Offa, King of the Mercians

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Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. In the year 794, the bright promise of a royal marriage swiftly turned into a bloody tragedy. One king ethylbert II of East Anglia arrived at the court of the great mercy and king, offer. Ethylbert had just won, aim, to marry offers daughter, Elfrith, and buy in their two kingdoms

together. The undisputed master of central Britain, offer ruled the mercy and heartland of the West Midlands and was troubled by this unexpected visitor. Perhaps he was just wary of an ambitious young rival, but his fears were exacerbated

“by his own queen who insinuated that ethylbert had not come as a suitor seeking marriage,”

but rather that he'd come to depose offer and seize his crown. The story goes that swayed by his wife's whispering's offer, summoned an assassin who led ethylbert in his companions into an ambush, cutting off their heads and casting their bodies into the marshes on the banks of the river lug. Abernext would seal ethylbert's place in history and indirectly, condemned offers memory.

Because almost immediately, miracles began to occur at the site and the murdered young king became venerated as a marted saint. For offer, the consequences were profound and lasting. The murder became the defining atrocity of his reign. When later chroniclers compiled their histories, when they wrote their accounts of great

kings and their deeds, they returned again and again to this single brutal fact. Offer had murdered a saintly king. Yes, offer was remembered as a great conqueror, the builder of the great diek in the maker of a kingdom, but above all else, the murderer of a young man, only seeking an honourable marriage. Whenever chroniclers and historians picked up their pens to write about him,

they would first write of that murder and his great works, only afterwards, if at all.

My guest today is on a mission to re-habilitate offer's reputation. In his new book, Offer, King of the Mercians, Rory Naismith, professor of early medieval history at the University of Cambridge, argues against the notion that, while Alfred the Great and his dynasty are remembered as agents of a new beginning that resulted in a unified Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Offer is cast as a symbol of an older, divided order.

Offer, Rory says, actually cemented Mercians' position as the dominant force in the sudden part of Britain, strengthened the internal cohesion of his domains and laid the basis for a new model of kingship. In fact, Offer was a king who was ambitious and successful and who carefully constructed his image and that of the royal family, making a lasting impact on how King ship was practiced and conceived across England.

Rory, welcome to Gone Medieval. It's great to have you with us. Thank you very much for asking me. I'm glad to be here. It was listeners may well know. I'm sitting here in the middle of the Mercian kingdom.

Mercian kingdom. It'd be really great to get to know him a little bit better if we can. And I wonder if you could start us off by telling us how much we know about Offer's

“kind of early life. Do we know about his origins? His family? How does he rise to power in Mercia?”

Not a lot is the short answer. He kind of springs out of nowhere in 757 to become King of the Mercians and then he rules for nearly 40 years. There is one source, one, one charter, which mentions casually that Offer came from the territory of people called The Witcher, who lived in and around what's now, was to share it's not clear if that's reliable or not. If it is, it's helpful,

if it's not never mind. But there's a couple of things we can infer about his background.

First of all, because he lasts so long, because he's King of the nearly 40 years. There's one of the longest reigns of any Anglo-Saxon King. He was probably relatively young when he came to this room. He was probably in his 20s or 30s, so he'd be in his 60s or 70s when he died. We don't know for sure, but he's got to have been pretty long in the tooth by then. But the other thing that's interesting is he is not from the main line of the Mercian Royal

“dynasty. He's a distant cousin of the, in fact, there's a very short live king called Beona.”

We know even less about him. He's there for a few months in 757. But before him, you've got a character called Athelbould, who was also around for a long time for 41 years,

between 716 and 757. Offers a distant cousin to him, and he's an even more distant cousin

to the whole group of kings that have ruled Mercian the 7th century. So he's coming, I don't quite say coming out of nowhere, but he's certainly not someone who's the obvious candidate to become King next. He's someone who's got a claim, but he's probably picked out by the ruling establishment as someone who is a fine strapping young Atheling. He's a guy they can work with. He's someone who is going places. And that's probably not necessarily that unusual

Francoise accent kingship in that they tended to have this sort of elected element where you would have a pool of candidates from which you pick the the most likely or the preferred one. Do we think

“maybe his offers rise a result of that? Or is it an ending of the dynastic line that had previously”

held the throne? It's probably something like that, a choice rather than election, a very

better way of putting it, because there's no sign that they sort of line them all up and say, okay, we want you. It's more like how you nominate the head of a committee or something like that, you know who the viable people are, and then you give someone a tap on the shoulder, and they they know that they've been chosen for it. He does have a lot going for him. He does have some family connections, and as he comes to settle into his role as king, he does try very hard to

establish his own family as the dynastic that will go forwards. And a number of royal families were established in this way in the Anglo-Saxon period, you know, you're quite right that there was an element of choice when he came to king, but usually it was a choice between members of that preferred family. And so when offer dies his son follows him as king, but unfortunately for offer, his poor old son dies after just four months. So that's pretty much the end of his direct line of

of kings, for come from his own family, but quite a lot of the practices that he'd established do live on, and so he's got a legacy of how kingship is practiced even if not of his own, his own blood on the throne. Yeah, and when offer becomes king of mercia, what does the king of a mercia look like, kind of geographically, but also politically and culturally? Well, mercia, the name of mercia comes from a term that means border frontier, like the word March,

like Marcher Lords, things like that. The old things you've made out of, and this is a slightly on the edge, on the fringe kind of place. You could, you could plausibly call the mercians the frontiersman, something like that. In Bevel, Grendel, the monster is described as a matchstaper, someone who walks on the borders, someone who walks on the marches, and historically that meant it was probably the frontier with the Britons. By the eight century, it means

the territory of the Midlands, particularly the West Midlands, the core area of mercia is around place like Tamworth, Lichfield, Repton, to some extent also the East Midlands, which traditionally were known as the territory of the Middle Angles, but they were very closely associated with the mercians for an early stage. By the time offers become king, mercia really means a big block of territory between whales on the west, the thinlands on the east, Northumbria, as in The Humber,

and beyond it to the north, and then the tembs to the south. Not all of that area had historically been thought of as the mercians, you know, the territory of the mercian people, but it's come to be recognised as the territory of the mercian king. Offer adds to that East Anglia, Kent, Sussex,

to many of the other Anglo-Saxon kingdom, as people are speaking old English, they live mostly in

