Offa and the Mercian Wars

by Chris Peers

  Henry of Huntingdon may have had an independent source, now lost, for his assertion that the Mercian kingdom was founded by Cryda about 585, and that Pybba reigned after him, followed by Cearl. If that is correct, perhaps it was Cearl who was the usurper, and Penda was merely reclaiming a throne that was his by right. In fact the word ‘Cearl’ may be an insult rather than a name: it seems clearly linked to the term ‘ceorl’ or ‘churl’, which in Anglo-Saxon law codes had come to denote a man of low birth. One other member of Penda’s family tree, Cynewald’s grandfather Icel, seems to have been a historical figure. In Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac we are told that the saint, who died in 714, was descended from a line of Mercian kings, ‘back to Icel in whom it began in days of old’, and around the time of Guthlac’s death the royal dynasty began to refer to itself as the Iclingas, or people of Icel. Calculating five generations back from Penda might place Icel around the beginning of the sixth century, but although he may have been the leader of the people who later founded the kingdom, he was not a king of Mercia itself. His name is an unusual one, and it has been plausibly suggested that several surviving place names incorporating the element ‘Icel’ – including Ickelford in Hertfordshire and Ickleton in Cambridgeshire – were associated with him or his family (Myres). These are mostly located in Middle and East Anglia, which implies that even if the Mercians themselves were mainly indigenous, their ruling clan had originally come from the south-east. However, other place name evidence hints at a connection with what is now Worcestershire, where places such as Pedmore (‘Pybba’s Moor’) near Stourbridge, and Pendiford (‘Penda’s Ford’) in King’s Norton, if they do not actually commemorate Penda and his forebears, at least show that their names were familiar in the region (N. Brooks, in Bassett).

  Contemporary evidence suggests that even at the end of the first quarter of the seventh century, Mercia hardly existed as a recognisable entity. The Northumbrians and East Anglians seem to have been able to campaign over its territory without any interference from local forces. The first mention of Penda in the Winchester manuscript of the Chronicle, under the year 626, states that he ‘had the kingdom for thirty years’, but does not name the kingdom or the people over whom he ruled. The Peterborough version refers to Penda several times, but the first mention of a title appears in 645, with a reference to ‘King Penda’, again of an unspecified kingdom (though Bede, describing the same events with hindsight some seventy years later, does call him ‘king of the Mercians’). In the Peterborough Chronicle under the year 641 he is ‘Penda the Southumbrian’, obviously so named in opposition to his enemy Oswald of Northumbria. The first clear statement pointing to the identity of Penda’s realm comes after his death in 654, when his son Peada ‘succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians.’

  The Northumbrian Menace

  Whatever his formal title, for nearly thirty years after 626 Penda was the dominant figure in British affairs. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states under this year that he was 50 years old when he came to power, but this must be an error as his sister, who was presumably roughly his contemporary, was not married until the 640s, and Penda’s own sons Peada and Wulfhere are described as young men in the following decade. More likely he was in his twenties in 626, and hence around 50, rather than 80, when he died in battle in 654.

  Penda’s career of conquest had its roots in a dispute between two of Mercia’s more powerful neighbours, Northumbria and East Anglia. At the beginning of the seventh century the Angles north of the Humber were still divided between their two original kingdoms – Deira in the south, with its heartland in what are now the Yorkshire Wolds, and Bernicia further north. Aethelfrith, the king of Bernicia from 593 to 616, was an aggressive warlord who, according to Bede, ‘ravaged the Britons more cruelly than all other English leaders.’ In 603 he defeated the Scottish king Aedan in a famous battle at Degsastan, and two years later was responsible for the deaths of the ‘countless number of Welsh’ which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says were killed at Chester. His expansionist aims, however, were not directed exclusively against the British. At some point early in his reign he married the daughter of the recently deceased Aelle, king of Deira, and incorporated his southern neighbour into a united kingdom, soon to become known as Northumbria.

