DBWI: England, rather than Ireland, unites the British isles.

As we all know, the Kingdom of Ireland, created in 1176 following the Scottish-Irish war, was the power that ultimately unified the British isles in our timeline after centuries of rivalry with the kingdoms of England and Scotland, managing too acquire Scotland through marriage and eventually conquering England. However, this was in no way the guaranteed outcome, and without the Anglo-Norwegian wars for the English crown, it’s very likely that England could have been the power that unified the British isles.

So, I have a question. What’s a plausible way for this to occur, and what do you think the results of such a massive change in history would be? I personally think it would make a very interesting timeline, but I don’t really have enough knowledge of the period to accurately predict the results or how this could happen, and I’m curious too see what you guys think.
 
There was a very interesting French adventurer/nobleman called William the Bastard who tried and failed to conquer England. It went quite terribly; his fleet was shattered by a storm and what remained of his army scattered after an outbreak of plague. William himself perished after an arrow found its way into his throat. His three sons went their separate ways. The eldest, Robert, became Count of Maine; his two younger brothers, Richard and William, seized the Duchy of Normandy (which rightfully belonged to Robert) and held on to it through William's line. Richard's children would later be ousted from Normandy and take up residence in Aquitaine under the Ramnulfids. The d'Normandie line still survives through Richard's descendants, I think, who maintain William the Bastard's claim on England in their heraldry.
 
The English language would have an even more dominant position in the British Isles, if it was England who gathered all the British Isles into one state. In such a case English would have even more characteristics than in OTL. Because of the greater size of the English speaking population, it was essentially almost impossible for any other language to become the common tongue of the British Isles
 
The English language would have an even more dominant position in the British Isles, if it was England who gathered all the British Isles into one state. In such a case English would have even more characteristics than in OTL. Because of the greater size of the English speaking population, it was essentially almost impossible for any other language to become the common tongue of the British Isles

This is especially true given that English is essentially a West Germanic language that reinvented itself as North Germanic one following the House of Hardrada's long occupation of Yorvig and the Nornfold (OOC: OTL York and Northumbria), and then tried and failed to do so as a Goidelic one in the 1700s. Perhaps, ITTL, English is not renowned for its complex grammar and extreme difficulty to learn?
 
This is especially true given that English is essentially a West Germanic language that reinvented itself as North Germanic one following the House of Hardrada's long occupation of Yorvig and the Nornfold (OOC: OTL York and Northumbria), and then tried and failed to do so as a Goidelic one in the 1700s. Perhaps, ITTL, English is not renowned for its complex grammar and extreme difficulty to learn?

I'm not sure. The languages of the British Isles pretty much all have ramshackle grammer and spelling created from he sporadic and regionally specific influences of the Norse urban and merchantile class on the Gaels as they integrated and interacted with the Celtic rural population around their cities, especially in terms of the written language where he Norse had a particularlly strong say on spelling given how much more frequently they used he written word than the inland clans. To get a more uniform English means you'll have to either regularize or remove the waves of Scandinavians settling and conquering the region; the former being basically impossible and the later likely waving away anything resembling a unified Scotland or Ireland in the first place given it was the Viking City-States that served as the backbone of the urbanizaton and consolidation of those regions and by hooking them into the broader North Sea trade network providing the wealth critical to hiring the mercenary-adventures (at first) and later sustain a proffesional army which allowed them to negate the population advantage of the Anglo-Saxon kings and their levees. via discipline and tactics
 
I'm not sure. The languages of the British Isles pretty much all have ramshackle grammer and spelling created from he sporadic and regionally specific influences of the Norse urban and merchantile class on the Gaels as they integrated and interacted with the Celtic rural population around their cities, especially in terms of the written language where he Norse had a particularlly strong say on spelling given how much more frequently they used he written word than the inland clans. To get a more uniform English means you'll have to either regularize or remove the waves of Scandinavians settling and conquering the region; the former being basically impossible and the later likely waving away anything resembling a unified Scotland or Ireland in the first place given it was the Viking City-States that served as the backbone of the urbanizaton and consolidation of those regions and by hooking them into the broader North Sea trade network providing the wealth critical to hiring the mercenary-adventures (at first) and later sustain a proffesional army which allowed them to negate the population advantage of the Anglo-Saxon kings and their levees. via discipline and tactics
This is very true, even if Ireland somehow united without the Viking City States (which is unlikely but not completely impossible), the abscence of the wealth generated by the North Sea trade they connected Ireland and Scotland to would have put Ireland at a massive disadvantage in any large scale wars against England or Scotland, since the Irish population was comparatively smaller and the huge amount of mercenaries that the King of Mhumhain could hire with that money was what allowed him to beat the Scots at the Battle of Armagh and finish conquering the north so he could found the kingdom to begin with, and such a force would almost certainly be necessary in any other war with a larger kingdom or ATL equivalent attempt at unification.
 
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It was just so much easier for the Irish to unite Britain because they already had a massive diaspora from the Scots Gaels, to significant influence on the Britonnic Cumbrians and Welsh. The English meanwhile, stuck around the eastern coast and kind of just stayed in the North Sea thalassocratic sphere. Obviously the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings both initially converted to Christianity on Irish terms, as well.
 
It was just so much easier for the Irish to unite Britain because they already had a massive diaspora from the Scots Gaels, to significant influence on the Britonnic Cumbrians and Welsh. The English meanwhile, stuck around the eastern coast and kind of just stayed in the North Sea thalassocratic sphere. Obviously the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings both initially converted to Christianity on Irish terms, as well.

Said Thalassocratc Sphere was the right bet by any measure, since the Irish only started thriving after the Gaelo-Norse hooked them into it. Prior to that the Celts were dirt poor and mosly made up of clans bashing each other over the head while the English monarchs were putting together a more centralized structure. Sure, the Vikings took on Celtic Christianity, but the Celts took on Norse culture and society to a far greater degree... especially after the Norse started dominating the monasteries they used to pillage.
 
This is especially true given that English is essentially a West Germanic language that reinvented itself as North Germanic one following the House of Hardrada's long occupation of Yorvig and the Nornfold (OOC: OTL York and Northumbria), and then tried and failed to do so as a Goidelic one in the 1700s. Perhaps, ITTL, English is not renowned for its complex grammar and extreme difficulty to learn?
While it is true that English despite it's West Germanic roots is now mostly considered a North Germanic language, a minority of language scholars hold the opinion that English is it's own branch on the Germanic language tree.
 
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