Prehistory
Two thousand years ago there was an Iron Age Celtic culture throughout the north-west European islands. It seems that the Celts had intermingledwith the peoples who were there already; we know that religious sites that had been built long before their arrival continued to be used in Celtic times.

For people in Britain today, the chief significance of the prehistoric period is its sense of mystery. This sense finds its focus most easily in the astonishing monumental architecture of this period, the remains of which exist throughout the country.¹ Wiltshire, in south-western England, has two spectacular examples: Silbury Hill, the largest burial mound in Europe, and Stonehenge. (Stonehenge) Such places have a special importance for some people with inclinations towards mysticism and esoteric religion.² For example, we know that Celtic society had a priestly caste called the Druids. Their name survives today in the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids.

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The Roman period (43-410)

The Roman province of Britannia covered most of present-day England and Wales, where the Romans imposed their own way of life and culture, making use of the existing Celtic aristocracy to govern and encouraging them to adopt Roman dress and the Latin language. They never went to Ireland and exerted an influence, without actually governing there, over only the southern part of Scotland. It was during this time that a Celtic tribe called the Scots migrated from Ireland to Scotland, where, along with another tribe, the Picts, they became opponents of the Romans. This division of the Celts into those who experienced Roman rule (the Britons in England and Wales) and those who did not (the Gaels in Ireland and Scotland) may help to explain the emergence of two distinct branches of the Celtic group of languages. (Hadrian's Wall)

The remarkable thing about the Romans is that, despite their long occupation of Britain, they left very little behind. To many other parts of Europe they bequeathed a system of law and administration which forms the basis of the modern system and a language which developed onto the modern Romance family of languages. In Britain, they left neither.³ Moreover, most of their villas, baths and temples, their impressive network of roads, and the cities they founded, including Londinium (London), were soon destroyed or fell into disrepair. Almost the only lasting reminders of their presence are place names like Chester, Lancaster and Gloucester, which include variants of the Latin word castra (a military camp).

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The Germanic invasions (410-1066)

The Roman occupation had been a matter of colonial control rather than large-scale settlement. But during the fifth century, a number of tribes from the European mainland invaded and settled in large numbers. Two of these tribes were the Angles and the Saxons. These Anglo-Saxons soon had the south-east of the country in their grasp. In the west, their advance was temporarily halted by an army of (Celtic) Britons under the command of the legendary King Arthur (King Arthur). Nevertheless, by the end of sixth century, they and their way of life predominated in nearly all of present-day England. Celtic culture and language survived only in present-day Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.

The Anglo-Saxons had little use for towns and cities. But they had a great effect on the countryside, where they introduced new farming methods and founded the thousands of self-sufficient villages which formed the basis of English society for the next thousand or so years.⁴

When they came to Britain, the Anglo-Saxons were pagan. During the sixth and seventh centuries, Christianity spread throughout Britain from two different directions. By the time it was introduced into the south of England by the Roman missionary St. Augustine, it had already been introduced into Scotland and northern England from Ireland, which had become Christianity eventually took over everywhere, the Celtic model persisted in Scotland and Ireland for several hundred years. It was less centrally organized and had less need for a strong monarchy to support it. This partly explains why both secular and religious power in these two countries continued to be both more locally based and less secure throughout the medieval period.

Britain experienced another wave of Germanic invasions in the eighth century. These invaders, known as Vikings, Norsemen or Danes, came from Scandinavia. In the ninth century they conquered and settled the islands around Scotland and some coastal regions of Ireland. Their conquest of England was halted when they were defeated by King Alfred of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex (King Alfred). As a result, their settlement was confined mostly to the north and east of the country.

However, the cultural differences between Anglo-Saxons and Danes were comparatively small. They led roughly the same way of life and spoke different varieties of the same Germanic tongue. Moreover, the Danes soon converted to Christianity. These similarities made political unification easier, and by the end of the tenth century, England was a united kingdom with a Germanic culture throughout. Most of Scotland was also united by this time, at least in name, in a (Celtic) Gaelic kingdom.

