In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  Three successive Northumbrian kings were overlords in the seventh century, fighting bitter wars with the Mercians on their southern border, and at times they took tribute from all the kings south of the Humber. In the 660s and 670s the Mercian Wulfhere held similar power, and for most of the eighth century Mercia was supreme over all the lands south of the Humber under its kings Aethelbald and Offa; they more than any of the others paved the way for the future unification of the English.

  Mercian origins are obscure. Like the other English peoples they were illiterate pagans when they came to Britain. The arts of writing came only with their conversion to Christianity after 655, so the foundation of their kingdom around the Upper Trent, which may only have happened in the 580s, was recorded generations later. Offa in fact claimed that his family had emigrated to Britain from Angeln in Schleswig, now on the German-Danish border, and that his ancestors had been kings there. In particular Offa seems to have regarded as a kinsman his namesake the legendary Offa of Angeln, who, the poets said,

  whilst still a youth gained the greatest of kingdoms … no one of the same age achieved greater deeds of valour in battle: with his single sword he fixed the boundary against the Myrgings at Fifledor.

  It is unlikely that the two Offas really were related, but the fact that the historical king bore the legendary name and built a great boundary has led some scholars to think that he was consciously imitating Offa of Angeln, whose legends he might have known from childhood. The claim that the Mercians had been kings before they ever came to Britain certainly gave Offa a more impressive pedigree than other English kings, and was used to justify his overlordship at the height of his empire. But it may be something Offa or his propagandists invented. Why, we shall see.

  OFFA SEIZES THE THRONE

  Offa came to the throne through that most successful kind of coup d’état, the one which is transformed in later records into a legitimate takeover of power. He seems to have gone to a great deal of effort to conceal from posterity the fact that it was a coup d’état, and were it not for some sources appearing over-anxious to justify his claim, we would never have been able to recover even a partial truth.

  His story begins with the killing of King Aethelbald in 757. At his death Aethelbald had been ‘Rex Britanniae’, bretwalda, ruler of all England south of the Humber. Although he was an old man he was still violent and over-fond of women when he was murdered at night by his bodyguard at Seckington near Tamworth. We do not know who instigated the act. Aethelbald’s heir, Beornred, succeeded him, but civil war broke out and his kinsman, Offa, seized the throne. Thirteenth-century historians writing at the abbey of St Albans, a stronghold of pro-Offa feeling, said that the people had risen against Beornred because of his unjust and tyrannical rule, and that they expelled him under the leadership of Offa, whom they unanimously elected king. This account may be no more than a later interpretation of events. A marginal note in a Mercian manuscript of the early ninth century gives us the official line which Offa wanted the world to believe: Beornred was a ‘tyrannus’, a usurper, and Offa overcame him in battle and took the kingdom.

  Offa’s claim to be king was as great-great-grandson of Eawa, brother of the Mercian King Penda. Beornred’s relation to the royal line is unknown, although he was clearly viewed as Aethelbald’s heir, and Offa’s view of him as a usurper accounts for his omission from the surviving list of Mercian kings, although he reigned for at least a few months. The list of kings was obviously tampered with by Offa. The fact that Beornred survived in exile (and probably had children) made Offa’s stress on his usurpation politically necessary, even after he was burned to death in Northumbria twelve years later.

  So Offa came to the throne after the murder of one king and the deposition of another. The whole affair smacks of modern power politics. But that should not surprise us. Most accessions were contested in the Dark Ages, and the succession of the eldest son was by no means guaranteed. In fact almost any ablebodied kinsman stood a chance if he was tough enough, and Offa was certainly to prove that.

  The civil war in Mercia between Beornred and Offa must have made news everywhere, so eminent had been the Mercian position in Britain before Aethelbald’s assassination. In Northumbria the news was received along with the defeated contender. The kings who had bowed to Aethelbald and paid him tribute would not do the same for Offa. Who was he in any case? A distant kinsman of Penda’s brother. Political power advanced and receded quickly in the Dark Ages and was dependent on the personal charisma of the man who wielded it. In the first years of Offa’s reign there is no sign that the neighbouring kings who had submitted to Aethelbald brought him gifts or asked his permission to grant land. To many in Mercia in the 750s it must have seemed that for all Aethelbald’s violent and lascivious behaviour, he had protected the poor, kept the peace – and been a bretwalda.

