757-796: The Age of Offa: What Else Was Happening Before the Vikings

In the previous post we referred to a first abortive attempt to create an English Empire within at least Southern Britain by Offa King of Mercia and suggested that, at the end, he was not the man for the job. As we will see, further 'progress' would be delayed by the eruption of the Viking raiders, bad luck and lack of strong leadership. It may be argued that this delay in creating a viable English State was at the root of one of the salient events of British history - the ease with which the brutal post-Viking Normans were able to occupy and destroy the native English aristocracy without even bothering to absorb them as the Romans had done. But we run ahead of ourselves ... what else was happening around Offa in these years?

Northumbria had turned in on itself as it ceded moral secular authority to Offa. Its great age was well and truly over. King Edbriht became a monk in 758 (we noted earlier in our postings how the Church had created a means of retirement to effect a peaceful transition of power). He is succeeded by his son Osulf but there is no peaceful transition - he is killed within his own household and Aethelwold Moll becomes King in 761. Throughout the next half century, every King of Northumbria (and there are six of them in our period including Aethelwold Moll) is deposed, murdered or exiled with only one returning to the throne only to be murdered in his turn. I suggest we pass over the unedifying details, fascinating though these may be to students of dark deeds and courtly intrigue in a generation being raised on Game of Thrones. One can reasonably assume that the Mercians were dabbling in these murky waters as well as in every other court in England.

Northumbria is not going to be the core of a central English state. Its political weakness may even have been the first encouragement to Viking raids - a back door to the rape of Southern England. There is a certain logic to this loss of impetus for Northumbria. Southern Britain is where the wealth is. That wealth would increase with the development of relatively ordered pre-feudal societies which could trade with Europe and accumulate the capital to invest in further order (we have already seen the economic and political effects of a deterioriation in the relationship between Offa and Charlemagne). The deliberate creation of the Frankish Empire as Roman substitute would have helped shift Britain back to its 'normal' Roman pattern of wealthy province in times of relative peace.

Power would flow from the North to the South. Perhaps even Mercia was not South enough to be the pivot of a viable English nationalism. Perhaps that destiny was always going to be that of Wessex which would underpin a half-viable English State, albeit one ready to be plucked like a ripe apple by European opportunists because of its delayed political development. Whoever was going to create a unified English Nation State, it was not by the end of the Eighth Century going to be Northumbria and the odds were already lengthening on Mercia. The tragedy would be that a European invasion would exploit England's delayed development and impose an alien regime that was neither the fish of native organic State nor the fowl of wealthy Province of a Universal Empire. Perhaps our current post-Imperial Atlantic system, neither organic native State nor centralised European Empire reproduces that weakness today - neither fish nor fowl.

We run ahead of ourselves to note that, in three hundred years, a series of events would impose a bunch of military adventurers and brutal gangsters as an occupying force that was neither native nor universal. Those gangsters, no different other than their superior efficiency than the gangsters who seized Britannia after the departure of the Romans a further three hundred years before Offa, are the lineal ancestors of our current elite albeit thoroughly watered down and democratised over our last 350 years! That same elite, in a rare moment of polemic here, that has given up on the independent nation and yet cannot go for integration into a more logical empire and sits, like the weak English aristocracy of the Eleventh Century on the historical fence waiting for events to happen to it, ducking and diving and crossing its fingers in the hope that the worst will not happen.

Meanwhile, it is a case of business as usual for the petty kingdoms that accepted or were to accept Offa's overlordship or, in the case of Northumbria, were just outside his remit as rex totius Anglorum Patriae. The natural Southern rival of Mercia remained Wessex where Sigebehrt is succeeded by Cynewulf as King in 757. We have noted in the previous posting that Offa was at war with Wessex in 779 and came to some kind of dynastic alliance through the marriage of his daughter to Brihtric in 789. Wessex too, like Northumbria, was subject to internal dissension. Cynewulf is killed in 783 by Cyneheard but is then killed in turn to be succeeded by Brihtric in that same year.

