England is a region in the southern part of the island of Great Britain in the British Isles. Scotland and Wales are the two other regions. The peoples of all three regions—the English, Scots, and Welsh—have distinct traditions, as do the peoples of the island of Ireland to the west, the Irish. The administrative divisions of England—Scotland, Wales, and Northern Island—make up the present-day nation of the United Kingdom, or officially the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (see British: nationality).
ORIGINS
The defeat of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans in 1066 created the conditions for the emergence of the English in the modern sense of the word. Previously the term English had referred solely to Anglo-Saxons (Angli later transformed to old English to Engle, which evolved into Engla-land and eventually English). But as the Norman ruling families in Britain, called by modern scholars Anglo-Normans, focused more of their energies on their lands and political ambitions there than in France, a new tradition emerged.
The Old English language evolved into the strongly French influenced Middle English, which evolved into modern English.
Armed Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Normans was at first local in response to local issues, such as misrule by officials and Norman landholders. Long accustomed to taking their cue from the Old English Crown, the thegns (thanes) lacked a leader to rally around. Only in 1069 did an organized rebellion occur, led by the Northumbrians, who had long resented rule from the south and had previously rebelled in 1065 and 1066 against Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. With assistance from Scotland and Denmark Northumbrians marched against the castle at Durham, massacring its garrison, then laying siege to York. Soon earls and other local leaders all over the north of England were up in arms. The response of William the Conqueror, king of England, was brutal. Building numerous simple castles of mounded earth and timber, which could be erected within as little as six days, to serve as hubs for lightning raids by his mounted knights, he quickly gained control of the territory and then proceeded with a scorched-earth campaign of destruction so complete, people were reduced to eating cats and dogs, and the area was a useless wasteland for decades thereafter.
William and later Anglo-Norman mon-archs also sought to project their power beyond their own borders. Wales, Scotland, and Ireland nevertheless remained largely independent. Scotland was a united kingdom; the various smaller kingdoms of Wales and Ireland over time generated a series of powerful leaders who tried to unite their country under their rule.
Norman Rivals
The Norman cohesion that William had managed to achieve collapsed on his death, as he divided Normandy and England between two of his sons, who soon were at war with one another. Only their younger brother, Henry I, who gained the English throne after his brother was killed while hunting, was able to consolidate his hold on England as his father had. The fact that when his daughter Matilda succeeded him as monarch in 1135 a powerful faction of Anglo-Norman barons immediately revolted against her illustrates the continued precariousness of the Anglo-Norman monar-
Chy Henry’s nephew Stephen of Blois headed the revolt, which in part was driven by mainland politics because Matilda had married Geoffrey of the powerful house of Anjou (whose members were called Angevins) in France, great rivals of the dukes of Normandy Three years after Stephen seized the throne, he was attacked by Geoffrey, and a long, devastating, and inconclusive civil war ensued, neither side able decisively to defeat the other. Other barons not primarily involved in the Matilda-Stephen rivalry took advantage of the political vacuum caused by Stephen’s distraction with the war to plunder weaker lords, and general lawlessness gripped the land. Even after Matilda abandoned her claims to the throne in 1148, Geoffrey, now duke of Normandy, mounted a new invasion led by his son Henry in 1153. When Stephen’s son and heir Eustace IV died the same year, Stephen agreed to reunite the Anglo-Norman kingdom by naming
Henry as his successor. Stephen died the following year.
Henry II’s reputation has been clouded by the murder, possibly at his command or possibly by mistake, in 1170 of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury. Becket had been Henry’s chancellor, the most powerful commoner in the land, and had applied his considerable talents on Henry’s behalf with much success. Thus, when the see of Canterbury became vacant, Henry thought Becket as archbishop would prove a powerful ally in his struggle for dominance with church leaders. Whether because he had a spiritual awakening or because his ambitions now centered on the church, the formerly worldly and irreligious Becket turned against Henry and opposed his plans as vigorously as he had once promoted them. His opposition to Henry’s coronation of his son particularly infuriated the king and led to Henry’s famous outburst, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four of his barons interpreted him literally and carried out his presumed wishes, by murdering Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Whether Henry had simply been carried away by rage, never intending his order to be executed, or whether he had feigned rage to cast this very doubt on his intentions and avoid culpability in the affair, has been the subject of speculation for centuries. But the rivalry of Henry and Becket—of a king and a minister of common descent—formed a paradigm of English and later British political life that continued to be a living reality up to the 20th century
Henry Il’s later years had been dominated by intrigue surrounding his domains in Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. England and large areas of France (almost half its landmass) remained under the joint rule of Richard and John, but the ambitions of the powerful French monarchy made the situation increasingly untenable under them and succeeding rulers, and by the 13th century the French lands were lost to the English Crown.
