Offa and the Mercian Wars (11 page)

Wulfhere is depicted by Bede as a pious young man, but he lost no time in restoring Mercia's military reputation. In fact his adoption of Christianity had immediate practical benefits, because he seems to have used it to strengthen his ties with several of the kings of south-eastern England. Around 670 he married Eormenhild, the daughter of King Eorconberht of Kent, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes that King Aethelwald of the South Saxons was his god-son. The West Saxon Cenwalh – who had been forced to take refuge in East Anglia after he had insulted Penda by abandoning his sister – had returned to Wessex, and in 661, apparently while Cenwalh was occupied by fighting in Devon, Wulfhere launched an attack in the area of Ashdown. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle goes on to say that he subdued the Isle of Wight, then subject to the kings of Wessex, and handed it to his god-son Aethelwald.

This brief notice is all we know of what must have been an extraordinary campaign. Wulfhere had led his army right through the heart of Wessex, built or otherwise acquired a fleet, and transported his troops across the Solent before the West Saxons could react. Although the Chronicle describes him as ‘raiding' the Isle of Wight, it is likely that many of the inhabitants preferred him to the rule of Wessex. Bede says that the people of Wight were not Angles or Saxons but Jutes like the men of Kent, which is unlikely to be true of most of them in an ethnic sense, but does indicate that they considered themselves distinct from the West Saxons, who had attacked them on previous occasions and were to do so again after Wulfhere's death. In 686, again according to Bede, the West Saxon king Caedwalla recaptured the island, found it still devoted to paganism, and attempted to solve the problem by exterminating the inhabitants and replacing them with West Saxon settlers. Fortunately he was unsuccessful, but the invasion finally convinced the men of Wight of the advisability of conversion, ‘last of all the provinces of Britain' to adopt Christianity.

By 670 Wulfhere had established a hegemony in southern England which had eluded even Penda. Kent and Surrey were ruled respectively by his brothers-in-law Ecgberht and Frithuwold, and according to Bede the joint kings of the East Saxons, Sigehere and Saebbi, also reigned as his vassals. In 664 there had been a serious outbreak of plague and a disillusioned Sigehere had turned back to the pagan religion, rebuilding ruined temples and setting up idols in them. Wulfhere had sent Bishop Jaruman to counter the apostasy and re-established the Church, and the extent of his power is shown by Bede's statement that he then sold the see of London to Wini, a former bishop of the West Saxons. Wulfhere was therefore the first Mercian king to control London, even though he still did so indirectly through his East Saxon subordinates. The post-Roman history of the city up till this time remains obscure, and it is still sometimes argued that the site was at one point entirely deserted, though Bede's statement that ‘the people of London' expelled their bishop, Mellitus, in 616 makes it clear that it was thriving again by the beginning of the seventh century. It was commonly referred to as ‘Lundenwic', the ‘wic' element indicating a trading post, and it may always have been inhabited mainly by Frisians and other foreign merchants, but it was by far the wealthiest place in Mercia's sphere of influence, and its submission was a considerable coup for Wulfhere. Its only rivals as centres of trade were Southampton, under West Saxon control, and Ipswich in East Anglia. Mercia was no longer a barbarous frontier region, but a developing kingdom fit to take its place among the Christian states of Europe.

Further north Wulfhere seems also to have brought Lindsey into his orbit – when the see of Lichfield was founded in 669 the Christians of Lindsey were placed under its authority. The expansion of Mercian power in the south was greatly aided by the maintenance of peace with the old enemy, Northumbria. Oswy remained on good terms with Wulfhere, and consequently in 670 succeeded in being the first Northumbrian king on record to die in his bed.

