Offa and the Mercian Wars (3 page)

The Mercians first appear as a distinct group in the accounts of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relating to the early seventh century. By then they were already a long-established people, with some of their oral traditions – such as the genealogies of their kings – going back several hundred years. Attempting to trace their origins, however, takes us into the most obscure and controversial period in the whole of English history. According to the conventional view the ‘English' people were easily distinguished by their Germanic language and culture from the ‘Celtic' or ‘British' occupants of northern and western Britain, and this difference is said to have originated with the mass migrations of Anglo-Saxon tribes from the Continent after the fall of the Roman Empire. Until the 1970s it was generally accepted that the present inhabitants of most of England were descended from these migrants, who had displaced the aboriginal Britons with various degrees of force. Since then a growing revisionist movement has cast doubt on this view, with estimates of the size of the immigrant contribution declining to the point where many archaeologists now deny that there is any evidence for an Anglo-Saxon migration at all, preferring to think in terms of imported fashions and cultural influences rather than people (Pryor, 2004).

In the past the waters have been further muddied by politically motivated ideas of history. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English scholars often shared the prevailing contempt for the peoples of the ‘Celtic fringe' and wished to emphasise the distinctness of the English and their supposedly superior political institutions, while more recently Celtic nationalists have also found it convenient to accentuate the same differences. Even today opinions tend to be so polarised that it is worth pointing out that the extreme migrationist view originates not from some Victorian ideologue, but from no less an authority than the Venerable Bede.

Bede's account of the coming of the English begins with the troubles which afflicted the Britons after the departure of the Roman armies early in the fifth century AD. The inhabitants of the former Roman province, now mostly converted to Christianity, are described as timid and demoralised, hiding in terror behind their fortifications while the barbarian Picts and Irish plundered the country. In the 440s they wrote to the Roman consul Aetius in Gaul, begging for help: ‘The barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us, drowning or slaughter.' But Aetius was already fully occupied with the war against Attila and his Huns, and no help could be sent. Meanwhile the Britons had rallied and temporarily driven off the invaders, but famine, followed by a terrible plague, caused many deaths and weakened them still further. Fearing that their enemies would soon return, they followed the advice of one of their kings, Vortigern, and hired German-speaking Saxon mercenaries from the Continent to defend them.

This, says Bede, happened during the reign of the Roman emperor Martianus, who came to the throne in the year 449. Vortigern brought over three shiploads of Saxon warriors, and they were given land in the eastern part of the country in return for military service. They quickly proved their worth by defeating a Pictish invasion from the north, then sent back to Saxony for more recruits, adding, in Bede's words, ‘that the country was fertile and the Britons cowardly'. This sparked off a land rush which brought immigrants from the territories of three of the most warlike pagan tribes of Germany – the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes. Soon they were settling in such numbers that the Britons became afraid. Bede does not specifically say that the Germans brought their families with them, but it is clear that he regarded this as a large-scale settlement of peoples rather than just a collection of pillaging war bands. He goes on to state that the various English peoples of his day were all descended from these newcomers: the occupants of Kent, and the Isle of Wight and the mainland opposite, from the Jutes; those of Essex, Sussex and Wessex from the Saxons; and the East and Middle Angles, the Northumbrians, the Mercians and ‘other English peoples' from the Angles.

It was the latter who precipitated the catastrophe which was to overwhelm the native Britons, when they made an alliance with the Picts and attempted to extort more land and provisions from their British employers. Whether or not they were successful in this we are not told, but eventually they broke out of the enclave where they had settled and began to ravage the country ‘from the eastern to the western shores'. There was no organised opposition and the Anglian war bands inflicted terrible damage, destroying buildings, murdering bishops and priests as well as laymen and forcing the survivors to flee overseas or take refuge in the hills. Bede's language implies a deliberate genocide: ‘A few wretched survivors captured in the hills were butchered wholesale, and others, desperate with hunger, came out and surrendered to the enemy for food, although they were doomed to lifelong slavery even if they escaped instant massacre.'

