Offa and the Mercian Wars

by Chris Peers

  Already in the eighth century the steady drift of valuable tribute-paying lands from secular to religious hands was posing a problem for the state. The church unashamedly operated a kind of moral blackmail, persuading kings and magnates to give grants of land to religious houses for the good of their souls or those of their people, while steadfastly opposing any transfers in the opposite direction. Any attempt by the king to collect revenues or military or labour service from church lands was liable to be characterised as theft of God’s property and attract thinly veiled accusations of paganism, so the long-term effect was a slow but virtually irreversible decline in the resources available to the state. Even far-sighted churchmen recognised that there was a problem; Bede, in a letter to Bishop Egbert of York, argued that many people were entering monasteries in order to evade taxes or other civil obligations, and that the houses which gave them refuge were no use to God or man, and ought to be suppressed. And yet any king who tried to take action risked being anathematised by Bede’s more uncompromising colleagues as an irreligious plunderer. Boniface’s motive for his verdict on Aethelbald need not have been as overtly cynical as this analysis suggests, but it seems to have had the right effect. In 749, at Gumley in Leicestershire, the king put his name to a charter which exempted the churches in his kingdom from all taxes and labour services, except for the essential maintenance of bridges and forts (Stenton).

  No criticism of the king’s behaviour would be likely to have much effect, though, if it had not had some basis in truth. The ageing statesman who compensates for the approaching decline of his powers by indulging in risky sexual adventures is a not unfamiliar figure today, and towards the end of his long reign Aethelbald might well have succumbed to the same sort of temptation. This may even have been a factor in his unusual end, although none of our sources gives much detail. Under the year 757 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records in its usual laconic style that ‘Aethelbald, king of the Mercians, was killed at Seckington, and his body rests at Repton, and he reigned forty one years.’ Seckington, five miles north of Tamworth, was a royal estate in the heart of Mercia, where the king might have expected to be reasonably safe. The continuation of Bede, however, adds that he was murdered one night, ‘treacherously and miserably’, by his own bodyguards. Stenton refers in this connection to a later document which states that Aethelbald gave lands to the abbey at Gloucester because he had attacked a kinsman of the abbess, and suggests that the king may have come to be seen as a violent oppressor.

  If he had really deserted his men on the field at Beorhford this might have provided his assailants with another motive, although as we shall see, Henry of Huntingdon, our only source for this allegation, himself undermines this argument. It is of course also possible to construct lurid theories involving a predatory old tyrant and the female relatives of his retainers, but there is another curious circumstance which deserves to be taken into account. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the same year includes a much longer and more detailed passage describing the death of King Cynewulf of the West Saxons, which actually occurred twenty-nine years later, but was presumably inserted here in error by a later copyist confused by the fact that 757 was the year of Cynewulf’s accession. He had taken the throne of Wessex after driving out the unpopular Sigeberht, and in 786 was planning to exile Sigeberht’s brother Cyneheard, no doubt as a precaution against a possible coup. Cyneheard, however, got wind of the plot and surprised the king one night at a place called Merton, where the king was ‘in the company of a woman’ and protected only by a small bodyguard. Cynewulf and all his thegns were killed, but an ealdorman named Osric arrived soon afterwards with a loyalist army and Cyneheard and his men were slaughtered in their turn.

  The continuator of Bede seems to be just as confused as the Chronicle at this point, and wrongly states that Cynewulf ‘died’ in the same year as Aethelbald. In view of this coincidence the same source’s statement that it was the latter who was murdered at night by his own men can hardly be regarded as reliable evidence. As this is the only source for the circumstances of Aethelbald’s death, the case against his bodyguards can only be regarded as unproven. Strangely, the Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records yet another royal assassination under the same year, 757 (ascribed by the continuator of Bede to 758). King Eadberht of Northumbria had abdicated in favour of his son Oswulf, who ruled for only a year before ‘his household killed him’. So unless we postulate a sudden brief epidemic of treachery among royal bodyguards all over England, we must suspect that one or more of these reported incidents is the result of a chronicler’s error.

