ENGLAND, the southern and larger section of the island of Great Britain, and the most important member of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The geography of E. will be found under the head of GREAT BRITAIN, the present article being confined to a sketch of its history previous to the union with Scotland.
Of the inhabitants of E. before the Christian era, little is known. In some of the ancient geographers, there are a few scattered notices of a rude population, with whom a limited commerce in tin was carried on by the Phenician merchants; and our infor mation scarcely extends further. What is known of E. under the Roman occupation has already been embodied in the article BRITANNIA. An account of the country during the period intervening between the withdrawal of the Romans and the Norman conquest will be found in the article ANGLO-SAXONS.
When William of Normandy landed in E. to claim the crown which Edward the confessor had bequeathed to him, he found that the people had raised to the throne Harold, the son of a popular nobleman. The resources of the Saxons, however, had been wasted in domestic conflicts before the attack of William; and the battle of Has tings (1066 A.D.) gave E. with comparative ease to the Normans. The next 20 years saw the conquest completed, and nearly all the large landed estates of the Saxons pass, on every pretext except the true one, into the hands of the Normans. William claimed, indeed, to rule as sovereign by hereditary right, bnt this made little difference to the fact of conquest. All the high offices in the state and in the church passed into the hands of a new race. The Danes alone could retain either property or dignity. For long, some of the Saxons maintained an unequal resistance, retiring to the forests as the outlaws whose adventures furnished the materials for those favorite popular legends, where, as in Robin Hood, the spoiling of the richer classes is depicted as one of the chief virtues. In the course of time, the Normans were absorbed among the Saxons, their very language disappearing, though leaving many traces. From this union arose the English people and the English language as they now exist.
The union of the Normans -with the Saxons was not fully effected so long as the Normans retained their foreign possessions. In king John's reign, the whole of these were lost, excepting Guienne and Poitou. Long wars under Henry III. and Edward and his famous sou, the Black prince, were continued, in the endeavor to regain the lost possessions; yet great victories like those of Cressy (1346 A.D.) and Poitiers (1356
A.D.) seemed to leave no result, for no sooner were the English armies withdrawn, than the population returned to their French allegiance. After Agincourt (1415 A.D.), Henry V. when he had forced himself to be acknowledged heir to the French throne, was virtually king of France, and held his court in Paris; yet, in a few years more, the rebellion of Joan of Arc came at a time when E. was weakened with the wars of the roses, and (1451 A.D.) nothing of foreign ground was left to this country excepting Calais.
To their efforts to conquer France, the Norman kings added others. Henry II. con quered Ireland (1171 A.D.), Edward I. conquered Wales (1285 A.D.), and had almost added Scotland to his dominions. The bravery of Wallace and Bruce defeated the armies of Edward II., his successor; and though the idea of the conquest of Scotland was always a favorite one, an opportunity for attempting it on a great scale never again presented itself.
The great struggles of the successors of William were with the ecclesiastics and with the barons. Sometimes in these the popular sympathies were with, and sometimes against the crown. The conqueror himself and his immediate successors had no diffi culty in maintaining the superiority of the courts of justice over the ecclesiastics; but even a sovereign so bold and skillful as Henry II. was forced, after:the outcry occasioned by the murder of Thomas-i1-Becket (1170 A.D.), to yield the point. The right to nom inate the higher ecclesiastics was also secured by the popes. The degradation of the English monarchy was at its lowest when king John consented (1213 A.D.) to hold the crown as a gift from Rome. The weaknesses of this monarch had good as well as evil results, for from him the barons won their great charter (1215 A.D.). From Henry II. something similar had already been gained; hut it was the Magna Charta of John which firmly established two great English principles—that no man should suffer arbitrary imprisonment, and that no tax should be imposed without the consent of the council of the nation. Under Edward I., the famous statute that no manner of tax should be imposed without the common consent of the bishops, barons, and burgesses of the realm, was passed (1296 A.D.); and before the time of Henry VII., the foundations of parlia mentary government had been laid.