The Kingdom of England

The kingdom formed by the political unification of the Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms of England during the tenth century, conventionally dated to Aethelstan's 927 submission of the northern kings and rulers of Britain at Eamont Bridge and his assumption of the title king of the English; some historians place genuine, lasting unification later, in Edgar's reign (959 to 975), or later still, at the Norman Conquest of 1066, when a single royal administration first extended uniform control over the whole kingdom. Conquered by William of Normandy in 1066, joined in personal union with Continental territories under the Angevin kings from 1154, and reduced to its island core after the loss of Normandy in 1204, the kingdom persisted as a sovereign polity under the Plantagenet, Lancastrian, Yorkist, Tudor and Stuart dynasties, its royal authority contested and gradually shared with a developing Parliament from the thirteenth century onward, until the Acts of Union of 1707 merged its crown and Parliament with Scotland's to form the Kingdom of Great Britain.