The Natural History Of The British Isles

At a time when the islands were still joined to continental Europe, Homo erectus brought Palaeolithic tool use to the south east of the modern British Isles some 750,000 years ago followed (about 500,000 years ago) by the more advanced tool use of Homo heidelbergensis found at Boxgrove. It appears that the glaciation of ice ages successively cleared all human life from the area, though human occupation occurred during warmer interglacial periods. Modern humans appear with the Aurignacian culture about 30,000 years ago, famously with the "Red Lady of Paviland" in modern Wales. The last ice age ended around 10,000 years ago, and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers spread to all parts of the islands by around 8,000 years ago, at a time when rising sea levels now cut off the islands from the continent. The immigrants came principally from the ice age refuge in what is now the Basque Country, with a smaller immigration from refuges in the modern Ukraine and Moldavia. Three quarters of the ancestors of people of the British Isles may have arrived in this wave of immigration.[38]

Around 6,500 years ago farming practices spread to the area with the Neolithic Revolution and the western seaways quickly brought megalithic culture throughout the islands. The earliest stone house still standing in northern Europe is at Knap of Howar, in Orkney which also features such monuments as Maes Howe ranking alongside the Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis, Newgrange in Ireland, and Stonehenge in southern England along with thousands of lesser monuments across the isles, often showing affinities with megalithic monuments in France and Spain.[39] Further cultural shifts in the Bronze Age were followed with the building of numerous hill forts in the Iron Age, and increased trade with continental Europe.

[edit] Celts, Romans and Anglo-Saxons

Early historical records of the islands, notably descriptions from Pytheas and Ptolemy, portray numerous named tribes while using Priteni or Pretani as an overall collective term, Hiberni for the inhabitants of Ireland and Albiones for those of Great Britain, though it is questionable if these people identified themselves with any grouping larger than the tribe.[40] Later scholars associated these tribal societies with the Celts the Ancient Greeks reported in what is now south-West Germany, and sub-grouped their Celtic languages in the British Isles into the Brythonic languages spoken in most of Great Britain, and Goidelic in Ireland. They perceived these languages as arriving in a series of invasions, but modern evidence suggests that these peoples may have migrated from Anatolia around 7000 BC through southern and then Western Europe.[41] Genetic evidence indicates that there was not a later large-scale replacement of these early inhabitants[42] and that the Celtic influence was largely cultural. In the Scottish highlands northwards the people the Romans called Caledonians or Picts spoke a language which is now unknown and extinct. It is also possible that southern England was settled by Belgic tribes.[41]

During the first century the Roman conquest of Britain established Roman Britain which became a province of the Roman Empire named Britannia. It included most of the island of Great Britain but never consolidating control over the highlands of Caledonia, and around 180 drew back to Hadrian's Wall with tribes forming friendly buffer states further north to around the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth. The interaction of the Romans with Ireland appears to have been limited to some trade. From the 4th century raids on Roman Britain increased and language links have led to speculation that many Britons migrated across the English Channel at this time to found Brittany, but it has been contended that Armorica was already Brythonic speaking due to trade and religious links, and the Romans subsequently called it Brittania.[43]

The end of Roman rule around 410 was followed by the formation of numerous kingdoms across most of Britain. Subsequent settlement in Sub-Roman Britain by peoples traditionally called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes created Anglo-Saxon kingdoms ("the Heptarchy") over much of what is now Eastern England and south-east Scotland. Between the 5th and 10th centuries England was divided into areas of British and Anglo-Saxon control, with the latter gradually expanding westward. The Irish raiders known as Scoti attacked many areas of Britain, and that name was also used for Gaels from Dál Riata in north eastern Ireland and later to settlers from Ireland in western Scotland.

[edit] National formation

The Vikings arrived in the British Isles in the 790's with raids on Lindisfarne, Iona, and the west of Ireland. They provided another wave of immigration, settling in Orkney and Shetland and then Western Isles, Caithness, Sutherland, Isle of Man, Galloway, Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia and founding the cities of Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Cork, Arklow, and Dublin in Ireland. Wessex prevented the further expansion of the Vikings in England, and achieved a united Kingdom of England in 927, which was then ruled by both English and Viking kings until 1066. In 900 A.D. Donald II was the first king of Alba rather than king of the Picts. His successors amalgamated all the kingdoms north of the English border into the Kingdom of Alba, later known as the Kingdom of Scotland, and fixed its southern border on the Tweed in 1018 , approximating the current England-Scotland border. Wales, still divided following the Roman withdrawal, was divided into a number of Brythonic kingdoms, with the exception from one short period of unification, and also suffered from Viking raids in the tenth century.