“rural settlements, they're not in big towns. London is an exception to that, and the mercian king”

to be very keen to try and get control of London from the 660s onwards, that's well established by a time offer, offers king, and generally the mercians are well positioned as the dominant political figures in the southern part of England by the 8th century. He's the clearly the top dog. Yeah, yeah. And does he inherit a reasonably stable government, or do we see him making reforms to try and create a more stable government in Mercia? He inherits big ambitions, he inherits big

boots to try and fill his, I wouldn't say too much about beyond it, this very short-lived character that offer kicks out in the course of 757, but Athelbord had been another very successful ruler, but in quite a different way, Athelbord is very much an overlord. He dominates lots of surrounding kingdoms, but in more of a personal way, that's as to say, you still have kings of East Anglia,

“wessex in the southwest, Kent in the southeast and so on, but they recognize Athelbord is the”

the more kingly king, the more powerful king. They recognize that he is the one with more land,

more resources, and they will not attack him, they will generally obey him, but at the same time, they're currently ruling their kingdom independently. So offer sees that model. He's probably grown up surrounded by that way of doing things, as he goes through his reign, particularly in the 770s, 780s, and after, he tries to bring these territories within Mercia and eastern south East England together as more of a coherent single unit. He has meetings, royal meetings,

which also combine the bishops of his kingdom. That was something that was new to do this so regularly, and this deals with business from across that whole territory. He's got a monetary system, a coinage system that embraces that whole territory as well, and which excludes coins from foreign kingdoms. He's doing quite a lot to try and position himself as the single king within this whole territory, and that includes systematically demoting or demoting local kings or encouraging

them to think of themselves more as aildo and more as aristocrats within offers regime. Can we see a situation where maybe Athalbold is considering himself or positioning himself

as kind of first among equals, but offer is sort of taking that and thinking, now I'm going to

turn myself into actual king of all of these people. So there will no longer be that sense of equality that we're all kings, I'm going to be the king, and you're going to be subject to me. Eventually, yes, and you can see that what this involves in a place like say, Sussex, the land of the South Saxons, is that you have local figures who've been kings there, who've called themselves kings for a long time, several at one, actually, is Sussex, which is slightly

exactly unusual place in that respect. And there's one of these cards called Oslaq, who misuse

“a charter in 780, which is important, because it's the only one that survives in a original form”

from Sussex before the age of the Vikings. So this is produced in Sussex, at that point in 780, he calls himself "ducks suitsacks" or um, "eldomen of the South Saxons." So he's not calling himself king anymore. This is after offer has taken over and he gives a piece of land to the local bishop. But what you can then see is that a few years later, about 15 years later, the bishop decides he isn't satisfied with just the local elderman's document saying he's got this piece of land.

Instead, he goes on a big trek, all the way up into the midlands, two, um, earthling barra, near North Hampton, which is a hill fort that offer used as a royal estate, a royal hall. And so he turns up there, he gets an addition made to this document saying offer and his son recognized that this grant is acceptable, is going to be upheld by the mercy and king as well. So you can see in action what this means, you've got a kind of layer of authority that's been put

on top of what the South Saxons had been doing before. And you can see people in other parts of office kingdom do exactly the same thing in the West Midlands, in Worcestershire, they do the same thing. In Kent, they're doing a similar thing. They were probably doing it in other places, too, that we don't have charters or other records from. So this is, this is the way offers kingdom

is done to be run basically. Yeah, yeah. And before we come back to some of those, those really

interesting details that we've started to pick apart there, there are a couple of things that offer is kind of famous for. If people know offers name, it's probably most likely an association

Do we have any sense of why it was built and what it was for? There have been an awful lot of

ideas about what offers diek is for and why and when it's built. But it's incredibly hard to make it stick because it's a hugely impressive thing. But it's also essentially just a really big, really long mound of earth. And so trying to pin down exactly when it's built, whether it's built in stages, all those sorts of things, it's hard. And in many places, it's been worn down by generations of people plowing it away, walking along it with a bit too much too much enthusiasm, all kinds

of, for all kinds of reasons, there are many parts of it, which are difficult to trace. We do know that already by the, the 9th century, the late 9th century, it was associated with offer. There's a, a can't called Assa, who was a wealth scholar that wrote a biography of alpha the Great

and he mentions casually that offer the King of the Mercians had a great big diek built from

C to C between the Welsh and the Mercians. And there's no reason to doubt that so that clearly this was thought of as as offers construction already in the 800s. And the phrasing that Assa uses is

“important. He says, built from C to C, that's the same language that was used by other scholars”

when they were writing about the building of Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall, which were built by the Romans to protect the Roman province and the Britons from the barbarians as they saw it's the north. So for offer to build a dike that did something similar, suggests that he's now claiming that it's in essence the Welsh have become the barbarians, you know, the Britons are now on the other side and the English, the Mercians are the dominant figures within, within Britain.

