The Kingdom of England was a sovereign state in western Europe from the 10th century to
1707.
Occupying the southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain, the kingdom included modern-day
England, Wales, and for a brief period in the 15th century the Southern Uplands of Scotland.
The kingdom shared a border with Scotland to the north, but otherwise was surrounded
by the Atlantic Ocean.
At the start of the period its capital and chief royal residence was Winchester, but
Westminster and Gloucester were accorded almost equal status, with Westminster gradually gaining
preference and becoming the administrative capital by the beginning of the 12th century.
During the 10th century, the City of London quickly established itself as England's largest
town and principal commercial centre.
The kingdom broadly traces its origins to the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and
the Heptarchy of petty states that followed.
The territory of what became England was unified into a single kingdom during the early 10th
century.
The Norman invasion of Wales from 1067 and the completion of its conquest by Edward I
put Wales under England's control, and Wales came under English law with the Laws in Wales
Acts 1535–1542.
On 1 May 1707, under the terms of the Acts of Union 1707, the kingdoms of England and
Scotland united to form Great Britain.
Although it is no longer a sovereign state, modern England continues as one of the countries
of the United Kingdom.
Unification The kingdom has no specific founding date.
It emerged from the gradual unification of the various kingdoms that were established
following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of the former Roman province of Britannia.
The minor kingdoms in time coalesced into the seven kingdoms known as the Heptarchy:
East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex.
The Viking invasions upset the balance of power between the English kingdoms, and native
Anglo-Saxon life in general.
The English lands were unified in the 10th century in a reconquest completed by King
Æthelstan in 927.
The Anglo-Saxons knew themselves as the Angelcynn, Englisc or Engle, originally names of the
Angles, that came to refer to Saxons, Jutes, and Frisii alike, at least in English.
They called their lands Engla land, meaning "Land of the Angles".
In time the name Englaland became England.
During the Heptarchy, the most powerful king among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms might become
acknowledged as Bretwalda, a high king over the other kings.
The decline of Mercia allowed Wessex to become more powerful.
It absorbed the kingdoms of Kent and Sussex in 825.
The kings of Wessex became increasingly dominant over the other kingdoms of England during
the 9th century.
In 827, Northumbria submitted to Egbert of Wessex at Dore.
It has been claimed that Egbert thereby became the first king to reign over a united England,
however briefly.
In 886, Alfred the Great retook London, which he apparently regarded as a turning point
in his reign.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that "all of the English people not subject to the Danes
submitted themselves to King Alfred."
Asser added that "Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, restored the city of London splendidly ... and
made it habitable once more."
Alfred's "restoration" entailed reoccupying and refurbishing the nearly deserted Roman
walled city, building quays along the Thames, and laying a new city street plan.
It is probably at this point that Alfred assumed the new royal style 'King of the Anglo-Saxons.'
During the following years Northumbria repeatedly changed hands between the English kings and
the Norwegian invaders, but was definitively brought under English control by Eadred in
954, completing the unification of England.
At about this time, Lothian, the northern part of Northumbria, was ceded to the Kingdom
of Scotland.
On 12 July 927 the monarchs of Britain gathered at Eamont in Cumbria to recognise Æthelstan
as king of the English.
This can be considered England's 'foundation date', although the process of unification
took almost 100 years.
England has remained in political unity ever since.
During the reign of Æthelred the Unready, a new wave of Danish invasions was orchestrated
by Sweyn I of Denmark, culminating after a quarter-century of warfare in the Danish conquest
of England in 1013.
But Sweyn died on 2 February 1014, and Æthelred was restored to the throne.
In 1015, Sweyn's son Cnut the Great launched a new invasion.
The ensuing war ended with an agreement in 1016 between Canute and Æthelred's successor,
Edmund Ironside, to divide England between them, but Edmund's death on 30 November of
that year left England united under Danish rule.
This continued for 26 years until the death of Harthacnut in June 1042.
He was the son of Canute and Emma of Normandy and had no heirs of his own; he was succeeded
by his half-brother, Æthelred's son, Edward the Confessor.
The Kingdom of England was once again independent.
Norman conquest
The peace lasted until the death of the childless Edward in January 1066.
His brother-in-law was crowned King Harold, but his cousin William the Conqueror, Duke
of Normandy, immediately claimed the throne for himself.
William launched an invasion of England and landed in Sussex on 28 September 1066.
Harold and his army were in York following their victory against the Norwegians at the
Battle of Stamford Bridge when the news reached him.
He decided to set out without delay and confront the Norman army in Sussex so marched southwards
at once, despite the army not being properly rested following the battle with the Norwegians.
The armies of Harold and William faced each other at the Battle of Hastings, in which
the English army, or Fyrd, was defeated, Harold and his two brothers were slain, and William
emerged as victor.
William was then able to conquer England with little further opposition.
He was not, however, planning to absorb the Kingdom into the Duchy of Normandy.