Ireland, having like England and Scotland been divided among around eighty to a hundred petty kingdoms, began to slowly amalgamate into eight to ten provincial kingdoms by the tenth century. Nominally these were governed by a single High King, with the title floating between an ever fewer number of noble dynasties with increasing national authority. Viking influence in Irish affairs was crushed in the 980 Battle of Tara. Following the 1014 Battle of Clontarf, they turned their attention to Scotland and especially England, conquered by the Viking Canute the Great the following year. The same battle, however, resulted in the death Brian Boru, who had effectively united Ireland, causing a power vacuum and a series of bloody factional wars.

[edit] Norman immigration

The Norman Conquest of 1066 first brought England under Norman rule. The Normans would later extend their influence, in different ways, into Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. The Normans were centralisers and expansionists. Their lands within the British Isles were part of extensive holdings across north-Western Europe held within a feudal framework. Wales was brought under their control by the end of the 11th century, but not successfully held until 1283. In 1072 the Normans forced the Scottish king to submit to their feudal overlordship, something they would regularly assert during the mediaeval period. The Normans did not supplant the Scottish political structure, but had great influence over it, eventually supplying the kings of the Scots from 1150 and then asserting independence of the Scottish Crown from that of England. The Scottish Crown gradually gained control of Norse areas, annexing the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles in 1266, and Orkney and Shetland from Norway in 1472. In 1169, the Normans were invited to Ireland to aid a provincial king whose lands had been confiscated by the High King. Papal permission was granted, by the only English head of the Catholic Church to sit in Rome, Pope Adrian IV, for the annexation of the country, to be a feudal possession of the English crown, as the Lordship of Ireland. Although immediately transferred to the king's second son, this reverted to the English crown with John's unexpected accession to the throne of his father.

During the Middle Ages, the Normans slowly intermarried with the previous populations and adopted their language and customs. In England, the Anglicisation of the Norman elite was driven by the slow erosion of their lands elsewhere, but it was 1362 before Anglo-Norman gave way to Middle English to become the language of the law courts. In Ireland, a Gaelic resurgence at the close of the 13th century led the Norman to famously become "more Irish than the Irish themselves", adopting Gaelic customs, laws and language, intermarrying with the native nobility and rebelling against the English crown. The 1360 Statutes of Kilkenny were intended to stem this tide by legislating the death penalty for any Englishman (as the Normans were then known) who consorted with the Irish in this way. However, little could be done, save an expensive re-conquest, to bring Ireland back under English law and by the 15th century only a fortified twenty-mile (32 km) radius around Dublin, known as the Pale, was loyal to the English crown.

[edit] Protestant reformation and civil wars

The feudal system decayed and by the end of the sixteenth century was replaced by a system of centralised states. The English throne had come under the Welsh Tudors, who centralised government in England, Ireland, and Wales. In 1603 James VI of Scotland brought England and Scotland into personal union and promoted the existence of a modern British identity.

These changes happened at the same time as the Protestant reformation where the Roman Catholic church had been replaced by national churches to which all people were expected to adhere to. Failure to do so resulted in prosecution for recusancy and heavy fines, and recusants laid themselves open to accusations of treason and loss of land. By 1600 there was a wide range of religious belief within the islands from Presbyterian Calvinists (who were the majority in much of Scotland) and Independents to episcopal Calvinists (in the Church of Ireland and parts of Scotland) to Protestant Episcopalians that retained formal liturgy (especially the Church of England) to Roman Catholicism (which retained a large majority in Ireland).

James, and his son, Charles I, favoured political and religious centralisation and uniformity throughout the British Isles. They favoured episcopal, Armininian churches with a formal liturgy, which antagonised many Protestants. In addition, James, although he followed a policy of relative religious toleration, worsened the position of Irish Catholics by expanding the policy of plantation in Ireland, most notably in the Plantation of Ulster where forfeited lands from Catholics were settled by Scottish and English Protestants and by barring Catholics from serving in public office. Charles tried to force central, personal government. He attempted to bypass institutions he could not control and impose a uniform non-Calvinistic settlement throughout the islands.

The result was the First Bishops War in Scotland in 1639, when the Scottish Presbyterians rebelled against Charles' religious policies. The crisis rapidly spread to Ireland, in the form of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and then to England, where Parliament refused to raise an army for Charles to fight in Scotland or Ireland, fearing that it would next be used against them. The English Civil War broke out in 1642. Collectively, these conflicts are known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a shifting series of conflicts and alliances within Britain and Ireland. The King's supporters were known as the Royalists and had forces in England, Scotland (mostly episcopalian and Catholic highlanders), and Ireland. The English Parliamentary forces (mostly presbyterian and independents) fought against them, but were defeated in England by 1645. The Scottish presbyterians (the Covenanters) were allied to the English Parliament, while the Irish Catholic Confederates were loosely allied with the Royalists.

