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I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Rory Naismith about his book titled King of the Marcians, published by Yale University Press in 2026. Now, the title makes it pretty clear where and when and who we're going to be talking about, which is really interesting because Offa of Mercia is an important king. When we're talking about Anglo Saxon history and we kind of know about him and we kind of don't. Right? That's something we're going to be talking about of the extent to which a biography can help us understand sort of who this guy was, what he was up to, and kind of what was happening around him, too, because there are bits of him that we remember. Right, Offa's dyke. Yes, this is that king that we're going to be talking about. But there is a lot more that we can investigate than just that kind of offhand memory that some of us might have from primary school. So, Rory, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to sort of do some myth busting and proper history with us.
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Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Miranda. It's a pleasure to be here.
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C
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write a biography of Offa and sort of do it now?
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Well, all of those things are joined together, really. I'm based at the University of Cambridge. I teach in the department of Anglo, Saxon, Norse and Celtic, which specialises in the history, the language, literature, everything about Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia in the earlier part of the Middle Ages. And so I've been interested in Ofa. In fact, Ofa was the subject of my first ever undergraduate dissertation more than 20 years ago. So he's followed me around for my whole career, in part because, as you said, he's got this wonderfully tantalising quality about him. He's clearly very interesting, he's clearly doing all sorts of fantastic things, but at the same time, it's immensely difficult to really get a grip on it. You always feel like you're kind of halfway there. And I decided that this book would be a way to try and either take that further, maybe get a bit more of a grasp on him, or at least make it clear why he's so slippery, why he's so challenging.
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C
Very interesting indeed. As someone else who ended up writing a book on their undergraduate dissertation, I'm glad I'm not the only one. So that's long trajectory, but a fascinating one as well. If we're thinking then, about the slipperiness of this character we're discussing, can you give us a brief sketch of, like, why he's slippery? What sources do we have? What do we not have? How can we navigate this problem?
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Well, Offa rules in the 8th century. He's king from 757 until summer 796. So it's a long time ago, basically. And although we tend not to favor the term Dark Ages in early Medieval history so much these days, this is a figure and a period where there really aren't that many sources. And that's the fundamental problem when it comes to offer, there just is not as much information as we would like to have. In particular, there aren't very many major narrative Sources that tell you about this period. There's the so called Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which is a collection of manuscripts written from about 900 and after. These are heavily, heavily influenced by views from Wessex, which is one of the other major kingdoms of the period, one of Offa's major rival kingdoms, and also by views from Canterbury, which was dominated by Offa for much of his reign, but which was not a fan of him. And so this means that the central narrative that has been used to build historical understanding of early medieval England is very much against Offa. He's not starting off from a good place. The other major problem is that even if you cast a wider net and you think about other kinds of materials, like for example, charters, which are records of grants usually of land by the king to a monastery or a nobleman or something like that, or you think of coins or you think of all kinds of other materials, these are valuable, these are helpful, but even so they tend not to come from the core part of Offa's kingdom. You hear most about him from outsiders, from enemies, from rivals, and so they're all quite predisposed to say negative things about him, basically. And this contributes to a general sense of him being a kind of villain of Anglo Saxon history, someone who's a sort of speed bump on the way towards the kingdom of England.
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C
That's definitely a very useful perspective to keep in mind as we continue our discussion. When we're talking about making someone out to be a villain, though that obviously does relate to sort of his policies and what he does and doesn't do, which I'm sure we'll get into. But often those kinds of attacks also tend to be about kind of the individual. So do we know anything from these sources, for instance, about like him as an individual or his family or his background? Do we have any of that biographical information?
