None of the sources say where Biscop and Wilfrid sailed from when they set off on their pilgrimage to Rome. But they were already in Kent and they were both young men with a sense of history. What they were embarking upon was something historic in itself: the first pilgrimage by Anglo-Saxon Christians to Rome.
To acknowledge that history, and because it was a good place to find a ship sailing to France, a likely site for their embarkation was Richborough, the old Roman port and fortress of Rutupiae. It stands at the origin of Watling Street – in itself a plausible route to the coast – and at the mouth of the Wantsum Channel where the River Stour drained into the Channel. There was a good harbour near the fort and although the fort had been abandoned following the Roman withdrawal, there’s no reason to suppose that the harbour was no longer in use since it follows maritime logic to anchor there while waiting for the tide to help push the boat out into the Channel.
Northumbria was a long way from Rome. For young Biscop, set on travelling as a pilgrim to Rome, the obvious place to find advice on how to make the journey was Canterbury. The archbishop of Canterbury at the time was Honorius, the last survivor of the original Augustinian mission to the Anglo-Saxons that had arrived in 597. Traditionally, Honorius succeeded to the archbishopric in 627 (although it’s possible the date was later, around 634). By the time Biscop arrived in Canterbury, Honorius had ruled over the church for 26 years. He most probably met the young Northumbrian in the spring or summer, for Honorius died on 30 September of that year. Alongside Honorius’s own knowledge of the best routes for a pilgrim to Rome, there was continued contact between Canterbury and Rome, allowing the clerics there to advise Biscop as to his best course.
Biscop sought secular as well as religious advice, seeking out Eorcenberht, the king of Kent. The Kentish royal family had long-established links to the Merovingian kings in France, so gaining Eorcenberht’s help for his pilgrimage would ensure Biscop a welcome when he crossed the Channel.
But at Eorcenberht’s court, Biscop met another young man who was also set on going to Rome. He was named Wilfrid and he would become a turbulent priest five hundred years before Thomas Becket earned that soubriquet from Henry II. Wilfrid was about five years younger than Biscop, so 20 to Biscop’s 25, and from a similar social background.
With letters of introduction safely tucked away in belt pouches, the two young men set off to one of the Kentish ports to find a ship to take them to France.
Let us programme our time machine to appear in Kent in the year 653. We want to meet a young man named Biscop before he sets off on his travels. Given that Biscop was a Northumbrian, Kent might seem a strange location but we know that Biscop was there in 653.
Biscop was about 25 years old. He came from a family of Northumbrian nobility, the Baducinga according to Stephen of Ripon. Nobility at the time was mainly a measure of ability with weapons and utility to the king. In one sense, these men were not dissimilar from the enforcers of a Mafia capo. But while they shared with gangsters a propensity for ultra-violence, the warriors of early-medieval Britain were different in an important respect: they were poet warriors. The culture of the mead hall demanded of them a facility and appreciation of words that you won’t find among mafiosi or narcos (transcripts of their conversations reveal a level of verbal banality that would make reality-TV viewers blanch).
This is a characteristic often shared among martial cultures. Woven through the violence is a thread of exquisite, often delicate, beauty. It’s there in the lament of the exiled Wanderer, one of the few Anglo-Saxon poems to have survived. It’s there in the jewelled intricacy of the sword hilts uncovered in Staffordshire and the glitter of garnets in the buckle discovered at Sutton Hoo.
It’s likely that that love of words was even more pronounced in the young Biscop than it was among his fellow gesith, the men who made up King Oswiu’s warband. For the young Biscop, having been one of the king’s men, decided to give up the life of arms, the company of his kin and his warrior brethren, and go on pilgrimage to Rome.
As for towns and cities, there were none in the 7th-century Britain. The old Roman towns remained but they had for the most part been abandoned, although some form of civic life had lingered on in places up to the 7th century. Carlisle was one of the last outposts of Roman life: its aqueduct still worked and its council met into that century. Londinium, the capital of Roman Britain, had been abandoned. Its basilica, the largest north of the Alps, had been the centre of civic life for 230 years until, around AD 300, it was systematically demolished. There are no records saying why such a magnificent building was destroyed so we’re left to speculate that it might have been some form of punishment for the support the city gave to an imperial pretender of the time, Carausius. The city was gradually abandoned during the new two centuries until, by the 7th century, it was a place of ruin and legends of giants to the Anglo-Saxons.
