History of England
The History of England stretches back more than 800,000 years, to a time when stone tools and footprints were left in the mud at Happisburgh in Norfolk by creatures who were not yet fully human. A jawbone pulled from Kents Cavern in Devon and re-dated in 2011 proved that anatomically modern humans had reached this corner of the world between 41,000 and 44,000 years ago. Continuous habitation picks up again around 13,000 years ago, after the ice retreated. What follows is a story of wave upon wave of arrivals: farmers from Iberia, bronze-smiths from the Pontic Steppe, Celtic warriors, Roman legions, Germanic settlers, Norse raiders, and Norman knights. Each group remade the island in some way, and each left the people who came after both richer and more fractured. The questions that drive this documentary are not merely about dates and dynasties. They are about how a patchwork of small kingdoms became a single nation, how that nation built the largest empire in recorded history, and how it then had to reimagine itself when that empire was gone.
Stonehenge and Avebury are the most famous remnants of a Neolithic England that was already deeply connected to long-distance trade and shared belief. A 2019 study found that the Neolithic farmers who built the first monuments arrived in a mass migration around 4100 BC; they were closely related to Neolithic peoples of Iberia, not to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. They raised chambered cairns and long barrows for their dead, and their stone alignments show a preoccupation with the sky. The Sweet Track in the Somerset Levels, a timber walkway dated by dendrochronology to the winter of 3807-3806 BC, is among the oldest roads in the world; researchers believe it served a primarily religious purpose.
Around 2500 BC the Bell Beaker culture arrived from the continent, and genetic studies have found that this migration largely replaced the earlier Neolithic population. These newcomers brought bronze, and with it a shift in social values: where Neolithic society emphasised the communal tomb, Bronze Age elites celebrated the individual warrior and the hoard of high-status weapons. Towards the end of the Bronze Age, fine metalwork began to be deposited in rivers, suggesting a turn in religious feeling from the sky to the earth.
The Iron Age, beginning around 800 BC, saw the island dominated by Celtic Britons who spoke the Brittonic language. A sailing manual known as the Massaliote Periplus, thought to date to the 6th century BC, contains the earliest historical mention of Britain. Pytheas of Massilia wrote of his voyage there around 325 BC. In 55 and 54 BC, Julius Caesar invaded twice, claimed victories, but never pushed further than Hertfordshire. His expeditions nevertheless transformed the relationship between southern Britain and Rome, making a full conquest feel, in retrospect, inevitable.
In AD 43, Emperor Claudius sent four legions ashore in Kent, beginning a serious occupation that would last roughly 350 years. The Roman force under Aulus Plautius defeated the Catuvellauni kings Caratacus and Togodumnus at the Medway and the Thames; Togodumnus was killed, and Caratacus fled to Wales. Eleven local rulers surrendered, and the old Catuvellauni capital at Camulodunum, modern Colchester, became the provincial capital.
The most dramatic episode of Roman rule came in AD 60, when Boudicca led a tribal rebellion that burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium to the ground. A ten-inch layer of melted red clay still lies 15 feet below the streets of London. The rebels were said to have killed 70,000 Romans and Roman sympathisers before the governor Suetonius Paulinus gathered his surviving forces. In the decisive battle, 10,000 Romans faced nearly 100,000 warriors along the line of Watling Street. The rebels were utterly defeated; sources claimed 80,000 were killed, against only 400 Roman dead.
Hadrian's Wall, built in AD 138, eventually solidified the northern border. When Roman authority collapsed in the early 5th century, it left behind roads, towns, and a Christianised population, but no central power to hold things together. Germanic peoples, collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons and including Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians, moved in to fill the vacuum. The Battle of Deorham in 577 was critical in cementing their rule.
Seven kingdoms are traditionally said to have emerged from the Anglo-Saxon migrations: Sussex, Kent, and Essex in the southeast; Mercia and East Anglia in the Midlands; and Northumbria in the north, itself formed from two earlier kingdoms, Bernicia and Deira. Genetic studies have found that the mean value of continental Germanic ancestry among the modern English population may be around 54 per cent, though the figure varies sharply by region, with East Anglia, the east Midlands, and Yorkshire showing over 50 per cent.
Christianisation began around 600 AD. Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, took office in 597. In 601 he baptised Æthelberht of Kent, the first Christian Anglo-Saxon king. The last pagan Anglo-Saxon king, Penda of Mercia, died in 655. Mercian power later peaked under Offa, who from 785 had influence over most of Anglo-Saxon England and was considered by Charlemagne to be the overlord of south Britain; his power is illustrated by the construction of Offa's Dyke.
The first recorded Viking landing took place in 787 in Dorsetshire. The first major attack followed in 793 at Lindisfarne monastery. When the Danish Great Heathen Army arrived, it toppled Northumbria in 867 and East Anglia in 869. Wessex alone held out. In 878, Alfred's forces were overwhelmed at Chippenham in a surprise attack; it was only then, with independence hanging by a thread, that Alfred assembled a counter-force. He defeated the Danish leader Guthrum at Edington in May 878, so completely that Guthrum accepted Christian baptism and withdrew from Mercia. Alfred rebuilt his fleet to 60 vessels strong. His grandson Æthelstan, who conquered the Kingdom of York in 927 and led a land and naval invasion of Scotland, became the first king to use the title 'King of the English'.
