Guy Fawkes Up

Terrorists, eh?
Poor old Fawkes was only one of a group with some grudge against James I, the grouchy Scot brought in to take over when Liz expired. And wouldn't you know it, it's the Catholics' turn again, so now it's the turn of the Protestants to get repressed... or was it the Catholics who were angry, about not getting a fair crack of the whip when they finally had their own man in charge again? Probably both. you just can't please people.
Anyway - Fawkes and his gang decided to do away with the whole ruling force with the aid of a cellar full of gunpowder, thereby providing us with a excuse to set fireworks off every November ever since.
The religious and political motivations behind the whole deal are now so vague in the popular memory - well, mine at least - that it just proves that what people really want is an excuse for a party, which is why it's a waste of time, guys, telling us heretics thsat we shoudn't celebrate Christmas... after all if there's one thing we like better than a party it's presents.

Elizabeth I

After Henry 8 died, having founded his own church and kicked out the Pope, his successor Bloody Mary invited him right back in again, having fallen for the charms of Philip IV of Spain, who made it a condition of their marriage, which never happened. If she was anything like she was in the film "Lady Jane" it's hard to blame him.
Liz came next and kicked the Pope out again. If you were at all religious in those days you wouldn't have known which way to turn from one monarch to the next... and of course everyone was, since no-one had yet thought of a credible origin for the world that didn't involve it bring made by someone.

By all accounts Liz was a high-powered queen. The word "Elizabethan" still has about it a ring of glamour and adventure. A bit of an enigma as well... she's often referred to as 'The Virgin Queen' -though if you were a monarch and weren't getting your oats one would think that all it would take would be a discreet word to a desirable servant who wanted to keep his head attached to his shoulders even if he didn't fancy you. He'd have much the same motivation for not bragging about it afterwards.
On the other hand, any undesired consequences would be practically impossible to cover up and the thought of all the political problems it would cause would surely be enough to cool even the royal ardour.
Either way, she had enough of a reputation that one of the many explorers she no doubt charmed into impressing her by going off and conquering new lands - probably Drake or Raleigh - was inspired to name a big tract of land "Virginia" after that rather personal detail, one would think. It's a bit like naming a planet "Fatty" after Patrick Moore.
One imagines that she led him on a bit and that there's a tinge of bitterness about the name, as if he would have preferred "Tight-Bitchia", but decided he'd rather keep his head than grumble about not getting any.

Columbus

There are at least two popular misconceptions about Columbus. One is that he discovered America; the other that everyone but him thought the world was flat. Most well-known facts are wrong, and so are these.
In these days before mass education, his sailors might indeed have been worried about falling off the edge of the world, but even in those days a few moments of thought would show how unlikely that was.
In the first place, if it was possible to do so, then the whole rim of the earth would be a massive waterfall, necessitating a collossal plumbing system to constantly put all the water back - one which, in doing so either did not harm the numerous fish, whales etc that inevitably fell over as well, or else carefully screened them out and provided safe passage back to the oceans by some other means - perhaps some sort of cable-car system.
Such an infrastructure would surely require a great deal of work and maintenance to keep it running, so any sailors afraid of falling off must surely in due course have had their fears offset by the employment prospects. (It might also have occured to them that souls in hell are recruited for this work - indeed this would validate the general consensus among religions that far more people go there than to heaven, even if none of them can agree on who it is that goes - but on the other hand souls in hell are disembodied and therefore presumably better suited to administrative tasks than manual labour.)
At any rate, Columbus did not subscribe to this view, and nor did the educated classes, who had access to the surviving works of clever Greeks such as Democratus, who demonstrated through experiment that the earth was not only more or less spherical but about 8000 miles in diameter.
Columbus begged to differ, and managed to persuade the queen of Spain that China was in fact within sailing distance to the west - though of course it may be that she just didn't like him and was quite happy to send him off the edge of the world and prepared to take a chance that he wouldn't reappear via the plumbing system.
At any rate he was quite wrong in his calculations, and it was sheer luck that there was a landmass in the way between Spain and China - probably Cuba.

17: Henry Ate

Hence the stomach.
Before Henry VIII there were lots of turbulent times, collectively known as the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. The Hundred Years War was a succession of arguments over who owned France, the English or the French, the answer to which may seem intuitive but in a way the French owned it either way since they still owned England, sort of, as our landlords were all descended from William the Conqueror's cohorts. It all gets so muddy after a while you wonder why they bother arguing over it in the first place. The wars of the Roses were a succession of quarrels over who owned England if it wasn't the French. (As it turned out, it was Henry VII, who might have saved everyone a lot of trouble by turning up about fifty years earlier.)
His offspring Henry VIII was one of those ruler-by-accident types, who never expected to get the job when he was younger and threw his considerable weight about after he did get it. My own impession of the gent - and it should be clear by now that this is based on minimal actual knowlwdge - is that he wasn't one to suffer fools gladly or to tolerate a situation he wasn't happy with. Being unhappy with his first wife, Henry decided to divorce her. The problem was that the Catholic Church, which was generally agreed to be the one power in Europe over and above its assorted kings, didn't approve of divorce and vetoed the idea.
Henry, quite sensationally, responded by vetoing the Catholic Church and setting up the Church of England. Who needs popes anyway? Since nothing in the Western world at this time had a longer pedigree than the Church, one can easily imagine that this seemed just like rejecting God himself so it's scarcely surprising that we are still feeling the ripples of this act to this day, in Northern Ireland for instance - though how much of some religious conflicts are simply facades for political ones is a debate I might like to join in one day when I know what I'm talking about. and speaking of not knowing what I'm talking about, my correspondent Dave informs me that it was Edward II not III who got assassinated by use of a red-hot poker in the tradesman's entrance. I'm sure Edward III will be dlighted to hear that, thoug it does leave me with nothing to say about him whatsoever. I shall look him up sometime.
But back to Henry VIII: his dismissal of the Catholic Church had the incidental effect of dissolving all the long-established monasteries, but it seems there was some popular support for this on account of the popular image of monks as having a rather cushy lifestyle - no wars to fight, nice accomodation, and always plenty to eat, hence the caricature of 'Friar Tuck' in the Robin Hood stories. By modern standards a medieval monk's life probably sounds rather austere, but I wonder how well they kept to their vows... If I was a medieval monk, I've got a pretty good idea what I'd be doing while the big tough local farmers were off fighting the crusades.... especially if I had nice high monastery walls plus the power of the church to hide behind when they got back.

