British Isles

Location of the British Isles

The British Isles are a group of islands off the north west coast of continental Europe comprising Great Britain, Ireland and a number of smaller islands. The term British Isles can be misunderstood and is sometimes considered objectionable, mainly in the Republic of Ireland and among nationalists in Northern Ireland. The term is not generally used in the Republic of Ireland.

There are two sovereign states located on the islands: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The group also includes the Isle of Man, a United Kingdom crown dependency. Both states, but not the Isle of Man, are members of the European Union. Between 1801 and 1922, Great Britain and Ireland together formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922, all but six counties in Ireland left the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom; the remaining six, mainly in the northeast of the island, became known as Northern Ireland.

The islands extend from Pednathise Head, Isles of Scilly in the south, to Out Stack, Shetland in the north; and from Tearaght Island, Ireland in the west, to Lowestoft Ness, England in the east. There are more than 6,000 islands, amounting to a total land area of 121,674 square miles (315,134 km²). Some sources [12] [13] include the Channel Isles in the British Isles although geographically they are an offshore French island group. The Faeroe Isles are geographically associated, but have never been under British rule and are not normally regarded as part of the British Isles.

The British Isles are largely low lying and fertile, though with significant mountainous areas in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the north of England. The regional geology is complex, formed by the drifting together of separate regions and subsequent orogenic, glacial and weathering activities.

The prefix Brit derives from a prehistoric Celtic languages word Priteni or Pritani for the inhabitants of much of Britain and Ireland between about 700 B.C. and 500 B.C.

Names of the islands through the ages

A 1490 Italian copy of Ptolomy's Geography showing Ibernia Britannica Insula ("Hibernia, Island of Britannia", Ireland), Albion Insula Britannica ("Albion, Island of Britannia", Great Britain) and Mona Insula (Isle of Man) separated from the European mainland by Oceanus Germanicus ("Germanic Ocean", North Sea) to the east and Oceanus Britannicus ("Britannic Ocean", English Channel) to the south.

Ancient terms

The earliest known names for the islands come from ancient Greek writings. Though the earliest texts have been lost, excerpts were quoted or paraphrased by later authors. There is considerable confusion about early use of these terms and the extent to which similar terms were used as self-description by the inhabitants. The main islands were called Ierne, equating to the term Ériu for Ireland, and Albion for modern-day Great Britain. Cognates of these terms are still used. The earlier writers referred to the inhabitants as the Ρρεττανοι, Priteni or Pretani, probably from a Celtic languages term meaning "people of the forms". This is often taken to refer to them being painted or tattooed, though as it is unusual for an ethnonym or self-description to describe appearance, this name may have been used by the Gaels of Armorica. From this name a collective term for the islands was used, appearing as αι Πρετανικαι νησοι (Pretanic Islands) and αι Βρεττανιαι (Brittanic Isles).

An early reference to Ierne and Albion may have appeared in the Massaliote Periplus, a merchants' handbook describing searoutes from around 500 BC, but this only survives in a poem by Avienus from around AD 400 and discrepancies have led to the suggestion that Avienus took this reference from the other sources he used.

The travel writings of the ancient Greek Pytheas around 320 BC, which are also lost but are referred to or cited by later authors, appear to be an early source of the terms "Albion and Ierne" and have been described as referring to the British Isles as the Pretanic Islands.

In 55 and 54 BC Caesar's invasions of Britain brought first hand knowledge, and in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico he introduced the term Britannia. Strabo, writing around AD 10, cited the comments of several earlier authors about Pytheas without quoting him directly, and followed Polybius in accusing Pytheas of fiction, at the same time promoting his own ideas of geography in which Ireland is entirely to the north of Britain, and so almost too cold for habitation. Throughout Book 4 of his Geography,Strabo calls the island of Albion as Prettanikee, which was written in Latin as Britannia. Strabo does not refer to the islands by a group name, referring to Ierne separately and only briefly before stating that he as "no trustworthy witnesses" concerning its inhabitants.

Pliny the Elder writing around AD 70 uses a Latin version of the same terminology in Book 4 of his Naturalis Historia. Pliny describes the islands he considers to be Britanniae (plural of Britannia), including Great Britain, Ireland, The Orkneys, smaller islands such as the Hebrides, Isle of Man, Anglesey, possibly one of the Friesan Islands, and islands that have been identified as Ushant and Sian. He also includes the island of Thule, most often identified as Iceland, although some express the view that it may have been Mainland, the largest of the Shetland islands, the Faroe Islands, or even the coast of Norway or Denmark.