As for what we can say about why it's built, it's probably got a symbolic element. It's trying to put the Welsh in their place, it's been recognised recently from careful surveys of the the dike that it's positioned in the landscape to try and look and posing from the West. They're choosing a course, they're choosing the crests of hills and things like that to induce a sense of awe from those who be looking up at it from the West. So that suggests they really are concerned about

wanting to make an impression on everyone who's on the other side of it. It's also got military capabilities, it's going to, it's not necessarily going to completely stop a determined individual or army that's trying to come over from the West but it's certainly going to slow them down and deter them and it's also going to communicate that this is, this is mocking the territory of a major player, someone who's got the way with all two erect, a construction like this

can also put together a big army and chase you back and come and destroy your farm and your home land.

“That's I think what it's trying to show. There are still lots of answer questions but it's”

definitely one of the major achievements of offers ready. Yeah, that allusion to Roman and Hadrian's Wall is interesting as well because that kind of positions the dike as something really symbolic in terms of creating a boundary, a border between, you know, the Romans did it as to mark the edge of the Roman Empire and it's almost like offer is staying. This is the delineating the edge of my empire if you cross this, you're moving into something else.

Which is kind of interesting as well as an acknowledgement that he can't control any further than that. He's not looking to move any further west. So whilst he's stopping people from the West coming east, he's also demarking the edge of his own authority without any real hope, I guess, of moving it any further west. I think that's right. It's not necessary that he couldn't go further

“west. I think offers got a lot of warriors, he's got a lot of resources at his disposal.”

I think in essence, he just doesn't want or need to. I think he recognises that the Welsh are doing their own thing. He's happy to dominate them. He's happy to be recognised as their overlord, but he doesn't necessarily want to incorporate them into his own kingdom in the same way as he does with East Anglia or Kent, for example. So yes, he's so the as interested Wales, and there are records from Welsh annals of raids, military campaigns that the

merchants undertake into Wales, and occasion that the Welsh undertake into Mercia, but is mostly the Welsh getting the sharp end in this period. You know, offers the the aggressor in most of these cases. And if people know anything else about offer, it might well be related to the the murder of Ethelbert II. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about who Ethelbert is, how he comes into contact with offer and why offer is often thought of as having

had him killed. Ethelbert was King of the East Angles, and we know that he dies in the year 794.

This is recorded for the first time in the Angles Saxon Chronicle in the 9th century. Pretty much

everything beyond that is hazy. We don't know why he was killed. We don't know what the background

related to previous kings. We do have a few coins of him this time, a grand total of four of them,

and these show that he had some sort of he was definitely there in the 790s, but they also show us that he's got some kind of power on the ground in East Anglia. It may be that he tried to take over from offer. It may be that he rules with offer as some rulers had earlier done in Kent. There's a number of different ways you can you can understand what's going on with those. There are a couple of interesting details in the very, very brief record of this from the

“Angles Saxon Chronicle. The key thing is that Ethelbert is beheaded. It's actually very, very unusual”

for people to be beheaded, especially in a kind of political context like this in Angles Saxon England. This isn't Henry VIII. This isn't later periods where it's much more commonplace to do that. Executing anyone at that level is rare and stood by beheading is very rare indeed. So it's definitely not offer just doing it on a whim. There must have been some kind of background to this. We just don't know precisely what that was. There is a safe life that was written about Ethelbert

about 300 odd years after this in the in the 12th century. It's difficult to know how much weight to put on this but it says that Ethelbert was in East Anglia. He's the son of a previous king about whom we've got no information whatsoever and that he decides he wants to marry one of off his daughters. That in and of itself is not a crazy idea. We know offers got at least three daughters, two of whom also marry other kings. So it's plausible. Ethelbert goes off on a trek

across England. Takes with him is two favorite poets who will sing ancient songs to them about his family's legends and history. He eventually gets to her referred which is where Ethelbert is based at that time and at that point his wife offers wife Kuna thrift, engineers the the deception of offer. She's not very happy about Ethelbert coming to try and claim one of the daughters. So she lies to offer says that he's coming to try and take over

office kingdom and so that means when offer has him taken an executed he's not actually to blame because in the eyes of this writer that's a perfectly justifiable reason to have someone's head cut

“off. But then afterwards the truth is discovered Ethelbert is recognized as a saint and offer”

leaves the charge in honouring him. So there's a lot of a lot of reasons to doubt aspects of that story

but it's always possible that the core of it the Ethelbert want to tell you one of offer's daughters and

something went awry that is that that might have some kind of truth to it. Yeah and offer seems to have had a bit of an image problem that he maybe didn't have in his own day but later writers weren't particularly kind to offer I don't think so I wondered if you could just talk us a little bit about what sources we have to draw on for offers story and why there might be problems with some of those sources. The major problem is that most of the, certainly the textual written sources about offer

are essentially hostile witnesses and there aren't that many of them. The major narrative source is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is actually multiple manuscripts which contain a similar set of

“year-on-year records written in Old English. These are put together in the time of alpha”

the great 100 years after offers time and they draw for the period of offers rain on texts from Canterbury on records from Canterbury and that's a problem for offer because Canterbury was not a place where he was particularly popular they were not fans of offer his name was mud there. So they they don't say that much about him or what they do say is often either pretty negative or it's focused very heavily on warfare it's focused very heavily on battles and that in and of itself

makes offer seem like a warm hunger it makes him seem bloodthirsty and if you combine it with the fact that he kills a saint he looks pretty horrific in later eyes and many later histories are

based ultimately on what's in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles that's one of the major problems you do

have a bunch of letters usually interesting letters which are written two people in England in North Amberia and in offers kingdom by character Al-Qun and he's a Northumbrian scholar cleric who spends a lot of his career in Mainman Europe he works closely with Charlemagne but he's got a lot of contacts in other places and he keeps up correspondence with them and he even writes to offer on a couple of occasions he writes to members of offers family people at his court and these are

really valuable for showing you a little bit about what else is going on in offers kingdom or be

after that point and there he becomes a bit more critical of offer he challenges him for having