16: Monarchy Business

Traditionally (ie 'until everything went wrong in the 70s') history was taught in schools largely as a string of kings and queens, and what they did and what happened during their reigns. I went to school in the 70s and early 80s by which time it had been deemed that none of that stuff was really important, and that instead we should be taught a smattering of information about the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, then nothing at all before the Industrial Revolution, rounding off with the causes of the First World War.
Needless to say, all those various topics meant very little in isolation, so I remained vaguely curious about all the gaps for many years after that. Just vaguely enough, in fact, not to actually read up on those gaps very much, and consequently it wasn't until the last year or so that I finally got the succession of the monarchy straight in my head - more or less. By which I mean, with a mental effort I can rattle off the complete list of British monarchs from William the Conqueror. Doesn't mean I know anything ABOUT them, but just find me someone else with a post-50s education who can do that, and who isn't a history graduate.

There now follows the aforementioned list, with whatever random facts about those monarchs that have permeated my brain over the years. None at all in many cases, I expect.

WILLIAM I 1066-1080something

William the Conqueror, William the Bastard, William of Normandy. Invaded England in 1066 and took over from Harold, who was killed at the battle of Hastings, reputedly with an arrow in the eye. Like all good historical stories, apparently not true.

WILLIAM II 1080something-1100ish

William Rufus, on account of his red hair. If you don't have a smattering of Latin, this makes as much sense as those never-explained Bible stories where Jesus says something like 'I shall call you Peter, because you will be the rock upon which I shall build my church'. You might as well say 'I shall call you Kevin, because you like fish' (or something). You could be forgiven for thinking that people just liked to be cryptic in those days.

HENRY I 1100ish-a bit later

Don't know a sodding thing about this chap. Wonder if he'd have been bothered about being king if he'd know that was going to be his legacy? Having said that maybe YOU know something about him that made his life worthwhile. In fact I'm tempted to look him up now, but that would be cheating.

STEPHEN

'King Steve' Who'd have thought there was ever such a chap? Much of his reign was spent disputing his claim with the equally-surprising Queen Matilda.

HENRY II

He of 'Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?' fame. A good friend of Thomas Becket for many years until Becket got above himself and started stirring things up.
Someone with a sword overheard the king's offhand remark and saw him off righ there in the cathederal, the bounder.
Becket was, for some reason, known to the history books for centuries as 'Thomas a Becket'. Obviously a mistake - if he wasn't Thomas the Becket, then I don't know who was.

RICHARD I

Crusader King, often played in movie cameos by the likes of Sean Connery. Got held prisoner for a king's ransom (naturally) on his way back from the crusades. Bit of a lapse of security there. Reigned for about 12 years I think but only spent six months of that time in the country, the rest of it off slaughtering Saracens or other heathens.

JOHN (Some years either side of 1215)

Ruled as regent in Richard's absence and is rather badly spoken of in all the Robin Hood stories. Became the victim of Magna Carta during his own reign, the famous piece of legislation that is noted for not being the King's own idea, and therefore a major early move in shifting power further down the social scale - if only as far as the aristocracy.

HENRY III

'King of the Sea' if memory serves - reigned for about 50 years and has so far totally failed to leave any other mark on my consciousness.

EDWARD I

'Hammer of the Scots' - not a nice man, if 'Braveheart' is anything to go by. Wasn't any nicer to the Welsh either, apparently. Got put to a lot of trouble by William Wallace. (Incidentally there are no contemporary accounts that say Wallace looked anything like Mel Gibson). Didn't die on the same day either.

EDWARD II

Bit of drip compared to the old man

EDWARD III

Even more so, so much so that he more or less abdicated in the face of collosal lack of support, and was subsequently spirited away to a country castle somewhere, where he was apparently disposed of by skilful use of a red-hot poker up the drainpipe. Thanks to Robert Lacey for that memorable story.

RICHARD II (around 1347)

Youngster who saw off the Peasant's Revolt, qv.

HENRY IV

Obscure prequel to Henry V

HENRY V

'Hold their manhood cheap, accursed they were not here, those who fought with us, upon St Crispin's day' or something of the kind. Apologies to Shakespeare and Lawrence Olivier. (Kenneth Who?)
Conquered France.

HENRY VI

Lost it again. Duh.

EDWARD IV

Calling yourself King Edward at this point in time seems like a triumph of faith over experience, but there you go. Henry VI was still alive when Edward was king, but was in his dotage and wearing a paper crown, if you believe the old movies.

EDWARD V

One of the unfortunate princes-in-the-tower of Richard III fame.

RICHARD III

Of princes-in-the-tower fame... as in, bumped them off to aid his own succession. Probably. Or is it all just Tudor propaganda? If it wasn't him, who was it, eh? Tell me that. Guilty as the man on the grassy knoll, if you ask me.

HENRY VII

First of the Tudor kings, defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field. Famously thrifty - organised the country's finance sufficiently well to build a royal palace good enough to compete on the increasingly-glamourous European stage.

HENRY VIII

Most notable monarchs only seem to have got the job on account of the unexpected death of an older sibling. Perhaps there's something to do with NOT having been groomed for the job, that allows one to retain enough independent spirit to make an impression. (Other examples are King Richard and John F Kennedy). In Bluff King Hal's case, this manifested itself in his determination to marry who he wanted, when he wanted, and pulling out all the stops to get away with it, including setting up a new state religion and dispensing with the old one. That's what being *KING* is all about-!

EDWARD VI

Poor mite, never got a good shot at the job. Died a sickly youth.

MARY I

Bloody Mary, wild and scary. Tried to reassert Catholicism as state religion. Burnt a lot of unrepentant protestants.

ELIZABETH I

Good Queen Bess. Put Protestantism back. Burnt Catholics. Seems like if you were foolish enough to have outspoken integrity in these times, you were going to get burnt by SOMEONE.

JAMES I

Oh dear, oh dear... Catholic AND Scottish - bound to be unpopular. No wonder they tried to blow him up.

CHARLES I

Had a spaniel named after him. Or was that his son? Possibly both.

CHARLES II

Bit of a hiatus between the two Charleses while we experimented with having a republic... but it turned out to be one of those states of affairs that can't seem to survive with the force of personality of its leader, in this case Oliver Cromwell... a bit like the empire of Alexander the Great or Nazi Germany, or the GLC.
Anyway, Charles II's 'restoration' reign was a bit like the Swinging Sixties - a time of freedom and licentiousness following a long period of war alternating with spiritual repression. Many parallels. The Restoration had Restoration Comedies, the Sixties had The Monkees. The Restoration the Plague, the sixties had other interesting infections. The Restoration had the Fire of London, the sixties - well, should have had, really.

JAMES II

Another I know nothing about, but probably another unwelcome return to Catholicism, I suspect.

WILLIAM III and MARY I

A Dutch import, not sure why.

ANNE

Had some chairs named after her.

GEORGE I

Now then. George was a German import. Reason being, a thing called the 'Act of Settlement' had gone through Parliament by this time, decreeing that all monarchs had to be C of E. (There must have been a feeling of 'That's THAT settled', hence the name.) George was about 50th in line for the throne, but 1st if you take away all the Catholics, who must have been well miffed.

GEORGE II

Nope, doesn't ring any bells.