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It's very. Well, the short answer is not, not a lot. There's. There's no information whatsoever about when he is born. He allude. There are a couple of charters that allude to his, his early life in what's known as the territory of the which this is. This is a people who live in what's now Worcestershire and some neighbouring shires in the, in the west Midland, which would make good sense. It's an area that is past the Mercian kingdom. There's no obvious reason why that would be made up. We do know when he dies and he must have been at least in his 60s by that stage, possibly quite a bit older, because he's king for nearly 40 years. Most of the information we do have about Offa is not of the kind that will really give you an insight into his inner thoughts, his inner life. It's its charters, its references to there was a battle fought in chronicles, it's things like that. So you really can't develop him as a person in the same way as you can some other historical personalities. On the other hand, you can make some inferences. In particular, there's a bunch of letters that are written to people in Offa's kingdom, or about that mention Offa by a cat called Alcuin. And Alcuin was originally from kingdom of Northumbria, from York or near to York. He spends a lot of his career in mainland Europe working closely with Charlemagne. But he's got lots of friends and contacts still in England, and he maintains correspondence with them. And this is one of the ways we can get a sense of what Offa might have been a bit more like an individual. They refer to someone who is very pious, who is very personally moral, who is possibly even a little bit stiff and unbending, someone who's very concerned about loyalty, who's very anxious about there being plots against him, about there being conspiracies against him, someone who pushes his own rights very hard, potentially sometimes takes things a bit too far. Alcohen alludes to offer having spilt blood to ensure the succession of his son, to ensure his son's accession to the kingship. What exactly he's getting out there is a bit debatable. But clearly Offa had been engaging in some nefarious behavior. But it's worth adding that most of this information comes from the last five or six years of Offa's reign. So it's a little bit like judging any long lived ruler by the state of their regime, the state of themselves as a person after they've been in charge for 30 or 40 years. So he may have been a very different character. If we had that sort of information from the 760s, the 770s. It's really only offa of the 790s where we've got that level of detail
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C
that's really interesting to kind of have that sort of perspective. Thinking, though about the length of his rule, we should probably make sure we understand a little bit more about what that actually means. So obviously, as the title of your book suggests, Offa was king of the Marcians. Where is Marcia? Who is around Marcia? What is actually happening here?
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That's a very good question because of course we don't really Have a Murcia nowadays, it sounds a little bit sort of archaeism. It is used for certain things nowadays, but there's not a county of Murcia or a sort of major designation like that. It means. It's related to words like mark. It means border, it means frontier. And so originally, the Mercians were those who dwelt on a border or a frontier, probably meaning the frontier with the Britons at an early stage in Anglo Saxon history, in the 5th or 6th century, they keep that designation. It may well be that they quite liked being the frontiersmen, the borderers, something like that. It referred to a territory, at least by the 8th century, that had its heart in the West Midlands. Places like Tamworth, Repton, Lichfield, the Upper Trent Valley. This is the area that was seen as the core of the Mercian kingdom, but it had expanded a lot beginning in the seventh century with this character called Penda, who was a pagan king. He's one of the great villains of Bede's ecclesiastical history. Eventually gets defeated and killed by the Northumbrians in 655. He's the first figure that really brings Mer, sets Mercia out on a path to great power status among the kingdoms of England at that stage. And by the time you get into the 8th century, Mercia is really one of the three or four most powerful political forces in what would become England, along with Wessex to the southwest, Northumbria to the north, East Anglia to the east and Kent to the southeast. There were a lot of other kingdoms too, but those mostly were moving into the orbit of one of these, these bigger, bigger forces. And so this means that when Offa becomes king, he's already sitting on a very powerful, very large kingdom that basically dominates a large square of territory, with Wales on the west, East Anglia on the east, the Humber on the north and the Thames on the south. That whole area in the middle was fairly well established as the kingdom of the Mercians. Not all of the peoples within it thought of themselves as always having been Mercians, but they had certainly become Mercians by this stage. And in the course of Offa's reign, they push that territory further on into East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, they add these territories to the Mercian kingdom as well.
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C
Okay, that's a very helpful mental map and kind of which bits are sort of more or less changing during the time period. What about the king bit of the title? What did it actually mean to be king? How did he go about ruling? Was he the one that made every single decision? How did that work?
