Robert Peal - English History - People, places and events that built a country

Copyright

HarperCollins Publishers

Westerhill Road

Bishopbriggs

Glasgow

G64 2QT

First Edition 2018

© HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Collins® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Limited

www.collins.co.uk

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Author: Robert Peal

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

HarperCollins does not warrant that www.collins.co.ukor any other website mentioned in this title will be provided uninterrupted, that any website will be error free, that defects will be corrected, or that the website or the server that makes it available are free of viruses or bugs. For full terms and conditions please refer to the site terms provided on the website.

Source ISBN: 9780008298135

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008306526

Version 2018-08-03

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

English History

10,000 BC | Prehistoric England

3,000 BC | Stonehenge

AD 43 | The Romans

AD 61 | Boudicca

410 | Legend of King Arthur

400s | Anglo-Saxons

597 | The Arrival of Christianity

793 | Viking Raids

899 | Alfred the Great

937 | Rex Angloram

1042 | Edward the Confessor

1066 | King Harold

1066 | Battle of Hastings

1060s and 70s | Norman Conquest

1086 | Domesday Book

1170 | Murder of Thomas Becket

1204 | Eleanor of Aquitaine

1215 | King John and the Magna Carta

1200s | Robin Hood

1265 | The first Parliament

1283 | The Conquest of Wales

1337 | The Hundred Years War

1348 | Order of the Garter

1348 | The Black Death

1381 | The Peasants’ Revolt

1387 | The Canterbury Tales

1415 | Agincourt

1459 | The Wars of the Roses

1483 | The Princes in the Tower

1485 | The Battle of Bosworth Field

1509 | Henry VIII

1534 | Anne Boleyn

1534 | The English Reformation

1547 | Henry VIII’s death

1553 | Mary I and the Counter-Reformation

1558 | Elizabeth I

1580 | Sir Francis Drake

1587 | Mary Queen of Scots

1588 | The Spanish Armada

1590 | Shakespeare

1603 | King James VI and I

1605 | The Gunpowder Plot

1629 | Charles I and Parliament

1642 | The English Civil War

1649 | Regicide

1649 | Cromwell’s Commonwealth

1660| Restoration

1666 | Great Fire of London

1687 | Sir Isaac Newton

1688 | The Glorious Revolution

1707 | The Act of Union

1714 | The House of Hanover

1721 | Britain’s First Prime Minister

1739 | Highwaymen

1740 | Rule, Britannia!

1745 | Jacobite Uprising

1755 | Dr Johnson’s Dictionary

1763 | The Seven Years War

1700s | Food and Empire

1770 | Captain Cook and Australia

1772 | The Slave Trade

1775 | Britain’s First Factories

1776 | American Revolution

1776 | Steam Engine

1788 | Mad King George

1791 | Rights of Man

1805 | The Battle of Trafalgar

1813 | Jane Austen

1815 | Duke of Wellington

1829 | The Metropolitan Police Force

1830 | The Railway Age

1833 | Child Labour

1833 | Abolition of the Slave Trade

1837 | Queen Victoria

1846 | The Workhouse

1851 | Industrial Cities

1851 | The Great Exhibition

1854 | Florence Nightingale

1859 | On the Origin of Species

1859 | Brunel

1859 | Big Ben

1863 | Association Football

1870 | Charles Dickens

1888 | Jack the Ripper

1899 | The Boer War

1912 | Titanic

1913 | Emily Davison

1914 | The First World War

1916 | The First Day of the Somme

1918 | Armistice Day

1922 | The BBC

1926 | General Strike

1936 | Abdication

1940 | Dunkirk

1940 | The Battle of Britain

1941 | The Home Front

1945 | VE Day

1948 | The NHS

1948 | The Empire Windrush

1953 | Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

1956 | Suez Crisis

1966 | World Cup Win

1960s | Beatlemania

1979 | Thatcher Becomes Prime Minister

1989 | Invention of the World Wide Web

1994 | Opening of the Channel Tunnel

1997 | Death of Princess Diana

1997 | Harry Potter

2012 | London Olympics

2016 | Brexit

Conclusion

Index

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle… This precious stone set in the silver sea… This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’

William Shakespeare, Richard II

In his paean to England in Shakespeare’s Richard II , John of Gaunt emphasises the importance of England’s status as an ‘island nation’. He is right to do so. So much of England’s history has been dictated by its position on a small, rainy island off the western coast of Europe.

England’s early history saw its shores invaded by waves of foreign settlers. The Romans arrived with Julius Caesar, followed by the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, and finally the Normans in 1066. This has given England an unusual mixture of Latin, French and Germanic influences. Days of the week in English are named after Norse Gods, but the months have Roman origins. The structure of the English language comes from Germany, but much of its vocabulary from France.

England’s status as an island nation has offered it unrivalled defences against foreign invaders, such as Phillip II of Spain in 1588, Napoleon Bonaparte in 1805, and Adolf Hitler in 1940. Unless you count the peaceful invasion of William and Mary in 1688, England has not been successfully invaded for one thousand years. The natural protection of the seas has given English history a stability and continuity that is unusual amongst the nations of Europe. The English Parliament has been meeting in Westminster since the 13th century, and the last battle fought on British soil was the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

England always depended upon its navy more than its army for protection, and for this reason the English people have long celebrated sailors as national heroes, such as Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain Cook and Lord Nelson. Britain’s seafaring tradition came into its own when the countries of Europe began building global empires. From the mid-18th century onwards, the Royal Navy lay behind Britain’s emergence as a world superpower, building an Empire stretching across North America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Today, Britain’s multi-racial society with large Caribbean, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese and Indian populations is a direct legacy of its time as a sea-faring Empire.

Any book on the history of England will encounter difficulty negotiating England’s appearance, and then disappearance, as a single political unit. England only emerged as one country, governed by one ruler, during the reign of Alfred the Great’s grandson, King Athelstan. If you were to pinpoint England’s birthdate, then King Athelstan’s victory against the Vikings at the Battle of Brunanburh in ad 937 is perhaps the best contender. For this reason, this book gives relatively brief treatment to the history of ‘England’ prior to 937, offering a brief outline of the prehistoric, Roman, and early Anglo-Saxon periods in order to set the scene for England’s emergence during the 10th century.