For a lighter take on this whole business, I can recommend Unruly -
The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell. It's a rather self-indulgent monologue at times (like, dude, it's a book, not a panel show), but also a pretty comprehensive-yet-short-and-funny look at how all that Kingdom stuff got started.
Basically the whole article can be distilled into the single paragraph:
> He was officially crowned in September 925AD. The following year, in 926AD, he married off his sister to the Viking king of Northumbria, which lay to the north of his kingdom's border. A year later, the Viking ruler died, and Æthelstan took over Northumbria.
In consolidating the previously separate kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, Æthelstan became the first king of all England.
Worth remembering that the Venerable Bede was writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People two centuries before Athelstan, so clearly there was some notion of unity as early as that.
The strength of feeling some English lovers of history have for the Anglo-Saxon kings slightly mystifies me. Athelstan created a unified English kingdom. Briefly, till he died and it un-unified. England was fully conquered by a Danish king later (Cnut). A couple of the kings, Aethelred the Unready and Edward the Confessor, were such colossal wet blankets that you get the impression of a people just crying out to be conquered. I can see why so much of the popular conception of English history basically starts with the Norman Conquest.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] thread> He was officially crowned in September 925AD. The following year, in 926AD, he married off his sister to the Viking king of Northumbria, which lay to the north of his kingdom's border. A year later, the Viking ruler died, and Æthelstan took over Northumbria.
In consolidating the previously separate kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, Æthelstan became the first king of all England.