  THE TRIBES OF MERCIA – THE ANCIENT PEOPLES OF THE MIDLANDS

  By the winter of 757 Offa found himself relatively secure in Mercia, and we can imagine him spending Christmas in the royal hall at Tarnworth with his young wife Cynethryth and the Mercian bishops and chiefs who had backed his seizure of power. The kingdom he had gained probably comprised only the heartland of Mercia, roughly bounded by the Thames, the Fens, the Don and the Trent to the north-east (Lindsey still had its own kings), the Mersey to the north-west, and the Wye and the hills of Powys to the west. We should not think of the Mercians as one people, or even one race. They were the dominant tribe among about thirty peoples who lived in central England, some of which rejoiced in primitive and now completely obscure names: the Unecung-ga, the Noxgaga, the Hendrica. All these had their own ealdormen and their own tribal centre at this time, and some of the large ones still had their own kings, but all were to lose their independence to Offa. Even though many of these local names were used as late as the tenth and eleventh centuries, Offa’s reign signifies the end of this primitive system of local government which had lasted nearly two hundred years, and the creation of a unified kingdom in middle England.

  In his day the landscape of central England was given shape and order by the small Mercian tribes. Some of them numbered several thousand households, like the Hwicce in the Severn valley whose name survives in Wychwood in Oxfordshire, ‘the wood of the Hwicce’ Some numbered only a few hundred households like the Gifle in the Ivel valley in Hertfordshire, or the Hicce who gave their name to Hitchin. A West-Saxon traveller or merchant coming up from the south would say that he entered Mercia as soon as he crossed the Thames at Kempsford or Cricklade south of Cirencester, but to a Mercian he was entering the land of the Hwicce: Mercia proper was the land around the upper Trent. The North Mercians, numbering 7000 households, had a centre at ‘Northworthy’ (now Derby) and their main divisions underlie the later counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The South Mercians, made up of 5000 households, lived west of the upper Trent, and their main tribes were the Pencersaetan, whose royal centre was Penkridge, and the Tomsaetan in the Tame valley. The territory of the Tomsaetan stretched from the church at Breedon-on-the-Hill to King’s Norton south-west of Birmingham, a distance of over thirty miles. This was the heartland of the Mercian empire, with the royal church at Repton, the bishopric at Lichfield and the main residence at Tamworth. The Tomsaetan were administered by their own ealdorman, and the council of the elders of the Tomsaetan met well into the ninth century. It may be that they were regarded as the royal tribe, and certainly the Mercian kings spent more time there than anywhere else.

  The names of all the Mercian tribes are given in an intriguing document called the Tribal Hidage. It is a tribute list, drawn up to aid the Mercian king’s ministers in exacting taxes from the provinces and regions of the Mercian empire, and it may have been compiled for Offa, though the obscurity of many of the names in it suggests that it is earlier still. Perhaps it was the work of Wulfhere, the first Mercian bretwalda. But the system of government it represents functioned in Offa’s time; indeed the Mercian kingdom reached its apogee under Off
a. To get a feel of the way these early peoples shaped the landscape, and to perceive the physical continuity between their world and ours, look, for instance, at the fields between Radway and Kineton in Warwickshire. Here it is possible to stand on the boundary between the Mercians and the Stoppingas (one of the small groups who made up the Hwicce) near the once royal village of Wellesbourne. The creation of the modern shires in the tenth century ignored this ancient division, but it still marks the diocesan boundary between the bishoprics of Worcester and Coventry (then called Lichfield), showing that when the Mercian kings in the seventh century accepted Christianity and divided their land into dioceses, the dioceses were formed on the old tribal territories. The still existing hedgerow near Radway was an old boundary even in Offa’s time. Such configurations defined his kingdom. When he and his court stayed ‘in the region of the Stoppingas’ he will have been entertained in the royal hall of those people at Wellesbourne (which remained a residence as late as 862); he will have collected his taxes or food rent from his reeve in Kineton (‘King’s tun’) and may even have ridden the bounds to confirm any grant of land there ‘… from the marl pit to the milldam and on to the oak copse’. A king in the Dark Ages knew his landscape intimately. It was his patrimony.