In the minor Kingdoms, Ethelbert of Kent dies in 762 to be succeeded by his son Eardwulf. Kent was may have been particularly problematic for Mercia (the Battle of Otford is noted in 776). We can put this down to Kent's pivotal role in the cross-channel European trade. The wealth of Kent would be vital to any claim to overlordship. The pacification of Europe under the Carolingian Frankish Empire would have increased trade substantially. Kent, a wealthy but essentially small and so weak polity, would have been target for any aggrandising English nation builder. Offa should have offered no exception. Offa was, as we have seen, quite capable of beheading a King of East Anglia (792) for what amounts to temerity although he clearly had to back-track soon enough to keep his alliance with the Church and no doubt internal peace but the power was there in the Mercian State as we shall see. Kent survives Offa only to fall to a successor - a matter for the next posting. Eadbert King of Kent, who will be the target of Mercian ire, comes to the throne only at the very end of our period in 796.

Archbishops also come and go. Cuthbert of Canterbury dies in 760 and is succeeded by Bregowine in 761. Ethelbert of York dies in 780 and is succeeded by Eanbald.  In the same year, there are changes in the Northumbrian Bishoprics - Ealhmund of Hexham dies to be succeeded by Rilberht and Cynewulf of Lindisfarne resigns to be succeeded by Higbald. From now on, we will take these copmings and goings as read, referring only to those Churchmen who make some greater mark on history. By the end of the Eighth Century, the proper relationship between Church and State, of which we have a modern pale reflection in the Established Anglican Church today, had been established and, until the Reformation, would not be disrupted except by pagan raiding and the occasional schism in the Church or irruption of popular protest as heresy.

We should note as a marker event the politically but not theologically contentius Synod at Chelsea in 787 and signs that Offa's position owes not a little to Papal support, the Papacy always tending to encourage centralised secular authority that respects its own claim to a higher spiritual authority.  Offa promoted at his Synod the supply of funds from the English Church to Rome through what later was to become St. Peter's Pence, an institution that survived until the Henrician Reformation but which here signifies (in essence) an annual payment to the Papacy for its endorsement of Offa's divine right to rule so long as he continued to toe the spiritual line.

The Catholic Church was, by now, an effective operation for establishing its own totalitarian position within Early Medieval society - soft power endorsement and a universal network of social control and intelligence operations (albeit with social welfare aspects) offered in return for the elimination of all rival religious structures and a flow of funds to maintain an extensive parallel government, a proto-civil service that buttressed secular power (and could survive the chaos of secular politics much as the British Civil Service does today), moderated its tendencies towards ruthlessness and brutality and (at least in part) protected the general population fromn extremes of exploitation. As a system, it was finely tuned to grow with pacification, centralisation and economic recovery although the seeds of its own eventual destruction lay in the internal contradictions of it supporting ambitious secular kings who, with increased wealth and authority, would chafe at the restraints put on them by a Church that was to become fully secularised as a power in its own right over the subsequent 750 years.

But then everything is in danger of being turned upside down by the Pagan Vikings who are going to dominate our next set of postings. The first raids on the Anglo-Saxon world are recorded in 787 and they are back again in 793 during a period of famine. In this latter raid, the Vikings sack and destroy the Church at Lindisfarne. This first major raid is reported across the nation. The raiders go on in the same year to sack the monastery at Jarrow but suffer a reverse when their fleet breaks up in bad weather and many are drowned, any survivors who struggle ashore being killed by the Northumbrians at Tynemouth. There is another raid on Iona in 795 so we see a pattern of targeting the easy money to be found in church treasures in a smash-and-grab raid within a polity past its prime and unable to organise itself to defend or effect a punishing defeat on what amount to an organised crime operation that strengthens as it accumulates capital from its raids. Northumbrian weakness is the first stage in the creation of a loose gangland empire of initially pagan plunder. We might today wonder whether Western weakness is not enabling a similar accumulation of capital amongst organised criminals leading to similar effects. After all, ISIS has emerged out of smuggling gangs much as the Normans arose out of the raiding Northmen. We shall see.

