Britain History
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It's hard to believe that Britain, a small island covering an area smaller than most US states, once ruled half the world's population and had a profound influence on much of the rest. Britain's long and fascinating history is evidenced in its rich blend of architecture, and its multitude of historic sites and monuments throughout the country. Britain is a nation whose proud heritage is highlighted with much pomp and ceremony and outlined in the many world-class museums around the country.
Prehistoric Britain: 6000 BC – 55 BC Roman Britain: 55 BC – 5 th Century Anglo-Saxon Britain, The Dark Ages: 5 th Century – 11 th Century Medieval Britain, The Middle Ages: 11 th Century – 15 th Century The Tudor Era: 15 th & 16 th Centuries Georgian Britain: 18 th & 19 th Centuries 20 th Century Britain: 1900 – 1950 Today's Britain: 1950 – 21 st Century
Prehistoric Britain: 6000 BC – 55 BC
From the Bronze Age, new immigrants came, the Beaker People, so called because of the drinking cups found in their graves. The Beaker People established mining and trade around Wales, Cornwall and Ireland producing bronze weapons and jewellery. The next group of immigrants to come were the Iron Age Celts from southern and central Europe, who settled much of Britain and Ireland from around 500 BC. These Celts left the most indelible mark, with cultural links still in Wales, Ireland and Cornwall today. The Celts established distinct tribes and kingdoms, including the Iceni of Norfolk, the Brigantes of northwest England, the Picts and Caledonii of Scotland, the Ordivices and Silures of Wales and the Scotti of Ireland.
Roman Britain: 55 BC – 5th Century Though Julius Caesar landed in Britain in 55 BC, it was Emperor Claudius who began the full invasion in AD 43 that established the 350-year Roman occupation of Britain. The Romans laid a firm imprint on Britain setting up a number of garrisons, termed ‘chesters', recalled in towns like Winchester, Colchester and Chichester, while the hub of Roman Britain was the fort of Londinium, or as we know it today, London. As well as forts the Romans also built temples and villas most famously the temple of Aqua Sulis, in Bath and Fishbourne Palace outside Chichester and great long straight roads around which many of the modern routes from north to south run. In the early years, the Romans were met with resistance, most famously by Boudicca or Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni. After the Romans plundered her tribe, flogged her and raped her daughters in front of her, Boudicca led her warriors, in a war chariot with blades set into the wheel hubs and sacked the Roman towns of Colchester and Londinium, sparing none. But the uprising wasn't to last and facing ultimate defeat she poisoned herself rather than be taken prisoner. By AD 70 the Romans completely controlled all of England and Wales, though the Pictish tribes of Scotland still proved problematic. Emperor Hadrian came up with the novel solution of keeping them out of his provinces by building what is known as Hadrian's Wall in AD 120, marking out his territory of Britannia encompassing modern day England and Wales. The Romans brought stability, prosperity and by the 4 th Century,
they brought Christianity to Britain further rooting a distinct Romano-British
culture. However, as history proves, all empires crumble and when
the Roman Empire did so its power was withdrawn from Britain around
AD 410. Anglo-Saxon Britain, The Dark Ages: 5th
Century – 11th Century This was the era of Arthurian Legend, which is believed to relate to battles fought between the Anglo Saxons invaders and the Celts, tales of chivalry and sorcery that are closely tied to the Celtic mythology of Wales and Cornwall and places like Glastonbury and Tintagel Castle in Cornwall. By the middle of the 5 th Century the Anglo-Saxons had established the main kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex, in much of what is now England, creating the separate culture and indeed language of English. Around this time Christian missionaries from Rome and Ireland came to convert the pagan English setting up monasteries on Lindisfarne, Iona and Canterbury. During the 8 th and 9 th Centuries, the Anglo-Saxons were on the receiving end of invasions from the Vikings of Scandinavia. These fearsome warriors travelled by long boat, ravaging the coasts of England for decades before settling and establishing the town of Jorvik in York. In 878 the Vikings were confronted by a united army of Anglo-Saxons under the King of Wessex, Alfred the Great who pushed them north. Separate territories were established, of Anglo Saxon England in the south and west and the Viking ‘Danelaw' of the north and east. Throughout the 10 th Century, control of England swung from Saxon to Dane and back to Saxon until 1066 when the country was taken over by an even more powerful group; the Normans.
