Unfortunate Ecgfrith

THE​ MERCIAN CHRONICLES completes a trilogy by Max Adams that began with The King in the North, centred on King Oswald of Northumbria (r. 634-42), and went on to Ælfred’s Britain, about King Ælfred of Wessex (r. 871-99). Its focus is King Offa (r. 757-96) and thus it helps to fill the chronological gap. There is, however, a major difference between this and the earlier volumes. Adams’s title is deliberately ironic. There are no ‘Mercian Chronicles’, the fact of which has caused historians headaches for centuries. For Northumbria we have Bede’s History of the English Church and People, written in Jarrow and finished in 731. For Wessex we have The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first compiled under the aegis of King Ælfred in the 890s, but including much earlier information and then kept up in various locations year by year. But for the land in between we have nothing: or rather, ‘no independent narrative’, apart from a short interpolation into two manuscripts of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle known as ‘the Mercian Register’ and covering only the years 902-24. For the rest, the historian has to work from often biased, often hostile enemy sources, and from indirect evidence: coins, charters, archaeology and, on occasion, suggestive silences.

The word ‘Mercia’ is a Latinisation of the Anglo-Saxon name. In West Saxon, the kingdom was called the Mearc, that is ‘the Mark’, while its inhabitants were the Mierce (pronounced ‘Meercher’), ‘the people of the March’ or ‘the Borderers’. Mercia was, however, surrounded by borders: Northumbria to the north, Wessex to the south, East Anglia to the east, and to the west, the post-Roman kingdoms of the Welsh. Probably it was the last that led to Mercians being called ‘Marchers’. For a while that was the open frontier of Anglo-Saxon expansion, until the line was eventually drawn by Offa’s Dyke, Mercia’s answer to Hadrian’s Wall, built sometime in the late eighth century.

Mercia matters because it was the English heartland, covering almost half of the 39 historic English counties. The rest were shared unevenly between Wessex, Northumbria and East Anglia, which also between them absorbed the smaller polities of Kent, Sussex, Essex and Middlesex. Mercia was, Adams claims, ‘the crucible of the English state’. The West Saxons may have promoted their version of the national story more successfully, but it is salutary to remember that if things had gone differently, the capital of England might be Tamworth (which has a population today of about eighty thousand), with its senior archbishopric in Lichfield a few miles away. Adams’s account also points us to the importance of such unfamiliar places as Wall and Hanbury (both Staffordshire) and even Claybrooke Parva (Leicestershire). It’s a new geographical perspective, as well as a historical one.

Most of the early history of Mercia, and its Anglo-Saxon neighbours, is one of war. Important, though never decisive, battles include the killing of the Northumbrian King Edwin at Hatfield Chase in 633, and of his successor, King Oswald, in 642, long thought to have taken place at Oswestry (Oswald’s Tree) but relocated by Andrew Breeze, in his British Battles 493-937 (2020), very precisely to Forden, just west of the present English/Welsh border. King Oswiu of Northumbria took his revenge on the Winwaed (655), by the river Went in Yorkshire (Breeze again), when he caught the Mercians trying to cross a flooded plain on a narrow causeway. There were then fruitless Mercian attacks on Northumbria and Wessex (674-75), the victorious fight on the river Trent for Lindsey (679), and eventual defeat by the West Saxons at Wroughton in Wiltshire (825) – soon after which all Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had a powerful reason for co-operation in the shape of Viking armies.

In this early ebb and flow of contests for land and power, Mercia had one considerable advantage, its ‘impressive dynastic stability’. This stability was repeatedly threatened by ‘factional tensions’ over royal succession, but certainly there was impressive continuity. In the century between Penda’s death and the accession of Offa, Mercia had only five kings, one of whom, Æthelbald, was ‘the longest-reigning English monarch before Edward III’, a record (716-57) almost beaten by his successor, Offa (757-96). The kings held together what were initially separate tribes or people – the Hwicce, whose name survives in Wychwood, the dwellers of the Peak district and the Wrekin; the Magonsaetan and Tomsaetan of Hereford and Staffordshire; and the North and South Gyrwe of the Fens. Together they made Mercia top dog in English politics for 150 years or more. Some might wish it had remained so.