757-796: The Age of Offa: A False Start for an English Kingdom

Offa, King of Mercia, dominates the second half of the Eighth Century. We will cover the other kingships in a subsequent post in order to have the facts on the table but it is Offa who interests us here. He seized power in 757 and united most of England under his rule. If his rule did not extend North of the Humber on his accession that was only because his son-in-law ruled in Northumbria (which we will deal with in the next posting). As leading 'Southumbrian', Offa is now termed in the Churchmen's Latin Rex Totius Anglorium Patriae. We have the first inklings of the possibility of a unified English State, a mini-empire to ape that of Charlemagne on the Continent.

Offa's Dyke - incomplete today but still the longest earthwork in Britain [1]

Wars to assert dominance have to continue however. In 776 Mercian and Kentish forces meet in battle at Otford in Kent and in 779 Offa defeats Cynewulf of Wessex near Benson (Oxfordshire) which town Offa then seizes. A border (Offa's Dyke) is also constructed between Anglian Mercia and the Welsh Kingdom of Powys although more recent archaeological research has suggested that he was building on earlier Mercian construction that may possibly have gone back to post-Roman times. 

Offa was a dynastic player intent on building a lasting 'house'. In 787, Offa has his son Egfrith solemnly consecrated as King of the Mercians under his overlordship. In 789, Brihtric of Wessex takes Offa's daughter Eadburg as his Queen. Offa is the most powerful King in England before Alfred, powerful enough to feel able to quarrel with the Empreror Charlemagne over marriage arangements. Apparently he thought himself important enough to have his son marry a daughter of the Emperor in return for sending a daughter over to Aachen to marry one of the Emperor's son. The Emperor did not agree and this lese-majeste led to Frankish ports being closed to English merchants, a serious economic matter for the Southern English.

Things got worse. Ethelbert of East Anglia was a suitor for Offa's daughter Alfrida in 792. Offa, for whatever reason, beheaded him but something about this did not sit right with him or with the public. He felt remorse, or was forced to appear to feel remorse, and ordered a tomb for the murdered king in what was later to become the Saxon Cathedral of Saints Mary & Ethelbert in Hereford (near Sutton Walls where the King was based). We also get a sense that Offa was now very interested in ensuring that the Church was on side (and we cannot forget the relationship between the Universal Church and the new Imperial Frankish regime in Europe). He founded St. Albans Abbey in the next year (793). It is hard not to see a connection between all this and reports of famine (perhaps connected to the economic effects of the closure of the Frankish sea ports) and of 'portents' (which we may take as signs of rumblings amongst the people). This is also the beginning of the period of Viking Raids, initially affecting Northumbria rather than points further south but perhaps creating an air of anxiety and fear.

As Offa's reign drew to a close, we can see the reasons why he was a false dawn from the point of view of England. He had an exaggerated sense of his own importance in relation to the Frankish Empire, he made political misjudgements and he came too late to an understanding that a viable Kingdom must be built on an alliance with the Church rather than through simple force of arms and dynastic fixes. Given that a European culture of dynastic legitimacy was emerging that required the backing of the Catholic Church, the lesson would not be lost on Alfred the Great. Offa died in 796. Mercian dominance died with him. His son and successor Ecgfrith did not live out the year and Ecgfrith was succeeded by Cenwulf.

[1] Source - BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/anglo_saxons/kings_and_laws

695-756: After Theodore - The Church Established

Once Archbishop Theodore had established the Church of Rome as a cultural absolute for the English, any lingering controversy could end and England could find its saints and shrines. We have already noted how retiring kings (perhaps saving themselves from a grisly end as power slipped away from them) became monks or found themselves migrating to Rome - Cenred of Mercia in 704 (in Rome by the next year) and Ine of Wessex who died in Rome in 726 being two examples. Aristocrats were also active in founding new establishments - Ine of Wessex's sister, Cuthburg, founded a religious community at Wimborne in 718 - so the integration of Church and aristocracy is becoming ever more close in the half century before Offa.

