National Library of Australia
The National Library of Australia is the largest reference library in Australia, responsible under the terms of the National Library Act for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people." In 2012–13, the National Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, an additional 15,506 metres of manuscript material. It is located in Parkes, Canberra, ACT; the National Library of Australia, while formally established by the passage of the National Library Act 1960, had been functioning as a national library rather than a Parliamentary Library since its inception. In 1901, a Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was established to serve the newly formed Federal Parliament of Australia. From its inception the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was driven to development of a national collection. In 1907 the Joint Parliamentary Library Committee under the Chairmanship of the Speaker, Sir Frederick William Holder defined the objective of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in the following words: The Library Committee is keeping before it the ideal of building up, for the time when Parliament shall be established in the Federal Capital, a great Public Library on the lines of the world-famed Library of Congress at Washington.
The present library building was opened on 15 August 1968 by Prime Minister John Gorton. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Bunning and Madden in the Late Twentieth Century Stripped Classical style; the foyer is decorated in marble, with stained-glass windows by Leonard French and three tapestries by Mathieu Matégot. The building was listed on the Australian Commonwealth Heritage List on 22 June 2004. In 2012–13 the Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, with an estimated additional 2,325,900 items held in the manuscripts collection; the Library's collections of Australiana have developed into the nation's single most important resource of materials recording the Australian cultural heritage. Australian writers and illustrators are sought and well represented—whether published in Australia or overseas; the Library's collection includes all formats of material, from books, journals and manuscripts to pictures, maps, oral history recordings, manuscript papers and ephemera.
92.1% of the Library's collection has been catalogued and is discoverable through the online catalogue. The Library has digitized over 174,000 items from its collection and, where possible, delivers these directly across the Internet; the Library is a world leader in digital preservation techniques, maintains an Internet-accessible archive of selected Australian websites called the Pandora Archive. The Library collects material produced by Australians, for Australians or about the Australian experience in all formats—not just printed works—books, newspapers, posters and printed ephemera—but online publications and unpublished material such as manuscripts and oral histories. A core Australiana collection is that of John A. Ferguson; the Library has particular collection strengths in the performing arts, including dance. The Library's considerable collections of general overseas and rare book materials, as well as world-class Asian and Pacific collections which augment the Australiana collections.
The print collections are further supported by extensive microform holdings. The Library maintains the National Reserve Braille Collection; the Library houses the largest and most developing research resource on Asia in Australia, the largest Asian language collections in the Southern hemisphere, with over half a million volumes in the collection, as well as extensive online and electronic resources. The Library collects resources about all Asian countries in Western languages extensively, resources in the following Asian languages: Burmese, Persian, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Thai and Vietnamese; the Library has acquired a number of important Western and Asian language scholarly collections from researchers and bibliophiles. These collections include: Australian Buddhist Library Collection Braga Collection Claasz Collection Coedes Collection London Missionary Society Collection Luce Collection McLaren-Human Collection Otley Beyer Collection Sakakibara Collection Sang Ye Collection Simon Collection Harold S. Williams Collection The Asian Collections are searchable via the National Library's catalogue.
The National Library holds an extensive collection of manuscripts. The manuscript collection contains about 26 million separate items, covering in excess of 10,492 meters of shelf space; the collection relates predominantly to Australia, but there are important holdings relating to Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and the Pacific. The collection holds a number of European and Asian manuscript collections or single items have been received as part of formed book collections; the Australian manuscript collections date from the period of maritime exploration and settlement in the 18th century until the present, with the greatest area of strength dating from the 1890s onwards. The collection includes a large number of outstanding single items, such as the 14th century Chertsey Cartulary, the journal of James Cook on the HM Bark Endeavour, inscribed on t
Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by small, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s; the Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, soleil levant, which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari; the development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music and impressionist literature. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting.
They constructed their pictures from brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner, they painted realistic scenes of modern life, painted outdoors. Still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were painted in a studio; the Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting outdoors or en plein air. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour—not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary—to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration. Impressionism emerged in France at the same time that a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, Winslow Homer in the United States, were exploring plein-air painting; the Impressionists, developed new techniques specific to the style. Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of seeing, it is an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.
The public, at first hostile came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than delineating the details of the subject, by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism is a precursor of various painting styles, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism. In the middle of the 19th century—a time of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris and waged war—the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French art; the Académie was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of style. Historical subjects, religious themes, portraits were valued; the Académie preferred finished images that looked realistic when examined closely. Paintings in this style were made up of precise brush strokes blended to hide the artist's hand in the work. Colour was restrained and toned down further by the application of a golden varnish.
