England Facts

In Victorian England, 'pants' was considered a vulgar word because it referred to undergarments, not trousers.

Medieval English longbows had an effective range of over 200 yards, with skilled archers able to launch arrows more than 350 yards.

French was the official language of England for about 300 years.

The state of Florida is bigger than England.

During the 1600's, boys and girls in England wore dresses until they were about seven years old.

In England, in the 1880's, "Pants" was considered a dirty word!

Until the 1920s, there was a profession called 'knocker-up', which involved going from client to client and tapping on their windows (or banging on their doors) with long sticks until they woke up.

Pineapples were such a status symbol in 18th century England that you could rent one for the evening to take to a party.

In England, there's a phenomenon called the "half-time kettle effect" where power use surges at half-time during England's matches in the World Cup as everyone turns on their tea kettles at the same time.

A retired gardener borrowed a metal detector in 1992 to find a lost hammer in a Suffolk field. Instead, he uncovered 14,865 Roman coins and 200 pieces of ancient jewelry - the largest late Roman treasure hoard ever found in Britain, valued at £1.75 million. They found the hammer too. It's in the British Museum.

In 1814, a giant vat of beer ruptured at a London brewery, unleashing 135,000 gallons of porter through the streets. It demolished two homes, collapsed a pub wall, and killed eight people. The brewery went to court. The jury ruled it an Act of God. Nobody paid a penny.

The Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly (off the coast of England) were technically at war from 1651 to 1986 — 335 years. No shots were fired. No one died. In 1985, a Scilly historian contacted the Dutch Embassy to joke about it. The Dutch ambassador flew to the islands and signed a peace treaty, ending a war nobody knew was still happening.

London Bridge, the real one from the Thames, now stands in the Arizona desert. In 1968, developer Robert McCulloch bought it for .46 million. Workers numbered every exterior granite block, shipped them 10,000 miles through the Panama Canal, and rebuilt the bridge over a canal in Lake Havasu City. It reopened in 1971 and still draws tourists today.

Muhammad has been the most popular baby boy's name in England for two years running.

Rupert Grint became an ice cream man after Harry Potter — not for publicity, but because it had been his childhood dream all along.

During a war between France and England in 1697, Louis XIV ordered the release of a captured English engineer who had been building a lighthouse. His reasoning: "France is at war with England, not with humanity."