Northern England, also known as the North of England or simply The North, is a region of England, located south of the border with Scotland and north of the River Trent and the Midlands. Traditionally an industrialized, working-class, and deprived region, the North has a rich, multicultural history and has developed its own cultural character over several centuries. Northern England traditionally consisted of the historic counties of Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland, County Durham, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cheshire; after the local government boundary changes of 1974, the ceremonial counties of Cumbria, East Riding of Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, West Yorkshire, and parts of northern Lincolnshire have been included in this definition. Northern England was historically a melting pot of several cultures, starting with the Brythonic Brigantes, but later coming to include the Romans, the Romano-British, Angles (Anglo-Saxons), Danes (Scandinavians), Normans, Flemings, Scots.
History
Classical history
Hadrian's Wall in the 9th century AD
Northern England, which includes the Pennines ("the backbone of England") and the Cheviot Hills, is a cool, wet, and cloudy region of England. The region was originally inhabited by the Celtic Britons, namely the Brigantes, who allied with the Roman Empire during the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century AD. In the 70s AD, the Governor of Roman Britain, Quintus Petillius Cerialis, defeated a Brigantian revolt and created the province of Britannia Inferior, which was ruled from the city of Eburacum (York). Eboracum and Deva Victrix (Chester) were the main legionary bases in the region, while there were smaller forts at Mamucium (Manchester) and Cataractonium (Catterick). The Roman emperor Hadrian built "Hadrian's Wall" to serve as a fortified frontier against the Caledones and Picts to the north, and the Romans were unable to establish a permanent presence beyond the River Tyne. In urban centers, a distinct "Romano-British" culture emerged. While the Britons were never as Romanized as the Gauls, they were mostly Roman and Christian in mind following the end of Roman rule in Britain in 410 AD, despite continuing to observe several Celtic customs and speaking the Celtic language.
Medieval history
Following the Roman withdrawal, the Romano-British established kingdoms such as Ebrauc, Rheged, and Elmet, but the invading Germanic Angles settled in northern England and established the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia, later united as Northumbria. Pockets of Celtic culture existed in Rheged into the 10th century AD, while the Cumbric language was spoken in Cumbria until the 12th century. The native Britons and the Germanic "Anglo-Saxons" occasionally intermarried, and, starting with King Edwin of Northumbria's baptism in 627, the Angles were converted to Christianity.
During the Viking invasions of England, the Danish "Great Heathen Army" conquered Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia, and the invading Scandinavians settled down in northern England following their capture of York in 865, bringing in ships of Danish colonists to repopulate the estates of slain thegns, transform Anglo-Saxon cities into Danish strongholds, or found new villages. The Scandinavians left a lasting impact on Northern England, with town names containing the phrases thorpe, by, thwaite, and kirk coming from the Norse language. While the Danish pagans and the Anglo-Saxon Christians were initially enemies, their languages were mutually intelligible and they had several similar cultural practices, and many northern English people in the generations after the invasion of the Great Heathen Army came to be of mixed Danish and Anglo-Saxon descent, almost always with a Danish father and a Saxon mother.
The Danes were gradually converted to Christianity, especially after the baptism of their king Guthred in 878. The Danish society which emerged in Northumbria was highly autonomous from the Anglo-Saxon kings in the south after the formation of the Kingdom of England in 927, and the northern Danes often lent their support to invading Viking kings such as Olaf Guthfrithson, Eric Bloodaxe, Sweyn Forkbeard, and Canute. On 12 November 1002, King Aethelred the Unready ordered the massacre of all Danes living in England in the St. Brice's Day Massacre, but this only affected the border communities; the north remained strongly Scandinavian in culture until William the Conqueror's Harrying of the North from 1069 to 1070, during which 75% of Northern England's population was either killed, died of famine, or migrated south due to the Normans' ruthless suppression of their uprising, the destruction of 60% of Yorkshire's holdings and 66% of villages, the butchery of 80,000 oxen, and the salting of farmland.
Early modern era
Northern England would never recover from William's genocide, and the Danish and Anglian nobility was replaced by Norman lords who cemented their rule with the construction of motte-and-bailey castles. It took decades for the wastelands of Northern England to be fully repopulated, starting with the return of the monasteries to "settle the desert". Flemish immigrants populated much of the desolated regions of Cumbria and Yorkshire, establishing an ethnic enclave in Beverley which existed into the 13th century. Northern England was devastated by centuries of wars between the English and the Scots and by the Wars of the Roses, and the English border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed changed hands more than a dozen times in just 400 years. Thousands of Scots settled south of the border in the border counties and Yorkshire, adding to the diversity of the already-multicultural region. Northern England, an overwhelmingly rural region until the 19th century, was staunchly conservative and Catholic even after the English Reformation, and the traditionalist Northerners violently resisted the spread of Protestantism under King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, including in the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising and the Rising of the North. It was later devastated by the English Civil War due to the fighting between the Parliamentarians and Cavaliers and the invasions of the Presbyterian Scottish Covenanters. The region gradually came to accept Protestantism, although, by 1715-1720, all of Northern England's regions were at least 10-20% Catholic, with Lancashire being the exception, with over 20% of their population being Catholics. The North later became a stronghold of nonconformist (non-Church of England) Protestantism (including Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Baptists, Methodism, Quakers, etc.) during its industrial heyday.
