THE NORMAN CONQUEST AND THE GRADUAL FORMATION OF THE UK

In the 9thcentury the Vikings from Denmark attacked the north-west of France, assimilated the French population there and established their state theDuchy of Normandy.

In the 11thcentury the king of England was Edward the Confessor. The heir to the throne was Harold and the duke of Normandy was William. According to a legend, one day Harold was trapped in the English Channel during a storm by the Normands and was brought to William. William promised to free him under the condition that after Edward's death the throne would pass to William but not to Harold. Harold accepted this offer but when Edward died he 'forgot' about his promise and was crowned king of England. William was enraged, furious, angry, gathered a large army and on the 14th of October 1066 he defeated Harold in the Battle of Hastings which became the largest battle in the history of England and the last one so far with foreign invaders. On the 25th of December of the same year William was crowned King of England William I also known as William the Conqueror.

William established the system of military feudalism in which all the vassals were given lands directly by the king and each of them was responsible directly to the king. Such a system allowed England to avoid lots of local wars in comparison with the rest of Europe and made England more stable.

In 1086 William wanted to know how many people lived in England and what they possessed. He ordered a register known in the history as Domesday Book. There are two versions of the title: the officers that collected this information were very cruel to people so people thought that their domes would have come. Or these officers warned the population that if they had told lies about their property, they would have been punished in their domes day. This document has an enormous historical value because the first known written census of population in Europe according to which about 2 mln people lived in England in that time.

A very peculiar linguistic situation could be observed in England in that time because actually three languages were being spoken parallelly. First, Norman dialect of French was the language of ruling class and aristocracy. Second, Latin was the language of science, church and education. Third, Anglo-Saxon was the language of simple local population. It took about 3 centuries for these languages to influence one another so only by the 14th century they had developed the single language for the whole country - modern English.

The first writer who used literally English in his works was Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales). In today's English about 80% of words have French origin.

Wales was the first country to be conquered by England. In the year 1282 Prince of Wales Lewelin was killed in a battle and King of England Edward I established a direct rule in Wales. To protect his power Edward built numerous castles in Wales, the most important of which was the castle of Caernarfon (Карнарвон). According to a legend, in the year 1301 the following story took place there. Welsh aristocracy that didn't want English kings in Wales wishing to reestablish Welsh rule came to king Edward and demanded that they wanted their own prince. Here we should say that each of the aristocratic families saw themselves on the throne so we can't speak about the unity of the Welsh opposition. They brought to Edward 4 conditions of kind of person they wanted to see as Prince of Wales:

1. He mustn't speak English and French.

2. He mustn't do any harm to Welsh people.

3. Must be born in Wales.

4. Must be of royal blood.

Edward asked two weeks to think it over and when time came he was ready with his answer he brought to the balcony of the castle his newly born son Edward II who was two weeks old. Edward II was claimed the Prince of Wales. Since then in Britain there has been a tradition that the eldest son of a king gets the title of Prince of Wales.

(Nowadays Prince of Wales is Charles).

The ceremony when this title is given takes place in the same castle of Caernarfon and is called 'investitute'.

Despite all this the relations between Wales and England remained very tense until in the year 1485 - the Welsh House of Tudor got the throne in London. In the years 1536 and 1542 two Acts of Union were signed, since then Wales has always been a part of the union with England.

The same Edward I in the 14^th century was trying to conquer Scotland. The king of Scotland in that time and at the same time the national hero of the country was Robert Bruce. At first his attempts to defend Scotland were unsuccessful and he lost many battles. According to a legend, after one of such defeats when Bruce lost all his friends and almost all his country he had to hide himself in a cave on an island between Scotland and Ireland. One day lying on the floor of the cave in despair without any hope for the future he suddenly saw a spider that was spinning his web. The walls in the cave were slippery so the spider fell down and climbed up again many times until he finished his work. So this spider gave Bruce the example of persistence.

He gathered a new army and in the year 1314 defeated England in the Battle of Bannodburn which allowed Scotland to remain independent for the next 3 centuries.

In the year 1603 Queen of England Elisabeth I died childless and English aristocracy invited king of Scotland James VI to become king of England James I (Яков).

Uniting two countries under one king aristocracy’s defacto deprived Scotland of its independence.

Only in 1707 Scotland officially joined the union with England and Wales when two parliaments agreed to create one and single parliament in London. According to the most accepted theory, Scottish parliament agreed to do this because its members were bribed. Since then the union of England, Scotland and Wales has been called Great Britain.

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Ireland was the first English colony. In 1169 king Genry II created a small colony near present-day Dublin, it was called the Pale which existed more or less peacefully until the 16thcentury. In 1534 king of England Henry VIII wanted to get divorced with one of his wives, but the Catholic Church didn't allow him to do this. In response Henry VIII sent the Catholic church to hell, established his own church and made himself the head of this church. That's how the Anglican Church was founded. Naturally Henry and later Elisabeth I wanted to spread the influence all over the British Isles. This Church was supposed to be Protestant. If Scotland and Wales accepted this church more or less peacefully, Ireland didn't want to have it at all wishing to remain Catholic. Then Henry undertook the policy known in the history as the Plantation of Ulster. He built 23 new towns in Northern Ireland and sent there thousands and thousands of protestants from Scotland to England to live. They pushed catholic population to the south of Ireland so Northern Ireland became almost equal in proportion of Catholic and Protestants. In 1801 after a century of bloody confrontation between England and Ireland the whole territory of Ireland was forced to join the union with Great Britain. So on the 1st of January 1801 there appeared the term United Britain.

In the middle of the 19th century a great disaster happened in Ireland. Due to bad harvest of potatoes in 1848-1849 the great hunger took place as a result of which 1 million people died and another million immigrated mainly to the USA. Within 4 years Ireland lost 1/3 of its population in this or that way.

What made the situation even worse was the fact that England didn't do anything to help the dying population of Ireland. It was a sign of revenge, a sort of punishment for many years struggling for independence.

After the World War I under the international pressure England recognized the independence of the southern part of Ireland in 1921 while the northern part remained in the UK. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in present-day borders has existed from 1921.

The independent south proclaimed itself a republic in 1949. Today the Irish Republic is an independent member of the EU and European monitoring union and until 2008 it was one of the most dynamically developing countries in Europe. It had a nick ‘The Celtic Tiger’ but as a result of American Credit Crunch in 2008-2009 Ireland appeared one of the first countries in Europe that asked for international financial help.

As for Northern Ireland, the situation there after the World War II was marked by the confrontation between two major political forces and their supporters:

1. Alter Unionist Party. Its members are protestants and their major aim is to remain within the UK.

2. Party Sinn Fein (from Irish 'We ourselves'). Their goal is to unite both parts of Ireland into one republic. Until recently Sinn Fain had a military wing called the Irish Republican Army (IRA) that was responsible for a lot of terrorist acts in Northern Ireland and England in the 1970s and 1980s especially. The conflict in Northern Ireland remains one of the numerous frozen conflicts that can be observed in Europe.

Panorama of Great Britain

7. P. 78-92

8. P. 103-106, 132-140

9. P. 162-177

10. Britain today (2015-2017) (Brexit, referendum in Scotland, British-American coalitions, difficult British-Russian relations)

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