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Make Mercia Great Again
00:43:37
Max Adams explains why he wants us to rediscover the glory of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia
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Daniel Kramer Arden
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Daniel Kramer Arden
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Now is the moment to make Mercia great again. That's the message that Max Adams, author of the Mercian Chronicles, wants us to take on board. In conversation with David Musgrove in today's episode, Max explains why Mercia has been overlooked in comparison to its neighbouring Anglo Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Wessex, and argues that we ought to know more about its role in the development of England.
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David Musgrove
So let's get straight to it. Why should we know more about and care more about the Anglo Saxon kingdom.
- [02:33]
Ryan Reynolds
Of Mercia as a Northumbrian exile? I'm very conscious of a Northumbrian bias which partly comes from the Venerable Bede, of course, the great early medieval historian. And then there's a sort of Southern Wessex bias that comes to us from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. So we know a lot about the famous kings and queens of Wessex and Northumbria. But, you know, I've been conscious for a long time that there's a period in between, I suppose, the golden age of Bede and Lindisfarne in Northumbria and King Oswald and the age of the Vikings, which is where we have the story of King Alfred fighting back against the foreign invaders. In the middle, there's this period where a tribal barbarian society, emerging from the end of the outwash of the Roman Empire, suddenly gets its act together and begins to see how a state might be buil a nation almost might be built from the fragments of the tribal peoples who have survived the Roman Empire or emerged from it. And the giant, of course, among these early medieval Mercian figures is King Offa. And yet the age of Mercian supremacy, when Mercia really is the maker and shaker and pusher. The driver of this move towards a state comes from the people he inherits Mercia from. In the 8th century, while Bede is writing about the decline of Northumbria, Mercia is busy doing things in the Midlands, coalescing into a kingdom that is militarily strong, that begins to build a sort of network of trade, rediscovers some of the assets, the infrastructure that the Romans left behind, and manages to construct this idea of a literate Christian state that doesn't require warfare to be successful, but can do warfare if it needs to.
- [04:26]
David Musgrove
You kind of said that we're both chronologically and geographically in the middle here a bit. Can you just give us a sense of where Mercia is in time and space?
- [04:34]
Ryan Reynolds
I wish I could give you a nice, simple answer to that. The name Mercer Mears Mercher really comes from the Old English word for borderland or marches. In fact, the word marches, as in the Welsh marches, comes from the same Anglo Saxon word. But which border were they referring to? Did they call themselves the border people, or were they called the border people by others? Do we know which border we're referring to? Well, traditionally, it's been thought to have meant the Welsh border, the Anglo Welsh border, where Offa builds his dyke in the 8th century. But it still isn't entirely clear that that's right. And we can't really say where Mershire was, but what we probably can say is where it wasn't. We know that Northumbria, the lands north of the Humber, extends south to the River Humber, then probably along the River Don, in which case the lands around the River Trent all belong to Mercia. And then we have the kingdom of Lindsey, which is Lincoln, and what we would now think of as Lincolnshire. Then we have an area called Middle Anglia, which is sort of East Midlands, Leicester, Northamptonshire. Then we've got a whole group of smaller tribal territories dotted around the Fens. And then we have along the Severn Valley and the Avon, we have the people called the Huicha, who were an independent kingdom until the merchants take them over. And then we extend roughly down to the River Thames. But the Thames is never really a boundary, the Severn is never really a boundary and nor is the Trent. So I'm afraid when people ask me to draw a line around Mercia, I can't do it. But I can definitely say where it wasn't. It's in the middle.
- [06:15]
David Musgrove
And in terms of time, the golden age of this period, I guess, is the 8th century. But clearly there's stuff that happens beforehand.