Medieval Britain, The Middle Ages: 11th Century – 15th Century
The Normans quickly established their rule under William the Conqueror, as he is known. Assessing his new kingdom, William commissioned the Doomsday Book, a comprehensive inventory of the country. Throughout the 11 th & 12 th centuries, the Normans built a number of castles and cathedrals from which to exert and legitimise their power. The Norman rule of law and the feudal system was established and French became the language of the ruling elite for almost 300 years. Throughout the Middle Ages many English Kings played their part in the Crusades, most notably Richard the Lion Heart, who only spent six months of his 10-years reign in England. The country was ruled instead by his brother King John, who under pressure from his nobles, was forced to sign the Magna Carta, a seminal document in legal and political history. One of the most prominent kings of this time was Edward I who sought to expand his territories in France, Wales and Scotland. After he beat the Welsh into submission, Edward built a number of mighty military castles, which still remain today, to keep them in check and established the tradition that the future King of England be known as the Prince of Wales. Edward then turned his attentions to Scotland and saw his opportunity when he was asked to arbitrate over the dispute for the Scottish throne, a contest between, John Balliol and Robert the Bruce. Edward chose Balliol on the condition that he swear allegiance to the English crown. When Balliol refused to fight for Edward against the French, the English king deposed him and established his own brutal rule on the Scots and if you've seen the film ‘Braveheart', you'll understand why Edward was called ‘Hammer of the Scots'. The Scottish were to achieve their independence after the famous Battle of Bannockburn where despite overwhelming numbers, Robert the Bruce defeated Edward's successor, Edward II. The Middle Ages saw yet more warfare. In 1337 Edward III started the One Hundred Years War with France in which English kings continually contested land in France and Henry V fought the famous Battle of Agincourt, which decimated the French in 1415. After the Hundred Years War ended in 1453 with the loss of the French territories, the nobles of England fought over the English crown in the War of the Roses.
The Tudor Era: 15th & 16th Centuries The War of the Roses saw the throne change hands between the powerful dynasties of the House of York and the House Lancaster, signified by their respective emblems of the white rose and the red rose. After Henry VI of the house of Lancaster was deposed by Edward IV of York the country was plunged into decades of bitter civil war until Henry Tudor a nobleman of Welsh descent, settled the conflict by defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and claiming the crown.
During his infamous reign, Henry was to marry six times, he divorced two of his wives, one died from childbirth and Henry executed two more, only one survived him. It was his divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon that led to the split from Rome and the establishment of Anglicanism as the main faith in England following the Act of Supremacy. This act made the monarch the head of the church in England rather than the Pope and deemed any other religion treasonous. Parallel to the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the Dissolution of the Monasteries began in England in 1536. Henry VIII confiscated church lands and transferred them to the Church of England sold them off to the aristocracy or laid them to ruin as evidenced in the huge number of ruined abbeys up and down the country such as Fountain's Abbey, Tintern Abbey and Jedburgh Abbey. When Henry VIII died he left two daughters Mary and Elizabeth and a son Edward, all from different wives. Edward succeeded him at the age of nine but died six years later and his eldest sister Mary, took the throne. Mary was the daughter of Catherine of Aragon and a catholic, when she became Queen she executed her cousin Lady Jane Grey, a protestant pretender to the throne and imprisoned her half-sister Elizabeth in the Tower of London. When she married the King of Spain, England was returned to Roman Catholicism and ‘Bloody' Mary, as she became known, conducted a five-year reign of terror during which many Protestants were burnt at the stake. When Mary died, she was succeeded by Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII's second wife Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth inherited a country in much disarray with divided loyalties all around, yet throughout her 45-year reign England was to become the dominant sea power in the world and the Elizabethan Age would come to be regarded as a period of great cultural renaissance. Elizabeth suppressed plots to supplant her with her Scottish cousin, Mary Queen of Scots and most famously her navy defeated the great Spanish Armada sent to conquer England. English sailors continued to harass the Spanish colonial fleet under captains such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh and throughout Elizabeth's reign the first English colonies were established in the West Indies, Virginia in the US and the East India Company was first set up. Back at home England prospered and English culture was developed through literature and theatre, enter Sir William Shakespeare who wrote his many great plays during this time for the Globe theatre which has been carefully rebuilt in south London. The one thing missing during Elizabeth's reign was a successor, the self styled Virgin Queen, never married and never had children and the Tudor dynasty died with her.
