THE UNITED KINGDOM (UK)
The United Kingdom (UK) was formed in on January 1, 1801 and constitutes the greater part of the British Isles.
The United Kingdom is made up of :
England – The capital is London.
Scotland – The capital is Edinburgh.
Wales – The capital is Cardiff.
Northern Ireland – The capital is Belfast.
Are Great Britain the same as the UK ?
No, they are refer to different areas. Great Britain is made up of three countries : England, Scotland and Wales.
The United Kingdom includes of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Are Great Britain the same as Britain ?
No, they are different. Sometimes people use the shorten name Britain instead of Great Britain, to mean the same thing, but really Britain only refers to England and Wales.
Definition of County :
A county is a land area of local government within a country. A county may have cities and towns within its area. Such as England, Scotland, Wales, Northern, etc.
The Union Flag (Union Jack)
The Union Flag, popularly known as the Union Jack, symbolises the union of the countries of the UK. It is made up of the individual flags of three countries in the Kingdom.
Union Jack design has existed after the events of Union 1800 Act of Union uniting the government of Ireland with Great Britain in 1801.
What is Union Jack ?
Union Jack is the national flag of the United Kingdom. The name of Union Jack comes from Queen Anne (1702-1714). It is called Union Jack because it embodies the emblems of the three countries united under one kingdom. The present Union Flag (Union Jack) represents the political union of three kingdoms: St. George from England, St. Andrews from Scotland and St. Patrick from Northern Ireland. Wales’s flag doesn’t give contribution because Wales has united with England a few years ago before United Kingdom created.
Union Jack is still uncertain. It may come from the ‘jack-et’ of the English or Scottish soldiers; or from the name of James I who originated the first union in 1603, in either its Latin or French form Jacobus or Jacques; or, as ‘jack’ once meant small, the name may be derived from a royal proclamation issued by Charles II that the Union Flag should be flown only by ships of the Royal Navy as a jack.
Why were the crosses named St. George, St. Andrew and St. Patrick ?
St. George
Saint George is popularly identified with England and English ideals of honour, bravery and gallantry, but actually he wasn’t English at all. Very little is known about the man who became St. George.
St. George is patron saint not only of England but also of Arogan, Catalonia, England, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, and Rusia, as well as the cities of Amersfoort Beirut, Bteghrine, Caceres, Ferrara, Freiburg, Genoa, Ljubljana, Gozo, Pomorie, Qormi, Lod and Moscow.
St. George is also patron saint of scouts, soldiers, archers, cavalry and civalry, farmers and field workers, riders and saddlers, and he helps those suffering from leprosy, plague and syphilis.
The cross of St George, patron saint of England since the 1270’s, is a red cross on a white ground. It was the national flag of England until James I succeeded to the throne in 1603, after which it was combined in 1606 with the crosses of St. Andrew and St. Patrick.
St. Andrew
The cross saltire of St Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, is a diagonal white cross on a blue ground.
After Queen Elizabeth I of England died in 1603, King James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne and became King James I of England. It was a Union of the Crowns, but not yet of the nations. Each country still kept their own parliaments.
Early in his reign James attempted to combine England and Scotland in a united kingdom of ‘Great Britain’. This was the policy he presented to his first Parliament, called on 22 March 1604. The union was resisted.
James defied them. On 20 October 1604 he proclaimed a new title for himself as ‘King of Great Britain’.
St. Patrick
Saint Patrick was known as a Romano-Briton and Christian missionary, who is the most generally recognized patron saint of Ireland.
When he was 16 years old, he was caught by Irish riders and taken as a slave in Ireland. But he tried to escape, and turned back to his family. After he entered into the church, he came back to Ireland as an ordained bishop in the north and west of the island, but not all of the people knew about the places where he worked and there is no contemporary evidence for any link between Patrick and any known church building.
By the eighth century he had come to be revered as the patron saint of Ireland.
Under whose government Ireland when they united with England ?
The united of Ireland to England happened under the government of George III in 1801.
The Republic of Irelands Flag is made of three equal-sized rectangles of orange, white, and green. This type of flag is called a tricolour. The green colour on the flag represents the native people of Ireland (most of them are Roman Catholic) yhe orange colour represents the British supporters of William of Orange who settled in Northern Ireland in the 17th century (most of them are Protestan). The white in the center of the flag represents peace between these two groups of people. The flag was adopted in 1919 by the Irish Republic during its war independence, and subsequently by the Irish Free State (1922-1937), later being given constitutional status under the 1937 Contitutions of Ireland. The tricolor is regarded by many nationalist as the national flag of the whole island of Ireland. In relation to the national flag of Ireland, the constitution of Ireland simply states in article 7. in 1921, Ireland was partitioned, with the unionist -dominated north-east becoming Northern Ireland , while later, in 1922, the remainder of Ireland left the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland to form the Irish Free State.
Northern Ireland continued to use the British Union Flag and created its own derivation of the flag of Ulster (with a crown on top of a six pointed star) to symbolise the state. Furthermore, for many years the tricolor was effectively banned in Northern Ireland under the Flags and Emblems (Display) Act (Northern Ireland) 1954 which empowered the police to remove any flag that could cause a breach of the peace but specified, rather controversially, that a Union Flag could never have such an effect.
In 1964, the enforcement of this law by the Royal Ulster Constabulary at the behest of Ian Paisley , involving the removal of a single tricolour from the offices of Sinn Féin in Belfast , led to two days of rioting. The tricolour was immediately replaced, highlighting the difficulty of enforcing the law.
