England

England is one of the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom (along with Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales). It appears to be the geographical region of Earth most frequently visited by the Doctor, who has adopted much of its customs, dress, and other cultural elements.

England constitutes the largest, most populous, and the most densely populated country of the United Kingdom. Because London, the capital of England (and the United Kingdom) is one of the largest, most populous, and wealthiest cities in Europe and indeed the world, England, especially the area immediately around London, has attracted the attention of many alien marauders in their bids to invade and conquer the planet.

History

England has been inhabited since at least 50,000 BC, although the repeated Ice Ages made much of Britain uninhabitable for extended periods until as recently as 20,000 BC. Stone Age hunter-gatherers eventually gave way to farmers and permanent settlements, with an advanced megalithic civilization arising in western England circa 2000 BC, possibly founded by Cessair of Diplos. It was replaced around 500 BC by Celtic tribes migrating from Western and continental Europe, mainly from France. These tribes were known collectively as "Britons", a name bestowed by Phoenician 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.

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. Their conquest was aided by the weakening of Harold's army by a Viking invasion.

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 by the 20th century it had come to be 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).