From A Storehouse of Knowledge

Wales is a constituent nation of the United Kingdom. It is a largely mountainous and upland area lying on the western side of the island of Great Britain, bounded to the east by England, to the south by the Bristol Channel, and to the west and north by the Irish Sea.

History

The Welsh people are descendants of the British nation, colonised by the Romans from AD 43 to AD 410 and subsequently by Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman invaders. The Anglo-Saxons established kingdoms covering most of the southern half of Great Britain in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries AD; Wales was the part of southern Britain that they did not conquer, and it consisted of a patchwork of principalities and small kingdoms under British (Welsh) rulers. The name Wales derives from the Old English wahl, 'foreigner', plural walas. The Welsh name for Wales is Cymru (pronounced Koomri), meaning '[Land of] compatriots'.

Following the Norman Conquest, of England, in 1066 Norman military leaders began to advance into Wales, seizing territory and establishing 'Marcher lordships', semi-independent fiefdoms between England and Wales. In the late 13th century the English King Edward I launched a series of attacks on the remaining independent Welsh kingdoms, and succeeded in conquering Wales when the last independent ruler, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Gwynedd in north-west Wales, was killed in battle in 1282. Wales was subsequently ruled by English kings, although a rebellion in the early fifteenth century led by Owain Glyndwr succeeded in liberating much of the country for a time.

In 1485 Henry Tudor, of the Welsh Tudor family, won the English crown at the Battle of Bosworth, the final battle of the Wars of the Roses. His son, Henry VIII, in 1536 signed an Act of Union which formally incorporated Wales into the Kingdom of England, and divided it into counties on the English model.

The subsequent history of Wales is noted for the growth of nonconformism and for the major industrialisation that took place in the nineteenth century, particularly in south Wales. Iron ore and coal were discovered and exploited, and the narrow valleys of Monmouthshire and Glamorgan became a major mining area, exporting huge amounts of coal through the ports of Newport, Cardiff, Penarth, Barry and Swansea.

In 1955 the city of Cardiff was designated the capital of Wales. In 1979, a referendum rejected a devolved government for Wales by a large margin, but in 1997 another referendum approved devolution by a small majority. Devolved Government was implemented with the inauguration of the new National Assembly for Wales (Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru) in 2008.