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The medieval period (1066-1458)
The successful Norman invasion of England (1066) brought Britain into the mainstream of western European culture. Previously, most links had been with Scandinavia. Only in Scotland did this link survive, the western isles (until the 13th century) and the control of Scandinavian kings. Throughout this period, the English kings also owned land on the continent and were often at war with the French kings.

Unlike the Germanic invasions, the Norman invasion was small-scale. There was no such thing as a Norman area of settlement. Instead, the Norman soldiers who had invaded were given the ownership of land and of people living on it. A strict feudal system was imposed. Great nobles, or barons, were directly responsible to a baron. Under them were the peasants, tied by a strict system of mutual duties and obligations to the local lord, and forbidden to travel without his permission. The peasants were the English-speaking Saxons. The lords and the barons were the French-speaking Normans. This was the start of the English class system⁵ (Language and social class).

The system of strong government which the Normans introduced made the Anglo-Norman kingdom the most powerful political force in Britain and Ireland. Not surprisingly therefore, the authority of the English monarch gradually extended to other parts of these islands in the next 250 years. By the end of the thirteenth century, a large part of eastern Ireland was controlled by Anglo-Norman lords in the name of their king and the whole of Wales was under his direct rule (at which time, the custom of naming the monarch’s eldest son the ‘Prince of Wales’ began). Scotland managed to remain politically independent in the medieval period, but was obliged to fight occasional wars to do so.

The cultural story of this period is different. In the 250 years after the Norman Conquest, it was a Germanic language, Middle English, and not the Norman (French) language, which had become the dominant one in all classes of society in England. Furthermore, it was the Anglo-Saxon concept of common law, and not Roman law, which formed the basis of the legal system.

Despite English rule, northern and central Wales was never settled in great numbers by Saxons or Normans. As a result, the (Celtic) Welsh language and culture remained strong. Eisteddfods, national festivals of Walsh song and poetry, continued throughout the medieval period and still continue today. The Anglo-Norman lords of Ireland remained loyal to the English king but, despite laws to the contrary, mostly adopted the Gaelic language and customs.

The political independence of Scotland did not prevent a gradual switch to English language and customs in the lowland (southern) part of the country.⁶ Many Anglo-Saxon aristocrats had fled there after the Norman Conquest. In addition, the Celtic kings saw that the adoption of an Anglo-Norman style of government would strengthen royal power. By the end of this period, a cultural split had developed between the lowlands, where the way of life and language was similar to that in England, and where, due to the mountainous terrain, the authority of the Scottish king was hard to enforce.

It was in this period that Parliament began its gradual evolution into the democratic body which it is today. The word ‘parliament’, which comes from the French word parler (to speak), was first used in England in the thirteenth century to describe an assembly of nobles called together by the king.⁷ (Robin Hood)

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The sixteenth century
In its first outbreak in the middle of the fourteenth century, bubonic plague (known in England as the Black Death) killed about a third of the population of Great Britain. It periodically reappeared for another 300 years. The shortage of labour which it caused, and the increasing importance of trade and towns, weakened the traditional ties between lord and peasant. At a higher level of feudal structure, the power of the great barons was greatly weakened by in-fighting (The Wars of the Roses).

Both these developments allowed English monarchs to increase their power. The Tudor dynasty (1485-1603) established a system of government departments staffed by professionals who depended for their position on the monarch. The feudal aristocracy was no longer needed for implementing government policy. It was needed less for making it too. Of the traditional two ‘Houses’ of Parliament, the Lords and the Commons, it was now more important for monarchs to get the agreement of the Commons for their policies because that was where the newly powerful merchants and landowners were represented. (Off with his head!)

Unlike in much of the rest of Europe, the immediate cause of the rise of Protestantism in England was political and personal rather than doctrinal.⁸ The King (Henry VIII) wanted a divorce, which the Pope would not give him. Also, by making himself head of the ‘Church of England’, independent of Rome, all church lands came under his control and gave him a large new source of income.

