Great Britain

• 1. Introduction

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  Great Britain is the ninth-largest island in the world, and the largest in Europe, covering 209,331 square kilometres in the North Atlantic Ocean. People often say the name as if it were settled and obvious. It is neither. In 2011 it held a population of about 61 million, third among the world's islands after Japan's Honshu and Indonesia's Java. The island carries the countries of England, Scotland and Wales on a single landmass off the north-west coast of continental Europe. Yet the word "Britain" has meant the island, three nations, and an entire kingdom, depending on who held the pen. Where did the name come from, and who first carved "Great" into it? How did a piece of marshland once joined to Denmark become an island at all? And how did a place with such modest animal diversity gather more than 3,600 species of mushroom and a yew tree older than any other in Europe? The answers run from a lost Greek travel diary to a marriage proposal written in 1474.

• 2. Naming The Island

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  By 50 BC, Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a collective name for the islands. The peoples there were called the Priteni or Pretani, a term that may derive from a Celtic word meaning "the painted ones" or "the tattooed folk", in reference to body decorations. That word survives in the Welsh Prydain. The earliest known name for Great Britain alone was Albion, from either the Latin albus, meaning "white", possibly for the white cliffs of Dover, or the "island of the Albiones". Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BC, or possibly Pseudo-Aristotle, wrote in On the Universe of "two very large islands" called Albion and Ierne. The word Britain first entered writing through an ancient Greek transliteration in a lost work on the travels of Pytheas of Massalia, who reached the island from southern Gaul in the 4th century BC. His account survives only as quotations in later authors, including Strabo's Geographica and Pliny's Natural History. Pliny the Elder, who lived from AD 23 to 79, recorded that the island's former name was Albion, before all the islands were gathered under the name Britanniae. The name descends from the Latin Britannia, the land of the Britons, which the Romans used from the 1st century BC for the islands taken together.

• 3. The Word Great

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  The Greco-Egyptian scientist Ptolemy drew the first sharp line in his Almagest, written around 147 to 148 AD. He called the larger island great Britain, megale Brettania, and Ireland little Britain, mikra Brettania. In his later Geography, around 150 AD, he renamed the islands Alwion, Iwernia and Mona, the Isle of Man, suggesting he had learned their individual names. Albion seems to have faded from use after the Roman conquest, leaving Britain as the common name. Around 1136, Geoffrey of Monmouth revived the idea in his pseudohistorical Historia Regum Britanniae. He called the island Britannia major, "Greater Britain", to set it apart from Britannia minor, the continental region settled by Celtic Briton migrants that approximates to modern Brittany. The term Great Britain was first used officially in 1474, in the instrument proposing a marriage between Cecily, daughter of Edward IV of England, and James, son of James III of Scotland. That document called it "this Nobill Isle, callit Gret Britanee". In 1521 the Scottish philosopher John Major published his Historia majoris Britanniae, a history of Great Britain covering both England and Scotland.

• 4. Two Crowns One Kingdom

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  On the 20th of October 1604, King James proclaimed himself "King of Great Brittaine, France, and Ireland". He had succeeded separately to the thrones of England and Scotland, after inheriting the English throne in the 1603 Union of the Crowns. When James died in 1625 and the Privy Council of England drafted the proclamation of Charles I, a Scottish peer named Thomas Erskine, 1st Earl of Kellie, insisted the new king's title keep the phrase "King of Great Britain". England and Scotland remained legally separate countries, each with its own parliament, until 1707. That year each parliament passed an Act of Union to ratify the Treaty of Union agreed the previous year. A single kingdom with one parliament took effect on the 1st of May 1707. The Treaty named the new all-island state "Great Britain", while also calling it "One Kingdom" and "the United Kingdom". To most historians, the all-island state that existed between 1707 and 1800 is either Great Britain or the Kingdom of Great Britain. The political union covered the entire island, but it did not reach across the water to the smaller territories nearby.

