Offa and the Mercian Wars

by Chris Peers

  The site of this encounter is usually supposed to be near Oswestry in Shropshire, which would imply a Northumbrian invasion of Mercian territory, but this identification is controversial. It seems to have been first suggested by Reginald of Durham in his Life of Saint Oswald, written in the late twelfth century. Reginald says that the site of the king’s death was marked by an ash tree at a place still known then as Maserfeld, a location that pilgrims continued to visit in his day. This seems inherently plausible, even though the name Maserfeld has now disappeared, because it is generally agreed that Oswestry derives from the Old English Oswaldstreow or ‘Oswald’s Tree’, the Welsh version being Croesoswald, or ‘Oswald’s Cross’. The battle itself was known in Welsh poetry as Maes Cogwy, and to Nennius, writing in Latin, as Bellum Cocboy, but no modern equivalent has been located. Other suggestions place the battle further north, in or near to Northumbrian territory, which would mean that rather than taking the fight to the enemy, Oswald was conducting a defensive campaign against yet another Mercian invasion. Bede refers to him as being killed ‘fighting for his country against the heathen’, though he would be expected to portray his hero’s death in the best possible light, and in any case an invasion of Mercia could have had a defensive purpose, perhaps to pre-empt an expected attack and ensure that this time it was Penda’s lands rather than Oswald’s that were ravaged by the campaigning armies. Another candidate for the battle site is in Lancashire, where the church at Winwick is traditionally associated with Saint Oswald, and still has a ‘Saint Oswald’s well’ in the vicinity. The surrounding district was once known as Makerfield, and the place names Ashton-and Ince-in-Makerfield survive today south of Wigan. Unfortunately, however, there seems to be no etymological link between the names Makerfield and Maserfelth (Kenyon).

  A site on the other side of the Pennines, near Bardney in Lindsey, has also recently been put forward (Clarkson). The evidence for this rests not on an account of the campaign itself, but on the subsequent fate of Oswald’s remains. Bede says that after the king’s death Penda had Oswald’s head and forearms cut off and displayed on stakes in a gruesome pagan ritual, presumably on the battlefield itself. The next year Oswald’s successor, his brother Oswy, led an army to the spot and retrieved the relics, taking the head to the monastery at Lindisfarne and the arms to Bamburgh, where the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that they remained uncorrupted as a sign of their former owner’s sanctity. Clarkson argues that Oswy would not have been in a position to launch another major invasion of the Mercian heartland so soon after the crushing defeat of the previous year, and hence that the field must have been located within easy reach of a raiding party coming from north of the River Humber. Furthermore, at a later date Oswy’s daughter Osthryth, who was then married to the Mercian king Aethelred (reigned 675 – 704), located the rest of her uncle’s bones and donated them to the monastery at Bardney, in modern Lincolnshire. This would have involved a gruelling and apparently unnecessary journey across England from Oswestry, but might seem more logical if Bardney had in fact been the nearest suitable location to the spot where Oswald died.

  This argument, however, relies heavily on the supposed difficulties of overland travel in the early Middle Ages, which have often been exaggerated. Oswald’s remains could have been transported from Shropshire to Lindsey in, at most, a few weeks, by known highways running through territory controlled by Osthryth’s husband. Bardney, far from being an illogical choice, was being promoted by Aethelred and his queen as a major religious centre. The bones of a saint would have been a valuable asset for such an establishment, conveniently tying in with Osthryth’s natural desire to find a safe resting place for her famous uncle. It is interesting to note that Oswald was far from being a local hero in Lindsey. According to Bede, the monks at Bardney at first refused to accept the bones as they remembered the Northumbrian king as a foreign oppressor, and they were only persuaded of his sanctity by a convenient miracle. As far as Oswy’s mission to the battlefield is concerned, it could easily have been achieved by a mounted raiding party small and mobile enough to evade any Mercian patrols and penetrate deep into the enemy’s country. That the grisly relics were guarded seems unlikely: old battlefields were unpleasant places, which we know from other sources would soon have been abandoned to wolves and other scavengers, and would also probably have been avoided for health or superstitious reasons.