The Académie had an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, artists whose work was displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie, represented by the works of such artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille—met while studying under the academic artist Charles Gleyre, they discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. Following a practice that had become popular by mid-century, they ventured into the countryside together to paint in the open air, but not for the purpose of making sketches to be developed into finished works in the studio, as was the usual custom. By painting in sunlight directly from nature, making bold use of the vivid synthetic pigments that had become available since the beginning of the century, they began to develop a lighter and brighter manner of painting that extended further the Realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school.
A favourite meeting place for the artists was the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy in Paris, where the discussions were led by Édouard Manet, whom the younger artists admired. They were soon joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin. During the 1860s, the Salon jury rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends in favour of works by artists faithful to the approved style. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While the Salon jury accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, they condemned Manet for placing a realistic nude in a contemporary setting; the jury's worded rejection of Manet's painting appalled his admirers, the unusually large number of rejected works that year perturbed many French artists. After Emperor Napoleon III saw the rejected works of 1863, he decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, the Salon des Refusés was organized.
While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refusés drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art and attracted more visi
Will Ashton
Sir John William Ashton, OBE, ROI was an English-Australian artist and director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1937 to 1945. Ashton was born on 20 September 1881 in Clifton, England, the son of James Ashton, an artist; the Ashtons migrated to Adelaide, South Australia, he was educated at Prince Alfred College from 1889-1897. Upon graduating, Ashton entered the life of an artist. In 1900, he left for England to work, spent 1902-1903 at the Académie Julian in Paris. Ashton had some of his works accepted by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, returned to Adelaide in 1905; the sale of his work, "Boulevard Montparnasse, Paris", to the National Gallery of South Australia enabled him to marry May Millman, on 31 January 1906 at Christ Church, North Adelaide. After holding exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, in 1908, he won the Wynne Prize for landscape. In 1912-14, he painted in Britain and Egypt, he was back in Australia for a year, but returned to London with his family in 1915 until 1917.
Others of his subsequent frequent overseas trips were in the company of Lionel Lindsay or Charles Bryant. The impressionist oil paintings he made on these trips always sold well on his return to Australia, he advised the National Gallery of South Australia and private collectors, supported his family by examining for the Royal Drawing Society of which he was a member. He won the Godfrey Rivers Bequest prize in 1933 and 1938. Ashton won the Wynne Prize for a second and third time in 1930 and 1939. In 1937, Ashton became director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, immediately had to organize the sesquicentennial exhibition of Australian art. During his tenure, he improved the gallery lighting, but other plans were postponed because of World War II. From 1944-1947, he was director of David Jones Art Gallery. A member of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board from 1918, Ashton was chairman in 1953-1962, he was a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, a vice-president of the Australian Painter-Etchers' Society, a member of the Society of Artists in Sydney, being awarded its medal in 1944.
He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire on 1 January 1941 and was made a Knight Bachelor on 11 June 1960 for his service as chairman of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. Ashton died of cancer at his home at Mosman on 1 September 1963, he was survived by three sons and by his second wife, Winfreda Isabel Hoggard, whom he had married on 6 February 1961. On 9 May 1989, Lady Ashton was murdered in the Sydney North Shore suburb of Mosman by John Wayne Glover. A portrait of Will Ashton was painted by William Dargie and was bought by the Commonwealth government
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is New Zealand's national museum, located in Wellington. Known as Te Papa, or'Our Place', it opened in 1998 after the merging of the National Museum and the National Art Gallery. More than 1.5 million people visit every year. Te Papa Tongarewa translates to'Container of Treasures'. A fuller interpretation is ‘our container of treasured things and people that spring from mother earth here in New Zealand’. Te Papa's philosophy emphasises the living face behind its cultural treasures, many of which retain deep ancestral links to the indigenous Māori people; the Museum recognises the partnership, created by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, te Tiriti o Waitangi, in 1840. The first predecessor of Te Papa was the Colonial Museum, founded in 1865, with James Hector as founding director, it was built on Museum Street. Halfway through the 1930s the museum moved to the new Dominion Museum building in Buckle Street, where the National Art Gallery of New Zealand was housed.
