Offa and the Mercian Wars Read online

  Many writers on the subject of Anglo-Saxon warfare have relied heavily on analogy with Scandinavian sources, especially the Viking sagas. This is understandable because of the shortage of detailed accounts of English battles, and because the Scandinavian material does seem to come from a very similar warrior culture to that described in Beowulf, for example. Weapons were almost identical, and it is logical to assume that so were the methods of using them. However, while acknowledging that these sources can sometimes shed light on our subject, I have tried not to lean too heavily on them. They are, after all, at two removes from the world of the Mercian kings, having been written down in distant lands several centuries after the events they purport to describe.

  Other sources which can illuminate the Mercian Wars in passing include the published laws of several Anglo-Saxon kings (none of them, unfortunately, Mercian), and the biographies of saints, not all of whom led entirely peaceful lives. Reference will also be made to the surviving ‘charters’ of the period from the eighth century onwards, which record grants of land made by kings and others in authority, often to ecclesiastical houses. These rather dry documents are of interest for two main reasons. Firstly, they record the names and often the titles of the parties, and so can show where a certain person was at a particular time and how he wished to style himself. The location of Offa’s ‘palace’ at Tamworth, for example, is deduced not from a specific statement in the narrative sources but from the frequency with which he issued charters from that town. Similarly, documents in which Offa grants land in other kingdoms, such as Kent, provide us with a guide to the extent of his power as well as hinting at his presence on military campaigns. Many charters also define the extent of the territory they grant by describing a perambulation of its boundaries, and these have enabled scholars to reconstruct the appearance of the countryside and the frequency of woods, roads and other features.

  In addition to written documents, we also have the huge and constantly growing supply of material provided by archaeologists, which has revolutionised our understanding of this and other periods, as well as providing ammunition for debate on all sorts of questions which we would once have thought lost in obscurity. At the same time textual criticism has cast doubt on the reliability of what we thought were solid facts, written down once and for all in ‘black and white’. Nevertheless, despite recent attempts to bring the two disciplines closer together, writers on this period remain divided into two camps: those who use archaeology mainly to illuminate the documentary sources, and those for whom excavated material provides the only real ‘hard’ evidence, in contrast to the subjective and unreliable texts. I have tried to steer a middle course between these extremes, but two considerations have pushed me in the direction of the first camp. I am not trained as an archaeologist, and in any case the real interest of military history often lies in matters with which excavated artefacts alone cannot help us. What bring it to life are the names and motivations of the commanders, the strategy and tactics of the campaigns, and the deeds of the heroes. All too often, in a period as remote as this one, these have to be guessed. The words ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’ appear far too often in these pages, for which I apologise. But that is probably better than giving a false impression of certainty, and surely better than discarding the written sources altogether, for all their weaknesses.

  Rulers of Mercia, c. AD 600 – 874

  Reign Relationship to previous rulers

  Cearl c. 600

  Penda 626 – 654 Unknown

  Peada 654 – 656 Son of Penda

  Wulfhere 658 – 675 Son of Penda

  Aethelred 675 – 704 Son of Penda

  Coenred 704 – 709 Son of Wulfhere

  Ceolred 709 – 716 Son of Aethelred

  Aethelbald 716 – 757 Grandson of Penda’s brother Eowa

  Beornred 757 Unknown

  Offa 757 – 796 Great-great-grandson of Eowa

  Ecgfrith 796 Son of Offa

  Coenwulf 796 – 821 Descendant of Penda’s brother Cenwalh

  Ceolwulf I 821 – 823 Brother of Coenwulf

  Beornwulf 823 – 826 Unknown

  Ludeca 826 – 827 Unknown

  Wiglaf 827 – 840 Unknown

  Beorhtwulf 840 – 852 Unknown

  Burhred 852 – 874 Unknown

  Ceolwulf II 874 – ? Unknown

  Chapter 1

  Offa’s Country

  The country which was to become the kingdom of Mercia occupies the approximate centre of England. It can be envisaged as a rough rectangle with its corners on the sea at the mouths of four rivers – clockwise from the south-west, the Severn, Mersey, Humber and Thames. In a great loop across the northern half of this region flows a fifth river, the Trent, along whose banks was situated the original core of the kingdom, ‘the land that was first called Mercia’. Running first southwards through what is now the county of Staffordshire, the Trent flows from west to east a few miles north of Lichfield and Tamworth – respectively the religious and civil centres of eighth-century Mercia – then north-east via Nottingham to join the Humber. On either side of the Middle Trent Valley is high ground – the Peak District of Derbyshire in the north, and the Birmingham Plateau to the south, now named after the region’s major city, which was an insignificant village in Anglo-Saxon times. The valley itself, however, contains some of the best agricultural land to be found in Europe. South and east of the Middle Trent is a wide swathe of rich lowland bounded by the swamps of the East Anglian Fens on the east, and on the south-east by the forested Chiltern Hills, almost a hundred miles from Tamworth. This was the territory of the Middle Angles, a closely related people who seem never to have had a kingdom of their own, most of whom had already come under Mercian control by the time our records begin. Beyond the Chilterns is London, at the mouth of the Thames, which, running across southern England from west to east, formed in historic times the boundary between the Mercians and the West Saxons. In the opposite direction, looking west from the edge of the Birmingham Plateau on a good day, you can see the Welsh hills sixty miles away. Between the two uplands the River Severn flows southwards towards the Irish Sea. East of its lower reaches lay the kingdom of the Hwicce, and between the Middle Severn and the hills of Wales a people called the Magonsaetan; both these groups were at least partly British rather than Anglo-Saxon in their culture and had once been independent kingdoms in their own right, but like the Middle Angles they had already become a part of the Mercian power bloc by the time our written sources begin.