- [06:24]
Ryan Reynolds
Yes, very much so. The first king that we really know about who coalesces the Mercians into a single people is called Penda, which oddly enough is a Brittonic, a British name. And he may not come from the centre of Mercia, he may come from the West. Bede portrays him as a sort of unreconstructed heathen warrior, but in fact he was perfectly tolerant of Christianity. He just didn't like hypocrites. I mean, he's an interesting figure and his main sort of career highlights are his fighting against Northumbria and against Wessex, and he's partially successful against both. He's the man who kills King Oswald and cuts him up and puts him on stakes in a place that becomes known as Oswald's Tree or Oswest Tree. And he's a great old fashioned Beowulf type warrior, wielding his sword in battle, leading his own troops into battle. And eventually, like a lot of early medieval kings, he succumbs in battle himself and is destroyed and cut down and killed by a great Northumbrian king, Oswald's younger brother, Oswy. So Pender sets the scene for a people called Mercia, and then both his sons rule after him and two of his grandsons. So he creates this great dynasty of Mercian kings. And one of the really conspicuous things about the Mercian kings is their longevity. So while kings are coming and going in all the other kingdoms, the 8th century, for example, is really dominated by just two Mercian kings, one of whom King Athelbald reigns for 41 years. I mean, it's really extraordinary. So he's one of our great long lasting rulers and yet absolutely nobody talks or thinks about King Ethelbald if we know of any Mercian king, we know of King Offa. But Ethelbald is a really key figure in English history. He's, I suppose, the man who begins to grasp the possibilities of creating a state with an infrastructure that runs through a sort of royal administration, in partnership with the church and in partnership with merchants to create a sort of solid economic, legal, infrastructural base from which kings can rule and through which, when kings die, the state survives their death. That's pretty novel in early medieval England.
- [08:41]
David Musgrove
Right, we'll come back to Ethelbord in just a second because obviously he's a very interesting figure, long lived. I just want to pause for a moment. You talked about Oswald just then. Listeners might want to be aware that we've got a podcast in our back catalogue all about the life of Oswald, the many headed saint. So if you want to know more about him, then you can listen back into the podcast today to hear more about him. But I'm curious about at what point this kingdom of Mercia becomes Christian. So he talked about Pender and his religious affiliations. This is a period when we've got the start of Christianity spreading around these different Anglo Saxon kingdoms across the country. Where's Mercia's role in that?
- [09:18]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, in the sense that it's both geographically in the middle, it's also religiously in the middle. So Pender dies a heathen, and yet he allows his sons to be baptized and they marry into the Northumbrian royal family. And when you marry into the Northumbrian royal family, you become Christian. That's part of the deal. And you become, as it were, baptized under the umbrella of the Northumbrian kings. And that gives them a certain sort of superiority or overlordship over you. In a sense, we have to sort of dodge back to the beginnings of Christianity, which is both a northern and southern phenomena. In England, St. Augustine arrives in Kent in the year 597, and his mission to Kent and the southeast, including London, falters after a while and is never really terrifically strong until the point at which the Northumbrian kings become Christian. And they're first evangelized by Augustine's people, but then, much more importantly under Oswald, they're evangelized by the Irish Christians of Iona in the western islands of Scotland. And Mercia, therefore has to rather decide which brand of Christianity it goes for. And because Penda's sons marry into the Northumbrian aristocracy, they sort of begin to follow the Northumbrian view of Christianity, which is really about Abbots and monasteries rather than bishops. But they do take a bishop, and there is a bishop of the Mercians from about the year 660 thereabouts, probably based in Leicester. And King Pender's sons are enthusiastic Christians. They begin to found monasteries, they begin to patronize some of these great holy men. Wilfrid is conspicuous among them, a periodic exile from Northumberland. He's an entrepreneurial disruptor, is Wilfrid, of a type we're quite used to in modern politics. The Mercian kings patronize him, take him in and use him as a sort of monastic hitman. But there's another great Mercian religious figure who we don't hear about very often, and his name is Gudlak, and he is a hermit who is a sort of retired thug. He spends the early part of his life at the head of a small warband, raiding, pillaging, stealing, picking fights. He's a real sort of thuggish young aristocrat. And then suddenly he undergoes a revelatory experience and decides to retire to a monastery at Repton in Derbyshire. And from there he then journeys into the watery, dangerous fastnesses of the Western Fens, at a place called Crowland, not far from Peterborough. And he becomes this terrifically famous hermit, and everybody comes for his advice, for his healing, and he really sets the scene as a sort of great Mercian holy man.
- [12:17]
David Musgrove
So there's interesting characterisation you've got here of a monastic hitman and a holy thug going on here.
