A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  King Wulfhere invaded the Isle of Wight through Wessex in 661, disposed of lands in Lindsey, sold the see of London to a Frankish-born bishop, and subjected the king of Essex and the minor ruler of Surrey to his rule. Probably his presentation of Wight to the king of the South Saxons was as important in that king’s final acceptance of Christianity as the preaching of St Wilfrid. Wielding power and influence on this scale throughout the island would seem to make Wulfhere a candidate to be numbered among Bede’s list of rulers who wielded the imperium, the ‘bretwaldas’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Then, in 674, he overstretched himself when, ‘insatiable of spirit’, he ‘roused all the southern peoples’ against King Ecgfrith of Northumbria and led them to defeat. He lost the province of Lindsey in the process and his life soon after.

  It was only a temporary setback for Mercia. Within five years his brother Æthelred (ruled Mercia 674–716) had raided into Kent and, in 679, fought Ecgfrith of Northumbria to a standstill at a battle ‘near the River Trent’. Mercia recovered Lindsey. Among the dead was Ecgfrith’s brother, Ælfwine, ‘much beloved in both kingdoms’, Bede tells us. A prolonged feud was to be expected; instead, in a notable settlement negotiated by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, Ecgfrith agreed to accept the wergild payable for the death of a royal kinsman. The resulting peace stretched well into the next century, for in 704 King Æthelred abdicated to become a monk and subsequently abbot of Bardney, where he ruled until his death, presiding over the burgeoning cult of the Northumbrian saint-king Oswald. His wife, Oswald’s niece, had brought the bulk of the relics there some years before.

  Æthelred was followed on the throne by a nephew, Coenred, who also followed him into religion, abdicating in 709; he died on pilgrimage to Rome. The reign of his successor Ceolred (709–16) was troubled by the lurking presence of Æthelbald, an exiled distant kinsman who claimed descent from a brother of King Penda.

  Æthelbald of Mercia – Lord of the Southern English 716–57

  Æthelbald found sanctuary on the desolate island of Crowland in the Fens, where Guthlac, by this time a noted holy man, had made his retreat. This St Guthlac had won renown in a former life as a warband leader on Mercia’s western frontier. A Life of St Guthlac was commissioned soon after his death by a king of East Anglia and two Old English poems, ‘Guthlac A’ and ‘Guthlac B’ also tell his story. Conditions on his island were ideal for the solitary soldier of Christ in battle against the demons of temptation, but hardly for a king-to-be. Guthlac dressed in skins and, by way of nourishment, indulged himself daily with a small piece of barley bread and a beaker of muddy fen water. On the other hand, the place was pretty secure; few, other than the saint and favoured pilgrims seeking the blessing of the holy man (and presumably the baker), knew the way through the treacherous, boggy terrain. The hermit saint prophesied that Æthelbald would become king, and the pretender vowed to build an abbey on the hermit’s island should that happen. He may have honoured his promise – eighth-century timber piling, adequate as the foundations of a wattle and daub structure, have been unearthed.5 Centuries later the Croyland/Crowland Chronicle would claim he had made extensive land grants. What little we know about Æthelbald indicates that an act of piety would have been out of character. The fact that he reigned for just over forty years in a violent age squares better with his reputation as a cruel and oppressive ruler. On the other hand, keeping faith with the deity might have seemed simple commonsense.

  About the year 732, Bede noted, Æthelbald was the overlord of the East Saxons, East Angles, the West Saxons, the ‘people who dwell to the west of the River Severn’, the kingdoms of the Hwicce, and Lindsey, the Isle of Wight and the South Saxons. (Where King Aelle had first wielded the obscure powers of bretwalda, the once royal house now barely exercised the authority of a district governor.) A Mercian royal charter of 736 describes Æthelbald as ‘king’ of all the ‘provinces’ known as the Sutangli; and in a charter of this same year he features as ‘Rex Britanniae’,6 presumably a Latin equivalent for ‘bretwalda’.

