Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers Page A

rather than a name: it seems clearly linked to the term ‘ceorl’ or ‘churl’, which in Anglo-Saxon law codes had come to denote a man of low birth. One other member of Penda’s family tree, Cynewald’s grandfather Icel, seems to have been a historical figure. In Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac we are told that the saint, who died in 714, was descended from a line of Mercian kings, ‘back to Icel in whom it began in days of old’, and around the time of Guthlac’s death the royal dynasty began to refer to itself as the Iclingas, or people of Icel. Calculating five generations back from Penda might place Icel around the beginning of the sixth century, but although he may have been the leader of the people who later founded the kingdom, he was not a king of Mercia itself. His name is an unusual one, and it has been plausibly suggested that several surviving place names incorporating the element ‘Icel’ – including Ickelford in Hertfordshire and Ickleton in Cambridgeshire – were associated with him or his family (Myres). These are mostly located in Middle and East Anglia, which implies that even if the Mercians themselves were mainly indigenous, their ruling clan had originally come from the south-east. However, other place name evidence hints at a connection with what is now Worcestershire, where places such as Pedmore (‘Pybba’s Moor’) near Stourbridge, and Pendiford (‘Penda’s Ford’) in King’s Norton, if they do not actually commemorate Penda and his forebears, at least show that their names were familiar in the region (N. Brooks, in Bassett).
    Contemporary evidence suggests that even at the end of the first quarter of the seventh century, Mercia hardly existed as a recognisable entity. The Northumbrians and East Anglians seem to have been able to campaign over its territory without any interference from local forces. The first mention of Penda in the Winchester manuscript of the Chronicle, under the year 626, states that he ‘had the kingdom for thirty years’, but does not name the kingdom or the people over whom he ruled. The Peterborough version refers to Penda several times, but the first mention of a title appears in 645, with a reference to ‘King Penda’, again of an unspecified kingdom (though Bede, describing the same events with hindsight some seventy years later, does call him ‘king of the Mercians’). In the Peterborough Chronicle under the year 641 he is ‘Penda the Southumbrian’, obviously so named in opposition to his enemy Oswald of Northumbria. The first clear statement pointing to the identity of Penda’s realm comes after his death in 654, when his son Peada ‘succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians.’
    The Northumbrian Menace
    Whatever his formal title, for nearly thirty years after 626 Penda was the dominant figure in British affairs. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states under this year that he was 50 years old when he came to power, but this must be an error as his sister, who was presumably roughly his contemporary, was not married until the 640s, and Penda’s own sons Peada and Wulfhere are described as young men in the following decade. More likely he was in his twenties in 626, and hence around 50, rather than 80, when he died in battle in 654.
    Penda’s career of conquest had its roots in a dispute between two of Mercia’s more powerful neighbours, Northumbria and East Anglia. At the beginning of the seventh century the Angles north of the Humber were still divided between their two original kingdoms – Deira in the south, with its heartland in what are now the Yorkshire Wolds, and Bernicia further north. Aethelfrith, the king of Bernicia from 593 to 616, was an aggressive warlord who, according to Bede, ‘ravaged the Britons more cruelly than all other English leaders.’ In 603 he defeated the Scottish king Aedan in a famous battle at