The Industrial North
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1760, the discovery of plentiful coal in England, the use of water power, and the availability of cheap labor in the barren uplands led to the booming of mines and mills in Northern England, which became the epicenter of industrialization in Britain. During the 1840s, the Great Famine in Ireland drove Irish refugees to the manufacturing cities of northern England, creating religious tensions between Irish Catholics and English Protestants. By 1851, 13% of Manchester and Salford were Irish-born, as well as 22% of Liverpool. Northern England also experienced immigration from Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Scandinavia, including industrialists, economic migrants, servants, sailors, Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, or migrants stranded at Liverpool while attempting to travel to the United States or the British Empire's colonies. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of poor Northerners emigrated to the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Following World War I and the Great Slump, the Northern economy began to decline, with Northern unemployment in 1937 standing at 16.1%, while the South's stood at a mere 7.1%. Deindustrialization and social unrest led to the growth of the trade union and socialist movements in the North, with the Labour Party emerging as the strongest party in the region for decades, replacing the Liberal heartland which had emerged in the 19th century. Northern England's industrial centers were heavily bombed by the German Luftwaffe during "The Blitz" of World War II, and the supply port of Liverpool was the most bombed in the UK outside London, with 4,000 deaths and much of the city center destroyed. During the 1950s, decolonization led to large-scale immigration to Northern England from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and significant British Asian communities developed in Bradford, Leeds, Preston, and Sheffield. During the Thatcher era of the 1980s, Northern unemployment skyrocketed, as she focused on the growth of the Southern economy at the expense of the North. Liverpool and South Yorkshire became centers of radical politics, and the region saw several IRA bombing attacks during The Troubles.
21st century
Map of the Brexit vote in the UK
By the 21st century, Northern England was one of the most deprived regions of England as a result of deindustrialization and the decline of the trade union movement. From 1918 to 2012, the percentage of the UK population living in Northern England had fallen from 35% to 25%, and the North was outpaced by the South in life expectancy and economic trends. In 2004, however, a referendum held in North East England to propose devolved regional assemblies for the three Northern regions was defeated with 78% of the vote.
Map of Labour seats lost to the Conservative Party in 2019
The North remained an electoral "red wall" stronghold for the Labour Party early in the century, with the Conservatives being limited to a few rural seats and being generally excluded from urban seats until 2019; until 2016, there were no Conservative councillors on the city councils of Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, or Sheffield. However, at the 2016 Brexit referendum, North West England, North East England, and Yorkshire all voted to leave the European Union, with 55.9% of Northerners voting "Leave". The neo-fascist National Front and the British National Party had found support in several northern towns starting in the 1960s, taking advantage of racial tensions (such as the 2001 Bradford riots) to steal socially conservative white, working-class voters from Labour and the Tories. By 2006, 40% of BNP voters lived in Northern England, and both BNP MEPs came from the North. The right-wing populist and Eurosceptic UKIP party - which stole most of the BNP's voters after 2013, and appealed to traditionalist Labour voters - placed second in many constituencies at the 2015 general election. Following the success of the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the Northern UKIP vote collapsed as voters returned to their former allegiances. At the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Boris Johnson targeted the Labour-held, Brexit-backing seats in the Midlands and the north of England, and the prior support of many northern Labour voters for UKIP made it easier for them to vote Conservative in 2019, mostly due to their support for Johnson's promise to "Get Brexit Done". Labour strongholds such as Bassetlaw (held since 1935), Heywood and Middleton (held since 1983), Bishop Auckland (held by non-Tories since its creation in 1918), Blyth Valley (held since 1950), Bolsover (held since 1950), Don Valley (held since 1922), Dudley North (held since 1970), Leigh (held since 1922), Sedgefield (held since 1935, Tony Blair's former constituency), Wakefield (held since 1932), Workington (held since 1918), and Ashfield (held since 1955, except for 1977-79) were lost to the Tories, shattering the "red wall".
By 2011, Northern England had a population of 14,933,000 people, with 90.5% being white, 2.9% Pakistani, 1.3% Indian, 1.3% black, .6% Chinese, and .5% Bangladeshi. By 2017, 52% of Northerners were Christian (22% Anglican, 14% nondenominational, 12% Roman Catholic, 2% Methodist, and 2% other), 40% were non-religious, 5% were Muslim, 1% were Hindu, and 1% Jewish.
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