GEORGE III

Farmer George. Longest reign until Victoria at about 60 years. Was upset about losing the American colonies when they declared independence. Went mad. God, this is taking ages. I forgot there were so many.

GEORGE IV

Ruled as Prince Regent while his dad was mad. Anything labelled 'regency ' hails from this time.

WILLIAM IV

Bit of a lad-about-town. Just brings to mind a mental picture of a newspaper (or possibly 'Punch') cartoon of the time, showing the bemused king looking at graffiti on a wall reading 'Reform Bill'.

VICTORIA

Ah, the Victorians. Invented everything. Most of them were Scottish, you know. Except Stephenson, he was a Geordie. Lots to say about this lady and her times but I can't be bothered right now.

EDWARD VII

Fat.

GEORGE V

Wore a sailor cap I think. I'm getting tired now. Can you tell? It's 1.30am.

EDWARD VIII

Abdicated. People objected to his brash American girlfriend stomping rond Balmoral syaing things like 'Those curtains will HAVE to go!!'

GEORGE VI

Had a stutter. Terrible public speakers, the royals, aren't they?

ELIZABETH II

Thank God, I can go to bed now.

15: The Peasants Are Revolting

We might be forgiven for imagining that medieval life was short, dull and muddy, but books and TV documentaries pop up from time to time to revise that view for us, and tell us there was a lot more going on than we think... but it's hard to be convinced, when all the evidence favours the view that there was no TV or radio, no branches of HMV, no theme parks, no iPods or DVD players, no cinemas or nightclubs (though plenty of knights and, I daresay, clubs). The printing press was a long way off and what few handwritten books there were were in Latin, apparently for the express purpose of not distracting the peasants.
So what did everyone do with their time? Very little, I imagine, except pull up carrots and cabbages and go to church to thank God for the privelege. This was the order of things and the hoi-polloi had no reason to think it ought to be any different, or ever had been.
Science was centuries away, so the only view of how the world worked came from the church, handed down to the peasants by the friendly local priest, who no doubt would have them soundly whipped if they failed to turn up to listen to his message of God's love, or chargrilled if they voiced any reservations.
Said message, when it wasn't expressed by anyone with their own agenda, could be summed up as 'Be nice to each other and God will be nice to you' - a thought that must have given much consolation on many a muddy carrot-pulling day.
What the millions of faithful hardworking carrot-pullers thought about it in 1347 when the Black Death reduced their number by two-thirds probably hasn't been recorded in any great detail, since most of those who might have recorded it got despatched with an equal lack of prejudice, but it's a safe bet that many of them must have wondered if it was something they said, or failed to say, in church.
What else could it possibly be? The very idea that such wholesale, not to mention unsightly, slaughter was simply an accident of nature was probably beyond the medieval imagination. God WAS nature, and this could only be a manifestation of his judgment.
Consequently, things must have been made worse by thousands of plague-ridden peasants huddling together in churches apologising for they knew not what, instead of keeping their distance.
Estimates vary over the proportion of the population of Europe that were carried off by the Black Death over the two or three years of its reign of terror, but the figures you hear most range from half to two-thirds. Soberingly, that means that if you were living in Europe in 1345, chances were that you would be dead in 1348.
There must be many more, and stranger, tales and tragedies of those years than could ever be recorded or imagined. One man had the sense to wall himself up inside his house with a supply of food and water until the threat had passed. He survived. An eight-year-old girl in Norway or Denmark or some such place inherited an entire village, having been the sole survivor.
If those who got sick and died horribly felt hard done by (and who wouldn't?), those who survived must have felt somewhat priveleged. God must like THEM. And this might have had something to do with the Peasant's Revolt, which was led some years later by one Jack Straw (and it's impossible at this point not to picture thousands of peasants going on the rampage led by a Labour politician in a grey suit and glasses, isn't it?)

There's a popular misconception that economics is a human invention that has something to do with money.
In fact, the whole universe runs on economics. Seas and deserts become hotter or colder, richer or more barren, because there is this much sunlight or that much rain. Stars and planets move in their orbits because there is this much gravity acting upon this much mass. Now, thanks to the plague, there were only so many peasant to pick so many carrots, and the balance of power had shifted just a little.
The workforce discovered that if one landlord didn't want to pay them just that little bit more for tending his farm, the one down the road, who was desperately short of help, would. The problem was that the ancient 'feudal system' whereby everyone in society knew his place and did what he was told by the next man up the ladder, did not permit any upstarts to rock the boat in this manner. You had to mind your place and like it.
So began what might be regarded as an early experiment in communism. Jack Straw and his buddies rallied the peasants and marched on London to present their case to the king. In the middle of town, Straw marched right up to the teenage Richard II, and in true communist form, chummily addressed him as a brother.
Whereupon Richard (exercising the diving right of kings to at least defer the laws of the universe) sent him to meet his Father, leaving the rest of to wait another 500 years for Karl Marx.

14: The Crusades

By the Middle Ages the former Roman Empire was still clinging to life in Constantinople, but new powers were on the rise in that part of the world in the form of Islam... and it's at this point in my narrative that I suddenly have to be careful what I say, since some adherents of that faith are famously sensitive about their culture and like to take, shall we say, strong action against anyone who speaks out disrespectfully. This type of reaction, combined with a popular perception of Islam as a culture that exercises a far stronger dogmatic influence over its people than some of us are used to, has helped to give it a rather menacing aspect to some of us in the Western world, but it's worth remembering that Islamic culture was the torch-bearer for the art of learning and discovery for several centuries which were still the 'dark ages' to the rest of us.
But I digress. Around 1100, Islamic forces were encroaching on Christendom (Which side you were on has often been defined in history as what name you give to your God), and the for the next few hundred years, Christian kings and princes in the Eastern end of the Mediterranean would send out a call for help every now and again to the safer kingdoms in the West, to say that Jerusalem was falling into the hands of the Heathens (ie - 'those who don't believe in God'. Their word for the rest of us was 'infidels', ie 'those who don't believe in Allah'. Allah being God.).
Now, life in the middle ages was probably, on the whole, pretty dull. For the average peasant, a standard day probably went something like this:
1. Get up.
2. Traipse out to field.
3. Pick turnips.
4. Eat lunch. Turnips.
5. Pick more turnips.
6. Go home to chilly damp hovel shared with donkey.
7. Watch fire.
8. Change channel. Still fire.
9. Service wife in full view of donkey.
10. Sleep.

If, from time to time, a king's messenger passed through the village promising fun and adventure in far-off lands, with food other than turnips, you would probably be tempted to take him up on the offer. Sure, you might get slaughtered by a greasy Saracen, but what the hell? If you stayed at home you'd be just as likely to die of pneumonia before you were thirty - and besides - if YOU slaughtered the greasy saracen instead of vice versa, or even several, the kudos would be worth a few beers for years to come when you got home. And anyway, this was the nearest thing they had to backpacking in those days.