However, life and commerce was returning to the area, although not to the Roman city. The new Anglo-Saxon trading settlement stretched upriver from the old city walls. Merchants drew their ships up on the beach, or the Strand as it was called, to sell their wares. But even at the height of a market, there would only have been a couple of thousand people living in the new London. Elsewhere, population centres ran to a few hundred. England was all but empty.
Philip Halling / Medieval Ridge and Furrow above Wood Stanway
Even where the land is cultivated in 7th-century Britain, it does not look like the hedgerow fenced countryside that we think of as quintessentially English. The fields are strip farmed, ploughed in ridge and furrow, without demarcation between the different fields beyond the knowledge of the men who work the land.
Ridge and furrow was a method of agriculture taken over from the period of Roman Britain but adapted by the people who came afterwards. Fields were dug into long ridges with furrows each side of the ridge, so that they looked like straight waves running towards the horizon. The ridges and furrows each foster a different microclimate, with the ridges draining faster and being more exposed, the furrows pooling rain water and being more protected. Thus a crop could be planted along the ridges and in the furrows with insurance against drought or flood: if either condition prevailed, at last half the crop should still survive, while in good years it could all be harvested.
In some quieter parts of the country, where fields have been turned to pasture for generations and not mechanically ploughed, it is still possible to see these earth waves, slowly subsiding back to the level but revealed when the sun is low or a thin dusting of snow collects in the furrows.
But it is not just a different coast that we see as we emerge from our time machine. The landscape is different too. Most notably, there were a lot less people and a lot more trees. Population estimates for this time can be little more than guesses but those guesses often come to a figure for the areas that would become England of about a million. At the end of our time voyage, we step into a country that seems almost empty. But what we do see are forests. Not the tame, truncated forests of our time but vast areas of wood, where wolves and possibly even bears still roamed. While no longer the Wildwood of the immediate post-glacial period (the stone axes of the Mesolithic and Neolithic had efficiently cleared large tracts of land) there were still forests to get lost in, forests where the writ of no king ran further than the occasional tracks and clearings.
The world of 7th-century Britain was…different. Looking back to it now, we are faced with barriers of language, culture, religion. Everything was different. If a time machine were to transport us back to the 7th century, we would find ourselves in a strange landscape.
Although not something we could see when we emerge, blinking, from our time machine, perhaps the most unexpected difference is the shape of the country. The map of Britain is something we’re as familiar with as our own neighbourhoods. But even the shape of the country, particularly in its low lying eastern half, was different. Then, the sea took deep bites into the land: what is today Lincolnshire was almost an island, its boundaries as fluid as the tidal marshes that surrounded it. The Humber flowed through a markedly broader estuary and then spread, north and south, creating a vast marshland south of York. The Wash washed inland to take up almost all of present-day Cambridgeshire. The River Thames was not constrained, as it is today, behind concrete embankments but breathed in and out on every tide, sending its turbid water through deep channels into Southwark and up the now hidden rivers and streams that fed it. The Kentish spur that ends at the shingle beach of Dungeness was salt marsh too, with boats able to navigate up stream along the River Rother as far as Bodiam Castle, built in 1385 to guard against French invaders sailing up stream and landing there. At the eastern extremity of Kent, forming the hinge upon which so much of our history has turned, the Isle of Thanet really was an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, a safe anchorage where many a boat moored before attempting the passage along the north coast of Kent and into the treacherous tidal waters of the Thames estuary.
These tidal estuaries, salt marshes and broad rivers made the eastern coast of England markedly different from today. In the west, only the Somerset levels interrupt a generally familiar coast line, taking a big bite out of their eponymous county and providing, two hundred and fifty years later a refuge for a later Anglo-Saxon king.
