Names are hard, especially when it comes to the British Isles.
The island of “Britain” is home to England, Scotland, and Wales, while the island of “Ireland”
is composed of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom’s Northern Ireland.
This is not only a nightmare to keep track of, but as we’ve seen, this is all subject
to change, probably a little sooner than we think.
I say all this to clarify what we’re actually gonna talk about in this video: England.
Now, England is not only Not Britain, but its history is plenty interesting all its
own.
So, to see how England grew from a simple Roman province to the master of Britain and
a major world power, let’s do some History!
Our earliest documentation for England comes with the arrival of Julius Cheekbones Caesar,
who crossed over from Gaul in 55BC.
The native Celts were none too pleased with this new neighbor, so Rome stalled for a century
until Emperor Claudius established the province of Britannia.
Roman influence in Britannia was rather slim outside the main port cities, since it was
hard enough to schlep all those armies across the channel, they were happy to delegate certain
responsibilities to the local kings.
In 60 AD, one such Client King bequeathed half his land to Rome, but when the empire
glomped it all anyway, the late king’s wife Boudicca led a rebellion that burned through
several eastern cities, including Londinium, before she was defeated in battle.
Later Romans expanded outwards to the edge of Caledonia before Hadrian said “NOPE”
and built a wall across the island to stop any hotshot general from getting ideas.
The benefit of Britannia’s insulation was that it didn’t see much disruption from
the carousel of imperial civil wars, the downside was that Britannia was the first province
to be cut loose when barbarians started rolling up in the 400s.
The next several centuries are marked by constant shuffling between small Romano-Britannic Kingdoms
and a tidal wave of Northern European newcomers.
The polite term for this is “Disorganized” and the accurate term for this is “Gross”.
The Early Medieval period saw raids and migrations from Picts, Angels, Jutes, and Saxons, and
while the map doesn’t stop fidgeting with its borders anytime soon, the players get
a little clearer by the late 600s.
Here we can see 7 major Anglisc and Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Kent, East Anglia,
Mercia, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex, (those last three being East, South, and West Saxony,
in case you were wondering why England sexed-up so many of its place names).
These kingdoms weren’t entirely Britannic nor fully Germanic; Just like the Romans,
it was a case of gradual integration between lots of small and unique groups of people;
sometimes friendly, sometimes stabby.
For a dash of literary context, the legendary character of King Arthur is set specifically
against the backdrop of these Germanic migrations.
Historically speaking, our record gets a little clearer in the Christian Monasteries of Northumbria,
where the scholar Bede wrote the Ecclesiastical History of England, our best source for this
period.
And monasteries all across Northumbria were becoming magnificent palaces of literature
and art throughout the 6 and 700s.
Northumbria can have a little bit of a golden age, as a treat.
The good news is that this was really shiny, but the bad news is that maybe this was a
little too shiny, as the glittering attracted our old pals the Vikings, who first rolled
up to the island monastery of Lindisfarne to save the priceless relics from the totally
unrelated fires that started burning right as the Vikings arrived.
Weird.
From there, the Vikings kept on coming, raiding all up and down the coasts and even heading
inland with the Great Heathen Army.
This was especially bad news for the King of Wessex, who was partway through conquering
Mercia when the Scandinavians glomped their way down the eastern coast.
They didn’t have the means or the interest to form a single unified state, but the laws
of these incoming Danes held sway over a pretty beefy stretch of land, so we call this thingy
the “Danelaw” because when historians aren’t creative, they’re at least direct.
While the Danelaw became a shiny mercantile midpoint between Ireland and Scandinavia,
it was soon reverso-glomped by the kingdom of Wessex.
By 927, King Aethelstan had conquered all the way to Northumbria, and began to style
himself as King of England.
So now, finally, we can actually discuss England as a single state.
In the century following, Northumbria played hopscotch between English and Viking rule,
and some wacky royal gymnastics resulted in the Scandinavian Canute becoming king of England
Denmark and Norway for two decades.
But despite the near-constant tire-fire of Scandinavian invasions and an extremely squiggly
royal lineage, England had become impressively well-run for the time, as the governing bureaucracy
was organized and they knew how taxes worked.
Not bad!
But, as will become a running theme in the next few centuries, there’s no getting over
that pesky question of royal succession.
After the death of King Edward in 1066, the crown passed to Harold Godwinson, but two
other parties wanted that shiny headwear for themselves, namely King Harald Hardrada of
Norway and Duke William of Normandy.
Hardrada arrived to challenge Godwinson for the title of One True Harold, but was beaten
at the battle of Stamford Bridge.
However, Godwinson’s luck ran out one month later when — Omae Wa, Mou Shindeiru, NANI?
And that’s the Norman Conquest in a nutshell!
In contrast to the other assorted cases of England being conquered, this one had lasting
significance.
Firstly, William was set on keeping his hot new kingdom, so he invented this little doohickey
called a Castle and built ‘em all over England to protect his armies from the odd revolt,
meanwhile he replaced the English aristocracy with freshly imported Norman Barons.
Now, the Normans, being from France, were French.
So they spoke their native language instead of the local Old English.
Over the centuries, these two languages smushed into each other to create what we recognize
as English, our beautiful disaster of a language.
The last significant consequence was William was still Duke of Normandy, and his supervisor,
The King of France, was a little miffed that he went and yoinked himself a kingdom.
And this diplomatic hiccup would embroil England and France in a casual 600-yearlong rivalry.
Now, this is normally the point where English history slavishly trails along the Royal family
tree through all its twists and turns, but this video is a summary, and I don’t care
about Kings.
Royal gymnastics are far too dull to be this needlessly confusing.
I say this now so we can skip the faff later.