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A
Being a king at this time meant that you operated on a couple of levels. There's being direct king of a territory where you can expect people to follow your laws, do exactly what you say, they will be giving tribute to you on a regular basis, that sort of thing. And for the Mercians prior to Offa, that really meant the, the area around Litchfield, it meant the area around Leicester, it meant broadly the Midlands. But then on top of that you had a level where you could be recognized as the, the top dog, the, the overlord of other kingdoms who might be around your own main one and those kingdoms wouldn't be ruled by you in quite as direct way, but you could expect the leaders of those territories to come and fight for you, to support you against other enemies, to generally be in your corner. What you see with Offa is that he tries to bring territories that had been in that looser category of overlordship into a more structured, formalized way of relating to the king of the Mercians. And crucially, you can see that gradually he is the only person who comes to be referred to as king within his territory. But before this, and even in the earlier part of Offa's reign, they're quite happy to have a number of kings and they've got a fairly elaborate language for describing this. You get charters where people refer to themselves as a sub regulus, because rex is the normal Latin word for king. A regulus means a little king and a sub regulus means a little king who is under someone else. So it's a way of encapsulating that this person is kind of kingly, but at the same time very much under the heel of offering. And so you've got a number of people who refer themselves in that way early on in his reign, but gradually they move towards being just a nobleman, an ealdorman, as the term was at the time, within Offa's kingdom, within Ofa's regime. That's not necessary to say that Ofa is deliberately setting out to squelch the independent traditions and aspirations of all these different groups. It may well be a two way street that these other areas, like Sussex, the Whichire, East Anglia, they've got things to gain by participating in Offa's kingdom. They would have seen that there's a higher level of patronage. There are connections that can be made when you go to a buzzing cosmopolitan court like Offa's was. And indeed Offa is actively changing the way he runs these big gatherings where people from across his kingdom come together, and this is the venue where they would receive charters. That tends to be how we know about these things. They're referred to in charters, but it's an occasion where people rub shoulders, they give gifts, they maybe listen to old English poetry, they do all kinds of things. There's even a letter of Alcuin where he's a little bit sniffy about the bishops of Offa's kingdom being rather too cosy in this regime. And so Offa's really trying to set up a way of centralizing his kingdom's elite, bringing them all together so that they can work closely with him under him and be very clear about what his status is at the top of the tree within this very, very expansive territory that he's welding together as a single unit. High interest debt can be a real vibe killer. Credit cards, personal loans and more can make you feel uncomfortable even in the sanctuary of your own home. Well, what if you knew that SoFi can help you leverage your home home's equity to feel more at ease? It's called a SOFI Home Equity Loan and it could consolidate your debt at a typically lower interest rate than existing debt with lower monthly payments, and all while keeping your existing mortgage rate. View your rate@sofi.com payoffdeb Today mortgages originated by SoFi bank and a member of FDSC and MLS number 696891. Terms and conditions apply. Equal housing lender right now at the Home Depot. Shop Spring Black Friday Savings and get up to 40% off plus up to $500 off select appliances from top brands like Samsung. Get a fridge with zero clearance hinges so the doors open fully, even in tighter spaces in your kitchen and laundry. That saves you time like an all in one washer dryer that can run a full load in just 68 minutes. Shop Spring Black Friday Savings plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more at the Home Depot off of out April 9 through April 29 US only C store online for details.
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C
That is definitely very interesting to hear about the kind of different ranks that were going on here and the jockeying for power. Really, it sounds like and that kind of raises the obvious question of why OFFA how OFA was able to kind of persuade all these people and it doesn't sound like it's through sort of massive military conquest. It sounds like Murcia was pretty rich. How did its economy work?
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A
That's a very, very good question. We we can say that OFA did sometimes take Army's fight, that's crucial. He's. He's able to assemble big forces and to defeat his enemies when he has to. But mostly he doesn't. It's a bit like, you know, you carry a big stick but you mostly speak softly. And yes, he occasionally fights against English kingdoms, but actually quite rarely he fights against the Welsh more often, but he regards them quite differently. There's no indication that he ever wants to conquer the Welsh, the various Welsh kingdoms that there were at this time. Instead, he wants to keep them in their place militarily. And of course, one other way in which he does that is he builds off as dyke. He builds this enormous fortification which runs from sea to sea. And indeed, it's now thought that it probably did run from sea to sea. It's sometimes been seen as rather more restricted in the past, but most recent research says that it really was quite an extensive construction. And, yeah, it's a huge investment of energy, of time, of labour, and it reflects, in a way, it reflects wealth. But I think what it reflects more than that is power. It reflects the capacity to tell people what to do and then they will do it and to marshal a lot of people who will do that for you. Probably what that means is Offa in Mercia itself, in the Midlands, especially the West Midlands, he can count on major aristocrats, major bishops, and they will do what he tells them. Basically, this seems to have been one of the foundations of Mercian power, going right back to the seventh century. They can count on solid service, they can count on armies, they can count on all sorts of advantages deriving from this territory they control. In the West Midlands, things are a little bit different in other parts of Offa's kingdom. So if you look to the eastern parts of his territory, so this is the East Midlands, like Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, but going on down into the southeast and East Anglia. This is a territory where there are more connections with international trade, with a monetary economy and a more commercialized structure for how people really, at quite a low level, even individual farmers are buying and selling and going to markets and things like that. And one of the major transformations of Ofa's reign, which shows very well just how deep down his power and influence reaches, is that he changes the coinage. Prior to this, people had used silver pennies, but they had been anonymous. They're highly diverse in how they look, how they're designed. It's very unlikely they're being produced in a sort of large scale. Well, they are being produced on a large scale. They're being produced by lots of people who will do their own thing. What Ofer does is standardize the weight and the quality of these things. And he standardizes the fact that they will all refer to him, they all refer to Offa as king. They get even more regimented in the last few years of his reign when they all start to look exactly the same as well. There's a bit more variety before then, but I think that this transformation of the currency, which is being used very extensively in the eastern half of England, represents how Offa is king and has control over the economy. But that. That looks quite different in the various parts of his kingdom. In the west, it means you can raise armies and build Offa's dyke. In the east, it means that you can expect people to make and use your coinage everywhere.
