United Kingdom
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United Kingdom, island country located off the northwestern coast of mainland Europe. The United Kingdom comprises the whole of the island of Great Britain—which contains England, Wales, and Scotland—as well as the northern portion of the island of Ireland. The name Britain is sometimes used to refer to the United Kingdom as a whole. The capital is London, which is among the world’s leading commercial, financial, and cultural centres. Other major cities include Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester in England, Belfast and Londonderry in Northern Ireland, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, and Swansea and Cardiff in Wales.
- Head Of Government:
- Prime Minister: Rishi Sunak
The origins of the United Kingdom can be traced to the time of the Anglo-Saxon king Athelstan, who in the early 10th century CE secured the allegiance of neighbouring Celtic kingdoms and became “the first to rule what previously many kings shared between them,” in the words of a contemporary chronicle. Through subsequent conquest over the following centuries, kingdoms lying farther afield came under English dominion. Wales, a congeries of Celtic kingdoms lying in Great Britain’s southwest, was formally united with England by the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542. Scotland, ruled from London since 1603, formally was joined with England and Wales in 1707 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain. (The adjective “British” came into use at this time to refer to all the kingdom’s peoples.) Ireland came under English control during the 1600s and was formally united with Great Britain through the Act of Union of 1800. The republic of Ireland gained its independence in 1922, but six of Ulster’s nine counties remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. Relations between these constituent states and England have been marked by controversy and, at times, open rebellion and even warfare. These tensions relaxed somewhat during the late 20th century, when devolved assemblies were introduced in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Nonetheless, even with the establishment of a power-sharing assembly after referenda in both Northern Ireland and the Irish republic, relations between Northern Ireland’s unionists (who favour continued British sovereignty over Northern Ireland) and nationalists (who favour unification with the republic of Ireland) remained tense into the 21st century.
The United Kingdom has made significant contributions to the world economy, especially in technology and industry. Since World War II, however, the United Kingdom’s most prominent exports have been cultural, including literature, theatre, film, television, and popular music that draw on all parts of the country. Perhaps Britain’s greatest export has been the English language, now spoken in every corner of the world as one of the leading international mediums of cultural and economic exchange.
The United Kingdom retains links with parts of its former empire through the Commonwealth. It also benefits from historical and cultural links with the United States and is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Moreover, the United Kingdom became a member of the European Union in 1973. Many Britons, however, were sometimes reluctant EU members, holding to the sentiments of the great wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, who sonorously remarked, “We see nothing but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented European commonalty. But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.” Indeed, in June 2016, in a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the EU, 52 percent of British voters chose to leave. After much negotiation, several deadline extensions, prolonged domestic political discord, and two changes of prime minister, an agreement on “Brexit” (British exit from the EU) was reached that satisfied both the EU and the majority of Parliament. Thus, on January 31, 2020, the United Kingdom would become the first country to withdraw from the EU.
Land
The United Kingdom comprises four geographic and historical parts—England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom contains most of the area and population of the British Isles—the geographic term for the group of islands that includes Great Britain, Ireland, and many smaller islands. Together England, Wales, and Scotland constitute Great Britain, the larger of the two principal islands, while Northern Ireland and the republic of Ireland constitute the second largest island, Ireland. England, occupying most of southern Great Britain, includes the Isles of Scilly off the southwest coast and the Isle of Wight off the southern coast. Scotland, occupying northern Great Britain, includes the Orkney and Shetland islands off the northern coast and the Hebrides off the northwestern coast. Wales lies west of England and includes the island of Anglesey to the northwest.
Apart from the land border with the Irish republic, the United Kingdom is surrounded by sea. To the south of England and between the United Kingdom and France is the English Channel. The North Sea lies to the east. To the west of Wales and northern England and to the southeast of Northern Ireland, the Irish Sea separates Great Britain from Ireland, while southwestern England, the northwestern coast of Northern Ireland, and western Scotland face the Atlantic Ocean. At its widest the United Kingdom is 300 miles (500 km) across. From the northern tip of Scotland to the southern coast of England, it is about 600 miles (1,000 km). No part is more than 75 miles (120 km) from the sea. The capital, London, is situated on the tidal River Thames in southeastern England.
The archipelago formed by Great Britain and the numerous smaller islands is as irregular in shape as it is diverse in geology and landscape. This diversity stems largely from the nature and disposition of the underlying rocks, which are westward extensions of European structures, with the shallow waters of the Strait of Dover and the North Sea concealing former land links. Northern Ireland contains a westward extension of the rock structures of Scotland. These common rock structures are breached by the narrow North Channel.
On a global scale, this natural endowment covers a small area—approximating that of the U.S. state of Oregon or the African country of Guinea—and its internal diversity, accompanied by rapid changes of often beautiful scenery, may convey to visitors from larger countries a striking sense of compactness and consolidation. The peoples who, over the centuries, have hewed an existence from this Atlantic extremity of Eurasia have put their own imprint on the environment, and the ancient and distinctive palimpsest of their field patterns and settlements complements the natural diversity.
Relief
Great Britain is traditionally divided into a highland and a lowland zone. A line running from the mouth of the River Exe, in the southwest, to that of the Tees, in the northeast, is a crude expression of this division. The course of the 700-foot (213-metre) contour, or of the boundary separating the older rocks of the north and west from the younger southeastern strata, provides a more accurate indication of the extent of the highlands.
The highland zone
The creation of the highlands was a long process, yet elevations, compared with European equivalents, are low, with the highest summit, Ben Nevis, only 4,406 feet (1,343 metres) above sea level. In addition, the really mountainous areas above 2,000 feet (600 metres) often form elevated plateaus with relatively smooth surfaces, reminders of the effects of former periods of erosion.
Scotland’s three main topographic regions follow the northeast-to-southwest trend of the ancient underlying rocks. The northern Highlands and the Southern Uplands are separated by the intervening rift valley, or subsided structural block, called the Midland Valley (or Central Lowlands). The core of the Highlands is the elevated, worn-down surface of the Grampian Mountains, 1,000–3,600 feet (300–1,100 metres) above sea level, with the Cairngorm Mountains rising to elevations of more than 4,000 feet (1,200 metres). This majestic mountain landscape is furrowed by numerous wide valleys, or straths. Occasional large areas of lowland, often fringed with long lines of sand dunes, add variety to the east. The Buchan peninsula, the Moray Firth estuarine flats, and the plain of Caithness—all low-lying areas—contrast sharply with the mountain scenery and show smoother outlines than do the glacier-scoured landscapes of the west, where northeast-facing hollows, or corries, separated by knife-edge ridges and deep glens, sculpt the surfaces left by earlier erosion. The many freshwater lochs (lakes) further enhance a landscape of wild beauty. The linear Glen Mor—where the Caledonian Canal now threads the chain of lakes that includes Loch Ness—is the result of a vast structural sideways tear in the whole mass of the North West Highlands. To the northwest of Glen Mor stretches land largely divided among agricultural smallholdings, or crofts; settlement is intermittent and mostly coastal, a pattern clearly reflecting the pronounced dissection of a highland massif that has been scored and plucked by the Ice Age glaciers. Many sea-drowned, glacier-widened river valleys (fjords) penetrate deeply into the mountains, the outliers of which rise from the sea in stately, elongated peninsulas or emerge in hundreds of offshore islands.
In comparison with the Scottish Highlands, the Southern Uplands of Scotland present a more subdued relief, with elevations that never exceed 2,800 feet (850 metres). The main hill masses are the Cheviots, which reach 2,676 feet (816 metres) in elevation, while only Merrick and Broad Law have elevations above the 2,700-foot (830-metre) contour line. Broad plateaus separated by numerous dales characterize these uplands, and in the west most of the rivers flow across the prevailing northeast-southwest trend, following the general slope of the plateau, toward the Solway Firth or the Firth of Clyde. Bold masses of granite and the rugged imprint of former glaciers occasionally engender mountainous scenery. In the east the valley network of the River Tweed and its many tributaries forms a broad lowland expanse between the Lammermuir and Cheviot hills.
The Midland Valley lies between great regular structural faults. The northern boundary with the Highlands is a wall-like escarpment, but the boundary with the Southern Uplands is sharp only near the coast. This vast trench is by no means a continuous plain, for high ground—often formed of sturdy, resistant masses of volcanic rock—meets the eye in all directions, rising above the low-lying areas that flank the rivers and the deeply penetrating estuaries of the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth.
In Northern Ireland, structural extensions of the Scottish Highlands reappear in the generally rugged mountain scenery and in the peat-covered summits of the Sperrin Mountains, which reach an elevation of 2,241 feet (683 metres). The uplands in the historic counties Down and Armagh are the western continuation of Scotland’s Southern Uplands but reach elevations of more than 500 feet (150 metres) only in limited areas; the one important exception is the Mourne Mountains, a lovely cluster of granite summits the loftiest of which, Slieve Donard, rises to an elevation of 2,789 feet (850 metres) within 2 miles (3.2 km) of the sea. In the central region of Northern Ireland that corresponds to Scotland’s Midland Valley, an outpouring of basaltic lavas has formed a huge plateau, much of which is occupied by the shallow Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles.
The highland zone of England and Wales consists, from north to south, of four broad upland masses: the Pennines, the Cumbrian Mountains, the Cambrian Mountains, and the South West Peninsula. The Pennines are usually considered to end in the north at the River Tyne gap, but the surface features of several hills in Northumberland are in many ways similar to those of the northern Pennines. The general surface of the asymmetrically arched backbone (anticline) of the Pennines is remarkably smooth because many of the valleys, though deep, occupy such a small portion of the total area that the windswept moorland between them appears almost featureless. This is particularly true of the landscape around Alston, in Cumbria (Cumberland), which—cut off by faults on its north, west, and south sides—stands out as an almost rectangular block of high moorland plateau with isolated peaks (known to geographers as monadnocks) rising up above it. Farther south, deep and scenic dales (valleys) dissect the Pennine plateau. The dales’ craggy sides are formed of millstone grit, and beneath them flow streams stepped by waterfalls. The most southerly part of the Pennines is a grassy upland. More than 2,000 feet (610 metres) above sea level in places, it is characterized by the dry valleys, steep-sided gorges, and underground streams and caverns of a limestone drainage system rather than the bleak moorland that might be expected at this elevation. At lower levels the larger dales are more richly wooded, and the trees stand out against a background of rugged cliffs of white-gray rocks. On both Pennine flanks, older rocks disappear beneath younger layers, and the uplands merge into flanking coastal lowlands.
The Cumbrian Mountains, which include the famous Lake District celebrated in poetry by William Wordsworth and the other Lake poets, constitute an isolated, compact mountain group to the west of the northern Pennines. Many deep gorges, separated by narrow ridges and sharp peaks, characterize the northern Cumbrian Mountains, which consist of tough slate rock. Greater expanses of level upland, formed from thick beds of lava and the ash thrown out by ancient volcanoes, lie to the south. The volcanic belt is largely an irregular upland traversed by deep, narrow valleys, and it includes England’s highest point, Scafell Pike, with an elevation of 3,210 feet (978 metres), and Helvellyn, at 3,116 feet (950 metres). Nine rivers flowing out in all directions from the centre of this uplifted dome form a classic radial drainage pattern. The valleys, often containing long, narrow lakes, have been widened to a U shape by glacial action, which has also etched corries from the mountainsides and deposited the debris in moraines. Glacial action also created a number of “hanging valleys” by truncating former tributary valleys.
The Cambrian Mountains, which form the core of Wales, are clearly defined by the sea except on the eastern side, where a sharp break of slope often marks the transition to the English lowlands. Cycles of erosion have repeatedly worn down the ancient and austere surfaces. Many topographic features derive from glacial processes, and some of the most striking scenery stems largely from former volcanism. The mountain areas above 2,000 feet (610 metres) are most extensive in North Wales. These include Snowdonia—named for Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa), the highest point in Wales, with an elevation of 3,560 feet (1,085 metres)—and its southeastern extensions, Cader Idris and Berwyn. With the exception of Plynlimon and the Radnor Forest, central Wales lacks similar high areas, but the monadnocks of South Wales—notably the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons—stand out in solitary splendour above the upland surfaces. There are three such surfaces: a high plateau of 1,700 to 1,800 feet (520 to 550 metres); a middle peneplain, or worn-down surface, of 1,200 to 1,600 feet (370 to 490 metres); and a low peneplain of 700 to 1,100 feet (210 to 340 metres). These smooth, rounded, grass-covered moorlands present a remarkably even skyline. Below 700 feet (210 metres) lies a further series of former wave-cut surfaces. Several valleys radiate from the highland core to the coastal regions. In the west these lowlands have provided a haven for traditional Welsh culture, but the deeply penetrating eastern valleys have channeled English culture into the highland. A more extensive lowland—physically and structurally an extension of the English lowlands—borders the Bristol Channel in the southeast. The irregularities of the 600-mile (970-km) Welsh coast show differing adjustments to the pounding attack of the sea.
The South West—England’s largest peninsula—has six conspicuous uplands: Exmoor, where Dunkery Beacon reaches an elevation of 1,704 feet (519 metres); the wild, granite uplands of Dartmoor, which reach 2,038 feet (621 metres) at High Willhays; Bodmin Moor; Hensbarrow; Carn Brea; and the Penwith upland that forms the spectacular extremity of Land’s End. Granite reappears above the sea in the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles (45 km) farther southwest. Despite the variation in elevation, the landscape in the South West, like that of so many other parts of the United Kingdom, has a quite marked uniformity of summit heights, with a high series occurring between 1,000 and 1,400 feet (300 and 430 metres), a middle group between 700 and 1,000 feet (210 and 300 metres), and coastal plateaus ranging between 200 and 400 feet (60 and 120 metres). A network of deep, narrow valleys alternates with flat-topped, steplike areas rising inland. The South West derives much of its renowned physical attraction from its peninsular nature; with both dramatic headlands and magnificent drowned estuaries created by sea-level changes, the coastline is unsurpassed for its diversity.
The lowland zone
Gauged by the 700-foot (210-metre) contour line, the lowland zone starts around the Solway Firth in the northwest, with a strip of low-lying ground extending up the fault-directed Vale of Eden (the valley of the River Eden). Southward the narrow coastal plain bordering the Lake District broadens into the flat, glacial-drift-covered Lancashire and Cheshire plains, with their slow-flowing rivers. East of the Pennine ridge the lowlands are continuous, except for the limestone plateau north of the River Tees and, to the south, the North York Moors, with large exposed tracts that have elevations of more than 1,400 feet (430 metres). West of the North York Moors lies the wide Vale of York, which merges with the east Midland plain to the south. The younger rocks of the Midlands terminate at the edge of the Cambrian Mountains to the west. The lowland continues southward along the flat landscapes bordering the lower River Severn, becomes constricted by the complex Bristol-Mendip upland, and opens out once more into the extensive and flat plain of Somerset. The eastern horizon of much of the Midland plain is the scarp face of the Cotswolds, part of the discontinuous outcrop of limestones and sandstones that arcs from the Dorset coast in southern England as far as the Cleveland Hills on the north coast of Yorkshire. The more massive limestones and sandstones give rise to noble 1,000-foot (300-metre) escarpments, yet the dip slope is frequently of such a low angle that the countryside resembles a dissected plateau, passing gradually on to the clay vales of Oxford, White Horse, Lincoln, and Pickering. The flat, often reclaimed landscapes of the once-marshy Fens are also underlain by these clays, and the next scarp, the western-facing chalk outcrop (cuesta), undergoes several marked directional changes in the vicinity of the Wash, a shallow arm of the North Sea.
The chalk scarp is a more conspicuous and continuous feature than the sandstone and limestone outcrops farther west. It begins in the north with the open rolling country known as the Yorkshire Wolds, where elevations of 750 feet (230 metres) occur. It is breached by the River Humber and then continues in the Lincolnshire Wolds. East of the Fens the scarp is very low, barely attaining 150 feet (45 metres), but it then rises gradually to the 807-foot (246-metre) Ivinghoe Beacon in the attractive Chiltern Hills. Several wind gaps, or former river courses, interrupt the scarp, and the River Thames actually cuts through it in the Goring Gap. Where the dip slope of the chalk is almost horizontal, as in the open Salisbury Plain, the landscape forms a large dissected plateau with an elevation of 350 to 500 feet (110 to 150 metres). The main valleys contain rivers, while the other valleys remain dry.
The chalk outcrop continues into Dorset, but in the south the chalk has been folded along west-to-east lines. Downfolds, subsequently filled in by geologically recent sands and clays, now floor the London and Hampshire basins. The former, an asymmetrical synclinal (or structurally downwarped) lowland rimmed by chalk, is occupied mainly by gravel terraces and valley-side benches and has relatively little floodplain; the latter is similarly cradled by a girdle of chalk, but the southern rim, or monocline, has been cut by the sea in two places to form the scenic Isle of Wight.
Between these two synclinal areas rises the anticlinal, or structurally upwarped, dome of the Weald of Kent and Sussex. The arch of this vast geologic upfold has long since been eroded away, and the bounding chalk escarpments of the North and South Downs are therefore inward-facing and enclose a concentric series of exposed clay vales and sandstone ridges. On the coast the waters of the English Channel have undermined and eroded the upfold to produce a dazzling succession of chalk cliffs facing the European mainland, 21 miles (34 km) distant at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel.
Drainage
The main drainage divide in Great Britain runs from north to south, keeping well to the west until the basin of the River Severn. Westward-flowing streams empty into the Atlantic Ocean or Irish Sea over relatively short distances. The Clyde in Scotland, the Eden and Mersey in northwestern England, and the Dee, Teifi, and Tywi in Wales are the only significant westward-flowing rivers north of the Severn estuary. The drainage complex that debouches into the Severn estuary covers a large part of Wales and the South West and West Midlands of England. To the south the Avon (flowing through Bristol) and the Parret watershed extend somewhat to the east, but subsequently, with the exception of the Taw and Torridge valleys, they run very close to the western coast in Devon and Cornwall.
The rivers draining east from the main divide are longer, and several coalesce into wide estuaries. The fast-flowing Spey, Don, Tay, Forth, and Tweed of eastern Scotland run generally across impermeable rocks, and their discharges increase rapidly after rain. From the northern Pennines the Tyne, Wear, and Tees flow independently to the North Sea, but thereafter significant estuary groupings occur. A number of rivers—including the Ouse, Aire, and Trent—drain into the Humber after they leave the Pennines. To the south another group of rivers (including the Ouse, Welland, and Nene) enters the Wash after sluggishly draining a large, flat countryside. The large drainage complex of the River Thames dominates southeastern England. Its source is in the Cotswolds, and, after receiving many tributaries as it flows over the Oxford Clay, the mainstream breaches the chalk escarpment in the Goring Gap. A number of tributaries add their discharges farther downstream, and the total area draining into the Thames estuary is nearly 4,000 square miles (10,000 square km). The important rivers flowing into the English Channel are the Tamar, Exe, Avon, Test, Arun, and Ouse. The major rivers in Northern Ireland are the Erne, Foyle, and Bann.
Soils
The regional pattern of soil formation correlates with local variations of relief and climate. Although changes are gradual and soils can vary locally, a division of Britain into four climatic regimes largely explains the distribution of soils.
At the higher altitudes of the highland zone, particularly in Scotland, the weather is characterized by a cold, wet regime of more than 40 inches (1,000 mm) rainfall and less than 47 °F (8 °C) mean temperature annually; these areas have blanket peat and peaty podzol soils, with their organic surface layer resting on a gray, leached base. A regime similarly wet but with a mean annual temperature exceeding 47 °F characterizes most of the remainder of the highland zone, particularly on the lower parts of the Southern Uplands, the Solway Firth–Lake District area, the peripheral plateaus of Wales, and most of southwestern England. These areas are covered by acid brown soils and weakly podzolized associates. On the lower-lying areas within the highland zone, particularly in eastern Scotland and the eastern flanks of the Pennines, a relatively cold, dry regime gives rise to soils intermediate between the richer brown earths and the podzols.
Over the entire lowland zone, which also has a mean annual temperature above 47 °F but less than 40 inches of rainfall, leached brown soils are characteristic. Calcareous, and thus alkaline, parent materials are widespread, particularly in the southeast, so acid soils and podzols are confined to the most quartz-laden parent materials. In Northern Ireland at elevations of about 460 feet (140 metres), brown earths give way to semipodzols, and these grade upslope into more intensively leached podzols, particularly in the Sperrins and the Mournes. Between these mountains in the Lough Neagh lowland, rich brown earth soils predominate.
Climate
The climate of the United Kingdom derives from its setting within atmospheric circulation patterns and from the position of its landforms in relation to the sea. Regional diversity does exist, but the boundaries of major world climatic systems do not pass through the country. Britain’s marginal position between the European landmass to the east and the ever-present relatively warm Atlantic waters to the west exposes the country to air masses with a variety of thermal and moisture characteristics. The main types of air masses, according to their source regions, are polar and tropical; by their route of travel, both the polar and tropical may be either maritime or continental. For much of the year, the weather depends on the sequence of disturbances within the midlatitude westerlies that bring in mostly polar maritime and occasionally tropical maritime air. In winter occasional high-pressure areas to the east allow biting polar continental air to sweep over Britain. All of these atmospheric systems tend to fluctuate rapidly in their paths and to vary both in frequency and intensity by season and also from year to year. Variability is characteristic of British weather, and extreme conditions, though rare, can be very important for the life of the country.