Ptolemy included essentially the same main islands in the Britannias. He first described Ireland, which he called Hibernia. Second was the island of Great Britain, which he called Albion. Book II, Chapters 1 and 2 of his Geography are respectively titled as Hibernia, Island of Britannia and Albion, Island of Britannia. Interestingly, Ptolemy included Thule in the chapter on Albion, although the coordinates he gives have been mapped to the area around modern Kristiansund in western Norway.

The term Priteni was the source of the Welsh language term Prydain, and has the same source as the Old Irish term Cruithne. The latter referred to a tribe of Brythonic speaking inhabitants in the north-east of Ireland, and to the inhabitants of northern Scotland who the Romans initially called Britons, then more generally as Caledonians and later as Picts.

During the classical era Britannia came to mean only the island of Great Britain, or even just the area of the province of Roman Britain. With the Battle of Mons Graupius in AD 83 tribes throughout the island had been persuaded to join as allies or had been defeated, but a series of setbacks led to the extent of Roman control fluctuating, initially incorporating the Scottish Lowlands then in AD 210 formally retreating behind a northern frontier at Hadrian's Wall when Septimius Severus divided the province into Britannia Superior to the south, and Britannia Inferior up to the wall. The post-Roman era saw Brythonic kingdoms established in all areas except the Scottish Highlands, but coming under increasing attacks from Picts, Scotti and Anglo Saxons.

Oceani insulae

Quite quickly after the imposition of Roman rule in most of Great Britain, Britannia ceased to have any collective meaning for the archipelago. Instead, Brittania became the preferred Roman term for the island of Great Britain, and in particular the province of Britain in the south-east.

Indigenous sources of the post-Roman period use a collective term for the archipelago, Oceani Insulae meaning Islands of the Ocean. One such example is the Life of Saint Columba, a hagiography recording the missionary activities of the sixth century Irish monk Saint Columba among the peoples of modern-day Scotland. It was written in the late seventh century by Adomnán of Iona, an Irish monk living on the Inner Hebridean island. No Priteni-derived collective reference is made.

Jordanes writing in Getica (AD 551) describes Oceani insulas as an island group comprising of two large islands with the Isle of Man (Menavia) in between them, as well as the Orkneys (Orcades) and Thule (said to be the Shetlands or Iceland), with Thule being the further north. While correctly placing these islands to the south of Scandinavia (Scandia), he also says that they are "not far from the neighbourhood of the Strait of Gades" (southern Spain) and warns not to confuse them with "the twin promontories of Gallaecia and Lusitania" (in modern-say Portugal), as well as naming the larger of the islands Fortunate and the smaller Blessed, showing inspiration from the mythology of the Fortunate Isles.

Another early native source to use the term is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum of Bede written in the early eighth century. Bede's work does not explicitly give a collective term for the archipelago, referring to Brittania solely as the island "formerly called Albion" and treating Ireland separately. As with Jordanes and Columba, however, he does refer to Oceani insula, describing Britain as being one.

British Isles

The term British Isles came into use in English at the same time as the term British Empire. This map shows the British Isles (red) at the centre of the empire (pink) at its height in 1897 where England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are referred to as the Home Nations

The sudden rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geographia by Maximus Planudes in 1300 was a shock to European map-makers of the time. The maps contained therein were far beyond what was known at the time and soon-after many copies began to be circulated, with Ptolemy's naming of Britannica being translated into Latin.

Meantime, Britannia had remained the Latin name for Great Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire and through the entire Middle Ages. During the years of Tudor rule and then with the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 the idea of Britannia and the term "British" became increasingly politically important.

At the same time as the increasing political consolidation in Great Britain and the effective Tudor conquest of Ireland, there was also a need to assert a place in the wider world, where Spain and Portugal had received nominal ownership of much of the world from the Pope in 1493. Richard Hakluyt and John Dee were some of the men who were active in this area, building a legal and historical case against the Spanish claims in the Americas and elsewhere and building a case for rule over Great Britain, Ireland and the surrounding seas. According to Frances Yates, John Dee used the term Brytish Iles in 1577 in his Memorials, a combination of a practical guide to navigation and a political polemic. This appears to be the first use of a recognisable version of the modern term. Dee is also attributed as coining the terms British Empire and British Ocean (a nautical region extending north-west from Britain, encompassing Iceland, Greenland and possibly as far as North America) and for building a case that Tudor (and subsequently Stuart) authority rested on a solid historical basis. Current scholarly opinion is that "his imperial vision was simply propaganda and antiquarianism, ".

