Introduction

If there can be such an entity as a brief history of England, I hope I am not being too presumptuous in attempting to provide one for the general reader. To compress thousands of years of history into a readable and I hope, entertaining few chapters, is a daunting task indeed. But perhaps together we can determine just what made the tiny country of England, the dominant partner in the British state* so powerful a force in world history, out of all proportion to its size and its population.

Naturally, our study will be concerned with the lives of the men and women who contributed to the history of their great nation, for good or for ill. We will look at its Kings and Queens and chief ministers; the growth of its political institutions; its technical and scientific marvels that put the little land ahead of its contemporaries in so many areas; its industrial and agricultural revolutions that changed peoples' lives forever. The important battles, too, that determined the fate of the English nation and gave it such an immense empire will find a place in our pages.

We will look at the great men of literature who wrote in a language that is now being understood and copied in almost every area of the world. And we mustn't forget those who fought against the establishment in so many different areas, those men (and women) whose revolutionary ideas helped change the face of government, brought down kings and parliaments, and introduced modern democracy. Perhaps we should begin our account right at the beginning, long before recorded history began.

*Because of the recent forces for devolution within the British Isles and the long, troubled history of Ireland, I have dealt with Wales, Scotland, and Ireland in their fully-deserved separate histories.

First chapter: Pre-historic Britain