In the 13th century Edward I made decisive moves toward the annexation of Wales, seizing control of Welsh territory that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, among the most powerful leaders in Welsh history, had managed to dominate, partly because of the weakness of Henry III. After a massive invasion in 1276 Edward defeated Llywelyn, dismembered his kingdom of
Gwynedd, and asserted his lordship over the Marcher lords. In 1301 he vested authority for Wales in his eldest son, beginning the tradition that the heir apparent to the English throne be given the title of prince of Wales.
During the same period Edward attempted to assert his overlordship in Scotland, deposing the reigning king and after an invasion removing the coronation Stone of Scone to England. His initiative would be resisted by Scots for years thereafter. Edward introduced England into the network of international finance by inviting Italian bankers to London. In return for their loans he granted them the revenues from a tax on wool, Britain’s principal export at this time, which the Italians collected directly.
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the first mass uprising by commoners in English history. Profound socioeconomic shifts caused by the devastation of the bubonic plague, or Black Death, which had ravaged England 30 years before, had increased the power of laborers, who were able to demand higher wages. The immediate cause of the revolt was the imposition of a poll tax on every man in England. Despite its name the revolt was led by small property holders called yeomen, who were becoming an important social force as more and more peasants were able to accumulate wealth. One of the leaders of the revolt was John Ball, an itinerant preacher who was inspired by the ideas of John Wycliffe, a reformist cleric who rejected church hierarchy and insisted that the Bible was the only true religious authority. (The epidemic known as the Black Death had had a disproportionate effect on the clergy. The loss of so many people led to recruitment into the church of men without the traditional education of clerics. In many cases these recruits had differing outlooks on religion and challenged the church’s organization and assumptions in parallel with the forces in society at large.) Wycliffe had preached that the pope and higher clergy were no more certain of salvation than the lowliest peasant. Ball took this egalitarianism a step further, comparing the relationship to serfdom.
The effects of societal changes were also felt in Parliament at this time. In the so-called Good Parliament of 1376 the first challenges to royal power from outside the aristocracy occurred as opposition to increasing taxes by Edward III, led not by the barons but the “commons” in Parliament.
After decades of conflict the English under Henry V finally achieved a decisive victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Henry capitalized on this victory by capturing Rouen in Normandy in 1419 and with it the whole province. His premature death in 1422 meant the end of English ambitions to annex the whole of France, however, as various factions aspired to the English Crown. This distraction of resources for the English allowed the French to regain the territories Henry V had won, and English forces were finally driven out of France in 1453. The Hundred Years’ War was over.
The struggle for power in England erupted into a bloody civil war for 30 years, 1455 to 1485, known as the Wars of the Roses. The conflict was brought to an end by Henry Tudor, who as Henry VII founded the Tudor dynasty.
Henry did much to reorganize the King’s Council, appointing new councilors and calling regular meetings. With his support his minister Thomas Cromwell further organized subcommittees and made of the Privy Council an important body similar to the present-day Cabinet. Under Henry and subsequent Tudor monarchs Parliament’s role as controlling the power of the purse became entrenched, and Henry regularly called Parliament into session to help enact legislation.
Henry VIII and the Church of England
In 1534 Parliament, under immense political pressure and intimidation, by the Act of Supremacy acknowledged Henry VIII as head of church and state and declared the Catholic religion, with its ritual and teachings, null and void. Henry wanted separation from the Catholic Church because he had failed to obtain papal approval for his desired divorce from his wife, Catherine of Aragon. Meanwhile because of England’s Continental trading links Protestant ideas had arrived soon after the German Martin Luther’s declaration against the church in 1516, and from 1526 German-printed vernacular versions of the Bible, produced by William Tynedale, were circulating extensively. As a result Henry’s withdrawal of England from the Catholic fold met with approval by many (although by no means everyone). His decision to dissolve all monasteries in England led to massive uprisings in 1536 and 1537, in part because of the monasteries’ importance in local economies, but also because of their continuing significant spiritual role in people’s lives. During the 1550s the Act of Uniformity, which imposed the First Book of Common Prayer on English worshippers, was opposed in southwestern England by rioting.