The period after the succession of Elizabeth's Scottish cousin, James VI of Scotland to the English throne (where he became James I of England) is a clear example of the increasing use of and need for terminology that would unify the various Kingdoms, e.g. James's personal unification of the Kingdoms of England (and the dominion of Wales), Ireland and Scotland when he proclaimed himself as 'King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland'.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that the first published use in English of "British Isles" was by Peter Heylin (or Heylyn) in his Microcosmus: a little description of the great world in 1621, a collection of his lectures on historical geography. He explains his use of the term with regard to Albion (modern-day Great Britain) on the basis that "ancient writers call this Iland a Brttiʃh Iland". He extended this reasoning to include Ireland as a British Island also, citing that the 1st century Roman writer Tacitus, who observed that the habits and disposition of the people in Ireland were not much unlike the "Brittaines", although Tacitus himself had treated Ireland and Britain separately and had also said that the Britons themselves were similar in many ways to the Gauls of the continent.

Recent scholarly work questions Helwyn's credibility as a neutral scientist, explaining that, "Nationalism was something about which Heylyn was more explicit in Cosmographie, his expanded rewriting of Microcosmus in the era of the Civil War, where he says, ‘as I have taken on my self the parts of an Historian and Geographer; so have I not forgotten that I [am] an English-man.’"

While acknowledging that Heylyn "politicized his geographical books Microcosmus (1621) and, still more, Cosmographie", modern writers advise to judge this in terms of what geography was for the period:

In the period between 1600 and 1800, politics meant what we might now term "high politics," excluding the cultural and social elements that modern analyses of ideology seek to uncover. Politics referred to discussions of dynastic legitimacy, of representation, and of the Constitution. ... Geography books spanning the period from the Reformation to the Reform Act ... demonstrated their authors' specific political identities by the languages and arguments they deployed. This cannot be seen as any deviation from the classical geographical tradition, or as a tainting of geography by politics, because geography was not to be conceived separately from politics.

Description like "British Isles", or similar terms in Latin, also started to be used by mapmakers from the late 16th century onwards, for example Gerardus Mercator. Mercator, who leant heavily on his friend Dee as a source for his maps, was the most notable. Similarly Ortelius, in his atlas derived from Mercator´s original maps, uses the title "Angliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae, sive Britannicar. insularum descriptio". This translates as "A Representation of England, Scotland and Ireland, or Britannica's islands".

Although other mapmakers (for example the Schagen Map) continued to use descriptions like "Angliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae", the precedent set by Mercator and Ortelius (who were probably the most influential mapmakers of the period), and the ongoing changes in the political situation in Great Britain and Ireland during the 17th century, meant that the term was very commonly used in maps by the late 17th century and quickly became near universal.

Modern names and descriptions

Main articles: British Isles (terminology) and British Isles naming dispute

Several different names are currently used to describe the islands. Probably the most common is the term the British Isles, title of this article. The complex political history and the complex contemporary political structures make names a difficult topic with regard to the many islands and states within the group.

Dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases that use the term British Isles define it as Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and their islands, with some sources also including the Channel Islands. The appropriateness of inclusion or exclusion of the Channel Islands from the archipelago is primarily a question of context, but is not a subject where certainty is possible. Geographically the Channel Islands are part of France rather than part of the archipelago, but geopolitically they are strongly connected to the United Kingdom. The Channel Islands regard themselves as part of the British Isles and state such in official literature.

