The culture of England is sometimes difficult to separate clearly from the culture of the United Kingdom, so influential has English culture been on the cultures of the British Isles and, on the other hand, given the extent to which other cultures have influenced life in England.

Art

English art is a term referring to a body of art originating from England. Nikolaus Pevsner attempted a definition in his 1956 book The Englishness of English Art.

It has developed over several centuries to current movements, such as Brit art, and encompasses all forms - painting, sculpture and performance art.

Notable English artists presently working range from Lucian Freud and Damien Hirst.

Oil painting came comparatively late to England. Hans Holbein, an imported talent, is generally credited with founding an English school of portrait painting. The rich ecclesiastical decoration of English churches was, in great measure, lost during the iconoclasm of the Reformation.

And although Charles I of England built up a great royal collection of art, the disposal of these treasures during the English Commonwealth and the subsequent democratisation of society meant that the patronage of the state never formed great palace collections such as seen in other European states.

It is often considered that English landscape painting typifies English art, mirroring as it does the development of the country house and its landscaping.

Cuisine

England being the first industrialised country in the world, urbanised workers were in many cases cut off from regional food traditions. Some consider that English cuisine has consequently suffered from a widespread image of blandness and lack of distinctiveness. The openness of English diners to exotic dishes has also meant that English cooking does not enjoy as high a profile as other nations’ culinary traditions. More recently, a new style of cooking called Modern British has emerged that combines traditional British ingredients with foreign culinary influences.

The Full English breakfast remains an enduring tradition for many, despite the increasing popularity of the continental-style breakfast, or no breakfast at all, for busy workers. Tea and beer are typical drinks. Cider is produced in the West Country, and the south of England has seen the reintroduction of vineyards producing high quality white wine on a comparatively small scale.

England produces a range of cheeses in various regions, including:

Stilton cheese
Wensleydale cheese
Lancashire cheese
Dorset Blue Vinney cheese
Cheshire cheese
Double Gloucester cheese

Other foods associated with England include:

Sunday roast
Lancashire Hotpot
Cornish pasty
Fish and chips (and mushy peas)
Clotted cream from Devon and Cornwall
Stargazy pie from Cornwall
Yorkshire pudding
Sausage and mash
Bakewell tart
Eccles cake
Cumberland sausage
British Curries
Balti
Chicken Tikka Masala
Other typical British dishes

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England is both the most populous and the most ethnically diverse nation in the United Kingdom with around 49 million inhabitants, of which roughly a tenth are from non-White ethnic groups. It is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, second only to the Netherlands.

There is a debate over the extent to which the population of England (and indeed that of Britain as a whole) is composed of long-standing indigenous stock or descended from various groups of settlers and immigrants who have arrived over millennia. The traditional view that the population was largely descended from successive waves of incomers has been increasingly challenged, and DNA evidence of the contemporary connections of Cheddar Man has been cited as demonstrating that a substantial proportion of the present day population maybe descended from groups that populated the island in prehistory (The Times, 8 March 1997).

The principal waves of migration have been in c. 600 BCE (Celts, although these days there is a view that the ‘Celtic’ culture may have spread to Britain through acculturation rather than migration), the Roman period (garrison soldiers from throughout the Empire), 350-550 (Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other West Germanic groups), 800-900 (Vikings, Danes), 1066 (Normans), 1650-1750 (European refugees such as the Huguenots), 1840-1850 (Irish), 1880-1940 (Irish, Jews), 1950- (Irish, Caribbeans, Africans, South Asians), 1985- (citizens of European Community member states especially Ireland, East Europeans, Iranians, Kurds, refugees). In 2001 the largest foreign-born elements in the British population came from the Republic of Ireland (495,000), India (466,000), Pakistan (321,000), Germany (262,000), the Caribbean (255,000) and the United States (155,000). (more…)

England comprises the central and southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain, plus offshore islands of which the largest is the Isle of Wight. It is bordered to the north by Scotland and to the west by Wales. It is closer to continental Europe than any other part of Britain, divided from France only by a 38 km (24 statute mile or 21 nautical mile) sea gap.

Most of England consists of rolling hills, but it is more mountainous in the north with a chain of low mountains, the Pennines, dividing east and west. The dividing line between terrain types is usually indicated by the Tees-Exe line. There is also an area of flat, low-lying marshland in the east, much of which has been drained for agricultural use.

The list of England’s largest cities is much debated because in British English the normal meaning of city is “a continuously built-up urban area”; these are hard to define and various other definitions are preferred by some people to boost the ranking of their own city. London is by far the largest English city. Manchester and Birmingham vie for second place. A number of other cities, mainly in the north of England, are of substantial size and influence. These include: Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham, Bristol and Sheffield.

The Channel Tunnel, near Folkestone, links England to the European mainland. The English/French border is halfway along the tunnel.