The polar maritime winds that reach the United Kingdom in winter create a temperature distribution that is largely independent of latitude. Thus, the north-to-south run of the 40 °F (4 °C) January isotherm, or line of equal temperature, from the coast in northwestern Scotland south to the Isle of Wight betrays the moderating influence of the winds blowing off the Atlantic Ocean. In summer polar maritime air is less common, and the 9° difference of latitude and the distance from the sea assume more importance, so that temperatures increase from north to south and from the coast inland. Above-average temperatures usually accompany tropical continental air, particularly in anticyclonic, or high-pressure, conditions. On rare occasions these southerly or southeasterly airstreams can bring heat waves to southern England with temperatures of 90 °F (32 °C). The mean annual temperature ranges from 46 °F (8 °C) in the Hebrides to 52 °F (11 °C) in southwestern England. In spring and autumn a variety of airstreams and temperature conditions may occur.
Rain-producing atmospheric systems arrive from a westerly direction, and some of the bleak summits of the highest peaks of the highland zone can receive as much as 200 inches (5,100 mm) of rainfall per year. Norfolk, Suffolk, and the Thames estuary, in contrast, can expect as little as 20 inches (510 mm) annually. Rain is fairly well distributed throughout the year. June, on average, is the driest month throughout Britain; May is the next driest in the eastern and central parts of England, but April is drier in parts of the west and north. The wettest months are typically October, December, and August, but in a given year almost any month can prove to be the wettest, and the association of Britain with seemingly perpetual rainfall (a concept popularly held among foreigners) is based on a germ of truth. Some precipitation falls as snow, which increases with altitude and from southwest to northeast. The average number of days with snow falling can vary from as many as 30 in blizzard-prone northeastern Scotland to as few as five in southwestern England. Average daily hours of sunshine vary from less than three in the extreme northeast to about four and one-half along the southeastern coast.
Plant and animal life
Except for northern Scotland, the highest hills of the north and west, the saturated fens and marshes, and the seacoast fringes, the natural vegetation of the British Isles is deciduous forest dominated by oak. Human occupation has left only scattered woodlands and areas of wild or seminatural vegetation outside the enclosed cultivated fields. Few of the fine moorlands and heathlands, wild though they may appear, can lay claim to any truly natural plant communities. Nearly all show varying degrees of adjustment to grazing, swaling (controlled burning), or other activities. Woodland now covers less than one-tenth of the country, and, although the Forestry Commission has been active since its creation in 1919, nearly two-thirds of this woodland remains in private hands. The largest areas of woodland now stand in northeastern Scotland, Kielder and other forests in Northumberland, Ashdown Forest in Sussex, Gwynedd in Wales, and Breckland in Norfolk.
The moorlands and heathlands that occupy about one-fourth of the total area of the United Kingdom consist of arctic-alpine vegetation on some mountain summits in Scotland and the much more extensive peat moss, heather, bilberry, and thin Molinia and Nardus grass moors of the highland zone. Similar vegetation exists on high ground in eastern Northern Ireland and on the Mournes, and there are considerable areas of peat moss vegetation on the mountains of Antrim. In the lowland zone, where light sandy soils occur, the most common plant of the moorlands is the common heather—whose deep purple adds a splash of colour to the autumn countryside—but these areas also contain bilberry and bell heather. A strip of land immediately bordering the coastline has also largely escaped exploitation by humans and domesticated animals, so that patches of maritime vegetation often appear in approximately their natural state.
The survival of the wild mammals, amphibians, and reptiles of the United Kingdom depends on their ability to adapt to the changing environment and to protect themselves from attacks by their enemies, the most dangerous of whom are human. British mammals survive in a greater range of habitats than do amphibians or reptiles. Most of the formerly abundant larger mammals—such as boars, reindeer, and wolves—have become extinct, but red deer survive in the Scottish Highlands and in Exmoor Forest and roe deer in the wooded areas of Scotland and southern England. Smaller carnivores (badgers, otters, foxes, stoats, and weasels) thrive in most rural areas. Rodents (rats, squirrels, mice) and insectivores (hedgehogs, moles, shrews) are also widely distributed. Rabbits are widespread, and their numbers are increasing. The other nocturnal vegetarian, the brown hare, lives in open lowland country, while the mountain hare is native to Scotland. Amphibians include three species of newt and five species of frogs and toads, while reptiles comprise three species of snakes, of which only the adder is venomous, and three species of lizards. There are no snakes in Northern Ireland.
In many respects the British Isles are an ornithologist’s paradise. The islands lie at the focal point of a migratory network, and the coastal, farmland, and urban habitats for birds are diverse. Some 200 species of birds occur in the United Kingdom, of which more than one-half are migratory. Many species are sufficiently versatile to adapt to changing conditions, and it is estimated that suburban gardens have a higher bird density than any kind of woodland. The most common game birds are the wild pigeon, pheasant, and grouse. Most numerous are the sparrow, blackbird, chaffinch, and starling.
Marshland reclamation has displaced waterfowl to various bird sanctuaries. A continuous effort by ornithological organizations has promoted and encouraged research and conservation. It also has led to the creation of bird refuges, sanctuaries, and reserves. These developments, along with a more sympathetic and enlightened attitude, may help to redress some of the worst effects of environmental changes on bird life.
Many British rivers, once renowned for their salmon, trout, roach, perch, pike, and grayling, have become polluted, and inland fisheries have consequently declined. Freshwater fishing is now largely for recreation and sport. The Dogger Bank in the North Sea, one of the richest fishing grounds in the world, has provided excellent fishing for centuries. Other good waters for fishing lie in the Irish Sea and also off the western coast of Scotland. Chief offshore species are cod, haddock, whiting, mackerel, coalfish, turbot, herring, and plaice.
People
Ethnic groups
For centuries people have migrated to the British Isles from many parts of the world, some to avoid political or religious persecution, others to find a better way of life or to escape poverty. In historic times migrants from the European mainland joined the indigenous population of Britain during the Roman Empire and during the invasions of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans. The Irish have long made homes in Great Britain. Many Jews arrived in Britain toward the end of the 19th century and in the 1930s.
After 1945 large numbers of other European refugees settled in the country. The large immigrant communities from the West Indies and South Asia date from the 1950s and ’60s. There are also substantial groups of Americans, Australians, and Chinese, as well as various other Europeans, such as Greeks, Russians, Poles, Serbs, Estonians, Latvians, Armenians, Turkish Cypriots, Italians, and Spaniards. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ugandan Asians (expelled by Idi Amin) and immigrants from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Sri Lanka have sought refuge in Britain. People of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi origin account for more than half of the total ethnic minority population, and people of West Indian origin are the next largest group. The foreign-born element of the population is disproportionately concentrated in inner-city areas, and more than half live in Greater London.
Languages
All the traditional languages spoken in the United Kingdom ultimately derive from a common Indo-European origin, a tongue so ancient that, over the millennia, it has split into a variety of languages, each with its own peculiarities in sounds, grammar, and vocabulary. The distinct languages in what became the United Kingdom originated when languages from the European continent developed independently in the British Isles, cut off from regular communication with their parent languages.
Of the surviving languages the earliest to arrive were the two forms of Celtic: the Goidelic (from which Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic derive) and Brythonic (from which the old Cornish language and modern Welsh have developed). Among the contemporary Celtic languages Welsh is the strongest: about one-fifth of the total population of Wales are able to speak it, and there are extensive interior upland areas and regions facing the Irish Sea where the percentage rises to more than half. Scottish Gaelic is strongest among the inhabitants of the islands of the Outer Hebrides and Skye, although it is still heard in the nearby North West Highlands. Because less than 2 percent of Scots are able to speak Gaelic, it has long since ceased to be a national language, and even in northwestern areas, where it remains the language of religion, business, and social activity, Gaelic is losing ground. In Northern Ireland very little Irish is spoken. Similarly, Manx no longer has any native speakers, although as late as 1870 it was spoken by about half the people of the Isle of Man. The last native speakers of Cornish died in the 18th century.
The second link with Indo-European is through the ancient Germanic language group, two branches of which, the North Germanic and the West Germanic, were destined to make contributions to the English language. Modern English is derived mainly from the Germanic dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (who all arrived in Britain in the 5th century CE) and heavily influenced by the language of the Danes (Vikings), who began raiding the British Isles about 790 and subsequently colonized parts of northern and eastern England. The Humber became an important linguistic as well as a geographic boundary, and the English-speaking territory was divided into a Northumbrian province (roughly corresponding to the kingdom of Northumbria) and a Southumbrian province (in which the most important kingdoms were Mercia, Wessex, and Kent). In the 8th century Northumbria was foremost in literature and culture, followed for a short time by Mercia; afterward Wessex predominated politically and linguistically until the time of King Edward the Confessor.
Although the French-speaking Normans were also of Viking stock, the English population initially regarded them as much more of an alien race than the Danes. Under the Norman and Angevin kings, England formed part of a continental empire, and the prolonged connection with France retained by its new rulers and landlords made a deep impression on the English language. A hybrid speech combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman French elements developed and remained the official language, sometimes even displacing Latin in public documents, until the mid-14th century, when late Middle English, a language heavily influenced by Norman French, became the official language. This hybrid language subsequently evolved into modern English. Many additions to the English language have been made since the 14th century, but the Normans were the last important linguistic group to enter Britain.
Religion of the United Kingdom
The various Christian denominations in the United Kingdom have emerged from schisms that divided the church over the centuries. The greatest of these occurred in England in the 16th century, when Henry VIII rejected the supremacy of the pope. This break with Rome facilitated the adoption of some Protestant tenets and the founding of the Church of England, still the state church in England, although Roman Catholicism has retained adherents. In Scotland the Reformation gave rise to the Church of Scotland, which was governed by presbyteries—local bodies composed of ministers and elders—rather than by bishops, as was the case in England. Roman Catholicism in Ireland as a whole was almost undisturbed by these events, but in what became Northern Ireland the Anglican and Scottish (Presbyterian) churches had many adherents. In the 17th century further schisms divided the Church of England as a consequence of the Puritan movement, which gave rise to so-called Nonconformist denominations, such as the Baptists and the Congregationalists, that reflected the Puritan desire for simpler forms of worship and church government. The Society of Friends (Quakers) also originated at that time. Religious revivals of the mid-18th century gave Wales a form of Protestantism closely linked with the Welsh language; the Presbyterian Church of Wales (or Calvinistic Methodism) remains the most powerful religious body in the principality. The great Evangelical revivals of the 18th century, associated with John Wesley and others, led to the foundation of Methodist churches, particularly in the industrial areas. Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire in northeastern England and Cornwall in the southwestern peninsula still have the largest percentages of Methodists. In the 19th century the Salvation Army and various fundamentalist faiths developed. Denominations from the United States also gained adherents, and there was a marked increase in the practice of Judaism in Britain. In 1290 Jews were expelled from Britain, as they would be from other countries in the 14th and 15th centuries, a reflection of medieval anti-Semitism. The first Jewish community to be reestablished in Britain was in London in the 17th century, and in the 19th century Jews also settled in many of the large provincial cities. More than half of all British Jews live in Greater London, and nearly all the rest are members of urban communities. Britain now has the second largest Jewish community in Europe.
The British tradition of religious tolerance has been particularly important since the 1950s, when immigrants began to introduce a great variety of religious beliefs. There are large and growing communities that practice Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism. The largest number of Muslims came from Pakistan and Bangladesh, with sizable groups from India, Cyprus, the Arab world, Malaysia, and parts of Africa. The large Sikh and Hindu communities originated in India. There are also many Buddhist groups.
Settlement patterns
British culture preserves regional variations, though they have become more muted over time. Still, the cultural identities of the Northern Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish—to say nothing of the rivalry between a North and South Walian or a Highland and Lowland Scot—are as distinct as the obvious geographic identities of these parts of the highland zone.
Rural settlement
The diverse forms and patterns of settlement in the United Kingdom reflect not only the physical variety of the landscape but also the successive movements of peoples arriving as settlers, refugees, or conquerors from continental Europe, along with the changing economic contexts in which settlement has occurred. Social and economic advantages led some people to cluster, whereas others had an equally strong desire for separateness. Both tendencies mark settlement forms in Britain from very early times, and regional contrasts in the degree of dispersion and nucleation are frequent.
Single farmsteads, the many surviving old clachans (clusters or hamlets), and occasional villages and small towns still characterize much of the highland zone. Some nucleated settlement patterns, however, have undergone radical change. In Wales hamlets began to disappear in the late Middle Ages through the related processes of consolidation and enclosure that accompanied the decline in the size of the bond (feudally tied) population. The Black Death of 1349, which spread quickly among poorer inhabitants, reinforced this trend. Many surviving bondsmen fled their servile obligations amid the turmoil of the nationalistic uprising led by Owain Glyn Dŵr. Thus, many Welsh hamlets had fallen into decay by 1410, when the rebellion was crushed. In Scotland great changes accompanied the late 18th-century Highland clearances, in which landlords forcibly evicted tenants and converted their holdings to sheep pastures. As late as the 1880s many clachans disappeared in Northern Ireland as part of a deliberate policy of reallocating land to new dispersed farmsteads. Great changes have also occurred in the lowland zone, where the swing to individual ownership or tenancy from the medieval custom of landholding in common brought about not only dispersion and deserted villages but the enclosure of fields by hedges and walls. Villages remain remarkably stable features of the rural landscape of Britain, however, and linear, round, oval, and ring-shaped villages survive, many with their ancient greens still held in common by the community.
Urban settlement
By any standard the United Kingdom is among the most urbanized of countries, for towns not only typify the national way of life but are unusually significant elements in the geography of the country. The greatest overall change in settlement was, in fact, the massive urbanization that accompanied Britain’s early industrial development. The increasing percentage of employees in offices and service industries ensures continued urban growth. Of every 10 people in the United Kingdom, about eight live in towns—more than three of them in one of the country’s 10 largest metropolitan areas. The Greater London metropolitan area—the greatest port, the largest centre of industry, the most important centre of office employment, and the capital city—is by far the largest of these. The need for accommodating business premises has displaced population from Inner London, and this outward movement, in part, has led to the development of new towns outside the 10-mile- (16-km-) wide Green Belt that surrounds London’s built-up area.
Large metropolitan areas also formed in industrial areas during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although coalfields or textile manufacture underpinned the initial growth of many of these urban areas, coal mining had virtually ceased in all of them by the end of the 20th century, and the economic predominance of heavy industry and textile production had given way to a more diverse blend of manufacturing and service activities. Birmingham dominates the extensive built-up area of the West Midlands metropolitan area, but the industrial Black Country—named for its formerly polluted skies and grimy buildings—also has several large and flourishing towns. In Greater Manchester, with a similar number of inhabitants, urbanization accompanied the mechanization of the cotton textile industry. Across the Pennines similar mechanization of wool textiles created the West Yorkshire metropolitan area, with Leeds and Bradford as its twin centres. The metropolitan area of Tyne and Wear (centred on Newcastle upon Tyne) and the Greater Glasgow metropolitan area are also located on coalfields. Greater Glasgow houses about one-third of Scotland’s people. Merseyside (centred on Liverpool) has traditionally served as a seaport and distribution centre for Greater Manchester and the rest of Lancashire. Other large metropolitan areas in Great Britain include South Yorkshire (centred on Sheffield), Nottingham, and Bristol. About one-fifth of Northern Ireland’s population live in Belfast. In addition to these large metropolitan areas, there are many other minor urban agglomerations and large towns, several of which line the coast.
With so much urban and suburban concentration, the problems of air, water, and noise pollution have attracted much concern in the United Kingdom. Clean-air legislation has brought considerable progress in controlling air pollution, partly by establishing smoke-control areas in most cities and towns, and there has been a shift from coal to cleaner fuels. Pollution of the rivers remains a large problem, particularly in the highly industrialized parts of the United Kingdom, but vigilance, research, and control by the National River Authorities and general public concern for the environment are encouraging features of contemporary Britain. Several statutory and voluntary organizations support measures to protect the environment. They aim to conserve the natural amenity and beauty not only of the countryside but also of the towns and cities.
Demographic trends
Population growth
The population of the United Kingdom has been increasing since at least 1086, the date of Domesday Book, which provides the earliest reasonable estimate of England’s population (the survey did not cover other areas). This growth has continued despite some setbacks, by far the most serious of which was the Black Death of the mid-14th century, in which it is estimated that about one-third of the population died. There is little concrete information, however, concerning birth or death rates, immigration, or emigration until 1801, the date of the first official census. The assumption is that a population of about three million lived in what became the United Kingdom at the end of the 11th century and that this figure had increased to about 12 million by 1801. This slow growth rate, in contrast with that of more modern times, resulted mainly from the combination of a high birth rate with an almost equally high death rate. Family monuments in old churches show many examples of men whose “quivers were full” but whose hearths were not crowded. It is estimated that in the first half of the 18th century three-fourths of the children born in London died before they reached puberty. Despite the appalling living conditions it produced, the Industrial Revolution resulted in an acceleration of the birth rate. Gradually the greater medical knowledge, improved nutrition, and concern for public health that characterized the 19th and 20th centuries yielded a lower mortality rate and an overall increase in population, even as birth rates began to drop.
Since the 1930s the population has experienced a complete cycle in its pattern of growth. A low rate of increase during the 1930s was followed by a post-World War II marriage boom that accelerated the rate of growth, culminating in a peak during the mid-1960s. After 1964 a considerable fall in the birth rate brought about a dramatic decline in growth, with a small absolute decline in population between 1974 and 1978. However, modest population growth resumed during the 1980s, and the population of the United Kingdom rose from 56 million in 1980 to about 60 million by the end of the 20th century. The main cause of these abrupt shifts was the erratic nature of the birth rate, with the interaction of two opposing trends: on one hand, a long-term general decline in fertility and, on the other, a rising longevity and a decline in death rates. Such processes also have affected the age composition of the population, which has grown decidedly older. There has been a decline in the proportion of youths and an increase in the proportion of older people, especially those age 85 and older.
Migration patterns
Beginning in the 1950s, the immigration of nonwhite (“New Commonwealth”) people from such developing nations as India, Pakistan, and the countries of the West Indies became significant, and from 1957 until 1962 there was a net migration gain. Since then restriction on the entry of New Commonwealth citizens has lessened the primary inflow, but dependents of immigrants already in the United Kingdom are still admitted. The reasons for restricting entry were in part economic but were also associated with the resistance of the existing population to the new arrivals. Nevertheless, the United Kingdom continues to gain people from the New Commonwealth.
Although historical records refer to emigration to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, there is little quantitative information about such movements before the middle of the following century. The greatest numbers appear to have left Great Britain in the 1880s and between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I. Emigration, particularly to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (“Old Commonwealth” countries), continued at a high rate after the war until 1930, when unfavourable economic conditions in the British Empire and in the United States reversed the movement. During the same years, there also was an influx of refugees from Europe. After World War II both inward and outward movements were considerable. Emigration to the countries of the Old Commonwealth and, to a lesser degree, to the United States continued, but until 1951 immigration into Britain roughly equaled British emigration to the rest of the world. Since the mid-1960s there has been a slackening of emigration, as Canada and Australia no longer maintain an open-door policy to citizens of the United Kingdom, accepting only those whose skills are in demand. Nevertheless, the United Kingdom continues to be an exporter of population, albeit on a declining scale, to the Old Commonwealth, while emigration to the nations of the European Union and other foreign countries has increased.
Migration within the United Kingdom has at times been sizable. Until 1700 the relatively small population was sparsely distributed and largely rural and agricultural, much as it had been in medieval times. From the mid-18th century, scientific and technological innovations created the first modern industrial state. At the same time, agriculture underwent technical and tenurial changes that allowed increased production with a smaller workforce, and revolutionary improvements in transport facilitated the movement of materials and people. As a result, by the late 19th century a theretofore mainly rural population had largely become a nation of industrial workers and town dwellers.
The rural exodus was a long process. The breakdown of communal farming started before the 14th century. Subsequently enclosures advanced steadily, especially after 1740, until a century later open fields had virtually disappeared from the landscape. Many of the displaced landless agricultural labourers were attracted to the better employment opportunities and the higher wage levels of the growing industries. Meanwhile, a rapid rise in the birth rate had produced a growing population of young people in the countryside who faced little prospect of agricultural employment. These groups contributed to a high volume of internal migration toward the towns.
Industry, as well as the urban centres that inevitably grew up around it, concentrated near the coalfields, while the railway network, which grew rapidly after 1830, enhanced the commercial importance of many towns. The migration of people, especially young people, from the country to industrialized towns took place at an unprecedented rate in the early railway age, and such movements were relatively confined geographically. Migration from agricultural Ireland provided an exception, for, when the disastrous potato disease of 1845–49 led to widespread famine, large numbers moved to Great Britain to become urban workers in Lancashire, Clydeside (the Glasgow region), and London. The rural exodus continued, but on a greatly reduced scale, after 1901.
Soon after World War I, new interregional migration flows commenced when the formerly booming 19th-century industrial and mining districts lost much of their economic momentum. Declining or stagnating heavy industry in Clydeside, northeastern England, South Wales, and parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire swelled the ranks of the unemployed, and many migrated to the relatively more prosperous Midlands and southern England. This movement of people continued until it was arrested by the relatively full employment conditions that obtained soon after the outbreak of World War II.
