Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Course Contents
British Insularity. Invasions and Patterns of Settlement in the British Isles British Monarchy: from the Anglo-Saxon Kings to the Twenty-first Century House of Windsor Main Developments in Britains Political Life
Selected Bibliography
Dascal, R. (2000) British Topics, Timisoara: Eurostampa. Deac, L. and A. Nicolescu (1983) British Life and Civilisation, Bucuresti: Editura Didactica si Pedagogica. Gavriliu, E. (2001) British History and Civilisation. A Student-friendly Approach through Guided Practice, Galati: Universitatea Dunarea de Jos. McDowall, D. (1995) An Illustrated History of Britain, Essex: Longman. Morgan, Kenneth O. (ed.) (1993) The Oxford History of Britain, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Musman, R. and A.-V. dArcy (1989) Britain Today, Essex: Longman. Oakland, J. (1991) British Civilisation. An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Room, A. (1991) An A to Z of British Life, Oxford University Press.
I. British Insularity
Great Britain: England (the South, the Midlands and the North): from the Channel to the Scottish Border (the Cheviot Hills); Scotland (united to England in 1707): the Highlands; the Lowlands and the Islands (the Inner and Outer Hebrides, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands); Wales (united to England under the first Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII).
Northern Ireland (Ulster); the Isle of Man and Anglesey (in the Irish Sea); the Isle of Wight, Jersey and Guernsey (the Channel Islands); the Scilly Islands (SE of Cornwall).
Middle Ages:
The Anglo-Saxons; The Vikings; The Normans.
This first wave of invaders settled in the western parts of Britain and Ireland, from Cornwall all the way to the far north. Remains that reveal the huge organisation of labour in prehistoric Britain:
the henges: centres of religious, political and economic power made of great circles of earth banks and ditches inside which there were wooden buildings and stone circles; e.g. Stonehenge in Salisbury Plain: made of monumental circles of massive vertical stones topped with immense horizontal slabs (megaliths the name of these prehistoric people, i.e., Megalithic Men); other (earth or stone) henges were built in many parts of Britain as far north as the Orkney Islands and as far south as Cornwall.
In the late eighteenth century, the interest in the old Celtic literary tradition was revived by the Pre-Romantic movement. James Macphersons alleged translations from the legendary Irish bard Ossian brought about the emergence of a new literary fashion in almost the whole Europe, known as Ossianism. With the rise of nationalistic feelings in present-day Britain, Britishness originally a general term denoting national identity for the inhabitants of England, Scotland and Wales has come to evoke the Celtic origin of Scotland and Wales as opposed to Englishness, evocative of Englands Anglo-Saxon roots and her ruling position.