Kent Fire and Rescue Service
Kent Fire and Rescue Service is the statutory fire and rescue service for the administrative county of Kent and the unitary authority area of Medway, covering a geographical area south of London, to the coast and including major shipping routes via the Thames and Medway rivers. The total coastline covered is 225 km; the FRS provides emergency cover to a population of nearly 2 million. The area meets the boundaries of the London Fire Brigade to the north of the county, Surrey to the north west and East Sussex to the south west of Kent; the first fire brigade appeared in Kent in 1802 when the Kent Fire Office formed an insurance brigade in Deptford. In the same year, separately from insurance companies, Hythe became the first town in Kent to set up its own fire brigade, followed by Ashford in 1826. By the 20th century, it was quite fashionable for local authorities to have their own fire brigades. Maidstone had seen the formation of its borough fire brigade in 1901 when the Royal Insurance Company provided a new Shand Mason horse-drawn steam fire engine, named The Queen.
This company had taken over the Kent Fire Office in the same year disbanding their own brigade. Things became competitive between individual town and village brigades, in many instances, each one trying to outdo its neighbour. In 1910, Bromley became the first town in Kent to house motorised fire engines, with two new Merryweather vehicles being stationed there; until 1938, the provision of a fire brigade was a discretionary power, there were a few local authorities that regarded it as an unnecessary expense. However, due to the threat of war, Parliament enacted the Fire Brigades Act 1938 and made it a duty and so created over 1,600 individual fire authorities across the nation, it was these local brigades and the Auxiliary Fire Service – formed in 1938 – that valiantly coped with the consequences of the Battle of Britain and much of The Blitz. In August 1941, local brigades and the AFS were absorbed into one organisation called The National Fire Service, it was in 1941 that the current Headquarters house The Godlands was requisitioned for war-time use by the National Fire Service and it has remained with the fire service since.
World War II brought dark days indeed for Kent fire-fighters. Fire-fighting has been and will always be a dangerous occupation, the Roll of Honour 1899-1990, compiled by Geoffrey Cooper, an ex-Kent fire-fighter, details the deaths of Kent fire-fighters while on duty. Of the 122'Kent' names listed, 15 were pre-1939, 16 were post-1939 and 91 died during World War II. Nationally, well over 1,000 fire-fighters died during World War II, with stories of fire stations and the water supplies needed for fire-fighting being targeted by German bombers, to maximise the damage caused by incendiary bombs; the last death on duty of a Kent fire-fighter was in 1990. The fire service was returned to local authority control on 1 April 1948 under the Fire Services Act 1947, with responsibility in England and Wales being given to the 146 counties and county boroughs of the day; the County of Kent and the City and County Borough of Canterbury combined to form Kent Fire Brigade, taking over 79 fire stations from the National Fire Service.
Subsequent local government reorganisations have had their effect upon the brigade, most in 1965 when eight fire stations in the northwest of the county were transferred to the newly created Greater London area. Further reorganisation in 1974 saw Canterbury lose its county borough status and the fire brigade became the exclusive responsibility of Kent County Council. In 1998, the structure of local government changed again and Kent combined with the new Medway Towns unitary authority for fire brigade provision. On 1 October 2003, Kent Fire Brigade was renamed Kent Fire and Rescue Service to better reflect the requirements demanded of it for many years; these changes were reflected nationally by the enactment of the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 which came into effect on 1 October 2004. In the spring of 2011, Kent Fire and Rescue underwent changes to its structure, these included restructuring from three divisions to 5 area groups: North Kent, East Kent, West Kent, South Kent and Mid Kent.
