We are learning English.
It is the language of the world today.
But where did it come from? It came from a small island called the United Kingdom.
If we know about this country, learning English becomes even better.
The UK has a very deep history.
It gave the world many great ideas and changed human society.
Today we will use very simple English to tell you the amazing story of this country.
Let us begin with a simple question.
What is the name of this country? You might say England.
But you would be wrong.
Everyone makes this mistake.
England is just one piece of the land in the south.
Great Britain is the whole big island and the UK, the UK is the big island plus a little piece of land next to it called Northern Ireland.
So when we say the UK, we mean the whole modern country.
Now that we know the names, let us go way, way back to the very beginning.
A long time ago, Britain was not an island.
It was connected to Europe.
You could walk from France to Britain.
Imagine you are standing there.
It is the ice age.
It is very cold.
You live a hard life.
You have to hunt big animals to eat and you have to hide from wild animals like bears and wolves.
But then the world got warmer.
The ice melted.
When the ice melted, the water in the ocean went up.
The water covered the land bridge.
Britain was cut off from Europe.
It became an island.
This changed everything.
As the weather got warmer, the big animals disappeared.
People had to change.
They started to hunt smaller animals like deer.
They moved around in the summer and the winter to find food.
They went to the sea to catch fish.
Then a huge change happened.
People learned how to farm.
This was the end of the stone age.
People cut down trees with stone axes.
They planted seeds to grow food.
They kept pigs and cows.
Because they could grow their own food, they did not have to move around all the time.
They built long houses made of wood and stayed in one place.
They even built huge circles of stone like Stonehenge.
These were giant rocks standing in a circle.
They did not build these stones for war.
They built them to look at the sun and the stars or to remember the dead.
The Stone Age was over.
People were ready to build a new world.
Time passed and people found something better than stone.
They found metal.
First, they learned to mix copper and tin to make bronze.
Bronze is hard.
They made bronze axes and swords.
When people get better weapons, they fight more.
Rich families started to take land and put fences around it.
Some people became rich and some became poor.
Later, people found iron.
Iron is even stronger.
They made iron tools for farming, which meant they could grow a lot more food.
During this time, a group of people called the Kelts moved to the island.
Kelts was the name of their big family.
They came from the middle of Europe.
There were many of them.
They were very good at making beautiful jewelry, but they were also tough fighters.
Because there was a lot of fighting, they built special towns.
How did they stay safe? They found high hills and they built high walls made of dirt and wood on top of the hills.
These were called hill forts.
It was safe up there.
But soon a danger came that they could not stop.
The Romans arrived with the biggest, scariest army in the world.
They wanted everything.
They marched in and took over the south part of the island.
There was a local queen named Buudaca.
She was the leader of a Celtic tribe.
A tribe is like a very big family that lives and fights together.
The Romans came and took her home.
They hurt Queen Buudaca and her daughters in terrible ways.
This was a massive mistake.
The Romans made a mother angry.
Queen Buudaca started a giant war.
She got an army of a 100,000 people.
They burned the Roman city of London to the ground.
They killed many Romans.
For a short time, it looked like she might push the Great Roman army out of Britain.
But in the end, the Romans had better weapons and rules for fighting.
They beat Queen Buudaca.
She took poison.
She died.
The Romans stayed.
The Great Rebellion was over.
After that, the Romans ruled Britain for nearly 400 years.
They changed the land.
They built long, straight roads.
They built towns with warm public baths.
They brought their laws and their money.
But nothing lasts forever.
The Roman Empire was getting weak.
It was too big.
They did not have enough money to pay their soldiers.
And back in Rome, the generals were fighting each other to be the emperor.
Britain was also being attacked by tribes from the north and from the sea.
Finally, the Romans decided they had to leave.
In the year 410, the last Roman soldiers sailed away.
They left Britain alone.
The Roman time was finished.
The island was waiting for what would happen next.
When the strong Roman army left, the door was open.
Other people saw this and came in.
These people came from the sea.
They were tribes from places we now call Germany and Denmark.
They were called the Angles and the Saxons.
They moved to Britain and started to live there.
They mixed together.
The name England actually comes from them.
It means land of the Angles.
But what happened to the Kelts? The people who were already there? The new people did not kill all of them.