  In the 720s the abdication of King Ine of Wessex to go on pilgrimage to Rome and the death of Wihtred of Kent had removed two powerful rivals on his southern frontier. The kings of the East Saxons (Essex) had to surrender control of London to Æthelbald and in 748 a Mercian royal council was held there. But his under-kings could exercise local authority. The Hwicce acknowledged him as ‘king of the Southern English’ (‘rex Sutanglorum’) and marched under his banners against the Welsh. But in 767 and 770 we find grants of land being made by their under-king.

  Æthelbald’s exercise of secular power outside Mercia was real enough. For a time in the 730s he occupied the West Saxon royal vill at Somerton; he made grants of Wessex land to the cathedral church at Canterbury; he enlisted the West Saxons, too, against the Welsh; at the other end of England he ravaged Northumbria and made opportunistic alliances with the king of the Picts. His agents collected tolls from the shipping in London’s emporium Lundenwic, and he disposed of lands in the territories of the Middle Saxons (Middlesex), formerly the preserve of the kings of Essex.

  This was the man that St Boniface chose to lecture on sexual mores. He credits him with generous charitable donations and as a friend to widows and the poor; and he praises him as an upholder of law and order who kept ‘a firm peace in [the] kingdom’. But against this Boniface sets reports he had heard ‘about your excellency’s private life’, which not only breached the laws of God but damaged the king’s standing ‘among the people’. If Boniface is to be believed, Æthelbald was unmarried and so, presumably, had yet to father a legitimate heir (in fact he was to be succeeded by a cousin). He was also a notorious lecher and adulterer, violating not only other men’s wives but also ‘the brides of Christ . . . Creator of heaven and earth!’ One supposes that many were jubilant when news broke in 757 that Æthelbald had met death at the hand of a bodyguard at Seckington, near the royal palace of Tamworth – probably under instructions from one or other party of the royal kin. After of the brief reign of Beornred, Offa, a kinsman of Æthelbald and quite possibly the chief plotter in his overthrow, emerges as the new monarch of the Mercians. With him we reach the most powerful of England’s many kings before the reign of King Alfred of Wessex. Mercia had already overtaken Northumbria as England’s dominant power.

  The world of Offa, King of the Mercians: 757 – July 796

  ‘The Age of Offa was perhaps the end of England’s heroic age.’ So wrote Patrick Wormald.7 The king himself claimed descent from Offa of Angeln, one of the kings named in the Beowulf epic; Offa’s Dyke may well have been in part inspired by ‘the boundary between his own people and their neighbours’ said to have been raised by this heroic Scandinavian namesake; and the title rex totius Anglorum patriae (‘king of the whole fatherland of the English’), awarded to him in a later copy of one of his charters, at least proclaims how big he appeared to a later generation.

  Asser, the Welsh biographer of King Alfred, describes Offa as building an earthwork ‘from sea to sea’. In fact, the structure we have today stretches more than 64 miles (103 km) northwards from the River Wye, near Hereford, to the vicinity of Mold in Clwyd. The northern end of the great Dyke is backed up by the 49-mile (62 km) Wat’s Dyke, which overlaps it and continues on to the estuary of the River Dee – one of Asser’s ‘seas’. We do not know when it was built. Numerous excavations from 1931 onwards have failed to find any signs of extensions to Offa’s defence work, or garrison forts or revetments or palisading. But at 30 feet (nearly 10 m) wide it was undoubtedly a formidable obstacle. Following thirty seasons of excavation and research, David Hill and Margaret Worthington, in their book of 2003 on the Dyke, argue that it runs along the line of the border between Mercia and the Welsh kingdom of Powys and that it may have been raised in the context of nine years of warfare between Offa and his western neighbour. It is guarded on the Welsh side by a wide ditch.

