The Invasions of England

The Spanish attacks upon England during the reign of Elizabeth were hardly invasions in the strict sense of the word, since only once was a small force actually landed. Neverthe...

The passing from the scene of the strangely unsubstantial and shadowy figure of the sainted Eadward ‘the Confessor’ was the signal for the bursting of the storm that was to over...

No work dealing with the invasions of England would be complete without some notice of the attempts, or supposed attempts, of Napoleon to invade this island. To discuss them in...

After Hadrian, in what Florus jokingly termed the great Emperor’s ‘walking about Britain,’ had reorganized the island, and established the famous military frontier, Britain sett...

In the year 57 B.C. Gaius Julius Cæsar, Roman politician, statesman, and legislator, and already, though he had only girt on the sword at forty-three years of age, a famous sold...

Of the history of Britain during the century succeeding the Cæsarian expeditions we have some fairly satisfactory glimpses. The terror of Cæsar was sufficient, on the one hand,...

Although the English invasion of Britain is by far the most important of all those which have affected the island, it is impossible to focus any very clearly defined picture of...

‘For you shall read that my great-grandfather Never went with his forces into France, But that the Scot on his unfurnish’d kingdom Came pouring like the tide into a breach.’

When in 1424 James I., after his long captivity in England, took over the government of Scotland, his energies were mainly directed to internal reform, though he made in 1436 a...

The stubborn resistance of Aethelred and Alfred had for the moment saved Wessex; but its immediate effect was to throw the whole force of the Northmen upon the rest of England....

From 596, the year of the coming of St. Augustine, to 793, England was practically untroubled by foreign invasion, except in so far as the raids of the still independent Kymry c...

Men who had seen the famous triumphal procession on the Dee in 973, when Eadgar the Peaceful, rowed by eight vassal princes, passed in his boat by the venerable walls of the ‘Ch...

Since 1066--a period of over eight centuries--there have been, apart from many sporadic raids, no great successful invasions of England. On two occasions relatively large forces...

The efforts of the dispossessed Stuart dynasty to re-establish itself in the British Isles produced the last land invasions of England by way of Scotland. That of 1715 was insig...

When the danger from Spain had passed away, it was not long before England and the Dutch Republic began to take up a position of rivalry. The two States had fought side by side...

Alfred’s death left Wessex and western Mercia still faced by a mass of more or less hostile Danish settlers in the Danelaw and Deira, but fairly well knit together by the consci...

Aristophanes, in ‘The Acharnians,’ puts into the mouth of Dicæopolis some sarcastic observations as to what the Athenians would do if the Spartans manned a skiff and stole a pug...

The defeat of the Armada of 1588 is commonly regarded as the end of any danger to England from Spain. This, however, is far from the truth. Had Elizabeth and her minister Burghl...