Published by Oxford University Press, it was originally intended to span from Roman Britain to the outbreak of the First World War in fourteen volumes written by eminent historians.
However, it was subsequently expanded and updated by further volumes and editions, taking the narrative as far as the end of the Second World War.
John Bossy wrote in 1996 that it "does not much ring in the mind" except for volumes 1, 2 and 15 (by Collingwood, Stenton and Taylor).
It meant indiscriminately England and Wales; Great Britain; the United Kingdom; and even the British Empire.
(A. J. P. Taylor, Volume XV: English History, 1914–1945, page v)Since then there has been a trend in history to restrict the use of the term England to the state that existed pre-1707 and to the geographic area it covered and people it contained in the period thereafter, but without Wales.