Each group consists of a number of clusters, which are made up of a number of certain stations where resources are locally managed. The Letter prefix for each division was dropped in the station call sign, for instance Swanley, under the old system was named as Station S31 the S standing for South Division, now it is just Station 31. Water Tender: P1 Rescue Pump Ladder: R3/P1 Rescue Pump Platform: R1 Aerial Ladder Platform: A1 Turntable Ladder: A1 Swift Water Rescue Unit + Inshore Rescue Boat: B1 Command Support Unit: C1 Fire Fogging Unit: M1 Animal Rescue Unit: R2 Line Rescue Unit: R2 Water Carrier: W1 Water Management Unit: W1 General Purpose Vehicle: T1/T2/T3 General Purpose Vehicle + Breathing Apparatus Support Unit: T1 Light 4x4 Vehicle + All Terrain Vehicle: T1 Personnel Carrier Vehicle: T1/T2 Prime Mover + High Volume Pump: T8 Prime Mover + High Volume Hose Layer: T9 Prime Mover + Incident Command & Control Unit: T1 Prime Mover + Incident Support Unit T4 Detection, Identification, & Monitoring: H8 Incident Response Unit: H9 Prime Mover + Mass Decontamination Disrobe: T9 Search & Rescue Dog Unit: R9 General Purpose Vehicle: T1 Prime Mover: T5/T6/T7/T8/T9Pods: Module 1 - Technical Search Equipment Module 2 - Heavy Transport, Confined Space & Hot Cutting Module 3 - Breaching & Breaking Equipment Module 4 - Multi Pu
Archaic humans
A number of varieties of Homo are grouped into the broad category of archaic humans in the period contemporary to and predating the emergence of the earliest anatomically modern humans over 315 ka. The term includes Homo neanderthalensis, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo antecessor. There is no universal consensus on this terminology, varieties of "archaic humans" are included under the binomial name of either Homo sapiens or Homo erectus by some authors. Archaic humans had a brain size averaging 1,200 to 1,400 cubic centimeters, which overlaps with the range of modern humans. Archaics are distinguished from anatomically modern humans by having a thick skull, prominent supraorbital ridges and the lack of a prominent chin. Anatomically modern humans appear from over 160,000 years ago in Ethiopia and after 70,000 years ago supplanting the "archaic" human varieties. Non-modern varieties of Homo are certain to have survived until after 30,000 years ago, until as as 12,000 years ago.
Which of these, if any, are included under the term "archaic human" is a matter of definition and varies among authors. Nonetheless, according to recent genetic studies, modern humans may have bred with "at least two groups" of ancient humans: Neanderthals and Denisovans. Other studies have cast doubt on admixture being the source of the shared genetic markers between archaic and modern humans, pointing to an ancestral origin of the traits which originated 500,000–800,000 years ago. Another group may have been extant as as 11,500 years ago, the Red Deer Cave people of China. Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London has suggested that these people could be a result of mating between Denisovans and modern humans. Other scientists remain skeptical, suggesting that the unique features are within the variations expected for modern human populations; the category archaic human lacks a single, agreed upon definition. According to one definition, Homo sapiens is a single species comprising several subspecies that include the archaics and modern humans.
Under this definition, modern humans are referred to as Homo sapiens sapiens and archaics are designated with the prefix "Homo sapiens". For example, the Neanderthals are Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis is Homo sapiens heidelbergensis. Other taxonomists prefer not to consider archaics and modern humans as a single species but as several different species. In this case the standard taxonomy is used, Homo neanderthalensis; the evolutionary dividing lines that separate modern humans from archaic humans and archaic humans from Homo erectus are unclear. The earliest known fossils of anatomically modern humans such as the Omo remains from 195,000 years ago, Homo sapiens idaltu from 160,000 years ago, Qafzeh remains from 90,000 years ago are recognizably modern humans. However, these early modern humans do possess a number of archaic traits, such as moderate, but not prominent, brow ridges; the emergence of archaic humans is sometimes used as an example of punctuated equilibrium.
This occurs when a species undergoes significant biological evolution within a short period. Subsequently, the species undergoes little change for long periods until the next punctuation; the brain size of archaic humans expanded from 900 cm3 in erectus to 1,300 cm3. Since the peak of human brain size during the archaics, it has begun to decline. Robin Dunbar has argued. Based on his analysis of the relationship between brain size and hominin group size, he concluded that because archaic humans had large brains, they must have lived in groups of over 120 individuals. Dunbar argues that it was not possible for hominins to live in such large groups without using language, otherwise there could be no group cohesion and the group would disintegrate. By comparison, chimpanzees live in smaller groups of up to 50 individuals. Atapuerca Mountains, Sima de los Huesos Saldanha Man Altamura Man Kabwe Skull Steinheim Skull Ndutu cranium Early and Late "Archaic" Homo Sapiens and "Anatomically Modern" Homo Sapiens Origins of Modern Humans: Multiregional or Out of Africa?