The National Art Gallery was opened in 1936 and occupied the first floor of the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum building on Buckle Street, Wellington. It was populated with a collection donated by Academy of Fine Arts; the Gallery was formed with the passing of the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum Act in 1930. Both the Dominion Museum and Gallery were overseen by a single board of trustees; the official opening was by the Governor General in 1934. The early holding consisted of donations and bequests, including those from Harold Beauchamp, T. Lindsay Buick, Archdeacon Smythe, N. Chevalier, J. C. Richmond, William Swainson, Bishop Monrad, John Ilott and Rex Nan Kivell. Eru D. Gore was secretary-manager from 1936 till his death in 1948 when Stewart Bell Maclennan was appointed the first director; this was the first appointment in New Zealand of a full-time art gallery director. Past directors of the gallery include: Stewart Bell Maclennan Melvin Day Luit Bieringa Jenny Harper Te Papa was established in 1992 by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992.
Part of the remit for Te Papa was to explore the national identity of New Zealand. The official opening took place on 14 February 1998, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, Sir Peter Blake, two children; the first chief executive of the Museum was Cheryll Sotheran. Māori traditional instrumentalist Richard Nunns co-led the musicians at a dawn ceremony on opening day; the museum is run by a board appointed by the Minister for Arts and Heritage. Board members have included: Wira Gardiner, Fiona Campbell, Sue Piper, Judith Tizard, John Judge, Miria Pomare, Michael Bassett, Christopher Parkin, Sandra Lee, Ngātata Love, Ronald Trotter, Glenys Coughlan, Judith Binney, Philip Carter, Wendy Lai; the museum had one million visitors in the first five months of operation, between 1 and 1.3 million visits have been made in each subsequent year. In 2004, more space was devoted to exhibiting works from the New Zealand art collection in a long-term exhibition called Toi Te Papa: Art of the Nation.
Filmmakers Gaylene Preston and Anna Cottrell documented the development of Te Papa in their film Getting to Our Place. The museum has sometimes been the center of controversy; the siting of significant collections at the water's edge on reclaimed land next to one of the world's most active faults has resulted in concern by some people. There has been criticism of the'sideshow' nature of some exhibits the Time Warp section, which has closed. There has been criticism that some exhibits were not given due reverence. For example, a major work by Colin McCahon was at one stage juxtaposed with a 1950s refrigerator in a New Zealand culture exhibition. New Zealand art commentator Hamish Keith has been a consistent critic of Te Papa at different times referring to it as a "theme park", the "cultural equivalent to a fast-food outlet" and "not a de facto national gallery", but seemed to moderate his opinion when making a case for exhibition space on the Auckland waterfront. Staff restructuring at Te Papa since 2012 has generated significant controversy.
In October 2018, Te Papa management promised to review restructuring plans, indicating that plans would be scaled back. In February 2019, the Collection Manager of Fishes Andrew Stewart and the Collection Manager of Molluscs Bruce Marshall were made redundant. Numerous museum experts and scientists in New Zealand and worldwide criticised the move, with some threatening a boycott. In March 2019, the redundancies were delayed. Te Papa advertised a research position for a molluscan curator, criticised by outside experts again. In April 2019, the Museum reversed the decision for Andrew Stewart; the main Te Papa building is on Cable Street. Inside the building are six floors of exhibitions, cafés and gift shops dedicated to New Zealand's culture and environment; the museum incorporates outdoor areas with artificial caves, native bushes and wetlands. A second building on Tory Street is a scientific research facility and storage area, is not open to the public. Te Papa was built by Fletcher Construction.
The 36,000-square-metre building had cost NZ$300 million by its opening in 1998. Earthquake strengthening of the Cable Street building was achieved through the New Zealand-developed technology of base isolation – seating the entire building on supports made from lead and rubber that slow down the effect of an earthquake; the site was occupied by a modern five-storey hotel. This was jacked off its foundations onto numerous rail bogies and transported 200 metres down and across the road to a n
St Ives, Cornwall
St Ives is a seaside town, civil parish and port in Cornwall. The town lies west of Camborne on the coast of the Celtic Sea. In former times it was commercially dependent on fishing; the decline in fishing, caused a shift in commercial emphasis, the town is now a popular seaside resort, notably achieving the title of Best UK Seaside Town from the British Travel Awards in both 2010 and 2011. St Ives was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1639. St Ives has become renowned for its number of artists, it was named best seaside town of 2007 by The Guardian newspaper. It should not be confused with a village and civil parish in south-east Cornwall; the origin of St Ives is attributed in legend to the arrival of the Irish saint Ia of Cornwall, in the 5th century. The parish church bears her name, St Ives derives from it; the Sloop Inn, which lies on the wharf was a fisherman's pub for many centuries and is dated to "circa 1312", making it one of the oldest inns in Cornwall. The town was the site of a notable atrocity during the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.
