Offa and the Mercian Wars

by Chris Peers

  On his southern front Coenwulf signed a treaty with Beorhtric of the West Saxons in 799, but three years later hostilities broke out when Beorhtric died and was succeeded by his old rival Ecgberht. The latter had been sent into exile during his predecessor’s reign and was obviously regarded as anti-Mercian. William of Malmesbury relates how he had originally been given asylum at the Mercian court, but had been expelled as part of an agreement by which Beorhtric married Offa’s daughter. It has also been suggested that Ecgberht was somehow involved in Eadberht Praen’s rebellion (Zaluckyi). Mercian reaction was characteristically swift. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that ‘on the same day’ as Ecgberht’s accession an army of the Hwicce, led by Ealdorman Aethelmund but no doubt with Coenwulf’s approval, crossed the River Thames into Wessex at Kempsford, a few miles north of the modern town of Swindon. From the Chronicle’s brief account it seems that the Hwiccans were on horseback, and they may have been either a large raiding party or an advanced guard for the main Mercian army. We are told that they crossed the border, so it must have been somewhere south of the Thames that they encountered the ‘Wiltshire men’ under Ealdorman Weohstan. Although both sides were only local contingents and neither king was present, the ensuing clash is described as a ‘big battle’, and it was clearly bitterly contested. The commanders on both sides were killed, but the Wiltshire army was victorious. Perhaps as the defenders, fighting on home ground, they were able to muster more fighting men than the hastily organised raiders. This battle is the last recorded independent action of a Hwiccan army.

  Despite this defeat, the next fourteen years of Coenwulf’s reign seem to have been quiet. He had re-established the supremacy of Mercia south of the Humber, and although Ecgberht remained on the throne of Wessex his energies seem to have been directed mainly against the Britons of Cornwall. Then in 816 the Welsh Annals record the beginning of a series of wars in the west. In that year ‘Saxons’ attacked Rhufoniog and the ‘mountains of Eyri’ (Snowdonia) in North Wales. From the location the culprits must surely have been the Mercians, and the same source for the year 818 is more explicit, stating that Coenwulf devastated Dyfed in the south-west. Three years later Coenwulf died; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives no details, but the Frankish writer Gaimar locates his death at Basingwerk in Flintshire. This implies that he was engaged in another Welsh campaign, but no battle is mentioned so it is likely that he died of natural causes. His brother and successor Ceolwulf I reigned for only two years, but it seems that he carried out the invasion plans already made by his predecessor, because under the year 822 the Welsh Annals describe a twofold disaster for British arms. The fortress of Degannwy in Gwynedd was destroyed by the ‘Saxons’, who also overran and occupied the neighbouring kingdom of Powys.

  Despite William of Malmesbury’s dismissive remark that Ceolwulf’s reign ‘produced nothing worthy’, it is clear that Mercia remained a formidable military power. But Ceolwulf was driven from the throne in circumstances which are unknown, and in 823 another distant relative named Beornwulf became king. Perhaps his predecessor had devoted too much attention to a decisive invasion of Wales, and had neglected to secure his power base in Mercia against potential rivals. The sudden disappearance of many of the men who had witnessed charters in Ceolwulf’s reign from those of his successor hints at a possible purge of Beornwulf’s opponents. One of these ealdormen, Muca, with an otherwise unknown colleague named Burhhelm, was ‘killed’ in 824, according to an enigmatic entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  At any rate Beornwulf displayed considerable energy, and must have seemed a worthy successor to Offa and Coenwulf. He maintained Mercian authority in Kent and Essex, and according to Stenton was ‘the dominant figure in southern England as late as the summer of 825’. At that point he decided to invade Wessex; the political background to this invasion is unknown, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records a battle in the same year between Britons and the men of Devon, and Beornwulf may have thought that King Ecgberht was too busy on his western frontier to oppose him. If so, it was a serious miscalculation. The two royal armies clashed at Ellendun, which is usually identified with Wroughton in Wiltshire. Wroughton is only ten miles or so south of Kempsford, the site of the battle of 802, and it is likely that the Mercians had crossed the Thames at the same spot as Aethelmund’s Hwicce and were aiming for the same strategic objective, the West Saxon heartland around Winchester. The Chronicle refers to a ‘great slaughter’, Henry of Huntingdon adding once again that the local stream was choked with corpses and ran red with blood. The Mercians were defeated, and it is probable that, as at the Winwaed, many of their losses occurred when they tried to retreat across the stream, though Beornwulf himself escaped. Ecgberht immediately followed up his triumph by dispatching his son Aethelwulf, with Bishop Ealhstan and Ealdorman Wulfheard, into Kent. Here they drove out a certain Baldred, whom the Chronicle describes as a ‘king’ but who may have been a viceroy appointed by Beornwulf. The Chronicle, relying as usual on West Saxon sources, claims that the people of Kent and Surrey, with the East and South Saxons, all welcomed Aethelwulf as a liberator, perhaps because they still resented Offa’s takeover of 785. Meanwhile the East Angles, ‘for fear of the Mercians’, also asked for Ecgberht’s protection.