  In this connection Henry of Huntingdon’s account is of particular interest. He says that Aethelbald was killed in an otherwise unknown battle at a place which he calls ‘Secandune’, presumably Seckington. The king, ‘disdaining to flee’ although ‘the carnage was wonderful’, allegedly died fighting, which implies that he had recovered from his failure of nerve at Beorhford and that his bodyguards, far from betraying their lord, were slaughtered with him. Admittedly Henry is usually disregarded as an unreliable late writer, but in this case his departure from the continuator’s dubious version tends to strengthen the theory that he had an independent source. It is of course possible that both versions contain a grain of truth, and that the Battle of Secandune or Seckington, if it ever took place, was the result of a civil war between factions at the Mercian court. Certainly if an army from a hostile kingdom had penetrated so far into Mercia we might have expected the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to take note of it. Nevertheless, rather than seeing Aethelbald as a tyrant whose cruelties and sexual conduct provoked his own followers into revolt, we may be justified in quoting as his epitaph a less-remembered passage from Boniface’s famous letter: ‘peace is established in your kingdom. For this we rejoice and praise God.’

  Who did kill Aethelbald, and why, we will never know. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that one Beornred replaced him on the throne of Mercia ‘and held it a little while, and unhappily.’ Whether he was a legitimate successor or a usurper who had overthrown his master by treachery, it was Beornred’s misfortune to find himself opposed by one of the most formidable characters in the whole of English history. He clearly put up a fight, but his reign can have lasted no more than a few months. In the entry for the year of Aethelbald’s death, the continuator of Bede concludes with the statement that ‘Offa, having put Beornred to flight, sought to gain the kingdom by bloodshed.’ From this we can deduce that Beornred and Offa were not the only contenders for the throne, but that none of the latter’s rivals lasted long enough to be credited with the kingship.

  Whether the ‘bloodshed’ involved pitched battles, a purge of those suspected of Aethelbald’s murder, or merely the hunting down and killing of fugitive pretenders to the throne, we do not know. Writing much later, Matthew of Westminster says that the people, ‘both noble and ignoble’, rebelled against Beornred because he disregarded the laws and ruled as a tyrant. Offa, ‘a most gallant young man’, was then accepted unanimously as their leader. He may have presented himself as Aethelbald’s avenger, or he might even have been one of those who disposed of him, but in any case he must have acted swiftly and ruthlessly, and can hardly have succeeded so quickly without some popular support. By the end of the year 757 Offa was the unchallenged master of Mercia, and was to remain so for the next thirty-nine years.

  Offa’s Pedigree

  So who was this Offa? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle follows its usual practice with prominent rulers by breaking off its narrative to insert a long genealogy. Offa’s father, we are told, was Thingfrith, son of Eanwulf, son of Osmod, son of Eowa, son of Pybba. Eowa, of course, we have encountered before: he was the brother of Penda who was killed at the Battle of Maserfelth in 642. An interesting analysis of the Mercian royal family tree suggests that there was a long-running struggle for the throne among at least three different branches of the family, who can be identified because their candidates bore names beginning with a particular letter of the alphabe
t (D. Dumville, in Bassett). This is not as far-fetched as it sounds, as series of alliterative names are quite common in Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Thus Offa’s opponent Beornred would have belonged to a line which later came to power with kings Beornwulf, Beorhtwulf and Burgred in the ninth century.

  A rival ‘C’ family, descended from Penda’s brother Coenwealh, may also have re-emerged after Offa’s death in the reign of Coenwulf (798 – 821). Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence apart from the names that most of these men were related to each other at all, and Offa’s own genealogy shows that the tradition of alliteration was not universal. This theory therefore gives us no real insight into the realities of Mercian power politics, and the best that can be said is that Offa was related, if distantly, to both Penda and Aethelbald, and so presumably had a valid claim to the throne by the prevailing rules of succession. But there must have been plenty of other candidates with at least as good a title, so Offa’s pedigree would have been of no value if he had not been able to prove himself the most fitted to rule, if necessary by force of arms.