  THE COURT ON THE MOVE: A BAD WINTER

  There was no capital of the Mercian empire. Offa was itinerant and only ruled by moving from place to place, constantly showing himself to friends and cowing his enemies. He stayed on his farms and estates and on those of his leading landowners and monasteries, taking taxes, food and hospitality, and giving land, privileges and gifts in return. He travelled by Roman roads often left in disrepair for four hundred years except where local authority had remade them. Apart from the four great roads – Watling Street, Ermine Street, the Fosse Way, and the Icknield Way – the concept of a well-defined road system had gone. The economy was based on highly localised centres of distribution, and the terminology of the charters shows that communications were geared to this: roads to local markets, roads which the local militia could use, roads suitable for a mounted army, and then the wonderful wealth of peasant names identifying the local tracks, the ‘foul way’, the ‘stubby way’, the ‘clay way’.

  When the court moved about, Offa and his chief men, his prefect Brorda, his bishops, and his court officials, rode horses, but carts were needed to carry tents and baggage, relics and treasure, the contents of the royal chapel. To be a king in the Dark Ages required physical toughness and energy, but all the members of the court must have been hardy men and women, for in winter travel can only have been miserable.

  During Christmas 763 travel stopped altogether and for four months the king was virtually inactive, for this was what the eighth century remembered as ‘the bad winter’ just as we do that of 1947. ‘The snow lay thick over the whole country, frozen from the start of winter through to the middle of spring,’ wrote a monk in Northumbria; ‘trees and crops were killed off, and even the fish died’ (Symeon of Durham History of the Kings ). Even in our era of high mechanisation and electronic communication, we know what chaos can still result from a really bad winter, and even in modern states crops can fail. In 763 it was disastrous. ‘Bread shortage,’ says an Irish annalist. On the continent there was the same bleak tale. And as always in those days a hard winter brought fires in towns built of wood in closely packed tenements. The Northumbrian annalist notes that London, Winchester, York and other towns burned down that winter. Faced with disasters like this a king was powerless to act. Without telephone or telegraph, his letters delivered by hand, he could not rule in these conditions. All he could do was to keep to his hall and his nearby estates, use up the supplies of food laid in for winter, and hope the royal poets had a good fund of stories to recite at table. The only consolation was that the Welsh were hardly going to raid in this weather.

  CHRISTMAS IN THE ROYAL HALL

  Christmas was usually spent at Tamworth. This is certainly true of the later Mercian kings, and probably of Offa too. On Boxing Day 781, for instance, we find him there making grants of land to Worcester Cathedral, the official business being transacted before the meal. (In earlier times, and perhaps as late as Offa’s day, these grants were accompanied by an archaic ritual in which the king joined hands with the queen and the bishop, and placed a turf from the land on a gospel book.) In the king’s chamber that day were Queen Cynethryth, bishops Eadberht of Leicester, Hygeberht of Lichfield and Hathored of Worcester, and the Mercian chiefs Brorda, Berhtwald and Eadbald. There would also have been thegns, royal officials, and abbots from nearby Mercian monasteries. Altogether twenty or thirty people sat at table for the feast, supervised by Offa’s steward and served by royal staff who lived and worked at the residence and its attached farms. These servants would be there all year round, and when Offa came to stay his assessors went on ahead to check that stocks were plentiful, bread baked, animals ready for slaughter and that the beer was brewing. (With no hops to act as preservative, beer went off quickly, and only hardened drinkers preferred it stale.) The feast on Boxing Day 781 was a grand occasion but there were times when Offa was there only with his bodyguard and his chief court officers, for it was an expensive matter to feed the bishops and ealdormen and their retinues. The list of food and drink needed for one night’s upkeep for the king and his court in the early eighth century gives an idea of how much was consumed: 10 jars of honey, 300 loaves, 12 casks of Welsh ale, 30 of clear ale, 2 old oxen, 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, a cask full of butter, 5 salmon, 100 eels, and 20 pounds weight of fodder (Laws of Ine). It can be imagined how efficient the food rent system had to be, to feed the court as it moved about, to make sure that food from surrounding estates arrived at the royal centres, and the kings rarely gave land to their churches or to their followers without imposing the obligation of providing the king’s feorm, his food rent. When Offa gave an estate at Westbury-on-Trym in Gloucestershire to the church at Worcester, he released it from the now customary dues of military service, but he insisted on keeping his ancient taxes, ‘two big casks of pure ale, a cask of mild ale, a cask of Welsh ale, seven oxen and six wethers, forty cheeses …’ and so on. Food and accommodation were major concerns of Dark Age kings, and much administrative expertise went into making the system work smoothly.