By 1649 Parliamentary forces ruled England and executed Charles and the Covenanters had secured Scotland. An alliance between the Catholic Confederates and the Royalists in Ireland resulted in the parliamentary conquest of Ireland, followed by a brutal guerrilla campaign which officially ended in 1653. Charles II repudiated the Irish alliance in 1650 in order to enter one with the Covenanters instead and invaded England. He was defeated in 1651 and the result was that the entire British Isles were brought under the English parliamentary army. There was religious toleration of Protestant denominations (though no episcopalian church), but Catholics were strongly repressed. In Ireland they were disenfranchised and dispossessed with Catholic land ownership dropping from 60% to 8% and their land was confiscated to pay off the Parliament's debts. Some of the land was given to another wave of Protestant immigrants, especially former soldiers, but these were not sufficient to replace the existing Irish, so Ireland became a land largely owned by Protestant landlords with Catholic tenants.

[edit] The return of the Stuarts

The restoration of Charles II in 1660 reversed many of the Commonwealth measures: the three kingdoms were separated again, the episcopalian Churches of England and Ireland re-established, a Presbyterian Church of Scotland established, and Protestant nonconformism repressed. A small proportion of the confiscated lands in Ireland were restored, bringing Catholic ownership up to 20%. 1685 brought Charles' brother, James II, a Catholic, to the thrones. James suspended the laws discriminating against those not adhering to the national churches; but he attempted personal rule with a large standing army and heavy-handedly attempted to replace Anglicans with Catholics. This alienated the English establishment who invited the Dutch William, Prince of Orange to depose James in favour of his daughter, Mary. On William's landing, James fled first to France and then to Ireland where the government remained loyal to him. Here he was defeated, and the position of the Protestant Ascendancy cemented with the imposition of Penal Laws there that effectively denied nearly all Catholics (75% of the population) any sort of power or substantial property.

James and his descendants attempted to recover the throne several times over the next sixty years, but failed to gain sufficient active support and were consistently defeated.

[edit] Kingdom of Great Britain and social revolutions

The 1707 Act of Union united England and Scotland in the Kingdom of Great Britain. The next century saw the start of great social changes. Enclosure had been taking place over a long period in England, but the British Agricultural Revolution accelerated the process by which land was privatised, commercialised, and intensively exploited, and caused it to spread throughout the British Isles. This resulted in the displacement of large numbers of people from the land and widespread hardship, including the Highland Clearances in which many of the residents of the Scottish highlands were systematically removed to make the land available for sheep farming.[44] In addition, the industrial revolution saw the displacement of cottage industries by large-scale factories and the rapid growth of industrial towns and cities. The British Empire grew substantially, stoking the growth in industrial production, bringing in wealth, giving rise to large-scale emigration, and making London the largest city in Europe.

Social unrest and repressive government accompanied these upheavals. The ideals of the French Revolution were widely supported and led to a full-scale rebellion in Ireland. A result of the rebellion was the start of the end of Ascendancy hegemony in Ireland and its political unification with Great Britain in 1801. Unrest throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland continued well into the 19th century, but was increasingly legitimised and able to find an outlet in Parliament from the Great Reform Act of 1832 onwards. The role of religion in determining political markedly decreased from the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 onwards. The social upheavals continued with widespread migration from the countryside to towns and cities and abroad. Ireland suffered a famine from 1845 until 1849 which resulted in its population dropping by a third through death and migration. This included large-scale movements to Great Britain, especially to the north west of England and western Scotland. Emigration from the whole of the British Isles overseas continued, especially to the English-speaking parts of the British Empire, the United States, and other countries such as Argentina.

[edit] The twentieth century

Prosperity increased in England through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century and politics became increasingly popular and democratic. The suspension of the Home Rule Act 1914, the subsequent Easter Rising, and the Anglo-Irish War led to the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, which subsequently survived the Irish Civil War. The Irish Free State existed until a new constitution in 1937. The Irish state held dominion status until 1949, when it became a republic. During World War II, the Irish Free State stayed officially neutral under a state of emergency.

Six counties in the north-east were politically separated from the rest of Ireland under the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, forming Northern Ireland. They remained part of the United Kingdom with a devolved government until 1972 [11], when direct rule was imposed from London following the failure of a power-sharing assembly. There have been extensive periods of unrest in Northern Ireland which has seen several periods of direct rule in the subsequent decades as the parties within Northern Ireland failed to reach practical agreement on power sharing.

Within the United Kingdom there are devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, and in Northern Ireland although each has different powers.

Attempts at long-needed economic reforms by the UK government in the wake of the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849) resulted in mass migration from Ireland to Great Britain. Despite attempts by the Irish governments, north and south, to stem the tide, the pattern continued following independence, with notable post-independence spikes in the 1950s and 1980s. Since the mid-1990s Ireland has grown more prosperous and the Irish Gross Domestic Product per capita now exceeds that of the United Kingdom. Both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in 1973.

The end of the British Empire in the latter half of the twentieth century saw the end of large-scale emigration from Great Britain; instead, there was new non-Irish imigration to Great Britain, especially from the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent. Recently, with the accession of Poland and other former communist states to the European Union, there has been significant migration to both Britain and Ireland from eastern Europe.