- [12:23]
Ryan Reynolds
Early medieval politics is like the politics of the mafia, really. I mean, these people are heavily family oriented. They're prepared to do very unpleasant, violent things to people, and yet they have another side of them which is thoughtful and subtle. And Mercian kings are all of those things. They send assassins to kill people, and yet they correspond with missionary Christians on the continent, exchanging gifts of falcons and fine robes, and they're in great awe of their holy men. There's a sort of shamanic respect for these great thinkers, partly, of course, because they're literate and, you know, writing is a magical thing. And kings are very respectful of literate men, slightly fearful of them. And they need them, of course, because literate men write laws down for them, and kings realized that the written word is a very powerful tool in royal administration.
- [13:22]
David Musgrove
Let's go back to Athelbold, the king you mentioned, who reigned in the early part of the 8th century following Pender and what went after him. So you told us that he reigned for a very long time. Why don't we know more about him? I would venture, and listeners, you can correct me, but I would venture that many of our listeners are not familiar with the reign of King Ethelbald.
- [13:40]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, first of all, to address why Athelbald is not more famous, one is because Offa is famous and people's imaginations very often have room for only one great king in a kingdom. I mean, everybody knows of Alfred, but not that many people know all his predecessors. Athelbald is partly not famous because Mercia had no great historian. Wessex had the Anglo Saxon chroniclers, Northumbria had Bede. Mercia still seems to have relied for its historical tradition on the aural, the spoken word. It's certainly the case that when the Anglo Saxon Chronicle was compiled under King Alfred, they were very keen to downplay the role of Mercia in forging a sense of nationhood in England. England's story is the Wessex story, because Wessex were the last tribal kings who essentially forged the idea of England. So Mercia has been written out of history. It's hard to write King Offa out of history because his dyke is the biggest thing in England between the Roman Empire and HS2, probably. So he's difficult to ignore. And he was famous in his own day and was written about on the continent. He had relations with the Emperor Charlemagne and so on. So he's written into history ineradicably. Athelbald, well, for a start, he makes the mistake of never being married. One of the things that the Church got very cross about, he had a series of affairs with nuns, which the Church disapproved of. By nuns, I mean people who were aristocratic women who found a congenial lifestyle living in a monastery. They weren't necessarily the most holy, pious and chaste women. They were part of the Mercian elite. He's the immediate predecessor of King Offa. So from the year 716 to the year 757, Abelbald is king of Mercia. And gradually he becomes, as other kings die or he defeats them, he becomes the most powerful overlord in Britain. He issues a very fine silver coinage, which is always. It's a bit like, you know, the markets are never wrong. The market's like Everbald. He has a very strong economy. He extends merchant rules so that London now becomes solidly a merchant town. London on the Thames controls all the trade up the River Thames right to its source in Gloucestershire, controls trade down the river all the way to Frisia and to Frankia, the great trading nations. So this is tremendously powerful asset for him and the other Thing that Athelbald realizes is that he begins to understand geography in a sophisticated way. He realizes that when the Romans came to Britain, they saw how navigable rivers, which essentially is the Severn, the Trent, the Thames, the Nen, the Ouse, had been connected, or the Romans designed a series of connections between these navigable rivers, a series of roads. And one of them leads from Lincoln, which is on a navigable waterway, to the Humber, links Lincoln all the way to Exeter. And another road links Chester, which has access to the River Mersey and the Irish Sea, to the Thames at London. And these two roads, which make an X shape which almost defines Mercia, actually give Applebaud tremendous economic and administrative power. His men can get anywhere in Mercia really quickly by traveling between these navigable heads of rivers and then controlling the trading places at these heads of rivers. So he extends this sort of traditional tribal kingship model of riding around the country with your war band, giving people gifts, feasting them, being praised, and making absolutely sure they're on message. He changes this into something we would recognize as a state. It has a royal administration. People travel about the kingdom using these roads, connecting the rivers together, controlling trade, controlling who has access to power, essentially. And the church is bound into this landscape power.
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- [19:27]
David Musgrove
So, Ethelwald sounds like quite a player, a formative figure in the story, but I do want to spend a bit of time on his successor. So what did he have to offer, so to speak?
