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.