As a mere duke, William owed allegiance to Philip I of France, whereas in the independent
Kingdom of England he could rule without interference.
He was crowned on 25 December 1066 in Westminster Abbey, London.
In 1092, William II led an invasion of Strathclyde, a Celtic kingdom in what is now southwest
Scotland and Cumbria.
In doing so, he annexed what is now the county of Cumbria to England; this final annexation
established what would become the traditional borders of England, which have remained largely
unchanged since then.
In 1124, Henry I ceded what is now southeast Scotland to the Kingdom of Scotland, in return
for the King of Scotland's loyalty.
This area of land had been English since its foundation in 927 AD, and before that had
been a part of the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria.
Lothian contained what later became the Scottish capital, Edinburgh.
This arrangement was later finalised in 1237 by the Treaty of York.
The Duchy of Aquitaine came into personal union with the Kingdom of England upon the
accession of Henry II, who had married Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine.
The Kingdom of England and the Duchy of Normandy remained in personal union until 1204.
John Lackland, Henry II's son and fifth-generation descendant of William I, lost the continental
possessions of the Duchy to Philip II of France during that year.
A few remnants of Normandy, including the Channel Islands, remained in John's possession,
together with most of the Duchy of Aquitaine.
Norman conquest of Wales
Up until the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England, Wales had remained for the most part
independent of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, although some Welsh kings did sometimes acknowledge
the Bretwalda.
Soon after the Norman conquest of England, however, some Norman lords began to attack
Wales.
They conquered and ruled parts of it, acknowledging the overlordship of the Norman kings of England
but with considerable local independence.
Over many years these "Marcher Lords" conquered more and more of Wales, against considerable
resistance led by various Welsh princes, who also often acknowledged the overlordship of
the Norman kings of England.
Edward I defeated Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and so effectively conquered Wales, in 1282.
He created the title Prince of Wales for his eldest son, the future Edward II, in 1301.
Edward I's conquest was brutal and the subsequent repression considerable, as the magnificent
Welsh castles such as Conwy, Harlech, and Caernarfon attest; but this event re-united
under a single ruler the lands of Roman Britain for the first time since the establishment
of the Kingdom of the Jutes in Kent in the 5th century AD, some 700 years before.
Accordingly, this was a highly significant moment in the history of medieval England,
as it re-established links with the pre-Saxon past.
These links were exploited for political purposes to unite the peoples of the kingdom, including
the Anglo-Normans, by popularising Welsh legends.
The Welsh language—derived from the British language, with significant Latin influences—continued
to be spoken by the majority of the population of Wales for at least another 500 years, and
is still a majority language in parts of the country.
Loss of the Angevin Empire and the Wars of the Roses
Edward III was the first English king to have a claim to the throne of France.
Edward III pursued this claim, which resulted in the Hundred Years' War.
The war pitted five kings of England of the House of Plantagenet against five kings of
France of the Capetian House of Valois.
Though the English won numerous victories, they were unable to overcome the numerical
superiority of the French and their strategic use of gunpowder weapons.
England was defeated at the Battle of Formigny in 1450 and finally at the Battle of Castillon
in 1453, retaining only a single town in France, Calais.
During the Hundred Years' War an English identity began to develop in place of the previous
division between the Norman lords and their Anglo-Saxon subjects, in consequence of sustained
hostility to the increasingly nationalist French, whose kings and other leaders used
a developing sense of French identity to help draw people to their cause.
The Anglo-Normans became separate from their cousins who held lands mainly in France, who
mocked the former for their archaic and bastardised spoken French.
English also became the language of the law courts during this period.
The kingdom had little time to recover before entering the Wars of the Roses, a series of
civil wars over possession of the throne between the House of Lancaster and the House of York,
each led by different branches of the descendants of Edward III.
The end of these wars found the throne held by the descendant of an initially illegitimate
member of the House of Lancaster, married to the eldest daughter of the House of York:
Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.
They were the founders of the Tudor dynasty, which ruled the Kingdom from 1485 to 1603.
Tudors and Stuarts
Wales had retained a separate legal and administrative system, which had been established by Edward
I in the late 13th century.
The country was divided between the Marcher Lords owing feudal allegiance to the crown
and the Principality of Wales.
Under the Tudor monarchy, Henry VIII replaced the laws of Wales with those of England.
Wales now was incorporated into the Kingdom of England, and henceforth was represented
in the Parliament of England.
During the 1530s, Henry VIII overthrew the power of the Roman Catholic Church within
the kingdom, replacing the pope as head of the English church and seizing the church's
lands, thereby facilitating the creation of a new Protestant religion.
This had the effect of aligning England with Scotland, which also gradually adopted a Protestant
religion, whereas the most important continental powers, France and Spain, remained Roman Catholic.
In 1541, during Henry VIII's reign, the Parliament of Ireland proclaimed him king of Ireland,
thereby bringing the Kingdom of Ireland into personal union with the Kingdom of England.