After centuries of tug-of-war between English monarchs and the landed nobility, under Henry VIII much of governmental power became centralized in the monarchy. Parliament, however, in part made up of members of the nobility, continued to have the power of the purse, that is, control of finances, in that it alone had the right to enact new taxes, and the failure of Tudor monarchs to implement a financial system under which they could raise funds for their wars gave Parliament a certain measure of control over them. Henry’s power over Parliament lay not in law but in his political acumen, and Parliaments in ensuing centuries under weaker kings would further curb royal power.
Under the Tudors the power of the English monarchy over Wales and Ireland increased significantly. In 1536 Parliament under Henry’s pressure incorporated Wales into England. English law was imposed on Wales and English was made its official language. The two were known thereafter as England. Five years later the same body proclaimed Henry “king of Ireland.”
After Henry’s death and the premature death of his son and successor, Edward VI, Henry’s daughter Mary, an avowed Catholic, was aided by anti-Protestant sentiment in her bid for the Crown against Edward’s chosen Protestant heir. Mary’s repressive regime, during which hundreds of Protestants were burned at the stake, earning her the nickname Bloody Mary, further deepened the divide between Catholics and Protestants, the roots of which lay in her father’s forcible establishment of the Church of England. Catholic-Protestant rivalries—and later those between radical Puritans and “High Church” conservatives—fomented tension and violence for years thereafter. Mary further strengthened her reestablishment of the Catholic Church in England by marrying Philip II of Spain, who was in the forefront of the Counter-Reformation, the goal of which was to eradicate Protestantism from Europe.
Protestantism Among the first initiatives of Elizabeth I, who gained power after Mary’s
This portrait from the 16th century is of Queen Elizabeth I of England. (Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-272]) death in 1558, was to restore Protestantism in a form that would not unduly antagonize Catholics. Worship was to be in English rather than Latin, and a modified Book of Common Prayer was put in use. However, some aspects of Catholic worship, such as the use of candles, crucifixes, and clerical robes, were retained. The more extreme Protestants, called Puritans, condemned this system, but their influence was kept at bay throughout Elizabeth’s reign as an uneasy accommodation between radicals of both sides was preserved, one however, punctuated from time to time with Catholic conspiracies to depose or assassinate Elizabeth.
Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Counter-Reformation
In 1567 Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been deposed by her own people, sought refuge with Elizabeth. Recognizing the threat that Mary posed, since she was a Catholic who might become a rallying point for Catholics bent on deposing Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s ministers immediately imprisoned her. Even so she became the focus of conspiracies that eventually led to her execution in 1587. In reaction the pope called on Philip of Spain to invade England, and accordingly Philip created his Armada, which sailed the next year.
Mary’s execution was only the final factor in Philip’s decision to invade. Troops from England, Scotland, and Ireland had been fighting Philip’s forces in the Netherlands since 1584, aiding the Protestant Dutch who were engaged in a rebellion against Spanish rule. Elizabeth had formed an alliance with the Dutch and had also closed her eyes to the activities of English privateers, notable among them Sir Francis Drake, who for years had been conducting a de facto naval war against the Spaniards in their own waters, raiding their treasure fleets from the Americas. The execution of Mary of Scotland finally prompted Philip to action and in 1588 a massive force of 130 ships, among them some of the largest ships of the day, and 19,000 troops sailed from Lisbon to Calais. Superior seamanship and naval tactics by the English, together with storms, forced the Armada out of British waters, although prevailing winds forced them to take an escape route north around Scotland and down the west coast of Ireland. Many Spanish ships were wrecked on these coasts along the way, and hundreds of Spanish seamen landed and were sheltered by Scots and Irish.