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C
That's really interesting to understand. A key element of his power and the expectation, as you said, that kind of people will do what he says. So do we have any idea of how people perceived him? I mean, you talked a little bit earlier about the letters towards the end of his reign. Obviously, the expectation that people would do what he said tells us something. But do we know anything else about, I guess, popular opinion, maybe?
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A
Popular opinion is extremely difficult to pin down. And in fact, the coins are one of the few glimpses we've got of this. They don't really tell us very much about how most people reacted to Offa, but they tell us quite a bit about how Offa and his agents in places like London and Canterbury and in East Anglia wanted the mass of the population to understand him. And they show him. They have busts, pictures of him that show him in Roman style. He is dressed up like emperors. He is sometimes put in front of a great big cross, which suggests that they're trying to make him. They're trying to create a parallel with Constantine the Great, who has a famous vision of. Of the cross in the sky before he wins a crucial battle. There are other coins that show Offa with this lovely puffy, curly hair, which is very unusual for the period. And it's. It's not something you see on other coins. And the thinking is that this is inspired by manuscript and sculptural representations of figures like the biblical King David, who often has this puffy, curly hair, and who was, like Constantine, a favorite model for kingship in this period. So these coins quite subtly show that offers agents, offers administration, is in touch with ideas of what kingship means, how kingship should be articulated, what kings should be aspiring to, and they're Translating this into a medium that everyone is going to see, at least at some point in much of Offa's kingdom. Other sources that give you an impression of reactions to Offa, there are indeed Alcuin's letters. Alcuin is in two minds about Offa. He's clearly. He clearly recognizes that this is a powerful individual, but also a slightly touchy one. He doesn't ever chastise Offa directly for immoral behaviour, which is something that he probably would have done certainly after Ofa's death, if he'd known Ofa had been, say, I don't know, being involved with other women, going off and having personal immorality in all sorts of ways. That's probably something Alcuin would have called out, but he. He never does. The main thing he calls Offa out for is being aggressive in prosecuting his and his son's rights as king. Other sources that tell us a bit about Offa and how people perceived him, his charters are full of references to him as king of the Mercians. Even when he's become king over all these other areas, they still refer to him very much as King of the Mercians. It's as if that's come to mean King of the Mercians and everyone subject to the Mercians. And it suggests that Offa has got a firm sense of who he is and how he relates to the rest of his kingdom. One way in which he does come across as, I wouldn't quite say softer, but as a family man, is that he's very, very keen also on emphasising the position of his wife and especially his eldest son, who's called Ecgfrith. Now, one of the reasons he does this is because he wants his son to follow him as king. He wants to found a dynasty in the event his son dies, apparently of natural causes, only a few months after he does so that dynasty never. Never really happens, but it's clearly what Offa is aspiring to. And that son, along with his mother, Offa's wife, who's called Cunithrith, they often appear as a trio. They often witness these charters as a group, which is very unusual for this period. You sometimes do get queens, but to have the queen and the oldest son, that suggests Offa and his family are trying very hard to put themselves in the center of things. They are the focal point of the kingdom. They are the family that will encapsulate and push forward the power of this unit into. Into the hereafter. There's even one charter from. From Chertsey in, in the southeast, where he not only brings together his wife and his son, but also three daughters. They all appear as a group. And these daughters in two cases went on to marry kings in England and one of them went on to. To join a nunnery. So he's. He does have a family side to him. He is very keen on his children, on his wife. But when it came to other people and it came to the kingdom, he is very much a powerful figure. He's a king who will not tolerate fools lightly.
