British History

The Saxons

Though many textbooks would like history to be in neat packages with clearly defined dates, this is rarely the case. Thus, though conventionally the Roman period in Britain is said to end in 410 when the Emperor Honorius told the Britons they had to defend themselves, the Saxons had ... more
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Roman Britain

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What the Romans did for us
Long before Julius Caesar invaded Britain the Romans had traded with these islands: Welsh gold and Cornish tin were valuable commodities in the ancient world, as were British pearls and jet, and Britain had surplus agricultural produce to export too, including wool. Hunting dogs from Britain were sought after in ... more

The Iron Age

Contrary to the situation which applies with precisely dated reigns or elected governments, providing start and end points for the Iron Age in Britain is not possible: there was naturally an overlapping of the final phase of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age; and when the ... more
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Viking Britain

There seems to be almost a folk-memory of the Vikings in Britain, the word itself conjuring images of hairy warriors wielding giant axes as they storm ashore from dragon boats. Rape and pillage are the words that spring to mind about the Norsemen, but they settled and farmed as well ... more

Norman Conquest

Although that date every schoolchild knows, 1066, was indeed the date of the Norman Conquest, the influence on England of the Normans predated the Battle of Hastings. Edward the Confessor was brought up in Normandy, and his Saxon courtiers were at times eclipsed by Normans, just as the church ... more

The Domesday Book

Though it has left us an invaluable source of information for historians, geographers and linguists, the Domesday Book for all its detail leaves many mysteries about itself. We know that William the Conqueror , over the Christmas of 1085 that he and his court spent at Gloucester , decided ... more

Medieval Britain

Peering back through the claret stained annals of history, was it not always so that England was at war with the French? Napoleonic expansionism in a post-Revolution France expelled plenty of energy, killing thousands whilst bringing British sovereignty under genuine threat. But this Anglo-French rivalry dates back centuries, to the ... more

The Crusades

The Crusades managed to leave their mark on Britain, in spite of the fact that only one king, Richard I, actually took up the cross. From 1095 when Urban II called for the First Crusade, to the late 15th century when the crusading age fizzled out, Britons took part in the ... more

Magna Carta

Magna Carta has become an important part of the British psyche, significant too even beyond our shores – it is still cited occasionally in American courts. King John had managed to alienate those beneath him in the pyramid of medieval power: the Barons and the Church. In a row ... more

Hundred Years War

The Hundred Years War is the useful (if numerically inaccurate) label given to the series of conflicts between England and France between 1337 and 1453 that had huge consequences at that time, and for the world-view of both peoples thereafter. A century of battle, famine, banditry and disease cut the ... more

The Wars of the Roses

Those attempting to reach an understanding of the Wars of the Roses face a herculean task. Firstly, it is not even agreed by historians when they began and when they ended. Secondly, though it is relatively easy to grasp the outcomes of various battles, the machinations away from the battlefield ... more

Britains first Printing Press

In any list evaluating major events in the long march of our history, the establishment by William Caxton of the first printing press in this country has to be given enormous significance. Caxton, born in Kent but apprenticed to a great London cloth merchant in his teens, spent ... more

Tudor Britain

The rather less than romantic Tudor dynasty had its roots in a most romantic liaison, the marriage in 1428 of an unknown young Welsh servant, Owen Tudor, to his mistress Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry V . This was a most unsettled era, and Owen was to be ... more

The Elizabethans

or the golden age
Elizabeth I ’s was the longest reign since that of Edward III : she came to the throne on November 17 1558 and left it with her death on March 24 1603. The sheer length of her reign is doubtless important in cementing her place as one of ... more

The Spanish Armada

Philip II reasons for sending his ‘Invincible Armada’ against England are clear: primarily he - like the Pope - deemed it a crusade against English heretics; the English too aided his protestant enemies in Flanders; Philip felt his marriage to Mary gave him some claim to Elizabeth ’s ... more

Publication of King James Bible

The publication of the King James Bible in 1611 was the culmination of seven years of scholarly work by 46 Church of England clerics plus Sir Henry Savile , Provost of Eton and Warden of Merton College Oxford, a noted Greek scholar. But the publication was far more than ... more

The Puritans

To their opponents in the Anglican Church, the Puritans were dissidents and non-conformists. Arising from the doctrinal untidiness of the English Reformation, the Puritans regarded themselves as godly. God’s word was sovereign to their heart. They believed that God had supreme authority over matters on Earth. The Puritan ideals withheld ... more