“spilt a lot of blood in order to raise his son up to the throne we know that offers son had been”

made king in 787 and then he inherits the kingdom as sole ruler after his father's death in summer 796 so what Al-Qun is referring to about this bloodshed is a little bit of a mystery it could be ethylbert of East Anglia being killed it could be something else if he's referring to edge with his son becoming king in the 780s other than the letters of Al-Qun and the Anglo-South Chronicle they really aren't that many written sources but you can go some way towards

rethinking even rehabilitating offer if you turn to material sources so particularly his coinage

and this is very very rich indeed he's the the first king south of the humble to issue silver pennies

in his own name on a large scale there are over 1,000 coins offer that survive they're made in at least three places in different parts of his kingdom some from Kent some from London maybe other

“places in messia and then some from East Anglia as well and these show that he's got a very”

firm sense of how he should be portrayed how he should be named they all abide by the same standards of weight and metal quality and on some coins they even show him they show images of him they show I want to say portraits because it's not necessarily what he actually looked like but they show images of how they imagined offer and these illustrate how they considered him comparable to

constant time the great and the biblical king David these these great touchstones of how kingship

should be practiced in the early Middle Ages charlomainers really keen on David others were really keen on him and also in constant time so offer and his his agents they're alive to that there is another narrative that can be teased out about offers representation but you're not going to get it from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle yeah and it seems like coinage is an important factor we can see from that I guess offers understanding of statecraft of his ability to project his image across

a wider area and again I wonder whether he's leaning a little bit on a Roman model of doing that you know we've seen his possible connection of the dyke to Hadrian's wall or at least you know in the minds of others that Hadrian's wall was connected to the dyke and perhaps the coinage is reflecting that too because he you know he's using he's importing a lot of carolinge and silver which is demonstrating his connections over to the continent mind standing is he model some of

those coins on Islamic styles too so he's again expressing his his reach and his connection to other places in the world can we see him kind of stage managing his own image in part and

“and using coinage as part of his statecraft I think definitely you can it's a two way street it's”

also how other people are responding to offer but at least they're responding in positive terms it's not just people laying into him which is what you mostly get from a lot of the the major narrative sources yes and the coins show that he's in touch with lots of different traditions there's an awful lot of Roman heritage coming into this the general principle of just having coins in the name of a of a ruler is looking back in the context of what offered as at least very much to

Roman coins they often look very similar in general terms to Roman coins with the images of the king that you see the kind of inscriptions that you get but he's also alive to more recent parallels from the Frankish world he's looking at coins of charlaman and his father Pippin III and he's also looking to other traditions you mentioned Islamic islamic precedence and those come out with a completely unique coin a gold coin there were very many gold coins made at

this point they're overwhelmingly made of silver gold ones were made for very high status very high prestige transactions where you're going to be paying a lot of attention to the medium in which these payments are made and in the 1840s a French diplomat in Rome found and acquired a gold coin which imitates a dinar a gold piece from the caliphate from the Abbasid caliphate except it's got the name offer Rex the words offer Rex inserted into the Arabic there is such an upside down

relative to the Arabic which strongly suggests that they didn't know what it actually meant and it's a good thing they didn't because then they probably really been a bit more hesitant about imitating a coin that said there is no god but alarm hammered as his prophet because it's actually thought that this gold coin of offer may have been made for a payment to the papacy a gift to the

786 to a meeting with offer and then in subsequent years it's claimed that offer at this point

said he would offer to Saint Peter every year 365 gold pieces and so this may well be one of those gold pieces that's actually made for being sent sent to the pope so he's doing his own thing in a lot of ways he's looking to lots of different sources and he's sometimes just doing his own

“thing he has coins issued in the name of his queen that's not something I think any early”

medieval ruler had done in recent times some Roman emperors had issued coins in name of their emperors but it shows how offer is is taking on board all kinds of different ideas and practices and making them his own through the coinage and through all the techniques.

Nah, no flene for Sochelnende. Besuch the road kept in a leapness world in Fribor with

Euron Mellitz, Deuroma or the Canalertücken von neben an ingen Alla Jagänge. Entect our interactive exhibition by the elite tour with audio guide and a classic and genious parvillung the whole world from Roadcatscheln. The Roadcatschene leapness world only has a set of things in front. I think the coins mentioning tuna frith is wife are interesting. I think if I understand it

“correctly there's four coins of her and they're kind of the only examples of that in Western Europe”

from this time so the Byzantines were perhaps doing something similar but you just don't see or we don't have examples of that from anywhere else in Western Europe at the time which kind of suggests that offer is doing something unique, something different that he's putting himself out there but I wonder if we could take the opportunity to understand what we know about tuna frith is wife. What kind of player is she? She's obviously significant enough that he'll put her on coins.

Definitely and her coins are hugely interesting. There's a few more of them that have turned up in recent years. Not as many as there are of offer but they're really interesting in themselves. You can see that the distribution of them is a little bit different to offers ones and that might suggest they're connects in some way with tuna through its own expenditure of money, her own movements, her own activities. They're made by at least two moneyers, one in Mercia, one in

Kent and we do know that there is one other example like these which is directly inspired by tuna thrith. There is one single coin known of Charlemagne's Queen, Fastrata and this was only found within the last five years or so and we know it's it's modeled on coins of tuna thrith because it's offer, it's all the type which only begins a year or two after the coins of tuna thrith must have stopped being made and it also imitates the way the inscription is arranged on tuna frith's coins.

