on the coast of Wessex, and killed the king’s reeve who had been sent to bring the strangers to the West Saxon court. But the assault on Lindisfarne was different because it attacked the sacred heart of the Northumbrian kingdom, desecrating ‘the very place where the Christian religion began in our nation’. It was where the patron saint of Northumbria, St Cuthbert (d. 687) had been bishop, and where his body was now revered as that of a saint.

It is often risky to draw parallels between events occurring in different periods of history. Values, ideas and outlooks do not always travel as easily as we sometimes make them do. But 793 was surely an Anglo-Saxon ‘9/11 moment’. It struck at national security and cultural values in an iconic place and in a brutal and bloody manner. If anything represented a ‘clash of civilizations’, then surely it was the sack of Lindisfarne.

For those Anglo-Saxons who heard of it, the destruction of Lindisfarne was an offence against God, learning and the sense that Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were safe from external threats. That the ancestors of the shocked and appalled listeners to the breaking news of 793 had done much the same things to the Romano-British citizens in the fifth century was an irony lost on most who heard it. Anglo-Saxon England had moved on since then and devastation at the hands of the pagans was totally unexpected. Similarly, the fact that Anglo-Saxon warbands in the eighth century were not above sacking monasteries loyal to rival neighbouring kingdoms within England did not diminish the shock of this attack from the sea by ‘outsiders’.

7 Northumbrian churchman, scholar and educationalist, Alcuin, provides us with the only significant contemporary account of the attack in a letter he wrote to the king of Northumbria in 793, expressing his shock at the events that had unfolded.

It is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church… spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more holy than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.

Contemporary Christians saw in this event the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy of Jeremiah in the Bible: ‘The Lord said to me, ‘from the North disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land’ ‘. This may have inspired Alcuin’s reminder – in the same letter – of a bloody rain which had fallen from a clear sky on the north side of the church at York. To Alcuin this suggested that ‘from the north there will come upon our nation retribution of blood’. He went on to attempt to explain why such a disaster had occurred. Claiming it to a punishment from God, he identified sins as varied as the hair fashion which imitated that of the northern pagans, luxurious clothing and the impoverishment of the common people as a result of the wealth enjoyed by their leaders.

Alcuin’s letter is not our only record of the disaster which hit Lindisfarne. A later source – a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – took up the theme dramatically.

In this year dire omens appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consistent of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.

The Viking Wars had started with a vengeance. The opening strike of what can only be described as the ‘First Blitzkrieg’ had fallen on Anglo-Saxon England. Not surprisingly, many histories of the Vikings in England start with this raid. They use this to illustrate the utter devastation caused by these first Viking attacks. Storm clouds were gathering over the communities of Anglo-Saxon England and its neighbours, and in the late eighth century, the storm began to break.

Between the years 789 and 866, the Viking raids on England escalated. Almost yearly, Viking warbands would strike, initially attacking monasteries and church centres like Lindisfarne to seize the largely undefended wealth and slaves – but increasingly attacking settlements further inland. The ‘Northmen’ caused untold slaughter, terror and destruction on the Anglo-Saxons, who seemed powerless to defend themselves.

In 866, the Viking Wars entered a new phase. In 851, raiding extended to over-wintering, and in 866, extended raiding turned to outright conquest. A series of devastating campaigns would destroy every Anglo-Saxon kingdom in England, except Wessex, in the space of just 11 years, and would cause the ruler of that remaining kingdom to run for his life into the marshes of Somerset. Seventy-three years earlier, in 793, Alcuin had written to the king of Northumbria warning him that the Vikings were a punishment sent by God as a consequence of the sins of the Anglo-Saxon people, and that, in the past, ‘for sins of this kind kings lost kingdoms and peoples their country…’

In 866, Alcuin’s warning was about to unfold. In that year, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the landing in East Anglia of the ‘micel haedan here’ (the ), and as a consequence, Anglo-Saxon England would never be the same again…

8 PART A – Anglo-Saxons, Task 2

Questions on BBC’s In Search of the Anglo-Saxons –

Watch the first episode of Michael Wood’s BBC documentary, found online at the link below. As you are watching, complete the questions, in as much detail as you can. https://dai.ly/x7tznuw

1. How did the map of England change during Alfred’s youth?

2. What does Wood argue the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was produced for? Why was this needed?

3. What happened late in 860? What did this mean for Wessex?

4. How did the Vikings often try to time their major attacks?

5. How does Wood describe the initial engagements between the Vikings and the West Saxons?

6. Where did the two forces meet in battle in January 871?

7. Describe the events of the and Alfred’s involvement.

8. What happened in April 871? What did this mean for Alfred?

9. What was Alfred’s only option for dealing with the Vikings after the rapid succession of conflicts that year?

10. What did a section of the Great Heathen Army do at Repton in 874?

11. Why was this news so concerning for Alfred and Wessex?

12. What happened suddenly in January of 878 at Chippenham?

13. What did this mean for Alfred?

14. How did he survive during this period?

15. What are some of the semi-mythological stories that emerged about Alfred’s time in hiding in the marshes?

16. What did Alfred and his men do around Easter of 878?

17. What does archaeological evidence suggest Alfred and his men were doing whilst regrouping at their swamp fortress in Athelney?

18. What did Alfred then do seven weeks after Easter?

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19. How did describe Alfred’s re-emergence at this time?