What matters to us here in the mid 1100s is that the royal family married across the channel,
so now the King of England became the Duke of Normandy, the Count of Anjou, and the Duke
of Aquitaine — England has never been taller.
This Angevin period rewrites Anglo-Frankish relations to the tune of “You got Chocolate
in my Peanut Butter”.
Anywho, with this absurdly large tax base and access to half a Franceload of natural
resources up and down the Atlantic coast, the Angevin empire was an economic powerhouse.
Of course, money means rich people and rich people means armed robbery, so this period
is the main historical setting for the legends of Robin Hood, most closely associated with
the reign of the Crusading King Richard the Lionheart at the turn of the 13th century.
Speaking of Military stuff, England took this opportunity to hop westward and glomp onto
the Dublin-y part of Ireland, they tried for more but didn’t really get much else.
Conquest is all well and good, but it’s also expensive, and France was itching to
get the rest of its France back, so the early 1200s saw Normandy, Anjou, and most of Aquitaine
go poof.
Meanwhile, the Barons were fed up with the monarchy, that makes two of us, so they forced
a few kings to sign a contract recognizing that teamwork makes the dreamwork, as in,
the Magna Carta makes Kings consult their Barons, and this puts us on track to get Parliament
a ways down the line.
Elsewhere in Britain, King Edward Longshanks conquered the Kingdom of Wales, and glomped
Scotland for a hot second, but they broke free.
The problem for England was that Scotland had allied with France, and by the mid-1300s,
France was in a century-long win-streak.
King Edward III was a big fan of the part where England owned half of France, so he
went for broke and claimed a right to the French Kingship to justify a continental invasion.
A bold strategy!
It won’t work, but it took a century for that to become apparent.
From 1337 to 1453, England and France were locked in a Hundred* Years’ War.
Edward oversaw the first act, where the English poured across the channel and thrashed the
French army at the battle of Crecy.
To explain why, we’ve gotta dig into the real juicy stuff, economics.
— Alright look, I minored in Econ, I have to at least pretend like this was worth something,
okay?
It all comes down to how they collected taxes; England had the sophistication to tax money
and put it towards a professional army, while France took payment in goods and conscription,
so their army was bigger, sure, but far weaker.
England’s advance would have pressed on were it not for the surprise guest appearance
of Plague.
Soon after fighting resumed, the new French King Charles V had a much better time than
his predecessor, and pushed the English out to the edges of Gascony and Calais.
The third phase of the war is the spicy stuff that shows up in all the Shakespeare plays.
We’re talkin’ Battle of Agincourt, Henry 5, hella longbows, take that, Frenchies!
Ahem, After the loss, France fell into a civil war and almost collapsed until Joan Kickass
D’Arc arrived to absolutely steamroll the English.
King Henry VI had exactly zero ways to handle this, so England got swept right on out of
there.
By 1453 all they had left was a tiiiny little sliver of Calais.
Despite the war’s overt goal of Conquer France, it inadvertently cemented a distinct
English identity, through language, national heroes, and insular geography.
The other major consequence was, big shock, another succession crisis.
I’ve covered The War of the Roses before, and I respect you too much to bore you with
this.
All that matters is a king died, and two families spent a century stabbing each other over who
would get the crown.
Plot twist, both of them.
Big ups to Henry VII for marrying the houses of York and Lancaster together to create the
Tudor Dynasty and resolve that mess.
The Tudors managed to accomplish quite a bit in their century-long runtime.
The first order of business for King Henry 8 was to formalize the rules for royal succession,
presumably because he had to read about the War of the Roses and decided never again.
But he also had outside problems, as King Charles of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V, coincidentally the same Charlie, was getting a smidge overpowered since he
put the Pope under house-arrest.
Further complicating matters was the little fact that Henry’s first wife was also Charles’
aunt, and she wasn’t bearing any Male Heirs.
Henry deftly solved the three problems of Charles, the Pope, and his Wife in one move,
by going diet-protestant and forming his own church.
This new Church of England didn’t lean that hard into Protestant theology, but the real
swerve was that the church answered only to the King.
This quasi-reformist compromise wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to enforce, but
the Tudors made it work.
Meanwhile, back in Geopolitics Land, Henry made a new push into Ireland, and tried (and
failed) to bully Scotland into uniting with England.
In the second half of the century, Queen Elizabeth I held the fort against an increasingly aggressive
Spain, way too hyped on Conquistador Cash to remember what Hubris means.
In 1588, Spain hucked an armada at England in the hopes of conquering it, but English
cannons and English Weather smashed the fleet to bits.
When Elizabeth died without an heir, the crown passed to her nearest male relative, who happened
to be King James VI of Scotland.
So in 1603, James became King of Scotland and England.
Everything after the Union of the Crowns is the Britain Plotline, where they glomp all
the isles, make an empire, all that Rule Britannia jazz.
So this is where we’ll wrap our History of England.
And, I’ll be fully honest, sagas like this give History a bad rap.
At a glance, it’s a 1600-year-long Nightmare that’s stuffed with more monarchs than anybody
should be forced to remember, and it’s easy to get bogged down in any one episode or to
lose track entirely.
But the good news is that just because English Historians are sadistically meticulous and
blindingly self-obsessed doesn’t mean we have to be.
Because if we zoom out a little bit, and focus on England as a unit rather than a backdrop
for royal gymnastics, the important kings will make sense in context, and we avoid getting
bogged down in the details.
So we can clearly see the macro plot-progression from Roman province, through the Heptarchy,
into the conflicts with France, and out towards the formation of Britain.
So let English History show why The Big Picture is often the Clearest, and also serve as an
object lesson in the Historiographic benefits of restraint.
Thank you so much for watching.
You can tell this is an OSP history video because I run away at the slightest hint of
Early Modern Europe.
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