So it shows very clearly that Charlemagne and his family are looking at what offers up to with his coins and then applying that to what his queen is doing. Again, it's a dialogue. It's not just one side imitating the other. Other than that, tuna thrith is a hugely interesting character, apart from the coins, she comes up a lot in Charters. She very often attests immediately after offer or offer in his son. They form a sort of very tight family unit. You do see some other

queens who appear in that way but not as often as tuna thrith does. She does stop appearing so regularly the end of the rain and her coinage also stops near the end of the rain. It may well be that there was some sort of reason for this that we're not aware of but she does then come back onto the stage after offers death in support of her son and then of the king who comes long after her son, Kurn Wolf. She's referred to in several of the letters of Alkuin. She's referred

“to as being the manager of her household which is a hugely important position because of course that”

means you control access to the king. She gets it in the neck from some later chronicles. I mentioned the stuff about Ethelbert of Ethelbert of East Anglia. There's also a wonderful, impressively wacky text called "The Lives of the Two Offers" that was written at some albums in the 13th century and this is all about the two kings called offer. One is a very legendary figure who was originally from a part of Northern Germany called Angel which is one of

the places that's thought to feed into the name of the angles and then the second offer is our offer.

And this text draws parallels between these two figures. It makes up an awful lot of swashbuckling detail and one of these swashbuckling details is about how Kurnothrith is

seems generally a villain but everything from offers own time is actually a lot more positive.

“She seems to have been a major part of how he practiced his kingship and ran his kingdom.”

Yeah, interesting. I wondered if we could zoom our lens out a little tiny bit because I just wanted to have a quick conversation about the idea of the head-tarky because I know that's something you're not necessarily fond of thinking of Anglo-Saxon England as he's kind of seven monolithic kingdoms. I wonder if you could talk us through how you think we should think about the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms during this period.

I'll do my best. It's probably worth just saying first of all that the idea of the head-tarky

is it is helpful in some sense. They're recognising that it's not just one kingdom. There are a number of separate kingdoms and in that respect, sure, fine. It's also a fairly venerable idea. It's been around since approximately 1100 people tried to rationalise the fairly complicated picture that they encountered from things like beads of ecclesiastical history, where they'll refer to all sorts of kings and kingdoms doing their own thing.

And the seven most prominent ones were basically then thought to be the ones that there were

“hence you come up with a head-tarky. I think it's better just to accept that there were sometimes”

more kingdoms. There were a lot of people who could call themselves king. In the time of bead,

there's about a dozen or more groups who are said at some stage to have a king or are referred to

as what be called a provincial. This is where we get the word province from in modern times, but in beads mine, that seems to have meant a unit that might have had its own king. So already you've got a fair few more than that. There were lots of smaller groups who might or might not have once been their own kings, as in many dozens. There's a list of some of these relating to the Midland territory of Mercia, which is now referred to as the Tribal Hydage,

that refers to 30-old groups, or the one of whom are the Mercians. And some of whom we know had their own kings from bead and from other texts. By the time you get into the the 8th century, and you've got a bit more of a grip on what the political geography looks like. There's really only about, if at few of them seven, more like four or five major kingdoms that are clearly dominant, which most likely have brought other smaller ones into their orbit around them.

And as you move beyond offers reign into the 9th century, it's even fewer than that. You've really only got Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, and East Anglia operating as autonomous kingdoms as you move

into the 9th century. So the short answer is, you probably never have exactly seven, but you do

have a lot. Yeah, yeah. It's just interesting that the temptation I suppose is just to think the whole Anglo-Saxon period was the the general consolidation towards seven, which then becomes one. And the picture is a little bit more complex than that. And the wonder if we could then return to something like the thing about offers relationships with his immediate neighbours. So we've seen that kind of Kent East Anglia and Sussex, he's he's looking to basically take them over. Can we

consider that that Mercia swallow those kingdoms by the end of offers reign? That's certainly what offer wanted to do. I don't think he's necessarily quite accomplished it because you can see that certainly in East Anglia and Kent as soon as offer dies, they try and break away from Mercia in rule. These characters who are probably related to the previous dynasty's turn up and they kick out whoever represented Mercia North or today. In case of Kent, that means the Archbishop

of Canterbury. Because by the time offer dies in 796, they've appointed an Archbishop who was originally from Lincolnshire. He's associated with the Mercia and regime. And so when this new King called Eadbeck, Pran turns up from Main Europe, he clearly isn't on good terms with the Archbishop. So he has to go and hide somewhere else. In East Anglia, there's not as much evidence for how that process works, but there are courtings of a character called Aidwald who was probably a member of the previous

dynasty. So offer certainly wants to try and build these territories into his kingdom. And he's trying to do that with the coins, with royal meetings, with charters, also by patronizing major

“monasteries in these areas. You can see him doing that particularly in Kent and Sussex. But I think”

that the process involved getting the hearts and minds of the people who mattered in these regions on side as well. And that was a harder hill to climb. And I think that offer was only part way to the top when he died. And so trying to keep these places in the Mercia and fold proved to be a tall order. There's one of the things that dominates the activities of Mercia and Kings from offer right through to the eight 20s, the eight states and beyond into the 9th century. They're trying

to keep that larger territory intact. Yeah. Yeah. And how much do we know then about his relations

a set of sites on them? Or are they a bit too big for him to have a go at at this point?

Basically they're a bit too big for him to absorb them and take them over in the same way.

A good illustration of this is when these people legates come in 786. There's a fairly detailed record of where they go, who they meet, what they do. And it says that they first have a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, then they have a meeting with offer and the King of the West Saxons. Offers clearly the one in the driving seats, but the King of the West Saxons is the only other one who gets to see at the table. Then the legates split up, one goes to Northumbria and one goes

to Wales. So Northumbria and Wales are true to the separate territories, but Wessex is also regarded as distinct. It has its own king. It's operating in a separate kind of way. It's certainly overshadowed by Messia. In the first part of Wessex, it's ruled by a character called Kuna Wolf

who at several points fights against offer and they certainly don't always win. The Betwess Saxons

don't always win. After he dies in 786, the kingdom of the Wessex has taken over by a character called Beortrick and he is much more amenable to the messians. He marries one of offer's daughters. He joins forces with offer to expel Edgebert who then becomes King in 802. He's the grandfather of Alfred the Great Eaton. So the first thing we're about to hear is he's booted out by offer and Beortrick and he has to spend time in Francia. Northumbria is also a different proposition.