  Tamworth today has been gutted by modern developments, although it has a fine Norman Castle, and it is difficult to picture it as it was in the eighth century except when you stand down on the flood plain of the Tame and the Anker and look westwards. Here the southern edge of the citadel was protected by water, marsh and reeds, and the road south-west crossed by a causeway. The northern side of the town was and is heavily wooded. In Offa’s day it would have seemed as if the settlement was in a great clearing in the forests between the Tame and the Trent.

  We know a great deal more about Offa’s Tamworth than we did only twenty years ago. It had been a royal seat, and was maybe the main seat, as early as the late seventh century. It was then known as Tomtun, ‘the settlement by the Tame’. At that time there may have been no more than a small wooden hall and chamber with a wooden chapel and a corral. Sometime in the mid eighth century a defensive ditch with stakes in the inner face of the bank and possibly a palisade were dug to enclose the site, so forming what the Mercians called a worthig, and from then on it was known as Tomeworthig, ‘the enclosure by the Tame’. The charters show that from 781 the Mercian kings regularly kept the festivals of Christmas and Easter at Tamworth. From the ninth century there was a permanent treasury here for the receipt of royal dues and it may be that royal archives were also kept here, as charters written elsewhere were occasionally brought to Tamworth for royal approval at Christmas.

  OFFA’S WATERMILL

  In 1971 a sensational discovery was made in connection with Offa’s Boxing Day feast in 781. In the south-east corner of the defences at Tamworth archaeologists found the intact timbers of a two-storey Anglo-Saxon watermill. Four radiocarbon dates place the structure in the mid eighth century.
It was of the horizontal-wheel type, which you can see in Crete today, and was chiefly remarkable for its high-quality craftsmanship, with glass and lead in the windows, a main bearing of high-quality steel, and lava querns imported from the Rhineland which may be the ‘dark stones’ referred to in a letter from Charlemagne to Offa on the subject of trade with England. Because there is as yet a lack of evidence with which to compare the Tamworth mill, it is difficult for the archaeologist to be sure whether he is looking at something which served a royal establishment, a farm, or some sort of urban nucleus, but the quality of the finds and their discovery within a known royal centre argue that the mill served the king. Here then, the flour would have been ground to make hundreds of loaves for the court at Christmas 781.

  OFFA’S PALACE

  Historians have always taken the presence of such gatherings to mean that Offa had a ‘palace’ in Tamworth, and they are probably right, though it is as well to remember that of the two grants issued there in 781, only a tenth-century copy speaks of a palace, the other referring simply to a ‘royal seat’. Nevertheless several sources mention Offa’s royal hall, and we are surely entitled to think that there was one here, and a splendid one at that. But where was it? Finds of reused Roman building material in the south-east corner of the town, and then the discovery of the mill in the same area, directed archaeologists’ attention there. But recently it has been suggested that the great building stood in the raised open space in the town centre by the church. As the ground is now the graveyard it cannot be excavated, and in any case it is unlikely that eighth-century layers would have survived in such deeply disturbed soil. But the kind of building envisaged gives us a new perspective on Offa’s forceful style of kingship.