In the 1950s opportunities for employment in the United Kingdom improved with government-sponsored diversification of industry, reducing the volume of migration to the south. The decline of certain northern industries—coal mining, shipbuilding, and cotton textiles in particular—had nevertheless reached a critical level by the late 1960s, and the emergence of new growth points in the West Midlands and southeastern England made the drift to the south a continuing feature of British economic life. During the 1960s and ’70s the areas of most rapid growth were East Anglia, the South West, and the East Midlands, partly because of limitations on growth in Greater London and the development of peripheral new towns in surrounding areas.
During the 1980s the government largely abandoned subsidies for industry and adopted a program of rationalization and privatization. The result was the collapse of coal mining and heavy industry in the north and the West Midlands of England and in the Lowlands of Scotland and a similar loss of heavy industry in Northern Ireland; this unleashed a wave of migration from these regions to the more prosperous south of England, especially East Anglia, the East Midlands, and the South West. As the economy stabilized during the 1990s, migration from Scotland, Northern Ireland, and northern England subsided. While the South East (including Greater London) was the chief destination of external immigrants into Britain, this region, along with the West Midlands, produced a growing internal migration to surrounding regions of England during the 1990s. This pattern reflected a larger trend of migration out of older urban centres throughout Britain to surrounding rural areas and small towns at the end of the 20th century.
William RavenhillThe Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaEconomy of the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has a fiercely independent, developed, and international trading economy that was at the forefront of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. The country emerged from World War II as a military victor but with a debilitated manufacturing sector. Postwar recovery was relatively slow, and it took nearly 40 years, with additional stimulation after 1973 from membership in the European Economic Community (ultimately succeeded by the European Union [EU]), for the British economy to improve its competitiveness significantly. Economic growth rates in the 1990s compared favourably with those of other top industrial countries. Manufacturing’s contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) has declined to about one-fifth of the total, with services providing the source of greatest growth. The United Kingdom’s chief trading ties shifted from its former empire to other members of the EU, which came to account for more than half its trade in tangible goods. The United States remained a major investment and trading partner, and Japan also became a significant investor in local production. American and Japanese companies have often chosen the United Kingdom as their European base. In addition, other fast-developing East Asian countries with export-oriented economies included the United Kingdom’s open market among their important outlets.
In the 1990s the movement known as Euroskepticism, which advocated political and economic disengagement from the EU, began gaining steam in the United Kingdom. By the second decade of the 21st century, support for this viewpoint had become so widespread that a referendum on continued British membership in the EU was put to the electorate. Some 52 percent of voters opted for British exit from the EU (popularly branded “Brexit”), setting in motion a protracted process that eventually culminated in the United Kingdom’s formal withdrawal from the EU on January 31, 2020, initiating a period of economic transition and uncertainty.
During the 1980s the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher pursued the privatization, or denationalization, of publicly owned corporations that had been nationalized by previous governments. Privatization, accompanied by widespread labour unrest, resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the coal-mining and heavy industrial sectors. Although there was some improvement in the standard of living nationally, in general there was greater prosperity in the South East, including London, than in the heavily industrialized regions of the West Midlands, northern England, Clydeside, and Belfast, whose economies suffered during the 1980s. During the 1980s and ’90s, income disparity also increased. Unemployment and inflation rates were gradually reduced but remained high until the late 1990s. The country’s role as a major world financial centre remained a source of economic strength. Moreover, its exploitation of offshore natural gas since 1967 and oil since 1975 in the North Sea has reduced dependence on coal and imported oil and provided a further economic boost.
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
Agriculture
The United Kingdom is unusual, even among western European countries, in the small proportion of its employed population (about 2 percent) engaged in agriculture. With commercial intensification of yields and a high level of mechanization, supported initially by national policy and subsequently by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU, the output of some agricultural products exceeded demand during much of the United Kingdom’s tenure in the European Union. Employment in agriculture has declined gradually, and, with the introduction of policies to achieve reduction of surpluses, the trend is likely to continue. Efforts have been made to create alternative employment opportunities in rural areas, some of which are remote from towns. The land area used for agriculture (about three-quarters of the total) has also declined, and the arable share has fallen in favour of pasture.
Official agricultural policy aimed to improve productivity, to ensure stable markets, to provide producers a fair standard of living, and to guarantee consumers regular food supplies at reasonable prices. Under CAP a system of minimum prices for domestic goods and levies on imports to support domestic prices was provided. Exports were encouraged by subsidies that made up the difference between the world market price and the EU price. For a few products, particularly beef and sheep, there were additional payments made directly to producers. Other policies included milk quotas, land set-asides (to compensate farmers for taking land out of agricultural use), and reliance on the price mechanism as a regulator.
The most important farm crops are wheat, barley, oats, sugar beets, potatoes, and rapeseed. While significant proportions of wheat, barley, and rapeseed provide animal feed, much of the remainder is processed for human consumption through flour milling (wheat), malting and distilling (barley), and the production of vegetable oil (rapeseed). The main livestock products derive from cattle and calves, sheep and lambs, pigs, and poultry. The United Kingdom has achieved a high level of self-sufficiency in the main agricultural products except for sugar and cheese.
Forestry
About one-tenth of the United Kingdom’s land area is devoted to productive forestry. The government-supported Forestry Commission manages almost half of these woodlands, and the rest are in private hands. Domestic timber production supplies less than one-fifth of the United Kingdom’s demand. The majority of new plantings are of conifers in upland areas, but the commission encourages planting broad-leaved trees where appropriate.
Fishing
Although the United Kingdom is one of Europe’s leading fishing countries, the industry has been in long-term decline. Fishing limits were extended to 200 nautical miles (370 km) offshore in the mid-1970s, and, because a significant part of the area fished by EU members lies within British waters, catches were regulated on a community-wide basis while the United Kingdom was a member of the EU. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom lost opportunities to fish in some more-distant waters (e.g., those off Iceland), and this reduced its total catch more than that of other countries of the EU. The United Kingdom’s fishing industry now supplies only half the country’s total demand. The most important fish landed are cod, haddock, mackerel, whiting, and plaice, as well as shellfish, including Nephrops (Norway lobsters), lobsters, crabs, and oysters. Estuarine fish farming—mainly of trout and salmon—has expanded considerably.
Resources and power
Minerals
The United Kingdom has relatively limited supplies of economically valuable mineral resources. The once-important extraction of iron ore has dwindled to almost nothing. Other important metals that are mined include tin, which supplies about half the domestic demand, and zinc. There are adequate supplies of nonmetallic minerals, including sand and gravel, limestone, dolomite, chalk, slate, barite, talc, clay and clay shale, kaolin (china clay), ball clay, fuller’s earth, celestine, and gypsum. Sand, gravel, limestone, and other crushed rocks are quarried for use in construction.
Energy
By contrast, the United Kingdom has relatively large energy resources including oil, natural gas, and coal. Coal, the fuel once vital to the British economy, has continued to decrease in importance. Compared with its peak year of 1913, when more than one million workers produced more than 300 million tons, current output has fallen by more than four-fifths, with an even greater reduction in the labour force. Power stations are the major customers for coal, but, with growth in the use of other fuels and the increasing closing of pits that have become uneconomical to operate, the industry remains under considerable pressure.
The discovery of oil in the North Sea and the apportionment of its area to surrounding countries led to the rapid development of oil exploitation, and the United Kingdom became virtually self-sufficient in oil and even an exporter. With an average output of nearly three million barrels per day at the beginning of the 21st century, the country was one of the world’s largest producers. The balance of payments has benefited considerably from oil revenues, and a substantial proportion has been invested abroad to offset diminishing oil income in the future. Proven reserves were estimated at around 700 million tons in the late 1990s.
Since offshore natural gas supplies from the North Sea began to be available in quantity in 1967, they have replaced the previously coal-based supplies of town gas. A national network of distribution pipelines has been created. Proven reserves of natural gas were estimated at 26.8 trillion cubic feet (760 billion cubic metres) in the late 1990s.
Self-sufficiency in oil and natural gas and the decline of coal mining has transformed Britain’s energy sector. Nuclear fuel has slightly expanded its contribution to electricity generation, and hydroelectric power contributes a small proportion (mainly in Scotland), but conventional steam power stations provide most of the country’s electricity.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing sector as a whole has continued to shrink both in employment and in its contribution (about one-fifth at the beginning of the 21st century) to the GDP. The decline in manufacturing largely accounted for the rapid rise in unemployment in the early 1980s. Once economic growth returned, however, there was great improvement in productivity and profits in British manufacturing.
In terms of their relative importance to the GDP, the most important manufacturing industries are engineering; food, beverages (including alcoholic beverages), and tobacco; chemicals; paper, printing, and publishing; metals and minerals; and textiles, clothing, footwear, and leather. The fastest-growing sectors have been chemicals and electrical engineering. Within the chemical industry, pharmaceuticals and specialty products have shown the largest increases. Within the engineering industry, electrical and instrument engineering and transport engineering—including motor vehicles and aerospace equipment—have grown faster than mechanical engineering and metal goods, and electronic products have shown the fastest growth. On the other hand, the growth in motor vehicle production has occurred among foreign-owned, especially Japanese, companies investing in the United Kingdom. British automobile manufacturers have been in decline since the 1970s. After a period of restructuring during the 1980s, the British steel industry substantially increased its productivity, output, and exports during the 1990s. However, food, beverages, tobacco, leather, and engineering as a whole have had below-average growth. Textiles, clothing, and footwear have been in absolute decline because British companies have faced increasing difficulty competing with imports, especially from Asia.
During the 1980s imports of manufactured products increased dramatically, and, although exports of finished manufactured products increased in value, the surplus in the balance of trade disappeared and was transformed into a large deficit. Nevertheless, after a period of restructuring in the 1980s, Britain’s manufacturing sector increased its productivity and competitiveness, and the trade balance improved and stabilized during the 1990s.
Construction in Britain stagnated during the 1990s because of a decline in prices and in demand for new housing and because of decreased government investment in infrastructure during the first half of the decade. About half the labour force in construction is self-employed. More than half of all construction work is on new projects, the remainder on repair and maintenance. There has been a marked switch from housing funded and owned by public authorities toward private development. Considerable efforts have also been made to encourage tenants of publicly owned rented houses to become owner-occupiers, with the result that the proportion of owner-occupied homes has grown considerably since the early 1970s. The supply of privately rented accommodations became scarcer because of statutory rent controls that discouraged new construction, but changes during the 1980s both in the economic climate and in official policy began to stimulate the supply. The average price of a new house, particularly in London and the South East, has generally continued to increase more rapidly than the prevailing rate of inflation, although prices have fluctuated considerably. In turn, the rising price of new homes has created considerable pressure on the land available for housing, which has been relatively tightly controlled. Here, too, public policy has been changing in favour of greater permissiveness.
Private industrial and commercial construction and public projects account for the remainder of construction. During the 1980s and ’90s the United Kingdom embarked on a series of major infrastructure projects, including the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France, the rebuilding of large parts of London’s traditional Docklands as a new commercial centre, and extensions to London’s rail and Underground systems.
Finance
The United Kingdom, particularly London, has traditionally been a world financial centre. Restructuring and deregulation transformed the sector during the 1980s and ’90s, with important changes in banking, insurance, the London Stock Exchange, shipping, and commodity markets. Some long-standing distinctions between financial institutions have become less clear-cut. For example, housing loans used to be primarily the responsibility of building societies, but increasingly banks and insurance companies have entered this area of lending. Two related developments have occurred: the transformation of building-society branch offices into virtual banks with personal cashing facilities and the diversification of all three of these types of institutions into real estate services. Building societies also participate to a limited extent in investment services, insurance, trusteeship, executorship, and land services.
At the end of the 20th century, the financial services industry employed more than one million people and contributed about one-twelfth of the GDP. Although financial services have grown rapidly in some medium-sized cities, notably Leeds and Edinburgh, London has continued to dominate the industry and has grown in size and influence as a centre of international financial operations. Capital flows have increased, as have foreign exchange and securities trading. Consequently, London long had more foreign banks than any other city in the world, though it remained to be seen whether this distinction would continue after the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU. Increased competition and technological developments have accelerated change. The International Stock Exchange was reorganized, and the historical two-tier structure of brokers, who executed investors’ instructions to buy and sell stocks and shares, and jobbers, who “made” markets in these securities, was abolished. As a result, new companies link British and foreign banks with former brokers and jobbers. The Financial Services Act of 1986, the Building Societies Act of 1987, and the Banking Act of 1987 regulate these new financial organizations.
In 1997 the government established the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to regulate the financial services industry; it replaced a series of separate supervisory organizations, some of them based on self-regulation. Among other tasks, the FSA took over the supervision of the United Kingdom’s commercial banks from the Bank of England. The FSA was widely criticized for its response to the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 and led to a government bailout for a number of prominent British banks. As a result, the Financial Services Act of 2012 abolished the FSA, and the “tripartite” system of financial regulation (the FSA, the Bank of England, and the Treasury) was replaced in 2013 with three new bodies—the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), mandated with regulating financial service firms and protecting consumers, the Financial Policy Committee (FPC), and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA)—the last two of which were embedded in the Bank of England, to which the supervision and regulation of banks were returned.
The Bank of England retains the sole right to issue banknotes in England and Wales (banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland have limited rights to do this in their own areas). In 1997 the Bank of England was given the power to set the “repo,” or benchmark, interest rate, which influences the general structure of interest rates. The bank’s standing instruction from the government is to set an interest rate that will meet a target inflation rate of 2.5 percent per annum. The bank also intervenes actively in foreign exchange markets and acts as the government’s banker. The pound sterling is a major internationally traded currency.
A variety of institutions, including insurance companies, pension funds, and investment and unit trusts, channel individual savings into investments. Finance houses are the primary providers of home mortgages and corporate lending and leasing. There are also companies that finance the leasing of business equipment; factoring companies that provide immediate cash to creditors and subsequently collect the corporate debts owed; and finance corporations that provide venture capital funding for innovations or high-risk companies and that supplement the medium- and long-term capital markets, otherwise supplied by the banks or the Stock Market.
The United Kingdom has a number of organized financial markets. The securities markets comprise the International Stock Exchange, which deals in officially listed stocks and shares (including government issues, traded options, stock index options, and currency options); the Unlisted Securities Market, for smaller companies; and the Third Market, for small unlisted companies. Money market activities include the trading of bills, certificates of deposit, short-term deposits, and, increasingly, sterling commercial paper. Other markets are those dealing in Eurocurrency, Eurobonds, foreign exchange, financial futures, gold, ship brokerage, freight futures, and agricultural and other commodity futures.
The share of invisible trade (receipts and payments from financial services; interest, profits, and dividends; and transfers between the United Kingdom and other countries) has been rising steadily since the 1960s—from about one-third to one-half of the country’s total foreign earnings. Within this area, service transactions have grown rapidly, and financial services have grown the fastest.
Trade of the United Kingdom
Trade has long been pivotal to the United Kingdom’s economy. The total value of imports and exports represents nearly half the country’s GDP. (By comparison, the value of foreign trade amounts to about one-fifth of the GDP of the United States.) The volume of both the exports and the imports of the United Kingdom has grown steadily in recent years. Principal British exports include machinery, automobiles and other transport equipment, electrical and electronic equipment (including computers), chemicals, and oil. Services, particularly financial services, are another major export and contribute positively to Britain’s trade balance. The country imports about one-tenth of its foodstuffs and about one-third of its machinery and transport equipment.
An increasing share of the United Kingdom’s trade is with other developed countries. Joining the European Economic Community caused a major reorientation of trade flows. At the beginning of the 21st century, about half of all trade was with the United Kingdom’s partners in the European Union, although the United States remained the United Kingdom’s single largest export market and a major supplier. Germany was the leading supplier and the second most important export market. Whether the United Kingdom’s trading partners would change dramatically as a result of Brexit (Britain’s exit from the European Union) remained an open question, as the country entered a period of economic transition in 2020.
The United Kingdom’s current overall balance of payments (including trade in services and transfer payments), which historically had been generally favourable, fell into deficit from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s because visible imports (i.e., tangible goods imported) exceeded visible exports. Meanwhile there was considerable overseas investment, and foreign earnings grew. The government has supported trade liberalization and participated in international trade organizations. By the late 1990s the steady growth in exports of goods and services and in foreign earnings had produced the first balance-of-payments surplus in more than a decade.
Services
The most remarkable economic development in the United Kingdom has been the growth of service industries, which now provide about two-thirds of the GDP and three-fourths of total employment. This reflects the rise in real personal incomes, changes in patterns of consumer expenditure, and the elaboration and increasing outsourcing of business services. Although some services—for example, public transportation, laundries, and movie theatres—have declined in favour of privately owned goods—such as automobiles, washing machines, and television sets—this has stimulated increased demand for the related services that distribute, maintain, and repair such products. Other growing service industries include hotels and catering, air travel and other leisure-related activities, distribution (particularly retailing), and finance. Especially rapid growth has occurred in other business-support services, including computing systems and software, management consultancy, advertising, and market research, as well as the provision of exhibition and conference facilities. Britain is also the base for some of the world’s leading art auction houses.
The United Kingdom’s many cultural treasures—e.g., its historic castles, museums, and theatres—make it a popular tourist destination. The tourism industry is a leading sector in the British economy, and each year more than 25 million tourists visit the country. London is among the world’s most-visited cities.
Labour and taxation
Government revenues are derived from several main sources, including income taxes, corporate taxes, taxes on the sale of goods and services, and national insurance contributions. After World War II the government adopted individual income tax rates that were among the highest in Europe. During the last two decades of the 20th century, individual income tax rates dropped, and corporate tax rates increased slightly. A value-added tax, which levies a 20 percent tax on purchases, generates between one-tenth and one-fifth of government revenues.
During the 1980s the Thatcher government adopted policies that placed limits on the power and influence of trade unions and provided training for those entering the workforce or changing careers. The Labour government of the late 1990s retained many of Thatcher’s policies, but they abandoned the Conservative objective of unlimited tax reduction and instead sought to stabilize the overall burden of taxation at about 37 percent of GDP.
Just under half the total population is in the labour force, including a small but expanding proportion who are self-employed. About three-tenths of workers are members of a trade union, a share that dropped significantly with the adoption of legislation restricting trade union rights in the last two decades of the 20th century. Among the various influential trade organizations are the public-sector union UNISON and the general-services unions Unite and GMB. Although manufacturing once dominated employment, it now involves less than one-sixth of all workers. In contrast, the service sector employs more than two-thirds of employees, with financial services and distribution the two largest components.
Transportation and telecommunications
The United Kingdom, which is relatively small in area and has a fairly high population density, has undergone considerable change in its patterns of transport. The growth of automobile ownership (by the turn of the 21st century, nearly two-thirds of all households had one automobile, and some had two or more), the decline in the use of local buses, and the transfer of much internal freight from rail to road increased the importance of maintaining and developing road networks, particularly motorways (superhighways) and trunk roads. Intercity rail services have been improved, as have commuter services in major metropolitan areas. Similarly, air traffic has grown, particularly international flights. Although there has been a downward trend in shipping and sea travel, most foreign trade still moves by sea. However, the opening of the Channel Tunnel rail link between England and France in 1994 had a big impact on cross-Channel passenger and freight patterns. At peak periods the tunnel accommodates up to four passenger and four freight shuttletrains per hour in each direction. By the end of the decade, these trains carried about half of the car traffic and more than one-third of the coach and truck traffic on the Dover/Folkestone–Calais route—the principal artery linking Britain to mainland Europe. In addition, the tunnel accommodates through freight trains and high-speed passenger trains between London and Paris or Brussels. Substantial passenger and cargo traffic moves by sea between the ports of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Europe. Oil and natural gas, each of which has a national bulk-distribution pipeline system, do not rely on the road and rail networks.
Investment in transportation has sometimes failed to meet rising demand—for example, the M25 motorway around London showed signs of overload soon after it was opened in 1986; there is overcrowding on commuter rail services, including London’s Underground; congested traffic moves at a snail’s pace in cities; and there is continuous pressure to build more motorways and airports to serve London.
During the 1980s British Telecom (BT) was privatized, and the government subsequently deregulated the country’s telecommunications sector. Although BT has continued to be the largest telecommunications company, several additional operators provide extensive service for cable, wireless, fibre-optic, and other telecommunications services. An independent regulatory agency, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), oversees the sector.
Ulric M. SpencerPeter KellnerGovernment and society
Constitutional framework
The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. The country’s head of state is the reigning king or queen, and the head of government is the prime minister, who is the leader of the majority political party in the House of Commons.
The British constitution is uncodified; it is only partly written and is flexible. Its basic sources are parliamentary and European Union legislation, the European Convention on Human Rights, and decisions by courts of law. Matters for which there is no formal law, such as the resignation of office by a government, follow precedents (conventions) that are open to development or modification. Works of authority, such as Albert Venn Dicey’s Lectures Introductory to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885), are also considered part of the constitution.
The main elements of the government are the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. There is some overlap between the branches, as there is no formal separation of powers or system of checks and balances. For example, the lord chancellor traditionally was a member of all three branches, serving as a member of the cabinet (executive branch), as the government’s leader in the House of Lords (legislative branch), and as the head of the country’s judiciary (judicial branch). However, constitutional reforms enacted in 2005 (and entering into force in 2006) stripped the office of most of its legislative and judicial functions, with those powers devolving to the lord speaker and the lord chief justice, respectively. That reform also created the Supreme Court, which in October 2009 replaced the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords as the venue of last resort in the British legal system.
