How could i keep the Four Kingdoms of England(East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex) seperate and never unify?

I'm not familiar with this part of England's history. What can keep the Four Kingdoms apart?
Keep the Danes out of England. The Viking invasions swallowing up all the extant kingdoms except Wessex gave the West Saxon rulers both an opportunity to unify the southern half of the island (given that all their non-Viking rivals had just been wiped out) and a strong incentive to do so (the Vikings evidently posed an existential threat, so it's not hard to make the case that the survivors need to unify to resist them).

So, uh, somehow butterfly the Great Heathen Army and you should be set.
4? My man there was like 7
Well, the number of "important" ones waxed and waned, especially since some were absorbed by others at different times, so sometimes the magic number really was four.
 
Keep the Danes out of England. The Viking invasions swallowing up all the extant kingdoms except Wessex gave the West Saxon rulers both an opportunity to unify the southern half of the island (given that all their non-Viking rivals had just been wiped out) and a strong incentive to do so (the Vikings evidently posed an existential threat, so it's not hard to make the case that the survivors need to unify to resist them).

So, uh, somehow butterfly the Great Heathen Army and you should be set.

Alternately, have them conquer, but co opt the local power structures, each one separately. Flood the country with Northmen but settle them unevenly and have a Saxon resurgence in say, Wessex but be too weak to reconquer and becomes like Dummonia (Devon, Cornwall Core Wessex) before it, important but not too strong and perhaps a bit more Celtic influenced as they genuinely need the Cornish. Have Jorvick/Northumbria be most Norse, to the point of being foreign to the more Saxon Wessex. Wank East Anglia, giving them the coast down to London, probably making the Norse rulers wealthy. What this does is keep rump Mercia the most "Saxon" from the sea, and poor and isolated but decently set for manpower and a perfect chew toy of a nation to keep around for the big three plus the Welsh from having too many conflicting borders. Let Jorvick and East Anglia become more foreign over time (Jorvick more so) and Wessex different enough from Mercia so they eventually they see each other as foreign as the Welsh and Scots.

And destroy Canterbury. Should delay Christianization allowing for more cultural drift and when/if it does come, their is nobody to unify the Church over the whole British Isles.
 
I'm not familiar with this part of England's history. What can keep the Four Kingdoms apart?

Wasn't there something like five or even seven Anglosaxon kigndoms?

Not sure if it is even possible since some onf them would eventually become strong enough to conquer other ones.
 

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Strengthen the smaller kingdoms and break the bigger ones, maybe. Give Essex, Sussex, and Kent a bit more of an advantage somehow, keep Northumbria separated into Deira and Bernicia, prevent Mercia from taking Hwicce and Lindsey, have a stronger Cornwall keeping Wessex in check in the Southwest.

Maybe some Frankish influence. If say, Kent and Sussex get protection from Europe’s most powerful rulers, that’s going to make Wessex and Mercia think twice before meddling around in that area.

Something else could be Scotland, Powys, and Stracthclyde getting more involved, allying with some Anglo-Saxon rulers and against others, keeping them more divided via their regional allies, with no common enemy
 
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Wasn't there something like five or even seven Anglosaxon kigndoms?

Not sure if it is even possible since some onf them would eventually become strong enough to conquer other ones.
Depends on when you do the count and what you consider a Kingdom. The 7th century Tribal Hidage counted over 30 separate "kingdoms" of varying sizes. Though most would have been tributaries of nearby major Kingdoms. It also excluded Northumbria, itself a very early 7th century fusion of two Kingdoms (Deira and Bernicia) that had absorbed lands from Celtic Kingdoms like Rheged.

But, to maintain at least four Kingdoms within England, you certainly need to prevent the Vikings destroying those of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia. I think you also need to prevent the fragmentation of South Eastern England into a bunch of petty "statelets" and the three Kingdoms of Essex, Sussex and Kent. All of which by the early 9th century had either been absorbed by Mercia (or Wessex) or rendered tributary to them.
 
Three separate Kingdoms , for arguments sake call them Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex is relatively easily achievable even with the Vikings. East Anglia is more of a problem, its natural communication routes are East- West and not North-South. So it will drift towards which ever is the more powerful of Mercia or Wessex. Mind you for a long time it was the most densely populated part of England so raw manpower isn't a problem.
 
I'm not familiar with this part of England's history. What can keep the Four Kingdoms apart?
From that I could see Scotland taking one kingdom at a time through the centuries because Northumbria use to be all the why up to the Scottish lowlands and Edinburgh.

As more of a case if how will conquer the kingdom to creat a new kingdom called done different.

The 4 kingdoms my exit longer if the great heathen army never came to England.
 
A stronger &more long-lasting Romano-British successor-state keeps all of them small, not bordering each other, and effectively forbids their unification.
 
Keep the Danes out of England. So, uh, somehow butterfly the Great Heathen Army and you should be set
The Great Heathen Army finds the English landscape and climate too similar to Scandinavia so they bypass the island and look at West Francia as a more desirable place to raid and eventually settle.
 
Realistically, any long-lasting kingdom will have both strong and weak periods. The risk to the desired setup is that one kingdom's strong period will, at some point, allow it to permanently subsume one or more of the others. This can be ameliorated by contriving strategic goals outside of England for each kingdom that have a higher priority than unification, but can be sacrificed if need be to preserve the kingdom against its immediate neighbors.
 
As it is otl the 7 kingdoms were nearly fully unified several times exluding Northumbria before the vikings arrived. Mercia was entering a decline after having nearly something like 2 centuries of dominance with most of the kingdoms accepting its king as bretwalda. With Mercia on the decline and Wessex and Northumbria being strong if it werent for the vikings i think we would have seen a wessex Dominated south and Northumbria Dominated north as long as Mercia wasnt re able to rise again.

To keep these tribes totally seperate i think you need to have the Vikings not hit so hard as they gave something the Saxons could unify against. If the Kingdoms continue their small wars against eachother as long as theirs no brilliant leader you could see the kingdom state at least another few hundred years.
 
Strengthen the smaller kingdoms and break the bigger ones, maybe. Give Essex, Sussex, and Kent a bit more of an advantage somehow, keep Northumbria separated into Deira and Bernicia, prevent Mercia from taking Hwicce and Lindsey, have a stronger Cornwall keeping Wessex in check in the Southwest.

Maybe some Frankish influence. If say, Kent and Sussex get protection from Europe’s most powerful rulers, that’s going to make Wessex and Mercia think twice before meddling around in that area.

Something else could be Scotland, Powys, and Stracthclyde getting more involved, allying with some Anglo-Saxon rulers and against others, keeping them more divided via their regional allies, with no common enemy
IMO this is really the key. With only four, reasonably big, kingdoms being reasonably viable the area, almost inevitably IMO, entered a dynamic of shifting hegemony, with Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex all having their turn, and there is no reason per say East Anglia couldn't have had theirs at some point. Someone was bound to ''clinch it'' at some point...

You need the fracture future England significantly more then it was to keep it divide indefinitely, or alternatively have some kind of POD far enough in the past to make the constituent kingdoms different enough for any unification to be ephemeral, but there was significant differences in OTL as it was and it wasn't enough...
 
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