Homo sapiens, Museum of Natural History Human Timeline – Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History
Straight-tusked elephant
The straight-tusked elephant is an extinct species of elephant that inhabited Europe and Western Asia during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Palaeoloxodon antiquus was quite large, with individuals reaching 4 metres in height. One 40-year-old male measured about 3.81 metres tall and weighed about 11.3 tonnes, while another from Montreuil weighed about 15 tonnes and was about 4.2 metres tall. And had long upward-curving tusks. P. antiquus's legs were longer than those of modern elephants. This elephant is thought to have had an 80-cm-long tongue that could be projected a short distance from the mouth to grasp leaves and grasses. With this tongue and a flexible trunk, straight-tusked elephants could graze or browse on Pleistocene foliage about 8 metres above ground; some experts regard the larger Asian species Palaeoloxodon namadicus as subspecies. The genus Palaeoloxodon has at times been regarded as a subgenus of Elephas, but a 2007 study of hyoid characteristics amongst living and fossil elephants has led to an abandonment of this hypothesis.
In 2016, a DNA sequence analysis of P. antiquus suggested that its closest extant relative may be the African forest elephant, L. cyclotis. The paper argues that P. antiquus is closer to L. cyclotis than L. cyclotis is to the African bush elephant, L. africana, thus invalidating the genus Loxodonta as recognized. A subsequent study published by Palkopoulou et al. indicated a more complicated relationship between straight-tusked elephants and other species of elephants. Straight-tusked elephants lived in small herds of about five to 15 individuals, they preferred warm conditions and flourished in the interglacial periods during the current Ice Age, spreading from continental Europe to Great Britain during the warmer periods. It is assumed. During colder periods, the species may have migrated south; the straight-tusked elephant became extinct in Britain near the beginning of the Weichselian glaciation, about 115,000 years ago. Finds of isolated tusks are common in the United Kingdom. For example, a tusk of this elephant was found during the construction of the Swan Valley Community School in Swanscombe, Kent.
However, finds of whole or partial skeletons of this elephant are rare. Skeleton finds. Two sites were found in the Lower Thames basin, one at Upnor and one at Aveley, Essex. Paleontological and archaeological excavations in advance of High Speed 1 revealed the 400,000-year-old skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant in the Ebbsfleet Valley, near Swanscombe, it was lying at the edge of. Flint tools lay scattered around, suggesting the elephant had been cut up by a tribe of the early humans around at the time, known as Homo heidelbergensis. On the European mainland, many remains of the straight-tusked elephant have been found. In addition to skeletons, some sites contained additional archaeological material, as in the Ebbsfleet Valley. A skeleton at Lehringen was found with the remains of a yew spear between its ribs and lithic artifacts around the head. In Greece, three partial skeletons have been recovered from the province of West Macedonia, a Palaeoloxodon antiquus butchering site has been excavated near Megalopolis, in the Peloponnese.
Straight-tusked elephant remains have been found with flint tools at a number of other sites, such as Torralba and Aridos in Spain, Notarchirico in Italy, Gröbern and Ehringsdorf in Germany. A Palaeolithic scratched figure of an elephant head in the Vermelhosa area, near the Côa Valley Park, is reported to be the depiction of an Palaeoloxodon antiquus; the Iberian peninsula may have served as the last European refuge of the straight-tusked elephant. According to João Luís Cardoso, the species survived until 30,000 years BP in Portugal. Elephants that evolved from the straight-tusked elephant are described from many Mediterranean islands, where they evolved into dwarfed elephants; the responsible factors for the dwarfing of island mammals are thought to be the reduction in food availability and competition. Shoshani, J. N. Goren-Inbar, R. Rabinovich. 2001. A stylohyoideum of Palaeoloxodon antiquus from Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel: morphology and functional inferences; the World of Elephants - International Congress, Rome 2001.