Sovereignty resides in Parliament, which comprises the monarch, the mainly appointive House of Lords, and the elected House of Commons. The sovereignty of Parliament is expressed in its legislative enactments, which are binding on all, though individuals may contest in the courts the legality of any action under a specific statute. In certain circumstances individuals may also seek protection under European law. Until 1999 the House of Lords consisted mainly of hereditary peers (or nobles). Since then it has comprised mainly appointed peers, selected by successive prime ministers to serve for life. As of March 2016, of 815 lords, 701 were life peers, 88 were hereditary peers, and another 26 were archbishops and bishops. Each of the 650 members of the House of Commons (members of Parliament; MPs) represents an individual constituency (district) by virtue of winning a plurality of votes in the constituency.
All political power rests with the prime minister and the cabinet, and the monarch must act on their advice. The prime minister chooses the cabinet from MPs in his political party. Most cabinet ministers are heads of government departments. The prime minister’s authority grew during the 20th century, and, alone or with one or two colleagues, the prime minister increasingly has made decisions previously made by the cabinet as a whole. Prime ministers have nevertheless been overruled by the cabinet on many occasions and must generally have its support to exercise their powers.
Because the party with a majority in the House of Commons supports the cabinet, it exercises the sovereignty of Parliament. The royal right of veto has not been exercised since the early 18th century, and the legislative power of the House of Lords was reduced in 1911 to the right to delay legislation. The cabinet plans and lays before Parliament all important bills. Although the cabinet thus controls the lawmaking machinery, it is also subject to Parliament; it must expound and defend its policy in debate, and its continuation in office depends on the support of the House of Commons.
The executive apparatus, the cabinet secretariat, was developed after World War I and carries out the cabinet’s decisions. It also prepares the cabinet’s agenda, records its conclusions, and communicates them to the government departments that implement them.
Regional government
Within the United Kingdom, national assemblies in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland took power in 1999 and assumed some powers previously held exclusively by the central Parliament at Westminster, to which they remain subordinate. The central Parliament retains full legislative and executive control over England, which lacks a separate regional assembly.
Scotland’s Parliament has wide powers over such matters as health, education, housing, transport, the environment, and agriculture. It also has the power to increase or decrease the British income tax rate within Scotland by up to three percentage points. The central Parliament retains responsibility for foreign affairs, defense, social security, and overall economic policy. Unlike the members of the House of Commons, members of the Scottish Parliament are chosen under a system of proportional representation. Scotland has a distinct legal system based on Roman law. In 2011 the Scottish National Party formed Scotland’s first majority government, which pledged an independence forum by 2015.
Since 1999 Wales has also had its own assembly, but only in 2011 did that National Assembly gain direct lawmaking power. It broadly administers the same services as the Scottish Parliament. Like Scottish legislators, members of the Welsh assembly are elected by proportional representation.
The Northern Ireland Assembly gained limited legislative and executive power at the end of 1999. Its members, like those of the other regional assemblies, are elected by proportional representation. It has power over matters concerning agriculture, economic development, education, the environment, health, and social services, but the Westminster government retains control over foreign affairs, defense, general economic policy, taxation, policing, and criminal justice. Divisions between unionist (Protestant) and nationalist (Roman Catholic) factions in the Northern Ireland Assembly, however, have threatened its future. If either faction withdraws from the assembly, the region could return to the system of direct rule by the central government that prevailed in Northern Ireland from 1973 to 1999.
Local government
Each part of the United Kingdom has a distinct system of local government. (For a full account of local government in each part of the United Kingdom, see the discussions of local government in the articles on England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.) Local governments have very few legislative powers and must act within the framework of laws passed by the central Parliament (and by the Scottish Parliament in Scotland). Nevertheless, they do have the power to enact regulations and to levy council taxes (property taxes) within limits set by the central government. They are funded by the council taxes that they levy, by business rates (taxes levied on nonresidential properties, such as stores, offices, factories, and warehouses), by fees for services, and by grants from the central government. Local governments in the United Kingdom are responsible for a range of community services, including environmental matters, education, highways and traffic, social services, firefighting, sanitation, planning, housing, parks and recreation, and elections. In Scotland and Wales regional governments handle some of these functions, and local governments handle the remainder. In Northern Ireland the Northern Ireland Assembly is responsible for many of these functions. The responsibilities of local governments in Northern Ireland are limited to environmental matters, sanitation, and recreation.
Parts of the United Kingdom have as many as three levels, or tiers, of local government, each with its own responsibilities, whereas other areas have only a single tier or two tiers. Throughout England, parish and town councils form the lowest tier of local government. (Parishes are civil subdivisions, usually centred on a village or small town, that are distinct from church bodies.) They have the power to assess “precepts” (surcharges) on the local rates and a range of rights and duties, including maintenance of commons, recreational facilities, and environmental quality and participation in the planning process. Community councils perform a similar role in Wales, whereas community councils in Scotland are voluntary and consultative bodies with few statutory powers. This lowest level of local government has no counterpart in Northern Ireland.
The next tier of local government is usually known in England and Northern Ireland as a district, borough, or city. In Northern Ireland this is the only level of local government. In Scotland and Wales this second tier is the only one with broad powers over major local government functions. In Wales these local government areas are known as either counties or county boroughs, while in Scotland they are variously known as council areas or local government authorities or, in some cases, cities. In some areas of England this second tier of local government is the only one with broad statutory and administrative powers. These areas are known in England as unitary authorities (since they form a single tier of local government above the parishes and towns) or metropolitan boroughs (which are functionally equivalent to unitary authorities but form part of a larger metropolitan county). In other areas of England, districts, boroughs, and cities form an intermediate tier of local government between the towns and parishes on the one hand and administrative counties on the other. Administrative counties, which cover much of England, are the highest tier of local government where they exist.
In Greater London, boroughs form the lowest tier of local government and are responsible for most local government functions. However, in 2000 a new Greater London Authority (GLA) was established with very limited revenue-gathering powers but with responsibility for public transport, policing, emergency services, the environment, and planning in Greater London as a whole. The GLA consists of a directly elected mayor (a constitutional innovation for the United Kingdom, which had never previously filled any executive post by direct election) and a 25-member assembly elected by proportional representation.
Whereas the administrative counties of England and the counties and county boroughs of Wales have statutory and administrative powers, there are other areas throughout the United Kingdom that are called counties but lack administrative power. In England, metropolitan counties cover metropolitan areas; they serve as geographic and statistical units, but since 1986 their administrative powers have belonged to their constituent metropolitan boroughs. Moreover, in England there is a unit known variously as a ceremonial county or a geographic county. These counties also form geographic and statistical units. In most cases they comprise an administrative county and one or more unitary authorities. In other cases they comprise one or more unitary authorities without an administrative county. Greater London and each of the metropolitan counties also constitute ceremonial and geographic counties. These areas are known as ceremonial counties because each has a lord lieutenant and a high sheriff who serve as the representatives of the monarch in the county and who represent the county at the ceremonial functions of the monarchy.
Finally, every part of the United Kingdom lies within what is known as a historic county. The historic counties have formed geographic and cultural units since the Middle Ages, and they historically had a variety of administrative powers. The Local Government Act of 1888 regularized the administrative powers of counties and reassigned them to new administrative counties with the same names as the historic counties but with different boundaries in some cases. Successive local government reorganizations in the 1970s and ’90s redrew the boundaries of administrative units in the United Kingdom so that no remaining administrative unit corresponds directly to a historic county, although many administrative and geographic counties and other local government units carry the names of historic counties. Still, even though they lack administrative power, historic counties remain important cultural units. They serve as a focus for local identity, and cultural institutions such as sporting associations are often organized by historic county.
Justice
Recruited from successful practicing lawyers, judges in the United Kingdom are appointed and virtually irremovable. The courts alone declare the law, but the courts accept any act of Parliament as part of the law. As courts in the United Kingdom do not possess the power of judicial review, no court can declare a statute invalid.
An accused person is presumed innocent until proved guilty. The courts strictly enforce a law of contempt to prevent newspapers or television from prejudicing the trial of the accused before a jury. Verdicts in criminal cases rest on a majority vote of the jury (in Scotland a simple majority, in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland with no more than two dissenting votes). Capital punishment was abolished in 1965. Almost all defendants in criminal cases in the Crown Courts (in Scotland the High Court of Justiciary), which deal with all serious cases, are granted publicly funded legal aid.
More than 90 percent of criminal cases in England and Wales are tried and determined by about 30,000 justices of the peace, who are unpaid laypersons, or by the more than 60 stipendiary (paid) magistrates, who are trained lawyers. More serious crimes also come initially before a magistrate’s court. The system is similar in Northern Ireland, but in Scotland district and sheriff courts try most criminal cases. The police must bring an arrested person before a magistrate within 36 hours, but the magistrate can authorize further detention without charge for up to 96 hours. Only 1 percent of suspects are held without charge for more than 24 hours, however. The magistrate decides whether the accused should be held on bail or in custody.
The vast majority of civil actions in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland are tried in local county courts, whose jurisdiction is limited by the nature of the action and the amount of money at stake. In Scotland, sheriff courts and the Court of Session try all civil actions.
Appeals in civil and criminal matters move from the High and Crown courts to the Court of Appeal, from which for centuries cases of legal importance could be appealed to the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, better known as the Law Lords. In October 2009, however, as a result of constitutional reform, the Appellate Committee was abolished and replaced by a newly constituted Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, made up of 12 independently appointed justices. At the same time, the Supreme Court also assumed the devolution jurisdiction previously held by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In Scotland only civil matters may be appealed to the House of Lords.
Political process
All citizens aged 18 or older are eligible to vote in parliamentary and local elections. All other public posts are filled by appointment. Each member of the House of Commons represents one parliamentary constituency. Constituency populations historically have varied considerably, with those in Scotland and Wales being much smaller than those in England. This overrepresentation for Scotland and Wales dates from the 18th century and the 1940s, respectively; however, because of the wide array of powers vested in the Scottish Parliament, the disparity in constituency size between England and Scotland was eliminated at the May 2005 election, when Scotland’s seats in the House of Commons were reduced from 72 to 59. Constituencies in Northern Ireland are slightly smaller than those in England. As there are no residency requirements, many members of Parliament reside outside the constituency that they represent.
Registration of voters is compulsory and carried out annually. Candidates for election to Parliament or a local council are normally chosen by the local parties. There are no primary elections along U.S. lines, for example, nor would such a system be easy because the timing of general elections is unpredictable.
The House of Commons is elected for a maximum term of five years. Traditionally, at any time during those five years, the prime minister had the right to ask the monarch to dissolve Parliament and call a general election. However, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 mandated a five-year period between elections and proscribed early elections except under special circumstances: (1) if a motion for an early general election is agreed upon either by at least two-thirds of the whole House of Commons or without division (that is, when a voice vote is sufficient to determine the will of the House of Commons) or (2) if a motion of no confidence is passed and no alternative government is confirmed by the House of Commons within 14 days. Parliamentary candidates’ campaign spending is strictly limited. Since 2000, national party expenditure, which was previously unrestricted, has been limited to a maximum of £20 million per party. In addition, each party is allocated free election broadcasts on the main television channels. Televised debates between the leaders of the principal parties (de facto candidates for prime minister) were a part of the campaign process for the first time in the 2010 general election. No paid political advertising is permitted on television or radio. These provisions and the uncertainty about the timing of an election produce campaigns that are, by international standards, unusually brief and relatively inexpensive.
A two-party system has existed in the United Kingdom since the late 17th century. Since the mid-1920s the dominant groupings have been the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. However, several smaller parties—e.g., the Liberal Democrats, the United Kingdom Independence Party, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party), and loyalist (unionist) and republican (nationalist) political parties in Northern Ireland—have gained representation in Parliament, especially since the 1970s. The two-party system is one of the outstanding features of British politics and generally has produced firm and decisive government. The practice of simple plurality voting in single-member constituencies (commonly referred to a “first past the post”) has tended to exaggerate the majority of the winning party and to diminish the representation and influence of third parties, except for those with a geographic base of support (e.g., Plaid Cymru). When the 2010 general election resulted in a “hung parliament” (no party with enough seats to form a majority government), the Liberal Democrats—who were courted as coalition partner by both the Conservatives (who captured the most seats) and Labour (which finished a distant second)—used as a bargaining chip the possibility of changing to a system of proportional representation that would benefit third parties.
The two-party system, together with uncertainty about the timing of a general election, has produced the British phenomenon of the official opposition. Its decisive characteristic is that the main opposition party forms an alternative, or “shadow,” government, ready at any time to take office, in recognition of which the leader of the opposition receives an official salary.
Despite several high-profile female monarchs and politicians, men have dominated politics in the United Kingdom for centuries. In 2011, however, centuries-old succession laws stipulating that the heir to the throne be the first-born son of the monarch and that sons take precedence over daughters in succession were slated for change to remove gender as a qualification. Nevertheless, while women have made strong political gains in much of western Europe, especially in Scandinavia, breakthroughs for women in British national elections have been rare. Throughout much of the 20th century, only a few women won elections; before the 1980s the high point for female representation in the House of Commons was 29 in 1964. Indeed, many women who were able to win election to the House of Commons were of aristocratic stock or widows of influential politicians. One such exception was Margaret Thatcher, who was first elected to Parliament in 1959 and became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979. However, during the 1980s women began to make gains, with 60 female candidates winning seats in Parliament in 1992. In order to increase its appeal to women and increase the number of women MPs, the Labour Party adopted a policy of all-women shortlists for half of its “target seats” (i.e., seats where an existing Labour MP was standing down or where Conservative MPs had small majorities) for the 1997 election, and, though the policy subsequently was ruled in violation of equal rights laws, 120 women—101 from the Labour Party—were elected to the House of Commons. Even with the law invalidated, 118 women won election in 2001. In addition to women, minorities have had some success in national elections. There consistently have been several Jewish members of the House of Commons, and Sikh and Muslim candidates also have had limited success.
Security
The United Kingdom has no national police force nor any minister exclusively responsible for the police. Each provincial force is overseen by an elected police and crime commissioner (PCC), whose performance is scrutinized by police and crime panels. PCCs are responsible for the totality of policing, answerable to the communities they serve, and charged with holding accountable the chief constable and police force.
The commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police has a status similar to that of a chief constable. Scotland Yard (the criminal investigation department of the Metropolitan Police) assists other police forces and handles the British responsibilities of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol).
The British police, popularly known as “bobbies,” wear a uniform that is nonmilitary in appearance. Their only regular weapon is a short, wooden truncheon, which they keep out of sight and may not employ except in self-defense or to restore order. Police on a dangerous mission may carry firearms for that specific occasion.
Responsibility for national defense rests with the prime minister and the cabinet. The secretary of state for defense formulates defense policy. His ministry has responsibility for the armed forces. The secretary of state is advised by the chief of the defense staff, aided by the chiefs of the three services—the army, navy, and air force. Britain has been an active member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), deploying its troops in various theatres of conflict. Internal security and intelligence are handled by the MI5 government agency, and foreign intelligence services are carried out by MI6.
Health and welfare
The National Health Service
The National Health Service (NHS) provides comprehensive health care throughout the United Kingdom. The NHS provides medical care through a tripartite structure of primary care, hospitals, and community health care. The main element in primary care is the system of general practitioners (family doctors), who provide preventive and curative care and who refer patients to hospital and specialist services. All consultations with a general practitioner under the NHS are free.
The other major types of primary medical care are dentistry and pharmaceutical and opthalmic services. These are the only services of the NHS for which charges are levied, though persons under age 16, past retirement, or with low incomes are usually exempt. Everyone else must pay charges that are below the full cost of the services involved.
Under the Department of Health in England are four regional health directors who oversee area health authorities, whose major responsibility is to run the hospital service. (Overseeing the health authorities in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland is the responsibility of their respective parliament or assembly.) Hospitals absorb more than two-thirds of the NHS budget. All hospital treatment under the NHS is free, including consultations with doctors, nursing, drugs, and intensive care, whatever the type of medical problem and however long the hospital stay. Hospital doctors are paid a salary rather than a fee for service but can combine salaried work for the NHS with a private practice.
The Community Health Service has three functions: to provide preventive health services; to act as a liaison with local government, especially over matters of public health; and to cooperate with local government personal social service departments to enable health and personal care to be handled together whenever possible.
Individuals can register with any NHS general practitioner in their area who is prepared to add them to his or her list of patients. Anyone who wishes to change to another doctor may do so. Except in emergencies, patients are referred to a hospital by their general practitioner, allowing patients an element of choice.
Apart from the charges mentioned above, treatment under the NHS is free to the patient. The service is almost entirely funded by government revenues, with less than 5 percent of NHS revenue coming from charges. This arrangement is unique among industrialized countries. There is no substantial reliance on private medical insurance (as, for example, in the United States).
The NHS budget, like that for any other government service, is determined by negotiations between the Treasury and the spending departments, as modified by subsequent discussion in the cabinet. The resulting figure is a budget for the NHS as a whole. The division of money throughout the United Kingdom is partly constrained by a formula designed to improve the geographic distribution of medical resources. Each regional authority divides its total funds among the area health authorities.
Alongside the NHS is a system of private medical care both for primary care and for hospital treatment. Although it grew somewhat in the 1980s and ’90s, the sector absorbs only about one-tenth of the total expenditure on doctors and hospital inpatient care. Most private care is financed by voluntary private medical insurance.
Although the NHS is a popular institution, it is not without problems: resources are scarce, many hospital buildings are old, there are waiting lists for nonurgent conditions, the distribution of health care by social class and by region is less equal than many would wish, and management needs to be improved. The advantages, however, are enormous. The NHS is very inexpensive by international standards; in the late 1990s, for example, the United Kingdom spent about half the percentage of GDP on health care as the United States. Despite such low spending, health in the United Kingdom, measured in terms of infant mortality and life expectancy, matches that in comparable countries. The variation in the quality and quantity of treatment by income level is smaller than in most other countries. The system is able to direct resources toward specific regions and specific types of care. Treatment is free, whatever the extent and duration of illness, no one is denied care because of low income, and no one fears financial ruin as a result of treatment.
Cash benefits
The current system of cash benefits, though substantially modified since its introduction in 1946, is based on the 1942 “Beveridge Report.” Every employed person pays a national insurance contribution, which since 1975 has taken the form of a percentage of earnings, although contributions are due only on amounts up to about 150 percent of nationwide average earnings. Employers collect the contribution, and there is also an employer contribution. Separate arrangements exist for the self-employed. The revenue from contributions goes into the National Insurance Fund.
Insured individuals are entitled to unemployment compensation, cash benefits during sickness or disability, and a retirement pension. There are also benefits for individuals injured in work-related accidents and for widows. Whether or not they receive an insurance benefit, all are eligible for a noncontributory benefit. Employees who lose their jobs through no fault of their own receive lump-sum redundancy, or severance, payments, whose cost is met in part by their employers and in part from a general levy on employers.
The major noncontributory benefits, paid out of general tax revenues, offer poverty relief to individuals and families whose income and savings fall below some prescribed level. The benefit of last resort is income support (formerly called the supplementary benefit); it is payable to individuals whose entitlement to insurance benefits has been exhausted or has left them with a very low income and to those who never had any entitlement to an insurance benefit. Other means-tested benefits assist low-paid working families with children and help people on low incomes with their housing costs. An important class of noncontributory benefits is not means-tested, the major example being the child benefit, a weekly tax-free payment for each child, usually payable to the mother.
The 1946 system has changed substantially over the years, with a burst of reform in the mid-1970s, including an increase in earnings-related pensions, and another in the late 1990s. In the late 1990s a working-families tax credit replaced income support for low-paid working households with children, and the government introduced a national minimum wage. The government also introduced a children’s tax credit to provide additional support to low- and middle-income families. There was a review of the benefit system in 1985 that changed the detailed workings of several benefits in 1988 but left the basic structure intact.
Housing
During the mid-20th century, local governments developed council houses (public housing estates) throughout the United Kingdom. At public housing’s peak, about 1970, local governments owned 30 percent of all housing in the country. Under the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977 (which amended older legislation), local governments have a statutory obligation in certain circumstances to find housing for homeless families. Partly for that reason, they keep a substantial stock of housing for rent, maintain waiting lists, and allocate housing according to need. Following the introduction of “right to buy” legislation in 1980, many tenants became owner-occupiers. By the beginning of the 21st century, the proportion of homes owned by local governments had almost halved.
Education
Primary and secondary education
Overall responsibility for education and children’s services in England rests with the Department of Education, which is accountable to Parliament. Separate departments of education are headed by ministers who answer to the assemblies in Scotland (Education and Lifelong Learning Department), Wales (Department of Education and Skills), and Northern Ireland (Department for Education). State-funded primary and secondary education are a local responsibility, generally overseen by the local authority. There is also a small private sector.
Primary education is free and compulsory from age 5 to 11. Secondary education is organized in a variety of ways for children aged 11 to 19 and is free and compulsory to age 16. In most parts of the United Kingdom, secondary schools are comprehensive; that is, they are open to pupils of all abilities. Pupils may stay on past the minimum school-leaving age of 16 to earn a certificate or take public examinations that qualify them for higher education.
The state finances primary and secondary education out of central and local tax revenues. Most expenditures take place at the local level, though about half of local revenues derive from the central government. Under the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, a new type of school was introduced—academies, which receive their funding directly from the central government (though they are eligible for some local funding and were initially required to have private sponsors). Academies operate independently of the local authority and have greater freedom than traditional (“maintained”) state schools over their curriculum and finance, as well as teachers’ pay and conditions. Academies generally arise from underperforming schools that have been given over to a new provider, whereas free schools, another new type of institution, operate as academies do but differ from them in that they are wholly new schools. Although the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government led by David Cameron pushed for a significant expansion of academies and free schools, in the early 2010s they still constituted only a small percentage of state-funded schools.