  Chapter 7

  The Warrior in the Age of the Mercian Kings

  Offensive Weapons

  Offa’s power, like that of all his contemporaries, rested ultimately on the fighting men he could command. The English soldier of the seventh and eighth centuries typically fought on foot with spear, sword and shield. Swords were expensive to make, and although the recent evidence of the Staffordshire Hoard suggests that they were more common than was once thought, it is unlikely that many men outside the professional warrior class would have been able to afford one. The weapon most closely associated with the Anglo-Saxons, and the one whose possession in effect defined a free man, was the spear. The cultural significance of the spear was enormous. Old English poetry had a dozen or so different terms for it, several alluding to the ash wood of which the shaft was traditionally made. Hence warriors could be described by titles such as ‘ash-bearers’. It is even possible that the name of the Angles themselves derived from the same root as ‘angon’, a Frankish term for a throwing spear. Most of our evidence for Anglo-Saxon spears comes from graves of the pagan era, in which men were frequently, though by no means always, buried with weapons (Swanton, 1973). About 85 per cent of the weapon finds in these graves are of spearheads, though this does not necessarily reflect their predominance in actual warfare. Because of their symbolic importance, and no doubt their relative cheapness, which would make them less likely to be coveted by surviving relatives, spears might have been particularly favoured as burial objects even for men who also possessed other weapons. Even boys far too young to fight were sometimes buried with them.

  The famous ‘Franks casket’, a whalebone box carved in unmistakeable English style and probably dating from around the eighth century, provides some of the earliest pictorial evidence for Anglo-Saxon warriors of the period. It is decorated with scenes from the Bible and Classical history as well as Germanic legend, but the models for the figures were no doubt those of the artist’s own day. The runic inscriptions are characteristic of Anglian rather than Saxon dialects, which place its origin somewhere in northern or central England. Discovered in France but now in the British Museum, it is usually thought to be of Northumbrian origin, but could equally well be Mercian. Most of the warriors depicted are carrying spears, and the same applies to a group of men shown watching Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf, who lack shields or armour and are thought to represent shepherds (Swanton, 1998). Professor Swanton remarks that shepherds ‘would have been wise to carry a spear’, and the casket may reflect a time when any man whose work took him into isolated places would have routinely gone armed. Early Anglo-Saxon countrymen may have found a spear a valuable multi-functional item, as some African tribesmen still do today. Apart from defending livestock against wolves, it would have been useful against rustlers or those who sought to pursue a blood feud by taking members of a rival community unawares. And unlike a sword, a spear can also double as a walking stick or a support to lean on during long hours of guard duty.

  Archaeologists have identified as many as forty different designs of iron spearhead (Swanton, 1973), but most of these are probably attributable to local variations in manufacturing techniques, or even the idiosyncrasies of individual smiths. The most common type was roughly lozenge shaped, fairly long (between twelve and eighteen inches) and heavy, with a sharply pointed blade, and seems to have been designed for thrusting rather than throwing. Swanton suggested that excavated examples show a detectable increase in size and strength as time went on, but the practice of burying weapons in graves gradually died out after the conversion of the country to Christianity, so we have very little evidence from after the mid-seventh century. One variant had projecting metal ‘wings’ fixed to the socket below the blade, which are usually interpreted as designed to stop the spear penetrating too far into a victim’s body.