Plantation in Ireland under Elizabeth
Under Elizabeth English involvement in Ireland continued to increase, although slowly at first. Elizabeth’s interest in Ireland focused most on the possibility that Catholic Spain and France would use Catholic Ireland as a staging area for invasion and insurgency. Elizabeth’s government, having little stomach for conquest of Ireland, tried an approach of moderation, in 1569-70 establishing in Connaught and Munster regional councils (or presidencies) aimed at counterbalancing the power of the chieftains, in order to convince the Irish of the benefits of English rule. Some of these became successful, self-financing bodies that allowed a measure of local self-government to commoners. Yet attempts at colonization fell victim to the ambitions of Elizabethan soldiers such as Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh, who modeled themselves on Spanish conquistadors in the New World and employed measures of utmost ruthlessness and brutality to seize lands from the Irish. The help given to Spanish seamen by Irish people apparently bore out Elizabeth’s worst fears, especially when Irish chiefs repelled an English army attempting to slaughter all Spaniards in Ulster. This defeat led to confiscation of lands and “plantation” or colonization in Ulster. In 1590 Elizabeth’s lord deputy in Ireland broke up the ruling family in Monaghan, the MacMahons. Further attempts at plantation led to nine years of rebellion, during which much of Ulster was laid waste, and the destruction of cattle and crops caused widespread famine.
Unification of English and Scottish Crowns
The ascension of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I in 1603 can be cited as the beginning of the move toward modern-day Great Britain, part of the United Kingdom. However, England and Scotland retained separate Parliaments under the united Crown. The familiar flag of Great Britain was created at this time by superimposing the red cross of St. George, patron saint of England, upon the X-shaped white cross of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland.
Great Britain
Increasingly after this period the political history of the English was intertwined with that of the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. Great Britain was created when in 1707 the Scots gave up their separate parliament and sent representatives to the English Parliament. Nearly a century later in 1801 Great Britain and Ireland were formally united, with Irish representation in the British Parliament. The red saltire (X-shaped cross) of St. Patrick was added to the flag of Great Britain. With the Government of Ireland Act in 1920 Ireland with the exception of six Protestant counties in the north was granted independence as the Irish Free State. The northern counties became Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, the latter consisting of England, Scotland, and Wales. At the end of the 20th century the different nations of the British archipelago, who had maintained remarkably distinct cultures and identities, gained their independence from the United Kingdom and the British Parliament. In 1997 the people of both Wales and Scotland voted to create their own legislative bodies, and in 1999 the Good Friday peace accords ended direct British rule in Northern Ireland.
CULTURE
Government and Society Anglo-Saxon England was probably the most highly organized state in Europe in the 11th
Century. The government had evolved beyond the relatively simple Germanic system based on personal loyalties, by which greater lords granted or “loaned” land to lesser lords in return for military service. Alfred the Great in the ninth century had resolved a common problem with this system—the fact that over time for various reasons landholders began to consider their lands their own, not loaned, and resisted making compensation in terms of military service. Alfred’s solution was to subject lands themselves to direct royal taxation in both money and service, in effect bypassing the web of aristocratic interrelationships. Great landowners were expected to contribute armed thegns (thanes) to the king’s military campaigns, the number based on the size of their estates and calculated according to an exact and unambiguous formula. Thegns in turn contributed a calculated number of their own retainers. The shire system furnished the means by which the king, through royal officials called shire reeves (later sheriffs), had far more direct control over local lords than Norman dukes had ever achieved.
In contrast Norman dukes assembled armies by means of personal and family loyalties. Moreover Norman lords expected a share in the spoils of war, in the old Germanic way, a practice that had been greatly curtailed in England, for two reasons: The expansionist pressure exerted by kings’ rewarding followers new lands gained in wars of conquest could not continue forever on an island with no new lands to conquer. And the continual threat of the VIKINGS, even more dangerous than the Normans, had brought about the emergence of the kings of Wessex as national leaders of all Old English, who joined in a common cause.
Thus William the Conqueror, who had struggled throughout his reign as duke to control his barons in Normandy, now found at his command the methods of Anglo-Saxon kingly control: and the use of writs, courts, and sheriffs became the instruments of dominance for him and for Anglo-Norman kings thereafter, making them the most powerful rulers in Britain.
Merging of Anglo-Saxons and Normans into English Numerically the Normans who took over present-day England in the 11th century were few—between about 10,000 and 20,000, a majority of whom were probably common sol-diers—ruling over a country of about 1 million. Several hundred Norman barons replaced around 4,000 Anglo-Saxon earls, but the whole structure of royal government remained fundamentally Anglo-Saxon for centuries. Elements of the former Anglo-Saxon government that the Normans retained included the king’s council, the royal seal and writing office, the shire system and the sheriffs, and the twofold royal revenue system consisting of the produce of royal estates and a direct tax levied by the Crown on the landowning class.
