History of United KingdomThe history of Britain concerns the study of the human past in one of Europe's oldest and most influential national territories. What is now England, a country within the United Kingdom, was inhabited by early humans 800,000 years ago as the 2010 discovery of flint tools at Happisburgh in Norfolk revealed. The earliest evidence for modern humans in North West Europe is a jawbone discovered in Devon at Kents Cavern in 1927, dates between 41,000 and 44,000 years old. Continuous human habitation dates to around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last glacial period. The region has numerous remains from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age, such as Stonehenge and Avebury. In the Iron Age, all of Britain, south of the Firth of Forth, was inhabited by the Celtic people known as the Britons.
The first extensive Roman campaigns in Britain were by the armies of Julius Caesar in 55 and in 54 BC, but the first significant campaign of conquest did not begin until AD 43, in the reign of the Emperor Claudius. They went on to annex the whole of what would become modern England and Wales over the next forty years and periodically extended their control over much of lowland Scotland. The Romans demarcated the northern border of Britannia with Hadrian's Wall, completed around the year 128. Fourteen years later, in AD 142, the Romans extended the Britannic frontier northwards, to the Forth-Clyde line, where they constructed a second wall the Antonine, but, after approximately twenty years, they then retreated to the border of Hadrian's Wall. Most Romans departed from Britain around the year 410, which began the sub-Roman period (AD 5–6 c.), but the legacy of the Roman Empire was felt for centuries in Britain. Roman military withdrawals left Britain open to invasion by pagan, seafaring warriors from north-western continental Europe, chiefly the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who had long raided the coasts of the Roman province and now began to settle, initially in the eastern part of Britain, the (Anglo-Saxons), established several kingdoms that became the primary powers, which is often regarded as the origin of England and the English people. They introduced the Old English language, which displaced the previous British language. Raids by the Vikings were frequent after about AD 800, and the Norsemen took control of almost all of what is now England. Wessex under Alfred the Great was left as the only surviving English kingdom, and under his successors it steadily expanded at the expense of the kingdoms of the Danes. This brought about the political unification of England, first accomplished under Æthelstanin 927. A dispute over the succession to Edward led to the Norman conquest of England in 1066, accomplished by an army led by Duke William of Normandy. The Normans themselves originated from Scandinavia and had settled in Normandy in the late 9th and early 10th centuries. This conquest led to the almost total dispossession of the English elite and its replacement by a new French - speaking aristocracy, whose speech had a profound and permanent effect on the English language. England had conquered Wales in the 13th century and was then united with Scotland in the early 18th century to form a new sovereign state called Great Britain. Following the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain ruled a worldwide Empire, the largest in the worlds history. Following a process of decolonization in the 20th century the vast majority of the Empire became independent; however, its cultural impact is widespread and deep in many countries of the present day. |
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e-mail [email protected] Copyright Nick Hedley