England Wallpapers

England, mega wallpapers: England is the largest, the most populous, and the most densely populated of the four "Home Nations" that make up the United Kingdom. Occupying the south-eastern portion of the island of Great Britain, England is named after the Angles, one of a number of Germanic peoples who settled there in the 5th and 6th centuries. England has not had a separate political identity since 1707, when Great Britain was established as a political entity. The capital city of England, London, is also the capital city of the UK. Official language None; English is de facto; Capital London; Capital's coordinates 51� 30' N, 0� 10' W; Largest city London; Religion: The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and is the mother branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion as well as a founding member of the Porvoo Communion. Christianity was planted in Britain in the first or second centuries and existed independent of the Church of Rome. The Church of England was part of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, but broke from Rome in the reign of Henry VIII. It was fully rejoined to Rome with the Act of Reunion in the reign of Mary I and eventually separated again by the excommunication of Elizabeth I. The head of the Church of England is officially the reigning monarch (at present, Elizabeth II), who is the called the "Supreme Governor". The effective head, however, is a senior cleric, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also recognized as a symbolic head to the worldwide Anglican Communion of independent national or regional churches. The current Archbishop of Canterbury is Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams. Although Christians may have been present in England from the Apostolic Age, and British bishops are recorded as being present at the Council of Arles in the early fourth century, Augustine of Canterbury was sent from Rome on a mission to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent in the year 597. With the help of Christians already residing there, he established his church in Canterbury, the capital of Kent, and became the first in the series of archbishops of Canterbury. Over the next few centuries, the pre-existing celtic christian churches were gradually absorbed into the Roman system begun by Augustine. The Church of England considers itself both protestant and catholic: protestant insofar as it has adopted many of the principles of the reformation and refuses to accept Papal authority; catholic in that as it views itself the unbroken continuation of the medi�val universal church rather than a new formation. In its practices, furthermore, the Church of England remains closer to Roman Catholicism than other protestant churches. Its theological beliefs are relatively conservative, its form of worship can be quite traditional and ceremonial, and its organization retains the historical episcopal hierarchy of bishops and dioceses. In many people's eyes, however, the primary distinguishing mark of the Church of England is its breadth and open-mindedness. In addition to the traditional mainstream, the church has long included "high church" and "low church" factions with their own particular preferences. Today, practices range from those of the Anglo-Catholics with their incense and holy water to the emotional and far less ceremonial services of Evangelicals and Charismatics. More contentious are various doctrinal questions raised by the development of modern society, such as conflicts over the ordination of women (finally accepted in 1992 and begun in 1994) and the status of homosexuals in the church (unsettled today). The Church of England has a legislative body, the General Synod. However, fundamental legislation still has to pass through the UK Parliament. The church has its own judicial branch, known as the Ecclesiastical courts, which are likewise a part of the UK court system. In addition to England proper, the jurisdiction of the Church of England extends to the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. In recent years, expatriate congregations on the continent of Europe have become the Diocese in Europe.Naming: The names by which most of the various languages of Europe refer to England follow two distinct patterns. Virtually every continental European tongue uses a name similar to "England": "Angleterre" (French), "Anglia" (Hungarian), "Anglija" (Slovene), "Inghilterra" (Italian), "Engleska" (Serbo-Croatian) and so on. The Celtic languages of northwest Europe, by contrast, use quite different names, e.g. "Bro-Saoz" (Breton), "Pow Sows" (Cornish) and "Sasana" (Irish). It has been suggested that these languages' alternative focus can be traced to the tribal geography of England in the Dark Ages: when the most uncompromising Britons were driven out of England by the invading tribes, squishing in with their neighbouring Celtic cousins, the tribes pushing up against the Cornish and Welsh borders were Saxon ones. (Although the Welsh country name for England, "Lloegr", is linguistically unrelated to Angle and Saxon alike, the English people are indeed "Saeson" in Welsh). (See Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/England) for a list of non-English names for England.) Alternative names sometimes used for England have included the slang "Blighty", from the Hindustani "bila yati" meaning "foreign"; and "Albion", an ancient name popularised by Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy in the 1st