England, which is said to have been inhabited since the Stone Age and forged unions with Wales (1284), Scotland (1707) and Ireland (1801), occupies geographically the largest proportion of the United Kingdom, and has a population of some 50 million people.
Tradition has it that the sport was born in 1823 at Rugby School in England when a student named William Webb Ellis became bored with the game of football and so picked up the ball and ran with it instead.
The Rugby Football Union was formed nearly 50 years later in January 1871, two months before the first ever Test was played at Raeburn Place in Edinburgh between Scotland and England, a match Scotland won 4-1.
England avenged this defeat in their next Test the following year, and the Rugby Football Union joined the International Rugby Board in 1890.
The league system was introduced by the Rugby Football Union in the late 1980s with the Zurich Premiership now the pinnacle of the domestic game, which has around 1,700 clubs and 160,000 senior players.