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C
And that's of course not just within his kingdom, but outside it too. So can we talk about his and Mercia's relationships beyond England? So obviously the Welsh loom pretty large. Do we want to talk about that?
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A
Very much so, yes. I mentioned already that he builds Offersdijk and this is just a huge undertaking. It's still an enormously impressive thing that you can walk the length of. And it's probably the single biggest building operation from the early Middle Ages. It's built at the same time as other rulers in other parts of Europe are doing similar things. So it's not coming in complete isolation, but it is very important within Britain. It's a way for Offa to signal a reversal of the historical relationship between the English and the Welsh, because he and probably his contemporaries would have been aware of what Bede and Gildas and other authors had written about Hadrian's Wall and the Anstnine Wall in the north, where these were described as being built from sea to sea by the Romans to protect their province and the Britons from what they saw as the barbarians to the north. And for Offa to build his own dyke, which was. Was described by Assa, the 9th century biographer of Alfred the Great, the first person who refers to Offa's dyke. He also talks about this as a dyke built from sea to sea. What that implicitly suggests could be that Offa is trying to frame his kingdom as kind of like the Romans, or you could even say the proper inhabitants of Britain and then the Britons, the Welsh to the west are now the barbarians. So he's alive to gestures. He knows how to use the politics of, well, performance, basically. It comes back also to those big gatherings that he's holding with his people, with his aristocrats, with his bishops. It's all tying together to show how he's building a new way of running a large kingdom as an articulated whole, which is not something that previous Mercian kings had done. They'd also been very powerful. They'd been recognized as top dogs in the rest of Britain. But Offa is changing the rules of the game for how that kingdom is run as a unit.
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C
Hmm, that's definitely an interesting aspect of the long rule. What about expanding further? I mean, you mentioned earlier letters relating to Charlemagne's court talked about Offa. So what were those interactions like?
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A
Well, those are extremely unusual. There are plenty of indications that other English kings, even earlier than this, had also been in contact with mainland Europe, with Frankish rulers, with others. But it's really only with Ofa that you actually have a lot of these letters surviving that show you what this looks like on a nitty gritty basis. And sometimes they're surprisingly mundane. There's a couple of quite brief letters between Offa and Charlemagne which basically just say, there's this troublesome priest who's been giving me problems in Cologne. Can you do something about him? There are others which are from Alcuin when he's in Frankia, commending young visitors, scholars, priests, who are moving between England and Frankia on a regular basis. So culturally, these areas are very, very interconnected. There's also a really remarkable letter which is basically ghost. It's supposedly from Charlemagne to offer, but it seems to be ghost written by Alcuin for Charlemagne. And this is a very, very important document. It's one of the first, what they call diplomatic exchanges that you can really, really look at in detail. And it's full of lots of language of brotherly love and fraternity, and how great it is that these figures can cooperate, even though we know they haven't actually cooperated that well. And they've been rivals of one another in all sorts of ways. And it talks about practical concerns. It talks about how there are exiles, political exiles from England who are members of dynasties that lost out to offer. They are h leading out in Frankia under Charlemagne's protection. It talks about how there have been merchants traveling through. Well, or rather the concern of Charlemagne is that merchants have been taking advantage of the exemption that pilgrims have from tolls, and the two kings are trying to. To work that out. There's even one part where they refer to how the some sort of cloak, some sort of cloth, cloth that's been sent from England to Frankia is now not at the right size and they need to adjust that. Charlemagne's not happy about this. It shows that they're talking to merchants, they're talking to lots of people who are involved in the back and forth between these two countries. And yeah, it's all going on behind the Scenes mostly, until you get a letter like this. That's the rosy side of, of the relations between the two. Sometimes it was emphatically not so rosy. There's a group of letters and also a Frankish history which together let you put together an account of a failed marriage negotiation between Offa and Charlemagne. This is probably around about the year 790. One of Charlemagne's sons, who also slightly confusingly is called Charles, makes an overture to Offa that he would like to marry one of Ofa's daughters. And in principle, that's not necessarily a very bad idea. But the, the slight problem for Offa is that on the whole, Frankish princes, Carolingian princes, tended to marry daughters of their, their aristocratic families, their important but subordinate families. And so if Offa just accepted this, it could be seen as putting him in that position. It could be seen as recognizing that he was a subordinate to Charlemagne. So what Offa does is make a counter proposal, which is that he will only allow that marriage to go ahead if he's able to arrange for his son to marry one of Charlemagne's daughters. And at this point, Charlemagne blows a gasket and decrees that not only can these marriages not go ahead, but he's so angry that he calls a halt to all cross channel trade at that stage, which is first of all a reflection of how important