  Aelle, however, had also left a son, Edwin, who had escaped into exile for fear that Aethelfrith would have him murdered as a potential rival. Edwin features prominently in Bede’s history because of his later role in spreading Christianity in Northumbria, and the chronicler relates how he wandered incognito through ‘many lands and kingdoms’, always just one step ahead of Aethelfrith’s assassins. As discussed above, there is evidence that he spent part of his exile in Mercia, but Cearl was probably not strong enough to resist pressure from Aethelfrith. It has even been suggested that Cearl fought against the Northumbrians at Chester in 605 and was killed there, but this is guesswork. Eventually Edwin was either forced to leave Mercia or decided to do so for his own safety, moving on to East Anglia where King Raedwald made him welcome at his court.

  When news of Edwin’s whereabouts reached Northumbria, Aethelfrith sent messengers to Raedwald with a bribe to induce him to kill his guest. The king at first refused, but the Northumbrians persisted, offering greater rewards, and at the same time threatening war if the fugitive was not disposed of or handed over. From subsequent events it seems that Aethelfrith backed up his threats by advancing southwards with an army, deep into what was to become Mercian territory. Eventually Raedwald, perhaps intimidated by Aethelfrith’s warlike reputation, agreed to comply, but one of Edwin’s friends at court informed him of the plan. Bede tells how the young prince refused to flee – believing that there was nowhere left where he would be safe, he prepared to meet his fate. In his misery he was visited by a spirit who promised that he would not only escape with his life, but would go on to become the greatest king there had ever been among the English people. In return Edwin agreed to follow the advice of whoever would help him to victory. He soon discovered that he had been saved by the intervention of Raedwald’s queen, who argued that for a king to betray a guest, especially for material reward, would be to sacrifice ‘the most valuable of all possessions’, his royal honour.

  Raedwald therefore decided on an aggressive policy, mustered his forces and struck at the Northumbrians without warning. The two armies met on the east bank of the River Idle, a tributary of the Trent, diverted in the seventeenth century, which once flowed as far north as Hatfield Chase near Doncaster. Bede describes the site as in Mercian territory, but there is no indication that the Mercians took any part in the battle. It is not unlikely that Aethelfrith had been expecting local reinforcements, but the speed of the East Anglian onslaught gave him no time to concentrate his forces. According to Bede he was greatly outnumbered by Raedwald’s men, but the battle must nevertheless have been hard fought. Henry of Huntingdon’s account has the East Angles advancing ‘in three bodies, with fluttering standards’. The ferocious Aethelfrith allegedly launched a desperate charge against the division led by Raedwald’s son Raegenhere, routing it and killing its commander. However, Raedwald stood firm in the face of this disaster, and the Northumbrian king became separated from his main body while pressing home the attack on the remaining two columns. He was surrounded and fought to the death, finally falling on top of a heap of East Anglian corpses slain by his own hand. The Northumbrians were decisively defeated and, as is customary in medieval battle narratives, the river ‘was stained with English blood’ (Henry of Huntingdon).

  Nevertheless some sort of negotiated peace must have followed, because the former refugee Edwin suddenly found himself returning home at the head of the survivors of the army which had been sent to kill him. Aethelfrith’s seven sons were in turn forced into exile among the Picts and Scots, and Edwin succeeded to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates these events to the year 617, and goes on to say that the new king, apparently uninhibited by any sense of gratitude towards his East Anglian hosts, ‘conque
red all Britain except for the inhabitants of Kent.’

  This last statement is obviously an exaggeration, but Edwin did enthusiastically continue his predecessor’s expansionist foreign policy, and, according to Bede, he achieved a pre-eminence ‘unmatched by any previous English king’. He annexed the little kingdom of Elmet south of the Humber, occupied the Isle of Man and launched a damaging invasion of the North Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, during which he overran Anglesey and unsuccessfully besieged the king of Gwynedd, Cadwallon, at Priestholm.