Around this time the town of Lichfield began its rise to prominence as the religious centre of Mercia. On the death of Jaruman in 667, Wulfhere asked Archbishop Theodore for a replacement. The choice fell on a certain Chad, who had already been consecrated, but was currently living in a Northumbrian monastery. He rode south – he preferred to walk but Theodore ordered him to ride a horse as more appropriate to his rank – and established a headquarters in what Bede calls ‘the town of Lyccidfelth'. Despite this description there are few if any archaeological signs that there was a town there at all before Chad's arrival, but he built a church and a house, probably situated near the site of Saint Chad's Well at Stowe, half a mile north of the present cathedral, and a settlement began to grow up around it.

Towards the end of Wulfhere's reign, however, the entente with Northumbria collapsed. Oswy's successor, Ecgfrith, was less well disposed towards his southern neighbour, and seems to have been scheming to regain control of Lindsey. According to Eddius Stephanus, an eighth-century Northumbrian source, in 674 Wulfhere ‘stirred up all the southern nations' and marched against Ecgfrith with the aim of enslaving his people. They met in battle at an unknown location, where after ‘countless' warriors had fallen on both sides, the Mercians were routed. Bede says that Ecgfrith then annexed Lindsey, and in the aftermath of his shock defeat the new king of Wessex, Aescwine, also declared war on Wulfhere. The Mercians and West Saxons fought at Biedanheafod or Beda's Head, another unidentified site, in 675. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not record the outcome, though Henry of Huntingdon says that the Mercians had the better of a hard-fought encounter in which ‘many thousands' were killed on each side. But within a year both the opposing kings were dead – in Wulfhere's case, says Henry, not in battle but from disease.

The throne passed to Aethelred, whose twenty-nine-year reign consolidated the gains made by his predecessors and left behind a relatively stable and secure northern frontier. Opinions on his character differ widely. To William of Malmesbury he was ‘more famed for his pious disposition than his skill in war', but Bede would probably have disagreed. He recounts how in 676 Aethelred led an army into Kent, which had been threatening the Mercian satellite kingdoms of Essex and Surrey. He ravaged the country with his ‘wicked soldiery', looting and destroying monasteries and churches, and damaging the town of Rochester so severely that Bishop Putta despaired of restoring it and went into retirement instead. This brutality had its desired effect, because the Kentish kings Hlothere and Eadric submitted to Aethelred and the threat in the south-east was removed.

In 679 the opportunity arose to avenge Wulfhere's defeat at Northumbrian hands. On this occasion King Ecgfrith had presumably invaded Mercian territory, because Aethelred confronted him on a field of which we are told only that it was ‘beside the River Trent'. As usual we have few details of the encounter, except that the Mercians were victorious, and that Ecgfrith's brother Aelfwine, a young man of about 18, was killed in the battle. Aelfwine was also Aethelred's brother-in-law and, says Bede, was ‘much loved' by the people of both kingdoms. His death threatened to cause a blood feud which might have led to lasting hatred between the two peoples, but Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury stepped in and negotiated a peace. The agreement held, and the Northumbrians relinquished their claim to Lindsey and never again tried to extend their power south of the Humber. For this reason Stenton has described the battle as ‘one of the decisive incidents in early English history'.

Ecgfrith turned his attention instead to conquests in Scotland and Ireland, where Bede says that he and his commanders ‘wretchedly abused and burned God's churches', so that the Irish, who had until then been friendly to the English, prayed to heaven for vengeance. They got it in May 685 when the Northumbrians suffered a second catastrophe at Nechtansmere, near Dunnichen in Angus. Ecgfrith was killed, along with most of his army, by the Picts under Bridei mac Beli. Henry of Huntingdon says that Ecgfrith was lured into difficult terrain by a feigned retreat and then surrounded. This battle, as much as Aethelred's victory on the Trent, ensured that Northumbria could never again aspire to dominate the whole of Britain.

