Offa and the Mercian Wars Read Free

consciously intended to bring Bede up to date, and obviously relied on him for much of his early material. However, he does include additional details, especially in his battle accounts, which are written in his characteristically lively and entertaining style. Some of these accounts probably derive from his own imagination, but others contain hints that they might preserve material from other sources now lost, the ‘chronicles preserved in ancient libraries’ which the Bishop of Lincoln advised him to consult. Another reason for not disregarding Henry is his location in the East Midlands, which put him in a better position than either Bede or the West Saxon annalists for recording oral traditions relevant to Mercian history. Several other writers of the post-Norman Conquest period dealt with the early Anglo-Saxons, and may, like Henry, have had independent sources to which we no longer have access. They include Simeon of Durham, Florence of Worcester, Roger of Wendover, William of Malmesbury, Matthew Paris, and the author of the fourteenth-century Flowers of History; the latter is traditionally ascribed to Matthew of Westminster and I have retained this attribution here, even though Matthew himself is now believed by many to be a fictional character.
    Many writers on the subject of Anglo-Saxon warfare have relied heavily on analogy with Scandinavian sources, especially the Viking sagas. This is understandable because of the shortage of detailed accounts of English battles, and because the Scandinavian material does seem to come from a very similar warrior culture to that described in Beowulf, for example. Weapons were almost identical, and it is logical to assume that so were the methods of using them. However, while acknowledging that these sources can sometimes shed light on our subject, I have tried not to lean too heavily on them. They are, after all, at two removes from the world of the Mercian kings, having been written down in distant lands several centuries after the events they purport to describe.
    Other sources which can illuminate the Mercian Wars in passing include the published laws of several Anglo-Saxon kings (none of them, unfortunately, Mercian), and the biographies of saints, not all of whom led entirely peaceful lives. Reference will also be made to the surviving ‘charters’ of the period from the eighth century onwards, which record grants of land made by kings and others in authority, often to ecclesiastical houses. These rather dry documents are of interest for two main reasons. Firstly, they record the names and often the titles of the parties, and so can show where a certain person was at a particular time and how he wished to style himself. The location of Offa’s ‘palace’ at Tamworth, for example, is deduced not from a specific statement in the narrative sources but from the frequency with which he issued charters from that town. Similarly, documents in which Offa grants land in other kingdoms, such as Kent, provide us with a guide to the extent of his power as well as hinting at his presence on military campaigns. Many charters also define the extent of the territory they grant by describing a perambulation of its boundaries, and these have enabled scholars to reconstruct the appearance of the countryside and the frequency of woods, roads and other features.
    In addition to written documents, we also have the huge and constantly growing supply of material provided by archaeologists, which has revolutionised our understanding of this and other periods, as well as providing ammunition for debate on all sorts of questions which we would once have thought lost in obscurity. At the same time textual criticism has cast doubt on the reliability of what we thought were solid facts, written down once and for all in ‘black and white’. Nevertheless, despite recent attempts to bring the two disciplines closer together, writers on this period remain divided into two