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England: Countries
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Well was it for England that William and Lanfranc, without any violent overthrow of the existing order of things, either in Church or State, had ... introduced systematic reforms and had provided the country with good bishops. A struggle was now at hand which ecclesiastically speaking was probably more momentous than any other event in history down to the time of the Reformation. The struggle is known as that about Investitures, and we may note that it had already been going on in Central Europe for some years before the question, through the action of William II and Henry I, sons of the Conqueror, reached an acute phase in England. Down to the eleventh century it may be said that, though the election of bishops always supposed the free choice, or at least the acceptance, of their flocks, the procedure was very variable. In these earlier ages bishops were normally chosen by an assembly of the clergy and people, the neighbouring bishops and the king or civil magnates exercising more or less of influence in the selection of a suitable candidate (see Imbart de la Tour, "Les élections épiscopales"). But from the seventh and eighth century onwards it became increasingly common for the local Churches to find themselves in some measure of bondage.
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William won, and then became king of England. The kings of England spoke French for the next 300 years (Queen Elizabeth II is a descendant of William, but not very directly). England took over the country of Wales in the 13th century. There were many wars, often against France and Scotland.
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The names by which most of the various languages of Europe refer to England follow two distinct patterns. Virtually every continental European tongue uses a name similar to "England": "Angleterre" (French), "Anglia" (Hungarian), "Anglija" (Slovene), "Inghilterra" (Italian), "Engleska" (Serbo-Croatian) and so on. The Celtic languages of northwest Europe, by contrast, use quite different names, e.g. "Bro-Saoz" (Breton), "Pow Sows" (Cornish) and "Sasana" (Irish). It has been suggested that these languages' alternative focus can be traced to the tribal geography of England in the Dark Ages: when the Celtic Romano-British were driven to the edges of Britain by the invading tribes, their realms abutted the Saxon lands while the other Germanic peoples were concentrated further to the east. (Although the Welsh country name for England, "Lloegr", is linguistically unrelated to Angle and Saxon alike, the English people are indeed "Saeson" in Welsh).
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