Many major road and rail maps and atlases use the term "Great Britain and Ireland" to describe the islands, although this can be ambiguous regarding the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

In addition, the term "British Isles" is itself used in widely varying ways, including as an effective synonym for the UK or for Great Britain and its islands, but excluding Ireland. Media organisations like the The Times and the BBC have style-guide entries to try to maintain consistent usage, but these efforts are not always successful. Encyclopedia Britannica, the Oxford University Press - publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary - and the UK Hydrographic Office (publisher of "Admiralty" brand charts) have all occasionally used the term "British Isles and Ireland" (with Britannica and Oxford contradicting their own definitions of the "British Isles"), and some specialist encyclopedias also use that term. The BBC style guide follows its entry on the subject of the complexity of the British Isles with a remark, "Confused already? Keep going." The Economic History Society style guide suggests in its paragraph on countries that the term should be avoided.

Several alternative terms for the islands exist and are used in everyday language, examples are: "Great Britain and Ireland", "UK and Ireland", and "the British Isles and Ireland". Some of these are used by corporate entities and can be seen on the internet, such as in the naming of Yahoo UK & Ireland, or such as in the 2001 renaming of the British Isles Rugby Union Team to the current name of the "British and Irish Lions".

The term "British Isles" is also considered irritating or offensive by some, primarily in Ireland, because of the modern association of the term British with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus making its application to the Republic of Ireland inappropriate. One map publisher recently decided to abandon using the term in Ireland while continuing to use it in Britain. The Irish government is opposed to the term "British Isles" and say that they "would discourage its useage."

Geography

Main article: Geography of the United Kingdom

Main article: Geography of Ireland

Main article: Geography of the Isle of Man

Satellite Image of the British Isles (excluding the Shetland Islands) and part of northern Continental Europe.

There are more than 6,000 islands in the group, the largest two being Great Britain and Ireland. Great Britain is to the east and covers 83,698 square miles (216,777 km²), over half of the total landmass of the group. Ireland is to the west and covers 32,589 square miles (84,406 km²). The largest of the other islands are to be found in the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland to the north, Anglesey and the Isle of Man between Great Britain and Ireland, and the Channel Islands near the coast of France.

The larger islands that constitute the British Isles include:

• clockwise around Great Britain from the north:
  • Northern Isles
    • Orkney
    • Shetland
    • Fair Isle
  • Farne Islands
  • Portsmouth Islands
    • Hayling Island
    • Portsea Island
  • Isle of Wight
  • Isle of Portland
  • Isles of Scilly
  • Islands of the Bristol Channel
    • Lundy
    • Steep Holme
    • Flat Holme
  • Anglesey
  • Islands of Furness
  • Islands of the lower Firth of Clyde
    • Isle of Arran
    • Bute
  • Hebrides
    • Inner Hebrides
    • Outer Hebrides
    • Small Isles

• clockwise around Ireland from the north:
  • Rathlin Island
  • Lambay Island
  • Ireland's Eye
  • Great Island
  • Sherkin Island
  • Cape Clear
  • Valentia Island
  • Blasket Islands
  • Aran Islands
  • Inishark
  • Inishbofin
  • Inishturk
  • Clew Bay islands
  • Achill Island
  • Arranmore
  • Tory Island

• Isle of Man

• Channel Islands

See also:

• List of islands of England
• List of islands of Ireland
• List of islands of Isle of Man
• List of islands of Scotland
• List of islands of Wales

The Channel Islands are sometimes stated as being in the British Isles, though geographically they are not part of the island group, being close to the coast of France.

The islands are at relatively low altitudes, with central Ireland and southern Great Britain particularly low lying. The Scottish Highlands in the northern part of Great Britain are mountainous, with Ben Nevis being the highest point in the British Isles at 1,344 metres (4,409 ft). Other mountainous areas include Wales and parts of the island of Ireland, but only seven peaks in these areas reach above 1,000 metres (3,281 ft). Lakes on the islands are generally not large, although Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland is an exception, covering 147 square miles (381 km²); the largest freshwater body in Great Britain is Loch Lomond at 27.5 square miles (71.1 km²). Neither are rivers particularly long, the rivers Severn at 219 miles (354 km) and Shannon at 240 miles (386 km) being the longest.

The British Isles have a temperate marine climate, the North Atlantic Drift ("Gulf Stream") which flows from the Gulf of Mexico brings with it significant moisture and raises temperatures 11 degrees Celsius (20°F) above the global average for the islands' latitudes. Winters are thus warm and wet, with summers mild and also wet. Most Atlantic depressions pass to the north of the islands, combined with the general westerly circulation and interactions with the landmass, this imposes an east-west variation in climate.

Geology

Main article: Geology of the British Isles

An interactive geological map is available.