  The building of a defensive dyke, however impressive, hardly seems work for heroes. Even so, it has be
en suggested that the text of Beowulf may first have been set down from the oral tradition in Mercia, possibly during the reign of Offa or in the immediately succeeding period. Wormald pointed out that the hero’s name itself is very similar to that of Beornwulf, one later king of Mercia, and that of Wiglaf, his last loyal supporter, to that of another. The poem’s ‘take’ on Offa of Angeln, celebrated in Old Norse and Danish sources (though hardly mentioned in Anglo-Saxon ones), calling him ‘the best king . . . on the face of the earth . . . honoured far and wide for his generous ways, his fighting spirit and his far-seeing defence of his homeland’, is certainly suggestive. Offa’s actual grandfather may have hailed from the land of the Hwicce.

  With Beornred disposed of, the way lay open for a king of ruthless ambition. For eighty years, between the accession of Æthelbald (716) and the death of Offa (796), Mercia dominated English history. With the exception of those few months in 757, just two men occupied the throne throughout that time, a record of dynastic tenure not to be outdone until the reigns of Henry III and Edward I (1216–1307), and quite remarkable for the bloodthirsty eighth century. His great predecessor had died without an heir, but Offa was determined to ensure the succession in his own family. He was also bent on supremacy over his neighbours – of achieving what Bede had called the imperium. It seems he owned a copy of Bede’s History.

  It was to be a new type of hegemony. Æthelbald had allowed a certain autonomy to subject regions. When Offa came to power three brothers apparently shared the rule of the Hwicce; some twenty years later these ‘sub-kinglets’ are heard of no more and the territory has been absorbed into greater Mercia. The kings of Sussex now administered the territory in Offa’s name as his ‘ealdormen’. In Kent, the first of England’s Christian kingdoms and in regular contact with the continent, the process took a little longer. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the battle of Otford between Kent and the Mercians in 776 but does not mention the outcome.

  In 785 Offa makes a land grant in Kent in his own name, without reference to any Kentish ‘king’ or even ‘ealdorman’. Other sources mention the shadowy figure of Ealhmund, who had been elected king in Kent by the native nobility. Unrest continued to trouble Offa in his Kentish province and then, in 786, Ealhmund’s son Ecgberht, who also claimed descent from the royal family of Wessex, attempted to ‘take the throne [there]’, but was ordered into exile ‘to the land of the Franks’ by Offa and King Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802). He stayed there for three years at the court of Charles the Great – did he perhaps meet Alcuin, the great Northumbrian scholar, at the Carolingian court (see chapter 6)?

  Wessex was independent; it was also a client state to Mercia, and Ecgberht did well to survive. Maybe the judicial execution of so prominent an æthling would have been too provocative. But things were not well in the Mercian supremacy. Offa’s death witnessed a full-scale revolt in Kent. The pretender, by name Eadberht Præn, was reportedly an ordained priest, although he may also have been a Kentish æthling and so throneworthy. He held the throne for two years before being deposed and taken bound to Mercia, where he was blinded (the standard penalty for usurpers at imperial Constantinople) and his hands cut off – the penalty for theft.

  There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that he had in fact been in exile on the Continent. The famous letter from Charles the Great to Offa, dealing with trade and other matters, also refers to ‘the priest Odberht’who, along with a company of other exiles, had ‘sought . . . our protection, being in fear of death’. It is apparent from the context that Offa wants him back in England and one wonders whether Odberht and Eadberht are one and the same person. Charles refers to letters from Offa that ‘have informed us, that [these exiles] had bound themselves by a (religious) vow’ but ‘Odberht’, claiming to be a pilgrim, wishes to continue his pilgrimage. Charles has decided to send him and his companions on to Rome where the pope and Archbishop Æthelheard, ‘your archbishop’, would judge their case. The Frankish king thinks it safer that the pope decide the status of the exiles, that is whether they are indeed ‘religious’, since ‘the opinion of some people is different’. Is the allusion to a forced tonsuring of a throne claimant to debar him from candidacy? Charles makes no promise to return ‘Odberht’ to Mercia once he is back from Rome since his wish for pilgrimage must be taken seriously.