The English provost marshal, Anthony Kingston, came to St Ives and invited the portreeve, John Payne, to lunch at an inn. He asked. Afterwards the portreeve and the Provost Marshal walked down to the gallows; the portreeve was hanged for being a "busy rebel". The seal of St Ives is Argent, an ivy branch overspreading the whole field Vert, with the legend Sigillum Burgi St. Ives in Com. Cornub. 1690. During the Spanish Armada of 1597 two Spanish ships, a bark and a pinnace had made their way to St Ives to seek shelter from the storm which had dispersed the Spanish fleet, they were captured by the English warship Warspite of Sir Walter Raleigh leaking from the same storm. The information given by the prisoners was vital on learning the Armada's objectives. From medieval times fishing was important at St Ives; the pier was built by John Smeaton between 1766 and 1770 but has been lengthened at a date. The octagonal lookout with a cupola belongs to Smeaton's design. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin describes how the St Ives fisherman observed Sunday as a day of rest.
St Ives was a busy fishing port and seining was the usual method of fishing. Seining was carried out by a set of three boats of different sizes, the largest two carrying seine nets of different sizes; the total number of crew was eighteen. However this came to an end in 1924. In the decade 1747–1756 the total number of pilchards dispatched from the four principal Cornish ports of Falmouth, Penzance, St Ives averaged 30,000 hogsheads annually. Much greater catches were achieved in 1790 and 1796. In 1847 the exports of pilchards from Cornwall amounted to 40,883 hogsheads or 122 million fish while the greatest number taken in one seine was 5,600 hogsheads at St Ives in 1868; the bulk of the catch was exported to Italy: for example, in 1830, 6400 hogsheads were sent to Mediterranean ports. From 1829 to 1838, the yearly average for this trade was 9000 hogsheads. Once the spring mackerel season ends, the fishing fleet head north. In July 1882, ninety luggers and six hundred men were engaged in the Scottish herring fishery.
While commercial fishing is much reduced, the harbour is still in use as well for recreational boating, tourist fishing and day trips to the nearby seal colonies on the Carrack Rocks and other locations along the coast. A class of Victorian fishing boat unique to St. Ives, known as a "jumbo," has been replicated by boatbuilder Jonny Nance to celebrate the town's maritime heritage. Today's jumbos are operated by the St. Ives Jumbo Association; the first lifeboat was stationed in the town in 1840. In 1867 the Royal National Lifeboat Institution built a boathouse at Porthgwidden beach, it proved to be a difficult site to launch from and in 1867 it was replaced by a building in Fore Street. In 1911 a new boathouse was built on the Quay, in 1993 a larger station was built at the landward end of the West Pier. Since its inception in 1839, thirty eight medals have been awarded to rescuers from St Ives, 18 silver medals and 20 bronze. Seven crewmen died in the St Ives lifeboat tragedy of 1939. In the early hours of 23 January 1939 there was a Force 10 storm blowing with gusts up to 100 miles per hour.
The lifeboat John and Sara Eliza Stych was launched at 3 o'clock to search for a ship reported in trouble off Cape Cornwall. It rounded the Island, it drifted across St Ives Bay when its propeller was fouled. The first time it turned over four men were lost, he scrambled ashore. The modern seaside resort developed as a result of the arrival of the St Ives Bay branch line from St Erth, part of the Great Western Railway in 1877. With it came a new generation of Victorian seaside holidaymakers. Much of the town was built during the latter part of the 19th century; the railway, which winds along the cliffs and bays, survived the Beeching cuts and has become a tourist attraction itself. In 1952, the Royal Navy warship HMS Wave ran aground near the town; the ship was salvaged and returned to service. A propeller believed to be from HMS Wave was washed ashore in 2008. In 1999, the town was the first landfall of the solar eclipse of 11 August 1999; the Tate St Ives displayed a exhibition called As Dark as Light, with art by Yuko Shiraishi, Garry
Royal Academy of Arts
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. It has a unique position as an independent funded institution led by eminent artists and architects, its purpose is to promote the creation and appreciation of the visual arts through exhibitions and debate. The Royal Academy of Arts was founded through a personal act of King George III on 10 December 1768 with a mission to promote the arts of design in Britain through education and exhibition; the motive in founding the Academy was twofold: to raise the professional status of the artist by establishing a sound system of training and expert judgement in the arts, to arrange the exhibition of contemporary works of art attaining an appropriate standard of excellence. Supporters wanted to foster a national school of art and to encourage appreciation and interest among the public based on recognised canons of good taste. Fashionable taste in 18th-century Britain was based on continental and traditional art forms, providing contemporary British artists little opportunity to sell their works.