There wasn’t much about the boy to suggest that he would be the father to the 20th century. Thomas Alva Edison was the seventh child of his parents and the fourth to survive to adulthood. He developed hearing problems when young and, while not totally deaf as an adult, he was very hard of hearing. He wrote, “I have not heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old.” Given his many inventions, it’s surprising that Edison never invented a hearing aid, although he often said he was working on one. But growing up deaf, he realised, had helped him, allowing greater concentration on his work and tuning out the “babble of ordinary conversation”.
Born on 11 Februay 1847 in Milan, Ohio, the young Edison had little schooling and what he had provided little of worth: he learned by reading – he was a lifelong, voracious and omnivorous reader – and doing. One of Edison’s first jobs was selling sweets and newspapers to railway passengers. During his breaks, the young Edison did chemistry experiments in the baggage car.
Telegraphy was the communication breakthrough that, together with the railroad, was opening up the vast expanses of the United States. In 1863, at the age of 16, Edison became an apprentice telegrapher and, naturally for him, started experimenting on improvements and by January 1869 he had done enough to believe that his future lay in being a full-time inventor.
That future lay in New York, which was where Edison moved, working initially on improvements to telegraphy so that it was possible to send four signals down one wire at once. Edison’s work on the quadriplex, as this new system of telegraphy was called, was snapped up for $100,000. There was serious money in these new-fangled inventions.
Unfortunately, Edison’s talents did not stretch to money management, and neither did those of his young bride, 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, so the couple moved away from the financial temptations of the city to Menlo Park, New Jersey, which was then a quiet rural backwater. At Menlo Park Edison built the world’s first research and development laboratory, combining a lab and machine shop.
It was here that Edison earned the soubriquet, ‘The wizard of Menlo Park’, creating many of the inventions that would usher in the modern, technological world. But these were not just the result of Edison: one of his unsung but crucial talents was his ability to bring together and motivate a team of skilled designers, technicians and engineers. In part this was because every member of the team was positively encouraged to note down ideas and bring them to the rest of the team. Good ideas were pursued by all. Edison’s working methods were unlike those that typified most scientific research. Rather than investigating experimentally the predictions of a theory, Edison pursued hunches, interests, anything that caught his fancy, treating every setback as a new avenue towards greater understanding. When some expensive chemicals were left out in sunlight and degraded, rather than bemoan the loss, Edison stopped all his other experiments and had his team investigate the properties of the degraded chemicals. Everything was interesting and, sometimes, useful. As Edison said, “Genius is hard work, stick-to-it-iveness, and common sense.” But the combination of gifts Edison brought together was far from common.
Edison’s research at Menlo Park produced the carbon microphone that made telephones a world wide technology, the basic design continuing in use for the next century; devised a system of electricity distribution that allowed the first widespread use of electric lights; devised the first cinema camera, known as the ‘Kinetograph’; and invented the electric light bulb. The neon-lit, connected, fame-obsessed world of the 21st century has its origin in Edison’s inventions in the second half of the 19th century.
On 9 August 1884, Edison’s wife, Mary, died. She was 29. The couple had three children. Edison remarried two years later, his new bride being 20-year-old Mina Miller. Edison was now 39. He had three more children with his new wife, moving with her to a new home and research complex in West Orange, New Jersey. The new facility saw the development of alkaline batteries, the foundation of the cinema industry and the production of commercial phonographs but, being larger and less intimate, it was not as conducive to the sort of small-team work that was the foundation for Edison’s most remarkable inventions. However Edison, ever the workaholic, continued working there until his 80s.
Thomas Edison died on 18 October 1931 at his home. The world around him was a very different place to that into which he had been born and probably no single man had changed it more than he had.
The date is famous. 17 December 1903. On that Thursday the Wright brothers, Orville then Wilbur, made the first controlled powered flights in a heavier-than-air machine. In all, there were four flights that day, two for each brother. Five people watched history being made. Reports reached the press. And then…nothing happened. Barely any newspapers covered the story and the news faded away. No one could believe a couple of bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, a place as far from the beating heart of things then as it is today, had done what other better known, better educated and better connected people had failed to do. But it was precisely the roots the Wright brothers had in Dayton that made possible their extraordinary achievements. Of these roots, none were more important than their parents.