So when, after 300 years of this sort of thing, Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Empire (thus, incidentally, finally ending all pretence that the Roman Empire was still a force in the world), it must have seemed, on the one hand, a lot of trouble for nothing... but on the other hand, a lot of fun while it lasted... or else King Richard wouldn't have spent all but six months of his reign out there himself.

13: The Normans

Contrary to what one might expect, few if any of the Normans were actually called Norman. Although if you think a bit further it's not so surprising, since they came from France and Norman doesn't sound like a French name. It sounds like the name of a geography teacher or a civil servant (no disrespect to either). Frenchmen have names like Francois or Gilles, or something else that somehow suggests a slightly slimy seductive quality despite having tonsils that taste of snails - though if you've discovered that Gilles' tonsils taste of snails it's probably too late not to be seduced.
Where were we?
The Normans. The Normans invaded Britain in 1066. Up until that time, Great Britain had been squabbled over for centuries by Romans, assorted Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Celts. The Celts, who were here before any of the others, got more and more marginalised during this time and ended up backing away into the territories that no-one else was all that interested in, ie Wales and Scotland, tourism being in its infancy then.
England had been a single autonomous kingdom, ie not part of the ridiculous-sounding Danish empire, for only about a hundred years or so when William the Conqueror decided that it was to become part of the William the Conqueror Empire, and set off across the Channel with an army in a lot of ships to organise that.
The incumbent king of England, Harold, was up north in York with his own army, busy fending off another invasion, from those troublesome Vikings (led incidentally by Harold's own brother Tostig. Families, eh!!) No sooner were the Vikings seen off - for the last time in history, as it happens - than Harold had to drag his weary army all the way down to Hastings to deal with the Normans.
He lost, of course, and if the Bayeaux Tapestry is anything to go by he got an arrow in the eye for his trouble, and William the Conqueror (or William the Bastard depending on your allegiances) became England's next king.
What did this mean for the Englishman in the street? Probably not a great deal. The Anglo-Saxon ruling class were booted out and all their castles and lands given to Norman knights and aristocrats. As far as your average peasant was concerned, he just had a new boss who talked funny.
A curiously long-lived side-effect of this business is that kings and queens of England are numbered from William 1st, as if the Anglo-Saxon kings before him didn't count... even though they were the only really English ones and therefore ought to count even more. A case, I think, of history being written by the winning side... and also part of a long-standing tradition of English kings and queens being anything but English.... French, Scottish, Dutch, German.... but then this is an island of immigrants. All of us, if you go back far enough.
Another interesting thought is that those Normans who were once the ruling class, are now so mixed in with the rest of us that many of their descendants are no doubt geography teachers and civil servants. Called Norman.

12: The Vikings

Due to the limitations of my own experience and education, much of this history will be Eurocentric at best and 24- Meadow-Riggs-Alnwick-Northumberland-England-centric at worst. This chapter is no exception.

With the decline of the Roman Empire, power in Europe dropped into the hands of the various cultures that it had once dominated, and they in their turn spread their influence and swung their swords over their surrounding territories, and the territories surrounding those territories. Among the Germanic tribes that stomped around Europe were the Huns (who were very fond of each other - called each other 'hun' all the time - except for their fierce leader Attila, who was probably just annoyed about having a girl's name), the Goths (in their scary black and white makeup), the Ostrogoths (hats with corks) the Visigoths, and presumably the Invisgoths (though nobody ever saw them).

On the more peaceful side, there were the Celts, whose main contribution to history was to inspire (1) the nice ornate artwork that those monks on Lindisfarne used all over their gospels, (2) the elves in 'Lord of the Rings' and (3) all of Enya's music, though I think St Cuthbert might have been disappointed by the last couple of albums.

Now finally we can move on to the Vikings.
The Vikings came from Scandinavia, notably Norway, and were motivated into moving further afield by the cold rocky barrenness of their own country. For much of the ninth and tenth centuries (not the seventh and eighth, as Orson Welles tells you at the beginning of the otherwise excellent film 'The Vikings') they sailed and rowed their scary-prowed longboats all over northern Europe, raping and pillaging and often deciding they liked the place and staying, much to the discomfort of their hosts, I imagine.

The Vikings explored as far as North Africa and Russia (which even takes it name from the 'Rus', the tribe who settled the place) and it's now widely accepted that they got to North America as well. They don't appear to have been very successful in colonising the place - perhaps having been enticed to Greenland by the alluring name given to the place by their explorers, they thought 'once bitten, twice shy'.

At the peak of their power, the Vikings (or at least the Danes) controlled all of Scandinavia and England as well, and took a kingly share of that country's revenue for the privelege. ('Danegeld')

We in this country don't seem to care to remember that England was once simply part of the Danish Empire. We chiefly associate the place with bacon, Lego and 70s porno films, so it's understandable.

11: The Dark Ages

With the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe once again became an expanse of relatively small, scattered states and communities, with nothing really to unite them except the common religion of Christianity, by now spreading far and wide due to the efforts of a lot of dedicated monks and missionaries.
The successful spread of Christianity was probably mainly down to two things.
Firstly, people didn't really know very much in those days. There wasn't any science to speak of; no-one bothered to sit and figure out why things happened the way they did or why things were the way they were - the issue seldom even occurred to them, as in fact it seldom occurs to many people today. But at least if it occurs to us today we can find a book about it by people it's occurred to before who did something about it, and who developed a thing called the 'Scientific Method', which is basically this:

Suppose you want to know why it is that a tree moves about in the wind. You might surmise that something invisible is moving it. You don't know about air, as such, because you've never seen the stuff. But clearly something is moving the tree - something you can't see. How can you prove, one way or another, whether something is there or not?
Let's assume that glass has been invented (which I'm informed it had been - thanks Dave-!) and that you have a glass bowl. You turn the bowl upside down and hold it on the surface of a pond. You surmise that, if there is an invisible substance all around you that moves the trees there must be some of it in that bowl, and that if you push the bowl downwards that substance will in turn push the water down. If nothing is there the water will remain level. You do and it doesn't. There is something there. Your curiosity piqued, you then surmise that this stuff must be made up of small invisible bits, so you try the same experiment with a tea-strainer. The water stays level. (At least I'm assuming it does.) You now know that the particles that make up the 'air' as you've decided to call it (by way of thinking 'I think I'll call it... errrr...') are smaller than the holes in the tea-strainer, as they are clearly escaping through it.

