Pretty fascinating history overall. In England's case, the earliest monarch we'd recognize as "King of England" was Alfred the Great, who was king of what was called Wessex at the time. Wessex was the last holdout of "native" English as opposed to being ruled by Vikings and their descendants. Wessex eventually re-conquered the island a few hundred years later and became England.
As to how earlier kings gained their position, at least in England I'd say it was some combination of local warlords that were semi-legitimized during Roman rule, then later their descendents consolidated power after the Romans left, either through marriage, trade, or violence.
> As to how earlier kings gained their position, at least in England I'd say it was some combination of local warlords that were semi-legitimized during Roman rule, then later their descendents consolidated power after the Romans left, either through marriage, trade, or violence.
That definitely didn't happen. The locals in Roman Britain would be the Bretons, a Celtic-speaking people. The withdrawal of Roman power from Britain was followed with the Anglo-Saxon migrations of people from what is now the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, which (actually rather rapidly) displaced the Celtic speakers with Germanic speakers. The Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms arose after the migration, although they were subsequently occupied by the Great Dane Army that settled in the Danelaw region of England. It was the Mercian (one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms) failure to deal with the Vikings and Alfred the Great's success that led the Wessex king, and not the then-dominant Mercian king, to actually unify all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into a single Kingdom of England.
The origination of these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is extremely unclear, happening during the Great Migration and in an area where the written record rather abruptly dies out. Virtually the entire list of sources for this period is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the Peoples of Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle commissioned by Alfred the Great.
Pretty fascinating history overall. In England's case, the earliest monarch we'd recognize as "King of England" was Alfred the Great, who was king of what was called Wessex at the time. Wessex was the last holdout of "native" English as opposed to being ruled by Vikings and their descendants. Wessex eventually re-conquered the island a few hundred years later and became England.
As to how earlier kings gained their position, at least in England I'd say it was some combination of local warlords that were semi-legitimized during Roman rule, then later their descendents consolidated power after the Romans left, either through marriage, trade, or violence.