England is old, very old.
For example the City of London existed before the crown of England, never mind the union we know as UK...
For example the City of London existed before the crown of England, never mind the union we know as UK...
- before the Crown, there were several crowns. England was composed of a handful of Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms
- before that, it had an emperor. The Roman emperor.
- parts were ruled by the Danish (the Danelaw) and parts were ruled by the Saxons
- with regards to the UK, the political union is much younger than the union of crowns. The personal union was a Scottish king inheriting the English throne. The political union was the English parliament strong arming the Scottish.
- there was once a kingdom of Ireland until England had its way.
There was, but its king was the King of England (and later of Great Britain), and its parliament was subjugated to the parliament at Westminster, which could veto its acts and legislate directly for Ireland. It saw a brief period of autonomy towards the end of the eighteenth century, when its relationship with Britain became more akin to that between England and Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Act of Union; but after the United Irishmen revolt, Britain convinced the Parliament of Ireland, at least partly through bribery of its members, to abolish itself, and Ireland was formally absorbed into the UK.
Before the Kingdom of Ireland was the Lordship of Ireland, which was much the same, but with the King of England as Lord (rather than King) of Ireland, a title granted in 1154 by the first and only English pope, Adrian IV. (Henry VIII had himself declared King of Ireland after his breach with Rome, to quash the belief that the Pope was Ireland's ultimate sovereign.)
Before the Lordship there was a whole mass of kingdoms and sub-kingdoms (including the Kingdom of Dublin mentioned by ptaipale in a sibling to this comment), sometimes united under a High King, the most famous possibly being Brian Boru.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saxon_Stories
I don't know how historically accurate they are, but they're relatively fast paced, fun to read and take place around the time where there were several kingdoms.
It lasted from 853 AD to 1171 when the Norman conquest finished it off -- in fact, this is a longer time than what the Acts of Union of England and Scotland have lasted so far.
Source: http://www.walesher1974.org/her/groups/GAT/media/GAT_Reports..., p. 121.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-... 'The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries—Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” ...Relationships with the rich and famous were essential in Vatopaidi’s pursuit of government grants and reparations for sackings, but also for the third prong of its new management’s strategy: real estate. By far the smartest thing Father Ephraim had done was go rummaging around in an old tower where they kept the Byzantine manuscripts, untouched for decades. Over the centuries Byzantine emperors and other rulers had deeded to Vatopaidi various tracts of land, mainly in modern-day Greece and Turkey. In the years before Ephraim arrived, the Greek government had clawed back much of this property, but there remained a title, bestowed in the 14th century by Emperor John V Palaiologos, to a lake in northern Greece. By the time Ephraim discovered the deed to the lake in Vatopaidi’s vaults, it had been designated a nature preserve by the Greek government. Then, in 1998, suddenly it wasn’t: someone had allowed the designation to lapse. Shortly thereafter, the monks were granted full title to the lake.' ...which they exchanged for government land at inflated value and then got into the bond market.
If you want a deep dive into Conspiracy Theory Territory, google for "Crown Temple" and read about how the "Crown Temple" controls the (regular) Crown and how it secretly owns the United States of America.