After this devastating raid the invaders returned to their settlements, and the surviving Britons gradually rallied. Under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, said to have been the sole surviving man of ‘Roman race' in the country, they inflicted a defeat on their enemies and a long struggle ensued, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage over the other. Eventually the Britons won a victory at the Battle of Mount Badon, which earned them peace for a generation. According to Bede this took place ‘about forty four years' after the Anglo-Saxon invasions, which would place it around the year 500. This was not the end of the story, for both Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle record further campaigns as late as the early seventh century which are usually supposed to be part of a gradual westward expansion of the invaders at the expense of the Britons. In 552, for example, the West Saxon king Cynric routed a British army at ‘Searo byrig' (Old Sarum, outside Salisbury). In 577 his successors Cuthwine and Ceawlin defeated and killed three British kings at Dyrham in Somerset, and subsequently captured the towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. Then in 605 Aethelfrith of Northumbria killed ‘a countless number of Welsh' at Chester, including Christian priests who had come to pray for a British victory.

Bede's account is not the only source for the Anglo-Saxon invasion. We also have the testimony of the British monk Gildas, who was writing much closer in time to the events he described, and who may have been the source of some of Bede's information. Gildas' book, evocatively entitled On the Ruin of Britain and written in Latin around 550, describes Vortigern's invitation to the Saxons, their arrival in three ships, later reinforced by ‘a larger company', and their demands for extra provisions, followed by a brutal attack. However, Gildas' perspective was much narrower than Bede's. His main purpose was to depict the sufferings of his people as God's punishment for their sins and those of their rulers, and he mentions contemporary kings by name only to condemn them for their immorality. Most of the identifiable places he refers to are in the far south-west of what is now England, and the only invaders he discusses are the Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes a series of campaigns against the ‘Britons' or ‘Welsh' which seem to be the same as the events related from the other side by Gildas, but again they give us only part of the picture, concentrating on the activities of Saxon pirates in Kent, Sussex and the region around the Solent. What is more, the Chronicle in its present form was not written down until the ninth century, and so it cannot necessarily be regarded as an independent authority for the events of 400 years before.

On Bede's evidence it was the Angles, the ancestors of the Mercians, who eventually conquered and occupied most of England north of the Thames after the temporary setback at Mount Badon. But we have no account of any military operations by which this extensive conquest might have been achieved. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the Angles appear as if from nowhere. The earliest mention here of them as invaders appears in a poem about the Battle of Brunanburgh inserted in the Chronicle under the year 937, which boasts that there had never been a greater slaughter, ‘as books tell us . . . since Angles and Saxons came here from the east, sought out Britain over the broad ocean . . . overcame the Welsh, seized the country.' A passage of this date cannot be regarded as independent of Bede, though, especially in view of the specific appeal to the authority of ‘books'.

The earliest mention of Angles in Britain, in fact, comes from a brief survey of the island in the De Bello Gotthico of Procopius of Caesarea (Stenton), who was writing only a decade or so after Gildas. According to Procopius, Britain was inhabited by three races: the native Britons, the ‘Frissones' or Frisians, and the ‘Angiloi'. But he says nothing of a recent invasion or migration. On the contrary, basing his account on the statements of some Angles who had accompanied a Frankish embassy to Constantinople, he states that the country and its people were so fertile that their surplus population regularly emigrated to the European mainland, where the Frankish king settled them in sparsely inhabited parts of his territory.

The presence of large numbers of Frisians in England is otherwise undocumented, but is not particularly surprising. They travelled widely as merchants and seaborne raiders, and the English language is remarkably similar to the Frisian dialects still spoken on the other side of the North Sea, in the coastal regions of what is now the Netherlands. It is possible that Procopius' Anglian informants used the term ‘Frissones' to denote their Saxon neighbours, although such usage is not attested in England itself. But Sir Frank Stenton has pointed out that German traditions also describe a population movement from England around the sixth century, and that according to one version, recorded at Fulda in the ninth century, the Saxons of Germany were descended from ‘Angli' who had come from Britain.