The Wright family home in Dayton, Ohio.
Milton Wright, father to the clan, was minister then bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. He fostered in his sons a love of reading and free intellectual inquiry that stemmed from his own interest in debate; if the boys, growing up, were engaged in some important investigation he happily turned a blind eye on them skipping school to concentrate on whatever new device they were constructing. However, it was from their mother, Susan, that the boys inherited their engineering flair: she constructed her own household appliances and made toys for the boys. Susan had met Milton during her studies at the United Brethren college in Hartsville, where she was studying English literature. Thus Wilbur and Orville grew up in a household predicated upon a deep commitment to learning, unshakeable faith (which the brothers also transferred into confidence in their work) and adherence to principles.
Milton and Susan had other children too: twins who died in infancy, two other sons, older than the flying brothers who made lives of their own, and the youngest, Katharine, who would share house, conversation and duties for many years with her famous brothers.
Wilbur Wright, born 16 April 1867, was the elder. In photographs of the pair he is the intense, balding figure with penetrating eyes. Orville Wright, born four years later on 19 August 1871, looks generally more avuncular and wears the thick moustache typical of the era. Despite the difference in age, the pair were inseparable. But separation was in the offing as Wilbur neared graduation from high school. A brilliant student – his test scores were in the 90s for everything – and an outstanding athlete, Wilbur was destined to fly high, educationally speaking: he was set for Yale.
Then, it happened, and everything changed. During an ice hockey match, a hockey stick smashed into Wilbur’s face, knocking out most of his upper front teeth. Wilbur suffered months of pain, followed by bouts of depression and withdrawal. Yale was out of the question. What’s more, their mother, Katharine, was ill with tuberculosis. Wilbur became her carer and, having retreated to the confines of the house, he read and read and read.
Wilbur Wright working in their bicycle workshop in 1897.
For his part, Orville had become fascinated with printing and, while still at school, built his own printing press using a tombstone, a spring from a horse buggy and scrap metal. Milton Wright credited the care Wilbur took of his mother for extending her life far beyond what was thought possible with tuberculosis, but in 1889 Susan Wright died. Wilbur, slowly emerging from his isolation, joined Orville in his printing business. In response to the national bicycle craze, in December 1892 the brothers started repairing bicycles and by 1896 they were building them too. They were assembling the skills they would need for the task that increasingly preoccupied them: flight.
One of the gliders the brothers built to test the principles of flight.
The boys first memory of flight was when their father brought home a toy helicopter, a contraption of wood and rubber bands, that they flew until it broke. But it was the news of the death, in August 1896, of Otto Lilienthal, the pioneer of glider flight, that resparked their interest in flight. In response, Wilbur did what he always did first: he read. Everything. When Orville recovered from a bout of typhoid, he joined his brother in scouring the libraries of Dayton. When these were exhausted, they wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for further reading – at the time, the Smithsonian was itself sponsoring expensive research into powered flight.
Wilbur Wright in one of their gliders as it lands leaving skid marks in the sand.
The Wright brothers were by no means the only people investigating flight: there were many inventors and teams working on how to fly. But what would set the brothers apart was the methodical way they broke down the problem and, in doing so, identified the key difficulty before flight could be achieved. The Wright brothers reasoned that there were three requirements for successful flight: a means of generating lift, some way of propelling the craft through the air and a system to direct and control the craft. All the other researchers were looking mainly at the first and second parts of the problem. The Wright brothers realised that it was the third part, the control system, that was least understood and most critical. After all, Otto Lilienthal, with his work on gliders, had demonstrated how wings could produce lift, and the burgeoning automobile industry was developing new, lighter and more powerful engines all the time. The real difficulty was control. This was where the brothers’ experience as cyclists was crucial. A cyclist, turning a corner, leans into the corner. They realised that the most effective way to turn a plane was for it to do the same, that it should bank in the direction it was turning (other researchers envisaged a system like a car, where the vehicle remains level while changing direction).
The first powered flight, piloted by Orville Wright.
