Seven Ages of Britain by Justin Pollard (Hodder and Stoughton), price £20

THE kings and queens, dukes and generals who fill the pages of our history books were certainly important, agrees Justin Pollard. But theirs is only one side of the great story which is history.

In Seven Ages Of Britain - based on a new Channel 4 TV series which starts on Saturday - Justin sets out to tell the other side. The story of the numberless ordinary men and women, our ancestors, whose lives are now forgotten but who helped shape the way we live today.

The 35-year-old archaeologist-turned-TV producer says it is easy to be seduced by the big events and characters that dominate history. Yet events that now seem important often had little effect on the development of Britain in the long term - whereas lesser-known factors had profound consequences.

The Roman occupation is a good example. It lasted several hundred years, left a concrete legacy in the form of roads, towns and viaducts, and is considered one of the most important episodes in British history.

But, says Justin, it had little effect on the lives of ordinary Britons - and when the Romans left, Britain reverted to an Iron Age lifestyle almost indistinguishable from the pre-Roman way of life.

What happened during the centuries of Roman occupation was that the existing British aristocracy adopted Roman customs and manners, Justin says - wearing togas, and living in Roman towns and villages.

"But if you look beyond the towns, not everyone is living in a villa, not everyone is living beside a straight road," he says, speaking on the telephone from his home in Dorking, Surrey.

"For the rest of us living beyond the towns, the Roman occupation did not have a huge impact. And when the Romans leave, we step back into a world that looks suspiciously like the Iron Age world before."

Much the same was true of that other great date in British history - 1066.

Because of the way history is written, we tend to think of this as a great turning point. "But Anglo-Saxon England did not stop in 1066," Justin points out. "Everyone living in England in 1067, apart from 10,000 knights, is Anglo-Saxon."

Contrast the impact of the Battle of Hastings and of centuries of Roman occupation with the catastrophic effect of a single event in 1348 - the Black Death.

All the king's horses and all the king's men could do nothing to alter the plague's dreadful progress. And that one single, appalling event did more to shape the future of British society than the deeds of any king or the outcome of any battle.

The effect of the Black Death on the peasant population of England - or at least on those who survived - was in many ways similar to the effect the First World War had on women, he says. It liberated them.

"It was a terrible thing," he says. "Getting on for half of the population was wiped out within three years. Just imagine taking out your school photo album and crossing off every other person.

"But for the ordinary people who survived, it offered an enormous opportunity.

"All of a sudden, labour was worth something. People had bargaining power. Before then, when the population was higher, if you were not working the land, someone else would. Now, they had a choice. People became aware of their worth, and if they were not happy, for example, they would move to another manor. You even had women going into business for the first time in history."

Justin's book, and the TV series on which it is based, covers British history in seven handy chunks, from prehistoric days at the end of the last Ice Age up to the enclosures and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

If one age typifies the ways in which the rich and powerful have distorted the writing of history, it is the Tudors, Justin says.

The Tudor period, under Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I, is held up as one of the most glittering in British history. And, despite Henry's wilfulness in working his way through five wives before eventually being survived by a sixth, in a way so it was. It was a time of great adventurers and voyages, of the world opening up, of Shakespeare and the defeat of the Armada.

But for the ordinary people of England it was a grim and desperate time to be alive, Justin says.

Henry, in dismantling the Catholic church in England, also effectively swept away the welfare state. Before the Reformation, the Catholic church provided help for those at the bottom of society - the poor, the sick, the desperate. In return, they would pray for the rich clergymen, which would ensure their passage from purgatory to heaven after their death.

When Henry dismantled the church as a pretext for granting himself a divorce from his first wife, that was all swept away. "The poor were left with nothing at all," says Justin.

The result, for large numbers of people, was desperation. Unrest and a succession of popular rebellions followed. The uprisings were put down with bloody brutality.

In one West Country uprising against Henry VIII known as the Prayer Book rebellion, Justin says, more West Country people died than were killed in both world wars.

It's a grim thought. And it helps explain why, for all its achievements, Tudor England is the period of British history during which Justin would least like to have been born.

Seven Ages of Britain by Justin Pollard is published by Hodder and Stoughton, price £20. The TV series begins on Channel 4 at 8pm on Saturday.

u Justin will be guest speaker at the Dean Court Literary Lunch at York's Dean Court Hotel at 12 noon on Wednesday next week (November 19). Tickets: £17.50 from the hotel on 01904 625082.

u At 6.30pm the same day, he will give an illustrated talk at Borders bookshop in Davygate, York. Entry is free - just turn up on the night.

Updated: 08:53 Wednesday, November 12, 2003