Pp 665–667. Online pdf BBC News. 2004. Stone Age elephant remains found. Downloaded at 2 July 2006 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/kent/3821527.stm. Masseti, M. 1994. On the Pleistocene occurrence of Elephas antiquus in the Tuscan Archipelago, Northern Tyrrhenian Sea. Hystni, 5: 101-105. Online pdf Wenban-Smith, F. F. & Bridgland, D. R. 1997. Newly discovered Pleistocene deposits at Swanscombe: an interim report. Lithics 17/18: 3–8. Wenban-Smith, F. F. & Bridgland, D. R. 2001. Palaeolithic archaeology at the Swan Valley Community School, Kent. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 67: 219–259. Wenban-Smith, F. F. P. Allen, M. R. Bates, S. A. Parfitt, R. C. Preece, J. R. Stewart, C. Turner, J. E. Whittaker. 2006. The Clactonian elephant butchery site at Southfleet Road, Ebbsfleet, UK. Journal of Quaternary Science. Volume 21, Issue 5, p 471-483
Ebbsfleet Valley
Ebbsfleet Valley is a new town and redevelopment area in Kent, South East England, part of the Thames Gateway, southwest of Gravesend. It is named after the valley of the Ebbsfleet River. Although a small part of the site in the east lies within the borough of Gravesham, Ebbsfleet Valley sits in the borough of Dartford; the name Ebbsfleet is an artificial creation of seventeenth-century antiquaries inspired by the name of Ebbsfleet in Thanet, 75 km to the east. It was announced on 16 March 2014 that redevelopment of the area would be led by a development corporation. Much of the land is brownfield and was used by industry; the new community is planned to have a population of 40,000. Ebbsfleet International railway station was opened in November 2007 and provides services to Continental Europe on High Speed 1. Domestic services to St Pancras railway station in central London are operated by Southeastern. In March 2014, the British government announced its intention to construct a garden city at Ebbsfleet for up to 15,000 homes.
In November 2015, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer attempted to kick start the project by injecting ₤300m. Richard Rogers, a former government adviser on cities, said: "They shouldn’t be building down there. East London still has masses of brownfield land, so why are we building 15 miles out? This is not a sustainable option." The development is referred to as a garden city, intended to be sustainable with publicly owned infrastructure and facilities, with inhabitants working on the estates. This was said to be inspired by the Stockholm suburbs such as Hammarby where the design there is to have cycleways, 1,500 self-build homes and parkland. In reality, at Ebbsfleet little of this will come to fruition, only 25 of the planned 15000 homes having been completed, those built by Barratt on land sold to them by Land Securities, a major landowner; the planning committee chair, Derek Hunnisett, said "We are looking for a higher quality than the normal and what we are getting is the norm – standard off-the-peg stuff.".
Despite Ebeneezer Howards's vision for garden cities to be leafy, with ample plots and a lower density than other developments: "air and water and churches... in gardens with pretty self contained cottages.. There should be an abundance of living room, playing room and living room" Ebbsfleet Garden City will not adhere to the same key design principles of a garden city. Ebbsfleet will be a much higher density housing development than an actual garden city of "30 persons per hectare"; this features multi-storey flats, dense road layouts dominated by private parking and passageways for cars. The nearest house is less than 20 minutes walk to Ebbsfleet International station; the current development contradicts policy and academic papers written in recent times to inform the coalition government's'blueprint'. "A strong landscape structure, that matures over time to create a leafy green character. Tree lined streets, green verges and planted front gardens". In a contradictory move, in the following May, London Paramount Entertainment Resort were given permission to build a theme park on potential housing land on the adjoining Swanscombe Peninsula site, Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project status, allowing the developers to bypass local planning requirements and build a leisure complex that by 2019 may create employment for 27,000 people.
Highways England consulted, in early 2017, about improvements to the A2 junctions in the area, citing a traffic increase of 200%. There will be a trial by BT of a fibre network in the Ebbsfleet valley offering the highest speed internet connection to home users in the United Kingdom, with the exception of Ashford in Kent, it has been confirmed they will be offering speeds of 100Mbit/s which will transfer TV, Broadband and Telephone via optical fibre. Businesses and residents of the area will be given a new telephone dialling code, 01987, though the small number of users who have numbers allocated from the neighbouring codes are able to retain them; the 01987 code was adopted in April 2008, in preference to the vacant 01321 code. The Ebbsfleet River is of great historical importance in English history and prehistory, much archaeological excavation has taken place here over the years. Quarrying here has revealed signs of extensive occupation some 100,000 years ago: flint knapping was carried out here, the remains of a straight-tusked elephant have been found.