In the south Caedwalla of Wessex fought a series of campaigns in Kent in the 690s, apparently without any interference from Aethelred. In one of these campaigns Caedwalla's brother Mul was killed, and in 694 Caedwalla's successor Ine again invaded Kent and imposed a heavy fine for the killing. It is not clear why this did not lead to war between Wessex and Mercia, but the remainder of Aethelred's reign passed fairly peacefully, marred only by the murder of his wife, Queen Osthryth, in 696. Osthryth was the sister of Ecgfrith of Northumbria, and some scholars have postulated that she was involved in a Northumbrian plot to overthrow her husband. On the other hand her family had killed countless Mercians over the years, and she may have been the victim of a blood feud that had simmered secretly despite Archbishop Theodore's intervention. We do not hear that Aethelred punished anyone for the crime, but neither is there any suspicion that he was guilty himself. He abdicated in 704 and became abbot of the monastery at Bardney in Lindsey, where both his wife and her uncle King Oswald were buried.

Wulfhere's son Coenred took the throne on Aethelred's retirement, but ruled for only five years. Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac records that during this time the Welsh were active in raiding the western provinces of the country, inflicting ‘pillage and devastation', and fighting ‘many skirmishes and battles' with the Mercians. Nevertheless Coenred must have defended his frontiers successfully, because charter evidence shows that he remained in control of London. In 709 he abdicated and became a monk, travelling to Rome with his friend King Offa of the East Saxons, who was also following the fashion for spiritually inclined kings to change to an ecclesiastical career.

Of the only slightly longer reign of Coenred's cousin, Ceolred, the chroniclers have little more to say. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle he succeeded in 709, and six years later fought a battle against Ine of Wessex at Woden's Barrow, a famous landmark which is believed to be the prehistoric tumulus now known as Adam's Grave, near Alton Priors in Wiltshire. A site so far south suggests a Mercian invasion of Wessex, but we know nothing of the events which led to it. In fact contemporary sources do not even tell us the outcome of the battle. Henry of Huntingdon says that ‘the slaughter was so great on both sides, that it is difficult to say who sustained the severest loss,' but William of Malmesbury refers to the Mercian king as the victor.

A letter from the English missionary Saint Boniface to Ceolred's successor Aethelbald gives us the only description of this king's character, and it was not favourable. According to Boniface, Ceolred was guilty of destroying monasteries and seducing nuns, and eventually received a well-deserved punishment for his immorality. In 716, while feasting with his nobles, he was suddenly stricken by ‘an evil spirit', and soon afterwards died ‘raving mad, gibbering with demons and cursing the priests of God', without having had an opportunity to confess his sins and so save himself from the torments of hell. The nature of the king's illness is of course impossible to deduce from this information, and Boniface is not necessarily a reliable source on the subject, as his aim in writing this account was to frighten Aethelbald into renouncing his own sins. Ceolred was nevertheless one of the few Mercian kings in this era who remained on the throne until the end of his life and still managed to end his days peacefully. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that he was buried at Lichfield, which suggests that he was holding court somewhere nearby when he died: perhaps Seckington or Tamworth, both places favoured by his successors, which were probably already royal residences in Ceolred's day.

He was succeeded, apparently without much trouble, by Aethelbald, who was a descendant of Penda's brother Eowa and so a member of a junior branch of the royal house. That Aethelbald had a plausible claim to the throne had obviously been recognised earlier, as we learn from the Life of Saint Guthlac that the saint, who was also related to the Mercian royal family, had once given him shelter in his fenland retreat. This obviously relates to a period when the future king was living in exile, no doubt driven out by Ceolred as a potential rival.