Instead, they pushed them away.
They pushed the Kelts to the edges of the island, to the high mountains and poor lands.
This is where Wales and Scotland are today.
This is why even now the people in England, Wales, and Scotland have different cultures and feel a little different from each other.
Hundreds of years passed.
The new English people built villages and lived quietly.
But then the sea brought a new terror, the Vikings.
We see Vikings in movies today.
They came from the cold north.
At first, they were just farmers and fishermen, but their land was poor.
So, in the summer, they got into their long, fast ships and went to steal things.
The word Viking actually was an action word.
It meant to go pirate.
Picture this.
You are a quiet farmer in Britain.
Suddenly, wild men land their ships on your beach.
They would kill the monks, steal all the gold, take people to sell as slaves, and leave fast before anyone could fight them.
It was a hitandrun game.
But soon the Vikings made a big decision.
They decided to stop running away.
Why? Because they saw that Britain had very good land for farming.
They brought a massive army known as the Great Heathen Army.
They wanted to take all of England.
They took over most of the land, but one king stood in their way.
His name was King Alfred.
He ruled the last free part of England in the south.
The Vikings were great at fighting in open fields.
But Alfred was smart.
He built a network of strong forts all over his land.
The Vikings did not know how to break high walls.
Alfred also made a real army that was ready all the time.
He fought the Vikings and beat them.
They made a deal.
The Vikings kept the north and east and the English kept the south and west.
Because they lived next to each other, they started to mix.
Many English words we use today like sky, egg, husband, and law come from the Vikings.
Even the word Thursday comes from the Viking god of thunder, Thor.
Think about that.
You use Viking words every week.
The Viking time finally ended a long time later when the English finally beat the last Viking army in a huge battle.
The pirates were gone.
A new time was about to begin.
But in history, when one problem ends, another problem begins.
The year was 1066.
This is a very famous year in British history.
A man named William came across the water from France.
He said that the old king of England had promised him the crown, but a powerful English lord had taken the crown for himself.
William brought an army to fight him.
This new English king had very bad luck.
In the same month, he had just fought a huge battle against Vikings in the north.
He won, but his army was tired and hurt.
Then he heard William had landed in the south.
The English king and his tired men had to run for three weeks all the way to the south to fight again.
They were too tired.
William won the fight.
He became the king of England.
We call him William the Conqueror.
This change was huge.
Why? Because King William was French.
He and his rich friends only spoke French.
They felt they were better than the English people.
William did something very tricky to take all the land.
He said that anyone who fought against him was a bad person who broke the law.
So he took all their land.
He took almost all the land in England.
Then he made a new rule.
He said, “I own all the dirt in this country.” He gave the land to his rich French, but he was not a gift.
It was a trade.
He said, “You can use my land, but you must give me soldiers when I need them.” This is called a feudal system.
This meant the king gave out land to get an army.
The poor English farmers lost everything.
They became tied to the dirt.
They could not leave their village or even get married without asking the Lord.
This time left a funny secret in the English language.
Think about the words we use for meat.
For hundreds of years after William came, the French lords only spoke French and the poor farmers only spoke English.
The poor farmers raised the animals.
So the living animals kept their English names.
cow, pig, sheep.
But the French lords ate the cooked meat in their big houses.
So the meat on the plate got French names.
Beef, pork, mutton.
This division of class lives in the words you speak today.
Isn’t that interesting? The French lords and English farmers lived in two different worlds.
Let us fast forward about 150 years.
The French family was still ruling England.
One of these kings was named King John.
John was a bad king.
He kept losing wars.
Wars cost a lot of money.
To get money, John just took it from the rich men in England.
If someone paid the king enough money, they would win in court.
Justice was for sale.
The rich men had enough.
They rode their horses to the king with their swords in their hands.
They gave him a paper called the Magna Carta.
Sign this, they said.
From now on, you cannot just take our money.
You must ask.
You cannot put us in jail for no reason.
The law is the boss, not you.
The king was scared of the swords, so he signed it.
Why does this matter? Because this idea is the foundation of the free world we live in today.
Even the king is not above the law.
While kings and rich men fought over laws, a new danger was on the way.
About a hundred years later, a terrible monster came to Britain.
It was a sickness.
It was the Black Death.