  This was the landscape that was to produce the first great English kingdom. It is not a big country by Continental standards, and despite its location in the centre of the island of Britain no part of it is more than seventy miles from the sea. Its rivers are also on a modest scale – you can throw a stone across the Trent at Newark, only fifty miles from its mouth – and none of its hills much exceed 1,000 feet above sea level. However, the maritime climate is relatively warm for its latitude, and the west winds provide reliable rainfall. People had been living in this land ever since the end of the Ice Age – essentially the same people, because modern DNA studies have proved that the old notion of successive waves of immigration was greatly exaggerated and that most of the modern inhabitants of Britain are the direct descendants of the original pioneers of the Stone Age. It is likely that all the primeval forest which once covered the land had been cleared for fields and pasture long before Mercia came into being, and most of the villages on the map today were already in existence in some form by the beginning of our period.

  This was by no means the Dark Age wilderness of popular imagination. It would, however, seem very alien to a modern observer. Most shocking would be the way in which people lived for much of the time on the edge of subsistence, with famine and epidemic disease on a scale now seldom encountered outside Africa. Bede tells how in Sussex in the late seventh century a prolonged drought brought a famine so severe that people committed suicide by throwing themselves from cliffs rather than face a lingering death from
starvation. Around the same time Saint Chad, one of the first Mercian bishops, died along with most of his colleagues from an outbreak of epidemic disease. And yet somehow the land produced large enough surpluses of food and population to sustain a wealthy warrior class and continually repair the damage inflicted by its incessant wars.

  The Landscape

  In order to understand the nature of military campaigning in the Mercian Age it is necessary to build up a picture of the sort of country over which these campaigns took place. It is likely that people were very aware of the distinction between wild and cultivated landscapes – a distinction which drives the plot in Beowulf, for example, in which the halls of men are constantly threatened by monsters from the woods and marshes. However, even in the seventh and eighth centuries there can have been little if any true wilderness in England, except perhaps in the Fens of East Anglia where Saint Guthlac sought refuge from the world amidst the demon-haunted marshes.

  The bears, wild cattle and bison which Offa’s contemporary, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, hunted in the forests beyond the Rhine had long ago disappeared from the British Isles, probably by the end of the Bronze Age. Wolves were still widespread in Anglo-Saxon times, though perhaps even then not that common, and there are hints that their activities may sometimes have been a political issue, or even a cause of conflict. According to William of Malmesbury, in the tenth century the English king Edgar imposed a tribute on the princes of North Wales of 300 wolf skins annually; this was paid for three years, but ceased after that because the Welsh could find no more wolves in their territory. No doubt the pelts had some value in trade, but historians have always considered this a rather strange demand when Edgar could have insisted on cattle, silver or other more obviously useful goods. It has been suggested that the king was interested in the pelts as clothing for his troops, or even a kind of uniform for his bodyguard, but we have no other evidence for Anglo-Saxon warriors dressed in wolf skins. Another possible explanation is that the mountainous Welsh terrain provided a refuge for the predators which had already been driven out of most of lowland England. The Welsh herdsmen, who raised mainly cattle and horses, may not have considered the wolves to be enough of a threat to be worth hunting down, whereas to the English, dependent on their more vulnerable flocks of sheep, their presence would have been intolerable. Perhaps Edgar’s subjects had complained of the damage done by ‘Welsh’ wolves raiding across the border in search of easy prey, obliging him to force his neighbours to address the problem. It is even possible that similar considerations had applied two centuries earlier in the reign of Offa, whose kingdom already relied heavily on the wool trade, and that a secondary purpose of his famous dyke (discussed in more detail on pages 136 to 140) was the control of four-legged raiders as well as human ones.