- [19:40]
Ryan Reynolds
Offa is also indirectly in the line of the merchant kings eligible for the merchant kingship. But he sort of comes from left field. We don't really know where. Where he belongs, possibly West Midlands. But he emerges in the aftermath of Athelbald's death very quickly. He establishes his rule over Athelbald's territory, which is essentially from the Humber to the Thames, from the Fens in the east to the Severn in the west. He, like King Avalbald, is very long reigning. So King Offa reigns from the year 757 to 796, so 39 years. So 2 kings in 80 years. Over that period, Northumbria has 11 kings. 2 kings demonstrates absolute stability, rock solid control of any possible competitors who might be waiting in the wings to take control. So Offa starts from a great platform. He's got this great trading settlement in London. He's got these bishops who are very, very politically on message. And Offa. Offa builds on this and I suppose makes himself two or three really key, almost revolutionary contributions. One is that he binds his family very much into his dynastic program. He marries a woman called Kyne Thrytha, who is the first really powerful Mercian woman we know about. He gives her her own independent wealth, sufficient that she's the first Anglo Saxon queen to mint her own coinage with her own portrait. That's tremendous power. She sits in the royal council as a member alongside the bishops and the great nobles, and she makes sure that her children are put in very key positions. Their son Ecgfrith is very early on regarded as a sort of heir presumptive. Aethelbald doesn't do any of this stuff. Offa then begins to look outward from England and to start making really substantial diplomatic inroads into Europe. And here's the contemporary of the great emperor Charlemagne, the Frankish king who becomes emperor in the year 800. And they have interesting relations which we might get to. And one of the other things that Offa does is he builds on this idea of a sort of geographical infrastructure, roads and rivers, to establish a series of central places which are royal Estate centers, places where the king will visit. And we begin to get this sense of either an evolution or a revolution that Offa constructs on the foundations that Ethelbald has built, that we would recognize as a medieval state. Not so very different in many respects from the medieval state that Henry VIII inherits. And such is King Offa's dominance, prestige and wealth and military prowess as well. He does fight battles and he wins them. But such is his prowess that at some point he is able to conceive this extraordinary grandiose scheme of I will build a dike.
- [22:57]
David Musgrove
Let's talk about the dyke then, because.
- [22:58]
Ryan Reynolds
Obviously we have to deal with the dyke, don't we?
- [23:00]
David Musgrove
Of course we do, because that's why he's famous. Offers dyke, which is kind of just say a bit about what the dyke was and is and how we understand it. So can you geographically locate it for us?
- [23:11]
Ryan Reynolds
Yes. If we think of the River Severn running from its mouth on the Bristol Channel quite a long way north along what we would now understand as the boundary between England and Wales, and then doing a broad loop and turning left and coming down into Wales, Offa's dyke starts where the River 7 meets the River Wye. The River Wye seems to be a reasonably strict boundary between English and Welsh speaking communities, between Welsh kings and Mercian kings. And then further up, when we get to the sort of Hereford area, the dyke begins to assume the form that we understand. It's a huge bank with a ditch and that runs almost due north. It winds a bit, but it runs almost due north, always facing west, so that the bank overlooks the ditch which faces west. In other words, it's looking at Wales. It's not a Welsh dyke looking into England. It's a good, you know, 80 or 100 miles long and it's big.
- [24:07]
David Musgrove
So it's designed presumably then, to separate Wales to the west and the Kingdom of Mercia to the east. What's it doing? What's the purpose?
- [24:16]
Ryan Reynolds
We know what it's doing more than we know what it's for. First of all, I should go back to the beginning, say, despite all the efforts of archaeologists, we still don't have a date from Uther's Dike. Okay. We have to understand that it's called Offa's Dike because one of King Alfred's men, Bishop Asser, who wrote the Bag of Alfid Alfred, said that in late years there was a great king named Offa, who was a terrible king, and he conquered all the lands of England and he built a great Dyke. Okay, so it's called Offa's Dike. On the basis of Bishop Asser's testimony. Nobody seriously doubts that Offa caused it to be made. What was he trying to do? Well, first of all, it's a grandiose, monumental statement. I'm going to build a wall and they're going to pay for it. Ever heard that phrase? Yeah. Okay. It's the same principle. I'm going to build a wall and they're going to pay for it. Now, the key question is, is Offers Dyck a frontier, or is it marking a zone of control in a more fluid landscape, which is indeterminately Welsh and English on one side, but certainly further west it's Welsh and certainly further east it's English. The place names tell is a fluid zone of interest.
