In 784 AD, Egbert of Wessex had every right to be king of his people and was instead in exile, fighting for his life. He spent years at the court of Charlemagne — present in Rome on Christmas Day 800 when the Pope placed the crown of Holy Roman Emperor on the Frankish king's head. Then word came from England that things had changed. He went home, outmaneuvered every rival and every petty king from Kent to Northumbria, and made himself the first ruler of a united England. He even changed the country's name.
The story of how England got its name begins with an exile. In 784 AD, Egbert had a legitimate claim to the throne of Wessex — the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom in southern Britain — and instead found himself fleeing for his life when the people elected someone else and made his continued presence dangerous. He left and went to the court of Charlemagne, where he stayed for years. He was there in Rome in 800 AD, among the witnesses when Pope Leo III placed the crown of Holy Roman Emperor on Charlemagne's head on Christmas morning. He watched the most powerful ruler in the western world receive the title that had been vacant for three centuries, and he filed away what he saw. Soon after came word from England: the people of Wessex had changed their minds. They wanted Egbert as their king. He went home and did not waste what he had learned.
Egbert of Wessex became king in 802 AD after years of exile at Charlemagne's court. By 829, he had made himself overlord of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain — the first man to rule what could genuinely be called England.
How Britain Became England
The island was British long before it was English. The Britons — the Celtic people who gave Britain its name — had been there for centuries when Julius Caesar arrived in 55 BCE. Rome occupied the island for nearly four hundred years, building roads and walls and walled cities, bringing Christianity with them, changing the place in ways that were still visible when the Romans withdrew their legions in 410 AD. The vacuum they left filled quickly. Jutes, led by two chieftains named Hengist and Horsa, landed on the southeastern coast. Angles and Saxons followed. The Britons resisted — their leader was King Arthur, whose round-table fellowship at Caerleon fought with genuine ferocity to push back the invaders. It was not enough. The Britons were driven into Wales and Cornwall, and nearly all of England came under the control of the Germanic invaders. For the next two centuries the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes worshipped the old Norse gods on British soil. Christianity had been in Britain since Roman times, but the new masters were not interested in learning religion from people they had just conquered. Seven separate kingdoms gradually coalesced across southern Britain — Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex — each with its own king, its own rivalries, its own identity.