On the 28th of September 1066, William of Normandy landed in England. Harold Godwinson had just defeated a separate Norse invasion at Stamford Bridge, killing Harald III of Norway and the traitor Tostig with a force that had marched from Yorkshire. Exhausted, his army was then defeated at the Battle of Hastings on the 14th of October, and Harold was killed. William was crowned king on Christmas Day 1066.
Within 20 years, the Domesday Book, a survey William ordered of the entire population and their lands, revealed that the English ruling class had been almost entirely dispossessed. Norman landholders monopolised every senior position in government and in the Church. William and his nobles conducted court in Norman French, a language whose influence on English endured for centuries.
The succession crisis following Henry I's death, after his son William Adelin drowned in the wreck of the White Ship in November 1120, produced the period known as the Anarchy, 1135-1154. Nobles built adulterine castles, erected without government permission; peasants were forced to build and maintain them. Henry's successor Stephen was eventually captured, and though Empress Matilda was proclaimed queen, she was expelled from London. The conflict only resolved when Henry II, already Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and Duke of Aquitaine, agreed with Stephen to become his heir. Henry II destroyed the remaining adulterine castles and began a major shift of legislative power away from both the baronage and the Church back toward the crown.
On the 15th of June 1215, at Runnymede near London, King John sealed Magna Carta, imposing legal limits on the king's personal powers. John quickly obtained papal approval to break his promise; but the document survived him, and Parliament's slow rise to dominance over legislation began.
The Black Death arrived in England in 1348 and killed as much as a third to half the population. The Great Famine of 1315-1317 had already killed perhaps half a million people in England, more than 10 per cent of the population at the time. The Hundred Years' War with France, running from 1337 to 1453, produced famous English victories at Crécy and Agincourt. Henry V, who succeeded to the throne in 1413, won the Treaty of Troyes, which gave him the right to succeed Charles VI of France, and married Charles's daughter Catherine of Valois in 1421. Henry died of dysentery in 1422 before he could claim the French crown.
In 1429, Joan of Arc began the military campaign that would drive England from France. When England finally lost the Hundred Years' War in August 1453, Henry VI suffered a mental breakdown that lasted until Christmas 1454. The Wars of the Roses followed, 1455-1485, pitting the House of York against the House of Lancaster. The conflict ended when Lancastrian Henry Tudor defeated and killed Richard III at Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August 1485, then married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York.
Henry VIII, who came to the throne in 1509, began a war in France in 1512, and at the Battle of Flodden on the 9th of September 1513, while Henry was abroad, Catherine of Aragon as regent oversaw the complete defeat of the Scottish army; James IV and most of the Scottish nobility were killed. Henry's need to divorce Catherine, blocked by a pope imprisoned by Catherine's nephew Emperor Charles V, led to the English Reformation. The new Church of England was, in Henry's own conception, the existing Catholic structure simply led by the king rather than the pope. By the time Henry died in January 1547 at age 55, the number of executions during his 38-year reign numbered in the tens of thousands.
England had subsumed Wales under Henry VIII in the 16th century and united with Scotland in 1707 to form Great Britain. The Industrial Revolution, which started in England, gave Great Britain the productive capacity to build what became the largest colonial empire in recorded history. The process of decolonisation in the 20th century, driven mainly by the weakening of Great Britain through debt and losses in two World Wars against Germany, left almost all of the empire's overseas territories as independent countries.
Before that dissolution, England had passed through a constitutional revolution that was, in some respects, more durable than any conquest. The Stuart king Charles I was executed in 1649 after a civil war between Parliamentarians and Royalists. A parliamentary republic, the Commonwealth of England, ran from 1649 to 1653, followed by Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate until 1659. The Stuarts returned to the throne in 1660, but James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Bill of Rights of 1689 placed Parliament in dominance over legislative change rather than the monarchy, an arrangement that has applied ever since.
Today England remains part of the United Kingdom, a constitutional monarchy, and elects 543 members to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The alliance with Portugal, signed in 1373, is claimed to be the oldest alliance in the world still in force. The layers of invasion, settlement, and legal revolution that produced modern England are still visible: in the Norman French embedded in English legal vocabulary, in Hadrian's Wall still crossing the northern hills, and in the Domesday Book, which remains one of the most complete records of medieval land ownership that any country has preserved.
Common questions
How long has England been inhabited by humans?
England has been inhabited for more than 800,000 years, as indicated by stone tools and footprints found at Happisburgh in Norfolk. Continuous human habitation dates to around 13,000 years ago, after the Last Glacial Period ended.
When did the Romans conquer England and how long did they stay?
The Roman conquest of Britain began in AD 43 under Emperor Claudius, with four legions landing in Kent. Roman rule lasted approximately 350 years, until the early 5th century.
Who was Boudicca and what did she do in Roman Britain?
Boudicca was a warrior-queen who led a tribal rebellion against Roman rule in AD 60. Her forces burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium and were said to have killed 70,000 Romans and Roman sympathisers before being decisively defeated by the governor Suetonius Paulinus.
When did the Norman Conquest of England take place?
William of Normandy invaded England on the 28th of September 1066 and defeated King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings on the 14th of October 1066. William was crowned King of England on Christmas Day 1066.
What was Magna Carta and when was it signed?
Magna Carta was a charter that imposed legal limits on the king's personal powers. King John sealed it at Runnymede, near London, on the 15th of June 1215, after a rebellion by his most important barons.
When did the Wars of the Roses begin and end, and who won?
The Wars of the Roses began in 1455 and ended in 1485. Henry Tudor, the last Lancastrian male, won by defeating and killing Richard III at Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August 1485, and was crowned Henry VII.
All sources
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