century, supposedly in reference to the white (Latin alba) cliffs of Dover. (In its origins, however, the name applied to the whole island of Great Britain.) More poetically, England has been called "this scept'red isle...this other Eden" and "this Green and Pleasant Land", quotations respectively from the poetry of William Shakespeare (in Richard II) and William Blake (And did those feet in ancient time)."England" is sometimes, wrongly, used in reference to the whole United Kingdom, the entire island of Great Britain (or simply Britain), or indeed the British Isles. This usage pattern is frequently seen in documents from the US. This is not only incorrect but can cause offence to people from other parts of the UK. Further, there are situations where, while the word "England" would be factually correct, British people would typically use the less-specific "Britain" or "The UK". The inhabitants of England are the English. Slang terms sometimes used for them include "Sassenachs" (from the Scots Gaelic), "Limeys" (in reference to the citrus fruits carried aboard English sailing vessels to prevent scurvy) and "Pom/Pommy" (used in Autralian English and New Zealand English). Also see alternative words for British.Symbols and insignia The two national symbols of England are the St. George's cross (usually as a flag) and the Three Lions crest (usually as a badge - both are pictured above), derived from the great Norman powers that formed the monarchy - the Cross of Aquitaine and the Lions of Anjou. The Three lions were first definitely used by Richard I (Richard the Lionheart), on his second seal, in the late twelfth century (although it is thought that Henry I may have bestowed it on his son Henry before then). Historian Simon Schama has argued that the Three Lions is the true English symbol because the English throne descended down the Angevin line. However, a red cross acted as a symbol for many Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries. It became associated with Saint George, and England, along with other countries and cities (such as Georgia, Milan and the Republic of Genoa) which claimed him as their patron saint and began to use his cross as a banner. It remained in national use until 1707, when the Union Flag (which English and Scottish ships had used at sea since 1606) was adopted for all purposes to unite the whole of Great Britain under a common flag. The rose is widely recognised as the national flower of England and is used in a variety of contexts, for example as the badge of the English Rugby Union team. The Three Lions badge performs a similar role for the English national football team and English national cricket team. Anthem:England does not have an official anthem of its own but Jerusalem (incorporating the Blake phrase quoted above), I vow to thee my country and Land of Hope and Glory are all widely regarded - unofficially - as English national hymns (although the last more properly refers to Great Britain, not just England). At sporting events, God Save The Queen (the national anthem for the UK as a whole) is nonetheless usually played for the England football team, although Land of Hope and Glory has been used as the English anthem at the Commonwealth Games (where the four nations in the UK face each other independently). >b>History Main article: History of England Since the term "English" explicitly refers to peoples who arrived on the island of Great Britain relatively recently, it is anachronistic to talk of England's prehistory or ancient history, which (although rich and interesting) are properly dealt with as part of the history of the island of Great Britain as a whole. Suffice it to say that when the geographical region we call "England" was invaded inconsequentially by Julius Caesar in 55 BC, and then again more conclusively the next century by the Emperor Claudius, it was inhabited by Celtic tribes collectively called "Britons". The whole southern part of the island � roughly corresponding to modern day England and Wales � became a part of the Roman Empire until finally abandoned early in the 5th century. Unaided by Roman legions, Roman Britannia could not long resist the Germanic tribes who arrived in the 5th and 6th centuries, pushing the Britons back into modern-day Wales and Cornwall. The invaders fell into three main groups: the Jutes, the Saxons, and the Angles. As they became more civilised, recognisable states formed and began to merge with one another. (The most well-known state of affairs being the "Anglo-Saxon heptarchy".) From time to time throughout this period, one Anglo-Saxon king, recognised as the "Bretwalda" by other rulers, had effective control of all or most of the English; so it is impossible to identify the precise moment when the country of England was unified. In some sense, real unity came as a response to the Danish Viking incursions which occupied the eastern half of "England" in the 8th century. Egbert, King of Wessex (d. 839) is often regarded as the first king of all the English, although the title "King of England" was first adopted, two generations later, by Alfred the Great (ruled 871�899). Some school histories of England begin with the Norman conquest in 1066, and the numbering system used for English monarchs treats that event as a blank slate from which to count. (For example, the Edward I who reigned in the 13th century was not the first king of England of that name, only the first since the conquest.) But although he unquestionably engineered a pivotal moment in the