  Most of the settlements identified by archaeologists from the period between AD 500 and 700 were situated on or near river banks, more than half of them being within 500 metres of a permanent source of water. However, the villages were less permanent than in later centuries, and many of them were apparently moved or abandoned – either temporarily or permanently – at some time during the seventh and eighth centuries. This may of course have been the result of political insecurity and chronic warfare, but there is also some evidence that the climate around this time was relatively unstable, with alternating droughts and floods and several severe winters (Arnold). For example the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions a ‘great mortality of birds’ in 671, presumably the result of extreme cold, as well as the notorious ‘big winter’ of 763. Archaeological discoveries suggest that sheep were the commonest livestock, followed by cattle. The latter were used not just for milk and meat but to pull ploughs, as horses were very rare in agricultural communities. Most agricultural land was used for grain crops, mainly barley and oats, with wheaten bread probably remaining a scarce luxury food.

  As discussed below (pages 28 to 29), modern research has disproved the theory that the Anglo-Saxons took over an abandoned and mostly forested landscape, and it has been estimated that the proportion of wooded country in the first millennium AD was already less than 20 per cent (Rackham). It was, however, much less evenly distributed than it is today. In the later Middle Ages there seems to have been a dramatic contrast between what Professor Rackham calls ‘Ancient Countryside’, which retained its pre-Roman and Roman patchwork of small fields, pasturelands, hedgerows and woods, and the ‘Planned Countryside’ characterised by huge, open arable fields, lacking natural obstacles and parcelled out among its cultivators in parallel and more or less regular strips. The true ‘open field’ system was probably a development of the tenth and eleventh centuries, but Rackham has detected signs that the difference between the two landscapes may go back much further. Place names referring to woods and clearings are much more common in Ancient Countryside, for example, and the features mentioned as boundary markers in charters from the eighth century onwards show a similar pattern. Especially in the Planned Countryside most woods were probably managed for timber, though less thoroughly than in Roman times, and so were by no means impassable to large bodies of men (Brooks). There is evidence that they were routinely surrounded by banks and ditches, probably intended to keep livestock from straying and wild pigs out of the fields, and no doubt some of these banks have subsequently been mistaken for military earthworks. On the other hand they could have been useful as instant defensive lines for outnumbered armies. Contemporary written sources do not appear to mention this tactic, however, and on the whole it seems that wooded areas were regarded as unsuitable for military operations.

  Rackham suggests that the contrast between the two types of landscape may have been as dramatic as that between the Normandy ‘bocage’ and the open plains of Champagne in France today. If so, it must have had a significant influence on the conduct of warfare. The ‘open country’ formed a rough triangle with its points on the English coast at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, Portland Bill in Dorset, and the mouth of the River Tees in North Yorkshire. Its boundaries were of course irregular, following local vagaries of terrain, and there were no doubt isolated patches of woodland within it. Conversely the ‘wooded country’ was typically a mixture of clearings, coppices and lightly wooded pasture. There may have been a more or less continuous belt of such close terrain running south-westwards across the country from the Humber to the Lower Severn, incorporating what were to become the Forests of Sherwood and Arden, and the escarpment of the Cotswolds further south (Hooke, 1985). This must have been a considerable barrier to armies moving between the kingdoms of Wessex and the Hwicce.

  It is also noteworthy that the Mercian heartland around Tamworth lies very close to the boundary between Rackham’s two landscapes. To the west and south-west lay the Forest of Arden and the hills, heaths and scattered hamlets of Cannock Chase and the Birmingham Plateau, while marching eastwards a Mercian army would soon have found itself in a rolling agricultural countryside with long lines of sight and little or no cover. Perhaps this partly explains the concentration of recorded battles in the corridor east of the southern Pennines and along the Berkshire and Wiltshire Downs, where the terrain lends itself to rapid manoeuvre and armies would have found it relatively easy to locate each other.

  Rivers were the most important strategic features in the landscape, and are referred to repeatedly in the campaign accounts which survive. Guy Halsall (in Hawkes) has shown that the great majority of the identifiable battle sites of the Mercian Age are located either at ancient burial mounds or similar well-known sites of obvious cultural significance, or at river crossings. It is quite likely, as he suggests, that the former were chosen as pre-arranged rendezvous, but it is less certain that this also applied to the river crossings. Given that settlements, and therefore supplies of food, were concentrated near rivers, and that fording them must often have been a protracted operation, it seems probable that any army in the field would have spent more time near river banks than away from them. The places where an army could cross easily wo
uld have been well known to the local ruler, and it would have been a logical move to await an invader on your own side of the river as he struggled to reform his troops after the crossing.

  The actual bank of a watercourse would not, however, normally have been a suitable spot for a battle. Before they were deepened and straightened for navigation and drainage purposes, the courses of rivers and streams were less well defined than they are today, with numerous small meanders and extensive marshy floodplains spreading into the countryside on either bank, and it must have been very difficult to find firm ground there on which to deploy. Other factors would also deter a defender from simply lining up his men along a river bank. Such a locality would be uncomfortable and unhealthy in wet weather, and might even be dangerous if sudden flooding was a possibility. And an invader whose passage was blocked in this way would probably not try to force his way across, but would instead leave a detachment behind to pin the defenders in place while he found an uncontested crossing up or downstream, which would automatically place him on the flank of the defenders and force them to withdraw.