The British Isles lie at the juncture of several regions with past episodes of tectonic mountain building. These orogenic belts form a complex geology which records a huge and varied span of earth history. Of particular note was the Caledonian Orogeny during the Ordovician Period, ca. 488–444 Ma and early Silurian period, when the craton Baltica collided with the terrane Avalonia to form the mountains and hills in northern Britain and Ireland. Baltica formed roughly the north western half of Ireland and Scotland. Further collisions caused the Variscan orogeny in the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, forming the hills of Munster, south-west England, and south Wales. Over the last 500 million years the land which forms the islands has drifted northwest from around 30°S, crossing the equator around 370 million years ago to reach its present northern latitude.

The islands have been shaped by numerous glaciations during the Quaternary Period, the most recent being the Devensian. As this ended, the central Irish Sea was de-glaciated (whether or not there was a land bridge between Great Britain and Ireland at this time is somewhat disputed, though there was certainly a single ice sheet covering the entire sea) and the English Channel flooded, with sea levels rising to current levels some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, leaving the British Isles in their current form.

The islands' geology is highly complex, though there are large amounts of limestone and chalk rocks which formed in the Permian and Triassic periods. The west coasts of Ireland and northern Great Britain that directly face the Atlantic Ocean are generally characterized by long peninsulas, and headlands and bays; the internal and eastern coasts are "smoother".

History

See also: History of the Isle of Man, History of the Orkney Islands.

The British Isles has a long and complex shared history. While this tends to be presented in terms of national narratives, many events transcended modern political boundaries. In particular these borders have little relevance to early times and in that context can be misleading, though useful as an indication of location to the modern reader. Also, cultural shifts which historians have previously interpreted as evidence of invaders eliminating or displacing the previous populations are now, in the light of genetic evidence, perceived by a number of archaeologists and historians as being to a considerable extent changes in the culture of the existing population brought by groups of immigrants or invaders who at times became a new ruling élite.

Prehistory

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.

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 stone circle 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. 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.

Pretani, Romans and Anglo-Saxons

The oldest surviving historical records of the islands preserve fragments of the travels of the ancient Greek Pytheas around 320 BC and describe Great Britain and Ireland as the islands of Prettanike with their peoples the Priteni or Pretani, a name which may have been used in Gaul. A later variation on this term as the Cruithne would come to refer to certain groups. Ireland was referred to as Ierne (the sacred island as the Greeks interpreted it) "inhabited by the race of Hiberni", and Great Britain as insula Albionum, "island of the Albions". These terms without the collective name appear in the 4th century writings of Avienus which preserve fragments of the Massaliote Periplus of the 6th century BC. Later scholars associated these tribal societies with the Celts the Ancient Greeks reported in what is now south-west Germany, and subgrouped 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. Genetic evidence indicates that there was not a later large-scale replacement of these early inhabitants 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.

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 largely 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 Brittonic speaking due to trade and religious links, and the Romans subsequently called it Brittania.

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 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. To the north, the Irish Dál Riatans, also known by the name Scotti expanded their influence to western Scotland.

National formation

The Vikings arrived in Britain and Ireland 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, in various places around Ireland, Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia. Wessex prevented the further expansion of the Vikings, and achieved a united kingdom of England in 927, which was then ruled by both English and Viking kings until 1066. Further north, 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 England into the kingdom of Alba and fixed its southern border on the Tweed in 1018. Wales was divided into a number of British kingdoms, apart from one short period of unification, and also suffered from Viking raids in the tenth century. Ireland was divided among around eighty to a hundred petty kingdoms grouped under larger regional kingdoms and then a weak High King. The Vikings founded Dublin in 852 and established several other coastal strongholds around Ireland. The Viking kingdom of Dublin went on to dominate much of Ireland, but their power was broken by Brian Boru in 1014 who effectively united Ireland, but only until his death.

