Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers

inhabitants of the country north of the narrow neck formed by the Forth and Clyde estuaries; the Scots of the south-western Highlands, ruled by a dynasty of Irish origin; and the Britons of Strathclyde in the far south-west, who were related by language and culture to the Welsh. Most of what is now the northern half of Wales was ruled by the kings of Gwynedd, who controlled Anglesey, Snowdonia and the north coast, and Powys, further south and east along the border with what is now Shropshire.
    These two kingdoms were the principal enemies of Mercia in Offa’s day, and may once have controlled territory as far west as the Middle Severn Valley, whose loss to the emerging kingdom of Mercia, probably towards the end of the sixth century, was a continuing source of grievance to them. Possibly the Magonsaetan and the Hwicce had once been vassals of Gwynedd or Powys, and their defection to Mercia had led to the establishment of the historical frontier between England and Wales. Gwent and Dyfed, in South Wales, were more often at war with Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons, who appear to have driven the Welsh out of Somerset and Gloucestershire during the late sixth century. England was divided among the kingdoms of what we know, following Henry of Huntingdon, as the ‘Heptarchy’, consisting of the seven kingdoms of Kent, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, and the East, South and West Saxons. This is in fact a simplified view, as several of these kingdoms – including Mercia – were evidently still in the process of consolidation from the chaos of petty tribes and chiefdoms from which they are believed to have originated. Northumbria in particular was a very recent creation at this time, formed from the older kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira.
    In his chapter relating the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria in 627, Bede refers in passing to the mother of two of Edwin’s sons, a certain ‘Coenburg, daughter of Cearl, King of the Mercians’. He adds that these children were born while Edwin was in exile, presumably in Mercia, during the reign of his predecessor Aethelfrith. The latter was killed by the East Angles in 616 or 617, which should allow us to place the birth of their mother, and hence the reign of Cearl, sometime towards the end of the previous century. Before that we have no near-contemporary written sources for the history of the region which was to become the kingdom of Mercia, and it is not until the career of Penda, first mentioned by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 626, that either the Chronicle or Bede’s History give us anything like a continuous narrative of events there.
    Nevertheless, some writers have attempted to use these few hints to construct a picture of Mercia as far back as the late sixth century. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle identifies Penda’s father as Pybba, son of Cryda, son of Cynewald. It goes on to provide Cynewald with a genealogy going back another eight generations to Woden, but we have no firm information on who most of these ancestors were, whether they were the rulers of kingdoms, or where they were located. Perhaps significantly, Cearl is not among them. Substantial portions of this family tree may of course have been concocted with the deliberate aim of conferring legitimacy, and Penda could have been eligible as a member of the royal family even if he was not directly descended from previous kings. Bede calls him ‘a warrior of the Mercian royal house’, but this vague description does admit the possibility that he was not a legitimate heir, and had seized the throne by force.
    Henry of Huntingdon may have had an independent source, now lost, for his assertion that the Mercian kingdom was founded by Cryda about 585, and that Pybba reigned after him, followed by Cearl. If that is correct, perhaps it was Cearl who was the usurper, and Penda was merely reclaiming a throne that was his by right. In fact the word ‘Cearl’ may be an insult