Was gonna write about Russia, but then ideas about the British Isles came to me. And so, I wrote.
Land of Fog and War: The British Isles from 1215-1818
The Norman conquests had, for a time, looked as though they could unite the disparate kingdoms of Britain and Ireland. The English had fractured after the reign of Canute the Great, and the Celts of varying stripes were at constant war- at least, before the conquests. Norman lords, like their Viking forebears had done in the British Isles, established petty lordships and dominions over the inhabitants, spreading Norman and, later, Anglo-Norman culture. In 1034, the greatest Norman conquest basically united Ireland, although some of the more prominent Norse and Irish lords remained as vassals. The Kingdom of Ireland, led by the House de Hauteville, then proceeded to conquer Cornwall and Northern Wales, along with vassalizing the Dinefwr. To the north and west, Norman lords conquered Kent and York, and made deep incursions into Scotland. These lords were often accompanied by Danish or Swedish lords, making similar incursions into the disunited lands. By 1100, the de Hautevilles ruled through direct control or vassalage the Irish, the Welsh, the Norse lords of the Duchy of Soreyar, Orkney and Man, the Cornish, and many western Saxon lords. Their vassals had also expanded- Welshmen ruled in Strathclyde once more, Saxons had lands in Tyrconnell, and Irishmen ruled in Somerset and Derby. This multiethnic kingdom, by 1169, had finally vassalized the MacBeth dynasts in northern Scotland, and held control over all of the British Isles, a land of Norsemen, Normans, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen, Saxons, and a few French minor lords. After the Duchy of Normandy was revoked by the French king after the French Civil War (1152-1173), more Norman knights, both first and second sons, flooded into what was called the Kingdom of Britain and Hibern.
However, the ascension of Bloody King Charles I of the House of Godwin (a Normanized Saxon family) in 1187 slowly decayed the Kingdom, until the barons and lords decided to give the slowly maddening Charles an ultimatum at Marston Magna in 1215. He refused the ultimatum, and the Kingdom slowly fell into anarchy. By 1234, all that had been wrought had fallen, and even the lower lords were susceptible to civil war and the decay of their realms. The British Isles were fractured, a mess of feudal intricacies, alternative governments, tiny polities and conflicting claims; as the famous Russian poet Ulyanov once said "a land created by lawyers and run by jesters, a land of fog and war".
Major Polities of the Middle Anarchy in Britain By Classification
The British Isles, after Bloody Charles, were fallen into disarray. Major shifts would occur over time; the period from 1215 to 1453 is referred to as the Earlier Anarchy, the period from 1453 to 1649 as the Middle Anarchy, and the period from 1649-1818 as the Later Anarchy or Consolidation.
The polities of the British Middle Anarchy were numbered in the hundreds, sometimes only encompassing towns, like the tiny Doncaster. Here, we will name the more major actors.
The large feudal states were duchies or Kingdoms, depending on the power of the polity and the pretensions of the local rulers. These were: the Kingdoms of Cumbria, Jorvik, Cornwall and Munster, and the Duchies of Oxford, Northumberland and Kent. Their smaller counterparts were the various counties or double counties, or Earldoms: Shetland, Kildare, Wight, Surrey, Derby, Buchan, Perfeddwlad, Dunbar, Moray, Tyrconnell and Surrey. These feudal states not only imitated the system of the continent, but absorbed culture from it. The maintenance of the Anglo-Norman language and standard was continued by French influence into the south of Britain and into Cork, and the settling of most of the actual Normans across Britain and Ireland as valuable mercenaries and landed knights.
The Church, before the Reformation, also held large amounts of land across Britain and Ireland in the form of Prince-Bishoprics and Archbishoprics. The Archbishoprics were those of Anglesey, the Fens, the Isles, and that of Connacht. The Prince-Bishoprics were Coventry, Lindisfarne, Clonmacnoise, Crowland, St. Albans, Kells, Monmouth, Raphoe, Dunkeld, Derry and Caithness.
There also existed states run by the burghers, the urban merchants or the craftsmen- the Republics of London and Bristol and the various free cities: Sarum, Inverness, Dublin, Limerick, and Macclesfield.
Finally, there were the two great oddities of the British Isles- the semi-democratic, upper-peasant government of the Cantons of Ulster (Ulster, Oriel, Galloway, Tyrone, Carrick and the Isle of Man), and the small Commonwealth of Orkney run by the upper peasants in a system similar to Ulster. The Ulster cantons were multi-cultural, with Norsemen, Scots, Irishmen and some Anglo-Normans all being represented.
These states, being on an island, were often independent of the various schemes of the continent, although this was not always the case. The Duchy of Kent, for example, vacillated in and out of French vassalage, and the Kingdom of Jorvik often found itself drawn into Scandinavian vassalage, sending its danegeld to Nidaros. The Republics and Free Cities acted as ports and centers of cultural exchange, and fought each other for influence in trade- London had monopoly over the North Sea into the Baltic, while Bristolmen traded in St. Georges Channel and down to Portugal.
The Reformation would disrupt this order of chaos- wars would start, and, by the end of the Middle Anarchy, the Consolidation had begun...