Distinctive pottery from the Neolithic age has been discovered. Belgic Britons, in the late Iron Age have left behind traces of their culture. Prior to the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in this area, archaeological work undertaken at Ebbsfleet found an Anglo-Saxon mill; the river, fed by eight natural springs at Springhead, was held sacred by the Celts who settled in the area around 100 BC. They were followed by the Romans. Many of the local chalk quarries were started by the Romans for cement manufacture and flint; the quarries were expanded, in line with the industrial revolution, by Joseph Parker and others. A large flooded quarry, Sawyer's Lake, can be found nearby; the football team Gravesend and Northfleet FC changed their name to Ebbsfleet United F. C. in the summer of 2007. Another move to promote a sense of identity in the new town is a planned landmark, which when built will be 50 m high and is intended to be visible from road and air. However, in June 2012, the p
Kent Police
Kent Police is the territorial police force for Kent in England. The force covers an area of 1,443 square miles with an approximate population of 1,660,588; the Chief Constable is Alan Pughsley, QPM, appointed in 2014. Kent Police was the first force in the United Kingdom to be led by a black Chief Constable, Michael Fuller QPM, in office from 2004 to 2010. Due to the Channel Tunnel, Kent Police is unique among English forces in having a police station outside of the country, in Coquelles, staffed by Kent Police. Kent Police work with other UK and European forces as part of the Cross Channel Intelligence Community, helping to tackle cross-border crime; the cross channel traffic causes Kent Police and the Highways Agency to enforce Operation Stack, controlling the freight flow on that part of the M20 motorway closest to the ports. Kent has the largest strategic road network of any force in the UK, covering four motorways. Proposals made by the Home Secretary on 20 March 2006 saw Kent Police stay as a standalone strategic force for Kent.
The Port of Dover maintains its own independent police force, the Port of Dover Police, Kent Police has statutory responsibility for policing the entire county and will take over primacy of serious investigations and incidents within the port when appropriate. On 14 January 1857, a 222-strong Kent County Constabulary was formed under Chief Constable John Henry Hay Ruxton; the first headquarters was at Wrens Cross, Stone Street and was rented for use by the police until 23 November 1860 when the force purchased it for £1,200. It was responsible for policing those parts of the county not under the jurisdiction of local Borough police forces. In 1860, the initial uniform of a frock coat and a high hat was replaced by a long uniform tunic and shako hat and constables were issued with a rattle and truncheon. In 1885 whistles were introduced and in 1897 the recognisable custodian helmet was introduced. On 1 April 1889, Kent County Constabulary absorbed the borough police forces of Deal, Faversham and Tenterden, five of the fourteen local police forces that policed boroughs within the county of Kent.
The remaining nine were absorbed on 1 April 1943, these being the borough forces of Dover, Gravesend, Margate and Tunbridge Wells, together with the Canterbury City Police, the Rochester City Police. Ruxton retired on 14 August 1894 and died on 20 April 1897. In terms of mobilisation and communication, Kent Constabulary purchased 20 bicycles in 1896, a number which rose to 129 by 1904. Telephones were given to village police constables in 1925 and by 1931, 29 motorcycles had been introduced, along with one police car; the constabulary employed horses until 1943. In 1965, the force had an establishment of 1,988 attested constables and an actual strength of 1,766, making it the third largest county force in Great Britain. Kent County Constabulary was the last British force to keep the word "county" in its official title, it changed its name to Kent Police in 2002. The main argument for the change was that the large number of visitors coming through the Channel Tunnel and the ports would understand the word "Police" more than "Constabulary".
The Kent Police headquarters are located at Maidstone. Kent Police College is located to the rear of the headquarters site; the headquarters houses the Kent Police Museum. After years of personnel cuts announced in 2010 and starting in 2011 that saw officer numbers fall from a peak of 3,800 in 2010 to under 3,200 by 2016, it was announced in March 2018 that Kent Police would launch the largest recruitment campaign in its history aiming to recruit over 200 more officers over the next one to two years; this was made possible due to an increase in the tax funding the police receive from county residents. The campaign has so far been successful with dozens of new constables passing out in 2018 with dozens more undergoing training into 2019. Once completed the campaign should bolster the number of sworn constables in Kent to over 3,400.. It was further announced in January 2019 that the PCC Matthew Scott was proposing another tax increase in the 2019/20 period in the amount of money Kent Police receive from county residents in order to recruit a further 180 officers by 2020.
If this proposal is approved and additional officers are recruited this would take the total number of sworn officers in Kent to upwards of 3,600 by 2020.. This tax increase for 180 additional officers was approved in February 2019. X26 Tasers were introduced to Kent police in 2009 for rank and file officers, although only Response vehicle drivers were issued with them; each Response vehicle had to be double crewed with both crew members carrying Taser due to the safety implications, to allow proper care and control of a Tased individual. In March 2019 it was announced that all frontline officers in a public-facing role who could face violence in the course of their duty will be able to volunteer to undertake taser training and carry a taser whilst on duty if they choose to; this would mean at least all officers who conduct patrol and emergency response duties would be able to undertake taser training. This measure is due as a result of a large increase in weapon crime in Kent and throughout the country as a whole.
