Exam questions
1. Stonehenge – Britain’ prehistory, Druids
2. Stonehenge’s significance
3. Early Britain.
4. Roman Britain.
5. Boudicca - queen of the Iceni
6. Hadrian’ Wall.
7. Powerful Germanic Tribes. The Picts
8. The Anglo-Saxon Times
9. Alfred the Great
10. King Arthur
11. The Most Noble Order of the Garter
12. Richard the Lionheart
13. King Richard III
14. Henry VIII
15. Mary Tudor
16. Queen Elizabeth I – Tudor Queen
17. Queen Victoria
18. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
19. Monarchism.
20. The Plantagenet’s
21. The House of Windsor
22. Britannia.
23. Ireland's history
24. United Kingdom. Anthem
25. Government.
26. Parliament.
27. The Union Jack.
28. Great Britain – a constitutional monarchy.
29. The Magna Carta
30. The Bill of Rights
31. 'The Petition of Right
32. British Commonwealth.
34. British political System.
35. The UK parliament.
36. Political Parties
37. The Queen
38. Royal Family.
39 History of the English Language
40. The spread of English across the Globe
41. Varieties of English.
42. Mass Media. Newspapers. Radio. TV
43. London.
44. Customs & Traditions
Educational materials for students
STONEHENGE. Located in southern England, it is comprised of roughly 100 massive upright stones placed in a circular layout. Whi1e many modern scholars now agree that Stonehenge was once a burial ground, they have yet to determine what other purposes it served and how a civilization without modern technology—or even the wheel—produced the mighty monument..
Archaeologists believe England most iconic prehistoric ruin was built in several stages, with the earliest constructed 5,000 or more years ago. Several hundred years later, it is thought, Stonehenge’s builders hoisted an estimated 80 non-indigenous bluestones, 43 of which remain today, into standing positions and placed them in either a horseshoe or circular formation. Radiocarbon dating suggests that work continued at Stonehenge until roughly 1600 B.C., with the bluestones in particularly being repositioned multiple times.
Who built stonehenge?
One early hypotheses attributed its building to the Saxons, Danes, Romans, Greeks or Egyptians. In the 17th century, archaeologist John Aubrey made the claim that Stonehenge was the work of the Celtic high priests known as the Druids. Druids continue to gather at Stonehenge for the summer solstice. However, in the mid-20th century, radiocarbon dating demonstrated that Stonehenge stood more than 1,000 years before the Celts inhabited the region, eliminating the ancient Druids from the running. Many modern historians and archaeologists now agree that several distinct tribes of people contributed to Stonehenge, each undertaking a different phase of its construction. Bones, tools and other artifacts found on the site seem to support this hypothesis.
Druids were people in ancient Britain and France who served a wide variety of roles — “philosophers, teachers, judges. Druids preferred oral teaching to writing.Druids were organized around the three groups of functionaries. The bards were the keepers of the wisdom tradition. They memorized the key material of the tradition, much of which was put into poetic form and made it available to the people. The Ovates were the mediums/shamans of the community. Among their duties was the establishment of contact with ancestors in the spirit realm. They also engaged in divination of various kinds, including the reading of entrails, in attempts to predict the future. The Druid priests were the most powerful leaders in the community. They presided over worship and group ceremonies, and often served as advisors to the secular rulers.
Stonehenge’s function and significance
There is strong archaeological evidence that Stonehenge was used as a burial site, at least for part of its long history, but most scholars believe it served other functions as well—either as a ceremonial site, a religious pilgrimage destination, a final resting place for royalty or a memorial erected to honor and perhaps spiritually connect with distant ancestors. In the 1960s, the astronomer Gerald Hawkins suggested that the cluster of megalithic stones operated as an astronomical calendar, with different points corresponding to astrological phenomena such as solstices and eclipses. While his theory has received quite a bit of attention over the years, critics maintain that Stonehenge’s builders probably lacked the knowledge necessary to predict such events or that England’s dense cloud cover would have obscured their view of the skies. More recently, signs of illness and injury in the human remains unearthed at Stonehenge led a group of British archaeologists to speculate that it was considered a place of healing, perhaps because bluestones were thought to have curative powers.
Early Britain
The first settlers in Britain that we know of belonged to the Celtic tribes which, before they arrival in Britain, had spread over what is now Germany, France and Spain. These first Celtic invaders are known as the Goidels, and their language survives in some parts of Ireland and Scotland.
About two centuries later a new wave of Celtic tribes known as Britons landed on the shores of Britain. They spoke a different language from that of the Goidels, both of which may be regarded as Celtic dialects. The actual conquest of Britain by Rome began one hundred years later, in 43 A.D. And their rule over Britain lasted for about four centuries. During this period a considerable part of the land was cleared for cultivation, many new towns grew up, roads in all directions were made and a number of forts were built for the defense of their frontiers.
Britain, now a Roman province, was frequently troubled by the Picts and Scots, the Celtic tribes which had escaped the Roman conquest and settled in Scotland and Ireland. But in the fifth century other enemies appeared. These were Germanic tribes: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. By this time the Britons were left on the island alone to defend their country, as the Roman legions had been withdrawn to the Continent to defend Rome from the advancing Germanic tribes.
Происхождение слова "Британия" Слово Британия происходит от Bretayne - так в средневековом английском передавалось латинское слово Britannia. Так называли Англию, Уэльс и Шотландию древнеримские историки и Юлий Цезарь. Сами же римляне позаимствовали это слово из языка древних жителей Британских островов, которое в IV веке до н.э. звучало как Pritani или Priteny.
We know very few details of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. We know that the invaders belonged to the Germanic tribes. Their languages and dialects belonged to the Indo-European family of languages.
The earliest invaders were Jutes, then Saxon tribes and then appeared Angles. The social order of these tribes preserved the early organization of human society in its transition stage from kindred order to that of feudalism. The unit of settlements was the kindred (clan), a large family or a group of families.
The isolation of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the Continental Germanic tribes actually led to the formation of the English nationality. The dialects of these tribes had so much in common that the tribes could easily understand each other. So we can say that even in this remote past the English people had a common language which they themselves called “Englisc”(English).
The time of the invasion of Britain by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes is considered to be the real beginning of the history of the English language which isolated from the continental Germanic dialects, developed according to its inner laws of development.