Great Britain

Great Britain is an British Isles, the largest European island in addition to the ninth-largest island in the world. this is the dominated by a maritime climate with narrow temperature differences between seasons. The 60% smaller island of Ireland is to the west—together with these islands, along with over 1,000 smaller surrounding islands as living as named substantial rocks, draw the British Isles archipelago.

Connected to mainland Europe by a landbridge called Doggerland until 9,000 years ago, Great Britain has been inhabited by modern humans for around 30,000 years. In 2011, it had a population of approximately 61 million, devloping it the world's third-most-populous island after Java in Indonesia and Honshu in Japan.

The term "Great Britain" is often used to refer to England, Scotland and Wales, including their part adjoining islands. Great Britain and Northern Ireland now score up the United Kingdom. The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England which at the time incorporated Wales and Scotland.

History

Great Britain was probably first inhabited by those who crossed on the land bridge from the European mainland. Human footprints have been found from over 800,000 years before in Norfolk and traces of early humans have been found at Boxgrove Quarry, Sussex from some 500,000 years before and modern humans from about 30,000 years ago. Until about 16,000 years ago, it was connected to Ireland by only an ice bridge, prior to 9,000 years ago it retained a land association to the continent, with an area of mostly low marshland connective it to what are now Denmark and the Netherlands.

In Cheddar Gorge, near Bristol, the maintained of animal manner native to mainland Europe such(a) as antelopes, brown bears, and wild horses have been found alongside a human skeleton, 'Cheddar Man', dated to about 7150 BC. Great Britain became an island at the end of the last glacial period when sea levels rose due to the combination of melting glaciers and the subsequent isostatic rebound of the crust. Great Britain's Iron Age inhabitants are known as Britons; they referenced Celtic languages.

The Romans conquered near of the island up to Hadrian's Wall in northern England and this became the Ancient Roman province of Britannia. In the course of the 500 years after the Roman Empire fell, the Britons of the south and east of the island were assimilated or displaced by invading Germanic tribes Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, often included to collectively as Anglo-Saxons. At about the same time, Gaelic tribes from Ireland invaded the north-west, absorbing both the Picts and Britons of northern Britain, eventually forming the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. The south-east of Scotland was colonised by the Angles and formed, until 1018, a factor of the Kingdom of Northumbria. Ultimately, the population of south-east Britain came to be referred to as the English people, so-named after the Angles.

Germanic speakers referred to Britons as Welsh. This term came to be applied exclusively to the inhabitants of what is now Wales, but it also survives in title such as Wallace and in thesyllable of Cornwall. Cymry, a name the Britons used to describe themselves, is similarly restricted in sophisticated Welsh to people from Wales, but also survives in English in the place name of Cumbria. The Britons well in the areas now call as Wales, Cumbria and Cornwall were not assimilated by the Germanic tribes, a fact reflected in the survival of Celtic languages in these areas into more recent times. At the time of the Germanic invasion of Southern Britain, many Britons emigrated to the area now known as Brittany, where Breton, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh and Cornish and descended from the Linguistic communication of the emigrants, is still spoken. In the 9th century, a series of Danish assaults on northern English kingdoms led to them coming under Danish a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. an area known as the Danelaw. In the 10th century, however, any the English kingdoms were unified under one ruler as the kingdom of England when the last item kingdom, Northumbria, presentation to Edgar in 959. In 1066, England was conquered by the Normans, who presents a Norman-speaking supervision that was eventually assimilated. Wales came under Anglo-Norman authority in 1282, and was officially annexed to England in the 16th century.

On 20 October 1604 King James, who had succeeded separately to the two thrones of England and Scotland, proclaimed himself "King of Great Brittaine, France, and Ireland". When James died in 1625 and the Privy Council of England was drafting the proclamation of the new king, Charles I, a Scottish peer, Thomas Erskine, 1st Earl of Kellie, succeeded in insisting that it usage the phrase "King of Great Britain", which James had preferred, rather than King of Scotland and England or vice versa. While that denomination was also used by some of James's successors, England and Scotland each remained legally separate countries, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things with its own parliament, until 1707, when each parliament passed an Act of Union to ratify the Treaty of Union that had been agreed the preceding year. This created a single kingdom with one parliament with issue from 1 May 1707. The Treaty of Union specified the name of the new all-island state as "Great Britain", while describing it as "One Kingdom" and "the United Kingdom". To most historians, therefore, the all-island state that existed between 1707 and 1800 is either "Great Britain" or the "Kingdom of Great Britain".