One of the excitements of studying this period is to realise how much of the Britain that we know today had its origins so long ago. Out of the collapse of Roman civilization, new forms of social and religious organisation emerged. The forging of ethnic and political identities brought into being the entities that we now call England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This paper will look the makeup of Britain in this period, considering the influences of the Celts, Picts, and Vikings to name a few. It will also consider the developing artistic, literary and religious culture that was growing in Britain and what influenced it.

By 600, less than half of Britain was under English control. The West and North still comprised Celtic states, which remained Christian, literate and in contact with the Mediterranean world. The Irish, still in many respects an Iron Age society, were developing a remarkable artistic, literary and religious culture. The conversion of the English to Christianity was associated with the building of kingdoms, and with an extraordinary interchange between Germanic, British, Irish, Gallic and Mediterranean cultures which produced such outstanding works of art as the Sutton Hoo treasures and the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Medieval society with its warriors, kings, bishops and peasants, can seem alien to us. These three centuries saw the emergence of essential pre-conditions for modern society. 

England’s own particular turning-point, the Norman Conquest, opens the paper: but just how much did it change and how much endured from previous centuries and how much would have changed anyway in a period of European-wide development? Its immediate result was a century of political instability, as England was drawn into the politics of northern France. Yet the Conquest also provided the foundation for a precociously strong monarchy, and the system of common law which still endures.

This paper explores English imperialism, magna carta, church and clergy, education, social and economic change, culture, ideology and perception in gender among other topics.

For England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales this was a period of dramatic conflict and change which presents many fascinating paradoxes. 

The Black Death of 1348-9 in which a third or more of the population died, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and frequent complaints of urban decay all suggest economic and social crisis; yet the cloth industry grew, living standards rose and economic opportunities for women temporarily widened. 

In the early fifteenth century the Welsh rose in revolt under Owain Glyn Dŵr, yet within a century and a half they were peacefully assimilated into the Tudor state. The Scots were united enough to resist English aggression, yet slew two of their kings in rebellion. The English won spectacular victories in France – Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt – yet lost ground to the Gaelic lords in Ireland.

The English crown steadily endowed itself with one of the most effective governmental machineries in Europe, negotiating for the cooperation of local élites in the developing parliament, court and legal system; yet Richard II was deposed and his successors fell prey to factionalism in the Wars of the Roses, only for monarchical power to revive under the Yorkists and Tudors. 

The English church survived the challenge of the Oxford-grown heresy, Lollardy, and provided for an increasingly elaborate and informed popular piety, but fell victim to Henry VIII’s determination to become its supreme head. 

Architecture, music and vernacular literature flourished from Barbour, Chaucer and Langland to Lindsay, Wyatt and Surrey; yet by 1550 an increasingly influential humanism affected contempt for much of medieval culture.

All these aspects of the period continue to provoke debate among historians and this creates an opportunity for undergraduates to forge their own understanding of a field in which political, social, cultural and religious history interact in stimulating ways, and one in which the different societies within the British Isles can be studied both in their own right and in their mutual interaction.

Reformation, Revolution, Restoration: Throughout this period political and religious authority were contested, challenged, and re-imagined afresh.

The paper begins in the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, with the Tudor dynasty consolidating a precarious grip on the English throne as well as a fragile hold on parts of Ireland and a delicate peace between Scotland and England. 

The long, contested process of Reformation unleashed a wide variety of religious ideas and encouraged new ways of understanding identity, community, and even family relationships. 

A period of sustained economic growth brought unimagined luxuries and new technologies to the growing cities, changing the social fabric of the country in complex ways. 

Literature, music and art flourished; Shakespeare’s plays, Tallis’s motets and Holbein’s portraits all express the grandeur and the individual anxieties of the period. 

Two hundred years later, the whole of Britain would be transformed, brought together into a Union with social and religious consequences no less important than the political implications. By 1700 Britain had moved from the fringes of Europe to become one of its leading powers, with a growing Empire in the Americas.

Students taking this paper have the opportunity to examine a wide range of social, political and religious developments across all three British kingdoms.

This course begins with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-9, which had profound consequences for the nature of government across the British Isles including the relationship between the churches and the state, Britain’s role in Europe and the wider world, and relations between three of the four component nations of the British Isles. 

Commerce and manufacturing flourished to the extent that contemporaries began to perceive a series of profound economic and social transformations. One of the most visible symptoms of change was accelerating and broadening urbanisation in England and Scotland, and the growth of large provincial towns and cities. 

London rose to be a city of global importance, at the centre of an empire which stretched across the Atlantic, into the Pacific, and which exercised a superficially impressive dominance in India. This period saw the making of the United Kingdom, starting with the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 and culminating in the Anglo-Irish Union of 1800, and Scotland in particular became a great centre of Enlightenment thought and learning. 

By the end of the period, Protestant Dissenters and Catholics had acquired full political rights, major political reforms had been enacted by the Whig governments of the 1830s, and Britain had become ‘the first industrial nation’. Such developments made Britain an object of fascination – often of admiration – to other Europeans.

The period covered by this paper was characterised by rapid and wide-ranging changes to the political, social, cultural and economic fabric of the United Kingdom.

For many of those living through these transformations, the possibilities for change and improvement seemed boundless. While those living in industrial cities endured terrible conditions, and the population of Ireland was devastated by the famine, many more prosperous Victorians conceived of themselves as the harbingers of progress. This self-confidence was reflected in ambitious building projects for schools, hospitals and civic buildings, which still stand in many British cities, towns and villages. 

In the early twentieth century, new ideas about national efficiency and social welfare prompted the development of projects for social insurance, education reform and the protection of workers which would underpin the development of the welfare state during and after the Second World War. Alongside these changes to civil society, the period saw smaller scale shifts in family dynamics. Children were accorded increasing importance within family life and new ideas about the role and responsibilities of mothers and fathers shaped conceptions of masculinity and femininity.