Private schools
Alongside the state sector, a small number of private schools (often called “public schools”) provide education for a small percentage of children. Their existence is controversial. It is argued that private schools divert gifted children and teachers and scarce financial resources from state schools and that they perpetuate economic and social divisions (an argument that some have extended to include academies and free schools). The counterarguments focus on their high quality, the beneficial effects of competition, and parents’ freedom of choice.
Higher education
Universities historically have been independent and self-governing; however, they have close links with the central government because a large proportion of their income derives from public funds. Higher education also takes place in other colleges.
Students do not have a right to a place at a university; they are carefully selected by examination performance, and the dropout rate is low by international standards. Most students receive state-funded grants inversely related to their parents’ income to cover the tuition fees. In addition, most students receive state-funded loans to cover living expenses. Foreign students and British students taking a degree at an overseas university are not generally eligible for public funding.
Public funds flow to universities through recurrent grants and in the form of tuition fees; universities also derive income from foreign students and from various private-sector sources. After a major expansion in the 1960s, the system came under pressure in the 1980s. Public funding became more restricted, and the grant system no longer supported students adequately. The government introduced the present system of student loans to replace dwindling grants for living expenses and established higher-education funding councils in each part of the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) to coordinate state support of higher education. In 2010, in the interest of budget reduction, the government raised the maximum level of tuition for higher educational institutions in England to £9,000 (about $11,600) per year. In 2016 that limit was raised to £9,250 (about $11,900), with plans to allow further increases to keep up with inflation.
The Open University—a unique innovation in higher education—is a degree-granting institution that provides courses of study for adults through television, radio, and local study programs. Applicants must apply for a number of places limited at any time by the availability of teachers.
Nicholas A. BarrPeter KellnerCultural life
English culture tends to dominate the formal cultural life of the United Kingdom, but Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have also made important contributions, as have the cultures that British colonialism brought into contact with the homeland. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland share fully in the common culture but also preserve lively traditions that predate political union with England.
Widespread changes in the United Kingdom’s cultural life occurred after 1945. The most remarkable was perhaps the emergence first of Liverpool and then of London in the 1960s as a world centre of popular culture. The Beatles were only the first and best-known of the many British rock groups to win a world following. British clothing designers for a time led the world as innovators of new styles of dress for both men and women, and the brightly coloured outfits sold in London’s Carnaby Street and King’s Road shops briefly became more symbolic of Britain than the traditionally staid tailoring of Savile Row.
Underlying both this development and a similar if less-remarked renewal of vigour in more traditional fields were several important social developments in the decades after World War II. Most evident was the rising standard of education. The number of pupils going on to higher education increased dramatically after World War II and was matched by a major expansion in the number of universities and other institutions of higher education. In society in general there was a marked increase in leisure. Furthermore, immigration, particularly from the West Indies and South Asia, introduced new cultural currents to the United Kingdom and contributed to innovation in music, film, literature, and other arts.
Daily life and social customs
The United Kingdom’s cultural traditions are reflective of the country’s heterogeneity and its central importance in world affairs over the past several centuries. Each constituent part of the United Kingdom—England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—maintains its own unique customs, traditions, cuisine, and festivals. Moreover, as Britain’s empire spanned the globe, it became a focal point of immigration, especially after the independence of its colonies, from its colonial possessions. As a result, immigrants from all corners of the world have entered the United Kingdom and settled throughout the country, leaving indelible imprints on British culture. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, age-old English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh customs stood alongside the rich traditions of Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and Muslim immigrants, placing the United Kingdom among the world’s most cosmopolitan and diverse countries.
The arts
From the plays of William Shakespeare to the music of the Sex Pistols, British art has had a tremendous impact on world culture. Writers from every part of the United Kingdom, joined by immigrants from parts of the former British Empire and the Commonwealth, have enriched the English language and world literature alike with their work. British studios, playwrights, directors, and actors have been remarkable pioneers of stage and screen. British comedians have brought laughter to diverse audiences and been widely imitated; British composers have found devoted listeners around the world, as have various contemporary pop groups and singer-songwriters; and British philosophers have had a tremendous influence in shaping the course of scientific and moral inquiry. From medieval time to the present, this extraordinary flowering of the arts has been encouraged at every level of society. Early royal patronage played an important role in the development of the arts in Britain, and since the mid 20th century the British government has done much to foster their growth.
The independent Arts Council of Great Britain, which was founded in 1946, supported many kinds of contemporary creative and performing arts until 1994, when it devolved into the Arts Council of England (which became Arts Council England in 2003 after joining with the Regional Arts Boards), the Arts Council of Wales, and the Scottish Arts Council (the last becoming Creative Scotland 2010, when it consolidated with Scottish Screen). Having developed separately from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland reorganized in 1995.
The state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and privately owned Channel Four Television are also major patrons of the arts, especially music and film. The work of filmmakers and actors throughout the United Kingdom is supported by the Film Council, a government board that helps fund productions and secure film-related services. This support has contributed to the great expansion of the market for cultural goods and of audiences for the arts generally. As in many other highly developed countries, the clash of tastes and values between generations and, to some extent, between social classes has occasionally been sharp, as it was in the 1960s and ’70s. However, the overall effect of social and financial diversity has been to make culture a major British industry.
Cultural institutions
The United Kingdom contains many cultural treasures. It is home to a wide range of learned societies, including the British Academy, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The British Museum in London houses historical artifacts from all parts of the globe. London is also home to many museums (e.g., the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate galleries, the Imperial War Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum) and theatres (e.g., the Royal National Theatre and those in the world-renowned West End theatre district). Cultural institutions also abound throughout the country. Among the many libraries and museums of interest in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are the Royal Museum, the Museum of Scotland, and the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, the Museum of Scottish Country Life in Glasgow, the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
Sports and recreation
The global spread of sports that had their origins in Britain was central to the development of modern sports in the 18th and 19th centuries and is one of the British Empire’s important cultural legacies. The modern game of football (soccer) is generally accepted to have originated in England. The Football Association, the game’s first organization, was founded in England in 1863, and the first football match played between England and Scotland—the oldest rivalry in the sport—was at Glasgow in 1872. English football fans can follow three national divisions and the celebrated premiership, which includes such legendary clubs as Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool FC. Scotland has three national divisions as well and a premiership that features the Celtic and Rangers clubs of Glasgow; Wales and Northern Ireland also have national leagues. The Scottish and English national teams regularly appear in international competitions. In 1966 England hosted and won the World Cup; it was the third host nation to win the championship.
Rugby and cricket have also long enjoyed great popularity in Britain. According to tradition, rugby began in 1823 at Rugby School in England. In 1871 the Rugby Football Union was formed as the English governing body, and the rival Rugby Football League was founded in 1895. England, Scotland, and Wales all have club competitions in both union and league versions of the game. The three also send national teams to the Six Nations Championship and to World Cup tournaments. Cricket’s origins may date to 13th-century England, and county competition in England was formally organized in the 19th century. International matches, known as tests, began in 1877 with a match between England and Australia.
Great Britain has attended every modern Olympic Games, beginning with the first competition in Athens, Greece, in 1896. Britain has hosted the Games three times in London, in 1908, 1948, and 2012. At the 1896 Games weight lifter Launceston Elliot was the first Briton to win a gold medal, and in 1908 figure skater Madge Cave Syers became the first female athlete to win a medal in the Winter Games. British athletes have won hundreds of medals over the years, making especially strong showings in athletics, tennis, rowing, yachting, and figure skating. Several British athletes have put forth memorable performances in track-and-field events, including sprinter Harold Abrahams in the 1920s, middle-distance runners Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, and two-time decathlon gold medalist Daley Thompson in the 1970s and ’80s. At the 2000 Summer Games rower Steve Redgrave accomplished the rare feat of earning gold medals in five consecutive Games. At the 2012 Games in London, athletes representing the United Kingdom claimed 65 medals.
Britain is home to several important international sports competitions. The Open Championship—also known, outside of Britain, as the British Open—is a golf tournament held annually, often at the world-renowned course at St. Andrews in Scotland. The All-England (Wimbledon) Championships is one of the world’s leading tennis competitions. Celebrated horse-racing events include the Royal Ascot, the Derby, and the Grand National steeplechase. The Henley Royal Regatta is the world’s premiere rowing championship.
Although the United Kingdom’s climate often rewards staying indoors, the British are enthusiasts of outdoor leisure activities and are well served by an extensive network of hiking and bicycling paths, national parks, and other amenities. Especially popular are the Lake District, which preserves a scenic area commemorated in many works by English poets; the rugged Scottish Highlands and Inner Hebrides islands; and the mountainous Welsh region of Snowdonia National Park, a magnet for climbers from around the world.
Media and publishing
The communications media—press, publishing, broadcasting, and entertainment—reach audiences ranging from the millions for television, radio, and national newspapers to small minorities for local papers, specialist periodicals, or experimental theatre and film. In addition to their presence in print, most newspapers disseminate information through the Internet, to which access grew rapidly during the late 1990s. By the early 21st century about one-third of all households had personal computers with access to the Internet.
Newspapers
In both sales and reputation the national papers published in London dominate. Within the national newspaper business in the United Kingdom, a distinction has developed between popular papers (often tabloids) with multimillion circulation and quality broadsheet papers with relatively small sales. Generally, British newspapers are not formally tied to specific political parties. However, most display clear political sympathies that are usually determined by their proprietors. The tabloid Daily Mail and the broadsheet The Daily Telegraph have consistently supported the Conservative Party, while the tabloid The Daily Mirror and the broadsheet The Guardian (published in both London and Manchester) have normally supported Labour. The Times of London is one of the world’s oldest newspapers. The Sun—long the United Kingdom’s biggest-selling newspaper, whose popularity since it was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News International company in 1969 has stemmed from a diet of sensational personality-based news stories, show-business gossip, lively sports reporting, and pictures of scantily dressed young women—supported Labour in the early 1970s, switched to the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and switched back again to Labour in the late 1990s only to return to the Conservatives by the early 21st century. Metro, a free paper launched in 1999, now rivals The Sun in terms of circulation. In England there are also several regional dailies and weeklies and national weeklies—some targeting particular ethnic communities.
The Welsh press includes several daily papers (e.g., the Western Mail and the South Wales Echo) as well as a number of weekly English-language, bilingual, or Welsh-language newspapers. Scotland has national daily newspapers based in Edinburgh and Glasgow with wide circulation (e.g., The Scotsman, the Daily Record, and The Herald) and a number of regional weeklies as well. Northern Ireland’s daily papers (e.g., the Belfast Telegraph and The Irish News) are all published in Belfast. There is a large periodical press in the United Kingdom that ranges from such traditional publications as The Economist, The Spectator, and New Statesman to more specialized and, often, more mercurial journals.
Broadcasting
The BBC, which had been established as an independent public corporation in 1927, held a monopoly of both radio and television broadcasting until 1954, when the Independent Television Authority (ITA) was established to provide the facilities for commercial television companies. The ITA’s successor today is the Office of Communications (Ofcom). Created by the Communications Act of 2003, Ofcom is responsible for regulating all commercial radio and television services, including satellite and cable, as well as all wired, wireless, and broadband telecommunications. Commercial television broadcasters include Channel Four and the ITV network. Almost every household receives the terrestrial television channels, and by the early 21st century about one in four households also could receive several dozen additional channels by satellite or cable. The satellite and cable market is dominated by Sky PLC (formerly BSkyB), which is partly owned by Murdoch’s News International. Sky, which serves Austria, Germany, Ireland, and Italy as well as the United Kingdom, also operates a 24-hour news channel and several sports channels.
A new 11-year charter for the BBC was enacted in 2016. Under it the BBC continues to draw its revenue from license fees (on a scale fixed by the government) from persons owning television sets. Its governance, however, shifted from the external BBC Trust and internal BBC Executive to a new “unitary board,” the majority of whose members are appointed by the BBC. The board also includes members nominated by the government whose involvement guarantees that the individual interests of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are represented. Whereas regulation of the BBC was formerly provided by the BBC Trust, that responsibility now falls to Ofcom and its governing board, which also license and regulate commercial television companies, which earn revenue by selling advertising time and (in the case of some satellite and cable companies) subscription and pay-per-view channels. The BBC operates two terrestrial television channels, and Ofcom operates three. On its second television channel, the BBC tends to offer programs of above-average intellectual and cultural interest—competition that the Channel Four commercial channel meets with its own cultural programs. The BBC also provides a 24-hour news service and a channel devoted to live proceedings of Parliament to people able to receive satellite, cable, or digital television services. In addition, BBC Radio operates a comprehensive external service, broadcasting around the world in more than 40 languages, as well as a world service in English 24 hours a day.
Both the BBC and terrestrial commercial channels supply educational programs for schools and for adult studies. The Open University, offering degree courses to people who lack formal academic qualifications, uses educational programs that are broadcast by the BBC; these programs are backed by correspondence courses.
The BBC and Ofcom are public bodies that in the last resort can be controlled by the government, and Parliament can alter the terms of their authority. The government has the statutory power to veto a broadcast, but only rarely does it interfere with the day-to-day management of the BBC or Ofcom. There are more than 30 BBC local radio stations and more than 200 commercial local radio stations serving the United Kingdom.
For a more-detailed discussion of cultural life in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, see the cultural life sections of the articles England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Peter KellnerThe Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaHistory
This discussion encompasses the history of England and Great Britain. Histories of the other three constituent parts of the United Kingdom can be found in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
Ancient Britain
Archaeologists working in Norfolk in the early 21st century discovered stone tools that suggest the presence of humans in Britain from about 800,000 to 1 million years ago. These startling discoveries underlined the extent to which archaeological research is responsible for any knowledge of Britain before the Roman conquest (begun 43 CE). Britain’s ancient history is thus lacking in detail, for archaeology can rarely identify personalities, motives, or exact dates or present more than a general overview. All that is available is a picture of successive cultures and some knowledge of economic development. But even in Roman times Britain lay on the periphery of the civilized world, and Roman historians, for the most part, provide for that period only a framework into which the results of archaeological research can be fitted. Britain truly emerged into the light of history only after the Saxon settlements in the 5th century CE.
Until late in the Mesolithic Period, Britain formed part of the continental landmass and was easily accessible to migrating hunters. The cutting of the land bridge, about 6000–5000 BCE, had important effects: migration became more difficult and remained for long impossible to large numbers. Thus Britain developed insular characteristics, absorbing and adapting rather than fully participating in successive continental cultures. And within the island geography worked to a similar end; the fertile southeast was more receptive of influence from the adjacent continent than were the less-accessible hill areas of the west and north. Yet in certain periods the use of sea routes brought these too within the ambit of the continent.
From the end of the Ice Age (c. 11,000 BCE), there was a gradual amelioration of climate leading to the replacement of tundra by forest and of reindeer hunting by that of red deer and elk. Valuable insight on contemporary conditions was gained by the excavation of a lakeside settlement at Star Carr, North Yorkshire, which was occupied for about 20 successive winters by hunting people in the 8th millennium BCE.
Pre-Roman Britain
Neolithic Period
A major change occurred about 4000 BCE with the introduction of agriculture by Neolithic immigrants from the coasts of western and possibly northwestern Europe. They were pastoralists as well as tillers of the soil. Tools were commonly of flint won by mining, but axes of volcanic rock were also traded by prospectors exploiting distant outcrops. The dead were buried in communal graves of two main kinds: in the west, tombs were built out of stone and concealed under mounds of rubble; in the stoneless eastern areas the dead were buried under long barrows (mounds of earth), which normally contained timber structures. Other evidence of religion comes from enclosures (e.g., Windmill Hill, Wiltshire), which are now believed to have been centres of ritual and of seasonal tribal feasting. From them developed, late in the 3rd millennium, more clearly ceremonial ditch-enclosed earthworks known as henge monuments. Some, like Durrington Walls, Wiltshire, are of great size and enclose subsidiary timber circles. British Neolithic culture thus developed its own individuality.
Bronze Age
Early in the 2nd millennium or perhaps even earlier, from about 2300 BCE, changes were introduced by the Beaker folk from the Low Countries and the middle Rhine. These people buried their dead in individual graves, often with the drinking vessel that gives their culture its name. The earliest of them still used flint; later groups, however, brought a knowledge of metallurgy and were responsible for the exploitation of gold and copper deposits in Britain and Ireland. They may also have introduced an Indo-European language. Trade was dominated by the chieftains of Wessex, whose rich graves testify to their success. Commerce was far-flung, in one direction to Ireland and Cornwall and in the other to central Europe and the Baltic, whence amber was imported. Amber bead spacers from Wessex have been found in the shaft graves at Mycenae in Greece. It was, perhaps, this prosperity that enabled the Wessex chieftains to construct the remarkable monument of shaped sarsens (large sandstones) known as Stonehenge III. Originally a late Neolithic henge, Stonehenge was uniquely transformed in Beaker times with a circle of large bluestone monoliths transported from southwest Wales.
Little is known in detail of the early and middle Bronze Age. Because of present ignorance of domestic sites, these periods are mainly defined by technological advances and changes in tools or weapons. In general, the southeast of Britain continued in close contact with the continent and the north and west with Ireland.
From about 1200 BCE there is clearer evidence for agriculture in the south; the farms consisted of circular huts in groups with small oblong fields and stock enclosures. This type of farm became standard in Britain down to and into the Roman period. From the 8th century onward, British communities developed close contacts with their continental European neighbours. Some of the earliest hill forts in Britain were constructed in this period (e.g., Beacon Hill, near Ivinghoe, Buckinghamshire; or Finavon, Angus); though formally belonging to the late Bronze Age, they usher in the succeeding period.
Iron Age
Knowledge of iron, introduced in the 7th century, was a merely incidental fact: it does not signify a change of population. The centuries 700–400 BCE saw continued development of contact with continental Europe. Yet the greater availability of iron facilitated land clearance and thus the growth of population. The earliest ironsmiths made daggers of the Hallstatt type but of a distinctively British form. The settlements were also of a distinctively British type, with the traditional round house, the “Celtic” system of farming with its small fields, and storage pits for grain.
The century following 600 BCE saw the building of many large hill forts; these suggest the existence of powerful chieftains and the growth of strife as increasing population created pressures on the land. By 300 BCE swords were making their appearance once more in place of daggers. Finally, beginning in the 3rd century, a British form of La Tène Celtic art was developed to decorate warlike equipment such as scabbards, shields, and helmets, and eventually also bronze mirrors and even domestic pottery. During the 2nd century the export of Cornish tin, noted before 300 by Pytheas of Massalia, a Greek explorer, continued; evidence of its destination is provided by the Paul (Cornwall) hoard of north Italian silver coins. In the 1st century BCE this trade was in the hands of the Veneti of Brittany; their conquest (56 BCE) by Julius Caesar, who destroyed their fleet, seems to have put an end to it.
By 200 Britain had fully developed its insular “Celtic” character. The emergence, however, of the British tribes known to Roman historians was due to limited settlement by tribesmen from Belgic Gaul. Coin finds suggest that southeast Britain was socially and economically bound to Belgic Gaul. The result was a distinctive culture in southeast Britain (especially in Kent and north of the Thames) which represented a later phase of the continental Celtic La Tène culture. Its people used coins and the potter’s wheel and cremated their dead, and their better equipment enabled them to begin the exploitation of heavier soils for agriculture.
Roman Britain
The conquest
Julius Caesar conquered Gaul between 58 and 50 BCE and invaded Britain in 55 or 54 BCE, thereby bringing the island into close contact with the Roman world. Caesar’s description of Britain at the time of his invasions is the first coherent account extant. From about 20 BCE it is possible to distinguish two principal powers: the Catuvellauni north of the Thames led by Tasciovanus, successor of Caesar’s adversary Cassivellaunus, and, south of the river, the kingdom of the Atrebates ruled by Commius and his sons Tincommius, Eppillus, and Verica. Tasciovanus was succeeded in about 5 CE by his son Cunobelinus, who, during a long reign, established power all over the southeast, which he ruled from Camulodunum (Colchester). Beyond these kingdoms lay the Iceni in what is now Norfolk, the Corieltavi in the Midlands, the Dobuni (Dobunni) in the area of Gloucestershire, and the Durotriges in that of Dorset, all of whom issued coins and probably had Belgic rulers. Behind these again lay further independent tribes—the Dumnonii of Devon, the Brigantes in the north, and the Silures and Ordovices in Wales. The Belgic and semi-Belgic tribes later formed the civilized nucleus of the Roman province and thus contributed greatly to Roman Britain.
