Offa and the Mercian Wars (12 page)

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.

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 alphabet (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.

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 remains 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).

In practice pattern-welded swords may not have been greatly superior to less sophisticated versions, as the process can make them brittle. But perhaps appearance and function were not easily separated in the minds of potential purchasers: the distinctive appearance of the blade might have served not only as a status symbol but as a sort of quality mark, indicating both to the owner and others the effort and expense which had gone into making it. Good quality swords could be fabulously expensive; one mentioned in the tenth-century will of Earl Aelfgar of Essex, for example, was valued at 120 ‘mancuses' of gold, or roughly the equivalent of the same number of good plough oxen.

Swords were clearly optimised for cutting or slashing rather than for thrusting. The typical blade of the pre-Viking era was parallel sided for most of its length and had a rounded rather than an acutely pointed tip, though as it was sharpened on both sides it would still be effective for stabbing, at least against an unarmoured target. Perhaps a more important consideration was that Anglo-Saxon pommels, both the decorative gold and garnet designs of the nobles' expensive weapons and the cheaper, more functional types, were too light to act as counterweights as they did on later medieval swords. This would have made the weapons somewhat blade heavy, and so perhaps more suited to deliberate, powerful cuts than to rapid manoeuvring. This may remind us of the remarks of the eleventh-century Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus, who says that ‘in days of old' men did not try to beat each other down in a sword fight with a rain of blows, but relied on the force rather than the frequency of their strokes. However, Saxo was referring specifically to a rather ritualised form of single combat, and it is unlikely that men in the heat of battle would have had the time to prepare their blows carefully in this way. More probably what to modern eyes seem unbalanced Anglo-Saxon swords simply required a stronger sword arm to wield, rewarding the practice needed to master them with the ability to deliver cuts of devastating force.

Another weapon commonly associated with the Anglo-Saxons is the knife or ‘seax', which is generally believed to have given the Saxons their name. Most of the seaxes found in England, however, have blades of fourteen inches or less, and look like general-purpose knives rather than weapons of war. Early types had single-edged but symmetrical blades with rounded tips, but by the sixth century a variant appeared with a sharply angled back, or even a reverse-curved tip like a Bowie knife. If the tip was sharpened on both sides in the manner of a modern Bowie knife this would have made the seax a more effective stabbing weapon, but such short blades can only have been used in combat as a last resort by a man who had lost his spear or sword. In the eighth century seaxes began to appear which were of similar design but much longer, approaching the length of short swords. Still single edged, but with relatively broad, heavy blades, these could have been very effective cutting and thrusting weapons, reminiscent of the later medieval falchion. Stephen Pollington has even suggested that some long-hilted seaxes could have been used two-handed, though he admits that this tactic is difficult to reconcile with the use of a shield.

Like the seax, the axe in this period was basically an agricultural or woodworking implement, with a limited application to warfare. The famous ‘axe-hammer' from Sutton Hoo looks more like a tool than a weapon, perhaps connected with the maintenance of the ship it was buried with. Fifth- and sixth-century finds – for example from Burgh Castle in Norfolk – occasionally include the remains of axes with narrow curved heads which have been interpreted as belonging to throwing axes of the type used by the Franks (Underwood). The two-handed axes familiar from the Bayeux tapestry were a much later development, adopted under Scandinavian influence in the eleventh century. However, despite Henry of Huntingdon's probably anachronistic description of the West Saxon champion Aethelhun wielding one at the Battle of Beorhford in 752, there is no reliable evidence that the axe played a significant part in the wars of the Mercian era.

Apart from thrown spears, missile weapons included bows and possibly slings; the latter have left no archaeological trace, but the ‘Life of Saint Wilfred' (Stephanus) describes one being used to kill a pagan priest in a passage with very obvious echoes of David and Goliath. Unfortunately archaeology can shed little more light on Anglo-Saxon archery, because the wooden bows themselves were perishable and the iron arrowheads are difficult to identify, the larger ones being easily mistaken for small spearheads.

It is often assumed, without much supporting evidence, that the early English despised the bow as a weapon of war, and that it was used mainly by the lower classes for hunting. This idea probably derives from Henry of Huntingdon, who quotes William the Conqueror as telling his men before the Battle of Hastings that the English were ‘a people that does not even possess arrows'. Even for Harold's army of 1066, however, this is suspect, as a general's pep talk on the eve of a battle can hardly be taken as evidence for his enemy's real capabilities! In fact an unprejudiced investigation lends weight to the idea that the English not only used the bow in war, but used it to considerable effect. It is obvious from one of the riddles preserved in the well-known Exeter Book that the bow was an implement with which most people would have been familiar, and it is noteworthy that this text describes it being used against men and not as a hunting weapon.