  The Mercian warrior class had suffered serious losses, but somehow Beornwulf must have raised another army to strike back at his encircling enemies, because later in 825 or 826 he was campaigning on his eastern frontier. His energy was not matched by his luck on the battlefield, however, because the Chronicle concludes with the statement that ‘in the same year the East Angles killed Beornwulf, king of the Mercians.’ A similar entry for 827 hints at yet another disaster for Mercian arms: ‘Here Ludeca, king of Mercia, was killed, and his five ealdormen with him, and Wiglaf succeeded to the kingdom. ’ Who Ludeca was we are not told, but Florence of Worcester adds that he had led another invasion of East Anglia to avenge Beornwulf’s death, and had met an identical fate at the hands of a local army.

  The ‘Bretwaldas’

  Wiglaf was not left in peace for long, because under the heading of the year 829 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that Ecgberht ‘conquered the kingdom of Mercia and all that was south of the Humber.’ At this moment of national triumph for the West Saxons there appears in the Chronicle a passage which has intrigued historians ever since. Ecgberht, it continues, ‘was the eighth king who was “Bretwalda” ’ (alternatively, in some manuscripts, ‘Brytenwalda’). This term is generally agreed to mean ‘Wide Ruler’, or perhaps originally ‘Britain Ruler’, and it is clearly intended to be the equivalent of what Bede, writing in Latin rather than English, calls ‘imperium’. The idea is evidently that up to that date there had been eight English kings whose power had extended beyond their own boundaries and brought most, if not all, of their neighbours into some form of subjection. But, despite the attempts of some scholars to define it more precisely, this cannot have been a formal title or political position with legally defined rights. No one, as far as we know, was ever crowned or acclaimed ‘Bretwalda’, and it is quite possible that the term was unknown in the lifetimes of most of the men who were said to have earned the distinction. It has been well described as ‘a poetic rather than political assertion’ (Swanton).

  The essential meaninglessness of the title is obvious when the list of the other seven ‘Bretwaldas’ in the Chronicle is examined. It comprises, in chronological order: King Aelle of the South Saxons (died c. 490), Ceawlin of Wessex (c. 593), Aethelberht of Kent (c. 616), Raedwald of the East Angles (c. 627), and Kings Edwin (616 – 33), Oswald (634 – 42) and Oswy (642 – 70) of Northumbria. It is in fact the same list given by Bede of those kings who had enjoyed the ‘imperium’ or overlordship of Britain up to his own day. Even then it was highly subjective, for it can hardly be accepted that a migration-era petty king of Sussex, for example, had exercised real power over the entire island. Indeed, by 829 the list was no more than propaganda. If Ecgberht, who had received the temporary submission of the English sou
th of the Humber, merited the title of Bretwalda, how could it have been withheld from Aethelbald, Offa or Coenwulf? Yet not a single Mercian ruler appears in Bede’s list or in that of the Chronicle, a fact which alone is sufficient to render them valueless as political documents.