trade is. But it might also be particularly designed to hurt Offa specifically, because by this stage, his kingdom's entire currency, his silver coinage, is dependent on silver that's coming from Frankia, it's coming from mines in western France. And it looks like Offa himself may have been involved in setting that flow silver up. And so by stopping the trade off, Charlemagne is not only stopping traders, he's also causing problems for the king and for everyone else in the kingdom. This does get resolved by the good offices of an abbot from an abbey on the north coast of Frankia. And then it's a few years after that you get this offer where they are being so, so buddy, buddy with each other. But it still shows how volatile these relations were, how easy it was for things to be derailed when there were these questions of prestige and power at stake. And you can see that these kings are very, very conscious of what the other is doing. They look very closely at what they're up to. There's one thing Charlemagne does in the early 780s is have two of his sons consecrated as king by the Pope to rule over segments of his kingdom. And then six years later, in 787 Offa does the same thing for his oldest son, for Ecgfrith. He even has a new archbishopric at Lichfield created probably as part of that initiative, so that he can have his son consecrated by a Mercian archbishop to become a new kind of ruler. There's also evidence from the coinage that they're looking at one another. There are. There are quite uniquely coins made in the name of Offa's wife, Cunathrith. These probably come from 780s or so. And it's been discovered recently that there were coins made of Charlemagne's wife Fastrada, that are modeled on those of Coonethrith. And those come from a time when both rulers reform their coinage at more or less exactly the same time, probably on a coordinated basis. They've arranged to do this at the same time. So it's a tricky relationship. I think you could almost describe them as more like rivals, even frenemies, something like that. They're cooperating, but there's always a risk that that cooperation will go flying off the rails in dramatic fashion.
- [35:47]
C
Yeah, it definitely sounds like it would, in some senses make a really good TV series to sort of trace these ups and downs and tensions and sort of watching each other very carefully. Is that also the case? If we look at Offa's relationship with the Pope, Was it also a mixture of kind of watching and tenseness and paying attention as well?
- [36:07]
A
Is Rome is. It felt a very long way from England in some ways in the 8th century, but it was also a place that was quite familiar to the Anglo Saxons. There had been a steady stream of pilgrims going there since the seventh century. And so by Offa's time, there was probably a fairly good community of English people built up there. And so OFA is in quite regular communication with the Pope. We know that in 786 there is a visit to England by a pair of papal officials, papal legates, who come in along with some Frankish colleagues to basically do a kind of inspection of the English Church. This is also an opportunity for Offa to show off his position in front of these high profile emissaries from the Frankish king, from the Pope. And there's a series of decrees that emerge from these meetings. They probably reflect more what came out of the legate's visit to Northumbria than to Mercy itself. But that was part of their progress. And this is no coincidence that this visit in 786 comes just a year before Offa creates that new archbishopric. He had to get the Pope, Pope's agreement for that. He had to get the agreement to Pope Hadrian I. And it's referred to in a document from about 10 or 15 years later that Offa had made the argument to Pope Hadrian on the basis that his kingdom was now so big and so powerful that it made sense for it to have its own archbishopric. And there's not a huge amount of information recorded from England about the process of setting up this archbishopric. There's a lot more known about how it's taken apart, because in the early 9th century, so just 15 or 16 years after it was created, it was disestablished because the political conditions that made it useful and advantageous for offer had passed. And there's a new king on the throne as well, who's got a more pliable Archbishop of Canterbury in place. So it doesn't. Just doesn't fulfil anyone's needs anymore. But in the time of Ofa, there's no reason for anyone to have been aware of this. You know, Litchfield, as a new archbishopric made, made a good amount of sense. The Archbishopric of York had only been created in the 730s. That was only 50 years earlier. And the Archbishop of Canterbury was unusually big, its province was unusually big for the period. So, again, it's. It's. It's not as nutty and villainous an idea as it was portrayed as being. It's a case in point of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle being against Offa. When it describes this establishment of Lichfield, it says that this is a matter of Canterbury losing a part of its province. It's not a gain for the Mercians, it's a loss for Canterbury. And then they say Ecgfrith was consecrated King immediately afterwards. So it implies that it's a ploy, it's a scheme by offer just to get his son on the throne. And it may well be that that was part of his aim, but that there were all sorts of other reasons too. And if you'd been in Murcia in the 780s, it might have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And so the Pope was central to that scheme. He was a little bit scared of Offa. There's a wonderful letter that was sent by Pope Hadrian at one stage where he's clearly quite panicked about a rumour that's reached him of a scheme jointly hatched by Offa and Charlemagne to dethrone him and take him out of his position. So he clearly thought this was at least a possibility. It didn't actually happen. And both Offa and Charlemagne Disavow it. But he is anxious about these powerful kings who, even from hundreds, thousands of miles away, could influence events in Rome, send people to cause problems for the Pope.