In the meantime your friend, who has also observed the tree shaking, has simply decided that the tree is shaking because God is shaking it, probably because he's pissed off about something; perhaps about the fact that your friend is wasting good worshipping time by messing about with tea-strainers.
This conclusion makes a certain amount of sense because a tree shaking violently in the wind is scary in the same way that having someone bigger than you shout and shake his fists at you is scary. It also saves you having to think about it any more depth and leaves you free to plough your field without having to worry about it any further, except for a nagging suspicion that God is angry because he didn't want you to use that particular field.
So, when monks and missionaries come plodding by with their big bibles, and tell you that you don't, indeed, have to think about all this stuff at all - the answers are all here in this book - how we got here and when; where we go when we leave and why - it seems sensible to pay attention, even if they do have silly haircuts. It feels like an even better idea when they tell you that if you don't happen to agree you'll spend eternity - or at least that part of it that starts when you die - burning horribly while little demons prod your more sensitive parts with forks and laugh maniacally. (It doesn't actually say this in the book, but this is no doubt a mere oversight on God's part.)
So for the next thousand years or so, a lot of people could be seen going into churches and promising to be good, while relatively few people were seen next to ponds messing about with tea-strainers.
And that's how the Dark Ages happened.

10: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged)

Meanwhile, Back in Rome, much to everyone's surprise, the bookish and physically feeble Claudius was making a respectable go of the job and presiding with relative sanity, having spent his whole life taking careful note of the mistakes of his predecessors. He put his final stamp on his reign by finishing the job Julius Caesar started and invading Britain. He didn't stay long personally since the natives were just a bunch of hooligans who liked painting their faces, grunting and hitting each other - and the weather was crap too. But he left a few thousand soldiers and colonists behind in an attempt to introduce civilisation, which by now meant plumbing, central heating, pizza and better swords as well as slavery and philosophy. Indeed the better swords pretty much made the philosophy redundant, since when you're top dog you don't tend to worry too much about abstract considerations - in fact if you worry too much about abstract considerations instead of about practical things like swords and plumbing you tend not to get to be top dog in the first place which is why Greece became a province of Rome and not vice versa, and also why I'm writing 'vice versa' instead of whatever it is in Greek, and also why I don't know what it is in Greek anyway.
In the following few hundred years Rome had its ups and downs... Claudius was succeeded by another raving egomaniac, Nero, who was too busy amusing himself to keep order and consequently allowed havoc to reign across his empire, culminating in the city itself getting burnt down - though it's widely believed he did this himself so he could build himself a Nero Theme Park. Either way, in a tradition that goes all the way to the twentieth century, he blamed the mess on an unpopular religious minority who just wanted to be left alone, and had many of them distastefully disposed of. Since violent movies hadn't been invented, the peasants had to make do with the real thing - with lions instead of special effects and Christians as extras. This kept the peasants in check by keeping them from getting too bored.

After a string of short-lived emperors things stabilised for a while until the time of the famously wise and philosophical Marcus Aurelius... sadly though his celebrated wisdom seems to have been of no interest to his adopted son Commodus, under whose aegis things went downhill again, and after couple of hundred years had degenerated to such an extent that the administration abandoned Rome to the invading tribes and moved en masse to Constantinople, named after the then-emperor Constantine.
Constantine, incidentally, was the Emperor who decided that Christianity was now the official religion of the empire. The persecuted minority had become the establishment - a bit like Steven Spielberg.

9: The Truth About Jesus

It was around this time, at the Eastern end of the Roman Empire, that a chap known to history as Jesus was starting to make his presence felt.
His real name Joshua or Jeshua or Jeheshua, a perfectly commonplace Hebrew name at the time, but he's known to us as Jesus because that was how his name translated into Greek.
As far as we know, it seems this man was an itinerant preacher whose followers claimed he was the rescuer of the Jewish people whose arrival had been announced in advance by certain authors of several hundred years before, whose writings had since become Holy (i.e. immune from rational scrutiny and therefore True). That being the case, a lot of people around the time of our Joshua were looking around for a good candidate to fulfil these prophesies: The main reason for them doing it at this particular time was probably that the Romans were stomping all over them, as indeed they were stomping all over most of Europe and the Middle East, replacing local barbaric murderous tyrants with their own civilised murderous tyrants, and no-one seemed to be able to do anything about it.
Centuries earlier (we skipped this bit) the Hebrews had made a legal deal - by proxy of course - with one of their gods, agreeing that they would worship only him and have no dealings with any of the others. Over the course of time this came to mean that they couldn't even acknowledge the existence of any others, and finally that anyone who DID acknowledge the existence of any others was definitely on the outs the one-and-only real god whether or not they'd been party to the original deal, and therefore on the outs with his followers too. Thus began the monotheistic mindset of 'we're all going to Heaven and to hell with everyone else'.
This was the state of affairs when the Blessed Hebrews found themselves being stomped all over by the Damned Romans, and naturally enough they had the feeling that this wasn't quite how things were meant to be. Surely their god wasn't going back on the deal?
So the prophesies about a rescuer (or 'Saviour') came to the fore, and they started looking high and low for him. There were a number of candidates - mainly itinerant evangelists - who seemed to vaguely fulfil the requirements, and Josh was one of them. He apparently went along with the idea - after all, he might have reasoned, there's no such thing as bad publicity - and gained something of a reputation. But neither the Jewish Establishment nor the Roman administrators were really won over by this upstart, and between the two of them they had him nailed to a big wooden cross for his impudence.
One would think that would be the end of the story, since this Rescuer, according to the prophesies, was supposed to free the Blessed Jews from whatever Damned Oppressors were oppressing them this time and give them the status of Top Nation that they so richly deserved. Getting himself nailed to a piece of wood was never part of the plan. If it had been, one suspects, he might have been a little more cautious about taking the part.
However, Josh had perhaps the best PR men the business has ever seen, and years after he died they got round to writing the whole story down and arguing that this was in fact what was supposed to happen all along.

It all ties in with the pagan customs their ancestors had adopted centuries earlier, and which were still popular in parts of Europe for centuries to come:

Many cultures throughout history have subscribed to the idea that they can get on good terms with their gods by giving them a present. This usually involves killing it. So if you want a particular favour from one of your gods, a specific present would be expected; a chicken or something - the bigger the favour, the bigger the present. If it's a really BIG favour, like asking if the annual harvest can PLEASE be a bit bigger this year than it was the last seven years, the present might have to be the hottest young unattached lady in the vicinity.
To take this reasoning to its next stage, what can you sacrifice to ask the one and only really genuine god to forgive everything you've ever done to upset him as well as everything you're ever going to do in the future? Hot tottie isn't even going to begin to cover it.
The idea was that by getting himself nailed to the cross, our Josh was volunteering himself as a sort of super-human sacrifice. Him being the one and only son of the one and only real god, he was worth way more than some chick of high repute and was therefore the only possible candidate for the job.
Under impolite scrutiny, the logic seems a bit strained to say the least. For one thing, you'd think killing God's son would only upset him. Second, he wasn't actually getting himself killed because he was only supposed to be going back up to Heaven anyway, which by all accounts is a much nicer place than here, even if it is invisible. (Come to think of it, if MY place was invisible that might be considered an improvement.) So where's the sacrifice there?
If the sacrifice is supposed to be ours, in that we don't have him around to consult any more, then that sort of negates the idea that he's all around us all the time, more so than if he was really here, so to speak, as his self-appointed representatives have been telling us he is.
As if that wasn't enough, we're told he came back for a quick encore a couple of days later (the old books said it would be three days, not two, but that always seems to be glossed over) as if just to prove he could do it. All of this seems to suggest that the crucifixion business never actually achieved anything worthwhile apart from giving the poor chap a remarkably painful day or two.
To wrap up the show, we're told that he was then taken up to heaven - floated up on a cloud or something - and that was the last anyone ever saw of him, apart from the occasional cameo on the road to Damascus or on a piece of toast.
Allow me to present two versions of these events, and you may draw your own conclusions as to which is more credible.