Wilfrid outlives Theodore by almost two decades in 709 but without any essential change to the settlement created by his old rival. He is buried at Ripon, presumably reconciled to the facts of the matter. He is succeeded at Ripon by his chaplain Acca in 710. Former John Archbishop of York (retired 717), reckoned to be a kind man, dies in retirement at Beverley (a monastery he had founded) in 721, showing that monasticism was also a means of retiring from the cares of office.

Theodore's successor at Canterbury, Brihtwold (there are many variants of the name), died in 731 after a very long incumbency (he had been appointed in 693) and is succeeded by Tatwine who has a very short incumbency (he dies in 734). Another short incumbency for Nothelm (735-739) is succeeded by another long one for Cuthbert (740-760).

This was not a conciliar period until 746-7 with the first Council of Clovesho (the first of several quasi-synods in England). The location is unclear but was probably in Mercia and it involved not only religious figures but political figures such as kings and aristocrats. Some have claimed this to be the earliest version of an English Parliament not without justification and the Clovesho Councils were to meet periodically through the second half of the eighth century and first quarter of the ninth. As far as we can gather this was primarily a dispute-resolving, administrative and advisory body to kings and shows again how the Church was becoming essential to the construction of the rules by which society would be ordered. Religious matters remained a matter for the Church alone but it seems that kings and nobles welcomed this intervention by the spiritual wing of the system as a means of securing power at the cost of some civilised restraint of their own impulses.

As for saints and shrines, at the beginning of the period (695), Abbess Sexburga, sister of Saint Etheldreda (Aethelthryth) founder of the convent at Ely in 673, places her sister's body in its Abbey Church and so created a shrine. To this day, there is a Catholic St. Etheldreda's Church in Ely Place in London - the oldest Catholic Church in London - in a building that was the town chapel of the powerful Bishops of Ely in the later Middle Ages. Another Fenland saint is Guthlac of Crowland who died at his hermitage in 714 on which site Crowland Abbey was to be founded only two years later. Six churches alone are dedicated to him in Lincolnshire today and others in nearby counties.

The Lindisfarne Gospels date from this period (late Seventh Century). England is culturally starting the process of matching the experience of the Irish Celtic Church and contributing to a later Charlemagnic Europe with its fine illuminated scholarship, piety toward spiritual exemplars and monasticism.  This is also the period of Bede's important source The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731 four years before his death in 735. His death marks the closing of a spectacular flowering of Northumbrian art and scholarship.

There is a defintely a humanising influence going on here even if the lot of the peasantry was probably only marginally improved - the real improvement (a betterment felt across Europe) was the Church's ability to defuse the sheer violence of a warlord society by imposing at least some restraint on barbarism, building a society of rules without the requirement for terror (an alternative model to Chinese legalism of which the West knew nothing thankfully), permitting a non-violent way out for yesterday's men and allowing scholars to retire in moderate security. The best of them tried to show respect to the poor and educate the brightest for the new administration - not quite mandarins in the making perhaps but still providers of rule-making and administrative services to rulers who had been little more than pirates and thugs not so long ago.

695-756: Before Offa - The First Half of the Eighth Century

The lack of development (of which we wrote in the last posting) will persist for another half century before the next great overlord appears - Offa of Mercia - in 757 but we run ahead of ourselves. It is our duty first to tell of kings and then, in the next posting, of prelates. The basic system remains the same as in the previous century - near constant fighting for survival and precedence amongst the same small set of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms whose instability is more noticeable than their power.