- [25:28]
David Musgrove
So this is a bit beyond my intellectual pay grade, but very much in your wheelhouse, I'm sure. I'm just wondering, is it more kind of a symbol of something than an actual physical device? Is it. You know, when we talk about walls being built today, it tends to be part of a broader conversation about identity and about who's allowed where. Is this the same concept, all of those things?
- [25:48]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. It's a line which can be patrolled and controlled. So it's a zone of control, if you like. It's probably a customs barrier. And when we think of customs in that period, what's being moved from Wales to England? Cattle. Okay. If you want to drive cattle, if you want to raid into England on horseback and steal anything, you're stealing cattle. It's mobile currency. It's easy to move around, you can move it at speed and it's difficult to catch up with. So to the extent that it's a barrier, it's probably a barrier to stop Welsh raiders raiding for cattle. And in that sense, King Offa is securing the loyalty of the people in the west of Mercia by showing them that he's protecting them. He's also giving them, as it were, fiefdoms along that zone of control, that sort of borderlands, the marcher lands, which gives them power rather like the reaving lords of the 14th and 15th century in this part of the world, Northumbria and the borders. And it's certainly a statement to the Welsh kings that you can't compete with me. But it's not defensive in a standard sense of literally keeping people out, but it certainly allows him to control who comes in. So, like all these things, it's multifunctional.
- [27:06]
David Musgrove
Yeah. So the kingdom you've described here. It sounds like it's in the 8th century, at least it's the preeminent one amongst the Anglo Saxon kingdom. You talked earlier about Offa being kind of an international figure. So if continental, the likes of Charlemagne wanted to talk to the leader of the Anglo Saxons, they'd head to Mercia, is that right?
- [27:26]
Ryan Reynolds
They would head to Mercia. And they do things in rather interesting ways. I've got a thing which I might just sort of give you as an idea of how this works. The people who are interested in Mercia are ecclesiastics, powerful European ecclesiastics. They're always terrifically curious about what's going on in England. You know, they get information from England. There's this one man, a former English missionary, who becomes Archbishop of Mainz in Germany. A very important, key man in the sort of power politics of Europe. Big powerful guy and a bishop and a missionary, and he writes to King Ethelbald and he wants to send his man to go and chat to fellow ecclesiastics, the archbishops and the bishops. And he asks King Alvibold if he will give protection to his man. And his man is a priest, he's also a messenger, and he's almost certainly a spy as well. Boniface, this missionary bishop, wants to know what's going on. And the way he does this is a rather beautiful piece of diplomacy he sends by way of a gift. And I'll just read you the list. A hawk, two falcons, two shields and two lances as tokens of my affection. This is oiling the diplomatic wheels. Athelbald allows this man free passage around Mercia, so he's protected by the king's peace. Okay, he's very well protected. But interesting enough, two or three years later, Boniface writes to King Ethelbald with these excoriating accusations of him fornicating with nuns and not protecting the church and doing dreadful things. And it's because his messenger has come back with all this intelligence. So Athelbald's allowed this man in, but actually he's the viper in the nest. So that's how 8th century diplomacy works. And then when it comes to his dealings with Charlemagne, this extraordinary diplomatic incident happens because one of the ways in which kings exercise power is they give their daughters in marriage to the sons of other kings, and in return, they expect the daughters of other kings to marry their sons. But there's very much who's on top and who's not on top of the. Okay, and this is bragging rights and turf wars. King Offa has a daughter called Athelswith. She's the unmarried one. His other daughters have been married off to kings of Northumbria and kings of Wessex, and that's a way of showing Mercian power. But Charlemagne sends an envoy to King Offa to ask if Offa's daughter Adelswith, will marry his son Charles. And in diplomatic terms, that's accepting the supremacy of the Frankish king Charlemagne. And Offa accepts, but then says, only if my son Ecgfrith can marry your daughter, which is tantamount to saying, I am not your inferior, I am your equal, and if you want my daughter to marry your son, you have to let your daughter marry my son. Instant cut off of diplomatic relations. And what do you know? The next thing Charlemagne does is he institutes a trade embargo across the channel. Any of this sound familiar? There's a trade embargo and he stops ships passing between the two. And there's a sort of flurry of diplomatic activity. There's a Northumbrian scholar named Alcuin who actually runs the palace school at Charlemagne's court in Aachen. And there's an abbot on the coast who happens to be Charlemagne's man of business on the coast, as well as being an abbot and a holy man. And these two are frantically sending messages across saying, no, no. Trade embargoes are a really terrible thing. Don't do it. And eventually, diplomacy is restored by the swapping of some cloaks. And would you mind sending me some of these very nice stones I've seen? And could we have some of your cloaks? They sort of gradually work their way back into being besties again. But, I mean, you know, the politics is so instantly recognizable. And obviously the politics is that King Offa thinks that there is a special relationship, but it's not as special as he thinks it is.