  If Maserfelth was indeed near Oswestry – as seems most probable – its exact site has been lost, but the general location suggests a possible strategic context for the battle. The previous devastating invasion of Northumbria had been undertaken by a combined army of Mercians and Welsh, and it is possible that Oswald knew, or feared, that a similar alliance was being put together in preparation for another invasion after the harvest of 642. A logical response to such a threat would have been to advance via Chester, which may still have been in Northumbrian hands after Aethelfrith’s victory in 605, and then south along the Welsh Marches with the aim of preventing the Welsh and Mercian armies linking up, ravaging the countryside from which they obtained their supplies, and perhaps catching and defeating them separately. Bede might then still have been justified in regarding this as a defensive war. Whether Oswald miscalculated and was caught between the two forces, or whether the Mercians alone proved too strong for him, we do not know, but both Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle attribute the victory solely to Penda.

  In 645 it was the turn of Cenwalh of Wessex. Cenwalh was the son and successor of Penda’s former enemy Cynegils, and, perhaps as part of a peace settlement, he had recently married one of Penda’s sisters. Foolishly he abandoned his wife in favour of another woman, and an infuriated Penda marched south to restore the family honour. Cenwalh was obviously unable to muster an army to resist the invasion, because he was forced to flee the country and take refuge with King Anna of East Anglia. Then under the year 654 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records laconically that ‘here King Anna was killed’, almost as if there was no need to elaborate on the cause of yet another royal death in those violent years. But Bede places the blame on Penda, and Henry of Huntingdon adds that Anna and his army were slaughtered in a battle from which few survivors escaped. A possible location for this fight is at Blytheburgh, near Southwold on the coast of Suffolk, where there was a shrine in Anna’s memory in the twelfth century. He was the third East Anglian king in succession to fall victim to the pagan Mercians.

  The Battle of the Winwaed

  Soon afterwards Penda embarked on his last campaign. He must now have been at least 50 years old, but Bede portrays him as just as bloodthirsty and eager for battle as he had ever been. He had recently led several more damaging raids into Northumbria, prompting King Oswy, Oswald’s brother and successor, to offer him ‘an incalculable quantity’ of treasure in return for peace. But the ‘treacherous’ Mercian king refused to negotiate and instead announced his intention of destroying the whole Northumbrian nation, ‘from the highest to the humblest in the land’. However, Bede, as always, tells only one side of the story, and it is not clear what Penda’s motive could have been for such a drastic policy. More likely his grievance against Oswy stemmed from the latter’s attempts to reunite the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, which had regained their independence after the death of Oswald. In 651 Oswy had killed Oswine, the king of Deira, but succeeded only in driving his people into the hands of the Mercians when their new ruler, Aethelwald, sought Penda’s protection.

  The army which Penda led northwards to put an end to Oswy’s intrigues included troops from most of southern Britain. Aethelhere, who had succeeded his brother Anna as king of East Anglia only a year previously, led his own contingent, as did Cadafael ap Cynfeddw of Gwynedd and several other Welsh princes. Altogether, according to Bede, there were thirty ‘battle hardened legions under famous commanders’. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls these commanders ‘royal children’ – not necessarily all Penda’s children, of course – and adds that some of them were kings in their own right. They may re
present the last appearance in history of the rulers of the Noxgaga, Ciltern Saetna and other obscure ‘tribes’ of the Tribal Hidage, soon to lose their identity in the consolidating kingdom of Mercia. Aethelwald’s Deirans provided guides for the expedition, although Bede says that they refused to take part in actual combat against their fellow Northumbrians and retired before battle was joined.