Moreover the Anglo-Saxon and Norman societies were not fundamentally different, both arising from a Germanic substrate. Both were warrior societies moving toward greater stability under the influence of strong leaders. The two had had ties for many years. The mother of King Edward the Confessor was a Norman, and Edward spent years living in Normandy; when he ascended the English throne, he took many Norman friends to his court. And it was characteristic of Normans to adapt quickly and adopt new cultural traits (they had ceased speaking their native Danish a generation after settling in Normandy in northern France). Thus the English culture and language can be thought of as basically Anglo-Saxon with a strong admixture of Norman qualities.
There is conflicting evidence as to how long the Normans had been in England when they merged with the Anglo-Saxons (or Old English, as some scholars call them). Some of the writings of the 12th century speak of “the English” as a single people; others distinguish continuing Norman traits. The Norman aristocracy are known to have lived apart from Anglo-Saxons. It is difficult to tell how many commoners from Normandy, such as merchants, craftsmen, or laborers, followed their lords to England, and to what extent such roles were filled by Anglo-Saxons, making the Norman rulers a small minority in their new land. Some second-generation Normans, it is known, could no longer speak French. It may have been only the highest aristocracy among the Normans, many of whom still had lands and extensive connections in France, who resisted speaking English for centuries.
Sweeping Changes in Anglo-Saxon Society under Normans For the Anglo-Saxon ceorls (churls), free small landholders called villeins by the Normans, the situation under the Normans may not have changed drastically immediately after the Norman Conquest, although over time they would be subject to the same trends—at a greatly accelerated pace—already under way; that is, losing their lands and becoming tenants cum serfs, called cottars. But Anglo-Saxons of a higher station were immediately dispossessed. There were approximately 1,400 officeholders called ten-ants-in-chief in Anglo-Saxon England; of these only two were still in office by 1086. There were exceptions, especially among English prelates who had recognized William as Edward the Confessor’s anointed successor. William confirmed many in their positions, as well as some English earls. Of the several thousand lesser thegns (freemen and free-women) below them, some still held their family lands in 1086 but often owed service to a Norman overlord.
The great castles and churches built in England by the Normans in the 11th and 12th centuries probably served a psychological as well as a practical function, a demonstration of Norman power intended to awe the Anglo-Saxons. The many castles built across England shortly after the conquest as well as much contemporary testimony give evidence of the brute force the Normans used to subdue the Old English. The Anglo-Saxon culture was much older, richer, and more evolved than the Norman, which had only emerged several centuries before under the influence of the Franks of present-day France. The heavy-handed use of force as well as cultural “apartheid” may actually be signs of the Normans’ sense of cultural inferiority to the Old English, the people who had produced Alfred the Great, the Venerable Bede, and Beowulf.
Magna Carta Aside from repeated attempts to regain French territory by successive mon-archs, during the medieval period the focus of the English Crown was mostly on domestic matters, most notably the struggle between the monarchy and the barons to delineate their respective powers. An important milestone in this process, although its full implications did not immediately come into play, was the drawing up in 1215 of Magna Carta, the Great Charter between John and his barons, which for the first time set down in written law limits to the powers of the monarchy. Among its provisions it guaranteed the rights of the church, and it included 25 chapters detailing provisions designed to curb the king’s exploitation of the tax system and other financial privileges.
During the 13th and 14th centuries considerable constitutional changes were instituted, including the creation of Parliament (derived from the French parler, to speak), a body of advisers to the king elected from among the local nobility, at first two knights from each shire. Contemporary compilation of
English law in the 13th century shows that it had become distinctively different from both canon (ecclesiastical) and Roman law. One of the most important concepts recognized by this time was that “the king is under the law because the law makes him king,” according to Henry de Bracton in his Laws and Customs of England, a crucial turning point away from the situation in England (and Europe in general) for centuries after the demise of the Roman Empire, particularly under the Anglo-Saxons, for whom royal power derived directly from military power.
Excesses and misgovernment by Henry III provoked Parliament to meet at Oxford in 1258 and draw up a provisional constitution to control the king. England was declared to be a “commune” made up of representative institutions. There were to be an elected council, three meetings of Parliament every year, and elected officials. Henry III was compelled to swear to the provisions, but by 1261 he had obtained release from his oath from the pope. Yet an important precedent had been set, and the relationship between Crown and Parliament would be developed for centuries to come.