It was the worst sickness in history.
It came on ships from far away.
The sickness was carried by little bugs on black rats.
The sickness was horrible.
People got big black lumps on their bodies.
It hurt.
Their skin turned black.
Then they died.
It only took a few days.
The doctors back then did not know about germs.
They thought bad air caused it.
Their medicine did not help at all.
The sickness killed almost half of the people in the country.
It was a tragedy.
But surprisingly, it helped the poor people who survived.
Before the sickness, the rich bosses had all the power.
But now, half the farmers were dead.
The rich men had huge fields of food, but no one to cut it.
The cows had no one to feed them.
The rich men were desperate.
They needed workers because there were not many workers left.
The workers could say, “If you do not pay me more money, I will go work for someone else.” The poor people finally had power.
This broke the old system of being tied to the dirt.
It was the beginning of free workers.
So, a terrible sickness actually helped the poor people in the end.
People were ready to fight for themselves.
More time passed.
While the poor people were getting more freedom, the rich people were fighting.
There was a long civil war where rich families killed each other over who gets to be king.
Finally, a new family took control.
They were the tutors.
One of the most famous tutor kings was King Henry.
You might know him because he had six wives, but he did not change wives just for fun.
He was scared.
He knew the history of his country.
If a king died without a strong son, the country would fall into a bloody war to find a new king.
Henry’s first wife only gave him a daughter.
He wanted a divorce so he could find a new wife to give him a son.
But the pope, the head of the Catholic Church in Rome, said no.
Henry was so angry and he wanted a son so badly that he did something crazy.
He said, “I do not listen to the pope anymore.” He made his own church, the church of England, and made himself the head of the church.
This was a new kind of religion called Protestant.
In this new religion, the king was the head of the church, not the pope in Rome.
He said, “You do not need the pope or to pay money to the church to talk to God.” But really, he did it for power and money.
He took all the land and gold from the old Catholic churches in England and put it in his own pocket.
And of course, he got his divorce.
But Henry could not live forever.
After he died, his daughter Mary became queen.
She was very angry.
Her mother was Henry’s first wife.
Mary loved the old Catholic church.
She hated the new church because it ruined her mother’s life.
When Mary became boss, she forced everyone to be Catholic again.
If people did not listen, she burned them alive.
They called her Bloody Mary.
But she died and her halfsister Elizabeth became queen.
Queen Elizabeth was very smart.
She never got married.
She led England to a golden time.
She fought off a massive attack from the Spanish ships.
A big storm helped her win.
During her time, a man named Shakespeare wrote plays.
He was amazing with words.
He made up thousands of new words that we still use today.
He made the English language rich and beautiful.
When Elizabeth died, she had no children.
The crown went to her cousin who was already the king of Scotland.
So for the first time, England and Scotland had the same king.
But this new king and the kings after him had big problems with religion and power.
The Catholics in England were treated very badly.
They had to pay fines and they could be killed just for hiding a Catholic priest.
Some angry Catholic men decided to fight back.
An angry man tried to blow up the big building where the king and the lawmakers met.
He put a lot of gunpowder under the floor, but the secret got out.
He was caught and killed.
Even today, British people light big fires and fireworks on the night this man was caught.
The religious fighting left deep scars on the country.
When that king died, his son took the crown.
This new king thought he was a god.
He thought he could do whatever he wanted.
He closed the meeting of lawmakers called the parliament.
He closed the parliament for 11 years.
He took money from people without asking.
The lawmakers got very angry.
They started their own army.
The king had his army.
They fought a terrible civil war.
It was very bloody.
In the end, the lawmakers won.
Then they did something that shocked the whole world.
They took the king.
They cut off his head right in front of everyone.
The world could not believe it.
A king was dead by the law.
For a while, England had no king.
A man from the army named Cromwell became the boss.
He was very strict.
It was like a military rule.
People hated it.
After he died, the country was a mess.
The lawmakers and the army fought for power.
The people decided that having no king was worse than having a bad king.
They asked the old king’s son to come back and wear the crown.
People thought life would finally be peaceful again.
But soon after the king came back, a great disaster happened.
In 1666, the great fire of London started from a small fire in a bakery.
The city was made of wood and the houses were very close together.
The fire spread.
