England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom.

[7][8][9] It shares land borders with Wales to its

west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest of England and the Celtic Sea to the
southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English
Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the
North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. It is
the largest country of the British Isles.

The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic
period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia
peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th
century, and since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant
cultural and legal impact on the wider world.[10] The English language, the Anglican Church, and English
law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world –
developed in England, and the country's parliamentary system of government has been widely adopted
by other nations.[11] The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society
into the world's first industrialised nation.[12]

England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains, especially in central and southern England. However,
there is upland and mountainous terrain in the north (for example, the Lake District and Pennines) and
in the west (for example, Dartmoor and the Shropshire Hills). The capital is London, which has the
largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and, prior to Brexit, the European Union.[nb 1]
England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom,[5]
largely concentrated around London, the South East, and conurbations in the Midlands, the North West,
the North East, and Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th
century.[13]

The Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on
1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous
year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain.
[14][15] In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland (through another Act of Union) to
become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the
United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland.[16]

Contents

1 Toponymy

2 History
2.1 Prehistory and antiquity

2.2 Middle Ages

2.3 Early modern

2.4 Late modern and contemporary

3 Governance

3.1 Politics

3.2 Law

3.3 Regions, counties, and districts

4 Geography

4.1 Landscape and rivers

4.2 Climate

4.3 Nature and wildlife

4.4 Major conurbations

5 Economy

5.1 Science and technology

5.2 Transport

5.3 Energy

5.4 Tourism

6 Healthcare

7 Demography

7.1 Population

7.2 Language

7.3 Religion

8 Education

9 Culture

9.1 Architecture

9.2 Gardens

9.3 Folklore

9.4 Cuisine
9.5 Visual arts

9.6 Literature, poetry, and philosophy

9.7 Performing arts

9.8 Cinema

9.9 Museums, libraries, and galleries

10 Sport

11 National symbols

12 See also

13 Notes

14 References

14.1 Bibliography

15 External links

Toponymy

See also: Toponymy of England

The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles".
[17] The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle
Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area (present-day German state of
Schleswig–Holstein) of the Baltic Sea.[18] The earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in
the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
The term was then used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the
English", and it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was then part of the
English kingdom of Northumbria. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086
covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years later the Chronicle stated
that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient
sense.[19]

The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in
which the Latin word Anglii is used.[20] The etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars; it
has been suggested that it derives from the shape of the Angeln peninsula, an angular shape.[21] How
and why a term derived from the name of a tribe that was less significant than others, such as the
Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related
to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish
them from continental Saxons (Eald-Seaxe) of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in
Northern Germany.[22] In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great
Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England (Sasunn);[23] similarly, the Welsh name
for the English language is "Saesneg". A romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word
for England, Lloegr, and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend. Albion is also applied to England in
a more poetic capacity,[24] though its original meaning is the island of Britain as a whole.