Though the Tudor dynasty was a turbulent one, the reign of the Stuart kings was to be one of the most dramatic and divisive in British history. When Elizabeth I died without an heir, the crown passed to James Stuart of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's cousin. James VI of Scotland also became James I of England, uniting the two crowns for the first time. The early years of James I's reign are remembered for the gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament with the King in it. The plot was foiled and every year on November the 5 th this remembered and celebrated in Britain, with fireworks, bonfires and the burning of an effigy of ringleader Guy Fawkes. James' reign also saw the publication of the King James Bible, translated into English and the sailing of the Mayflower to New England in 1620. James found ruling England very different to Scotland, his belief in the Divine Right of Kings put him at odds with the political workings of Parliament who were unwilling to simply follow his orders and raise taxes at his bidding. When James' successor Charles I came to power, the relationship between King and Parliament degenerated into the bitter Civil War of 1642-49. The lines were drawn, between the Royalist Cavaliers under the King and the Parliamentarian forces known as the Roundheads under Oliver Cromwell. At the same time both Scotland and Ireland were split by their own bitter wars. In the end the Parliamentarians won, Charles I was tried for treason and executed. However Cromwell proved to be a worse tyrant than any absolute ruler, establishing an unstable Republic of the Commonwealth and leading his New Model Army in vicious killing sprees across Ireland. After Cromwell's death his son Richard briefly ruled the Republic, before parliament decided the experiment had gone wrong and restored Charles II to the monarchy in 1660. Charles II was wholly welcomed by the people of Britain and he proved to be a shrewd and capable King. His rule throughout the period known as the Restoration, saw the lows of the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the Great Plague of 1665-6 and the highs of great cultural and scientific endeavour such as Christopher Wren's rebuilding of London and St Paul's Cathedral. Known as ‘the Merry Monarch' had countless mistresses in his court, fathering an acknowledged 14 illegitimate children! However without a legitimate heir, the throne passed to his brother, James II. James II, is widely perceived as an arrogant, hot tempered and useless monarch and his conflicts with parliament and his strong catholic leanings, quickly moved parliament to depose him in favour of William of Orange, the Dutch duke married to Mary, James' daughter, ironic enough. William and Mary succeeded to the throne in a relatively bloodless coup known as the Glorious Revolution. Bloodless the coup may have been for England, but in Scotland and Ireland the wars raged on. William defeated James and his Jacobite supporters at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland, a symbolic victory that still creates friction in Northern Ireland today. While in Scotland the Jacobites were to be a constant source of dissent and rebellion throughout the decades to come. William and Mary were succeeded by Mary's sister Anne, during whose reign, Britain gained increased supremacy throughout Europe. The Act of Union with Scotland of 1707, for the first time established the nation as Great Britain. On the continent Queen Anne's forces captured Gibraltar from Spain and defeated the French at Blenheim, establishing Britain as the dominant force in Europe. For this the Duke of Marlborough, victor at Blenheim was gifted the lavish Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
Georgian Britain: 18th & 19th Centuries Queen Anne died childless, but before she did, the Act of Settlement establish her heir as Electress Sophia of Hanover, a distant Protestant cousin, bypassing the lines of closer Catholic, Jacobean heirs. Sophia died before Anne, so the line was passed to George, ending the Stuart dynasty and crowning a German King, who spoke no English. George I took over a Britain that was fast becoming the dominant force in the World, competing with France in Europe and throughout the colonies of North America, Canada and India. Britain was also fast developing as a commercial and industrial powerhouse and London became a major centre for banking and commerce. The nation's increased prosperity throughout the Georgian era as can be seen in the elegant Georgian architecture of towns like Bath, Brighton and Cheltenham. Speaking little English and spending very little time in the country, George I, like the Hanoverian Kings who succeeded him left the running of Britain very much to Parliament. This practice established the role of a Prime Minister, the first of which was Sir Robert Walpole and further increased the power of parliament in governing the country. Throughout the early Georgian era, undercurrents of Jacobitism still existed calling for the reinstatement of the heirs of James II and the Stuart line as opposed to the Hanoverians. This undercurrent ran into open rebellion in Scotland, in 1715 and more prominently in 1745, when ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie' led his Highlander army as far south as Derby. However it was to end in tragic fashion at the Battle of Culloden, where the outmanned and outgunned highlanders where utterly defeated, and all injured and prisoners slaughtered by the Hanoverian army under the Duke of Cumberland. Defeat at Culloden sounded the death knell for Jacobitism and for the Highlander's way of life while Bonnie Prince Charlie fled back to France. As Britain became ever more consolidated, its Empire continued to expand and strengthen in the Americas, Canada and India and following the voyage of Captain James Cook in 1768, it added the newly discovered territories of Australia and New Zealand. However it didn't all go Britain's way, the loss of the American Colonies in the American War of Independence of 1776-83 was a huge and embarrassing set back. The Napoleonic Wars that were to follow were to be a much bigger threat to the fledgling Empire until the French invasion fleet was defeated by the famous naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson in the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and Napoleon's army was eventually beaten by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo in 1815.