- [31:30]
David Musgrove
This is really interesting. So you're making obvious overt parallels to what you see today. One of the things we talk about today is President Trump's sort of transactional style of leadership. Is that the same sort of thing you see with the relationship between the rural. Very transactional and businesslike?
- [31:47]
Ryan Reynolds
It is absolutely transactional. And if you'll indulge me, I'll read to you, because it shows exactly how transactional relationships are. This missionary Bishop Boniface is corresponding with a King of Kent. Trade is rather a sordid word amongst the clergy. They don't like to think of themselves doing trade. And kings don't like to be seen to be trading either. It's beneath Them. So what they do is they use gifts. And I've already sort of talked about the gifts that Boniface sends to have his missionary accepted. Well, there's a rather beautiful letter which shows exactly how this coercive gift giving works, this transactional generosity. King Athelbert of Kent is writing to Boniface. I am sending your grace a few gifts. A silver drinking cup lined with gold, weighing three and a half pounds, and two woollen cloaks, not in the hope of receiving any earthly gift, but just for your prayers. But there is one other favor I have to ask, namely to send me a pair of falcons, quick and spirited enough to attack crows without hesitation and bring them back to earth after catching them. There are few hawks of this kind in Kent. Now, that's transactional politics, okay? We recognize it. It's the same politics. I'll give you this, you give me that. It's a trade, okay? They're deal makers. And we know this stuff goes on in the age of Bede and in every other age. It's during the age of merchant supremacy that we actually get the little detail, these letters that survive that tell us something about how trade is made and how trade carries diplomatic messages, how the political use of dynastic marriages carries diplomatic messages. I mean, it's brilliant stuff.
- [33:33]
David Musgrove
There's lots of wheeler dealing going on. I mean, the title of your book, the Mercian Chronicles, is great, but I wonder if you ought to have gone with the Anglo Saxon Art of the Deal.
- [33:41]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, the Art of the Deal. Well, I know, I know, I know. I suppose what I love about the early medieval period is that the politics are instantly recognizable to us. Instantly. Exactly what you say, transactional politics. Not particularly subtle in many respects, although it has its subtleties. But in Mercia, for the first time, we really see these lines of political transaction being almost codified as tools of statehood. So much so that the concessions for salt, the concessions given to the bishop of London for remissions on taxes on his ships, these sorts of things really reveal in such stark detail how this world works long before we get the sort of the Henry VIII machinations that we're so familiar with, and long before, you know, modern politics that we understand. But the politics are laid bare in this great age of Mercia because we get the written record for the first time. We get the coins, we get the place names. And although we don't have a history of Mercia, we have all this other stuff from which you can. Like clippings on the cutting room floor of an editing suite, all These clippings, and if you stick them together, you can begin to reconstruct a chronicle that we would have had if we'd had a Mercian chronicle.
- [34:58]
David Musgrove
We'd better wrap up, but we haven't quite finished the story. So the kingdom kind of fades from its preeminence after the 8th century, I guess. What causes it to fade away a bit? And would you be able to summarize sort of the contribution of the kingdom and the figures within it to the broader narrative of the development of a nation?