There's no indication that offer ever wants to take over Northumbria, invade Northumbria. In fact, the maid interaction we know of between offer and Northumbria comes when in 792, one of his daughters marries the King of the Northumbrians. That's a soft demonstration of power. You marry someone who is, especially if you're the one who arranges the marriage, it's generally sign that you're the one who's in a superior position, but it's more of a recognition of respect.

And just building on that idea, so we've got offer in control of a fair chunk of England, but not going near or after kind of Wessex and Northumbria probably are not Wales. But we do have some text that seem to refer to offer as King of the English.

“And I think a gone medieval audience will know that we normally associate that with apple stand.”

How does that title come to be attached to offer? Is that him trying to project himself as something like that or people misunderstanding his power later? I think it doesn't actually get picked up by people in Lace. I've not least until very modern times that there's not really much interest in portraying offers a king of the English until really the 20th century. There was a great score that called Sir Frank Stenton who tried to use a certain group of

charters which refer to offer in this way as grounds for thinking of him as someone who's getting to that position before apple stand does. It was a way of saying that the Mercians actually had their, had their act together and they were doing something really important. And I think he's absolutely right to be asking that sort of question trying to see the Mercians as doing something distinct and something that has got merit on its own terms.

But it doesn't necessarily mean that you've got to see it as king, king ship of the English

“in the same way apple stand understood it. And I think that's not what offer was trying to do.”

There's only a few sources that call him king of the English. Several of these are actually quite problematic. So the charters that Stenton leaned on are probably forgeries from the 10th century. There are some other ones which are less easy to dismiss. There are some coins that seem to call him king of the English. There are also a couple of charters which are more reliable. None of them are actually preserved in their original form but there's no obvious sign that

all them have been tampered with. Plus there's the point that not many pre-viking rulers ever get called king of the English even by people in later times. So the fact that it happens with offer at a number of separate locations means it's a little bit hard to dismiss them completely. What I think you can do is think about what they would have meant by Rex Anglorum which is what this looks like in Latin which is what mostly sources of written in.

Angly is where you get English from in later times but it also just means angles or even potentially

“an angly in kingdom or multiple angly in kingdoms. So it could well be that that's what offers”

reaching for. It's a way of recognizing either that he's a king of English people's beyond the messians or it's a with other way of just saying based in alternative way of saying king of the

messians because of course they are also an angly in people. I think what's really crucial is that

far more often both at the start of his reign and much later in his reign when offers at his at the peak of his power is they much prefer calling him king of the messians and that implies king of the messians and of all the people who are subject to the messians. So it's not necessarily

Nah, I don't have any plans for such an end. Besuch the road kept in a leapness world in

“the river with the oromelists of the area or in the canal of the south of the life of all the years.”

It's our interactive exhibition with the elite tour with audio guide and a classic and the next parvillion, the whole world of road kept in the road kept in the leapness world not in the zikling and found. It is quite interesting that those things can be quite fluid isn't because we would tend to think today of titles being really distinct and weird. We're clear about what they mean but it seems that in this period people are happy to be known as

king of the mercians, king of the angles, king of several angle kingdoms. It doesn't necessarily have to be pinned down to one thing that is really clear about what it means. There's almost it's almost a little bit more fluid than we might think it is today. It definitely is a lot more fluid

“and what makes it even more complicated is that we deal with a lot of different sources that come”

for a lot of different directions. So you've got you've got charters, you might think those are the

closest to the king's own view because these stem ultimately from meetings where offer or whoever will

tell so and so that he's giving them a piece of land and then they get this written up. But you can see that actually the people who get these grants then have to find someone to write it up for them. So it's not as if you're getting it straight from the horse's mouth and you see that offer is referred to in a number of different ways. Other mercenaries are referred to in a number of different ways. There's not a single set title in the same way as we we have nowadays that you see

on on coins or when something like that. In fact on his coins offer is referred to sometimes just as

“offer Rex M offer Rex murky orm king of the messians offer O F R A O F R M offer Rex murky orm offer”

Rex angle orm they they like to mix it up a lot. So yes it is quite fluid and that's that makes it really interesting. It shows how people are thinking about and responding to what their kings are doing but it also makes it really hard to pin down for sure what the king himself and his close circle actually thought of themselves. That gets a bit easier once you're into the time people like Aquastine where you've got a bit more of a party line going on at the center.

Yeah yeah it's really interesting. And we've mentioned a couple of times about offers relationship with with canterbury and that he was in contact with Rome. How much do we know about his relationship with the church does he work well with the church? He works well with some members of the church certainly. He doesn't get on well with the archbishop of canterbury who's in power for most of his reign. This is a band called Yandek. It's a fairly unusual name and he's

he's linked to the kintish royal dynasty. So he's predisposed not to be a fan of offer and there's even a letter which refers quite casually to how offer and Yandek just didn't get along. They were not fans of each other. And this is probably one reason why one of offers great projects along side things like offers Dijk is creating a new archbishopric. Canterbury was an archbishopric York was an archbishopric and in 787 he creates Litchfield as an archbishopric for the kingdom of

the Mercians and it probably had as its jurisdiction basically everything north of the terms except

