Historic Overview Of England

It is indeed a tough task to separate the history of Britain from that of the world. It is a country whose own fate has paralleled and shadowed the history of the world .

The conquest of England by Julius Caeser in about 55 BC was a trifling victory following his legendary conquest of Gaul. The famous Hadrian's Wall which you will see in northern Britain today, was built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep the mischievous Scots off bounds. But as they felt their own empire decline, the Romans eventually abandoned the land in 410 BC, heading out for what they thought were greener pastures....

Many insist that the true history of England began with the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded Great Britain in about AD 449 after the Romans left, and called it "Angle-Land". Any Roman legacy left was wiped out by the Saxons, as they replaced all Roman names of places with their own nomenclature.

The legendary Anglo-Saxon king Arthur held court at what is today the monument of King Arthur's Round Table at the Winchester Castle. Anglo-Saxon society was defined by strong kinship groups and feudal customs. The next round of conquest battles came with the death of king Ethelred. The Danish prince Canute II of Norway and Denmark was followed in 1066 AD by the son of Ethelred William the Conqueror who was crowned King of England. He was eventually succeeded by the legendary monarch Henry II.

Power tussles persisted with the royals quarreling for the next couple of centuries. The Hundred Years War with France resulted into the domestic War of the Roses. Henry was appointed head of the Church of England by the English Parliament and the Bible was translated into English. In 1536, Henry dissolved the smaller monasteries and confiscated their land as the relationship between Church and State was truly on the rocks. Civil war followed in the mid-17th century, with the monarchy and Parliament at loggerheads.

In the next two centuries that followed, Britain's history was really being created across oceans in other lands rather than within the frontiers of the British nation itself. The Americas, the Indian subcontinent and most of Canada and Australia became members of the Colony Club. For a while, it seemed as if the sun would never really set on the British Empire - but it was struck its first blow in 1772, when the American Colonies won their independence, triggering off revolts against the English all around the suppressed British Isles.

At home the British were doing well. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the modes of production around the world. Internal development coupled with profitable colonial empires overseas really made this age a golden one for the country.

Britain bumbled into the stalemate of World War I in 1914, resulting in the senseless slaughter of a million Britons and a widening gulf between the ruling and working classes. This set the stage for 50 years of labour unrest, beginning with the 1926 Great Strike and growing throughout the 1930s depression. Britain dithered through the 1920s and '30s, with mediocre and visionless government, which failed to confront the problems the country faced - including the rise of Hitler and imperial Germany. Most of the colonies had won their independence by the middle of the 20th Century.

Today under the leadership of Tony Blair and the Labor Party, England is on the way to recovery even though it's problems with Northern Ireland continue to underscore it's progress.