  Mercia Eclipsed

  After subjugating the new Mercian king, Wiglaf, Ecgberht marched unopposed through Mercia as far as Dore near Sheffield, where he accepted the submission of the Northumbrians. In 830 he was in Wales, where the rulers again offered him tribute, but his triumph proved ephemeral, for the Chronicle entry for the same year says that ‘here Wiglaf obtained again the kingdom of Mercia.’ As Stenton observes, this is unlikely to have been as a result of Ecgberht’s generosity, despite a much later assertion by Roger of Wendover, or the pro-West Saxon Chronicle would have said so. Probably the annal refers to an otherwise undocumented Mercian revolt against the domination of Wessex, which resulted in the heartland of the kingdom quickly reverting to Wiglaf’s control. He seems also to have recovered the London area, granting land in Middlesex in a charter of 831, and in 836 he was secure enough to be able to invite the Archbishop of Canterbury to a conference at Croft in Leicestershire. King Aethelstan of East Anglia resumed the minting of his own coins around 830, which suggests that he was also able to take advantage of the Mercian victory to throw off West Saxon rule. Meanwhile Ecgberht’s fortunes continued to deteriorate. In 836 he was defeated by the Danes in what the Chronicle admits was a ‘great slaughter’ in Somerset, and although he routed a combined Cornish and Danish force at Hingston Down in Cornwall in 838, he died a year later.

  The locations of Ecgberht’s last battles illustrate how, in the first decades of the ninth century, the forays of the Vikings had been diverted away from eastern England towards the north and west. Northumbria had been repeatedly ravaged, but most of the longships had sailed around the north of Scotland to pillage and settle the Shetland and Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, North Wales and Ireland. Mercia had enjoyed nearly half a century of respite, but this was now coming to an end. In 840 Wiglaf was succeeded by Beorhtwulf, and two years later the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes ‘a great slaughter in London, in Quentovic, and in Rochester’. Quentovic, situated just across the Straits of Dover, was one of the main commercial centres of the Frankish Empire. Only one agent could have been responsible for this mayhem on both sides of the English Channel, and other Chronicle entries confirm the sense of growing menace as the Vikings tightened their grip on the seas around Western Europe. Later in 842 what was probably the same fleet, having sacked Nantes at the mouth of the River Loire, settled for the winter on the island of Noirmoutier, ‘as if they meant to stay for ever’, in the words of a Frankish chronicle. This was the first time that a Viking army is recorded as wintering in its southern raiding grounds, but the experiment was successful, as the Franks made no attempt to storm the island stronghold and the raiders were able to resume their operations as soon as the weather improved.

  Under the year 850, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the first appearance in England of this sinister new development: although temporarily defeated by a West Saxon army in Devon, ‘the heathen men stayed in Thanet over the winter.’ At that time it seems that the ‘Isle’ of Thanet at the north-eastern tip of Kent, where Margate and Ramsgate now stand, was a genuine island, offering the same sort of security against attack as Noirmoutier. King Alfred’s biographer Asser, writing half a century later, claims that the raiders’ base was Sheppey, a similar island closer to the mouth of the Thames, though the Chronicle dates the first overwintering in Sheppey to four years later. It is of course possible that both places were occupied at different stages of the same campaign.

  Kent had remained under West Saxon control and was now permanently outside Beorhtwulf’s sphere of influence, but London was still a Mercian city, and was clearly at risk from a Viking fleet based no more than fifty miles to the east. The king responded by raising an army and marching to its defence, but he was too late. In the spring of 851 a Danish fleet, which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle estimates at 350 ships, sailed into the mouth of the Thames, sent a landing party to sack Canterbury, then descended on London.

  At this point it is necessary to confront a longstanding problem in early medieval military history. Is 350 ships a plausible total, and if so how many fighting men does that represent? And more generally, how large were these Viking armies, against which the great powers of Western Europe seemed so helpless? Naturally their victims thought that their numbers were incalculable. The ‘Annals of Ulster’, for example, describes how ‘the sea spewed forth floods of foreigners’, so that the country was ‘submerged by waves of Vikings and pirates’. This idea was strengthened by the raiders’ seaborne mobility, because the same group could attack targets many miles apart in quick succession, giving the impression that there were many such bands operating simultaneously. It has been argued that the smallest ships mentioned in the tenth-century Norwegian ‘Leidang’, or national levy, had twenty benches for oarsmen, which assuming two men per bench, one rowing on each side, would give a minimum of forty warriors per ship. Other vessels were much bigger – the crew of Olaf Tryggvason’s Long Serpent at the Battle of Svoldr in the year 1000 has been estimated as over 500 strong (Heath).