- [35:20]
Ryan Reynolds
Why does Mercia decline? Well, after two great kings, it suffers the sorts of dynastic instability, the lack of continuity of kings that we find elsewhere. Every kingdom has its great age, and then it goes into decline. That's countered by the rise of the kings of Wessex. So the last great king of Mercia is defeated in battle by the grandfather of King Alfred. Okay, so there's a nice little switch over the baton is passed to Wessex. And then, of course, we get the age of the Vikings. The great Viking army arrives in 865. And almost because of the genius of the Mercian kings in reconnecting this central portion of England, using its roads and its trading settlements and its navigable rivers. The Scandinavian traders are only too familiar with these trade routes. They've travelled them for decades, so that when they decide to invade, Mercia is a really, really easy nation to invade and take over. It's almost like the conquistadors, they do it as a sort of lightning strike. Mercia is just so easy to get to, so easy to get at. So they conquer Mercia as far down as Watling street, essentially, after which Mercian kings are half as powerful as they were before, almost literally half as powerful. Their kingdom is chopped in half. The story doesn't quite end there because King Alfred's most famous battle, the one after he comes out of hiding in the Somerset marshes, the cake episode thing, we now pretty sure that he only won that battle because the king of Mercia came to his aid. But they've been written out, and Alfred's ancestors write Mercia almost completely out of history, apart from King Alfred's famous daughter, Aethelflaad, the lady of the Mercians, who is really de facto queen of Mercia after Alfred dies. So she's written out of history as well. The legacy. If we think of the productive industrial and agricultural heartlands of England, if we think of the great towns of industrial England, Leicester, Derby, Stamford, Lincoln, Northampton, these are the towns that the Vikings take and create as a sort of core land of Scandinavian power in England. They're the merchant towns. They're the towns established by merchants before the Vikings get there. They sit on navigable rivers. They are highly connected trade wise. They're connected for wealth to flow in and along and out. So there's that sort of legacy of commercial power that lays the foundations for England as a great medieval state in Europe, when before the age of Mercian supremacy. These are just. These are petty kingdoms good at warfare, but they're no more than petty kingdoms. Mercia is the origin of the English state. We think of Wessex making England. It's really Mercia before Alfred. The idea of a royal administration through which power flows regionally and locally to create that sense of hierarchy. We have our regions and our shires and our districts. It's really immersion concept of how you devolve hierarchical power down through those layers. And even the counties that we inherit, you know, the historic counties, they're really based on a immersion idea of formerly independent peoples who still have an identity. You know, try confusing Leicestershire and Rutland to people who live in Leicestershire or Rutland. You know, we're still a very regional country, I think, that evolves under the merchant kings. I think this idea of power being invested in coinage and in the art of the deal is very much a Mercian thing. And I think really the idea of a single dominant kingdom arises in Mercia before it arises in Wessex. Wessex takes advantage of instability to make it look like it was the origin of England. But really, you know, I think I can hold my hand on the heart and say, you know, the Mercian kings needed to be brought back up into the central core of English early medieval history. Just because it was difficult to write doesn't mean it's not an important story to tell. And it is difficult to write because we don't have Bede or the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. But generations of historians and place name scholars and geographers and coin specialists have just now been able to reconstruct something of this great movement. I'm almost tempted to call it a revolution, actually. Almost an industrial, economic, political revolution on which platform England's great medieval wealth and ambition is built.
- [40:12]
David Musgrove
That's great, Max, thank you so much. That's been pleasure. A fascinating tour of a kingdom which was clearly formative and you've highlighted some modern parallels in the way that it was operated as well, I should say. There's so much that we haven't been able to talk about here. And listeners, if you want to know more about Assa or Alfred or Bede, or Oswald. We've got podcasts in our archive there for you to listen to all of those. So we've covered lots of those things, but we've never really talked about Mercia in depth before. We have talked about Aethelfladder a few times, but this has been really interesting. So, Max Adams, thank you very much. In the book Mercian Chronicles is on sale now and is a great read. Thank you for your time.
- [40:48]
Ryan Reynolds
Thanks very much. Thanks.
- [40:50]
Daniel Kramer Arden
That was Max Adams speaking to David Musgrove. Max's book, the Mercian Chronicles, is on sale now. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.