Æthelstan’s Englaland lasted until the 1707 British merger
England as a single kingdom runs from Æthelstan’s 927 gathering of Anglo-Saxon realms to 1 May 1707, when union with Scotland created Great Britain. Alfred’s capture of London in 886 and his “King of the Anglo-Saxons” title already sketched the fusion decades earlier.
Unification took decades. From 886, when Alfred the Great seized London from the Danes, he called himself King of the Anglo-Saxons to cover both Wessex and western Mercia. His son Edward the Elder, who reigned from 899 to 924, and grandson Æthelstan kept the title and widened the House of Wessex's reach. Æthelstan's conquest of York, the last Viking kingdom, in 927 made him the first Anglo-Saxon to rule all England. In 1016 the realm was folded into Cnut the Great's North Sea Empire alongside Denmark and Norway, and the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought a new ruling class.
Historians carve the later kingdom into dynastic eras: Norman and Angevin to 1216, Plantagenet to 1485, Tudor to 1603 and Stuart to 1707, broken by the Interregnum of 1649 to 1660. Every monarch after 1066 traced descent from the Normans, so the labels are partly convention; the Tudors claimed Edward III through John Beaufort, and James VI and I claimed Henry VII through Margaret Tudor.
Edward I finished conquering Wales in 1284. Edward III, reigning from 1327 to 1377, made England one of Europe's most formidable military powers, and his reign saw Parliament develop. English kings claimed the French throne from the 1340s, but after the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of the Roses, which broke out in 1455, only Calais remained of their continental lands. The Tudors, ruling through the English Renaissance, fully merged England and Wales by statute.
James VI of Scotland's accession in 1603 united the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland under the Stuarts, and his reign planted the first colony in Virginia in 1607. Civil war ended with Charles I's execution in 1649. The monarchy came back in 1660, but the war had set the precedent that a king could not govern without Parliament's consent, which the Glorious Revolution of 1688 turned into law, leaving England effectively a constitutional monarchy. On 1 May 1707 the Acts of Union abolished the separate English and Scottish parliaments and kingdoms and created Great Britain.
Source: Kingdom of England
