History of England - Some information about England

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History of England

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Bones and flint tools found in Norfolk and Suffolk show that Homo erectus lived in what is now England about 700,000 years ago. At this time, Great Britain was joined to mainland Europe by a large land bridge. The current position of the English Channel was a large river flowing westwards and fed by tributaries that would later become the Thames and the Seine. This area was greatly depopulated during the period of the last major ice age, as were other regions of the British Isles. In the subsequent recolonisation, after the thawing of the ice, genetic research shows that present-day England was the last area of the British Isles to be repopulated, about 13,000 years ago. The migrants arriving during this period contrast with the other of the inhabitants of the British Isles, coming across lands from the south east of Europe, whereas earlier arriving inhabitants came north along a coastal route from Iberia. These migrants would later adopt the Celtic culture that came to dominate much of western Europe.

By AD 43, the time of the main Roman invasion, Britain had already been the target of frequent invasions, planned and actual, by forces of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. It was first invaded by the Roman dictator Julius Caesar in 55 BC, but it was conquered more fully by the Emperor Claudius in 43 AD. Like other regions on the edge of the empire, Britain had long enjoyed trading links with the Romans, and their economic and cultural influence was a significant part of the British late pre-Roman Iron Age, especially in the south. With the fall of the Roman Empire 400 years later, the Romans left the Province of Britannia, much of which later came to be known as England.

The History of Anglo-Saxon England covers the history of early mediæval England from the end of Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 5th century until the Conquest by the Normans in 1066. Fragmentary knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England in the 5th and 6th centuries comes from the British writer Gildas (6th century) the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a history of the English people begun in the 9th century), saints' lives, poetry, archaeological findings, and place-name studies. The dominant themes of the seventh to tenth centuries were the spread of Christianity and the political unification of England. Christianity is thought to have come from three directions—from Rome to the south, and Scotland and Ireland to the north and west, respectively. From about 500 AD, it is believed England was divided into seven petty kingdoms, known as the Heptarchy: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms tended to coalesce by means of warfare. As early as the time of Ethelbert of Kent, one king could be recognised as Bretwalda ("Lord of Britain"). Generally speaking, the title fell in the 7th century to the kings of Northumbria; in the 8th to those of Mercia; and in the 9th to Egbert of Wessex, who in 825 defeated the Mercians at the Battle of Ellendun. In the next century, his family came to rule England. The "Great Heathen Army" of Danish Vikings pillaged and conquered much of England in the late 9th century

Originally, England was a geographical term to describe the part of Britain occupied by the Anglo-Saxons, rather than a name of an individual nation-state. It became politically united through the expansion of the kingdom of Wessex, whose king Athelstan brought the whole of England under one ruler for the first time in 927, although unification did not become permanent until 954, when Edred defeated Eric Bloodaxe and became King of England.

In 1016, England was conquered by the Danish king Canute the Great and became the centre of government for his short-lived empire. With the accession of Edward the Confessor, heir of the native English dynasty, in 1042, England once again became a separate kingdom. Its ties and nature, however, were forever changed following the Norman Conquest in 1066. The next few hundred years saw England as a major part of expanding and dwindling empires based in France with the "Kings of England" using England as a source of troops to enlarge their personal holdings in France for years (Hundred Years' War) starting with Edward III; in fact, the English crown did not relinquish its last foothold on mainland France until Calais was lost in 1558, during the reign of Mary Tudor (the Channel Islands are still crown dependencies, though not part of the UK)

In the 13th century Wales (the remaining Romano-Celts) was brought under the control of English monarchs through conquest. This was formalised in the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 and Wales was legally annexed to the Kingdom of England by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542. Wales shared a legal identity with England as the joint entity originally called England and later England and Wales. An epidemic of catastrophic proportions, the Black Death first reached England in the summer of 1348. The Black Death is estimated to have killed between a third and two-thirds of Europe's population. England alone lost as much as 70% of its population, which passed from seven million to two million in 1400. The plague repeatedly returned to haunt England throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. The Great Plague of London in 1665–1666 was the last plague outbreak. more.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England#History

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