  Edwin also intervened in Wessex heavy-handedly enough to make himself unpopular, as Bede tells the story of how Cwichelm, one of several contemporary ‘kings’ of the West Saxons, sent an assassin named Eumer to kill him. In Bede’s account this act set off a train of events which had enormous unforeseen consequences. Eumer arrived at the Northumbrian court beside the River Derwent on Easter Day 626, claiming to have an important message from Cwichelm. Edwin granted him an audience, whereupon Eumer produced a hidden dagger and attempted to stab him. One of the king’s thegns, Lilla, threw himself in front of his master, but the blow was so powerful that the dagger went right through him and wounded Edwin. The king’s guards quickly closed in on Eumer, but he fought so desperately that he killed another thegn named Forthhere before he was finally cut down. Bede says that the assassin’s dagger was poisoned, but if so it was not very effective, as Edwin made a swift recovery from his wound.

  This was an eventful day for the Northumbrian ruler, for at the same time his wife Ethelberga was giving birth to a daughter. Ethelberga was the sister of King Eadbald of Kent, and a Christian. At her brother’s insistence she had been accompanied to the still-pagan Northumbrian court by an Italian bishop named Paulinus, who now lost no time in persuading Edwin that his survival and Ethelberga’s painless childbirth had been due to the prayers of the queen and her Christian followers. According to Bede the king recalled his other miraculous escape at the East Anglian court, and told the bishop that if God would grant him victory over those who had tried to murder him he would in return abandon his pagan deities. He then invaded Wessex and was victorious, killing five ‘kings’ and countless other people. Bede says that he killed or captured all those who had been involved in the assassination plot, although this cannot have included Cwichelm himself, who was still in power two years later.

  ‘Not Angles but Angels’

  Despite this apparent sign from heaven Edwin remained reluctant to commit himself to Christianity, and Bede quotes letters sent to him and Ethelberga by Pope Boniface V, at Paulinus’ instigation, encouraging him to take the final step. It was during this period that one of his councillors made perhaps the most famous speech of the age, likening the life of a man to the flight of a sparrow through a firelit hall on a winter’s night, from the darkness, briefly into the light, then back into darkness. Any teaching that could shed light on what happened before or after our short span on earth, he argued, was worth following. Edwin may of course have been genuinely interested in religious matters, and Bede, anxious to establish him as one of the first and greatest of English saints, would have us believe so. But Christianity also had practical advantages, not least in promising diplomatic and trade contacts with the already converted peoples of south-eastern England and the Continent, and in providing access to the services of literate churchmen such as Paulinus with experience of Roman legal and administrative practices.

  We know very little about post-Roman English paganism, but we can be sure that by the 620s it was increasingly beleaguered. Much of the west of Britain had retained an unbroken tradition of Christianity since Roman times, and during the fifth and sixth centuries, when the faith had been giving ground in England, it continued to spread westwards. Receiving their Christianity from Palladius and Patrick in the late fifth century, the Irish had reexported it to the Picts and Scots of Scotland in the sixth. Meanwhile, across the English Channel the Franks, a warlike German people who had overrun much of Roman Gaul, had been converted under their king Clovis in 496. How much of the religion persisted in England is unclear, but Bede admits that the Hwicce were already converted by the time missionaries from Rome reached the area, and records that the first of these missionaries, Augustine, found a church already available for use when he arrived in Kent in 597. This mission was sent by Pope Gregory, whose interest in the plight of the heathen English was said to have been inspired by the sight of Anglian slave boys in the market at Rome, the subjects of his famous pun, ‘non Anglii sed Angeli’.

  At first Augustine and his companions were reluctant to venture among what Bede calls ‘a barbarous, fierce and pagan nation’, but they need not have worried. King Aethelberht of Kent was already disposed towards toleration because his wife Bertha, a Frankish princess, was a Christian. By the time of his death in 616 Aethelberht himself had accepted baptism. The teachings of Augustine and his followers were soon gaining, or regaining, ground across most of England, thanks to the Roman missionaries’ tactic of converting the rulers first and encouraging them to set an example to their people.