Aethelbald had inherited a powerful kingdom, thanks to the efforts of his predecessors, but was soon to take it to new heights. He was fortunate in that his main rival, Ine of Wessex, was distracted by internal troubles, and in 726 abdicated and retired to Rome, where he died. Bede completed his History in the year 731, and his final chapter, describing the ‘present state of Britain', provides a useful snapshot of the political situation in the middle of Aethelbald's reign. After listing the bishops of Kent, the East, West and South Saxons, the Mercians, the Hwicce, Lindsey, the Isle of Wight, and ‘the folk who live in the west, beyond the River Severn', Bede adds that ‘all these provinces', and all the others south of the River Humber, were ‘subject to Aethelbald, king of the Mercians'. Northumbria remained outside the Mercian sphere of influence, but the two great English kingdoms were then at peace, to the extent that many Northumbrians had renounced the life of the warrior in favour of monastic vows. The Picts and Scots were also quiet, says Bede, and although the ‘Britons' of Wales and the west continued to hate the English, they had been at least partially subdued and were for the time being powerless to harm them.

The peace was not to last. In 733 Aethelbald descended on the West Saxon royal manor of Somerton in Somerset and captured it, bringing a large area of western Wessex under his direct control. Four years later he led an apparently unprovoked raid on Northumbria, ‘despising holiness, and setting might above right', in the words of Henry of Huntingdon. Then in 740, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the new king of Wessex, Cuthred, abandoned his allegiance and ‘boldly made war' against Aethelbald. However bold his initiative, he was obviously unsuccessful, and saw the error of his ways in time to avoid drastic retribution, for three years later he was fighting alongside the Mercians against the Welsh. Henry of Huntingdon describes how in the ensuing battle the Britons deployed in ‘immense multitudes' to stop the English invaders, but ‘falling on the enemy's ranks at different points, in a sort of rivalry and contest which should be foremost', the allies routed them and returned home in triumph.

In 746 King Selred of the East Saxons was killed; the Chronicle does not say by whom, but he had also been a vassal of Aethelbald and may have perished in another unsuccessful revolt. Cuthred seems to have been distracted for the next few years by internal troubles, because the Chronicle says that in 748 ‘Cynric, aetheling [i.e. a royal prince] of Wessex, was killed,' perhaps in a failed bid for the throne, and in 750 Cuthred was fighting against an ‘arrogant ealdorman' named Aethelhun. But in the same year the continuator of Bede tells us that the West Saxon king, his home front now no doubt secured, once more rose in revolt against Aethelbald. The phrasing of this entry hints that Cuthred was involved in much greater matters than a purely local rebellion, for it actually states that he ‘rose up against King Aethelbald and Oengus.' Oengus mac Fergus was the king of the Picts, and at that time he exercised a hegemony in the north of Britain similar to that of Aethelbald in the south. In 741 he also took over the throne of the Dal Riata Scots who were settled in what is now Argyll, and became involved in conflict with both the Northumbrians and the Britons of Strathclyde, described in the twelfth-century chronicle of Simeon of Durham.

The year 750 saw the defeat of the Picts by Tewdwr of Strathclyde at the Battle of Mugdock, where Oengus' brother Talorcan, commanding the Pictish army, was killed. Six years later, however, the Picts returned in alliance with the Northumbrians, and forced Tewdwr's son and successor Domnagual to submit to them. We have no details of the role played by Mercia in this northern war, but it is not unlikely that Aethelbald had been in communication with Oengus, perhaps with a view to keeping the Northumbrians occupied in case they decided to join the British side in the 750 campaign. In that case Wessex might have been persuaded to take advantage of the fact that the Mercians were temporarily focused on their northern frontier.

In 752, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Aethelbald and Cuthred met in battle at a place called Beorhford, which is generally identified with Burford on the River Windrush, on the slopes of the Cotswold Hills between Oxford and Circencester. Henry of Huntingdon's dramatic account relates that Aethelbald, as ‘king of kings', was accompanied by allied contingents from Kent, the East Saxons and the ‘Angles' (probably those of East Anglia). Fighting alongside Cuthred was the former rebel Aethelhun, now reconciled, who was entrusted with the golden dragon standard of Wessex. Before the opposing lines clashed, Aethelhun, no doubt eager to prove his loyalty, rushed forward and ‘transfixed' his opposite number, who was carrying the Mercian standard. A terrible battle then took place, with the usual carnage on both sides. Aethelbald and Aethelhun both fought like heroes, mowing down their respective enemies so that the armies seemed caught between two consuming fires. ‘Wherever the brave King Aethelbald turned, the enemy was slaughtered, for his invincible sword rent armour as if it were a vestment, and bones as if they were flesh.' At last the moment came when the two champions faced each other in single combat. But at the first exchange of blows Aethelbald's courage failed. Henry explains that God had decided to punish him for his pride and afflicted him suddenly with terror, so that he fled from the field even while the rest of his army was still fighting, leaving it to scatter in ignominious defeat.