This rejection of the Roman Church also accorded with a new spirit of patriotic confidence in England. The country had finally lost any realistic claim to lands in France, thus becoming more consciously a distinct ‘`island nation’. At the same time, increasing European exploration of the Americas meant that England was closer to the geographical centre of western civilization instead of being, as previously, on the edge of it. It was in the last quarter of this adventurous and optimistic century that Shakespeare began writing his famous plays, giving voice to the modern form of English.

It was therefore patriotism as much as religious conviction that had caused Protestantism to become the majority religion in England by the end of the century. It took a form known as Anglicanism, not so very different from Catholicism in its organization and ritual. But in the lowlands of Scotland, it took a more idealistic form. Calvinism, with its strict insistence on simplicity and its dislike of ritual and celebration became the dominant religion. It is from this date that the stereotype image of the dour, thrifty Scottish developed. However, the highlands remained Catholic and so further widened the gulf between the two parts of the nation. Ireland also remained Catholic. There, Protestantism was identified with the English, who at that time were making further attempts to control the whole of the country. (Elizabeth I)

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The seventeenth century
When James I became the first English king of the Stuart dynasty, he was already James VI of Scotland, so that the crowns of these two countries were united. Although their governments continued to be separate, their linguistic differences were lessened in this century. The kind of Middle English spoken in lowland Scotland had developed into a written language known as ‘Scots’. However, the Scottish Protestant church adopted English rather than Scots bibles. This and the glamour of the English court where the king now sat caused modern English to become the written standard in Scotland as well. (Scots gradually became just ‘a dialect’.)

In the seventeenth century, the link between religion and politics became intense. At the start of the century, some people tried to kill the king because he wasn't Catholic enough. By the end of the century, another king had been killed, partly because he seemed too Catholic, and yet another had been forced into exile for the same reason.

This was the context in which, during the century, Parliament established its supremacy over the monarchy. Anger grew in the country at the way the Stuart monarchs raised money without, as tradition prescribed, getting the agreement of the House of Commons first. In addition, ideological Protestantism, especially Puritanism, had grown in England. Puritans regarded the luxurious lifestyle of the king and his followers as immoral. They were also anti-Catholic and suspicious of the apparent sympathy towards Catholicism of the Stuart monarchs.

This conflict led to the Civil War (The Civil War), which ended with complete victory for the parliamentary forces. James's son, Charles I, became the first monarch in Europe to be executed after a formal trial for crimes against his people. The leader of the parliamentary army, Oliver Cromwell, became ‘Lord Protector’ of a republic with a military government which, after he had brutally crushed resistance in Ireland, effectively encompassed all of Britain and Ireland.

But by the time Cromwell died, he, his system of government, and the puritan ethics that went with it (theatres and other forms of amusement had been banned) had become so unpopular that the executed king's son was asked to return and become King Charles II. However, the conflict between monarch and Parliament soon re-emerged in the reign of Charles II’s brother, James II. (The Battle of the Boyne) Again, religion was its focus. James tried to give full rights to Catholics, and to promote them in his government. The `Glorious Revolution' (‘glorious’ because it was bloodless) followed, in which Prince William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, and his Stuart wife Mary accepted Parliament's invitation to become king and queen. Parliament immediately drew up a Bill of Rights, which limited some of the monarch's powers. it also allowed Dissenters ( those Protestants who did not agree with the practices of Anglicanism) to practise their religion freely. This meant that the Presbyterian Church, to which the majority of the lowland Scottish belonged, was guaranteed its legality. However, Dissenters were not allowed to hold government posts or become Members of Parliament (MPs). (Ring-a-ring-a-roses)

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The eighteenth century
In 1707, the Act of Union was passed. Under this agreement, the Scottish parliament was dissolved and some of its members joined the English and Welsh parliament in London and the former two kingdoms became one `United Kingdom of Great Britain'. However, Scotland retained its own system of law, more similar to continental European systems than that of England's. It does so to this day.

Politically, the eighteenth century was stable. Monarch and Parliament got on quite well together. One reason for this was that the monarch's favorite politicians, through the royal power of patronage (the ability to give people jobs), were able to control the election and voting habits of a large number of MPs in the House of Commons.