Poor Laws In Elizabeth’s reign the problem of poverty in Britain had become severe. The shrinkage of arable land and shorter growing seasons caused by the Little Ice Age had led to greater importance of fishing and of trade in the overall economy during the 15th century, and this in turn led to a movement of people from the countryside to the cities. Overpopulation was held in check for a time by recurrences of the plague and by wars, and higher wages paid to laborers after the Peasants’ Revolt brought about a higher standard of living. Over time, however, this fostered a higher birth and lower death rate, and by the 16th century the population began to grow dramatically. Because of the Little Ice Age economic resources derived from agriculture, still of vital importance to the economy, could not keep pace with the population growth. At the same time many landowners were ejecting tenant farmers from their land in order to raise sheep for the lucrative wool trade. Henry Vlll’s devaluation of the currency intensified price inflation. Increasing numbers of people were unable to support themselves, and the destitute flocked to the cities in great numbers. Elizabeth’s ministers feared the consequences of having large numbers of the poor and desperate concentrated in the cities with no option except to beg, steal, or do worse.
In 1563 the government enacted the first in a series of provisions that came to be called the Poor Laws, for the first time acknowledging that care for the poor was the responsibility not solely of individual benefactors or of church authorities, but of citizens as a whole through the central government. This idea was underscored by the introduction of a poor law tax in 1572. Some of the Poor Laws aimed to curb begging and robbery with harsh penalties; others required local municipalities to provide work and oversee the needs of the poor. In cities “houses of correction” were established in which vagrants, while incarcerated, were given work with the idea that this would “cure” them of their ways so that they could be reintegrated into society
Perhaps the most characteristically “English” architecture, after the English had established an identity out of their varying ancestry and cultural influences, was that of the 18th-century Georgian style, in which, following classical models, architects arrived at a harmonious resolution of opposites. Based on the Roman Palladian style (a perhaps conscious derivation of a nation that was coming to see itself in Roman terms as it embarked on the creation of an even greater empire than that of the Romans), Georgian style was used both for domestic architecture, such as Somerset House in London, and for planned sections in cities, such as the Adelphi section of London, the Royal Crescent of Bath, and the Customs House and surrounding buildings in Dublin. It is thus preeminently a social rather than religious style.
As in past ages English visual artists after Anglo-Norman times to the present have received strong influences from Europe. The illuminated manuscript painters of medieval England worked in mainstream European traditions and were also influenced by Celtic styles from Ireland and Scotland. English painters of the 16th and 17th centuries learned Renaissance styles and techniques of portrait painting, together with a humanistic worldview, as well as the baroque style from Flemish painters (see Flemings). From the 18th century on English painters began to carve out their own particular styles and became less imitative of foreign models, absorbing influences and making them their own.
Rise of the English Language Although the English have excelled in all the arts, they have shown a particular genius for literature. The cause of this may in part be the English language with its huge vocabulary gained through its mixed origins in the Germanic Old English and Latin-derived French, thus combining the two main branches of most Western European languages. Modern English further developed, through the melding of Old English and French, and many Old and Middle English dialects, into a common or standard language of commerce, of the law, and of politics as well as of scholarship and literature. English, then, is in part an urban “melting pot” language of great flexibility and range, which readily absorbs new words and elements but also is capable of clarity and conciseness of expression.
The 14 th century was a watershed for the English language as for so much else. In part because of the loss of clerks educated in French in 1362 Parliament passed a statute decreeing that all pleas should be heard in English. The new opportunities opening up to the Englishspeaking lower classes fostered greater pride and confidence than they ever had before, one result of which was the emergence of a vibrant vernacular literature, led by William Langland and by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales of 1387. During the 14th and 15th centuries, possibly because of the rise of English patriotism during the Hundred Years’ War with France, even among the aristocracy English replaced French as the language of daily use.