Essex. So Mercia Middle Angles East Anglia Lincolnshire that whole area is assigned to a new archbishopric for for a period of about 15 years. Exactly why offer does this is not completely clear. It was thought certainly at counterbury in the 9th century that this was a a ploy. This was a maneuver so that he could have his son elevated to the kingship because that's one of the first things we know this new archbishop does. He crowns Edgeworth King in 787. But there is another letter from

well in part of the correspondence with the poops in the 790s which refers to how offer had made a case to Pope Adrian who was the Pope in 787 that everyone in England was on side about creationist New archbishopric and also that it reflected the extent and power of his kingdom. So those are both perfectly plausible reasons and they could be tied up with the elevation of his son's the kingship. It's not necessarily as as cynical as as as sometimes thought and within

Mercia of course this would be regarded as probably a good thing. In Canterbury it was not in

So that's how they understood it. We do know that after offers death the impetus behind having

this new archbishopric gradually falls away. You've got a more friendly archbishop in place in Canterbury. You've got a new king in place who's not from offers immediate family who's got different priorities a different way of doing things and who is in control of Kent pretty quickly as well. And so by a to three they've disestablished the archbishopric of Lichfield and they gone back just to having Canterbury. The Pope is instrumental in doing all of this both creating it and then dismantling

it 15 16 years later. Off seems to have been seen as a pretty tough cookie in Rome. There's a wonderful letter from Pope Adrian in the seven eighties where he is very concerned about having

heard a rumor that offer and Charlemagne are joining forces to depose him to remove him as Pope.

“And he's he's trying to work out what Earth is going on. Is there any truth to this?”

Clearly he imagines that offer is someone who could do that. And we know there were an awful lot of English people in Rome at this point. There were lots of pilgrims, there were lots of travellers going there. So it's by no means impossible. We know that some other Pope did suffer at least attacks on them in that kind of way. So offer is working with the bishops in his own kingdom quite closely. He's working with the Pope quite closely. He's not on as good terms with the

archbishop of Canterbury at least for most of his reign. In 792 they're a point a new guy called Applehaired who's much more friendly towards him. So then the things probably get a little bit more rosy for offer in Canterbury. And you also mentioned Charlemagne there who is obviously a contemporary of offer and one of the really significant European players do out this entire period. Do we have

“a sense of what kind of relationship offer might have had with Charlemagne? Did they were”

were they in contact with each other? They certainly weren't contact with each other. In many ways they are kind of friend of these would be one slightly facetious way of putting it in in modern terms. When they write to each other and there are a couple of letters that survive written from a Charlemagne too offer and they're actually probably ghost written by Alcoan who's working closely with Charlemagne at this point. One of them is just very specific and business like and there are probably a lot of

letters like this. We've only got one of them surviving. The other one is quite long and it begins with a wonderful preamble about how great it is that these kings share brotherly love and how they relate to each other's peers and brothers and all those things. And then it goes into a lot of specific about trade and how to handle exiles who are living in in Charlemagne's kingdom, how to handle travelers going through Charlemagne's kingdom, who are heading from England to Rome. Some of them were

actually merchants, but they're trying to claim exemption from tolls, which is what pilgrims are entitled to. It mentions how they're interested in cloth, they're interested in high prestige, probably black marble, which is moving around out of Charlemagne's territory. That all makes it sound pretty friendly, pretty happy. I mentioned already that there are connections in terms of the coinage. Charlemagne and offer both reform their coinages at possibly the same time. It's so close

that it's really not possible to say for sure who did it first. It's around the year 792 793. There

is a specimen of one of the very nicest, most handsome coins of offer that was found in the gardens of St. Emma Rams Abbey in Regensburg, which is where Charlemagne was based at the time when he conceived his own coin reform. So may well be that they were looking at the coin's offer was issuing at that point thinking about what the other guys were doing. Sometimes things were not so friendly. We know that at some point around about the year 790 there's a failed marriage negotiation

between offer and Charlemagne. It's instigated by Charlemagne's son who slightly unhelpfully is also called Charles. He tries to arrange to marry one of offer's daughters. Now offer is not not very keen on this. In part because in Francia, in Charlemagne's kingdom, normally princes would marry members of the Franckish aristocracy. And so if offer just went along with this, it might be seen

“as putting him in that kind of subordinate position. So what he does is actually quite I think a”

canny solution, which is he makes a counter-proposal, that he will only go along with that marriage proposal. If his son can also marry one of Charlemagne's daughters. And he even says specifically he wants to be a daughter called Bertha who is one of Charlemagne's dearest daughters, but who also shares a name with the Franckish princess who married Ethel Bertha of Kent a couple of hundred years earlier. Charlemagne does not like this idea. Charlemagne flips out. He's he's not only says no

political denastic slight. And Alcoin is probably brought in trying resolve this, although it

doesn't actually work very well. He clearly doesn't succeed in mining this out, but then they bring in another Franckish habit, who's a well-known figure to offer. He's an expert in handling cross-channel diplomatics and trade, and he does manage to square all of this. We don't know what he does. We don't know what nice words he says to offer in Charlemagne, but he does manage to get them to play ball again, and let the ships start sailing across the channel with silver and other goods once more.