Version 1: Josh is up on a hill nailed to a cross. His friends are hanging around watching. They can't do anything because the Romans who nailed him there are also hanging around. After a day or so Josh dies. His friends draw this fact to the attention of the guards who let them take him down and carry him off. Without too much ceremony, they put him in a cave and wheel a great big stone over the doorway.
A couple of days later some of them wander by and find that the stone has been moved away; the door is open. Then they happen across Josh, who is up and walking about. He has miraculously come back to life. After a final quiet party they wander up a hill with him and watch him being taken up to heaven on a cloud.

Version 2: Josh is up on a hill nailed to a cross. His friends are hanging round watching. After a day or so he loses consciousness. His friends tell the Roman guards that he's dead and ask if they can please take him down. The guards, keen to get indoors after standing in the rain for hours, agree. Josh's friends remove him and hide him in a cave. Just to keep the Romans from finding him again too easily, they wheel a big stone across the doorway.
A couple of days later, they sneak back and open the door up again while no-one is looking and take Josh away to a safe house. However the opened tomb does not go unnoticed, and it is decided that it would be a good idea for Josh to make himself scarce and keep a low profile. He does not want to get nailed to a cross again.
Next day a couple of Romans accost some of Josh's friends and interrogate them about the open tomb and the whereabouts of Josh. 'Oh,' they say. 'You won't be seeing him again. We saw him being taken up to heaven'. The Romans accept this, at least as a good reason for not letting this chap create more work and trouble for them.

Naturally enough, word of that story gets around, tying in as it does with all the remaining evidence, and Josh's reputation starts to grow. We might speculate on how much of it Josh himself lived to see, and indeed whether he was responsible for any of it.

One would like to think that all this is of secondary importance compared to the philosophy of life that Josh went around teaching:

Whereas God's instructions in the Old Testament can be summed up thus:
'Do what I tell you, or you'll be sorry'.
Josh's version reads:
'Be nice to each other.'
In itself that seems beautifully simple, harmless and nothing if not helpful and constructive - in fact in retrospect it seems odd that no-one thought of it before, but sadly a lot of people have found it necessary to combine it with the older philosophy, and interpret it this way:
'Be nice to each other or I'll set my Dad on you, then you'll be sorry.'
Which, naturally enough, often provokes the response:
'No you won't.'
To which the inevitable reply is:
'To Hell with you, then.'
... and downhill from there. Which shows what happens when you complicate things.

8: The Roman Empire

A couple of hundred years or so later we come to Julius Caesar, the most famous Roman ever. Caesar was Rome's greatest general and the first Roman to take a bunch of soldiers ('legion') over to Britain.

Britain was regarded as an easy target for conquest in those days since the natives were merely a bunch of unruly savages whose interests seldom went beyond painting their faces, grunting and hitting each other. However, perhaps discouraged by the bad weather and lack of intelligent conversation, Caesar limited his invasion to a quick look around, and quickly left again. He diverted his energies towards lots of conquering on mainland Europe until he got to the point where, when he decided he'd like to rule the whole Empire personally, nobody wanted to argue.
After a while though his arrogance began to get on people's nerves and a bunch of his friends literally stabbed him in the back - but I ask you, if you can't be an arrogant sod when you're Emperor of Rome, when can you?
Julius Caesar's one-time friend Mark Antony aspired to take over the job and started by annexing Caesar's girlfriend Cleopatra, but he was seen off by Caesar's nephew Augustus, who held onto power for about forty years, a reign reputedly put paid to by his wife Livia, who had been running the show from the wings the whole time anyway. Many historians dispute the popular picture of Livia as a conniving poisoner who spent decades disposing of anyone who looked like they had a better chance of becoming the next emperor than her moody and unpopular son Tiberius, and in all probablity she was indeed no more than a dutiful wife and stateswoman.

The next emperor was Livia's moody and unpopular son Tiberius, and Livia evidently ran the show from the wings until leaving the scene at the grand old age of ninety-something. When Tiberius passed on in his turn the Roman people were delighted that they could now have a nice cheerful, sensible, popular young chap as their leader: Caligula.

Caligula, as is common knowledge, demonstrated his aptitude for the position by appointing a horse to the senate. (Modern Americans like to go one better by appointing an ass to the presidency.) His reign was a perfect opportunity, his subjects felt, to revive an old tradition and stab him to death, so they did. This left a vacancy for the position of emperor but Caligula and his predecessors had pretty much killed off all the likely candidates so the job fell to his retiring old uncle Claudius.

7: The Roman Republic

The Romans had the first proper empire to have any lasting effect on the world, and a lot of their ways of doing things are still with us today.

Why it sprung up when and where it did is anyone's guess, but at any rate Rome started around 1000BC when the city was, according to legend, founded by two brothers, Romulus and Remus, who were raised from infancy by a wolf - hardly an auspicious start for a pair of future city-builders - unless wolves have an innate talent for town planning which, being wolves, they seldom get a chance to exercise. Similarly, many humans of course have a gift for stalking caribou and the like, an activity best left to wolves, who at least have the dignity to do it the hard way, by pouncing on them and using their teeth. Though perhaps Prince Charles feels he'd just look silly.

Little is known about Roman history until about 600BC, when they threw out their royalty and declared themselves a republic. This worked quite well for a few hundred years, so much so that by 300BC Roman influence stretched across the Mediterranean to the City of Cartlidge, (part of modern Two-Knees) where it somehow raised the hackles of local big man Hannibal, who decided it was time for a change of leadership.

Strong on Leader but short on Ship, Hannibal marched on Rome the long way round, by way of Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain, France and the Alps - or whatever they were called then. Not satisfied with taking a huge army, he also took a bunch of elephants, possibly for dramatic effect. The impact of these beasts on the locals must have been awesome. It's not even as if they might amusingly have mistaken them for giant cats or sheep because elephants look utterly unlike anything else, beyond having four legs and two eyes. The first guy to see the creatures must have had a terrible job trying to describe them to his mates when he ran home. The problem wouldn't have been so bad for those living directly in Hannibal's path, because his bizarre description would pretty soon be backed up and followed by those satisfying 'Oh, yeah-! Crikey!' noises - but if you lived a few miles from the route and just happened to be in the area when the elephants were passing, you'd have to suffer a lifetime of ridicule, known forever afterwards as the guy who got all excited over what could only have been an unusually fat horse. And you wouldn't get the satisfaction of being able to say 'told you so' as your critics' homes were trampled to a pulp.