From 1746 the Foundling Hospital, through the efforts of William Hogarth, provided an early venue for contemporary artists in Britain. The success of this venture led to the formation of the Society of Artists of Great Britain and the Free Society of Artists. Both these groups were exhibiting societies; the combined vision of education and exhibition to establish a national school of art set the Royal Academy apart from the other exhibiting societies. It provided the foundation upon which the Royal Academy came to dominate the art scene of the 18th and 19th centuries, supplanting the earlier art societies; the origin of the Royal Academy of Arts lies in an attempt in 1755 by members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Commerce, principally the sculptor Henry Cheere, to found an autonomous academy of arts. Prior to this a number of artists were members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Commerce, including Cheere and William Hogarth, or were involved in small-scale private art academies, such as the St Martin's Lane Academy.
Although Cheere's attempt failed, the eventual charter, called an'Instrument', used to establish the Royal Academy of Arts over a decade was identical to that drawn up by Cheere in 1755. It was Sir William Chambers, a prominent architect and head of the British government's architects' department, the Office of Works, who used his connections with George III to gain royal patronage and financial support for the Academy in 1768; the painter Joshua Reynolds was made its first president, Francis Milner Newton was elected the first secretary, a post he held for two decades until his resignation in 1788. The instrument of foundation, signed by George III on 10 December 1768, named 34 founder members and allowed for a total membership of 40; the founder members were Reynolds, John Baker, George Barret, Francesco Bartolozzi, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Augustino Carlini, Charles Catton, Mason Chamberlin, William Chambers, Francis Cotes, George Dance, Nathaniel Dance, Thomas Gainsborough, John Gwynn, Francis Hayman, Nathaniel Hone the Elder, Angelica Kauffman, Jeremiah Meyer, George Michael Moser, Mary Moser, Francis Milner Newton, Edward Penny, John Inigo Richards, Paul Sandby, Thomas Sandby, Dominic Serres, Peter Toms, William Tyler, Samuel Wale, Benjamin West, Richard Wilson, Joseph Wilton, Richard Yeo, Francesco Zuccarelli.
William Hoare and Johann Zoffany were added to this list by the King and are known as nominated members. Among the founder members were two women, a father and daughter, two sets of brothers; the Royal Academy was housed in cramped quarters in Pall Mall, although in 1771 it was given temporary accommodation for its library and schools in Old Somerset House a royal palace. In 1780 it was installed in purpose-built apartments in the first completed wing of New Somerset House, designed by Chambers, located in the Strand and designed by Chambers, the Academy's first treasurer; the Academy moved in 1837 to Trafalgar Square, where it occupied the east wing of the completed National Gallery. These premises soon proved too small to house both institutions. In 1868, 100 years after the Academy's foundation, it moved to Burlington House, where it remains. Burlington House is owned by the British Government, used rent-free by the Royal Academy; the first Royal Academy exhibition of contemporary art, open to all artists, opened on 25 April 1769 and ran until 27 May 1769.
136 works of art were shown and this exhibition, now known as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, has been staged annually without interruption to the present day. In 1870 the Academy expanded its exhibition programme to include a temporary annual loan exhibition of Old Masters, following the cessation of a similar annual exhibition at the British Institution; the range and frequency of these loan exhibitions have grown enormously since that time, making the Royal Academy a leading art exhibition institution of international importance. Britain's first public lectures on art were staged by the Royal Academy, as another way to fulfil its mission. Led by Reynolds, the first president, a program included lectures by Dr. William Hunter, John Flaxman, James Barry, Sir John Soane, J. M. W. Turner; the last three were all graduates of the RA School, which for a long time was the only established art school in the Royal Academy. In 2018, the Academy's 250th anniversary, the results of a major refurbishment were unveiled.
The project began on 1 January 2008 with the appointment of David Chipperfield Architects. Heritage Lottery
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 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. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; 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 used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was 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 the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. 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. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people 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 of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
