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.
In any case, huge thanks to our Patrons, whose
names you can see scrolling across the screen
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If you want to support the channel and get
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Additionally, massive thanks to everybody
who participated in our Spring Break streams!
We had a great time, and managed to raise
a whopping $31,000 for Feeding America.
You’re all champions, and I’ll see you
in the next video.