Within Parliament, the bitter divisions of the previous century were echoed in the formation of two vaguely opposed, loose collections of allies. One group, the Whigs, were the political `descendants' of the parliamentarians. They supported the Protestant values of hard work and thrift, were sympathetic to dissenters and believed in government by monarch and aristocracy together. The other group, the Tories, had a greater respect for the idea of the monarchy and the importance of the Anglican Church (and sometimes even a little sympathy for Catholics and the Stuarts). This was the beginning of the party system in Britain. (The origins of modern government)

The only part of Britain to change radically as a result of political forces in this century was the highlands of Scotland. This area twice supported failed attempts to put a (Catholic) Stuart monarch back on the throne. After the second attempt, many inhabitants of the highlands were killed or sent away from Britain and the wearing of highland dress (the tartan kilt) was banned. The Celtic way of life was effectively destroyed.

It was cultural change that was most marked in this century. Britain gradually acquired an empire in the Americas, along the west African coast and in India. The greatly increased trade that this allowed was one factor which led to the Industrial Revolution. Other factors were the many technical innovations in manufacture and transport.⁹

In England, the growth of the industrial mode of production, together with advances in agriculture, caused the greatest upheaval in the pattern of everyday life since the Germanic invasions. Areas of common land, which had been used by everybody in a village for the grazing of animals, disappeared as landowners incorporated them into their increasingly large and more efficient farms. (There remain some pieces of common land in Britain today, used mainly as parks. They are often called `the common'.) Millions moved from rural areas into new towns and cities. Most of these were in the north of England, where the raw materials for industry were available. In this way, the north, which had previously been economically backward, became the industrial heartland of the country. The right conditions also existed in lowland Scotland and south Wales, which further accentuated the differences between these parts of those countries and their other regions. In the south of England, London came to dominate, not as an industrial centre, but as a business and trading centre.

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The nineteenth century
Not long before this century began, Britain lost its most important colonies (north American ones) in a war of independence. At the start of the century, it was locked in a war with France, during which an invasion of the country was a real possibility. Soon after the end of the century, it controlled the biggest empire the world had ever seen.

One section of this empire was Ireland. During this century, it was in fact part of the UK itself, and it was during this century that British culture and way of life came to predominate in Ireland. In the 1840s, the potato crop failed two years in a row and there was a terrible famine. Millions of peasants, those with Gaelic language and customs, either died or emigrated. By the end of the century, almost the whole of the remaining population had switched to English as their first language. (Queen Victoria)

Another part of the empire was made up of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, `where British settlers had become the majority population. Another was India, an enormous country with a culture more ancient than Britain's. Tens of thousands of British civil servants and troops were used to govern it. At the head of this administration was a viceroy (governor) whose position within the country was similar to the monarch's in Britain itself. Because India was so far away, and the journey from Britain took so long, these British officials spent most of their working lives there and so developed a distinct way of life. The majority, however, remained self-consciously `British' as they imposed British institutions and methods of government on the country. Large parts of Africa also belonged to the empire. Except for South Africa, where there was some British settlement, most of Britain's African colonies started as trading bases on the coast, and were only incorporated into the empire at the end of the century. As well as these areas, the empire included numerous smaller areas and islands. Some, such as those in the Caribbean, were the result of earlier British settlement, but most were included because of their strategic position along trading routes.

The growth of the empire was encouraged by a change in attitude during the century. Previously, colonization had been a matter of settlement, commerce, or military strategy. The aim was simply to possess territory, but not necessarily to govern it. By the end of the century, colonization was seen as a matter of destiny. During the century, Britain became the world's foremost economic power. This, together with long years of political stability unequalled anywhere else in Europe, gave the British a sense of supreme confidence, even arrogance, about their culture and civilization. The British came to see themselves as having a duty to spread this culture and civilization around the world. Being the rulers of an empire was therefore a matter of moral obligation.