  However, it is generally agreed that statistics from internal Scandinavian wars, which took place in coastal waters, are not relevant to the long-distance raids of the ninth century, on which the vessels also had to carry supplies and even livestock and could not have risked compromising seaworthiness by overloading. The ship excavated at Gokstad in Norway, believed to date from around the time of the attacks on London, has often been taken as typical of the vessels used in these campaigns. It is seventy-six feet long, built of oak, with sixteen benches each housing a pair of oars. Allowing for a captain, a steersman and a few other supernumeraries, an average figure of thirty-five crewmen per ship would seem reasonable. So if there really were 350 such ships in the fleet which attacked London, it could have carried as many as 10,000 men.

  A counterargument has been put forward by P. H. Sawyer, who has claimed that even large Viking armies should be numbered not in thousands, but in hundreds. He reminds us of Ine’s dictum that a ‘here’ or raiding army could be anything from thirty-five men upwards. It is unlikely that any chronicler had the opportunity to count the huge fleets of hundreds of ships mentioned at critical points in the campaigns, and their numbers may have been exaggerated by popular rumour. Even if the count is roughly correct, it might include large numbers of smaller boats, either brought over from Scandinavia as ships’ boats or requisitioned locally. And we should remember that the primary method of propulsion of the longships was sail, with oars used mainly in emergencies or for manoeuvring in the confined spaces of rivers and coastal waters. So they could have operated effectively with smaller crews than the number of benches provided would suggest, and may routinely have done so. On the other hand it is possible to overemphasise the small size of Viking armies. If the 260 or more bodies excavated at Repton (see page 169) are really casualties from the Great Army of 874, it was obviously possible for such a force to sustain losses of this magnitude and still remain in the field. A total strength of at least 1,000 can be assumed on this basis, but this was an exceptionally big army, recognised as such by the chroniclers on both sides of the English Channel.

  Some explanation other than sheer numbers must nevertheless be sought for the success of the Viking armies in England and elsewhere. Tactically they enjoyed no decisive superiority over the English on land, as is proven by the number of defeats which they suffered. Their armament, in fact, was very similar to that of their Mercian and West Saxon enemies. Mail armour and iron helmets may have been more common among the invaders, but we have no reliable data on the proportion of men on either side who were so equipped, so it is hard to reach a firm conclusion. The long-handled two-handed axes associated with eleventh-century Danes and used by English huscarles on the Bayeux
tapestry seem to have been unknown in the ninth century. It has been argued that Viking swords were made of better quality iron than English ones, and their more tapering blades and heavier counterweighted pommels made them better balanced (Loades), but this can only have provided a marginal advantage in the press of a ‘shieldwall’ fight, though it might have been more useful in individual combat. The Scandinavians made considerable use of the bow, but as has been argued above (page 110) it cannot be proved that the English were not also effective archers. Similarly Viking battlefield formations can be shown to have been fairly sophisticated, at least if the late evidence of Saxo Grammaticus is accepted as relevant, but it is hard to believe that the English, with their long experience of internal wars, were not just as capable.

  What the men who attacked Beorhtwulf’s London almost certainly did have, however, was a psychological advantage. As seaborne raiders, whose movements were unpredictable and their numbers apparently huge, they would have been frightening enough to the levies of landlocked Mercia; their heathenism and their ferocious attacks on churches and monasteries as well as peaceful settlements must have added to the terror. On the other hand, the invaders would have consisted of the most desperate and warlike elements of their home countries, motivated by the desire to win their fortunes and by the knowledge that defeat so far from their homes was likely to result in their ignominious destruction. They were also largely immune to the logistic problems which the English encountered when raising large armies, and so they did not need to restrict their campaigning to particular seasons. The Vikings did not need supply trains as they were prepared to live off the land, indifferent to the damage this caused to the local economy, and in any case their ships were available to store and transport their loot. Paradoxically for such relentless aggressors, the one strategy which the invaders used time and again, and which their enemies found almost impossible to counter, was a defensive one. They would retire across the sea, or into fortified camps on islands, and then return to the attack when their enemies least expected them.