Voyage of the Mayflower

The voyage of the Mayflower is one of the foundations of the USA’s view of itself, but it is significant in British history too – not least because for more than 150 years after the voyage New England remained a British colony. England was plagued by religious strife throughout the more

The Civil Wars

Though it is usual to refer to the English Civil War in the singular, it is more useful to consider the era as a series of conflicts - Civil Wars plural. The topic can seem overly complex, with endless lists of battles and generals. But it is still of significance ... more

The Restoration

On a typically brisk winter’s day, 30th January 1649 , King Charles I wore an extra layer of clothing not out of concern for his comfort, but his image. It would not have looked good for him to be shaking; people may have interpreted this as timidity, as ... more

Foundation of the Royal Society

Founded in 1660 and still going strong with 120 employees, The Royal Society is a pillar of the scientific community. Its inception was shrouded in secrecy, and dates back to the 1640s, a time when Puritans like Oliver Cromwell were coming to power and new ideas were forced underground ... more

Georgian Britain

After the amorphous turmoil of the previous century, with its civil war, Regicide and Reformation, the Georgian era was a magical time for Britain. British society was dragged into modernity as agriculture and industry were revolutionised, and the iron foundations of Empire were erected. Culture blossomed as literary giants such ... more

The Highland Clearances

During the 18th and 19th Centuries, as Britain’s pastoral heritage was augmented by the Industrial Revolution ’s steam, steal and bluster, the Scottish Highlands witnessed emigration en masse as its population sought economic refuge in Lowland Scotland, England and North America. What was happening in the Highlands echoed ... more

The Jacobite Rebellions

When English nobility conspired against their king and invited William Of Orange to England, the date was more than ironic. 5th November 1605 , Guy Fawkes hatched an audacious plot to kill King James Stuart I of England; 73 years later King James Stuart II was ... more

Industrial Revolution

In the early 18th Century, Britain was about to make an evolutionary leap that would lay the foundations of a modern economy, transforming a largely agricultural nation into an industrial superpower. This was a febrile time in history for forward thinkers, for modernisers. New ideas would take root that would ... more

American War Of Independence

The American War Of Independence was an unusual beast. What was seeded as a rebellion against the manner of British colonial rule, mutated into a civil conflict, augmented by international intervention and centuries-old European rivalry. There were warning signs that all was not well in the thirteen colonies. In 1773, ... more

Abolition of Slavery

Britain’s role in the slave trade was shameful. There was and is no hiding place for the British Empire’s participatory role in the trading of slaves. The sugar and textiles trade was built on the back of it, and at its height, half of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was British. ... more

Regency Britain

King George III was not fit to rule. Not anymore. The monarch that had presided over Britain for 50 years and watched his Empire grow, finally succumbed to mental illness. The consensus argues that George III suffered from Porphyria. Whatever was causing his bouts of insanity, condemning him to his ... more

Battle of Waterloo

The Battle Of Waterloo was the final engagement in the Napoleonic Wars. Victory made a hero of the Duke Of Wellington and saw an end to the French Empire’s era of expansionism. For 26 years, Napoleon Bonaparte , destabilised Europe. He was the bête noire noir of the early 19th ... more

Battle of Trafalgar

The importance of Trafalgar should never be underplayed. This was the battle that saved our bacon and sired the ultimate hero in Admiral Horatio Nelson . Dying during battle, Nelson preserved Britain’s sovereignty in the face of an expansive and all-conquering French Empire. The early 19th Century was a precarious ... more

Tolpuddle Martyrs

In the 1830s, six men from Tolpuddle , Dorset , became heroes of the people, inspiring a nascent trade unionist movement thought long dead by the factory and landowning middle classes. The story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs marks a watershed for industrial relations in Britain. When the Tolpuddle Martyrs ... more

The Victorian Era

Charles Dickens was ostensibly writing about the French Revolution when he penned ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’ in 1859. But the serial-turned-novel’s iconic opening gambit was very much an observation of life in the Victorian Era. On the 20th June 1837, when Alexandrina Victoria was informed that her uncle, ... more

The Potato Famine

In five years of crop failure and famine, Ireland lost an estimated one million of her population to starvation and disease. A further two million fled her shores, cramming themselves onto ships set sail for America and mainland Britain. This was a pivotal moment in Ireland’s history. The Irish Potato ... more