There were great changes in social structure. Most people now lived in towns and cities. They no longer depended on country landowners for their living but rather on the owners of industries. These owners and the growing middle class of tradespeople and professionals held the real power in the country. Along with their power went a set of values which emphasized hard work, thrift, religious observance, the family, an awareness of one's dory, absolute honesty in public life, and extreme respectability in sexual matters. This is the set of values which are now called Victorian.

Middle-class religious conviction, together with a belief that reform was better than revolution, allowed reforms in public life. These included not only political reforms, but also reforms which recognized some human rights (as we now call them). Slavery and the laws against people on the basis of religion were abolished, and laws were made to protect workers from some of the worst excesses of the industrial mode of production.¹⁰ Public services such as the post and the police were begun.

Despite reform, the nature of the new industrial society forced many people to Live and work in very unpleasant surroundings. Writers and intellectuals of this period either protested againstthe horrors of this new style of life (for example, Dickens) or simply ignored it. Many, especially the Romantic poets, praised the beauties of the countryside and the virtues of country life. This was a new development. In previous centuries, the countryside wasn't something to be discussed or admired. But from this time on, most British people developed a sentimental attachment to the idea of the Countryside.

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The twentieth century
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain ceased to be the world's richest country. Perhaps this caused，failure of the Victorian confidence in gradual reform. Whatever the reason, the first 20 years of the century were a period of extremism in Britain. The Suffragettes, women demanding the right to vote, were prepared to damage property and even die for their beliefs; some sections of the army appeared ready to disobey the government over its policies concerning Ulster in Ireland; and the government's introduction of new taxation was opposed so absolutely by the House of Lords that even Parliament, the foundation of the political system, seemed to have an uncertain future. But by the 1920s, these issues had been resolved (although only temporarily in the case of Ulster) and the rather un-British climate of extremism died out.

The British empire reached its greatest extent in 1919. By this time, however, it was already becoming less of an empire and more of a confederation. At the same international conference at which Britain acquired new possessions under the Treaty of Versailles, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were all represented separately from Britain. A couple of years later, Britain lost most of its oldest colony (The creation of Northern Ireland).

The real dismantling of the empire took place in the 25 years following the Second World War. In the same period, it gradually became clear that Britain was no longer a `superpower' in the world and its forces were no longer able to act unilaterally. In 1956, for instance, British and French military action to stop the Egyptian government taking over the Suez canal failed because it did not receive American support. During the 1950s, it had been generally understood that a conference of the world's great powers involved the USA, the Soviet Union and Britain. But in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis, one of the greatest threats to global peace in the twentieth century, eras resolved without reference to Britain. And when, in 1974, the island of Cyprus, a former British colony, was invaded by Turkey, British military activity was restricted to airlifting the personnel of its military base there to safe-even though it was one of the guarantors of Cypriot independence. At the end of the century, in 1997, Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, thus losing its last imperial possession of any significant size.

It was from the start of the twentieth century that the urban working class (the majority of the population} finally began to make its voice heard. In Parliament, the Labour parry gradually replaced the Liberals (the `descendants' of the Whigs) as the main opposition to the Conservatives (the `descendants' of the Tories). In addition, trade unions managed to organize themselves. In 1926, they were powerful enough to hold a General Strike, and from the 1930s until the 1980s the Trades Union Congress was probably the single most powerful political force outside the institutions of government and Parliament.

Since then, the working class has faded as a political force. They say history moves in cycles. At the start of the twenty-first century, a historian pointed out that Britain in some ways had more in common with the start of the twentieth century than with its middle. In 1900, a general sense of prosperity was combined with a rather high long-term unemployment rate and concerns about an `underclass'. This is exactly where Britain stood in 2000, but clearly different from 1950, when a sense of austerity was combined with a very low rate of unemployment. In 1900, domestic servants comprised a full 10% of the workforce. In 1950 this figure was down to 3% and still falling. But by 2000, with so mans professional women with no time to look after the house or the children, it was back up to 8% and increasing every year. Even the average speed of traffic through London was the same in 1900 and 2000, while in 1950 it was much faster! (Britain (re)joins `Europe') (Some important dates in British history)

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