Victorian Britain: 19th Century When Victoria became Queen at the age of 18 in 1837, Britain was already in the throes of the Industrial Revolution and the Empire was firmly established. The Victorian era is regarded by many in Britain as the Golden Age, a time of high morals and conservative values, a time when the British economy boomed through trade in cotton, tobacco, coal and steel, when British (well Scottish) names, like Stephenson, Watt and Faraday where behind scientific and industrial endeavours and Britannia really did rule the waves. The British Empire, proudly proclaimed as the ‘Empire where the sun never sets', reached around the globe from Canada and the Caribbean, to parts of Africa, India and South East Asia to Australia and New Zealand. In securing this empire, Britain's cathedrals are filled with monuments to the soldiers, officers and regiments who died in Wars such as the Crimean, 1854-6 and the Boer 1899-1902. At home the Victorian Age was a time of huge social and democratic reform, prompted by social commentators, writers such as Charles Dickens and humanist preachers such as John Wesley. Many of the industrial slums of Britain were cleaned up with various health acts, education was made universal, working conditions were greatly improved including the ending of child labour, trade unionism was legalised, workers rights were enshrined and electoral reform brought the vote to all men, though women would have to wait until the 1920s. The V & A museum in London, is a proud testament to the Victorian
Age, with one of the world's widest collections of decorative arts.
The museum was established by Queen Victoria in 1899 in memory of
her husband Prince Albert. 20th Century Britain: 1900 - 1950 The new century brought an auspicious start for Britain, a new monarch Edward VII and a new era. However over the first 50 years of the 20 th Century, Britain's Golden Age together with its Empire was to come to a halt and the country was to face some of the toughest challenges in its history.
By the end of the war in 1918, over 8 million soldiers and 6 million civilians of all nationalities were killed. In Britain, as in many other countries, there isn't a town or village no matter how small that doesn't have a monument to those that it lost in the Great War. For those that returned to Britain, the country would never again be the same. The old class divide seem completely irrelevant when the working classes and middle classes died side by side on the orders of the commanding officers of the upper classes and the old social order established since the Norman feudal times started to crack. This social change brought women the vote, established working class politics in the mainstream, with the Labour Party win in 1923 and in 1921 after centuries of struggle, Ireland, the first British colony became the first to be given independence, though the northern provinces remained a British domain. World War I broke the British economy, from being the world's largest foreign investor, before the war Britain became the World's biggest debtor. Massive unemployment brought about the bitter General Strike of 1926 and even the Royal family had their upheavals when Edward VIII abdicated, to marry a commoner, an American divorcee named Ms Wallis Simpson. Meanwhile trouble was again brewing on the continent with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. While the then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was waving pieces of paper and announcing ‘peace in our time', Winston Churchill, who had consistently warned of Hitler's rise to power was being derided as a political has-been and a war monger. History would soon prove Churchill right and Britain as he said, would find itself staring into the abyss. Churchill, described World War II as Britain's finest hour, The country held firm against the Nazi onslaught, through the miraculous evacuation of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain where a handful of Spitfire pilots withstood the invasion force of the German Luftwaffe and the bombings of the Blitz, before the launch of D-Day, the Normandy landings of June 1944 when British and American forces retook Europe. WWII was certainly Winston Churchill's finest hour, his rousing wartime speeches helped galvanise the nation against the surmountable force it faced and won him a place in the hearts of the people, who in a recent BBC survey considered Churchill the greatest ever Briton. Churchill, was born at Blenheim Palace, where there is an exhibition on his life and is buried in a churchyard nearby. After the war Britain entered the long march to recovery, but for the British Empire the sun was finally setting as one by one the former colonies gained independence.