Starting with self-made gliders, the Wrights tested out their ideas for controlling a craft in flight, developing the system of three-axis control – roll (lateral motion), pitch (up and down) and yaw (side to side) – that underlies aircraft control systems to this day. Through three years testing at Kitty Hawk on the Atlantic Coast of America – a site chosen for its isolation, helpful winds and soft sand to cushion hard landings – the Wrights brought their craft towards the ideal of powered flight. In December 1903, they were ready. The first attempt, on 14 December, damaged the plane. But at 10:35 on 17 December 1903, Orville Wright took off, flying 120 feet (36m) and staying in the air for 12 seconds. Wilbur had the second go, going further, then Orville outdid him only for Wilbur’s final flight (852 feet in 59 seconds) to eclipse all three previous efforts. They had done it.
Orville flying the Wright Type A Airplane at Ft. Myer, Va. on Sept. 9, 1908
The press completely missed the story. The Dayton newspaper said the flights were so short the news wasn’t worth printing. Never men to court publicity, the Wrights weren’t too bothered. Besides, they wanted to perfect their airplane and they spent the next couple of years doing so. European aviators were sceptical of the rumours they were hearing about the Wright’s plane. All that would change in 1908, when Wilbur Wright began making public demonstration flights in France. All that they had heard about the Wright’s flyer was true – and more. Meanwhile, in America, Orville was demonstrating their plane to the US Army. The brothers, having funded their research out of their own pockets, needed to make money of their momentous invention.
In Europe, the control and distances over which Wilbur piloted his plane caused a sensation.
The demonstration flights put an end to all doubts. The Wrights took off, flew circles and figure-8s, and landed, all while in total control of their planes. The two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, had done it. They had realised mankind’s second oldest dream. We could fly.
They were 6,000 feet (1,800m) above the Moon’s surface when the alarms started going off. The Lunar Module Eagle was descending far to the west of its designated landing site. Then, looking out of the window, Flight Commander Neil Armstrong saw that the Eagle’s computer system was aiming to land them on the steep slope of a crater made jagged with boulders. The mission to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth, always a tall order, was beginning to look more and more like it was going to fail.
But that was when Armstrong took control of the Lunar Module. Over his career as a fighter pilot, test pilot and astronaut, Armstrong had been shot down, had the engine of his plane explode and ejected from a Lunar Module simulator seconds before it crashed. He’d survived all these close escapes with nothing more than a bitten tongue and a reputation for never panicking under pressure. Now, Armstrong did what he always did: he stayed calm and played the situation as he saw it. In control of the lander, Armstrong and his co-pilot, Buzz Aldrin, scanned the lunar surface for somewhere safe to land, while the Eagle hovered 500 feet over the lunar surface, riding its rockets. Armstrong moved the craft sideways, searching for somewhere clear to land. They’d been hovering now for 90 seconds. Back on Earth, the mission controllers, watching the fuel supply gauges, were getting worried. Seriously worried. The Eagle had less than a minute of fuel left.
Then they saw it: an area clear enough to land. The Lunar Module descended. 400 feet. 300. 200. 100. 50. 20. Then, one of the probes that dangled down below the landing pads of the Lunar Module touched not earth but Moon. Seeing the warning light on the control panel, Aldrin said, “Contact light.”
“Shutdown,” said Armstrong, cutting the rockets. “OK. Engine stop,” said Aldrin.
The Eagle settled down upon the surface of the Moon, its landing soft under the gentle gravity, only one sixth that of Earth.
Armstrong and Aldrin looked through the windows and saw the dust blown up by their rockets spreading away from them. Outside was the Moon.
Armstrong got on the radio. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” It was 20:17 UTC on 20 July 1969. On 17 December 1903, the Wright brothers had made the first powered flight, travelling 120 feet during that first flight. Now, 65 years later, two men had travelled 240,000 miles through space and were about to set foot on the Moon.
Growing up in Ohio in the 1930s, Armstrong (born 5 August 1930) certainly didn’t expect to find himself looking over the colour leached surface of the Moon a few weeks shy of his 40th birthday. But from his earliest childhood, Armstrong had been fascinated by flight. His father took him to an air show when he was two and for his first flight when he was five. Living in Wapakoneta, Ohio (population just over 5,000), the young Armstrong took a job with a local chemist so that he could pay for flying lessons. Already proficient as a flyer, Armstrong received his official flying license on his 16th birthday, meaning that he could fly before he could drive.
