Officially Britons have been Christian for more than 1500 years. But scratch the surface and you'll find their ancestors believed in far more than Christ and the cross. From kings to commoners, they believed gods, witches, sprites, demons, and evil spirits were all indisputably real - and could intervene in their daily lives with devastating results. This is a relatively unexplored aspect of the past yet it's crucial to our understanding of life in previous centuries.
In this series Tony Robinson delves back through 2000 years of history to investigate the beliefs of Britain's ancestors. From the brutal human sacrifices of Iron Age Britain, through the stomach-churning supernatural medicine of the middle ages, to the horrifying witch-hunts and exorcisms of the 16th and 17th centuries (and beyond), Tony's remarkable journey takes him to some of the darkest moments in the country's past.
Each program follows Tony on a quest to understand a particular belief or superstition. What did people believe? Why did they believe it? And what impact did that belief have, not just on their daily lives, but on the course of history? In this episode, Tony Robinson encounters corpses mutilated after they died, a 12th-century plague-spreading zombie, and cannibalistic kings of England in his quest to discover why their ancestors were so afraid of the dead. |
