AHC: Britain and France switch with Italy and Germany

Ok, the title may be misleading, but anyway.
Many of you notice that Germany and Italy stayed divided for long after the Brits and French. How would you go about making Britain and France stay into a patchwork of nations similar to Germany and Italy of OTL; while making Germany and Italy unite extremely early, say before 1650.
 
France is easy- it was largely the situation on the ground OTL for much of the Medieval period.

Britain is harder - though it may have been fragmented up until the mid-10th century, the geography and common culture of England tends to make it unlikely
 
I'm thinking some alternate version of the English Civil War (alternate because obviously the lack of French unification will have enormous effects on European history) which divides the pre-war Kingdom of England between a Commonwealth/Republic of England in the South and a surviving Kingdom of England in Wales and the North, and where the Kingdom and the Commonwealth fight on for a long time but neither of them achieves success and eventually they give up; in this scenario Ireland and Scotland would remain independent (getting rid of OTL's Anglo-Scottish personal union won't be too hard and Ireland might successfully assert its independence from Protestant England in the *English Civil War). (Various more extreme suggestions, like Cornish independence, ignore the inconvenient fact that the vast majority of Cornwall has very little Cornish nationalist sentiment and so they're probably unviable. Welsh independence is difficult when Wales has been unified with England for many centuries and, more importantly, is right next to England.) That gives only four states in the British Isles (more than that is hard because of the British Isles' historical very low population compared to anywhere on the Continent), but I hope it's enough for the OP.

If Austria wins several wars against rival German powers and there's some Hundred Years' War-esque invasion that solidifies German national identity, it might make the Holy Roman Empire (more realistically, just parts of it) into something more centralised and substantial. That'll almost inevitably lead into a boringly German-dominated Europe from very early on, by sheer weight of population, but perhaps the northernmost parts of Germany and/or the Rhineland can go their own way.

Italy is the really hard one; with the papal states existing and religion remaining so important, it'll take the coming of the age of nationalism to end that (as it did IOTL), short of absurdly early PoDs that will render European history unrecognisable.

French balkanisation is easy; the problem is that the peoples of what became France weren't very linguistically unified at all, so without French unification then many parts of OTL's France won't regard themselves as French at all, so later French unification probably won't work.
 
Otto II lives longer, keeping the Ottonian Dynasty in power in Germany ... HRE never splinters into bickering minnows
 
With Britain, you've also got the fact that it's an island and so there are obvious "natural borders" within which to attain unity.
 
To have Britain split into different nations you would either:

1) Go back before 927 and AEthalstan being King of the English

or

2) Stop Edward I defeating the Welsh / Scottish

depending on just how split up you wanted England.

Without the Vikings I think it would be possible for the Saxon kingdoms to continue to exist.
 
england might be doable with William only winning by a hair's breadth, losing control of northern england doing a similar Harrowing of the North, with the north Anglo-Danish lords establishing a seperate kingdom, with the Normans keeping control of southern England, and a stalematish situation between Northern england with support from Scotland and South with support from Normandy and Flanders
 
england might be doable with William only winning by a hair's breadth, losing control of northern england doing a similar Harrowing of the North, with the north Anglo-Danish lords establishing a seperate kingdom, with the Normans keeping control of southern England, and a stalematish situation between Northern england with support from Scotland and South with support from Normandy and Flanders

I read somewhere that if William and Harald Hardrada had both lived, they were going to split England somewhere alone these lines?
 
For Britain, a more destructive War of the Roses, with Wales successfully rebelling and Scotland taking full advantage of the opportunity, and annexes the north?

Or possibly a Reformation split in England, where the south go Protestant while the north and Wales stay Catholic and successfully rebel?
 
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