Norman immigration

The Normans, Viking descendants, were the next wave of immigration. The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought England under their rule and then extended their influence and power to the rest of the British Isles. The Normans were centralisers and expansionists. Their lands (and those of their successors, the Plantagenets) within the British Isles were part of more extensive land holdings in France and elsewhere, and held within a feudal framework. They controlled Wales by the end of the 11th century, only to partially lose it again several times owing to revolts until 1283 when Edward I successfully enforced Plantagenet supremacy. In 1072 the Normans forced the Scottish king Malcolm III 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 kingdoms of Mann and of the Isles in 1266, and Orkney and Shetland from Norway in 1472. The Normans were initially invited to Ireland, here they asserted overlordship, resulting in 1184 with the Pope authorising the feudal Lordship of Ireland. This fell under the English crown with the accession of John. Formal taxation and government during the Middle Ages was generally restricted to an arc around Dublin called the Pale.

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 and Plantagenet elite was driven by the slow erosion of their lands elsewhere, but it was 1362 before the Langue d'oïl, Anglo-Norman gave way to Middle English to become the language of the law courts.

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.

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%. In1685 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.

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 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. 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 great 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.

The 20th century

Prosperity increased through the 19th and into the 20th century, and politics became increasingly popular and democratic. The suspension of the Home Rule Act 1914, the subsequent Easter Rising, and the Irish War of Independence led to the 1921/1922 formation of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, thus more than reversing the 1801 Act of Union. The Irish Civil War which followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty had no impact on constitutional arrangements between Great Britain and Ireland since the anti-Treaty side was defeated.

The Irish Free State held dominion status until 1937, finally becoming the republic in 1949.

The six Irish counties which remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland had a devolved government from 1922 until the late 1960s , when direct rule was reimposed from London. There have been extensive periods of unrest in Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland has seen several re-impositions of direct rule in the subsequent decades as the parties within Northern Ireland fail to reach practical agreement on power sharing.

During World War II, the Irish Free State stayed officially neutral. Although much practical assistance was given to the allied side, the Irish Government at the time felt it impossible to join the British side in the conflict.

Both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in 1973.

Within the United Kingdom there are devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, though in Northern Ireland the devolved assembly is still suspended.

Further waves of migration from Ireland to Great Britain took place during times of economic difficulty in Ireland in the thirties, forties, and fifties, though since then Ireland has grown more prosperous and the Irish Gross Domestic Product per capita now exceeds that of the United Kingdom.

The end of the British Empire in the latter half of the 20th century saw the end of large-scale emigration from Great Britain; instead, there was new non-Irish immigration 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 immigration to both Britain and Ireland from eastern Europe.

Sport and Culture

A number of sports have strong ties to one or other of the islands of the British Isles, through either having been invented there or their rules being first formalized by associations there.

Examples of globally popular games include football, tennis and golf, all either invented or formalized in Great Britain, although golf actually originated in Flanders and The Netherlands. Other games, while not commanding the same global popularly, draw pan-global support, such as rugby, cricket, and darts, all invented or formalised in England.

Handball is a derivative or variant of Gaelic Handball, with the first records of play in Scotland in 1427 and in Ireland in 1527, both in statutes proscribing their play. Baseball is widely believed to have originated from the British and Irish game of rounders - although this view has been challenged in recent years - and is broadly similar to the version of rounders played in Ireland. Shinty is considered one of the many forebears of ice hockey, along with hockey, hurling, bandy and several other stick games.

There are several sports popular in Ireland but not in Great Britain, and vice versa. Cricket, hurling and Gaelic football are probably the best examples of this. Cricket, while being very popular in England and Wales, is rare in Scotland and Ireland. Similarly, hurling and Gaelic football, although hugely popular across the island of Ireland and capable of regularly filling the 82,500-capacity Croke Park, the 4th largest stadium in Europe, are almost unknown in Great Britain.

However, for some sports a common level of popularity is shared across the islands. Football (the term soccer, common in American English, is also sometimes used for the sport in the British Isles) is hugely popular in both Great Britain and Ireland, as in the rest of the world.

The organization of football across Great Britain and Ireland is split into five independent national associations and national teams, one for the Republic of Ireland and four for the United Kingdom. Football in the Republic of Ireland is governed by Football Association of Ireland; Northern Ireland by the Irish Football Association; Wales by the Football Association of Wales; Scotland by the Scottish Football Association; and England by the Football Association. The four United Kingdom associations are, alongside FIFA, the members of the International Football Association Board, who decide upon the Laws of the Game.

Some sporting events do operate across Great Britain and Ireland as a whole.

