A nation that takes up about half of the island of Great Britain but accounts for 50 million out of the United Kingdom‘s population of 60 million people.

Loved by its people, hated by everyone else. Shares a common heritage with the peoples of Europe, but that common heritage mostly consists of having had wars with all of them for the past thousand years.

England’s national character essentially owes itself to the Norman Conquest, in which the indigenous (i.e., were invaders themselves only five centuries earlier) Anglo-Saxons had their culture and nobility crushed by a French-speaking upper class. England’s obsession with the class system, distrust of all French-speakers and completely illogical language (invented by Norman knights to chat up Saxon barmaids) can all be traced back to this.

Over the past century or so the English national identity has slept while the “oppressed” Celts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales asserted themselves within the UK, but it has recently undergone something of an awakening. Contrary to popular belief, Cornwall is just another county of England, although it does have the status of a royal duchy.

Not all English people still speak like those from 1950s public information films, although MrP does. England has a wide range of culturally separated regions - a largely proletarian, rural/industrial North and a bourgeois, more urbanised South, and then within those numerous counties or regions have strong identities. Despite this, recent years appear to suggest that English people reject being governed based on regional rather than English identity.

England is often confused with Britain or the UK, especially by Americans and also by some Europeans. Quick guide -

England is the green bit with the cricketers and green fields making up the southern half of Great Britain.

Great Britain is the largest island off the coast of France (separated by a dozen or so miles geographically and several million light-years in public imagination). It is made up of England, Wales and Scotland.

The United Kingdom is the name of the nation-state which includes all of Great Britain and the northern counties of Ireland as one unified kingdom. Should properly be abbreviated to “Britain” or “the UK”, not “Great Britain” or, God forbid, “UK” with no definite article.

The unofficial national anthem of England is “Jerusalem”.