Robin Hood The dynamic process of sorting out the differing roles and powers in England involving the king, the barons, the minor aristocracy, and the common people is illustrated in the story of Robin Hood. By the 14th century ballads concerning Robin Hood were so common that in the earliest known written reference to Robin by name, found in The Vision of Piers Plowman, written by William Langland in 1377, the character of a drunken chaplain laments that he knows the rhymes of Robin Hood better than he knows his prayers. The “King’s deer,” whose slaying propelled Robin, possibly a member of the minor aristocracy, into a life of outlawry, is a powerful symbol of royal prerogatives, and the outlaw bands that Robin joined and led represented forces in English society at odds with the status quo. The poor for whom Robin provided by stealing from the rich were probably predominantly descended from dispossessed Anglo-Saxons. The many characters in the Robin Hood tales— peasants, yeomen, foresters, craftsmen, friars, the sheriff of Nottingham and kings John and Richard—together with Robin’s change in status from nobleman to outlaw give a sense of a society in flux, one also in which people in many stations of society and walks of life mingle. The immense popularity of the Robin Hood ballads and plays in medieval England attests to the importance to English people of Robin’s egalitarian creed of “robbing the rich to feed the poor,” even at a time when society was highly stratified.
Nature Themes One of the hallmarks of English writers has been their preoccupation with nature—nature in general, but also the particular character of nature in England observed with that almost obsessive absorption shared by people of other island nations, such as Ireland and Japan. No other English writer made the natural world more essential to his created world of characters and narrative than William Shakespeare. Shakespeare used a philosophical system of his time called the doctrine of humors, which gives his plays a sense of universality but also of being set in an organically coherent natural world of their own. In this doctrine the whole of nature was governed by the interactions of essences called “humors” or temperaments, which were influenced by the planets. Each individual was influenced most by one of these temperaments—mercurial, saturnine, jovial (from Jove, or Jupiter)—although subject to the others to a lesser degree as well. Another basic premise of the doctrine of humors was that they connected human beings to nature; the planets affecting the individual could also affect the natural world at large; humanity was a microcosm of the macrocosmic universe. A cardinal point about this doctrine was that health depended upon the maintenance of an equilibrium among all the humors, and that imbalance was what led to illness. Virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays begin with a situation of dis-equilibrium—for instance, as in Hamlet, “times are out of joint”—that by the end has been resolved, either in joyful harmony or, a shocking loss, when suddenly all the main actors are killed and we are stunned into silence. Part of the greatness of Shakespeare is the way his plays unfold with the organic motion of natural processes.
The theme of nature as the fount of poetry runs through the work of many English poets,
Shakespeare performs before Queen Elizabeth I and her court. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-D6i94])
From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which opens with an evocation of the springtide as the potent force that sends people on pilgrimage, to later works. English writers over the ages, such as the essayist Izaak Walton of the 17 th century and the naturalist Gilbert White of the 18 th century, have expressed the English love of the countryside and its pastimes. The 19th-century writers Robert Surtees, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy in their novels on society and human relations have nature as a theme. In Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss the river Floss is practically one of the characters, providing the livelihood of the miller’s family but also, by flooding, generating the novel’s dramatic denouement.
War and Adventure Discussion of English letters must include writing on war, with notable examples throughout history, from the 15th-century carol Deo Gracias Anglia celebrating Henry V’s victory at Agincourt, as does also Shakespeare’s play Henry V, to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in 1855 by Alfred Lord Tennyson and Wilfred Owen’s poems on World
War I. The Arthurian legend, rooted in the Celtic past, formed the basis for many works on war and adventure, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 1300s, author unknown) and Sir Thomas Mallory’s La Morte d’Arthur of the 15 th century.
Writings on Society Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and others of his works are 14th-century examples of English writing on society, as is William Langland’s Piers Plowman. With the influence on English letters of the European intellectual movement called Renaissance humanism in the 16th century, derived from ancient Greek models, most notably Plato, which preferred rational discourse over the medieval reliance on received wisdom, writers began a more incisive observation and discussion of English society and politics than ever before. Chief among these was Sir Thomas More, who in Utopia (1516) questions assumptions underlying English society by describing a distant land organized according to rational principles rather than superstition.
Although Roman Britain had been Christian, with the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, Christianity disappeared in much of what would later be England. At the time Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were emerging in the sixth century, missionaries were sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great. Despite initial successes, the Gregorian mission to the Anglo-Saxons had no lasting impact, however. Rather, the Irish missionary centers of Iona and Lindisfarne in Scotland were the driving force behind the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. By the 680s all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been converted, at least nominally, and their kings began to enforce Christianity by law. After the seventh century the Catholic Church in England was vigorous and secure enough to send missionaries to pagans in Germanic Europe.