  Nennius, in his Historia Brittonum, states that Oswy took refuge in a fortified place called Iudeu, from where he delivered all the valuables he could collect as tribute to Penda, who gave them to his Welsh allies. Iudeu has been placed as far north as Stirling in central Scotland, but this is uncertain. Nennius’ version is obviously inconsistent with Bede’s statement that Penda had rejected the proffered treasure, but if the Mercian leader first accepted payment and then later broke a promise to withdraw, it would account for the chronicler’s description of him as ‘treacherous’. Eventually Oswy realised that he had no choice but to risk a battle, even though he was heavily outnumbered – by thirty to one according to Bede. He made his stand on 15 November 654 (or possibly 655) by the River Winwaed, which cannot be precisely identified but is generally assumed to have been somewhere in what is now Yorkshire. Stenton and others place it east of Leeds, where a location near Barwick-in-Elmet, in the valley of the River Cock, is still known as Penda’s Fields. Bede’s narrative suggests that the Winwaed was a much more substantial river than the Cock is today, but much of the area overlies impermeable boulder clay, and it would have flooded more easily before the era of modern drainage. If this is the right location, it is near to the sites of two of the other great battlefields of English history. A few miles downstream is the field of Towton, the bloodiest encounter of the Wars of the Roses, where in 1461 the defeated Lancastrians drowned in the waters of the River Cock as the Mercians may have done eight centuries before. Ten miles further north is Marston Moor, the scene of Cromwell’s triumph over Charles I in 1644. That three such decisive battles should have been fought in such a small area is more than coincidence, for this has always been the main route between the Midlands and the north. In fact the strip of territory between Mansfield and Doncaster has been aptly described as the ‘cockpit’ of Anglo-Saxon England, constantly fought over by Mercian armies aiming for York and Northumbrians striking southwards towards the valley of the Trent.

  Unfortunately the manoeuvres which led up to the Battle of the Winwaed cannot now be reconstructed. If Penda had really marched as far as Scotland the location of the site would imply that he was on his way home, but if this was the case it is hard to see what Oswy stood to gain from obstructing him. Probably the initial contact had taken place further south, and the crossing of the Winwaed marked an attempt by the Mercians to invade the rich farming country around York at a time when the harvest would have been gathered and ready for the taking. Heavy rain had caused the river to overflow its banks and flood the surrounding area, but it appears from Bede’s account that Penda must somehow have forded it and fought with his back to the water. Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose brief narrative otherwise seems to derive entirely from Bede, suggests that the Northumbrians were drawn up along the bank to contest the crossing, but Geoffrey is a late and not very reliable source, and such a deployment would have been extremely risky. More likely, perhaps, is that Oswy was planning to attack the Mercians as they tried to reform after the crossing and drive them back into the river.

  Despite his strategic advantage, the Northumbrian king was understandably pessimistic: not only was Penda much stronger in numbers, but he had a formidable record of success. During the past thirty years he had never lost a major battle, and at least five kings had already met their deaths at his hands. To dare to take the field against him must have seemed literally suicide. The Northumbrian therefore decided to play the only card he had: his people’s Christian religion. He made a vow that if he was victorious he would donate twelve royal estates to build monasteries, and give his infant daughter to God ‘as a consecrated virgin’. He and his son Alchfrid then led their troops into battle.

  Unfortunately we have no details of the fighting, but the result was an unprecedented disaster for the Mercians. To Bede the Northumbrian victory required no further explanation than ‘the mercy of God’, and this may not have been far from the truth. History provides other examples of a tiny outnumbered force, reduced to the courage of despair and inspired by its faith, sweeping all before it: the Crusaders at Antioch, for example, or the Northumbrians themselves at Denisesburn. By contrast, Penda’s army was linguistically and religiously diverse, and we do not know what tensions might have arisen among the various contingents. The presence of thirty leaders, some of whom were kings in their own right, must have greatly complicated the business of command. Some of them deserted at the last moment, including Cadafael, who according to Nennius earned the nickname of ‘battle-shirker’ for his behaviour on that day.