It burned the city to ashes.
Everything was gone.
But this terrible fire actually did one very good thing.
The year before the fire, a terrible plague had killed thousands of people in London.
The fire burned down all the dirty houses and killed the rats that carried the sickness.
The plague never came back.
Also, because people lost their homes in the fire, smart businessmen started the very first fire insurance companies.
They learned how to share risk.
Around this same time, something quiet but very powerful was happening.
A revolution of the mind.
Men like Newton were looking at the world in a new way.
Newton saw an apple fall from a tree and he looked at the moon in the sky.
He used math to prove that the same invisible force pulled the apple down and kept the moon in the sky.
He called it gravity.
This was the start of modern science.
Before this, people just thought about the world.
Now they learned to test it, measure it, and prove it.
People started to believe that the world follows rules of reason.
This way of thinking was the seed for the big changes that were coming.
While science was moving forward, politics was still a problem.
A later king wanted to be a dictator and wanted to bring the Catholic Church back to power.
The English people remembered the bloody civil wars.
The rich men did not want to lose their land.
So they did something very smart.
They sent a secret letter to a prince in the Netherlands.
They asked him to bring his army to England and take the crown.
He came and the king ran away.
Almost nobody was killed.
They called this the glorious revolution.
It was a change of kings with almost no fighting.
But before they gave the new king the shiny crown, the rich men stopped him.
They made him sign a special paper called the Bill of Rights.
They looked at the new king and said, “You can wear the crown, but we have a deal.
You are not the big boss anymore.
You cannot just take our money.
You cannot build a scary army when there is no war.
From now on, the rules are the boss.
The king had to say yes.
This changed the world.
It showed everyone that people do not need to live under a bossy king.
A country can be run by fair laws.
The king was finally put in a box.
Soon after, England and Scotland officially joined together to become one country, Great Britain.
Now we enter the 18th century.
Britain began to send ships all over the world to trade and build a huge empire.
They made a lot of money.
But this wealth came with a very dark shadow.
Britain became the biggest player in the slave trade.
Ships left Britain with guns and cloth.
They went to Africa and traded for human beings.
They put these people tightly inside ships.
Then they took them across the ocean to America.
It was a nightmare.
Why did they do this? Because they wanted money and they did not see these people as human.
They sold the slaves to farmers.
The slaves were forced to grow sugar and cotton.
The ships then brought the sugar and cotton back to Britain to make a lot of money.
It was a cruel triangle trade.
It is a very sad part of history, but it gave Britain the money it needed for what happened next.
Later, good people fought hard against this and Britain finally made the slave trade illegal.
They even used their strong ships to stop other countries from doing it.
During this time of building the empire, Britain made a very big mistake.
They owned a lot of land in America.
Many British people lived there.
The king in Britain wanted more money.
He told the people in America to pay heavy taxes.
The people in America were very angry.
They said, “You cannot tax us without asking us.” They started a war against the king.
It was a long fight.
In the end, the people in America won.
In the year 1776, they broke away.
America became a new free country.
This was a huge loss for Britain.
Even with the loss of America, Britain was still very rich from trade.
And with a new way of thinking from science, Britain changed the world again.
They started the industrial revolution.
This was the time when machines took over the work.
How did this happen? Under the ground in Britain, there were mountains of black coal.
But human workers in Britain were expensive.
The rich factory owners looked at the coal and thought, “Can we use these black rocks to do the work instead of paying people?” Also, the law in Britain was special.
It protected smart people.
If you invented something new, the king could not steal your idea.
Because their ideas were safe, smart people started to invent crazy things.
They needed machines.
And the most important machine was the steam engine.
It was not invented by just one person.
[snorts] It took a long time to get right.
Early steam engines were just big pumps to get water out of coal mines.
But a man named Watt changed it.
He found a way to make the engine keep its heat, which saved a lot of coal.
Most importantly, he changed the way the machine moved.
Instead of just going up and down, he made it turn in a circle.
Turning in a circle is the language of machines.
Once a machine can spin a wheel, it can run a factory.
Imagine your life changing overnight.
Everything changed.
People stopped making things by hand in their houses.
They moved to big cities to work in giant factories.
Machines made huge amounts of cloth to sell to the world.
[snorts] Steam hit heavy iron to make train tracks.