- [40:04]
C
That is really interesting because, as you said, the Pope does seem pretty far away from Murcia in this time period. So seeing and hearing about those interactions really, you know, makes us rethink kind of what we think about connections during this time and gives us a sense really, of all the things you've covered, of kind of why this is a king. That's kind of worth writing a biography about, you know, or writing at least an attempt of a biography about. As you said, we don't really know a lot about him sort of personally, but we do clearly know a lot about him as a king. What happens, though, afterwards? Because with any sort of king, the moment of death and the succession and transition is often a key part of it. So what's the story in this case?
- [40:47]
A
Well, Offa dies in July 796. And in the short term, things probably looked fairly positive because he's got this son, Ecgfrith, who's probably in his 20s or so at this stage. He's a strapping young atheling, he's got his whole life ahead of him. But like I mentioned earlier, he dies within only about four months. And that's. That's a crisis for mercy. That means they see three kings in the course of one year. They have Offa, they have Egfrith, and then very quickly they appoint a new king called Cernwulf. And Cernwulf then goes on to remain king for another 25 years. He re establishes much of what Offa had done, because the other crisis they face in the immediate aftermath of Offa's death is that in Kent and in East Anglia, there are local rulers, members of the old royal dynasty, who pop up and try and break away from Mercian rule. And so one of Cernwald's first jobs is to suppress these rebels, as he saw them, and reimpose Mercian dominance, which he does eventually manage to do. You can see that this progression of Kings in 796, there is an element of continuity behind the scenes. Offa's widow, Cunathrith, remains important into the early years of Kurnwulf. There's a whole bunch of the Mercian aristocrats, the ealdorman, as they're called, who also persevere across these changes. So there's actually quite a robust personal core, well, core of personnel to the Mercian kingdom, which manages to keep the show on the road and it raises interesting questions about how they choose these new kings. Because Cernwulf is a fairly distant cousin of Offa, who had in turn been a fairly distant cousin of Athelbald. In fact, there is a very short lived king called Bjornred who challenges the succession after Atelbald, he tries to take the throne for himself and Offer displaces him. Quite how and why that happens is very murky, but it shows that Offer's succession was not an automatic and done deal. And very probably you've got a core of these powerful people who've got knowledge of potential candidates for kingship who are out there, people who come from the much wider royal kindred, which surely must have had other people in it besides Offa and Cernwulf and Athelbald. And they're choosing someone who is a good, able prospect, but who would also be able to work with them, to work with the powers that be to keep Mercia running as it should. So there are problems definitely after Offa's death, there are crises that the kingdom has to weather, but they're remarkably effective at finding someone else who can come back onto the throne and keep that juggernaut going, keep the Mercian supremacy, as it's often known, supreme for at least another Generation until the 820s when the Kingdom of the West Saxon win a couple of crucial battles and the balance of power shifts more significantly in southern England.
- [44:05]
C
Very interesting indeed to think about these various transitions and of course how they've been remembered across time too, is something that we've mentioned throughout this conversation. Kind of his reputation in the moment and his reputation from the sources that have survived. Obviously I'm not going to ask you to tell us every up and down of his reputation from the 7 hundreds until now, but is there any sort of brief sketch you'd like to give us of kind of how he's usually remembered and why before, you know, interventions like yours?