The client relationships that Caesar had established with certain British tribes were extended by Augustus. In particular, the Atrebatic kings welcomed Roman aid in their resistance to Catuvellaunian expansion. The decision of the emperor Claudius to conquer the island was the result partly of his personal ambition, partly of British aggression. Verica had been driven from his kingdom and appealed for help, and it may have been calculated that a hostile Catuvellaunian supremacy would endanger stability across the Channel. Under Aulus Plautius an army of four legions was assembled, together with a number of auxiliary regiments consisting of cavalry and infantry raised among warlike tribes subject to the empire. After delay caused by the troops’ unwillingness to cross the ocean, which they then regarded as the boundary of the human world, a landing was made at Richborough, Kent, in 43 CE. The British under Togodumnus and Caratacus, sons and successors of Cunobelinus, were taken by surprise and defeated. They retired to defend the Medway crossing near Rochester but were again defeated in a hard battle. The way to Camulodunum lay open, but Plautius halted at the Thames to await the arrival of the emperor, who took personal command of the closing stages of the campaign. In one short season the main military opposition had been crushed: Togodumnus was dead and Caratacus had fled to Wales. The rest of Britain was by no means united, for Belgic expansion had created tensions. Some tribes submitted, and subduing the rest remained the task for the year 44. For this purpose smaller expeditionary forces were formed consisting of single legions or parts of legions with their auxilia (subsidiary allied troops). The best-documented campaign is that of Legion II under its legate Vespasian starting from Chichester, where the Atrebatic kingdom was restored; the Isle of Wight was taken and the hill forts of Dorset reduced. Legion IX advanced into Lincolnshire, and Legion XIV probably across the Midlands toward Leicester. Colchester was the chief base, but the fortresses of individual legions at this stage have not yet been identified.
By the year 47, when Plautius was succeeded as commanding officer by Ostorius Scapula, a frontier had been established from Exeter to the Humber, based on the road known as the Fosse Way; from this fact it appears that Claudius did not plan the annexation of the whole island but only of the arable southeast. The intransigence of the tribes of Wales, spurred on by Caratacus, however, caused Scapula to occupy the lowlands beyond the Fosse Way up to the River Severn and to move forward his forces into this area for the struggle with the Silures and Ordovices. The Roman forces were strengthened by the addition of Legion XX, released for this purpose by the foundation of a veteran settlement (colonia) at Camulodunum in the year 49. The colonia would form a strategic reserve as well as setting the Britons an example of Roman urban organization and life. A provincial centre for the worship of the emperor was also established. Scapula’s right flank was secured by the treaty relationship that had been established with Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes. Hers was the largest kingdom in Britain, occupying the whole area between Derbyshire and the Tyne; unfortunately it lacked stability, nor was it united behind its queen, who lost popularity when she surrendered the British resistance leader, Caratacus, to the Romans. Nevertheless, with occasional Roman military support, Cartimandua was maintained in power until 69 against the opposition led by her husband, Venutius, and this enabled Roman governors to concentrate on Wales.
By 60 CE much had been achieved; Suetonius Paulinus, governor from 59 to 61, was invading the island of Anglesey, the last stronghold of independence, when a serious setback occurred: this was the rebellion of Boudicca, queen of the Iceni. Under its king Prasutagus the tribe of the Iceni had enjoyed a position of alliance and independence; but on his death (60) the territory was forcibly annexed and outrages occurred. Boudicca was able to rally other tribes to her assistance; chief of these were the Trinovantes of Essex, who had many grievances against the settlers of Camulodunum for their arrogant seizure of lands. Roman forces were distant and scattered; and, before peace could be restored, the rebels had sacked Camulodunum, Verulamium (St. Albans), and London, the three chief centres of Romanized life in Britain. Paulinus acted harshly after his victory, but the procurator of the province, Julius Classicianus, with the revenues in mind and perhaps also because, as a Gaul by birth, he possessed a truer vision of provincial partnership with Rome, brought about his recall.
In the first 20 years of occupation some progress had been made in spreading Roman civilization. Towns had been founded, the imperial cult had been established, and merchants were busily introducing the Britons to material benefits. It was not, however, until the Flavian period, 69–96 CE, that real advances were made in this field. With the occupation of Wales by Julius Frontinus (governor from 74 to 78) and the advance into northern Scotland by Gnaeus Julius Agricola (78–84), troops were removed from southern Britain, and self-governing civitates, administrative areas based for the most part on the indigenous tribes, took over local administration. This involved a large program of urbanization and also of education, which continued into the 2nd century; Tacitus, in his biography of Agricola, emphasizes the encouragement given to it. Roman conquest of Wales was complete by 78, but Agricola’s invasion of Scotland failed because shortage of manpower prevented him from completing the occupation of the whole island. Moreover, when the British garrison was reduced (c. 90 CE) by a legion because of continental needs, it became evident that a frontier would have to be maintained in the north. After several experiments, the Solway–Tyne isthmus was chosen, and there the emperor Hadrian built his stone wall (c. 122–130).
Condition of the province
There was a marked contrast in attitude toward the Roman occupation between the lowland Britons and the inhabitants of Wales and the hill country of the north. The economy of the former was that of settled agriculture, and they were largely of Belgic stock; they soon accepted and appreciated the Roman way of life. The economy of the hill dwellers was pastoral, and the urban civilization of Rome threatened their freedom of life. Although resistance in Wales was stamped out by the end of the 1st century CE, Roman influences were nonetheless weak except in the Vale of Glamorgan. In the Pennines until the beginning of the 3rd century there were repeated rebellions, the more dangerous because of the threat of assistance from free Scotland.
Army and frontier
After the emperor Domitian had reduced the garrison in about the year 90, three legions remained; their permanent bases were established at York, Chester, and Caerleon. The legions formed the foundation of Roman military power, but they were supplemented in garrison duty by numerous smaller auxiliary regiments both of cavalry and infantry, either 1,000 or 500 strong. These latter garrisoned the wall and were stationed in a network of other forts established for police work in Wales and northern England. With 15,000 legionaries and about 40,000 auxiliaries, the army of Britain was very powerful; its presence had economic as well as political results. Hadrian’s Wall was the most impressive frontier work in the Roman Empire. Despite a period in the following two reigns when another frontier was laid out on the Glasgow–Edinburgh line—the Antonine Wall, built of turf—the wall of Hadrian came to be the permanent frontier of Roman Britain. The northern tribes only twice succeeded in passing it, and then at moments when the garrison was fighting elsewhere. In the late Roman period, when sea raiding became prevalent, the wall lost its preeminence as a defense for the province, but it was continuously held until the end of the 4th century. But although they withdrew to Hadrian’s line not later than the year 180, the Romans never abandoned interest in southern Scotland. In the 2nd century their solution was military occupation. In the 3rd, after active campaigning (208–211) by the emperor Septimius Severus and his sons during which permanent bases were built on the east coast of Scotland, the solution adopted by the emperor Caracalla was regulation of relationship by treaties. These, perhaps supported by subsidies, were enforced by supervision of the whole Lowlands by patrols based on forts beyond the wall. During the 4th century more and more reliance was placed on friendly native states, and patrols were withdrawn.
Administration
Britain was an imperial province. The governor represented the emperor, exercising supreme military as well as civil jurisdiction. As commander of three legions he was a senior general of consular rank. From the late 1st century he was assisted on the legal side by a legatus juridicus. The finances were in the hands of the provincial procurator, an independent official of equestrian status whose staff supervised imperial domains and the revenues of mines in addition to normal taxation. In the early 3rd century Britain was divided into two provinces in order to reduce the power of its governor to rebel, as Albinus had done in 196: Britannia Superior had its capital at London and a consular governor in control of two legions and a few auxiliaries; Britannia Inferior, with its capital at York, was under a praetorian governor with one legion but many more auxiliaries.
Local administration was of varied character. First came the chartered towns. By the year 98 Lincoln and Gloucester had joined Camulodunum as coloniae, and by 237 York had become a fourth. Coloniae of Roman citizens enjoyed autonomy with a constitution based on that of republican Rome, and Roman citizens had various privileges before the law. It is likely that Verulamium was chartered as a Latin municipium (free town); in such a town the annual magistrates were rewarded with Roman citizenship. The remainder of the provincials ranked as peregrini (subjects). In military districts control was in the hands of fort prefects responsible to legionary commanders; but by the late 1st century local self-government, as already stated, was granted to civitates peregrinae, whose number tended to increase with time. These also had republican constitutions, being controlled by elected councils and annual magistrates and having responsibility for raising taxes and administering local justice. In the 1st century there were also client kingdoms whose rulers were allied to Rome; Cogidubnus, Verica’s successor, who had his capital at Chichester, is the best known. But Rome regarded these as temporary expedients, and none outlasted the Flavian Period (69–96).
Roman society
Pre-Roman Celtic tribes had been ruled by kings and aristocracies; the Roman civitates remained in the hands of the rich because of the heavy expense of office. But since trade and industry now yielded increasing profits and the old aristocracies no longer derived wealth from war but only from large estates, it is likely that new men rose to power. Roman citizenship was now an avenue of social advancement, and it could be obtained by 25 years’ service in the auxiliary forces as well as (more rarely) by direct grants. Soldiers and traders from other parts of the empire significantly enhanced the cosmopolitan character of the population, as did the large number of legionaries, who were already citizens and many of whom must have settled locally. The population of Roman Britain at its peak amounted perhaps to about two million.
Economy
Even before the conquest, according to the Greek geographer Strabo, Britain exported gold, silver, iron, hides, slaves, and hounds in addition to grain. A Roman gold mine is known in Wales, but its yield was not outstanding. Iron was worked in many places but only for local needs; silver, obtained from lead, was of more significance. But the basis of the economy was agriculture, and the conquest greatly stimulated production because of the requirements of the army. According to Tacitus, grain to feed the troops was levied as a tax; correspondingly more had to be grown before a profit could be made. The pastoralists in Wales and the north probably had to supply leather, which the Roman army needed in quantity for tents, boots, uniforms, and shields. A military tannery is known at Catterick. A profit could, nonetheless, be won from the land because of the increasing demand from the towns. At the same time the development of a system of large estates (villas) relieved the ancient Celtic farming system of the necessity of shouldering the whole burden. Small peasant farmers tended to till the lighter, less-productive, more easily worked soils. Villa estates were established on heavier, richer soils, sometimes on land recently won by forest clearance, itself a result of the enormous new demand for building timber from the army and the new towns and for fuel for domestic heating and for public baths. The villa owners had access to the precepts of classical farming manuals and also to the improved equipment made available by Roman technology. Their growing prosperity is vouched for by excavation: there are few villas that did not increase in size and luxury as corridors and wings were added or mosaics and bath blocks provided. At least by the 3rd century some landowners were finding great profit in wool; Diocletian’s price edict (301 CE) shows that at least two British cloth products had won an empire-wide reputation. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Cotswold district was one of the centres of this industry.
Trade in imported luxury goods ranging from wine to tableware and bronze trinkets vastly increased as traders swarmed in behind the army to exploit new markets. The profits of developing industries went similarly at first to foreign capitalists. This is clearly seen in the exploitation of silver-lead ore and even in the pottery industry. The Mendip lead field was being worked under military control as early as the year 49, but under Nero (54–68) both there and in Flintshire, and not much later also in the Derbyshire lead field, freedmen—the representatives of Roman capital—were at work. By Vespasian’s reign (69–79) organized companies (societates) of prospectors are attested. Roman citizens, who must in the context be freedmen, are also found organizing the pottery industry in the late 1st century. Large profits were made by continental businessmen in the first two centuries not only from such sources but also by the import on a vast scale of high-class pottery from Gaul and the Rhineland and on a lesser scale of glass vessels, luxury metalware, and Spanish oil and wine. A large market existed among the military, and the Britons themselves provided a second. Eventually this adverse trade balance was rectified by the gradual capture of the market by British products. Much of the exceptional prosperity of 4th-century Britain must have been due to its success in retaining available profits at home.
A final important point is the role of the Roman army in the economic development of the frontier regions. The presence as consumers of large forces in northern Britain created a revolution in previous patterns of trade and civilized settlement. Cereal production was encouraged in regions where it had been rare, and large settlements grew up in which many of the inhabitants must have been retired soldiers with an interest in the land as well as in trade and industry.
Towns
Belgic Britain had large centres of population but not towns in the Roman sense of having not merely streets and public buildings but also the amenities and local autonomy of a city. In Britain these had therefore to be provided if Roman civilization and normal methods of provincial administration were to be introduced. Thus a policy of urbanization existed in which the legions, as the nearest convenient source of architects and craftsmen, played an organizing role. The earlier towns consisted of half-timbered buildings; before 100 CE only public buildings seem to have been of stone. The administrative capitals had regular street grids, a forum with basilica (public hall), public baths, and temples; a few had theatres and amphitheatres, too. With few exceptions they were undefended. In the 3rd century, town walls were provided, not so much as a precaution in unsettled times but as a means of keeping operational the earthwork defenses already provided during a crisis at the end of the 2nd century. These towns grew in size to about 100–130 acres with populations of about 5,000; a few were twice this size. The majority of towns in Roman Britain seem to have developed out of traders’ settlements in the vicinity of early garrison-forts: those that were not selected as administrative centres remained dependent for their existence on economic factors, serving either as centres of trade or manufacture or else as markets for the agricultural peasantry. They varied considerably in size. In the north, where garrisons were permanently established, quite large trading settlements grew up in their vicinity, and at least some of these would rank as towns.
Villas
Apart from the exceptional establishment at Fishbourne, in West Sussex, whose Italian style and luxurious fittings show that it was the palace of King Cogidubnus, the houses of Romano-British villas had simple beginnings and were of a provincial type. A few owners were prosperous enough in the 2nd century to afford mosaics; but the great period of villa prosperity lay in the 4th century, when many villas grew to impressive size. Their importance was economic and has already been described. Much remains to be learned from full excavation of their subsidiary work buildings. Larger questions of tenure and organization are probably insoluble in the absence of documentary evidence, for it is dangerous to draw analogies from classical sources since conditions in Celtic Britain were very different from those of the Mediterranean world.
Religion and culture
A great variety of religious cults were to be found. In addition to numerous Celtic deities of local or wider significance, the gods of the classical pantheon were introduced and were often identified with their Celtic counterparts. In official circles the worship of the state gods of Rome and of the imperial cult was duly observed. In addition merchants and soldiers introduced oriental cults, among them Christianity. The latter, however, made little headway until the late 4th century, though the frescoes at Lullingstone in Kent and the mosaics at Hinton St. Mary in Dorset attest its presence among villa owners. Although classical temples are sometimes found in towns, the normal temple was of the Romano-Celtic type consisting of a small square shrine and surrounding portico; temples of this type are found in town and country alike.
Romanization was strongest in the towns and among the upper classes, as would be expected; there is evidence that in the countryside Celtic continued to be spoken, though it was not written. Many people were bilingual: graffiti prove that even artisans wrote Latin. Evidence of the classical education of the villa owners is provided by their mosaics, which prove an acquaintance with classical mythology and even with the Aeneid of Virgil. Sculpture and wall painting were both novelties in Roman Britain. Statues or busts in bronze or marble were imported from Gaulish or Mediterranean workshops, but British sculptors soon learned their trade and at their best produced attractive works in a provincial idiom, often for votive purposes. Many cruder works were also executed whose interest lies in the proof they afford that the conventions of the classical world had penetrated even to the lower classes. Mosaic floors, found in towns and villas, were at first, as at Fishbourne, laid by imported craftsmen. But there is evidence that by the middle of the 2nd century a local firm was at work at Colchester and Verulamium, and in the 4th century a number of local mosaic workshops can be recognized by their styles. One of the most skilled of these was based in Cirencester.
Roman civilization thus took root in Britain; its growth was more obvious in urban circles than among the peasants and weakest in the resistant highland zone. It was a provincial version of Roman culture, but one with recognizably British traits.
The decline of Roman rule
The reforms of Diocletian ended the chaos of the 3rd century and ushered in the late imperial period. Britain, however, for a short time became a separate empire through the rebellion (286/287) of Carausius. This man had been in command against the Saxon pirates in the Channel and by his naval power was able to maintain his independence. His main achievement was to complete the new system of Saxon Shore forts around the southeastern coasts. At first he sought recognition as coemperor, but this was refused. In 293 the fall of Boulogne to Roman forces led to his murder and the accession of Allectus, who, however, fell in his turn when Constantius I invaded Britain in 296. Allectus had withdrawn troops from the north to oppose the landing, and Hadrian’s Wall seems to have been attacked, for Constantius had to restore the frontier as well as reform the administration. He divided Britain into four provinces, and in the same period the civil power was separated from the military. Late Roman sources show three separate commands respectively under the dux Britanniarum (commander of the Britains), the comes litoris Saxonici (count of the Saxon Shore), and the comes Britanniarum, though the dates of their establishment are unknown and may not have been identical.
The 4th century was a period of great prosperity in towns and countryside alike. Britain had escaped the barbarian invasions of the 3rd century and may have seemed a safe refuge for wealthy continentals. Its weakness lay in the fact that its defense was ultimately controlled by distant rather than local rulers. The garrison was perhaps weakened by withdrawals for the civil war of Magnentius (350–351); at any rate in 367 a military disaster occurred due to concerted seaborne attacks from the Picts of Scotland and the Scots of Ireland. But, though the frontier and forts behind it suffered severely, there is little trace of damage to towns or villas. Count Theodosius in 369 restored order and strengthened the defenses of the towns with external towers designed to mount artillery. Prosperity continued, but the withdrawals of troops by Magnus Maximus in 383 and again at the end of the century by Stilicho weakened security. Thus, when Constantine III, who was declared emperor by the army in Britain in 407, took further troops to Gaul, the forces remaining in the island were insufficient to provide protection against increasing Pictish and Saxon raids. The Britons appealed to the legitimate emperor, Honorius, who was unable to send assistance but authorized the cities to provide for their own defense (410). This marks the end of Roman Britain, for the central government never reestablished control, but for a generation there was little other outward change.
Power fell gradually into the hands of tyrants. Chief of these was Vortigern (c. 425), who, unlike earlier usurpers, made no attempt to become Roman emperor but was content with power in Britain. Independence was producing separate interests. By this date Christianity had made considerable headway in the island, but the leaders followed the heretical teaching of Pelagius, himself a Briton, who had emphasized the importance of the human will over divine grace in the achievement of salvation. It has been held that the self-reliance shown in the maintenance of national independence was inspired by this philosophy. Yet there was also a powerful Roman Catholic party anxious to reforge the links with Rome, in support of whom St. Germanus of Auxerre visited Britain in 429. It may have been partly to thwart the plans of this party that Vortigern made the mistake (c. 430; the date given by the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine scholar Bede [died 735] is between 446 and 454) of inviting Saxons to settle and garrison strategic areas of the east coast, though he certainly also had in mind the need to ward off seaborne raids by Picts, which at this time were troublesome.
Planned settlement of this sort is the best explanation for the earliest Saxon settlements found around the mouths of the east-coast estuaries and also in the central southeast region around Oxford. For a time the system worked successfully, but, when in 442 these Saxon foederati (allies) rebelled and called in others of their race to help them, it was found that they had been given a stranglehold on Britain. A long period of warfare and chaos was inaugurated, which was economically disastrous. It was probably this period that saw the disintegration of the majority of the villa estates; with the breakdown of markets and the escape of slaves, villas ceased to be viable and must have gradually fallen into ruin, though the land itself did not cease to be cultivated. A few villas met a violent end. The towns, under the protection of their strong defenses, at first provided refuge at any rate for the rich who could leave their lands; but by degrees decay set in as trade declined and finally even the supply of food was threatened. About 446 the British made a vain appeal for help to the Roman general Aetius (the “Groans of the Britons” mentioned in the De excidio et conquestu Britanniae of the British writer Gildas). For several decades they suffered reverses; many emigrated to Brittany. In the second half of the 5th century Ambrosius Aurelianus and the shadowy figure of Arthur began to turn the tide by the use of cavalry against the ill-armed Saxon infantry. A great victory was won at Mons Badonicus (a site not identifiable) toward 500: now it was Saxons who emigrated, and the British lived in peace all through the first half of the 6th century, as Gildas records. But in the second half the situation slowly worsened.
Sheppard Sunderland FrereThe Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaAnglo-Saxon England
The invaders and their early settlements
Although Germanic foederati, allies of Roman and post-Roman authorities, had settled in England in the 4th century CE, tribal migrations into Britain began about the middle of the 5th century. The first arrivals, according to the 6th-century British writer Gildas, were invited by a British king to defend his kingdom against the Picts and Scots. A tradition reached Bede that the first mercenaries were from three tribes—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—which he locates on the Cimbric Peninsula, and by implication the coastlands of northwestern Germany. Archaeology, however, suggests a more complex picture showing many tribal elements, Frankish leadership in the first waves, and Frisian contacts. Revolt by these mercenaries against their British employers in the southeast of England led to large-scale Germanic settlements near the coasts and along the river valleys. Their advance was halted for a generation by native resistance, which tradition associates with the names of Ambrosius Aurelianus and Arthur, culminating in victory about 500 by the Britons at the Battle of Mons Badonicus at an unidentified location. But a new Germanic drive began about 550, and before the century had ended, the Britons had been driven west to the borders of Dumnonia (Cornwall and Devon) and to the Welsh Marches, while invaders were advancing west of the Pennines and northward into Lothian.
The fate of the native British population is difficult to determine. The case against its large-scale survival rests largely on linguistic evidence, such as the scarcity of Romano-British words continuing into English and the use of English even by Northumbrian peasants. The case against wholesale extermination also rests on linguistic evidence, such as place-names and personal names, as well as on evidence provided by urban and rural archaeology. Certainly few Britons in England were above servile condition. By the end of the 7th century people regarded themselves as belonging to “the nation of the English,” though divided into several kingdoms. This sense of unity was strengthened during long periods when all kingdoms south of the Humber acknowledged the overlordship (called by Bede an imperium) of a single ruler, known as a bretwalda, a word first recorded in the 9th century.
