ENGLAND, including WALES, the south ern and larger portion of the island of Great Britain, is situated between lat. 50° and 46' N. and long. 1° 46' E. and 42' W. Eng land covers 42 per cent, and Wales 6 per cent, together 48 per cent of the whole area of the British Isles. For geographical, administrative and statistical purposes. Wales is usually in cluded with England, of which it forms a west ern peninsula, similar to the counties of Devon and Cornwall. Bounded on the East by the North Sea or German Ocean, which seoarates the territory from Germany, Holland, Denmark and Belgium; on the south by the English Channel, dividing it from France, and on the west by the Saint George's Channel and the Irish Sea, its only land frontier is that irreg ular line of 110 miles facing Scotland on the North. As the crow flies, that border line is barely 70 miles; forming a rough triangle, the eastern side measures 350 miles in a straight line; the western 425, and the southern 325 miles —a total of 1,170 miles. But the shores within this triangle are so deeply indented by bays and estuaries that the actual coast line is more than twice that distance, estimated at not less than 2.765 miles. The length of the coun try, measured on a meridian from Berwick nearly to Saint Alban's Head, is 365 miles. Its breadth, calculated on a parallel of latitude, at tains its maximum between Saint David's Head, in South Wales, and the Naze, in Essex, where it amounts to 280 miles. The area of England without Wales is 50,873 square miles; that of Wales, 7,366; together, 58,239 square miles. The seas surrounding the British Isles are shal low. If the waters were to subside to the ex tent of 300 feet, the whole of the British Islands, including Ireland, would once more be united to Continental Europe.
Geographical History.— This great island possession of Rome had been virtually aban doned by the Romans (A.u. 410) before the Teutonic settlements in it began. The invaders had therefore to struggle rather with native Britons than with Romans. Moreover were invaders who came by sea, and from lands where little or nothing was known of the Roman law or religion. They met with a de gree of strictly national resistance such as no other Teutonic conquerors encountered, and therefore, in the end, they swept away all traces of the earlier state of things in a radical way which took place nowhere else. As far as
such a process is possible, they slew or drove out the older inhabitants; they kept their heathen religion and Teutonic language, and were thus able to grow up as a new Teutonic nation in their new home without any impor tant intermixture with the earlier inhabitants, Roman or British. The conquerors who wrought this change were the forefathers of the present day English,— the low Dutch in habitants of the borderlands of Germany and Denmark. Among them three tribes, the An gles, the Saxons and the jutes, had the chief share in the conquest of Britain. The Saxons had already attempted a settlement here in the 4th century and were consequently the tribe first known to the Roman and Celtic inhabit ants of the island. Hence it came that the Celts of Britain and Ireland have called all the Teutonic settlers Saxons to this day. But, as the Angles, or English occupied in the end by far the greater part of the land, it was they who, when the Teutonic tribes in Britain began to form one nation, gave their name to that nation and its land. That nation was the English and their land was England. While Britain thus remains the proper geographical name of the whole island, England is the political name of that part of Britain which was step by step conquered by the English. Before the end of the 5th century several Teutonic kingdoms had been founded in Britain. The Jutes began the conquest by their settlement in Kent, and pres ently the Saxons began to settle on the south coast and on a small part of the east coast, in Sussex, Wessex and Essex. Along a consid erable portion of the eastern coast various Anglian settlements were also made, which gradually grew into the kingdoms of East 'Anglia, Deira and Bernicia. By their ultimate union the last two formed the great kingdom of Northumberland. At the close of the 6th century, however, the English had not got very far from the southern and eastern coasts. The Britons, whom the English called Welsh, or strangers, held out in the west, and the Picts and Scots in the north. The Scots were prop erly the people of Ireland; but a colony of them had settled on the western coast of northern Britain — distant at one part only 13 miles from Ireland— and in the' end gave the name of Scotland to the whole northern part of the island.