In 2017 new two-shot X2 tasers were approved for use by officers and have replaced the older single-shot X26 models. Until November 2011 the force was formed into six BCU's, as shown below: North Kent South Kent East Kent (Canterbury, Herne Bay
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
Civil parish
In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government, they are a territorial designation, the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authority. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of ecclesiastical parishes which played a role in both civil and ecclesiastical administration; the unit rolled out across England in the 1860s. A civil parish can range in size from a large town with a population of about 75,000 to a single village with fewer than a hundred inhabitants. Eight parishes have city status. A civil parish may be known as and confirmed as a town, neighbourhood or community by resolution of its parish council, a right reserved not conferred on other units of English local government. 35% of the English population live in a civil parish. As of 31 December 2015 there were 10,449 parishes in England; the most populous is Weston super Mare and those with cathedral city status are Chichester, Hereford, Ripon, Salisbury and Wells.
On 1 April 2014, Queen's Park became the first civil parish in Greater London. Before 2008 their creation was not permitted within a London borough. Wales was divided into civil parishes until 1974, when they were replaced by communities, which are similar to English parishes in the way they operate. Civil parishes in Scotland were abolished for local government purposes by the Local Government Act 1929, the Scottish equivalent of English civil parishes are community council areas, which were established by the Local Government Act 1973; the Parish system in Europe was established between the 8th and 12th centuries and in England was old by the time of the Conquest. These areas were based on the territory of one or more manors, areas which in some cases derived their bounds from Roman or Iron Age estates. Parish boundaries were conservative, changing little, after 1180'froze' so that boundaries could no longer be changed at all, despite changes to manorial landholdings - though there were some examples of sub-division.
The consistency of these boundaries, up until the 19th century is useful to historians, is of cultural significance in terms of shaping local identities, a factor reinforced by the adoption of parish boundaries unchanged, by successor local government units. There was huge variation in size between parishes, for instance Writtle in Essex was 13,568 acres while neighbouring Shellow Bowells was just 469 acres, Chignall Smealy 476 acres; until the break with Rome, parishes managed ecclesiastical matters, while the manor was the principal unit of local administration and justice. The church replaced the manor court as the rural administrative centre, levied a local tax on produce known as a tithe. In the medieval period, responsibilities such as relief of the poor passed from the Lord of the Manor to the parish's rector, who in practice would delegate tasks among his vestry or the monasteries. After the dissolution of the monasteries, the power to levy a rate to fund relief of the poor was conferred on the parish authorities by the Act for the Relief of the Poor 1601.
Both before and after this optional social change, local charities are well-documented. The parish authorities were consisted of all the ratepayers of the parish; as the number of ratepayers of some parishes grew, it became difficult to convene meetings as an open vestry. In some built up, areas the select vestry took over responsibility from the entire body of ratepayers; this innovation allowed governance by a self-perpetuating elite. The administration of the parish system relied on the monopoly of the established English Church, which for a few years after Henry VIII alternated between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, before settling on the latter on the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558. By the 18th century, religious membership was becoming more fractured in some places, due for instance to the progress of Methodism; the legitimacy of the parish vestry came into question and the perceived inefficiency and corruption inherent in the system became a source for concern in some places.
For this reason, during the early 19th century the parish progressively lost its powers to ad hoc boards and other organisations, for example the loss of responsibility for poor relief through the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. Sanitary districts covered England in Ireland three years later; the replacement boards were each entitled to levy their own rate in the parish. The church rate ceased to be levied in many parishes and became voluntary from 1868; the ancient parishes diverged into two distinct, nearly overlapping, systems of parishes during the 19th century. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1866 declared all areas that levied a separate rate: C of E ecclesiastical parishes, extra-parochial areas and their analogue, chapelries, to be "civil parishes". To have collected rates this means these beforehand had their own vestries, boards or equivalent bodies; the Church of England parishes, which cover more than 99% of England, became termed "ecclesiastical parishes" and the boundaries of these soon diverged from those of the Ancient Parishes in order to reflect modern circumstances.
After 1921 each ecclesiastical parish has been the responsibility of the parochial church councils. In the late 19th century, most of the ancient irregularities inheri
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