Having graduated from high school, Armstrong went to Purdue University where he studied aeronautical engineering as a naval air cadet. Two years later, on 26 January 1949, Armstrong was called up into the Navy and, after flight training, served as a pilot in the Korean War, flying 78 combat missions in Gruman F9F Panthers from the aircraft carrier USS Essex. On one low-level bombing mission, having been hit by anti-aircraft fire and struggling to regain control, the wing of Armstrong’s jet hit a cable – he was only 20 feet off the ground at the time – cutting six feet off the end of the plane’s right wing. Armstrong managed to nurse his plane back into friendly airspace and then ejected. Armstrong’s combat tour lasted from August 1951 to May 1952; 27 of Armstrong’s fellow pilots on the Essex were killed during these missions.
His war over, Armstrong returned to Purdue to finish his studies, receiving a BSc in aeronautical engineering in January 1955. With skills in engineering to match those in flying, Armstrong was accepted when he applied to become a test pilot with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) just before it was renamed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
As a test pilot, Armstrong flew many of the X planes, the jet- and rocket-powered craft that were pushing airplane technology further, higher and faster. Some of these planes had to be launched from the air and it was while carrying an X plane up to its launch altitude aboard a B-29 Superfortress that Armstrong had another fly past with disaster: one of the plane’s engines exploded, knocking two others out of action, and cutting the co-pilot’s control cables. Armstrong, with one engine working, managed to glide the B-29 back down to a safe landing.
Apart from his many other test flights, Armstrong flew the X-15 rocket plane seven times, touching space and reaching speeds of 4,000mph. He was, in all but name, an astronaut. That title would follow when, in September 1962, Armstrong was selected as one of the second group of astronauts for the NASA space programme. As part of the space programme, Armstrong took part in testing and development, areas where his combination of engineering and flight skills were particularly valuable. On 16 March 1966, Armstrong sat, with Dave Scott, atop the Gemini 8 rocket as it quivered under the 430,000 pound thrust of its engine before firing up, up, up into space. The huge engine generated 6G of thrust but at the end of it, Armstrong and Scott were in orbit. There, they made the first docking in space between their command module and an unmanned target vehicle before a safe re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
All was set. On 16 July 1969, Apollo 11 with Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins aboard blasted off from Kennedy Space Centre. On 19 July, the mission reached the Moon, swinging into orbit. A day later, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the Lunar Module, leaving Collins in the Command Module to orbit the Moon alone, and began their descent.
Safely down, NASA’s schedule called for the two astronauts to take a five-hour sleep before leaving the lander as they’d been awake for a long time. Not entirely surprisingly, Armstrong and Aldrin found going to sleep – they were on the Moon! – impossible, and asked for permission to bring forward their EVA (extravehicular activity). Permission granted, the astronauts suited up and depressurised the Eagle. At 02:39 Armstrong opened the hatch and at 02:51 began to climb down the ladder on the outside of the lander. There were nine rungs on the ladder. At 02:56 UTC on 21 July 1969, Armstrong stepped off the footpad and stepped on to the Moon.
“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Twenty minutes later, Aldrin joined Armstrong. The two astronauts spent 2 hours, 31 minutes walking on the Moon, collecting samples and setting up experiments. The Earth hung, blue and white, in the black sky. Then they returned to the Lunar Module and settled down to rest. At 17:54 UTC, they ignited the rocket in the Eagle’s ascent stage and took off. Armstrong and Aldrin had been on the Moon for less than a day.
After returning to Earth, Neil Armstrong gave up space flight and left NASA in 1971, taking up a post in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He lived a quiet life, generally shunning publicity, and flying gliders from his farm near Lebanon, Ohio. On 25 August 2012, Neil Armstrong died from complications following heart surgery. He was 82.
Between 21 July 1969 and 19 December 1972, twelve men walked on the Moon. No one has done so since.