In 697, Osthryth, the Queen of Aethelred of Mercia, is murdered for reasons unknown by Mercian nobles. She is daughter of Oswy, King of Northumbria. If that it is not going to be the basis of a blood feud, one wonders what might be but nothing of significance happens as a result. Perhaps she was just written off as a wasting asset. Aethelred seems not to have had the confidence of his own people and abdicated to become a monk in 704 (he dies in 716). He is replaced by Coenred who is then replaced by Aethelred and then Osthryth's son Ceolred. Cenred makes his way to Rome (accompanied by the East Saxon King Offa, not to be confused with the later Offa of Mercia) where he remained until his death. Ceolred lasted until 716 and was buried at Lichfield to be succeeded by Ethelbald

In Northumbria, King Aldfrith died in 704 to be succeeded by Eadwulf but only for a few months before being succeeded by Osred, Aldfrith's son, who, in turn is killed, probably in a battle (716) with the Picts. Osred is succeeded by Cenred who dies two years later (718). Cenred is succeeded by Osric, another son of Aldfrith, who is succeeded by Ceolwulf in 729. In East Anglia, Aldwold succeeds Aldwulf as King of East Anglia who dies in 749. East Anglia is then divided amongst three successors - Hun, Beonna and Alberht. In Kent, the long-reigned (690-725) Wihtred of Kent is succeeded by a succession of often joint obscure monarchs best listed from Wikipedia.

This decentralising tendency, with the patrimonies of the Eastern Anglo-Jutes being divided up instead of turned into centralised states, is interesting. It suggests that not having a border with neighbours who posed a direct threat took away the incentive to centralise power and reversed history somewhat by restoring power to the highest nobility. Empires seem to require external threats or radical ambition to self-organise (as we know from our own time). However, this does not mean that the nobles were idle in internal politics - where kings failed to offer a decentralised model through their princelings, as in Wessex, rebel nobles would clearly try to force the issue.

Both Mercia and Wessex are thus rather more centralised states with important border issues with the 'Welsh' (see below) and each other - Northumbria, of course, exists in direct competition with the Picts. The struggle for supremacy between Wessex and Mercia in the South and Midlands is ever-present with Ine of Wessex and Ceolred of Mercia fighting at the Battle of Adam's Grave, a Neolithic Long Barrow in Wiltshire in 715. Later, in 752, Cuthred of Wessex and Ethelbald of Mercia go to war and the latter is defeated in battle in 749 despite an earlier alliance of the two against the Welsh (see below).

But, when not fighting neighbours, the rulers of Wessex were fighting rebels. In 722, Ine's wife Ethelburgh had to destroy a town founded by Ine (Taunton) in the West because (apparently) it became a rebel stronghold - the circumstances are obscure. Ine dies in 726 and is succeeded by Aethelheard in 726. He dies in 740 and is succeeded by Cuthred whose reign also appears to have been troubled with revolts and dissent. Indeed, compared to Kent and East Anglia (though we know precious few details to be sure of this), Wessex appears to be peculiarly unstable during this period. While always stronger than the 'Welsh' and able to hold the Picts to a standstill, the Anglo-Saxons remained, in secular though not in religious terms, a fragmented and unstable culture with an inability, it would appear, to create a strong indigenous State, a weakness that would prove fatal three centuries later.

Although most of the action takes place within and between the Heptarchy, we should not forget the small poor principalities of the 'Celts', the Romano-British survivor states in the far West of Britain against which the Saxons continue to push their advantage. In 710, for example, Ine of Wessex and his under-king Num of Sussex made war on Geraint, the last significant King of Dumnonia (the South Western 'Wealhas'), who died that year.  From this point on, the Southern 'Welsh' are continuously pushed back to what is now modern Cornwall. Further to the North the rivals Ethelbald of Mercia and Cuthred of Wessex will find themselves in alliance in another war against the 'Welsh' (which we will now call them) in 743.

Cuthred dies in 756 ( to be succeeded by Sigebehrt)  and Ethelbald, still the acknowledged overlord of the Southern English despite recent events, was murdered in a palace coup at Seckington in the same year. The scene has been set for Offa.