After the Norman Conquest Norman prelates took control of and reorganized the Anglo-Saxon Church. The Normans were great champions of the church and of religious orthodoxy. Their fervor for Christianity was not without a certain pagan outlook, and they expected their patronage of the church to gain them both spiritual and temporal support for their worldly political aims. This attitude underlay perhaps the darkest chapter in the history of the early medieval church in England: the murder in 1170 of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, by barons of King Henry II.
In the 14th century almost certainly in part because of the devastation caused by the Black Death (the bubonic plague), which had decimated the clergy as they fulfilled their duty of giving last rites to the dying, new ideas prefiguring Protestantism began to appear among clerics who replaced them. Most prominently among these was John Wycliffe, a reformist cleric who rejected church hierarchy and insisted that the Bible is the only true religious authority.
A century later because of England’s Continental trading links Protestant ideas arrived soon after the German Martin Luther’s declaration against the church in 1516, and from 1526 German-printed vernacular versions of the Bible, produced by William Tynedale, were circulating extensively. Against this backdrop King Henry VIII withdrew the English Church from allegiance to the pope in Rome, declaring himself head of the church. Monasteries were dissolved and new liturgy was instituted; both initiatives were met at first with violent opposition among the common people. Although many in England had responded favorably to Protestant ideas, Henry’s abrupt and forcible imposition of change polarized opinion between Protestants and Catholics; this divide was deepened considerably in the brutally repressive reign of Henry’s daughter, Mary I, a Catholic, known as Bloody Mary for her executions of Protestants. This schism has led to violence and war in England and elsewhere in the British Isles up to the present day in the Catholic-Protestant controversies in Northern Ireland, where many English Protestants settled during the forcible “plantations” of the Elizabethan period and later. Ironically later English monarchs, most notably the Stuarts, sought to return England to Catholicism, initiatives that led to the English Civil War and strengthened the English Parliament, which was dominated by Protestants. The polarization led to the rise of extreme Protestant sects, most prominently the Calvinist-influenced Puritanism.
Perhaps in rejection of such extremes and also of sectarian violence, new Protestant sects continued to be born in England in succeeding centuries. In the 1640s there arose the so-called Quakers, or the Society of Friends; they were and are pacifists who reject the need for clergy to intercede with the divine, believing each individual is a potential vessel for God’s light. In the 18th century Methodism rejected the Calvinist doctrine of psredestination (that the individual is foreordained by God for salvation or damnation, whatever his or her acts during life). In general the Church of England, or the Anglican Church, the national church of England, beginning with efforts by Elizabeth I, has steered a course between extremes, preserving much Catholic liturgy, while over time responding to new movements such as Methodism as well.
English culture has taken shape around the absorption and reinterpretation of foreign ele-ments—Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Italian, German. The following characteristics relate to what it means to be “English”: a combination of insularity and cosmopolitanism brought about by the status of the English as islanders whose land at the same time was large enough to support a nation that could rise to world importance; the sense among the English of being at once part of and apart from Europe as a whole; their language, blended of a
Germanic and a Latin tongue, which has allowed them to feel a kinship with the two main poles of European culture; their social egalitarianism, which to this day has not eradicated class consciousness (illustrated, for example, by contradictory attitudes of condemnation and loyalty toward the English royal family); their love of nature, which only deepened as they became the most urbanized people in the world; and their pragmatic, down-to-earth character, which nevertheless has produced art and philosophy of the most high-flown idealism.
Further Reading
John Cannon, ed. The Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). John Cannon and Ralph Griffiths. The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Michael Clanchy. England and Its Rulers, 1066-1272 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
Juliet Gardiner and Neil Wenborn, eds. The Columbia Companion to British History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
C. Warren Hollister. The Making of England to 1399 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
Thomas Babington MacAulay. History of England (London: Penguin, 1979).
Kenneth O. Morgan. The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Clayton Roberts. A History of England, vol. 1, Prehistory to 1714 (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 2001).
-. A History of England, vol. 2, 1688 to the
Present (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 2001).
Lacey Baldwin Smith. This Realm of England 1399-1688 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
G. M. Trevelyan. Shortened History of England (London: Penguin, 1987).
World History