Calais, the last remaining continental possession of the Kingdom, was lost in 1558, during the
reign of Philip and Mary I. Their successor, Elizabeth I, consolidated the new Protestant
Church of England.
She also began to build up the Kingdom's naval strength, on the foundations Henry VIII had
laid down.
In 1588, her new navy was strong enough to defeat the Spanish Armada, which had sought
to invade England in order to put a Catholic monarch on the throne in her place.
The House of Tudor ended with the death of Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603.
James I ascended the throne of England and brought it into personal union with the Kingdom
of Scotland.
Despite the Union of the Crowns, the kingdoms remained separate and independent states:
a state of affairs which lasted for more than a century.
The Stuart kings overestimated the power of the English monarchy, and were cast down by
Parliament in 1645 and 1688.
In the first instance, Charles I's introduction of new forms of taxation in defiance of Parliament
led to the English Civil War, in which the king was defeated, and to the abolition of
the monarchy under Oliver Cromwell during the interregnum of 1649–1660.
Henceforth, the monarch could reign only at the will of Parliament.
Following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, an attempt by James II to reintroduce
Roman Catholicism—a century after its suppression by the Tudors—led to the Glorious Revolution
of 1688, in which he was deposed by Parliament.
The Crown was then offered by Parliament to James II's Protestant daughter and son-in-law/nephew,
William III and Mary II.
Interregnum
England was a monarchy for the entirety of its political existence, except for the 11
years of the English Interregnum, which followed the English Civil War.
After the trial and execution of Charles I in January 1649, the Rump Parliament passed
an act declaring England to be a Commonwealth on 19 May 1649.
The monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, and so the House of Commons became a unitary
legislative chamber with a new body, the Council of State becoming the executive.
However the Army remain the dominant institution in the new republic and the most prominent
general was Oliver Cromwell.
The Commonwealth fought wars in Ireland and Scotland which were subdued and placed under
Commonwealth military occupation.
In April 1653 Cromwell and the other Grandees of the New Model Army, frustrated with the
members of the Rump Parliament who would not pass legislation to dissolve the Rump and
to allow a new more representative parliament to be elected, stopped the Rumps session by
force of arms and declared the Rump dissolved.
After an experiment with a Nominated Assembly, the Grandees in the Army, through the Council
of State imposed a new constitutional arrangement under a written constitution called the Instrument
of Government.
Under the Instrument of Government executive power lay with a Lord Protector and there
were to be triennial Parliaments, with each sitting for at least five months.
Article 23 of the Instrument of Government stated that Oliver Cromwell was to be the
first Lord Protector.
The Instrument of Government was replaced by a second constitution under which the Lord
Protector could nominate his successor.
Cromwell nominated his son Richard who became Lord Protector on the death of Oliver on 3
September 1658.
Richard proved to ineffectual and unable to maintain his rule.
He resigned his title and retired into obscurity.
The Rump Parliament was recalled and there was a second period where the executive power
lay with the Council of state.
But this restoration of Commonwealth rule similar to that before the Protecotrate, proved
to be unstable, the exiled claimant, Charles II, was restored to the throne in 1660.
Union with Scotland In the Scottish case, the attractions were
partly financial and partly to do with removing English trade sanctions put in place through
the Alien Act 1705.
The English were more anxious about the royal succession.
The death of William III in 1702 had led to the accession of his sister-in-law Anne to
the thrones of England and Scotland, but her only surviving child had died in 1700, and
the English Act of Settlement 1701 had given the succession to the English crown to the
Protestant House of Hanover.
Securing the same succession in Scotland became the primary object of English strategic thinking
towards Scotland.
By 1704, the Union of the Crowns was in crisis, with the Scottish Act of Security allowing
for the Scottish Parliament to choose a different monarch, which could in turn lead to an independent
foreign policy during a major European war.
The English establishment did not wish to risk a Stuart on the Scottish throne, nor
the possibility of a Scottish military alliance with another power.
A Treaty of Union was agreed on 22 July 1706, and following the Acts of Union of 1707, which
created the Kingdom of Great Britain, the independence of the kingdoms of England and
Scotland came to an end on 1 May 1707.
The Acts of Union created a customs union and monetary union and provided that any "laws
and statutes" that were "contrary to or inconsistent with the terms" of the Acts would "cease and
become void."
The English and Scottish Parliaments were merged into the Parliament of Great Britain,
located in Westminster, London.
At this point England ceased to exist as a separate political entity, and since then
has had no national government.
The laws of England were unaffected, with the legal jurisdiction continuing to be that
of England and Wales, while Scotland continued to have its own laws and law courts.
This continued after the 1801 union between the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland,
forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter
being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
See also List of English monarchs
English colonial empire English Army
Royal Navy Privy Council of England
Crown Jewels of England England and Wales
Etymology of England Anglo-Norman language
Notes
References
Bibliography