  Although this type is common in illustrations from the later Anglo-Saxon period (including on the Bayeux tapestry), it is very rare in graves, suggesting that it did not become widespread until the Christian era. An important question which cannot easily be resolved by archaeology is the length of the shafts, as the wood itself is seldom preserved. Some graves contain both a spearhead and an iron ferrule which would presumably have been fitted to the other end of the shaft, and from the positions of these items it has been estimated that the shafts varied between about five and a half and eight feet in length (Underwood). This is not necessarily conclusive evidence, however, as they may have been shortened, or shorter versions selected, in order to fit conveniently into the graves. Actual shafts from the third or fourth centuries AD, found preserved in a bog at Nydam in Denmark, were slightly longer. It is of course likely that a man would choose to use a spear of length suitable to his own height, and that shorter weapons might have been reserved for throwing, but illustrations such as the carvings on the Franks casket confirm that the typical thrusting spear was somewhat longer than the height of a man.

  Another group of spearheads seems to have belonged to specialised missile weapons, which might be better described as javelins. These are much smaller, and often barbed. Particularly interesting are those with a long, thin metal shank like the Roman ‘pilum’ or the Frankish ‘angon’, which was designed to bend when the head stuck in an opponent’s shield. We have no contemporary accounts of their use in battle in England, but they do appear occasionally in pagan-period graves, for example at Prittlewell in Essex (Underwood). The Byzantine writer Agathias described the effects of the angon in Frankish hands at the Battle of Casilinum in 554. A man whose shield had been struck and penetrated could not pull the spear out because of the barbs, nor could he easily cut the iron shaft to release it, so was forced to carry the unwieldy object around with him, dragging on the ground and making it hard to manoeuvre his shield. ‘When the Frank sees this he quickly treads on it with his foot, stepping on the ferrule and forcing his shield downwards so that the man’s grip is loosened and his head and breast bared. Then, taking him unprotected, he kills him easily.’

  An additional advantage of this type of weapon was that once the shaft was bent it could not be thrown back by an enemy even if he did succeed in extracting it from the shield. Why such an effective design was eventually abandoned is not clear, as it would seem to be the ideal counter to the defensive use of shields. Again, the problem may simply be the shortage of archaeological evidence in the Christian period. At the Battle of Maldon Byrhtnoth is said to have thrown a spear which burst his victim’s coat of mail and wounded him fatally in the heart, which is the kind of effect that would be expected from a heavy spear with a sharply pointed tip like an angon. It may, however, have been considered more cost effective to concentrate on general-purpose designs suitable for both throwing and stabbing, and there seems no reason why the large-headed thrusting types could not have been thrown over short distances in emergencies.

  Approximately one pagan grave in six contains the rema
ins of a sword or swords, although as discussed above this is hardly conclusive evidence for their frequency in life. Hilts often incorporated materials such as gold and garnet, which survive in the ground while iron rusts away, and their decoration shows more variation over time than do the associated blades, so most archaeological attention has focused on the development of the hilts and other fittings. From a purely practical point of view the design of sword blades changed very little during the Anglo-Saxon period. It did not need to change, as it had already reached a high level of sophistication by the fourth or fifth century AD.

  The sword remained in essence the single-handed, double-edged cutting weapon of the Germanic migration period, with a blade measuring between twenty-eight and thirty-four inches in length. It had probably been derived from the Roman ‘spatha’, which was originally a cavalry weapon but had gradually been adopted by footsoldiers – including Germans – serving in the armies of the later Empire. Various methods of forging the blades were in use, but the most expensive and prestigious is what is known today as ‘pattern welding’. In this process any flaws or impurities in the metal are evened out by repeatedly twisting and welding together a number of iron bars, then hammering them flat. The result is a tough but flexible blade with an intricate and beautiful surface pattern sometimes known as ‘brogdenmael’, or ‘weaving marks’, analogous to the appearance of woven cloth. This process was probably invented under the Roman Empire, and it became increasingly popular from the fifth century onwards. It appears to have gradually declined in the eighth century, perhaps because the availability of better-quality iron and more advanced forging techniques made it unnecessary, although as in the case of spearheads the shortage of examples in datable graves makes this trend difficult to establish. It has been suggested that the purpose of pattern welding was mainly decorative in any case, especially as it was sometimes used for items such as knives and spearheads which would hardly justify such a labour-intensive method of manufacture (Pollington).