The largest harbour in England is at Poole, on the south-central coast. Internationally, it is the second largest harbour in the world, although this fact is disputed (See harbours for a list of other potential second largest harbours).
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Since the promulgation of the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan and the Laws in Wales Acts 1535-1542, Wales has shared a legal identity with England as the joint entity of England and Wales. The Act of Union with the Kingdom of Scotland in 1707 created the Kingdom of Great Britain, subsuming England, Wales and Scotland into a single political entity. Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, retain separate legal systems. The Duchy of Cornwall and Duchy of Lancaster also retain some unique rights. Wales and Scotland have also gained, in 2000, separate legislatures and significant “home rule” though ostensibly still answering to London.

All of Great Britain has been ruled by the government of the United Kingdom since that date, although in 1999 the first elections to the newly created Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales left England as the only part of the Union with no devolved assembly or parliament. As all legislation for England is passed by Parliament at Westminster there are some complaints about the ability of non-English Members of Parliament to influence purely English affairs. This apparent anomaly has been highlighted by both English and non-English politicians, often those opposed to devolution, has become popularly known as the West Lothian question.

Administratively, England is something of an anomaly within the UK. Unlike the other three nations, it has no local parliament or government and its administrative affairs are dealt with by a combination of the UK government, the UK parliament and a number of England-specific quangos, such as English Heritage. There are calls from an increasing number for a devolved English Parliament and from others for the dissolution of the UK and an independent England.

The current Labour government favoured the establishment of regional administration, claiming that England was too large to be governed as a sub-state entity. A referendum on this issue in North East England on 4 November 2004 !--more-->
Some criticised the English regional proposals for not decentralising enough, saying that they amounted not to devolution, but to little more than local government reorganisation, with no real power being removed from central government. The English regions would not even have had the limited powers of the Welsh Assembly, much less the tax-varying and legislative powers of the Scottish Parliament. Rather, power was simply re-allocated within the region, with little new resource allocation and no real prospects of Assemblies being able to change the pattern of regional aid. Responsibility for regional transport was added to the proposals late in the process. This was perhaps crucial in the North East, where resentment at the Barnett Formula, which delivers greater regional aid to adjacent Scotland, was a significant impetus for the North East devolution campaign. There has also been a campaign for a Cornish assembly along Welsh lines by groups such as Mebyon Kernow, which recently collected 50,000 signatures in support.

Some eurosceptics believe that the establishment of English regions as administrative entities is designed to undermine the concept of English nationhood and more easily fit England into a European federal model.

Conventionally the national capital of England is London, although technically it would be more exact to call London the capital of “England and Wales” given England’s lack of a distinctive political identity separate from the Principality. Winchester served as the country’s first national capital until some time in the late 11th century after the Norman Conquest. The City of London became England’s commercial capital, while the City of Westminster (where the Royal court was located) became the political capital. These roles have, broadly speaking, been maintained to the present day.

England has been inhabited for at least 50,000 years, although the repeated Ice Ages made much of Britain uninhabitable for extended periods until as recently as 20,000 years ago. Stone Age hunter-gatherers eventually gave way to farmers and permanent settlements, with an advanced megalithic civilization arising in western England some 4,000 years ago. It was replaced around 1,500 years later by Celtic tribes migrating from Western and continental Europe, mainly from France. These tribes were known collectively as “Britons”, a name bestowed by Phonecian traders - an indication of how, even at this early date, the island was part of a Europe-wide trading network.

The Britons were significant players in continental affairs and supported their allies in Gaul militarily during the Gallic Wars with the Roman Republic. This prompted the Romans to invade and subdue the island, first with Julius Caesar’s raid in 55 BC, and then the Emperor Claudius’ conquest in the following century. The whole southern part of the island - roughly corresponding to modern day England and Wales - became a prosperous part of the Roman Empire. It was finally abandoned early in the 5th century when a weakening Empire pulled back its legions to defend borders on the Continent.

Unaided by the Roman army, Roman Britannia could not long resist the Germanic tribes who arrived in the 5th and 6th centuries, enveloping the majority of modern day England in a new culture and language and pushing Romano-British rule back into modern-day Wales and western extremities of England, notably Cornwall and Cumbria. Others emigrated across the channel to modern-day Brittany, thus giving it its name and language (Breton). But many of the Romano-British remained in and were assimilated into the newly English areas.

The invaders fell into three main groups: the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Angles. As they became more civilised, recognisable states formed and began to merge with one another. (The most well-known state of affairs being the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy.) From time to time throughout this period, one Anglo-Saxon king, recognised as the “Bretwalda” by other rulers, had effective control of all or most of the English; so it is impossible to identify the precise moment when the Kingdom of England was unified. In some sense, real unity came as a response to the Danish Viking incursions which occupied the eastern half of “England” in the 8th century. Egbert, King of Wessex (d. 839) is often regarded as the first king of all the English, although the title “King of England” was first adopted, two generations later, by Alfred the Great (ruled 871-899).

The principal legacy left behind in those territories from which the languages of the Britons were displaced is that of toponyms. Many of the place-names in England and to a lesser extent Scotland are derived from Celtic British names, including London, Dumbarton, York, Dorchester, Dover and Colchester. Several place-name elements are thought to be wholly or partly Brythonic in origin, particularly bre-, bal-, and -dun for hills, carr for a high rocky place, coomb for a small deep valley.