Having noted the difficulty of creating a chronicle from what can only be a ‘silhouette’, Adams goes on to treat his material king by king. The first is Penda, the pagan warlord, who ruled from 633 to 655. He was known as the hammer of the Northumbrians until his death at the Winwaed: Bede says of him, with praiseworthy fairness from a Christian Northumbrian, that although he was a determined heathen, Penda had no objection to Christians so long as they believed sincerely. (One wonders what kind of Christian at that time would have believed insincerely.) He was succeeded by Wulfhere, his second son (658-75), his first son, Peada, having been murdered in obscure circumstances, possibly by his Northumbrian wife. Wulfhere oversaw the conversion of Mercia to Christianity, but was defeated badly by the Northumbrians and then by Wessex: he may have died of wounds suffered in the second battle.

He was succeeded by his brother Æthelred, another long-enduring king (675-704), who made many grants to the Church, and gets a favourable write-up in the Life of Saint Wilfrid. For this period we also have the Life of Saint Guthlac, a work which, according to Adams, ‘shimmers with tantalising political and social gems’, though they are on the whole more tantalising than satisfying. The Life makes much of Guthlac’s early career as raider and plunderer, before his conversion to saintliness: but who can he have been raiding? It also implies that Guthlac recognised Welsh when he heard it spoken (by the demons that assailed him in his hermitage), and Adams suggests that in his youth Guthlac may have been raiding the Welsh kingdoms. But all Guthlac’s connections are with the east of the country: Repton, Peterborough, his eventual demon-haunted hermitage in the Fens. Could he have been raiding Norfolk and Suffolk? Or is the story just there to fit the hagiographic convention of dramatic repentance and conversion?

One plausible element in the Life, nevertheless, is Guthlac’s companionship with Æthelbald, a grandson of Penda’s brother, and a second cousin of kings Coenred and Ceolred, themselves cousins, who occupied the throne of Mercia from 704 to 716. It was probably the danger posed to him by these cousins (or their assassins) that led Æthelbald to seek refuge with Guthlac in the remote Fens. After the death (or possibly abdication) of Coenred and Ceolred, Æthelbald did indeed succeed them as king, ruling for more than forty years. In his time Mercia became dominant over all the southern kingdoms, so much so that Æthelbald described himself in one document as Rex Britanniae. Yet factional rivalries within Mercia were too much for him in the end. He was murdered in 757 by his bodyguard, after which there was a brief civil war, won by Offa, who would become the greatest of the Mercian kings.

In spite of his fame, much about Offa remains obscure, including his real name. In the old North, names were regularly dithematic, like Ed-ward or Os-wald or Wulf-here or Ælf-red. These were however often abbreviated – as they still are in Iceland – so that sometimes the short or ‘hypocoristic’ form is the only one to survive in the history books. King Harold’s rebellious brother from 1066 is known only as ‘Tostig’: his real name may have been Thorstein. Similarly Offa was short for, quite likely, Os-frith: his father was Thingfrith, his son Ecgfrith, and Osfrith would regularly be shortened to Offa. But the full name is nowhere recorded.

We also know nothing about Offa’s birth or his connection with the royal family, though he seems to have been descended, like Æthelbald, from Penda’s brother. A further complication is that ‘Offa’ was also a famous name in English legend from the far past. This earlier Offa is said to have fixed the boundary between the English and the Swabians by winning a duel on an island in the river Eider, when he insisted on fighting one-against-two to wipe out the shame of two Englishmen fighting one Swabian. Perhaps the legendary connection was seized on as a political tactic, and perhaps this also accounts for Offa’s interest in fixing a border. But again, we don’t know.

Nonetheless Offa is the hero of Adams’s book, and takes up a quarter of it. There is no doubt at least about his power. He was said by King Ælfred’s Welsh biographer to have ‘terrified all the neighbouring kings and provinces around him’. More than six hundred of his coins survive, including his remarkable portrait coinage. These are thought to represent ‘a cumulative output … in the many millions of silver pennies’. Across the Channel, Charlemagne (who had probably never so much as heard of Mercia before) dealt with him as an equal, and sent him a sword, possibly one looted from the Huns. This sword may be the one kept as an heirloom and eventually inherited by Ælfred’s great-great-great grandson Edmund ‘Ironside’.

And, of course, Offa built the dyke: still visible and still traceable along much of its almost two-hundred-mile length. Though much eroded now, it represents a remarkable achievement both in surveying and in construction. It was designed to be always visible from the Welsh side, and its bank and ditch measured some nineteen feet top to bottom. It wasn’t fortified or guarded, so far as we know, but it made a statement no one could mistake.

