Europe Essay Research Paper IIConstitutionally England does

Europe Essay, Research Paper

II:

Constitutionally, England does not exist. It is not mentioned in the title of the sovereign who rules ?the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories.? Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have certain governmental institutions of their own, but England, having subsumed or created those institutions at one time or another, needs no special mention. Holding more than four-fifths of the population, however, England?s dominance in the United Kingdom is beyond question. London was the largest town in Roman Britain and has been the capital of a unified England since the Norman Conquest of 1066. England has played a dominant role in British history since that time.

By ethnic origin the English are a mongrel breed. Their language is polyglot, drawn from a variety of sources, and its vocabulary has been augmented by importations from all over the world. The English language does not identify the English, for it is the main language of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, many Commonwealth countries, and the United States. The primary source of the language, however, is the main ethnic stem of the English, the Anglo-Saxons, who invaded and colonized England in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their language provides about half the words in modern English vocabulary.

In the millennia following the last Ice Age, migrant tribes from the continent of Europe and, later, by traders from the Mediterranean area, inhabited the British Isles. During the Roman occupation, Celtic Brythons inhabited England, but the Celts withdrew before the Teutonic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (from northwestern Germany) into the mountainous areas of western and northern Britain. The Anglo-Saxons neither preserved nor absorbed the Roman-British culture they found in the 5th century. There are few traces of Celtic or Roman Latin in the early English of the Anglo-Saxons, though some words survive in place-names.

Greek of the educated scholars of the Renaissance. The seafarers, explorers, and empire builders of modern history have imported foreign words, most copiously from Europe but also from Asia. These words have been so completely absorbed into the language that they pass unselfconsciously as English. The English, it might be said, are great anglicizers.

The English have also absorbed and anglicized people of alien race, from Scandinavian pillagers and Norman conquerors to Latin churchmen. In the royal line, a Welsh dynasty of monarchs, the Tudors, were succeeded by the Scottish Stuarts, to be followed by the Dutch William of Orange, and the German Hanoverians. England provided a haven for refugees from the time of the Huguenots in the 17th century to the totalitarian persecutions of the 20th century. Many Jews have settled in England. In recent decades there has been large-scale immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, posing seemingly more difficult problems of assimilation, and restrictive immigration regulations have been imposed that are out of key with the open-door policy that had been an English tradition for many generations. To be counted English, it has never been necessary to be of purebred English stock, and indeed, there can be few English who are. Increasingly, England is a secular country. Though nearly three-fifths of the population is baptized in an Anglican church and for form-filling purposes would say they belonged to the Church of England, fewer than one in 40 of the baptized are communicant churchgoers. The Church of England still has some 16,500 churches, but it has been in financial difficulties. The nonconformist Free Churches has nominally fewer members, but there is probably greater dedication among them, as with the Roman Catholic Church. Apart perhaps from some isolated centers of Irish settlement in the North West, there is complete religious tolerance in England and no overt prejudice against Catholics. The decline in churchgoing has been thought to be an indicator of decline in religious belief, but opinion polls substantiate the view that belief in God and the central tenets of Christianity survives the flagging fortunes of the churches. There are also large communities of Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and Hindus.

England?s contribution to both British and world culture is too vast for anything but a cursory survey. In the contemporary cultural scene, England is not always distinguishable from Wales and Scotland or even Northern Ireland.

It is, arguably, in its literature that England has attained its most influential cultural expression. For more than a millennium, each stage in the development of the English language has produced its masterworks.

The heroic poem Beowulf, dating from the 9th or 10th century, preserves the earliest literary language of Britain, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon, known as Old English. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, French influence shaped the vocabulary as well as the literary preoccupations of Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer epitomized both the courtly philosophical concerns and the earthy vernacular of this period in his Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, respectively. The Elizabethan era of the late 16th century fostered the flowering of the European Renaissance in England and the golden age of English literature. The plays of William Shakespeare, while on their surface representing the culminati