From this age, where the majority culture and language came to be that of a Germanic origin - Old English. We can piece together how England came to be created and have the Welsh legacy of their meaning for England “Lloegr” translated as “lost lands”.

Until recently it has been believed that those areas settled by the Anglo-Saxons were uninhabited at the time or the Britons had fled before them. However, genetic studies show that the British may not have been pushed out to the Celtic fringes - many tribes remained in what was to become England.[1] Capelli’s findings strengthen the research of Steven Bassett of the University of Birmingham; his work during the 1990s suggests that much of the West Midlands was only lightly colonised with Anglian and Saxon settlements.

In 1066, William the Conqueror and the Normans conquered the existing Kingdom of England and instituted an Anglo-Norman administration and nobility who, retaining proto-French as their language for the next three hundred years, ruled as custodians over English commoners. Although the language and racial distinctions faded rapidly during the middle ages, the class system born in the Norman/Saxon divide persisted longer - arguably with traces lasting to the modern day.

While Old English continued to be spoken by common folk, Norman feudal lords significantly influenced the language with French words and customs being adopted over the succeeding centuries evolving to a Germano-Romance creole now known as Middle English widely spoken in Chaucer’s time.

England came repeatedly into conflict with Wales and Scotland, at the time an independent principality and an independent kingdom respectively, as its rulers sought to expand Norman power across the entire island of Britain. The conquest of Wales was achieved in the 13th century, when it was annexed to England and gradually came to be a part of that kingdom for most legal purposes, although in the modern era it is more usually thought of as a separate nation (fielding, for example, its own athletic teams). Norman influence in Scotland waxed and waned over the years, with the Scots managing to maintain a varying degree of independence despite repeated wars with the English, in particular the Wars of Scottish Independence, and serious attempts at conquest were abandoned after the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton. Although it was on the whole only a moderately successful power in military terms, England became one of the wealthiest states in medieval Europe, due chiefly to its dominance in the lucrative wool market.

England also found itself in conflict with France, in particular during the Hundred Years’ War. This failure of English territorial ambitions in continental Europe prompted the kingdom’s rulers to look further afield, creating the foundations of the mercantile and colonial network that was to become the British Empire. The turmoil of the Reformation embroiled England in religious wars with Europe’s Catholic powers, notably Spain, but the kingdom preserved its independence as much through luck as through the skill of charismatic rulers such as Elizabeth I. Elizabeth’s successor, James I was already king of Scotland (as James VI); and this personal union of the two crowns into the crown of Great Britain was followed a century later by the Act of Union 1707, which formally unified England, Scotland and Wales into the Kingdom of Great Britain. This later became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801 to 1927) and then the modern state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1927 to present).

England before the English

Archaeological evidence indicates that what is now southern England was colonised by humans long before the rest of the British Isles due to its more hospitable climate between and during the various ice ages of the distant past. The first historical mention of the region is from the Massaliote Periplus, a sailing manual for merchants thought to date to the 6th century BC, although cultural and trade links with the continent had existed for millennia prior to this. Pytheas of Massilia wrote of his trading journey to the island around 325 BC. Later writers such as Pliny the Elder (quoting Timaeus) and Diodorus Siculus (probably drawing on Poseidonius) mention the tin trade from southern England but there is little further historical detail of the people who lived there. Tacitus wrote that there was no great difference in language between the people of southern England and northern Gaul and noted that the various tribes of Britons shared physical characteristics with their continental neighbours. (more…)

England is the largest and most populous home nation of the United Kingdom. It accounts for more than 83% of the total UK population, occupies most of the southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain and shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west. Elsewhere, it is bordered by the North Sea, Irish Sea, Atlantic Ocean and English Channel.

England is named after the Angles, one of a number of Germanic tribes believed to have originated in Angeln in Northern Germany, who settled in England in the 5th and 6th centuries. This is also the origin of its Latin name Anglia. It has not had a distinct political identity since 1707, when the Kingdom of Great Britain was established as a unified political entity; however, it has a legal identity separate from those of Scotland and Northern Ireland, as part of the entity “England and Wales”.

England’s largest city, London, is also the capital of the United Kingdom.Vibrant , multicultural and contradictory, contemporary England is a place of extremes yet, at times, fiercely united. From the essential glories of London, Stratford, Gloucester and York, to the quirky delights of Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester, England’s cities are lively, buzzing places, where a love of nostalgia strains against a spirit of inventiveness.

Enjoy the unrivalled beauty of the Cotswolds and the Dales, but travel the byways of Northumberland, and church-laden Lincolnshire too. With time to spare, escape the tourist trails and wander over peaceful countryside, savour ‘real’ ale at a country pub, visit a traditional town market, or sample England’s ‘new-wave’ wines and a cosmopolitan cuisine that rivals any in the world. England today is welcoming, friendly, fascinating and fun, where pomp and circumstance balance the often bizarre idiosyncrasies of its people, and a sense of humor is the passport to certain acceptance.