Offa and the Mercian Wars Read Free Page B

their culture and had once been independent kingdoms in their own right, but like the Middle Angles they had already become a part of the Mercian power bloc by the time our written sources begin.
    This was the landscape that was to produce the first great English kingdom. It is not a big country by Continental standards, and despite its location in the centre of the island of Britain no part of it is more than seventy miles from the sea. Its rivers are also on a modest scale – you can throw a stone across the Trent at Newark, only fifty miles from its mouth – and none of its hills much exceed 1,000 feet above sea level. However, the maritime climate is relatively warm for its latitude, and the west winds provide reliable rainfall. People had been living in this land ever since the end of the Ice Age – essentially the same people, because modern DNA studies have proved that the old notion of successive waves of immigration was greatly exaggerated and that most of the modern inhabitants of Britain are the direct descendants of the original pioneers of the Stone Age. It is likely that all the primeval forest which once covered the land had been cleared for fields and pasture long before Mercia came into being, and most of the villages on the map today were already in existence in some form by the beginning of our period.
    This was by no means the Dark Age wilderness of popular imagination. It would, however, seem very alien to a modern observer. Most shocking would be the way in which people lived for much of the time on the edge of subsistence, with famine and epidemic disease on a scale now seldom encountered outside Africa. Bede tells how in Sussex in the late seventh century a prolonged drought brought a famine so severe that people committed suicide by throwing themselves from cliffs rather than face a lingering death from starvation. Around the same time Saint Chad, one of the first Mercian bishops, died along with most of his colleagues from an outbreak of epidemic disease. And yet somehow the land produced large enough surpluses of food and population to sustain a wealthy warrior class and continually repair the damage inflicted by its incessant wars.
    The Landscape
    In order to understand the nature of military campaigning in the Mercian Age it is necessary to build up a picture of the sort of country over which these campaigns took place. It is likely that people were very aware of the distinction between wild and cultivated landscapes – a distinction which drives the plot in Beowulf, for example, in which the halls of men are constantly threatened by monsters from the woods and marshes. However, even in the seventh and eighth centuries there can have been little if any true wilderness in England, except perhaps in the Fens of East Anglia where Saint Guthlac sought refuge from the world amidst the demon-haunted marshes.
    The bears, wild cattle and bison which Offa’s contemporary, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, hunted in the forests beyond the Rhine had long ago disappeared from the British Isles, probably by the end of the Bronze Age. Wolves were still widespread in Anglo-Saxon times, though perhaps even then not that common, and there are hints that their activities may sometimes have been a political issue, or even a cause of conflict. According to William of Malmesbury, in the tenth century the English king Edgar imposed a tribute on the princes of North Wales of 300 wolf skins annually; this was paid for three years, but ceased after that because the Welsh could find no more wolves in their territory. No doubt the pelts had some value in trade, but historians have always considered this a rather strange demand when Edgar could have insisted on cattle, silver or other more obviously useful goods. It has been suggested that the king was interested in the pelts as clothing for his troops, or even a kind of uniform for his bodyguard, but we have no other evidence for Anglo-Saxon warriors