The sky turned black with smoke.
Life for the workers was very hard and dangerous.
They even used small children to work because they were cheap and could fit inside the machines.
But here is the big picture.
This time also created modern capitalism.
A thinker named Adam Smith wrote a book saying that if people freely buy and sell things, it will help the whole country grow.
Humans were no longer waiting for animals or the wind to do the work.
They had the power of steam.
Human life would never be the same again.
In the 19th century, a queen named Victoria ruled the country.
It was a time of huge inventions.
They built trains that went everywhere.
They put pipes underground for water.
A man named Darwin wrote a book about how animals and humans grow and change over millions of years.
This changed the way people saw life itself.
Britain also made the rules for sports that the whole world plays today like soccer and tennis.
During this time, the British Empire became the biggest in history.
The empire was so big that it had land all over the earth.
It was always daytime somewhere in the empire.
At first, they did not even use the national army to take over places.
India, a private business company did it.
India made Britain very rich.
The British Navy was so strong that no one could fight them on the water.
They controlled the sea and the trade.
They built roads and schools in other countries, but they also took their resources and often treated the local people very poorly.
Then came the 20th century.
The world went to war.
Two world wars happened.
During the Second World War, Britain faced its darkest hour.
A terrifying army from Germany took over almost all of Europe.
The British island was alone.
But they had a leader named Churchill.
He knew that to win they needed more than just guns.
They needed courage.
When German bombs were falling from the sky, he spoke to the people on the radio.
He told them, “We will never give up.” His words became a powerful weapon.
They made ordinary people brave enough to keep fighting.
In the end, Britain fought hard and won.
But the cost was terrible.
Millions of people died.
When the men went to fight, the women went to work in the factories and farms.
Even though Britain won the wars, the country was broke.
They had spent all their money to fight.
They could no longer hold on to their giant empire across the ocean.
Countries like India became independent and the empire slowly fell apart.
The long wars were over.
Britain had to start a new life without its giant empire.
But after the second war, Britain did something very good for its people.
They created a welfare system called the National Health Service.
It meant the government would pay for your doctor.
They decided that everyone, rich or poor, should be able to see a doctor for free when they are sick.
It was a big step in taking care of people.
To help rebuild the country, Britain invited people from all over the old empire like Jamaica and India to come and work.
This brought new cultures, new music, and new food.
As decades passed, the country kept changing.
The modern Queen Elizabeth watched this change.
She ruled for over 70 years, seeing a world that moved from steam engines to the internet.
The English language because of the empire and America is now spoken all over the world.
It is the language that connects us.
It is the language you are learning right now.
Today, modern Britain is a melting pot.
It is a mix of the old and the new.
In cities like London, you can see ancient castles next to glass towers.
The food has changed, too.
Yes, they still eat fish and chips and big breakfasts with eggs and meat.
But the most popular dish in the country today is chicken tikka masala, a spicy dish made by immigrants.
And speaking of music, a British band called the Beatles made the whole world sing along with them.
Recently, Britain made another huge choice that shocked the world.
After the wars, countries in Europe made a big group to trade and help each other.
This group is called the European Union.
Britain joined this group.
But in 2016, the British people voted to leave it.
They wanted to stand alone and make their own rules again.
People call this Brexit.
It was like a very noisy divorce.
It showed that even today, the history of this island is still changing.
But no matter what happens in politics, some things about the British people never change.
If you visit the UK today, look around.
You will notice some funny rules of life.
British people love to go to the pub.
A pub is like a living room for the neighborhood where people go after work to drink and talk.
They also believe strongly in waiting in line, which they call queuing.
never cut in line in Britain.
It is very rude and because it rains a lot, talking about the weather is the best way to say hello to a stranger.
They use a special kind of humor to make fun of themselves and not take life too seriously.
So that is the story of the UK.
It is a story of ice melting and oceans rising.
It is a story of kings fighting for power and ordinary people fighting for freedom.
It is a story of sickness, machines, wars, and tea.
A small island at the edge of the map that ended up touching every corner of the earth.
The world we live in today with our laws, our machines, and our language holds a piece of this long and wonderful story.
If you liked it, please leave a comment below.
Tell us what do you think is the most important thing the UK gave to the world.