Rome was still there after Hannibal had a go at it; no doubt they had plenty of time to prepare while those elephants stumbled over the Alps. I don't know what happened to the elephants afterwards but the Roman army probably didn't want for meat for a while.

6: The Greeks

The Ancient Greeks lived in Greece from a time before history up to about 500AD, at which point they ceased to be ancient and became merely Greek, or possibly Middle-Aged, and finally Modern. (Individual people are generally Modern, Middle-Aged then Ancient but with history it's the other way round.)

As far as Europe is concerned, the Greeks were the first to be civilised, and therefore the first to widely practice both slavery and philosophy. Having slaves gave them the free time to sit around thinking, and thereby develop philosophy, which they then passed on to the slaves, enabling them to be more content with their lot by thinking such profound thoughts as 'Oh well, could be worse'.

The Greeks also thought up Mythology, i.e. stories that are supposed to be true, but which everyone knows really aren't, on account of the fact that they include such elements as dozens of squabbling gods, mindthedoors, and golden fleas.

Regarding the dozens of gods, the idea of Polytheism has not stood the test of time in Europe, possibly on the grounds that one God strains the credibility quite enough, thank you very much.

5: The Egyptians

Ancient history, the little I was taught of it, tends to centre on Europe and the Middle East for the simple reason that these were the only cultures doing any writing in those days, and therefore the only ones we really know about (apart from China and they wrote Chinese so we're none the wiser).
Written history started with the Assyrians and the Mesopotamians, who invented cunieform writing, fancy chariots and tidily knitted little black beards, but the three Big Cultures of ancient times, roughly in order of appearance, were the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. Egyptians first:

The ancient Egyptians are best know today for their tombs and temples- in fact those are about the only things left after five thousand years, with the result that we tend to think of the Egyptians as being death-obsessed in those days. (The one exception to this is the Sphinx, apparently the oldest thing in Egypt - much older than the Pyramids. Not only do we not even know what it is, we don't even know what the word 'sphinx' means - beyond 'lion-type-thing with human head' which is a bit circular). Why anyone would want to expend years of effort creating a big lion statue with a human head on it is not only beyond my knowledge, it's beyond my imagination - I can only speculate that if you have thousands of people all living in that desert heat year in and year out it might only take one slightly drier summer for them all to go off their heads, in which case it might seem like quite a good idea to knock up a big wacky statue.

The other big Egyptian thing was the Pyramids, which are not only still there, several of them are more there than any other man-made thing is anywhere, wherever it might be, except possibly the Great Wall of China, which perhaps doesn't count because relatively little of it is any one place - which is to say, wherever part of it is, the rest of it is somewhere else, if you follow - but then that's because it's so big.
Popular belief has it that the pyramids were built as enormous tombs to house dead pharaohs. This theory is given weight by the discovery of various dead people inside pyramids, often wrapped in bandages and surrounded by gold things. Personally I'm not convinced.
Even if you're a pharaoh it seems like an awful lot of trouble to have a massive pyramid built which you will only fully appreciate after you are dead - and even then you'll be right in the middle of it; the only point for miles around where you wouldn't have a good view of it, even if you were alive. (The Egyptians, not uniquely, seem to have had trouble getting their heads round the concept of 'dead'.)
A more likely explanation is that the things were built just to keep an idle population of peasants or Hebrew slaves occupied and out of mischief - any depositing of dead personages within these structures no doubt came later. An excellent idea if you ask me, in fact a few new pyramids probably wouldn't go amiss, as long as they put them somewhere discreet. Speaking of which: all the dead characters found in there seem to have been wrapped in bandages, suggesting that they suffered some nasty mishap shortly before their demise, perhaps involving those chariots with the spiky wheels. It seems likely that these people were simply thieves who had been caught stealing all those gold things that surround them, and have been severely beaten up then planted in a pyramid as punishment. Not only are they stuck for all eternity in the one place where they can't see the only tourist attraction for hundreds of miles (except for the wacky lion thing which they can't see either), but all those hundreds of feet of rock stop their souls from drifting off to heaven or any other more desirable place. As for why they are allowed to keep all the gold, that can only be a sort of bloody-minded taunt - an eternal reminder that their ill-gotten gains are no good to them here. The previous, rightful owner of the wealth might have something to say, but- well, what can you spend it on in the middle of the desert anyway, when they haven't even invented DVDs yet?

4: Ancient History According to Science

Those who dismiss science in favour of the Bible often cite the fact that scientists are always changing their minds about stuff, so how can we possibly give any credence to what they say? In contrast, those who simply believe the Bible never have cause to change their mind - and we all know that people who never change their mind, no matter what new case you put to them, are always right. Nevertheless, in the interests of an unbiased report, here is a summary of Science's current view, as I understand it:

20 billion years ago there was a huge bang and the universe was created. In time it cooled and congealed from dust and gas into planets and stars, including the Earth and the Sun.
Much later life arose, first in the form of a microbe with the capacity to duplicate itself. Some copies were better than others, some worse, and naturally the better ones made more and better copies of themselves while the poorer ones, by definition, didn't, and died out. Following this pattern, more and more complex life forms gradually arose, leading to bigger and bigger creatures until we get to trilobites, fish, and dinosaurs.
Every seventy or eighty million years or so, great masses of creatures suddenly died out due to some environmental catastrophe - many think that one of the millions of metoerites that orbit nearby crashes into the Earth from time to time and creates climatic havoc, thus killing off the larger and hungrier species and leaving a gap in the ecosystem for smaller ones to grow and flourish.
My own theory is that every seventy or eighty million years some intelligent species springs up, discovers fossil fuels and atomic energy, and creates climatic havoc long before it can build enough Playstations and iPods to leave a detectable layer in its own fossil record.
Either that, or it's just God - younger still than his grumpy Old-Testament self, throwing a tantrum at the inadequacy of his work and starting over.
Right now, we're keeping our civilization going largely through the courtesy of oil - the fossilised remains of ancient organisms - according to science.

If the Biblical account is true, though, then oil must have some other origin. Probably it was put there by God to keep the earth lubricated and going round smoothly and efficiently. Either way, the world will grind to a halt when it runs out.

2: Eternity - Some Thoughts

So God, for reasons that are none of our business, created the universe roughly six thousand years ago, in about a week.

God being eternal, one might wonder what he did with his time before he got round to this job. Eternity being what it is, it could go back a very long way - even if such a thing as Eternity could be said to have a start at all.
Actually it could, because we are often told that if we're naughty or give too much credence to certain parts of the Bible and not enough to other parts, we will burn in hell for all of it - though clearly we are not there already.