The first such overlord was Aelle of Sussex, in the late 5th century; the second was Ceawlin of Wessex, who died in 593. The third overlord, Aethelberht of Kent, held this power in 597 when the monk Augustine led a mission from Rome to Kent; Kent was the first English kingdom to be converted to Christianity. The Christian church provided another unifying influence, overriding political divisions, although it was not until 669 that the church in England acknowledged a single head.
The social system
Aethelberht set down in writing a code of laws; although it reflects Christian influence, the system underlying the laws was already old, brought over from the Continent in its main lines. The strongest social bond of this system was that of kinship; every freeman depended on his kindred for protection, and the social classes were distinguished by the amount of their wergild (the sum that the kindred could accept in place of vengeance if a man were killed). The normal freeman was the ceorl, an independent peasant landowner; below him in Kent were persons with lower wergilds, who were either freedmen or, as were similar persons in Wessex, members of a subject population; above the ceorls were the nobles—some perhaps noble by birth but more often men who had risen by service as companions of the king—with a wergild three times that of a ceorl in Kent, six times that of a ceorl elsewhere. The tie that bound a man to his lord was as strong as that of the kindred. Both nobles and ceorls might possess slaves, who had no wergild and were regarded as chattels.
Early traditions, embodied in king lists, imply that all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Sussex were established by rulers deemed to have descended from the gods. No invading chieftain is described by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as “king”—although the title was soon used—and chieftainship, as before the conquest, remained central to Germanic tribal society. The sacral character of kingship later increased and changed in meaning as the Christian ruler was set apart by coronation and anointment. In the established English kingdoms the king had special rights—compensations for offenses committed in his presence or his home or against anyone under his protection; rights to hospitality, which later became a food rent charged on all land; and rights to various services. He rewarded his followers with grants of land, probably at first for their lifetime only, but the need to provide permanent endowment for the church brought into being a type of land that was free from most royal dues and that did not revert to the king. From the latter part of the 7th century such land was sometimes conferred by charter. It became common to make similar grants by charter to laymen, with power to bequeath; but three services—the building of forts and bridges and service in the army—were almost invariably excepted from the immunity. The king received fines for various crimes; but a man’s guilt was established in an assembly of freemen, where the accused tried to establish his innocence by his oath—supported by oath helpers—and, if this failed, by ordeal. On matters of importance the king normally consulted his witan (wise men).
There were local variations in the law, and over a period of time the law developed to meet changed circumstances. As kingdoms grew larger, for example, an official called an ealderman was needed to administer part of the area, and later a sheriff was needed to look after the royal rights in each shire. The acceptance of Christianity made it necessary to fit the clergy into the scale of compensations and assign a value to their oaths and to fix penalties for offenses such as sacrilege, heathen practices, and breaches of the marriage law. But the basic principles were little changed.
The Anglo-Saxons left England a land of villages, but the continuity of village development is uncertain. In the 7th–8th centuries, in what is called the “Middle Saxon shuffle,” many early villages were abandoned, and others, from which later medieval villages descended, were founded. The oldest villages are not, as previously thought, those with names ending in -ingas but rather those ending in -ham and -ingham. English trading towns, whose names often end in -wich, from the Latin vicus (“village”), developed in the Middle Saxon period, and other urban settlements grew out of and date from the Alfredian and later defenses against Viking attack.
The conversion to Christianity
Place-names containing the names of gods or other heathen elements are plentiful enough to prove the vitality of heathenism and to account for the slow progress of conversion in some areas. In Kent, the first kingdom to accept Christianity, King Wihtred’s laws in 695 contained clauses against heathen worship. The conversion renewed relations with Rome and the Continent; but the full benefit of this was delayed because much of England was converted by the Celtic church, which had lost contact with Rome.
Augustine’s mission in 597 converted Kent; but it had only temporary success in Essex, which reverted to heathenism in 616. A mission sent under Bishop Paulinus from Kent to Northumbria in 627 converted King Edwin and many of his subjects in Northumbria and Lindsey. It received a setback in 632 when Edwin was killed and Paulinus withdrew to Kent. About 630 Archbishop Honorius of Canterbury sent a Burgundian, Felix, to convert East Anglia, and the East Anglian church thenceforth remained faithful to Canterbury. Soon after, the West Saxons were converted by Birinus, who came from Rome. Meanwhile, King Oswald began to restore Christianity in Northumbria, bringing Celtic missionaries from Iona. And it was the Celtic church that began in 653 to spread the faith among the Middle Angles, the Mercians, and the peoples of the Severn valley; it also won back Essex.
At first there was little friction between the Roman and Celtic missions. Oswald of Northumbria joined with Cynegils of Wessex in giving Dorchester-on-Thames as seat for Birinus’ bishopric; the Irishmen Maildubh in Wessex and Fursey in East Anglia worked in areas converted by the Roman church; and James the Deacon continued Paulinus’ work in Northumbria. Later, however, differences in usage—especially in the calculation of the date of Easter—caused controversy, which was settled in favour of the Roman party at the Synod of Whitby in 664. The adherents of Celtic usage either conformed or withdrew, and advocates of Roman practice became active in the north, the Midlands, and Essex. Theodore of Tarsus (arrived 669), the first Roman archbishop to be acknowledged all over England, was active in establishing a proper diocesan system, whereas in the Celtic church bishops tended to move freely without fixed sees and settled boundaries; he held the first synod of the English church at Hertford in 672, and this forbade a bishop to interfere in another’s diocese or any priest to move into another diocese without his bishop’s permission. Sussex and the Isle of Wight—the last outposts of heathenism—were converted by Bishop Wilfrid and his followers from 681 to 687 and thenceforth followed Roman usages.
The Anglo-Saxons attributed their conversion to Pope Gregory I, “the Apostle of the English,” who had sent Augustine. This may seem less than fair to the Celtic mission. The Celtic church made a great impression by its asceticism, fervour, and simplicity, and it had a lasting influence on scholarship. Yet the period of Celtic dominance was only 30 years. The decision at Whitby made possible a form of organization better fitted for permanent needs than the looser system of the Celtic church.
The golden age of Bede
Within a century of Augustine’s landing, England was in the forefront of scholarship. This high standard arose from a combination of influences: that from Ireland, which had escaped the decay caused elsewhere by the barbarian invasions, and that from the Mediterranean, which reached England mainly through Archbishop Theodore and his companion, the abbot Adrian. Under Theodore and Adrian, Canterbury became a famous school, and men trained there took their learning to other parts of England. One of these men was Aldhelm, who had been a pupil of Maildubh (the Irish founder of Malmesbury); under Aldhelm, Malmesbury became an influential centre of learning. Aldhelm’s own works, in Latin verse and prose, reveal a familiarity with many Latin authors; his writings became popular among admirers of the ornate and artificial style he had learned from his Celtic teachers. Before long a liberal education could be had at such other West Saxon monasteries as Nursling and Wimborne.
The finest centre of scholarship was Northumbria. There Celtic and classical influences met: missionaries brought books from Ireland, and many Englishmen went to Ireland to study. Other Northumbrians went abroad, especially to Rome; among them was Benedict Biscop. Benedict returned from Rome with Theodore (668–669), spent some time in Canterbury, and then brought the learning acquired there to Northumbria. He founded the monasteries at Wearmouth (674) and Jarrow (682), where Bede spent his life. Benedict and Ceolfrith, abbot of Jarrow, brought books from the Continent and assembled the fine library that was available to Bede.
Bede (c. 672–735) is remembered as a great historian whose work never lost its value; but he was also a theologian regarded throughout the Middle Ages as second only to the Church Fathers. Nonetheless, even though he was outstanding, he did not work in isolation. Other Northumbrian houses—Lindisfarne, Whitby, and Ripon—produced saints’ lives, and Bede was in touch with many learned men, not only in Northumbria; there are also signs of scholarly activity in London and in East Anglia.
Moreover, in this period religious poetry was composed in the diction and technique of the older secular poetry in the vernacular. Beowulf, considered the greatest Old English poem, is sometimes assigned to this age, but the dating is uncertain. Art flourished, with a combination of native elements and influences from Ireland and the Mediterranean. The Hiberno-Saxon (or Anglo-Irish) style of manuscript illumination was evolved, its greatest example—the Lindisfarne Gospels—also showing classical influence. Masons from Gaul and Rome built stone churches. In Northumbria stone monuments with figure sculpture and vine-scroll patterns were set up. Churches were equipped with precious objects—some from abroad, some of native manufacture (even in heathen times the English had been skilled metalworkers). Manuscripts and works of art were taken abroad to churches founded by the English missions, and these churches, in turn, became centres of production. The great Sutton Hoo ship burial, discovered in 1939 at the burial site of the East Anglian royal house and perhaps the cenotaph of the bretwalda Raedwald (died c. 625), is further evidence of influences from abroad, revealing important Anglo-Saxon contacts with Scandinavia, Byzantium, France, and the Mediterranean.
The heptarchy of the United Kingdom
The supremacy of Northumbria and the rise of Mercia
When Northumbria became eminent in scholarship, its age of political importance was over. This political dominance had begun when Aethelfrith, ruling over the united Northumbrian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, defeated the Dalriadic Scots at Degsastan in 603 and the Welsh at Chester in 613–616. Aethelfrith was himself defeated and killed in 616 by Edwin, the exiled heir to Deira, with the help of Raedwald of East Anglia, then overlord of the southern peoples.
Edwin continued to defeat the Welsh and became the acknowledged overlord of all England except Kent: he annexed the British kingdom of Elmet, invaded North Wales, and captured Anglesey and the Isle of Man. But he fell at Hatfield in 632 before the forces of Cadwallon, king of Gwynedd, and of Penda, a Mercian chieftain. A year later Aethelfrith’s son Oswald destroyed Cadwallon and restored the kingdom of Northumbria, and he became overlord of all the lands south of the River Humber. But Mercia was becoming a serious rival; originally a small kingdom in the northwest Midlands, it had absorbed the peoples of the Severn valley, including the Hwicce, a West Saxon people annexed in 628 after a victory by Penda at Cirencester.
Penda threw off Northumbrian control when he defeated and killed Oswald in 641. He drove out Cenwalh of Wessex, who took refuge in East Anglia from 645 to 648. Penda’s control of Middle Anglia, where he made his son subking in 653, brought him to the East Anglian frontier; he invaded this kingdom three times, killing three of its kings. He was able to draw an army from a wide area, including East Anglia, when he invaded Northumbria in 654; nevertheless, he was defeated and killed by Oswiu, Oswald’s successor.
For a short time Oswiu was overlord of southern England, but a Mercian revolt put Penda’s son Wulfhere on the throne in 657, and he greatly extended Mercian power to the southeast and south. Wulfhere became overlord of Essex, with London, and of Surrey. He also held the West Saxon lands along the middle Thames and blocked any eastward advance of the West Saxons by capturing the Isle of Wight and the mainland opposite and giving them to his godson, Aethelwalh of Sussex. Yet Wulfhere’s reign ended in disaster; the Kentish monk Aedde, in his Life of St. Wilfrid, said Wulfhere roused all the southern peoples in an attack on Ecgfrith of Northumbria in 674 but was defeated and died soon after.
Ecgfrith took possession of Lindsey, a section of modern Lincolnshire, but he lost it to Aethelred of Mercia after the Battle of the Trent in 678. Thenceforward Northumbria was no threat to Mercian dominance because it was occupied in fighting the Picts in the north. After Ecgfrith was slain by them in 685, his successors took little part in external affairs.
Yet Mercian power was threatened from the south. Caedwalla had added Surrey, Sussex, and the Isle of Wight to the West Saxon kingdom and thus came near to uniting all lands south of the Thames into a single kingdom that might have held its own against Mercia. But this kingdom was short-lived. Kent became free from foreign interference in 694, two years after the accession of Wihtred, who reestablished the Kentish royal line. Sussex appears again as an independent kingdom; and Caedwalla’s successor, Ine, was mainly occupied in extending his territory to the west. After Wihtred’s death in 725 and Ine’s abdication in 726, both Kent and Wessex had internal troubles and could not resist the Mercian kings Aethelbald and Offa.
The great age of Mercia
Aethelbald succeeded in 716 to the rule of all the Midlands and to the control of Essex and London. By 731 all provinces south of the Humber were subject to him. Some of his charters use a regnal style suited to this dignity, such as “king not only of the Mercians but also of all provinces . . . of the South English” and rex Britanniae (a Latinization of bretwalda). Aethelbald held this position, with only occasional warfare, until his death, in 757—far longer than any previous holder of the imperium. St. Boniface praised the good order he maintained in his kingdom, though complaining of his immoral life and his encroachment on church privileges. Aethelbald was murdered by his own household.
Offa did not at once attain the powerful position that later caused Charles the Great (Charlemagne) to treat with him on equal terms; Cynewulf of Wessex recovered West Saxon lands by the middle Thames and did not submit until 779. Offa was overlord in Kent by 764, in Sussex and the district of Hastings by 771; he apparently lost his authority in Kent after the Battle of Otford in 776 but recovered it in 785. His use of an East Anglian mint shows him supreme there. He claimed greater powers than earlier overlords—subkings among the Hwicce and in Sussex dropped their royal titles and appeared as ealdermen, and he referred to a Kentish king as his thegn. The English scholar Alcuin spoke of the blood shed by Offa to secure the succession of his son, and fugitives from his kingdom sought asylum with Charles the Great. Charles treated Offa as if he were sole king of England, at least of the region south of the Humber; the only other king he acknowledged was the Northumbrian ruler. Offa seemed not to have claimed authority beyond the Humber but instead allied himself with King Aethelred of Northumbria by giving him his daughter in 794.
Offa appears on the continental scene more than had any previous English king. Charles wrote to him as “his dearest brother” and wished for a marriage between his own son Charles and Offa’s daughter. Offa’s refusal, unless Charles let one of his daughters marry Offa’s son Ecgfrith, led to a three-year quarrel in which Charles closed his ports to traders from England. This and a letter about regulating trade, written when the quarrel was over, provide evidence for the importance of cross-Channel trade, which was one reason for Offa’s reform of the coinage.
Imitating the action of Pippin III in 755, Offa took responsibility for the coinage, and thenceforward the king’s name normally appeared on coins. But the excellent quality in design and workmanship of his coins, especially those with his portrait, served an additional purpose: they had a propaganda value in bringing home the preeminence of the Mercian king not only to his English subjects but also to people on the Continent. Pope Adrian I regarded Offa with awe and respect.
Because Offa’s laws are lost, little is known of his internal government, though Alcuin praises it. Offa was able to draw on immense resources to build a dike to demarcate his frontier against Wales. In the greatness of its conception and the skill of its construction, the dike forms a fitting memorial to him. It probably belongs to his later years, and it secured Mercia from sudden incursions.
The church and scholarship in Offa’s time
Northumbria was still preeminent in scholarship, and the fame of the school of York, founded by Bede’s pupil Archbishop Egbert, attracted students from the Continent and from Ireland. Eventually it supplied Alcuin to take charge of the revival of learning inaugurated by Charles the Great; Alcuin’s writings exercised great influence on theological, biblical, and liturgical studies, and his pupils carried on his work well into the 9th century.
Learning was not confined to Northumbria; one Latin work was produced in East Anglia, and recent attribution of manuscripts to Lichfield suggests that Mercian scholarship has been underestimated. Offa himself took an interest in education, and men from all areas corresponded with the missionaries. The Mercian schools that supplied Alfred with scholars in the 9th century may go back to this period. Vernacular poetry was composed, perhaps including Beowulf and the poems of Cynewulf.
A steady advance was made in the creation of parishes, and monasticism flourished and received support from Offa. A great event in ecclesiastical history was the arrival of a papal legation in 787, the first since the conversion. It drew up reforming statutes, which were accepted by the two ecclesiastical provinces, meeting separately under the presidency of Offa and Aelfwald of Northumbria. Offa used the visit to secure the consecration of his son—the first recorded coronation ceremony in England—and also to have Mercia made into a metropolitan province with its see at Lichfield. The latter seemed desirable partly because he disliked the Kentish archbishop of Canterbury, Jaenberht, but also because it would seem fitting to him that the leading kingdom should be free from external interference in ecclesiastical affairs. This move was unpopular with the church, and in 802, when relations with Canterbury had improved, the archbishopric of Lichfield was abolished.
The decline of Mercia and the rise of Wessex
Offa died in 796, and his son died a few weeks later. Cenwulf, their successor, suppressed revolts in Kent and East Anglia, but he never attained Offa’s position. Cenwulf allowed Charles to intervene in Northumbria in 808 and restore Eardwulf (who had been driven from his kingdom) to the throne—a unique incident in Anglo-Saxon history. Mercian influence in Wessex was ended when Egbert became king there in 802, though there is no recorded warfare between the kingdoms for many years, during which Egbert conquered Cornwall and Cenwulf fought in Wales. But in 825 Egbert defeated Beornwulf of Mercia and then sent an army into Kent, with the result that he was accepted as king of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. In that same year the East Angles threw off the Mercian yoke, killing Beornwulf. In 829 Egbert became ruler of Mercia and all regions south of the Humber, which caused the chronicler to add his name to Bede’s list of kings who held the imperium, calling him bretwalda. The Northumbrians accepted Egbert without fighting. Yet he held this proud position only one year; then Wiglaf recovered the Mercian throne and ruled without subjection to Egbert.
By this time Danish Viking raids were a grave menace, and Aethelwulf, who succeeded his father Egbert in 839, had the wisdom to see that Mercia and Wessex must combine against the Vikings. Friendly relations between them were established by marriage alliances and by a peaceful settlement of boundaries; this paved the way for the acceptance in 886 of Alfred, king of Wessex, as lord of all the English who had not fallen under Danish rule.
The church and the monastic revival
To those who judged the church solely by the state of its monasteries, the first half of the 10th century seemed a period of inertia. In fact, the great tasks of converting the heathen settlers, restoring ecclesiastical organization in Danish areas, and repairing the damages of the invasions elsewhere must have absorbed much energy. Even so, learning and book production were not at so low an ebb as monastic reformers claimed. Moreover, new monasteries were founded and benefactions were made to older ones, even though, by post-revival standards, none of these monasteries was enforcing a strict monastic rule and several benefactions were held by secular priests. Alfred had failed to arouse much enthusiasm for monasticism. The movement for reform began in England about 940 and soon came under the influence of reforms in Fleury and Lorraine. King Edgar, an enthusiastic supporter, promoted the three chief reformers to important positions—Dunstan to Canterbury, Aethelwold to Winchester, and Oswald to Worcester and later to York. The secular clergy were violently ejected from Winchester and some other places; Oswald gradually replaced them with monks at Worcester. All three reformers founded new houses, including the great monasteries in the Fenlands, where older houses had perished in the Danish invasion; but Oswald had no success in Northumbria. The reformers, however, were concerned with more than monasticism—they paid great attention to other needs of their dioceses; the scholars Abbot Aelfric and Archbishop Wulfstan, trained by the reformers, directed much of their writings to improving the education and morals of the parish clergy and, through them, of the people.
The monastic revival resulted in a great revival of both vernacular and Latin literature, of manuscript production and illumination, and of other forms of art. It reached its zenith in the troubled years of King Ethelred II (reigned 978–1016), after a brief, though violent, reaction to monasticism following Edgar’s death. In the 11th century monasteries continued to be productive and new houses were founded; there was also a movement to impose a communal life on bodies of secular priests and to found houses of secular canons.
The Anglo-Danish state
The Danish conquest and the reigns of the Danish kings
Ethelred succeeded as a child in 978, after the murder of his stepbrother Edward. He took the throne in an atmosphere of insecurity and distrust, which partly accounts for the incompetence and treachery rife in his reign. Viking raids began in 980 and steadily increased in intensity. They were led by formidable leaders: from 991 to 994 by Olaf Tryggvason, later king of Norway, and frequently from 994 by Sweyn, king of Denmark. Ethelred’s massacre of the Danes in England on St. Brice’s Day, 1002, called for vengeance by Sweyn and, from 1009 to 1012, by a famous Viking, Thorkell the Tall. In 1013 the English, worn out by continuous warfare and heavy tributes to buy off the invaders, accepted Sweyn as king. Ethelred, his wife Emma, and his younger sons sought asylum with Richard, duke of Normandy, brother of Emma. Ethelred was recalled to England after Sweyn’s death in 1014; but Sweyn’s son Canute (Cnut) renewed the invasions and, in spite of valiant resistance by Ethelred’s son and successor, Edmund, obtained half of England after a victory at Ashingdon in October 1016 and the rest after Edmund’s death that November.
Canute rewarded some of his followers with English lands and ruthlessly got rid of some prominent Englishmen, among them Edmund’s brother Edwy. (Edmund’s infant sons, however, were carried away to safety in Hungary.) Yet Canute’s rule was not tyrannical, and his reign was remembered as a time of good order. The Danish element in his entourage diminished; and the Englishmen Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Godwine, Earl of Wessex, became the most powerful magnates. Canute married Ethelred’s widow, Emma, thus removing the danger of Norman support for her sons by Ethelred. Canute fought a successful campaign in Scotland in 1031, and Englishmen were drawn into his wars in Scandinavia, which made him lord of Norway. But at home there was peace. Probably under the influence of Archbishop Wulfstan he became a stout supporter of the church, which in his reign had the vitality to engage in missionary work in Scandinavia. Religious as well as political motives may have caused his pilgrimage to Rome in 1027 to attend the coronation of the emperor Conrad; from the pope, the emperor, and the princes whom he met he obtained concessions for English pilgrims and traders going to Rome. Canute’s laws, drafted by Archbishop Wulfstan, are mainly based on those of earlier kings, especially Edgar.