The British and Irish Lions is a rugby union team made up of players from the entire archipelago and which undertakes tours of the Southern Hemisphere rugby playing nations every few years. This team was formerly known as The British Isles or colloquially as "The British Lions", but was renamed as "The British and Irish Lions" in 2001, apparently because of objections in Ireland to the team being named "The British Isles".

One united team represent both Northern Ireland and the Republic.

The Six Nations rugby championship originated as a championship between the nations of the British Isles in 1883. France participated in 4 of the "Home International Championships" championships prior to 1910 and then continuously from 1910, originating the term "The Five Nations" in that year. The event was extended to include Italy, becoming the Six Nations Championship, in the year 2000. However, if any of the nations from Great Britain and Ireland beat the other three within the Six Nations tournament, they are still awarded the Triple Crown.

Since 2001 the professional club teams of Ireland, Scotland and Wales compete together in the Celtic League. Clubs in the English Guinness Premiership do not participate in the Celtic League.

Between 1927 and 1971 the Ryder Cup in golf was played between a United States team and a Great Britain team, although, in practice, a team representing Great Britain and Ireland. In 1973, the team was renamed so that United States faced an official Great Britain and Ireland team. From 1979 onwards this was expanded to include the whole of Europe. Bowls is also an example of a sport that continues to have a British Isles championship.

As with sport, there are only a few cultural activities that are experienced in common across the two islands. The United Kingdom and Ireland have separate television and radio networks. However, many people in Ireland watch British television, which is widely available, giving people in Ireland a high level of familiarity with cultural matters in Great Britain. Irish television is not widely available in Great Britain . British newspapers and magazine are widely read in Ireland and in recent decades have started to produce specific Ireland-orientated editorial copy . Again, as with television, the reverse is not true and Irish newspapers are only available in a few selected locations.

A few activities are presented as being applicable to both Great Britain and Ireland. For example, the Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread Awards, are awarded to authors resident in the UK or Ireland. The Man Booker Prize is awarded to authors from the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland. The Mercury Music Prize is handed out every year to the best album from a British or Irish musician or group, though other musical awards are considered on a national basis; for example, U2 won the best international group award at the 2001 Brit awards.

Other organisations are sometimes organised across the islands; for example the Samaritans.

References

• Cunliffe, Barry (2002), The extraordinary voyage of Pytheas the Greek (revised ed.), New York: Walker & Co, ISBN 0-8027-1393-9 also in Penguin ISBN 0-14-200254-2 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Ó Corráin, Donnchadh (1989), "Chapter 1: Prehistoric and Early Christian Ireland", in Foster, R. F. (ed.), The Oxford History of Ireland (reissue ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press (published 1 November 2001), ISBN 0-19-280202-X {{citation}}: Check date values in: |publication-date= (help).
• O'Rahilly, T. F. (1946), Early Irish History and Mythology (reprinted 1964, 1971, 1984 ed.), Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, ISBN 0-901282-29-4
• Snyder, Christopher A. (2003), [www.blackwellpublishing.com The Britons], Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 0-631-22260-X {{citation}}: Check |url= value (help)

Further reading

• A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, 3500 BC - 1603 AD by Simon Schama, BBC/Miramax, 2000 ISBN
• A History of Britain — The Complete Collection on DVD by Simon Schama, BBC 2002
• The Isles, A History by Norman Davies, Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN
• Shortened History of England by G. M. Trevelyan Penguin Books ISBN

See also

• UK topics
• Botanical Society of the British Isles
• History of Great Britain
• Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542
• Act of Union 1707
• Act of Union 1800
• Anglo-Irish Treaty
• British-Irish Council

External links

• Britons and their origins
  • The Scotsman.
  • Daily Mail.
  • The Telegraph.
  • Prospect.

• Template:PDFlink.
• Archaic England: an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitions, by Harold Bayley. Publisher: London, Chapman & Hall ltd., 1919.
• Geograph British Isles — Creative Commons-licensed, geo-located photographs of the British Isles.
• Roman Britain.
• Roman Britain at LacusCurtius (includes 3 complete books).
• The Geography of Claudius Ptolemy: Book II, Chapter 1.
• Pliny, Book 4 section 102ff.
• Pliny excerpts.
• Britannicarum Insularum Typus, Ortelius 1624
• Excerpt from Reeves edition of Life of Saint Columba.
• Excerpt from Bede in Latin.
• Excerpt from Bede in English translation.
• BBC Nations.
• The British Isles.