  The differing versions of the fate of Oswy’s treasure might possibly stem from a secret deal struck with the Welsh princes, or perhaps they were becoming reluctant to fight for a pagan ally against their fellow Christians. Others in Penda’s army, even though they had no obvious reason for loyalty, stood and fought to the end. Bede records that the East Angles and their king, Anna’s brother Aethelhere, were killed to a man. Penda himself, the grizzled veteran of thirty years of victorious warfare, is unlikely to have thought of retreat, or to have expected mercy. We can imagine him fighting on grimly in the front rank, trying again and again to rally the waverers by the force of his personality, calling on Woden and the other pagan gods – if he still believed in them – to curse his enemies as the Christian banners closed in around him. Henry of Huntingdon imaginatively claims that Penda’s nerve failed him at the end, when he discovered that his enemies had at last learned to stand up to him, and ‘he who had shed the blood of others now suffered what he had inflicted on them.’ Eventually he fell, and his army broke in rout. However, the flooded river lay between the Mercians and safety, and Bede says that, as often happened in medieval warfare, more men died by drowning while attempting to cross it than had been killed on the battlefield itself.

  In the immediate aftermath of his victory at the Winwaed, Oswy claimed a brief overlordship over the whole of Mercia. Penda was succeeded by his son Peada, who, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘ruled no length of time, because he was betrayed by his own queen at Eastertide.’ Bede’s account is slightly different, because he states that for three years Oswy himself replaced Penda as the direct ruler of Mercia, and that Peada ruled only the ‘Kingdom of the Middle Angles’ – a country of 5,000 hides which was clearly an artificial creation imposed by the victorious Northumbrians – as a vassal and son-in-law of Oswy.

  Chapter 5

  Two Treasures

  On two different occasions during the tumultuous half century described in the previous chapter, in different parts of the country, people placed in the ground treasures which were to remain buried for more than 1,300 years. When they finally emerged, in 1939 and seventy years later, they provided the distant descendants of those anonymous Anglo-Saxons with stunning evidence of the glory of kings such as Penda, who had until then been no more than names in the chronicles.

  The ‘Sutton Hoo Man’

  The first of these discoveries was made in the kingdom of Raedwald of the East Angles, whose victory at the River Idle had been a catalyst for the Mercian Wars. The barrows or burial mounds which stood on a windswept rise overlooking the River Deben, at Sutton Hoo on the Suffolk coast, had been recognised for what they are as long ago as the sixteenth century, and sporadic attempts had been made ever since to excavate them, or rather to dig them up in the hunt for buried treasure. However, the treasure seekers had missed the greatest prize, as became apparent in 1938 – 9 when the landowner, Mrs Edith Pretty, commissioned a local archaeologist to excavate them scientifically. In May 1939 the biggest barrow, which became known as Mound One, proved to contain the remains of a wooden ship, underneath which wa
s an intact burial chamber. The sandy soil was very acidic and little organic material had survived – at first there appeared to be no sign of a body, although traces of phosphate residues have since been found which indicate that human remains had been interred there (Carver).

  The items which were found, however, were enough to revolutionise the study of the period. As Professor Martin Carver put it, ‘Every Dark Age object that had been imagined, and a few that had not, seemed to be represented.’ Another seventeen barrows have since been excavated, but Mound One remains the most spectacular, the site associated in the popular imagination with the words ‘Sutton Hoo’. The ship survived only as rusted rivets and an impression in the sand, but it appeared to have been a fully seaworthy vessel, about ninety feet long and carrying a crew of forty oarsmen. Other finds included cauldrons, lamps, drinking horns, gold coins and jewellery, some coming from as far afield as Constantinople. The deceased had also been buried with his complete war panoply, comprising a coat of mail, a sword, shield, spears, gold- and garnet-decorated shoulder clasps and fittings for belts and scabbards, as well as, of course, the famous helmet. The latter, as restored at the British Museum with its full face mask and elaborate tinned bronze decoration, has become the best-known image of the era, instantly recognisable worldwide as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon wealth and power.