Kingdom of England (A New World)

The Kingdom of England was a sovereign state on the island of Great Britain. On 12 July 927, the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were united by Æthelstan to form 'Kingdom of England'. In 1016, the kingdom was conquered by the Vikings who created a personal union between England, Denmark and Norway. Then in 1066, the Normans successfully conquered, this led to the transfer of the English capital city and chief royal residence from the Anglo-Saxon one at Winchester to Westminster, and the City of London quickly established itself as England's largest and principal commercial center.

Histories of the kingdom of England from the Norman conquest of 1066 conventionally distinguish periods named after successive ruling dynasties: Norman 1066–1154, Plantagenet 1154–1485 and Tudor 1485–1603 and (the Stuart's 1603–1707 and Georgian was part of Great Britain). From 1154–1214 England was called the 'Angevin Empire', the possessions of the Angevin kings of England who held lands in England and France. Henry's son, John, was defeated in the Anglo-French War (1213–1214) by Philip II of France following the Battle of Bouvines. John lost control of most of his continental possessions. This defeat set the scene for the Hundred Years' War.

The completion of the conquest of Wales by Edward I in 1284 put Wales under the control of the English crown. Edward III (reigned 1327–1377) transformed the Kingdom of England into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe; his reign also saw vital developments in legislation and government, in particular the evolution of the English parliament. After the Glyndŵr Rising, the full union of England and the Principality of Wales occurred in 1416.

From the 1340s the kings of England also laid claim to the crown of France, but after the Hundred Years' War and the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in 1455, the English were no longer in any position to pursue their French claims and lost all their land on the continent, except for Calais. After the turmoils of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudor dynasty ruled during the English Renaissance and again extended English monarchical power beyond England proper. Henry VIII oversaw the English Reformation, and his daughter Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603) the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, meanwhile establishing England as a great power and laying the foundations of the British Empire by claiming possessions in the New World.

After the accession of James VI and I in 1603, on 1 May 1603, under the terms of the Acts of Union 1603, the kingdoms of England and Scotland united to form the Kingdom of Great Britain

Under the Stuarts, the kingdom plunged into civil war, which culminated in the execution of Charles I in 1649. The monarchy returned in 1660, but the Civil War had established the precedent that an English monarch cannot govern without the consent of Parliament. This concept became legally established as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, functioned in effect as a constitutional monarchy.