  Bede ascribes the conversion of the West Saxons to the year 635, and adds that at about the same time the throne of the East Angles, whose ruling family had fluctuated in their allegiance to the new faith during the reign of King Raedwald, was occupied by Sigeberht, ‘a good and religious man’ who had been baptised while living in exile in France during Raedwald’s reign, and who now requested a bishop to be sent from Canterbury to consolidate the East Anglian church. Five years later the newly crowned King Eorconberht of Kent was the first English ruler to prohibit paganism, order the destruction of idols, and introduce compulsory fasting during Lent. Christianity was no longer a matter purely of personal conviction but was becoming a state ideology, in aggressive opposition to the remnants of the ancient religion of the Angles and Saxons.

  Only Mercia continued to resist the wave of conversion. Even Bede admits, however, that Penda was no diehard pagan fanatic. He refused to accept baptism himself, but he tolerated those who preached Christianity to his subjects and allowed his own sons to convert. In fact he reserved his scorn for those who professed to follow the new faith but failed to live up to its ideals. For this reason it is unlikely that religion was an important motive behind his wars, at least on the Mercian side. This, however, did not prevent the chronicler and many of those who followed him from stigmatising the Mercians as irreconcilable pagans, often referring to them as ‘the heathen’, in contrast to the nominally Christian armies of their rivals. Unfortunately our sources for the pre-Christian beliefs of the English are too poor to enable us to reconstruct the role of religion in motivating their armies, and it is likely that there never was a coherent ‘pagan’ theology, but rather a loosely organised collection of gods and beliefs varying from place to place. Bede’s account of the conversion of Edwin’s Northumbria suggests that by the seventh century even its own priests were losing faith in the ability of the old gods to deliver victory, but Bede is hardly an unbiased source.

  Bede also tells us that pagan priests were not allowed to bear arms or to ride stallions, but this need not preclude a ceremonial or morale-boosting role on the battlefield. There is plenty of evidence that Christian commanders made use of crosses, prayer and similar devices to encourage their troops, and Bede’s description of the Battle of Chester in 605 suggests that non-Christians may also have believed in the efficacy of such tactics. Faced with an invasion by Aethelfrith’s Northumbrians, the Britons of North Wales recruited a contingent of over 1,200 priests, mostly brought from the great monastery at Bangor, to pray for victory. These were drawn up separately from the British army in what was supposed to be a safe location, and were provided with a bodyguard led by a man named Brocmail or Scrocmail. But before the battle began they were spotted by Aethelfrith, who asked his advisers who they were. On being informed of their identity he declared that ‘if they are crying to their God against us, they are fighting against us even if they do not bear arms.’ He therefore ordered th
e first attack to be made not against the enemy army, but against the Christian holy men. Brocmail and his warriors, who had no doubt thought that their duties would keep them safely out of danger, ran away and left their charges to be massacred. The Northumbrians then wheeled against the British main body and destroyed it after a hard fight.

  It is tempting to play down the Christian/heathen dichotomy which runs through Bede’s writings as a product of his own religious background, and to question whether it was as important to the people of early seventh-century England as it seemed with hindsight. But this was not just a matter of doctrine and personal conviction: the visible manifestations of the two religious traditions could be very different indeed. There were pagan practices in Britain – whether ancient survivals or new introductions – which would have struck a contemporary Christian as barbarous in the extreme. The excavations at Sutton Hoo in the 1980s revealed that the mounds where the East Anglian kings were presumably buried were accompanied by two groups of burials consisting of bodies which had been dismembered in various ways before being placed in the ground. Many of these ‘execution burials’ clearly dated from the Christian era and so are likely to represent victims of judicial punishment, but at least some of the earlier ones can be interpreted as human sacrifices. Perhaps the sinister associations of the site persisted for several centuries, making it seem a suitable spot for the execution and burial of criminals.