Unfortunately, this exciting story is unlikely on several grounds. Henry could offer no rational motive for Aethelbald's uncharacteristic cowardice, hence his reliance on divine intervention. The pro-West Saxon Chronicle, which would have been expected to mention such a humiliation for the Mercian enemy, is silent on the matter. Not only is it out of character, but Aethelbald's behaviour seems to have had none of the expected repercussions. It is hardly likely that a war leader who suddenly abandoned his men in the presence of the enemy could retain their loyalty and respect, but Aethelbald returned to Mercia still fully in control, and there is no record that his followers turned against him until the confused events of 757, which are discussed below. It is of course quite possible that he was coming off worst in single combat when he was rescued by his bodyguards – an incident of that sort might have been gleefully remembered in Wessex without having much impact on his reputation at home.

The mention of the dragon standard may, however, reflect a genuine tradition, because William Camden says that in his day, in the late sixteenth century, the inhabitants of Burford still celebrated the battle by parading a golden dragon about the village on midsummer eve. The Chronicle is of course a West Saxon source, and may have exaggerated the extent of the victory. In fact Aethelbald's army probably withdrew more or less intact, because no deaths of eminent men are recorded apart from the standard bearer, and there seem to have been no serious consequences for Mercian power.

Cuthred went on to campaign against the Welsh, but died two years later. One of his relatives, Sigeberht, succeeded him briefly, but reigned for only a year before Cynewulf and the leading men of the kingdom deposed him for unspecified ‘unlawful actions'. One of the first acts of Cynewulf, who succeeded him, must have been to visit Aethelbald's court to make his submission, because his name and those of several of his prominent followers appear as witnesses on a charter of 757 in which the Mercian made a grant of land in Wiltshire to a local abbot. That a Mercian ruler could give away land in the heart of Wessex while a young and vigorous West Saxon king stood meekly by and endorsed it says a great deal about the balance of power at the end of Aethelbald's reign, even after the apparent defeat at Beorhford.

The reputation for tyranny which Aethelbald later earned seems to have been a result of his difficulties with the church. In fact several examples of his interest in religion are recorded. Felix's account of Guthlac's life tells us that the king repaid the benefactor of his early years by commissioning building work to dignify his last resting place at Crowland, which became a place of pilgrimage. In 747, at Boniface's instigation, Aethelbald joined with Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury to convene a council to discuss church reform. But the king's private life, like that of his predecessor, attracted Boniface's disapproval. The letter quoted above which relates the fate of Ceolred, probably written around the time of this council, congratulates Aethelbald on his just government, his generosity to the poor and his maintenance of the rule of law in the kingdom – but it goes on to accuse the king of a list of sins very similar to those of his predecessor. He had supposedly ignored the privileges of the church, plundered monasteries and allowed his noblemen to use violence against members of the clergy. What was worse, it had been brought to Boniface's attention that Aethelbald had never married, but far from remaining single ‘for the sake of chastity and continence', was in the habit of fornicating with nuns and virgins as well as with ordinary ‘harlots'. Many commentators have allowed this criticism to overshadow Aethelbald's undoubted achievements, acknowledged even by Boniface himself, but they are perhaps the sort of thing which we might expect from a leader of a church which was still trying to assert itself as a political force, a reminder that the difficulties which Henry II experienced with Thomas Becket, for example, were nothing new.

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.