20. How did Alfred and his men prepare for battle?

21. How many men did he probably have with him?

22. Where did they travel to at dawn?

23. How does Asser describe the fighting?

24. What did the remaining do after the battle, and how did Alfred react?

25. What then happened around June 15th?

26. What did the Scandinavians really want to achieve long-term with their conquests?

27. What was Alfred hoping to achieve with his approach to the peace-making process with ?

28. How did he follow up the baptism?

29. What significant detail does the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle include after describing these events?

30. What idea had Bede given the Anglo-Saxons centuries before?

31. How did Alfred secure his kingdom?

32. What were these settlements designed to do?

33. What did Alfred do with in 886?

34. What was the issue with the Anglo-Saxon coinage earlier in Alfred’s reign?

35. How does Alfred tackle this?

36. What was a non-economic reason that reforming the coinage was so important?

37. What was Alfred’s other major goal within England?

38. Why might Alfred have selected Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy for his programme of translation?

39. What final challenges does Alfred face in his final years in the 890s?

40. What did Alfred say he had aimed do with his life?

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PART A – Russia 1894-1941, Task 1

Watch the Epic History documentary “History of Russia – Rurik to Revolution”. This can be accessed at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0Wmc8C0Eq0 . This provides a brief sweeping overview of 1200 years of Russian History.

PART A – Russia 1894, 1941, Task 2

Read “Chapter 1 - And Russia?” from Robert Service’s The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century. A scanned copy of this chapter is provided in the work pack.

Tip: Make sure that you have read the whole chapter before moving on to the next part.

Summarise the “Key features of Russian History 1900-1914” from this chapter in no more than four pages of A4. You must decide which information is most important. It is recommended that you use the Cornell Note-Taking Method (see information in the work pack).

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PART B - Tas ks to co mplete AFTER Results Day (August/September) Tasks to complete AFTER Results Day (August/September)

24 PART B – Anglo-Saxons Tasks

Viking Invasions

In your course on King Alfred and the Making of England 871-1016, you will be studying the clash, conflict and developing relationships between Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon societies in the British Isles. At this time, England was divided into many different kingdoms of which the four largest were Wessex (south of the Thames), Mercia (the Midlands), East Anglia and Northumbria (north of the River Humber). Scandinavian attacks in the ninth century played a major role in the creation of a single kingdom of England.

To help you to understand a little more about the relationships between these different peoples and societies, you will need to research and read to find answers to the following questions:

- Who were the Vikings and where did they come from?

- Why did they begin to raid, attack and invade the British Isles in the eighth to ninth centuries?

Task 1: Create a glossary of key terms relating to the period to help with your reading. This should include all of the below:

Viking, Ealdorman, Monastery, Reeve, Heathen, Sack (as in, to sack a city), , Carolingian Empire, Maritime, Barbarian,

Task 2: Use the following links to create a detailed mind-map under a range of different headings, representing the different factors which influenced Viking Raids – e.g. Reputation, Wealth, Power, Vengeance etc. You must use at least 2 sources.

You should record which sources you use to get your information. http://newhistories.group.shef.ac.uk/wordpress/wordpress/the-viking-conundrum/ https://www.historyhit.com/why-did-the-vikings-invade-britain/ https://www.livescience.com/56786-vikings-raided-to-find-love.html http://www.medievalists.net/2015/06/viking-raids-were-for-more-than-just-money-historian-says/ https://www.historyonthenet.com/why-did-the-viking-age-happen http://sciencenordic.com/why-danish-vikings-moved-england

Task 3: Write a detailed, substantiated answer to the below question (approximately 200-300 words).

‘What was the most important factor driving Viking raiding from the 8th century onwards?’

25 PART B – Anglo-Saxons Reading and Viewing

To gain a greater sense of the period, you may also wish to read one or more of the following, all of which are available on Amazon for under £10. There are also the TV series ‘The Last Kingdom’ (on Netflix) and ‘Vikings’ (Amazon Prime), which are fictional, but great fun and have some relevance to our course!

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PART B – Russia 1894-1941 Tasks

Russia in the C19th

Task 1: Research Russian Society in the late C19th (only focus on the period before 1900). You might wish to include:

- Social Structure - Political System - Political Opposition - The Economy (including agriculture and industrial development) - Education

You should also include at least two additional categories of your own choosing.

You must find detailed evidence to illustrate the key features of each of these areas of Russian society. Present your findings in a detailed A3 mind-map.

You may consult the following resources (and any others that you find useful). You should include evidence from at LEAST two different sources:

- Russia under Tsarism and Communism 1881-1953 by Corin and Fiehn (Chapter 1 is provided in the work pack) - A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes - Any other textbook on modern Russian History (I recommend those by Lynch and Oxley) - The following websites: https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/russian-revolution-topics/ (especially section on the Old Regime and Opposition to Tsarism) www.orlandofiges.info (especially Section One) http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?ParagraphID=mjs

Be careful to focus on finding out information relevant to Russia’s situation towards the end of the 1800s. You should record which sources you use to get your information.

Task 2: In the late C19th, Russia was an autocracy. It was governed by a series of Tsars from the Romanov dynasty whose authority was backed by the Russian Orthodox church.

Create a glossary of key terms. Define “Autocracy”, “Tsar”, “Romanov” and Russian Orthodoxy”. Add any other words that you have discovered during your research.

Task 3: Using your research, answer the following question.

Considering the nature of Russian society that you have researched, identify problems which might be a challenge to the power of the Tsar. Which problem would pose the greatest threat to the authority of the Romanov dynasty in the late C19th?

Write a short answer (approximately 400 words) justifying your choice. Your answer should compare at least two significant problems. You should reach a clear judgement. Give clear criteria for your decision.

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PART B – Russia 1894-1941 Reading and Viewing

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