Eternity, though, in all probability goes infinitely far back as well as forward (the odds of our present time being anywhere near the start of something infinitely long are obviously infinitely small).
This, surely, would give God literally no end of time to practice on previous Earths - thus becoming Perfect - before getting around to ours. However ours is so clearly faulty that it seems likely to be one of the practice versions itself. Infinitely more likely, come to think of it. Also, if God is eternal, then no matter how old he is NOW, he's still young in comparison (though old enough to have a son, of course).
This does of course present the disturbing picture of God being young and inexperienced by divine standards - a picture that rather matches the petulant, tantrum-prone character in the Old Testament.

All this raises the worrying question of whether any of us are going to get to Heaven. After all, the super-perfect graduates of any future draft of Earth - which there must be in all Eternity - might have something to say about it (though very politely, of course). Unless we get kicked out when they arrive, in which case (a) they get a second-hand Heaven, (b) we would have to clean it up before leaving, and (c) we would be spending much of our time there worrying about the next place, in which case it wouldn't be Heaven.
Presumably they could get some Damned Souls in from Hell to clean it up one Sunday. This would have the side benefit of showing them what they were missing, thereby making them even more Damned - though it would probably be more efficient just to pipe down pictures of it on cable TV for them to watch with one eye whilst having the other gouged out with a rusty fruit knife, or whatever it is they do.

3: Ancient History According to the Bible

Shortly after creating the world God either made the animals and plants then the first man; or the other way round, depending on which chapter of the Bible you read - which presents a problem since it's all True. However, what we don't know is how much never made it into the book, so it's possible that God made all the animals, decided they weren't good enough (quite plausible from what we've already deduced), deleted them all, created Man, THEN created a fresh lot of animals for Man to name - a nice neat explanation that not only keeps the Bible perfectly true but explains where all the fossils of other no-longer-here animals came from. Perhaps the first lot were dinosaurs or trilobites or something - which presents the entertaining image of God wiping them out with a huge meteorite in a fit of frustration, perhaps because they weren't very good at building churches. Next, God created Woman, who led Man astray in no time flat (this bit at least rings true). This particular piece of mischief involved the Devil disguised as a snake - for some reason he seems to have thought this would help his credibility.

The Bible has little to say about where the Devil came from, though it has been speculated that the Devil was an angel gone bad; a problem usually attributed only to humans.

The Adam and Eve story involves the Devil persuading them to eat of the 'tree of knowledge', which they'd expressly been told not to do. Having eaten, our heroes suddenly realised they were naked; not a great secret in the first place one would think but then as far as we know they only took one bite. Perhaps if they'd had the whole apple we might have learned something useful and avoided a lot of trouble later on, but they never got the chance to do that, since at this point they were unceremoniously booted out of their nice garden and forced to live in much less hospitable climes. (For some reason I always visualise the Garden of Eden as being a lot like the formal garden at Hampton Court, with a high hedge round it - somewhat at odds with the mental picture of people wandering around naked, come to think of it - after all it would take a lot of use of hedge-clippers to keep it that way, and you don't want to be using those with nothing on.)
Much further down the line God decided that a spring-cleaning was in order and drowned the whole planet, except for a select few that one Noah rescued in a big wooden ship. (The Bible doesn't say what he did with the termites.)
Clearly this would have involved creating a lot more water than we already had, and neatly disposing of it again afterwards - no great problem to the sort of being who can create the whole world in a week in the first place - it just makes you wonder why he doesn't do this sort of thing more often. After all we are now several thousand years down the line and he's had lots of time to learn a few tricks, so one would think it would be no great problem for him to flood Slough and leave, say, Legoland relatively unscathed. (Most of Legoland would float anyway, come to think of it.)

1: The Creation

Owing to the lack of reliable witnesses at the dawn of time (with the possible exception of Adam, and he's dead) we are forced to fall back on conjecture. Put simply, views on the creation tend to fall into two main camps: The 'scientific' ideas, which currently state that it all popped into existence from absolutely nothing around 20 billion years ago, and the 'religious' ones, which state that God did it all about 6000 years ago - a much more comprehensible timescale and therefore, obviously, far more appealing.

There are problems with the idea, of course, but they're easily dismissed if we want to:
For instance: If God made the universe, who made God?
Answer: God is eternal and divine and therefore immune from such impertinent questioning. Just think yourself grateful he did it. If he wanted us to know he'd have put it in at least one edition of the Bible (which makes me wonder if he's one of those people who just don't like to talk about their embarrassing parents).
Anyway, if he wants to pop into existence from nothing, he's perfectly entitled, being God and all. The universe, by comparison, couldn't possibly do anything so wondrous becuae it's mainly composed of mundane stuff like rocks and inert gases and badgers, and they don't do cool stuff like that.

Also, scientists would have us believe in complicated, counter-intuitive stuff like carbon dating, cores from the Greenland ice sheet, and the geological laying-down of layers of rock over aeons of time... however they also like to say that the simplest explanation is the most likely, and the simple explanation for all this stuff is that the devil put it there to confuse us, so they've rather shot themselves in the foot there I think.

Introduction

Like you, I'm sure, I don't know very much.
You don't really need to know much these days, it seems. You can get by in life being incredibly ignorant because thanks to the education system since the 70s nobody else knows anything either, so it's not embarrassing.
Even so, I try to read books and learn stuff from time to time - somebody should, I think - but I often find when I finish a book that I can't actually remember very much of it... perhaps this is a reaction against those high-school exam days, when for several weeks you would cram the stuff into your head till your skull stretched, retain it just long enough to write some of it down (depressingly little of it ever seemed to be relevant to the set questions) then later, quite happily allow all those facts to dissipate out of your ears and into the summer air, never to be retrieved.
History was the subject I did worst in at school, perhaps because they left such huge gaps. At middle school they taught me a smattering of stuff about the Romans, and all the various other invaders up to the Normans, then at high school they cut straight to the Industrial Revoloution, then to the Boer War, while everything in between remained a mysterious vacuum filled only by old movies, semi-absorbed Shakespeare plays and bewildering passing references, heard here and there, to the Wars of the Roses and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, both of which I know practically nothing about to this day.
This sense of ignorance with regard to history in particular led me to take slightly more of an interest in it in later years, so I read the odd book, but as I said I'm not sure I'm very good at retaining much of it - so I'm doing this blog as a sort of experiment to find out how much I really do know. All I can confidently predict as I set out on this project is that it will not become my life's work. If you really want to learn some history, this is not the place to look.
The idea is to write down pretty much everyting I can remember about the history of the world, without referring to any texts or doing any research. I won't refrain from reading any history books at all while I write this, but I won't look anything up specifically to help with the project. That means I won't be checking my facts, so don't come here looking for revision material.
Here goes.
And by the way - I'm allowed to digress and be opinionated. It's my page. So there.