  Connection with the royal kin, even if remote, was important for a successful claim on the crown. Offa could show descent in the fifth generation of a collateral branch from the Mercian founding ancestor; in Wessex Ecgberht was the first of his branch of the royal house of Cerdic to ascend the throne – his father was a Kentish king, presumably of Kentish stock. After his death a West Saxon genealogist grafted him into the Cerdic family to produce what the historian Richard Abels has called ‘a useable past’.8 Genealogy was very much in vogue in the late eighth century and an important compilation of family trees that survives from the 810s probably originated in the Northumbrian court in the 760s. A Northumbrian provenance is not surprising. In the hundred years up to 810 that kingdom had had fifteen kings, of whom just three had died in office: of the others five had been deposed, two exiled, two murdered and three ‘killed’.

  It is quite possible that the Mercian kings had been responsible for some of these fatalities; their ascendancy was not a matter of chance either within or outside their frontiers. In 794, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Offa ordered the beheading of King Æthelberht of East Anglia, without reason given. Shortly after the great king’s death, writing to a Mercian ealdorman, Alcuin stated as common knowledge ‘how much blood [Offa] shed to secure the kingdom on his son’. In the year 787 he had that son, Ecgfrith, ‘consecrated’.

  There are no details as to the nature of the ceremony, but it is assumed that the word ‘consecration’ carried its traditional Christian meaning of an anointing with holy oil and chrism (oil and balsam mixed) administered by priest or bishop. ‘King making’ in early Germanic society was more a matter of presenting the winner of a ceremony of election, generally completed by raising the new king on a shield. We do not know whether early Anglo-Saxon kings were ever made in this way; Alcuin’s reference to King Eadberht at York ‘wearing the crown of his ancestors upon his head’ (see chapter 3) indicates that Northumbrians at least thought that crowning as such had a long tradition. Among Germanic kings on the Continent the crown or diadem was presumably adopted from the ceremonial of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine empire, but from York itself comes that mysterious piece of headgear known as the Coppergate Helm with its religious Latin inscriptions – surely fitting furniture for the ‘churching’ of a Christian warrior king.

  A few years before Ecgfrith’s elevation, the pope had anointed two sons of Charles the Great. For the last ten years of the reign, Ecgfrith presumably held the rank of co-ruler, though given his father’s imperious nature it probably had little practical significance. However, in 796, the year of his months-long reign, Ecgfrith issued a charter at the Mercian court assembly held at the ‘famous’ vill or ‘minster’ of Bath. The remains of the Roman city were almost certainly the subject of a short Old English poem Ruin, which reflects on the past glories of the work of giants and the marvels of the hot springs. It seems likely that the Mercian monarchy was looking to ape the new palace complex that Charles the Great was building near the hot springs of Aachen.9 But the new king died in December 796. Alcuin believed he fell victim to ‘the vengeance for the blood shed by his father’. Three years later Ecgfrith’s successors began the development of Offa’s royal vill at Tamworth as something approaching a ‘capital’ of the kingdom, also no doubt inspired by the complex at Aachen.

  The Mercian Church

  Ecgfrith was probably consecrated at the synod or ecclesiastical council of 786/7, attended by papal legates and presided over by King Offa. The council’s decrees were promulgated both in Latin and the vernacular (in Southumbria presumably in Offa’s name, and in Northumbria at a similar council held there), and were reported back to the pope
by the legates. They dealt with the proper conduct of and the sacrosanctity of the office of king, the desirability of powerful men rendering justice, and various ecclesiastical provisions (apparently approved of by Alcuin of York, who was in England at this time). It was the latest in a series of councils of the church in England south of the Humber that had begun with Archbishop Theodore’s synod at Hertford back in 672 (when the delegates had agreed to a yearly convention thereafter at the place called Clofesho). The series had contributed to the growth in the power and unity of the English church as a whole.