Today's Britain: 1950 – 21 st Century Then came the swinging 60s, an era in which the then Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said that ‘Britain had never had it so good'. It was at this time that four lads from Liverpool were to shoot to fame as the Beatles, capturing the spirit of the decade and revolutionising popular music. Glamour and sexual liberation followed and British names again dominated popular culture; the music world with the Beatles and Rolling Stones and the acting world with Richard Burton, Peter Sellers and Sean Connery. However the following decades were to be remembered for economic, social and political upheaval, of the oil crisis, the three-day week, the Winter of Discontent, Punk Rock, strikes and Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher, ‘the Iron Lady' as she was known was Britain's first women Prime Minister and was the longest serving Prime Minister of the 20 th Century maintaining office from 1979 to 1990. Her era of Thatcherism was to be a watershed for modern British history, she smashed the trade unions, shut down British industry, polarised society and won a war with Argentina over the far-flung territories of the Falklands. But throughout all this Thatcher's right wing policies created a prosperous economy and dragged Britain into the modern world. While Thatcher had spent much of her rule centralising power and wealth in London, the 1990s saw it slowly returning to the rest of Britain and greater links with the European Union were established. Great moves were made to bring about a peace process for Northern Ireland, which is still ongoing and the Labour Party, revived by its leader Tony Blair, won power in 1997. As Prime Minister Tony Blair presided over an optimistic first term in which Devolution brought self-governing powers to both Scotland and Wales, reversing control from London. The late 1990s and into the millennium saw an increased celebration of British culture in its myriad of aspects from the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations of 2002 and the opening of many modern museums and galleries such as the Tate Modern, National Portrait Gallery, the Lowry Gallery and Imperial War Museum. It was also a time when the long neglected industrial cities of the north, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow, saw huge programmes of urban renewal making them the great cities of culture they are today. As Britain enters the new Millennium, it has sought to strengthen its cultural ties both across the Atlantic and across the Channel and has been a celebrated host of many international events as well as maintaining a rich depth of traditional festivals and events of great pageantry and heritage. |
During the last
Ice Age around 6000 BC Britain was cut off from the rest of Europe
and by around 4000 BC, the island was populated by Neolithic nomads.
These early settlers established themselves around the islands off
the north of Scotland, the Welsh coast and in England, around the
open lands of the South Downs and Salisbury Plain. Here they built
impressive stone structures and burial sites such as the burial chamber
of Maes Howe, the Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar
all on Orkney, the cromlech of Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire and of
course the enigmatic megaliths of Stonehenge and Avebury. All the
more impressive as they were built prior to the great Pyramids of
ancient Egypt using technologies that we can only guess about today.
1066 was a pivotal
year in the history of Britain, it was when the old rule of the Saxons
was overturned and the new order of the Normans established. When
the Saxon King of England, Edward the Confessor died, the crown was
contested by the Saxon noble Harold and William, the powerful Duke
of Normandy. William set sail from France with an invasion fleet of
some 600 ships and landed at Hastings on the south east coast. Harold
in the meantime was in the north of England fighting off an invasion
force of Vikings. When he heard of the Norman landings, he marched
his army 250 miles south to meet them in the Battle of Hastings. Battle
weary and tired after the long march the Saxons were defeated by the
Normans after King Harold was famously killed by a shot in the eye
with an arrow, a story that is neatly told in the Bayeux Tapestry
and at Battle Abbey near Hastings. 
Henry VII ushered
in the prominent Tudor dynasty that was to bring about a renaissance
in English culture but sink the country into deep religious strife.
When Henry VIII came to the throne he proved himself to be a forthright
though controversial leader who passed the first Act of Union between
England and Wales in 1535. However it is Henry's affairs of court
that he is most remembered for and these were leave a lasting legacy
on the nation. 
When war broke
out in Europe in the summer of 1914, many naively believed it would
all be over by Christmas. Of course the War was to grind on for four
years, dragging the countries of Britain, Germany, France, Russia,
Belgium, Austria, Italy, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and
the United States into the horrific trench warfare of World War One.