It's so easy to imagine them in a little tug of war across the channel about who is senior, who is the best king, who is the most progressive, the most splendid person, and playing that kind of really careful politics game of who is who's overlord, perhaps a little bit too, and but they both seem very aware that they were involved in that game, and neither of them was

“going to be fooled by it. No, I think that's right. There's not really any contest if it came”

down to how big your kingdoms are, how much they've got in terms of resources. Charlemagne is

king by this stage of basically all of Western Europe, France, big chunk of Germany, half of Italy,

huge area of land, whereas offers territory is about half the territory of modern England, you know, in those terms, there's no real comparison, but at the same time, offers got the advance of being across the sea, and he's one of the very few figures with whom Charlemagne does at least in diplomatic context, in these letters, he does refer to offer as a peer, as another king, with whom he interacts as a notional equal, even though as you already alluded to with the silver,

offer is by this stage almost entirely dependent on Frankish sources for the silver that's going into his currency, he's probably dependent on Frankish for lots of other prestige goods that they can't

get in England, and culturally there's a lot more, but though you know, not nothing going on

in office king, and there probably is more than we've got direct evidence for, but there's certainly an awful lot more going on in Charlemagne's territory at the stage, and just to bring off a story kind of to a close, how much do we know, or how much don't we know, about offers death, what happens to him in the end? We know that he dies in July 796, we know that he's buried probably in Bedford, or somewhere near Bedford, that is also claimed as some Albans he was buried there,

but that's seen as less reliable, we don't know why he dies, and because there's no specific information given about that, it most likely means it's from what would have been understood as natural causes, you know, that he's not being stabbed, he's not being killed in battle or something like that, Alkuin does have this reference to the father, or rather the sun being punished for the sins of the father, this is all offers sun then dying quite soon afterwards, but again he doesn't

say exactly why age-frith dies, it's in moral terms he's got a strong idea of why it might be, but he doesn't indicate whether he was stabbed or assassinated or anything like that.

“So I think it's most likely to offer and his son just died of natural causes,”

and then Mercia's left in a precarious state because they've had three kings within one year, and the wheels are coming off the wagon in East Anglia and Kent, and you can see the surviving Elderbundis finding out the crats offers widow coming together to try and keep the show on the road, you know, keep the Mercia and kingdom intact and gradually to restore its dominance in these eastern southern areas. Yeah, and it seems like for Mercia, the 8th century was a story of

two kind of really long standing rulers with a, you know, slight blipping between, but offer has put a lot of work into building this state, into building his dynasty, into positioning his son, you know, having him crowned in his lifetime, positioning him as the next rightful ruler, and then it all falls apart kind of almost immediately. Does offer have a legacy in Mercia in England

“more widely, and how should, how should we think about offer today? I think offer does have a legacy.”

I think he's got a legacy as someone who shows how you put together what had been essentially separate kingdoms that recognize an overlord into one larger kingdom, and you can see that Kernwall for the next Mercia King and then in turn, the West Saxon rulers, including Alfred the Great and his heirs in the 9th century and beyond, they follow a lot of those same tactics, a lot of the same methods which offer had used to tie his kingdom together in terms of the coinage

in terms of how you bring everyone together for a single set of meetings, all of those methods become part and parcel of the way you run a large kingdom in England. As a person, as an individual

a warm-unger, a bloodletter, killer of saints, all of these are bad things, and so he's referred to

in generally those terms as you go through the middle ages and into into modern times. The main exception to that was St. Albans. I would imagine that's one place which claimed his burial. St. Albans was probably refounded by offer in 793. It's got Roman roots. There's probably some kind of monastery there beforehand, but offer puts it on a much sure of footing in his reign, and for that reason, they preserve a very, very positive image of him. This swimming

hard against the channel of anti-offer, against the current of anti-offer feeling. You even got this wonderful set of drawings of offer made by Matthew Paris. This great historian artist of the

13th century, which show offer riding to battle to defeat his enemies, offer patronising this

new church as an Albans, doing all these glorious things that were very much a good thing as

“radial things were understood. In much more recent times, very modern times, offer, I think, has been”

to some extent rehabilitated. That's a kind of symbol for the old provincial order in England. So in the Midlands, particularly the Westland is the area of offers, he's quite widely used for street names, there are statues of him. He's seen as a figurehead for regional identity. There's a great set of poems that feature offer quite prominently by Jeffrey Hill, where offer is a kind of representative of how he understands that regional identity. There's even a band named after offer.

To my knowledge, he's the only Anglo-Saxon king to have a band named after him, a very good folk rock ensemble called offer Rex. So, like I say, I think he's come back onto the Elms, the good books in some ways, but in a very different sort of way, he's seen as a kind of path not taken, a kind of alternative view of English history for those who like it a little bit

“different from Alfred the Great, Athelstar, the sort of corsetation towards England. This is”

a corsetation towards Englishness, if not towards England as a as a single coherent entity under mercenaries. Yeah, I was thinking as you're saying that he seems like someone the Victorians and that kind of 19th century historians might have liked as someone who contributed something towards the formation of England and Englishness and the institutions of government. They tended to like people who they thought had moved that project forwards towards their day of empire and

offers things like someone you can see kind of helping take a step forward and that he's building something that starts to look like Englishness. That's right, and you can see that the beginnings of this this warmer asked you towards offer do start in the later Victorian period. There's a scholar at the 1870s who starts trying to just look on the mercenaries supremacy more positive. In fact, the mercenaries supremacy as a term starts to gain currency in the 19th century and then it's

cemented by this guy in the 1870s by Frank Stanton in the beginning of the 20th century and they take offer in particular to some extent the other mercenaries too but particularly offer as exactly that

“an important stepping stone on the way towards the institutional establishment of the English.”

There's still a very strong sense that the real story lies with Alfred, the great and and his dynasty. I don't think that's ever ever lost sight of but there is a growing awareness that the mercenaries are pointing in the right direction in the eight century. Well thank you so much for joining us for this war. It's been absolutely fascinating and hopefully you know we've got to know offer us a bit more than just a man who built a big pile of earth from all along the Welsh coast and

there's clearly so much more to his reign and the period in which he lived and the relationships

that he's building across Britain but across Europe too. So it's been absolutely incredible to

get to know him a little bit better. Thank you very much, Laurie. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like more on this period of England's history you can find episodes in our archives about the Kingdom of Mercia more broadly on Charlemagne and on Bayer Wolf too. There are new instalments of God Medieval every Tuesday and Friday so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe

or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone Medieval. You can also sign up to history hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go.

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