country's history, William the Conqueror did not "found" or "unify" the country; he took over a pre-existing England and gave it an Anglo-Norman administration and nobility who gradually adopted the language and customs of the English over the succeeding centuries. From the late 13th century, the neighbouring principality of Wales was joined to England, and gradually came to be a part of that kingdom for most legal purposes, although in the modern era it is more usually thought of as a separate nation (fielding, for example, its own athletic teams). The history of England as an independent country stretches on through the middle ages and renaissance to the reign of Elizabeth I, often remembered as a golden age in its history, notable both for its culture and mercantile success. Elizabeth's successor, James I was already king of Scotland (as James VI); and this personal union of the two crowns was followed a century later by the Act of Union 1707 which finally joined England and Scotland into the germ of the present-day United Kingdom. For the history of England after that date, see History of the United Kingdom. Politics; Main article: Politics of the United Kingdom, Government of England Since the promulgation of the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan and the Acts of Union 1536-1543 Wales has shared a legal identity with England as the joint entity of England and Wales. The Act of Union with the Kingdom of Scotland in 1707 created the Kingdom of Great Britain, subsuming England, Wales and Scotland into a single political entity. Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, retains separate legal systems and identities. All of Great Britain has been ruled by the government of the United Kingdom since that date, although in 1999 the first elections to the newly created Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales left England as the only part of the Union with no devolved assembly or parliament. As all legislation for England is passed by Parliament at Westminster there are some complaints about the ability of non-English Members of Parliament to influence purely English affairs. This apparent anomaly has been highlighted by both English and non-English politicians, often those opposed to devolution, and has become popularly known as the West Lothian question. Although there are calls for some for an English Parliament, there appears to be little popular support for independence of England from the UK - perhaps due to its dominance in the Union. Those groups that do campaign for such a thing tend to be right-wing organisations with very little popular support. The current Labour government favoured the establishment of regional administration, claiming that England was too large to be governed as a sub-state entity. A referendum on this issue in North East England on 4 November 2004 decisively rejected the proposal. Some criticised the English regional proposals for not decentralising enough, saying that they amounted not to devolution, but to little more than local government reorganisation, with no real power being removed from central government. The English regions would not even have had the limited powers of the Welsh Assembly, much less the tax varying and legislative powers of the Scottish Parliament. Rather, power was simply re-allocated within the region, with little new resource allocation and no real prospects of Assemblies being able to change the pattern of regional aid. Responsibility for regional transport was added to the proposals late in the process. This was perhaps crucial in the North East, where resentment at the Barnett Formula, which delivers greater regional aid to adjacent Scotland, was a significant impetus for the North East devolution campaign. Some eurosceptics believe that the establishment of English regions as administrative entities is designed to undermine the concept of English nationhood and more easily fit England into a European federal model. Subdivisions: Main article: Subdivisions of England: Historically, the highest level of local government in England was the county. These divisions had emerged from a range of units of old, pre-unification England, whether they were Kingdoms, such as Essex and Sussex; Duchies, such as Yorkshire, Cornwall and Lancashire or simply tracts of land given to some noble, as is the case with Berkshire. Until 1867, they were subdivided into smaller divisions called hundreds. These counties all still exist in, or near to, their original form as the traditional counties. In many places, however, they have been heavily modified or abolished outright as administrative counties. This came about due to a number of factors.The fact that the counties were so small meant, and still means, that there was no regional government able to coordinate an overarching plan for the area. This was especially true in the metropolitan areas surrounding the cities, as the county lines were usually drawn up before the industrial revolution and the mass urbanisation of England. The solution was the creation of large metropolitan counties centred on cities. These were later broken up, with several other counties, into unitary authorities, unifying the county and district/borough levels of government. London is a special case, and is the one Region which currently has a representative authority as well as a directly elected mayor. The thirty-two London boroughs remain the local form of government in the city.

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