• 5. From Peninsula To Island

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  Around 10,000 years ago, during the Devensian glaciation, Great Britain was not an island at all. The sea level sat about 120 metres lower than today, and the dry bed of the North Sea formed a land bridge to the Continent, now known as Doggerland. That low marshland joined the island to what are now Denmark and the Netherlands. The English Channel itself is thought to have formed between 450,000 and 180,000 years ago, carved by two catastrophic glacial lake outburst floods that breached the Weald-Artois Anticline. As sea levels rose after the last glacial period, Doggerland reflooded and cut off the British peninsula by around 6500 BC. Modern humans had arrived about 40,000 years ago, evidenced by remains in Kents Cavern in Devon, following the disappearance of Neanderthals. The oldest evidence for archaic humans is older still: the Happisburgh footprints and stone tools found in Norfolk, dating to around 950,000 to 850,000 years ago. Neolithic farmers of Anatolian origin arrived around 4000 BC and replaced the hunter gatherers. Around 2000 BC the Bronze Age Bell Beaker Culture brought another near-complete population replacement, and migration around 1000 BC may have carried the Celtic languages to the island.

• 6. Conquest And Survival

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  Hadrian's Wall in northern England marked the limit of Roman control, beyond which the province of Britannia did not extend. In the 500 years after the Roman Empire fell, invading Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, assimilated or displaced the Britons of the south and east. The English people took their name from the Angles. Germanic speakers called the Britons Welsh, a term that narrowed to the inhabitants of Wales but survives in the name Wallace and in the second syllable of Cornwall. The Britons of Wales, Cumbria and Cornwall were never assimilated, a fact reflected in the survival of Celtic languages there. Many Britons emigrated to the area now known as Brittany, where Breton, closely related to Welsh and Cornish, is still spoken. Gaelic tribes from Ireland invaded the north-west, absorbing the Picts and northern Britons, and eventually formed the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. In 959 the last constituent kingdom, Northumbria, submitted to Edgar, unifying the English kingdoms. In 1066 the Normans conquered England. Wales came under Anglo-Norman control in 1282 and was officially annexed in the 16th century.

• 7. Faiths And Tongues

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  Around 800 Latin loan-words have survived in the three modern Brythonic languages, a legacy of the Roman occupation of southern Britain from AD 43 to about 410. Those Brythonic languages are Breton, Cornish and Welsh, all descended from a common ancestor that developed by the 6th century AD. British English grew from the Old English brought by Anglo-Saxon settlers from the mid 5th century. Some 1.5 million people speak Scots, an estimated 700,000 speak Welsh, an official language in Wales, and Scottish Gaelic remains widely spoken in parts of north west Scotland. Christianity has been the largest religion since the Early Middle Ages, introduced under the ancient Romans and developing as Celtic Christianity. The World Christian Database estimated just over 26 million adherents to Anglicanism in Britain in 2005, though only around one million regularly attend services. The first patron saint of Great Britain was Saint Alban, the first Christian martyr of the Romano-British period, condemned to death for his faith. Jews have inhabited Britain since 1070, were expelled from England in 1290, and were permitted to re-establish settlement in 1656. The 2011 census recorded around 2.7 million Muslim adherents, excluding Scotland, and 263,000 followers of Judaism.

• 8. A Modest Wild

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  Animal diversity here is modest, shaped by the island's small land area, its physical separation from continental Europe, and the relatively recent age of its habitats. A 2006 study by DEFRA suggested that 100 species became extinct in the UK during the 20th century, about 100 times the background extinction rate. Rodents make up 40 percent of the mammal species, among them the recently reintroduced European beaver. The red deer is the largest land animal, while the fallow deer was introduced by the Normans. Extinct large mammals include the brown bear, grey wolf and wild boar, the last of which has had a limited reintroduction. Birdlife tells a richer story, with 628 species recorded and 258 that breed on the island or stay through winter. The flora comprises 3,354 vascular plant species, of which 2,297 are native. The tallest trees are Douglas firs, two of which have been recorded at 65 metres, or 212 feet. The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire is the oldest tree in Europe. The fungi run further still: a 2005 checklist of Basidiomycota accepts over 3,600 species, and the total number of fungal species very probably exceeds 10,000, with mycologists agreeing many more are yet to be found.