The Crimean War

A forceful collision of newly industrialised empires, the Crimean War pitted the expansive Russians against a alliance of Britain, France, Sardinia and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman’s atrophying economic and political influence played a key role in the preamble to a war that became regarded by military historians ... more

The Boer War

The Boer Wars brought bloodshed to South Africa in two gory chapters of uprising and oppression, pitting the British Empire against the Boers, Dutch and Huguenot descendants who settled in South Africa as farmers. The first war was brief; a four-month rebellion resulting in the Pretoria Convention granting the Boers ... more

Edwardian Britain

While the 20th Century ended in paranoia, with fears that planes would fall from the sky as the millennium bug crippled technology, it began with a more robust sense of optimism. For Britain, this was the dawn of a new era, one with a reinvigorating new sense of self inspired ... more

World War One

With an estimated 10 million people falling during the First World War, one of the greatest tragedies of the conflict was that it precipitated an even more protracted and deadlier war just decades later. The bloody trench warfare, the mustard gas, the stolid defence of allied lines under attack from ... more

Between the Wars

After more than four years of bitter conflict the guns fell silent over Europe, an uneasy peace descended over the continent. At Paris, the recriminations continued in the negotiations for a peacetime settlement. When it arrived, The Treaty Of Versailles was met with condemnation from Germany and criticism from the allies. ... more

World War II

After the dust had settled on the First World War , with 800,000 British soldiers failing to come home to their families, the country was understandably worried about the continued and accelerated militarisation of Central Europe. Britain had no appetite for another war as Adolf Hitler’s rearmament of Germany ... more

Battle of Britain

When the Western Front began to collapse, with Paris under the control of the Nazi war machine and the allies having made a desperate strategic retreat from the shell-ridden beaches of Dunkirk, Britain’s long-held invasion fears became a profound concern. By the summer of 1940, The Second World War ... more

The Blitz

With tales of sing-songs in dark air-raid shelters and close-knit communities rallying together, you would be forgiven for dismissing the Blitz of the 1940s as a minor inconvenience. Such are the candid recollections of a generation who joked about the number of years they went before seeing a packet of ... more

The Fifties

1950s Britain was still pockmarked by bombsites and wearing the heavy features of a nation rebuilding after the Second World War . But how could a decade which witnessed Edmund Hillary 's scaling of the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest, and the decommissioning of the rationing book be ... more

The Sixties

Unless you were in a psychedelic rock band or ensconced in the hedonistic cultural vortex that was the hippy movement, the Swinging Sixties were memorable. Even for those poor drug-addled souls, whose recreational bingeing on free love and LSD rinsed their brains of the decade, the sixties meant something. They ... more

Britain in the 1970s

We found oil in the North Sea at the start of the 1970s. This should have been the eureka moment that the British economy needed, a fillip to the nation's purse and the guarantor of an era of prosperity. But it didn't quite work out like that. Compared to ... more

The Troubles

Northern Ireland’s Troubles were seeded long before two members of the loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), sent petrol bombs flying through the window of 77-year-old Matilda Gould’s flat, burning her to death on the 7th May 1966. But from that moment forward, Northern Ireland descended into ... more

Thatchers Britain in the 80s

Every decade sires its own tumult, positing leaders as both heroes and villains. Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as British prime minister, from 4th May 1979 to 22 November 1990 , was no different. After assuming leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975, Baroness Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime ... more

Britain in the Nineties

It was a very different sort of tension that waved goodbye to the 1990s than that which ushered the decade in with quarrel and disorder. 1999 was the year where pre-millennium anxieties seemed like a quaintly held sci-fi irrationality rather than a bold, capitalised pronouncement of the Apocalypse. And that ... more

New Labour

When the May 1 1997 General Election swept the Conservative Party of John Major from power and brought Tony Blair’s New Labour into government much of the nation, even many natural Tory voters, heaved a collective sigh of relief. Some 13 years later it was the same effect, different party. ... more

The Noughties

What can you say about a decade which became coquettishly named 'The Noughties'? This was a decade of buzzwords and technology, an age where the tyranny of information had never been so absolute. By the time it was through, the decade had levelled the cognitive playing field between goldfish and ... more

Brit Quote:
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end - Margaret Thatcher
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On this day:
The Pilgrim Fathers arrive at Massachusetts - 1620, The Rochdale Pioneers open shop - 1844, Westhoughton Pit Disaster - 1910, Lockerbie Air Disaster - 1988
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