11. Anglo-Saxon England.

• Historical sources mention incomers from regions called Angeln and Saxony, so we call these newcomers Anglo-Saxons. Their way of life can indeed be paralleled in northern Germany and Denmark, but also in northern France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia and there would have been an element of the original Romano-British population.

• First, this was the period in which England developed a national identity, emerging from the early fragmented kingdoms of the invading Germanic tribes to a unified nation (initially under Athelstan in the early part of the tenth-century) and, at times, a singular head of state (e.g. Edgar, Canute, Edward, Harold).

• Second, this was the first period in which the English language appears in written form in such historical documents as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , or literary works such as Beowulf. This period of the English language is referred to as Old English (or occasionally Anglo-Saxon). Recorded in manuscripts from the later part of the period, most students will encounter the form of Old English known as Late West Saxon - a standardised version of Old English appearing in the tenth century under the learning program instigated by the dominant kingdom of Wessex.

• However, it should be noted that dialectal variations do appear and students should be prepared for some unfamiliar spellings.

• By the seventh century a number of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had formed. The treasures from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, for instance, may bear witness to an East Anglian royal house. At the same time Christianity became established, the first towns formed from trading centres and the Anglo-Saxons started minting their own coinage.

• With time, the kingdoms were united, notably under Alfred the Great in the ninth century, when the Anglo-Saxons faced major opposition from Viking settlers in the east and north of England. By the 950s, one unified kingdom emerged.

• The Anglo-Saxon collection of the British Museum reflects all the different influences and developments in the make-up of Anglo-Saxon England. It starts with the first settlers and illustrates with later pieces how England became one of the major artistic and intellectual forces in early medieval Europe.

12.England after the Norman Conquest.

• A new era in English history began with the Norman Conquest. William I introduced Norman-style political and military feudalism. He used the feudal system to collect taxes, employed the bureaucracy of the church to strengthen the central government, and made the administration of royal justice more efficient.

• After the death of William's second son, Henry I, the country was subjected to a period of civil war that ended one year before the accession of Henry II in 1154. Henry II's reign was marked by the sharp conflict between king and church that led to the murder of Thomas à Becket.

• Conflict between kings and nobles, which had begun under Richard I, came to a head under John, who made unprecedented financial demands and whose foreign and church policies were unsuccessful. A temporary victory of the nobles bore fruit in the most noted of all English constitutional documents, the Magna Carta (1215). The recurring baronial wars of the 13th cent. (see Barons' War; Montfort, Simon de, earl of Leicester) were roughly contemporaneous with the first steps in the development of Parliament.

• Edward I began the conquest of Wales and Scotland. He also carried out an elaborate reform and expansion of the central courts and of other aspects of the legal system. The Hundred Years War with France began (1337) in the reign of Edward III. The Black Death (see plague) first arrived in 1348 and had a tremendous effect on economic life, hastening the breakdown (long since under way) of the manorial and feudal systems, including the institution of serfdom. At the same time the fast-growing towns and trades gave new prominence to the burgess and artisan classes.

• In the 14th cent. the English began exporting their wool, rather than depending on foreign traders of English wool. Later in the century, trade in woolen cloth began to gain on the raw wool trade.

13.Tudor England. Expansion. Reformation. Renaissance.

• The reign of the Tudors (1485-1603) is one of the most fascinating periods in English history. Henry VII restored political order and the financial solvency of the crown, bequeathing his son, Henry VIII, a full exchequer. In 1536,

• Henry VIII brought about the political union of England and Wales. Henry and his minister Thomas Cromwell greatly expanded the central administration. During Henry's reign commerce flourished and the New Learning of the Renaissance came to England. Several factors-the revival of Lollardry, anticlericalism, the influence of humanism, and burgeoning nationalism-climaxed by the pope's refusal to grant Henry a divorce from Katharine of Aragón so that he could remarry and have a male heir-led the king to break with Roman Catholicism and establish the Church of England.

The term "English Renaissance" is used by many historians to refer to a cultural movement in England in the 16th and 17th centuries that was heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance. This movement is characterized by the flowering of English music (particularly the English adoption and development of the madrigal), notable achievements in drama (by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson), and the development of English epic poetry (most famously Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and John Milton's Paradise Lost).

Reformation

• During the 16th century, Scotland underwent a Protestant Reformation. In the earlier part of the century, the teachings of first Martin Luther and then John Calvin began to influence Scotland. the execution of a number of Protestant preachers, most notably the Lutheran influenced Patrick Hamilton in 1528 and later the proto-Calvinist George Wishart in 1546 who was burnt at the stake in St. Andrews by Cardinal Beaton for heresy, did nothing to stem the growth of these ideas. Beaton was assassinated shortly after the execution of George Wishart.

• The Reformation remained somewhat precarious through the reign of Queen Mary, who remained Roman Catholic but tolerated Protestantism. Following her deposition in 1567, her infant son James VI was raised as a Protestant. In 1603, following the death of the childless Queen Elizabeth I, the crown of England passed to James. He took the tle James I of England and James VI of Scotland, thus unifying these two countries under his personal rule. For a time, this remained the only political connection between two independent nations, but it foreshadowed the eventual 1707 union of Scotland and England under the banner of the Great Britain.

14.The Stuarts, Rebellion, Restoration, and Unrest.

15.The Industrial Revolution

• The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times. It began in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spread throughout Western Europe, North America, Japan, and eventually the world.

• The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. Most notably, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. In the two centuries following 1800, the world's average per capita income increased over tenfold, while the world's population increased over sixfold.

• Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before".

Starting in the later part of the 18th century, there began a transition in parts of Great Britain's previously manual labour and draft-animal–based economy towards machine-based manufacturing. It started with the mechanisation of the textile industries, the development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal.

• Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways. With the transition away from an agricultural-based economy and towards machine-based manufacturing came a great influx of population from the countryside and into the towns and cities, which swelled in population.

• The First Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century, merged into the Second Industrial Revolution around 1850, when technological and economic progress gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later in the 19th century with the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation. The period of time covered by the Industrial Revolution varies