There were some things, however, that even Offa could not control. His reign ended in disaster. Charlemagne’s minister Alcuin remarks in a letter ‘how much blood the father shed to secure the kingdom for his son’, and it seems that, no doubt remembering the earlier intra-family fighting, Offa did his best to save his son by pre-emptively eliminating all other related royals. It wasn’t an unsuccessful strategy: Offa’s son Ecgfrith did indeed succeed his father without challenge. But he survived his father by just 141 days, dying of natural causes in December 796. Looking round for any surviving member of the old line, after all Offa’s precautionary eliminations, the Mercians could only come up with one Coenwulf, who – if I have counted the generations correctly – must have been no closer than seventh cousin to the unfortunate Ecgfrith.

Around the same time, a new factor emerged in English politics. Viking raiders hit Lindisfarne in the far north, followed by Viking armies, including the ‘Great Army’ which arrived in 865. Landlocked Mercia was not immediately threatened, but in 873-74 the Vikings spent the winter in Repton, and the following year took control of northern Mercia, the ‘five boroughs’ of Lincoln, Derby, Leicester, Nottingham and Stamford. Burghred, then king of Mercia, ignominiously packed his bags and fled to Rome. The question was what would happen to the rest of Mercia, not yet subject to the Danes, but leaderless and vulnerable. It was long past time for the Christian kingdoms of England to make common cause. A start had been made when King Ælfred of Wessex married his sister Æthelswyth to Burghred; this in the end proved decisive.

In English Mercia, the Vikings installed a puppet king called Ceolwulf: he gets a bad notice in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which writes him off as ‘a foolish king’s thane’, though he lasted long enough to produce a joint currency with King Ælfred and may have supported him in his major victory over the Vikings in the south at Edington (878). Much more important was the enigmatic Æthelred. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes him as a Mercian ‘alderman’, but this usually means the head of a single county: Æthelred was clearly more important than that. Ælfred married his daughter Æthelflæd to him, and signed over London to him as well. But little is known about him, or why he was so assiduously courted by Wessex.

Modern historians have been as puzzled as anyone, but Alex Woolf of St Andrews has put forward an attractive theory: that Æthelred was the son of King Burghred and his wife Æthelswyth. This would make him Ælfred’s nephew by birth and son-in-law by marriage, while he and his wife would be first cousins: strong family ties indeed. But Æthelred would also be, arguably, the rightful king of Mercia, which neither Ælfred nor the chroniclers were prepared to concede, or even mention – any more than they gave any credit to Ceolwulf. As the controller of the counties of English Mercia, however, Æthelred’s co-operation would almost double the resources of Wessex, in land and manpower. The deal was, perhaps, semi-independence for Æthelred while he lived, and more than that for his wife and any children.

On Æthelred’s death in 911, his wife Æthelflæd became ‘the Lady of the Mercians’, as Adams puts it, and the last independent ruler of Mercia. With her brother, King Edward of Wessex, she co-ordinated a campaign to reconquer Danish Mercia, and Edward’s son Æthelstan (called ‘the Victorious’ by the Vikings) at last united the two kingdoms, concluding a period of slow rapprochement that may go back as far as the birth of King Ælfred in 849, probably in Mercia rather than Wessex. This must have helped his eventual post-Viking claim to be the natural ruler of all Angelcynn, including English Mercia, not just his own Wessex.

The danger of cousins had not been forgotten, however. After her mother’s death in 918, Æthelred and Æthelflæd’s daughter Ælfwynn was hustled off into Wessex and probably into a convent. What would have happened if she had married another semi-royal Mercian? Might such a prospective pair have been able to hold on to Mercian independence, against the claims of Æthelstan? Again, we don’t know.

At the end of his book, Adams notes the ‘cultural failure’ of Mercia to produce a coherent narrative of itself. This left a ‘gaping hole for a triumphant West Saxon narrative to fill’, of unity and civilisation spreading from the south (a view which is still familiar in the upper reaches of English society). Historians have managed only to ‘probe tentatively at the edges of the darkness … without, so to speak, turning the floodlights on’. Adams undersells himself here. His book provides a new and welcome perspective on what is still, after so many centuries, the heartland of England, and which was, perhaps, the kernel of the English state.