With our earliest sources in such a state of confusion it is tempting to sidestep the issue of ethnic identity, and in common parlance the term ‘Anglo-Saxon' (which was already in use in late Anglo-Saxon times) is widely used to include the descendants of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, as well as the smaller groups of Frisian and Frankish immigrants whom Bede also mentions. The Welsh writers were lumping them all together as ‘Saxons' as early as the time of Nennius, around 800, while at the same time the word ‘Welsh', derived from Old English ‘wealh' or ‘foreign', became attached to the Celtic-speakers of southern Britain.

There is plenty of evidence that the ‘English' peoples all spoke mutually intelligible languages and considered themselves to belong to a common cultural tradition. For example, all the English royal houses except that of Essex claimed descent from the legendary hero (or god) Woden, who is identical to the Scandinavian Odin. However, the dialects of English written in the ‘Anglian' regions from the seventh century onwards are readily distinguishable from those of the ‘Saxons', and the differences were presumably more marked in earlier times. It therefore makes sense to see the Angles as somehow self-consciously different from the Saxons, Jutes and others, though as we shall see this was not necessarily due to their origin in a different location on the Continent.

So, according to the traditional view, the Mercians and their neighbours were descended from invaders from the Anglian homeland in Europe, which is usually located in what is now the Schleswig-Holstein region at the southern end of the Jutland Peninsula. These Angles took advantage of the weakness of the Britons after the Roman withdrawal to carry out a violent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing', and then occupied the fertile lands vacated by their victims. They presumably penetrated inland via the rivers which flow into the Wash and the Humber estuary, and over a period of a century and a half, between about AD 450 and 600, pushed their settlement frontier west as far as the watershed between the east-flowing River Trent and the Severn, which runs south-westwards into the Bristol Channel. The name Mercian, which derives from the word ‘mierce', meaning mark or frontier, suggests that this group formed the spearhead of the advance, gaining as a reward the rich farmlands of the Middle Trent Valley – the location of their heartland in historic times. This scenario could certainly explain the appearance in the centre of previously Celtic England of a warlike people speaking a Germanic language, worshipping Germanic gods, and bringing with them many of the trappings of German military and civilian culture. However, on examination it presents more problems than it solves.

The first is an obvious point which has nevertheless eluded many with an emotional attachment to the Anglo-Saxons, from Bede to the present day. The numerous small groups which the document known as the Tribal Hidage (see below, page 39) reveals in central England in the seventh century, some of them comprising only a few hundred fighting men, can hardly represent the successors of an army of conquest. Even in the time of Penda in the 630s and 640s, the Mercians, who were eventually forged into a kingdom under his leadership, were just one tribe among many, their name so obscure that to their contemporaries their ruler was just ‘King Penda', or ‘Penda the Southumbrian' (in other words, from south of the River Humber), as though he were a mere warlord without a proper kingdom. There is no surviving tradition of battles fought against the Britons along the Trent, no source mentions an earlier Anglian conqueror, no later Mercian king harks back to one – at least not in England – and we find no trace of a powerful kingdom which might have recently fragmented into those two dozen or more little tribes.

Bede's allegation that ‘the Angles' made a treaty with the Picts does imply some sort of central command, but even if true it refers to a very early stage in the invasion, when their force may have consisted of only a few ships' crews. The strong impression is that large-scale political organisation was new to the region in the middle of the seventh century. But only an organised military force could have driven a well-established native population from an area of this size. In more recent times independent groups of settlers without military organisation have displaced other peoples – in North America, South Africa and Australia, for example – but only with huge advantages in numbers and technology, and even then the process has never been quick or easy. In fact it has often been observed that no settlement frontier ever managed a sustained advance against an intact Native American society which had not already been disrupted by disease or military operations. The theory that sixth-century Anglian farmers could have achieved such a result without greatly superior weapons or implausibly large numbers must depend solely on assertions of racial superiority over Bede's ‘cowardly Britons'. In historic times the British kingdoms were themselves well organised, though, and furthermore were capable of launching fast mounted raids over long distances, as the famous epic poem
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Gododdin relates. Small groups of Anglo-Saxon settlers pushing ahead of the frontier would have been extremely vulnerable to such attacks. For a roughly comparable situation we can look to nineteenth-century Texas, where, even with the benefit of firearms, white settlers were unable to hold their ground against mounted Comanche raiders, let alone advance onto the plains without the support of the army.