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 England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62, and more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. England shares a land border with Scotland to the north and another land border with Wales to the west, and is otherwise surrounded by the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south, the Celtic Sea to the south-west, and the Irish Sea to the west. Continental Europe lies to the south-east, and Ireland to the west. At the 2021 census, the population was 56,490,048. London is both the largest city and the capital.

The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Paleolithic. It takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century and has had extensive cultural and legal impact on the wider world since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century. The Kingdom of England, which included Wales after 1535, ceased to be a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union brought into effect a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland that created the Kingdom of Great Britain.

England is the origin of the English language, the English legal system which served as the basis for the common law systems of many other countries, association football, and the Anglican branch of Christianity; its parliamentary system of government has been widely adopted by other nations. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England is home to the two oldest universities in the English-speaking world: the University of Oxford, founded in 1096, and the University of Cambridge, founded in 1209. Both universities are ranked amongst the most prestigious in the world.

England's terrain chiefly consists of low hills and plains, especially in the centre and south. Upland and mountainous terrain is mostly found in the north and west, including Dartmoor, the Lake District, the Pennines, and the Shropshire Hills. The London metropolitan area has a population of over 15 million as of 2025, representing the United Kingdom's largest metropolitan area. England's population of 56.3 million comprises 84 of the population of the United Kingdom, 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.

Toponymy

See also: Toponymy of England

The name England is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means land of the Angles. The Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. They came from the Angeln region of what is now the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. 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 to mean 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.

The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used. 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. How and why a term derived from the name of this tribe, rather than others such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country 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 in Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England Sasunn; 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, though its original meaning is the island of Britain as a whole.

History

Main article: History of England

For a chronological guide, see Timeline of English history.

Prehistory

Main article: Prehistoric Britain

Sun shining through row of upright standing stones with other stones horizontally on the top.

Stonehenge, a Neolithic monument

The Battersea Shield is one of the most significant pieces of ancient Celtic art found in Britain.

The earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to about 780,000 years ago. The oldest proto-human bones discovered in England date from 500,000 years ago. Modern humans are known to have inhabited the area during the Upper Paleolithic period, though permanent settlements were only established within the last 6,000 years. After the last ice age only large mammals such as mammoths, bison and woolly rhinoceros remained. Roughly 11,000 years ago, when the ice sheets began to recede, humans repopulated the area; genetic research suggests they came from the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula. The sea level was lower than the present day and Britain was connected by land bridge to Ireland and Eurasia. As the seas rose, it was separated from Ireland 10,000 years ago and from Eurasia two millennia later. Neolithic farmers from the Iberian Peninsula migrated to the region around