- [44:35]
A
I can do my best. On the whole, he's not remembered very fondly from the later Middle Ages, well, even the later Anglo Saxon period onwards. That's because the main source that they rely on is the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and other things that are extrapolated based on the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. So they see Offa as someone who fights battles against his neighbours, who build, who creates this new archbishopric, as a challenge to Canterbury, which just made him seem like someone who upsets apple carts. The other thing that tends to win him a lot of infamy in later times is the Death. Well, the execution in 794 of a character called Ethelbert II, who's king of the East Angles, and he is later venerated as a saint. Now, he wouldn't have been a saint while he was alive, and there's probably some sort of context to him being executed on Offa's orders, but what that context is isn't clear. And so this just means that in later times, Offa was remembered as someone who had been involved in killing a saint. And that's not a good look in the Middle Ages, which is a very Christian time. And so on the basis of these actions, he is widely remembered as a bad guy. He is someone who exemplifies a more violent, darker kind of political life. Before you move into the era of the west Saxon dynasty, I.e. egbert of Wessex, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, all the people who come after them. There were some exceptions to this. The main one was St Albans, this monastery a little bit north of London, which has got a history going back to the Roman era, but which was re established as a significant monastery by Offa probably in the 790s, the early 790s, a few years before his death. And this meant that they were one of the main holdouts for Offa as a good guy. Right through the Middle Ages, right through even into the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century, St Albans preserved a much more favourable picture of Offa. There's a wonderful manuscript produced in the early 12, well, in the 13th century, in the early 1200s, by a character called Matthew Paris, who was a great chronicler, a great writer, but also a great artist. And he embellished this great account of the history of St Albans with images of Offa building the monastery, going to war against his enemies, looking every inch like the medieval hero, you know, like King Arthur, like Charlemagne, like all these other figures, how they were celebrated. So St Albans is exceptional in that regard. In more recent times, Offa remains seen as a little bit outside the main path of English Anglo Saxon history. I think is fair to say there's a sense that he's associated with more regional, rural, non metropolitan identities and constructions of the past, you know, the paths not taken of English history. Basically. There's a wonderful extended group of poems on him by Geoffrey hill from the 1960s and 70s. These talk about Offa as a figurehead for kind of deep English Midland identity, you know, something that's quite different from the kind of Englishness that was seen in other sources in other places. And there's even a band named after Off. I think the only Anglo Saxon king I've come across who's got a band named after him. It shows how deeply he's associated with these ideas of. Of alternative ideas of Englishness. That's what Offa stands for nowadays. I think it's coming out of his villainy, but doing something different with it, something more positive with it.
- [48:41]
C
Very, very interesting to understand the change through time and the holdouts. Right. Like the St. Albans bit I found fascinating to read about and hear you tell us about, because it's such a kind of, in some ways, random, like, little community that's like, no, we're over here, right. And that's what makes so interesting to look at sort of historiographical trends and go into the details of this kind of history. Because the answer is never sort of, he's 100% a villain. He's 100% not. Like. The nuance of all of this is what's so fascinating to excavate. So thank you for taking us through it here and obviously in way more detail in the book for anyone who wants more. But I do have to ask what you might be working on next. Given how long Ofa has stayed with you, what could you possibly be turning your attention to now?
- [49:25]
A
Well, now that I've got offer off my back, I've got a couple of things I'm keen to do. I've mentioned coins a few times. If anyone's read the book, they'll see that coins come up quite a lot in the book. So I'm quite interested in this intersection of economic and political institutional history. And so some of my next projects will be developing that I want at some stage to write a. A study of the region where. Well, where I am right now, the area around the Abbey of Ely, the other major Fenland abbeys, which have got very, very rich information about how these institutions worked with the people around them, the individual farmers, the villages, the aristocrats, all these different groups. You can learn quite a lot about how they dealt with these monasteries in the 10th and 11th centuries. I'm also hoping at some stage to write a more general economic and social history of the whole of early medieval England, which will develop all of these things in the long duration.
- [50:24]
C
Certainly plenty to keep you busy then. And of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled King of the Marsians, published by Yale University Press in 2026. Rory, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [50:38]
A
Thank you for having me, Sam.