Already in 1018 the English and Danes had come to an agreement “according to Edgar’s law.” No important changes were made in the machinery of government except that small earldoms were combined to make great earldoms, a change that placed much power in the hands of their holders. No attempt was made to restore the English line when Canute died in 1035; he was followed by his sons Harold and Hardecanute, whose reigns were unpopular. Denmark passed to Sweyn, son of Canute’s sister Estrith, in 1043. Meanwhile the Norwegians in 1035 had driven out another Sweyn, the son whom Canute had set to rule over them with his mother, Aelfgifu, and had elected Magnus.
The close links with Scandinavia had benefited English trade, but they left one awkward heritage: Hardecanute and Magnus made an agreement that if either died without a son, the survivor was to succeed to both kingdoms. Hardecanute died without a son in 1042, but he was succeeded by Ethelred’s son Edward, who was known as the Confessor or the Saint because of his reputation for chastity. Magnus was prevented by trouble with Denmark from invading England as he intended in 1046; but Harold Hardraada inherited Magnus’ claim to the English throne, and he came to enforce it in 1066.
The reign of Edward the Confessor and the Norman Conquest
It is easy to regard the years of Edward’s rule simply as a prelude to the catastrophe of 1066, yet there are other aspects of his reign. Harrying caused by political disturbances or by incursions of the Scots or Welsh was only occasional and localized; friendly relations were usually maintained with Malcolm of Scotland, whom Earl Siward of Northumbria had supported against Macbeth in 1054; and in 1063 the victories of Harold, Earl of Wessex, and his brother Tostig ended the trouble from Wales. The normal course of administration was maintained, with efficient mints, writing office, taxation system, and courts of justice. Trade was prosperous. The church contained several good and competent leaders, and bad appointments—like those of the Normans, Ulf to Dorchester and Robert to London and Canterbury, and of Stigand to Winchester—were the exception. Scholarship was not in decline, and manuscripts were produced in great number. English illumination and other forms of art were admired abroad.
The troubles of the reign came from the excessive power concentrated in the hands of the rival houses of Leofric of Mercia and Godwine of Wessex and from resentment caused by the king’s introduction of Norman friends, though their influence has sometimes been exaggerated. A crisis arose in 1051 when Godwine defied the king’s order to punish the men of Dover, who had resisted an attempt by Eustace of Boulogne to quarter his men on them by force. The support of Earl Leofric and Earl Siward enabled Edward to secure the outlawry of Godwine and his sons; and William of Normandy paid Edward a visit during which Edward may have promised William succession to the English throne, although this Norman claim may have been mere propaganda. Godwine and his sons came back the following year with a strong force, and the magnates were not prepared to engage them in civil war but forced the king to make terms. Some unpopular Normans were driven out, including Archbishop Robert, whose archbishopric was given to Stigand; this act supplied one excuse for the papal support of William’s cause.
Harold succeeded his father Godwine as earl of Wessex in 1053; Tostig was made earl of Northumbria in 1055; and their younger brothers were also provided with earldoms. To settle the question of succession, negotiations were begun in 1054 to bring Edward, Edmund’s son (nephew of Edward the Confessor), from Hungary; but Edward died in 1057, leaving a son, Edgar Aetheling, then a child, who was passed over in 1066. In about 1064 Harold of Wessex, when visiting Normandy, swore to support William’s claim. Only Norman versions of the incident survive and the true circumstances cannot be ascertained, but William used Harold’s broken oath to help secure papal support later. In 1065 Harold acquiesced in the appointment of Morcar, brother of Edwin, Earl of Mercia, to replace Tostig when the Northumbrians revolted against him, and thus Harold turned his brother into an enemy. King Edward, when dying, named Harold to succeed him, and, after overcoming Northumbrian reluctance with the help of Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, Harold was universally accepted.
Harold might have proved an effective ruler, but the forces against him were too strong. The papacy, without hearing the defense in favour of Harold’s succession, gave its blessing to an invasion of a people who had always been distinguished for their loyalty to Rome, and this papal support helped William to collect his army widely. The threat from Harold III Hardraade, who was joined by Tostig, prevented Harold from concentrating his forces in the south and took him north at a critical moment. He fought at Hastings only 24 days after the armies of Mercia and Northumbria had been put out of action by enormous losses at Fulford and only 19 days after he had defeated and killed Harold III Hardraade and Tostig at Stamford Bridge. Harold was slain at Hastings, and on Christmas Day, 1066, William of Normandy was crowned king of England. Although the Anglo-Saxon fighting force was perhaps the best in Europe and the defeat at Hastings due largely to a series of historical accidents, it is not difficult to understand the English chronicler’s view that God was angry with the English people.
Dorothy WhitelockWilliam A. ChaneyThe Normans (1066–1154)
William I (1066–87)
The Norman Conquest has long been argued about. The question has been whether William I introduced fundamental changes in England or based his rule solidly on Anglo-Saxon foundations. A particularly controversial issue has been the introduction of feudalism. On balance, the debate has favoured dramatic change while also granting that in some respects the Normans learned much from the English past. Yet William replaced his initial policy of trying to govern through Englishmen with an increasingly thoroughgoing Normanization.
Resistance and rebellion
The Conquest was not achieved at a single stroke. In 1068 Exeter rose against the Normans, and a major rising began in the north. A savage campaign in 1069–70, the so-called harrying of the north, emphasized William’s military supremacy and his brutality. A further English rising in the Fens achieved nothing. In 1075 William put down rebellion by the earls of Hereford, Norfolk, and Northumbria. The latter, the last surviving English earl, was executed for treason.
The introduction of feudalism
The Conquest resulted in the subordination of England to a Norman aristocracy. William probably distributed estates to his followers on a piecemeal basis as lands came into his hands. He granted lands directly to fewer than 180 men, making them his tenants in chief. Their estates were often well distributed, consisting of manors scattered through a number of shires. In vulnerable regions, however, compact blocks of land were formed, clustered around castles. The tenants in chief owed homage and fealty to the king and held their land in return for military service. They were under obligation to supply a certain number of knights for the royal feudal host—a number that was not necessarily related to the quantity or quality of land held. Early in the reign many tenants in chief provided knights from their own households to meet demands for service, but they soon began to grant some of their own lands to knights who would serve them just as they in turn served the king. They could not, however, use their knights for private warfare, which, in contrast to Normandy, was forbidden in England. In addition to drawing on the forces provided by feudal means, William made extensive use of mercenary troops to secure the military strength he needed. Castles, which were virtually unknown in pre-Conquest England and could only be built with royal permission, provided bases for administration and military organization. They were an essential element in the Norman settlement of England.
Government and justice
William hoped to be able to rule England in much the same way as his Anglo-Saxon predecessors had done, though in many respects the old institutions and practices had to be changed in response to the problems of ruling a conquered land. The Anglo-Saxon witan, or council, became the king’s curia regis, a meeting of the royal tenants in chief, both lay and ecclesiastical. William was said by chroniclers to have held full courts three times a year, at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, to which all the great men of the realm were summoned and at which he wore his crown. These were similar to the great courts he held in Normandy. Inevitably there were many disputes over land, and the curia regis was where justice was done to the great tenants in chief. William himself is said to have sat one Sunday “from morn till eve” to hear a plea between William de Braose and the abbot of Fécamp.
William at first did little to change Anglo-Saxon administrative organization. The royal household was at the centre of royal government, and the system, such as it was, under Edward the Confessor had probably been quite similar to that which existed in Normandy at the same period, although the actual titles of the officers were not the same. Initially under William there also was little change in personnel. But, by the end of his reign, all important administrative officials were Norman, and their titles corresponded to those in use in Normandy. There were a steward, a butler, a chamberlain, a constable, a marshal, and a head of the royal scriptorium, or chancellor. This scriptorium was the source from which all writs (i.e., written royal commands) were issued. At the start of William’s reign the writs were in English, and by the end of it, in Latin.
In local government the Anglo-Saxon shire and hundred courts continued to function as units of administration and justice, but with important changes. Bishops and earls ceased to preside over the shire courts. Bishops now had their own ecclesiastical courts, while earls had their feudal courts. But although earls no longer presided over shire courts, they were entitled to take a third of the proceeds coming from them. The old Anglo-Saxon office of sheriff was transformed into a position resembling that of the Norman vicomte, as native sheriffs were replaced by Norman nobles. They controlled the shire and hundred courts, were responsible for collecting royal revenue, and controlled the royal castles that had been built both to subdue and protect the country.
William made the most of the financial system he had inherited. In addition to customary dues, such as revenues from justice and income from royal lands, his predecessors had been able to levy a geld, or tax, assessed on the value of land and originally intended to provide funds to buy off Danish invaders. The Confessor had abandoned this tax, but the Conqueror collected it at least four times. Profits from the ample royal estates must have been significant, along with those from royal mints and towns.
The Conqueror greatly strengthened the administration of justice in his new land. He occasionally appointed justiciars to preside over local cases and at times named commissioners to act as his deputies in the localities. There were a number of great trials during the reign. The most famous of them was the trial at Pinnenden Heath of a case between Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, and the king’s half brother, Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent. Not only all the Normans of the shire but also many Englishmen, especially those learned in the customary law, attended. On occasion jurors were summoned to give a collective verdict under oath. Historians have debated as to whether juries were introduced as a result of the Viking conquests or were a Norman innovation, derived from Carolingian practice in France. Whichever argument is correct, it is evident that, under the Normans, juries came into more frequent use. William introduced one measure to protect his followers: he made the local community of the hundred responsible for the murder of any Norman.
Church–state relations
The upper ranks of the clergy were Normanized and feudalized, following the pattern of lay society. Bishops received their lands and the symbols of their spiritual office from the king. They owed knight service and were under firm royal control. Sees were reorganized, and most came to be held by continental clergy. In 1070 Lanfranc replaced Stigand as archbishop of Canterbury. An ecclesiastical lawyer, teacher, and church statesman, Lanfranc, a native of Italy, had been a monk at Bec and an abbot of Saint Stephen’s at Caen. Lanfranc and William understood each other and worked together to introduce discipline and order into the English church. The see of York was subordinated to Canterbury, and efforts were made to bring the ecclesiastical affairs of Ireland and Scotland under Lanfranc’s control. Several church councils were held in England to legislate for the English church, as similar councils did in Normandy. William denied that he owed homage or fealty to the pope for his English lands, although he acknowledged papal support in winning the new realm. William and Lanfranc resisted Pope Gregory VII’s claim to papal supremacy: the king decreed that without his consent no pope was to be recognized in England, no papal letter was to be received, no church council was to legislate, and no baron or royal official was to be excommunicated. During William’s reign the controversy over the right of lay rulers to invest ecclesiastics with the symbols of their office did not affect England, in contrast to other parts of Latin Christendom.
William’s accomplishments
At Christmas 1085 William had “deep speech” with his council and as a result ordered a general survey of the land to be made. Historians have debated the purpose of this “Domesday” survey, some seeing it as primarily a tax assessment, others emphasizing its importance as a basis for assignment of feudal rights and duties. Its form owed much to Anglo-Saxon precedent, but within each county section it was organized on a feudal basis. It was probably a multipurpose document with the main emphasis on resources for taxation. It was incomplete, for the far north of England, London, and Winchester were not included, while the returns for Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk were not condensed into the same form as was used for the rest of the country. Domesday is a unique record and offers rich materials for research.
One policy that caused deep resentment under William I, and even hatred under his successor William II, was the taking over of vast tracts of land for the king’s forest. In some areas whole villages were destroyed and the people driven out; elsewhere, people living in forest areas, though not necessarily removed, were subjected to a severe system of law with drastic penalties for poaching.
William the Conqueror is presented in contemporary chronicles as a ruthless tyrant who rigorously put down rebellion and devastated vast areas, especially in his pacification of the north in 1069–70. He was, however, an able administrator. Perhaps one of his greatest contributions to England’s future was the linking up of England with continental affairs. If the country had been conquered again by the Danes, as seemed possible, it might have remained in a backwater of European development. In the event, England was linked, economically and culturally, to France and continental Europe. The aristocracy spoke French, while Latin was the language of the church and the administration.
The sons of William I
William II Rufus (1087–1100)
Under William I’s two sons William II Rufus and Henry I, strong, centralized government continued, and England’s link with Normandy was strengthened. Rebellion by Norman barons, led by the king’s half uncles, Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain, was soon put down by William II, who made promises of good government and relief from taxation and the severity of the forest laws. Odo of Bayeux was banished, and William of St. Calais, bishop of Durham, tried for treason. As an ecclesiastic he rejected the jurisdiction of the king’s court. But Lanfranc pointed out that it was not as a churchman but as lord of his temporal fiefs that he was being tried. He was finally allowed to leave the country, in return for surrender of his fiefs.
William II’s main preoccupation was to win Normandy from his elder brother Robert. After some initial skirmishing, William’s plans were furthered by Robert’s decision to go on crusade in 1096. Robert mortgaged his lands to William for 10,000 marks, which was raised in England by drastic and unpopular means. In his last years William campaigned successfully in Maine and the French Vexin so as to extend the borders of Normandy. His death was the result of an “accident” possibly engineered by his younger brother Henry: he was shot with an arrow in the New Forest. Henry, who was conveniently with the hunting party, rode posthaste to Winchester, seized the treasury, and was chosen king the next day.
Henry I (1100–35)
A good politician and administrator, Henry I was the ablest of the Conqueror’s sons. At his coronation on Aug. 5, 1100, he issued a charter intended to win the support of the nation. This propaganda document, in which Henry promised to give up many practices of the past, demonstrates how oppressive Norman government had become. Henry promised not to exploit church vacancies, as his brother had done, and guaranteed that reliefs, sums paid by feudal vassals when they took over their fathers’ estates, would be “just and legitimate.” He also promised to return to the laws of Edward the Confessor, though this cannot have been intended literally.
Following the suppression of rebellion in England, the conquest of Normandy was an important priority for Henry. By 1105 he took the offensive, and in September 1106 he won a decisive battle at Tinchebray that gave him control of the whole of Normandy. Robert was captured and was to spend the rest of his 80 years in castle dungeons. His son, William Clito, escaped and remained until his death in 1128 a thorn in Henry’s flesh. Success in Normandy was followed by wars against Louis VI of France, but by 1120 Henry was everywhere successful in both diplomacy and war. He had arranged a marriage for his only legitimate son, William, to Matilda, daughter of Fulk of Anjou, and had received Fulk’s homage for Maine. Pope Calixtus II, his cousin, gave him full support for his control of Normandy on condition that his son William should do homage to the French king.
Relations with the church had not always been easy. Henry had inherited from William II a quarrel with the church that became part of the Europe-wide Investiture Controversy. After Lanfranc’s death William had delayed appointing a successor, presumably for the privilege of exploiting the resources of the archbishopric. After four years, during a bout of illness, he appointed Anselm of Bec, one of the great scholars of his time (1093). Anselm did homage for his temporalities, but whether or not he was ever invested with the symbols of spiritual office by the king is not clear. Papal confirmation was complicated by the fact that there were two claimants to the papal throne. Anselm refused to accept a decision made by the king’s supporters and insisted on receiving his pallium from Urban II, a reform pope in the tradition of Gregory VII, rather than from the imperial nominee, Clement III. Conflict between king and archbishop flared up again in 1097 over what William considered to be an inadequate Canterbury contingent for his Welsh war. The upshot was that Anselm went into exile until William’s death. At Rome he heard new papal decrees against lay investiture.
Anselm supported Henry’s bid for the throne and returned from exile in 1100. Almost immediately he quarreled with Henry when the king asked him to do homage and to receive his archbishopric from his hands. After various ineffective appeals to Rome, Anselm again went into exile. A compromise was finally arranged in 1107, when it was agreed that the king would surrender investiture with the symbols of spiritual office in return for an agreement that he should supervise the election of the archbishop and take homage for the temporalities before investiture with the spiritual symbols took place. It was said that the concession cost the king “a little, perhaps, of his royal dignity, but nothing of his power to enthrone anyone he pleased.”
Henry continued and extended the administrative work of his father. His frequent absences from England prompted the development of a system that could operate effectively in his absence, under the guidance of such men as Roger, bishop of Salisbury. The exchequer was developed as a department of government dealing with royal revenues, and the first record of the sheriffs’ regular accounting at the exchequer, or Pipe Roll, to survive is that of 1129–30. Justices with wide-ranging commissions were sent out into the shires to reinforce local administration and to inquire into crown pleas, royal revenues, and other matters of interest and profit for the king. Henry’s government was highly efficient, but it was also harsh and demanding.
During the last 15 years of his reign the succession was a major issue. William, Henry’s only legitimate son, was drowned in 1120, leaving Henry’s daughter Matilda, wife of the German emperor Henry V, as heir. When Henry V died in 1125, Matilda returned to England. Henry I persuaded his barons to swear an oath in her support but did not consult them over her second marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou, who at 14 was 11 years her junior. Within a year Geoffrey repudiated Matilda, but during a temporary reconciliation, Matilda and Geoffrey had three children.
Henry was a skilled politician, adept at using the levers of patronage. Men such as Geoffrey de Clinton, the royal chamberlain, owed much to the favours they received from the king, and they served him well in return. There was tension between the established nobility and the “new men” raised to high office by the king, but Henry maintained control with great effect and distributed favours evenhandedly. In England his rule, particularly when seen in retrospect, was characterized by peace, order, and justice. He died, probably of a heart attack, on Dec. 1, 1135.
The period of anarchy (1135–54)
Matilda and Stephen
Henry I’s death precipitated a 20-year crisis whose immediate cause was a succession dispute. But there has been much debate among historians as to whether the problems of these years were the result of some deeper malaise.
No one was enthusiastic about accepting Matilda as queen, especially as her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, was actually at war with Henry at the time of his death. Robert, Earl of Gloucester, one of Henry’s many illegitimate sons, was an impressive candidate for the throne, as were Henry’s nephews, Theobald and Stephen of Blois. The outcome of the struggle in 1135 was unexpected: while Theobald, the elder brother, was receiving the homage of continental vassals for Normandy, Stephen took ship for England and claimed the throne. Having secured the treasury at Winchester, he was crowned on December 22.
Stephen had been quick and resolute in securing the crown. But after the first flush of victory he made concessions that, instead of winning him support, served to expose his weakness. One such concession was to King David of Scotland, who was also the Earl of Huntingdon in England. When David learned of Stephen’s succession, he crossed the border by force. He was effectively bought off by Stephen’s agreeing that David’s son Henry should receive Carlisle, Doncaster, and the honour of Huntingdon. Stephen obtained the support of Robert of Gloucester by a lavish charter. He also granted a charter to the church forbidding simony and confirmed the rights of church courts to all jurisdiction over clerics. Stephen’s lavish appointment of new earls (19 in the course of the reign) was intended in part as a way of undermining the power of the sheriffs and constituted a shift of power away from the centre. Expenditure in Stephen’s early years was heavy and achievements few.
Stephen soon alienated the church. Much power in central government had been concentrated in the hands of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, and his family. One of Roger’s nephews was bishop of Ely, and another was bishop of Lincoln. This was resented by the Beaumont family, headed by the Earl of Leicester, and their allies, who formed a powerful court faction. They planned the downfall of the bishops, and, when a council meeting was held at Oxford in June 1139, they seized on the opportunity provided by a brawl in which some of Roger’s men were involved. Rumours of treason were spread, and Stephen demanded that the bishops should make satisfaction. When they did not do so, he ordered their arrest. Thenceforth Stephen was in disfavour with the clergy; he had already forfeited the support of his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, by failing to make him archbishop of Canterbury in 1137. As papal legate, Henry was to be the most influential member of the clergy in the realm.
Civil war
Matilda did not land in England until 1139. She and her half brother Robert of Gloucester established themselves in the southwest; Stephen’s main strength lay in the east. In 1141 Stephen was defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln, but Matilda alienated the Londoners and lost support. When Stephen was exchanged for Robert of Gloucester, who was captured at Winchester, Matilda’s fortunes waned. The Angevin cause, however, prospered in Normandy. Although Matilda’s son, Henry, mounted an unsuccessful invasion from Normandy in 1147, in 1153 he carried out a vigorous and effective campaign. Stephen, saddened by the death of his elder son Eustace, agreed to a compromise peace. He was to remain king, but he recognized Henry as his heir.
One chronicler said, “In this king’s time there was nothing but disturbance and wickedness and robbery.” Though this was an exaggeration, it is clear that disorder was widespread, with a great many adulterine castles built (that is, unlicensed castles). It was possible for the earls of Chester and Leicester to make a treaty without any reference to royal authority. Stephen’s government lost control of much of England, and power was fragmented and decentralized.
There has been much debate as to why men fought in the civil war. It was much more than a simple succession dispute and can be seen as a natural reaction both to the strong, centralized government of Henry I and to the weak rule of Stephen. The aim of many magnates was to recover lands and offices to which they considered they had hereditary rights: much land had changed hands under Henry I. Men such as Ranulf de Gernons, 4th Earl of Chester, and Geoffrey de Mandeville, 1st Earl of Essex, changed sides frequently, obtaining fresh grants each time. Essex wanted to recover the lands and positions his grandfather had held. Most men, however, probably did not want to demolish royal government but rather wished to control and profit from it. The institutions of government did not disappear altogether. The period of the “anarchy” strengthened feudal principles of succession to land, but such offices as those of sheriff and castellan did not become hereditary.
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