Offa, King of the Mercians

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In the year 794, the bright promise of a royal marriage swiftly turned into a bloody tragedy. Young King Ethelbert II of East Anglia arrived at the court of the great Mercian king Offa. Ethelbert had just one aim: to marry Offa's daughter Elthrith and bind 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 younger. Rivals.

but his fears were exacerbated by his own Queen, who insinuated that Ethelbert 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 whisperings, Other summoned an assassin who led Ethelbert and his companions into an ambush, cutting off their heads and casting their bodies into the marshes on the banks of the river love.

What happened next would seal Ethelbert's place in history and, indirectly, condemn Offer's memory. Because almost immediately miracles began to occur at the site and the murdered young king became venerated as a martyred saint. For Offa, 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. Offa had murdered a saintly king. Yes, Other was remembered as a great conqueror, the builder of the Great Dyke, and the maker of a kingdom, but above all else, the murderer of a young man only seeking an honorable 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 rehabilitate Offa's reputation. In his new book, Offa, 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, Offa is cast as a symbol of an older, divided order. Offer, Rory says, actually cemented Mercia's position as the dominant force in the southern part of Britain, strengthened the internal cohesion of his domains, and laid the basis for a new model of kingship. In fact, Offa was a king who was ambitious.

Carefully constructed his image and that of the royal family, making a lasting impact on how kingship 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. Yeah, as listeners may well know, I'm sitting here in the middle of the Mercian Kingdom. So we're here today to talk about Offa, who is someone who is so closely associated with the Mercian Kingdom. Uh it'd be really great to 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 Other'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 in seven fifty seven to become King of the Mercians, and then he rules for nearly nearly forty years. There is one

one source, one one charter which mentions casually that Offa came from the territory of people called the Huitsha who lived in and around what's now Worcestershire. It's not clear if that 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 for nearly forty years, this is one of the longest reigns of any Anglo-Saxon king.

He was probably relatively young when he came to the throne. He was probably in his twenties or thirties, so he'd be in his sixties or seventies 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 a distant cousin.

of the in fact there's a very short-lived king called Bjornor. We know even less about him. He's there for a few months in 757. But before him you've got a character called Athelbald, who was also around for a long time, for forty-one years, between seven sixteen and seven fifty-seven. offers a a a distant cousin to him, and he's an even more distant cousin to the whole group of kings that had ruled Mercia in the seventh century. So he's coming I wouldn'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 who's got a claim, but he's probably picked out by the ruling establishment as someone who is a fine strapping young athling. He's a guy they can work with. He's someone who is going places. That's probably not necessarily that unusual for Anglo Saxon kingship in that they 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 is offers rise a result of that or is it a an ending of the dynastic line that had had previously held the throne? It's probably something like that. Uh choice rather than election is maybe a better way of putting it,'cause they it

It there's no sign that they sort of line them all up and then say, Okay, we want you. It's more like how you nominate the head of a committee or something like that. You know, you know who the viable people are and then you give someone a tap on the shoulder and they they know that they're 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 to settle into his role as king, he does try very hard to establish his own family as the dynasty 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 it came to king, but usually it was a choice between members of that preferred family.

And so when Otha dies his son follows him as king, but unfortunately for Otha, his poor old son dies after just four months. So that's pretty much the end of his direct line of of kings f 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.

And when Otha becomes King of Mercia, what does what does the Kingdom of 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. Uh the old English is Mayarch, and this is a slightly

on the edge, on the fringe kind of place. You could you could plausibly call the Mercians the frontiersmen, something like that. Uh in Beowulf Grendel the monster is described as a Meatstapa, 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 eighth century, it means the territory of the Midlands, particularly the West Midlands, the core area of Mercia is around places like Tamworth.

Lichfield, Repton, to some extent also the East Midlands, which which traditionally were known as the territory of the Middle Angles, but they were very closely associated with the Mercians from an early stage. By the time Offers become king, Mercia really means a big block of territory between Wales on the west, the Fenlands on the east, Northumbria, as in the Humber, and beyond it to the north, and then the Thames to the Sound.

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 recognized as the territory of the Merci that is ruled by the Mercian kings. Offa adds to that East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Surrey. He takes over a lot of eastern and southern England. Culturally, it's not so very different to many of the other Anglo Saxon kingdoms. People are speaking Old English, they live

uh, mostly in in rural settlements. They're not in big towns. London is a an exception to that, and the Merchant Kings have been very keen to try and get control of London from the the six sixties onwards. So that's well established by a time offer. offer his king. And generally the Mercians are are well positioned as the dominant political figures in the southern part of England by the eighth century. He's the clearly the the top dog.

Yeah. Does he inherit a a reasonably stable government or do we see him making reforms to try and and create a more stable government in Mercia? He inherits big ambitions, he inherits big boots to try and fill his I I won't say too much about Bjornred, this very short-lived character that Offer kicks out in in the course of seven fifty-seven. Um but Athelbald had been another very successful ruler, but in quite a different way. Athelbald

is very much an overlord. He dominates lots of surrounding kingdoms, but in more of a personal way. That's to say, you still have kings of East Anglia, Wessex in the southwest, Kent in the south east and so on. But they recognise Athelbald is the the more kingly king, the more powerful king. They recognize that he is the the one with more land, more resources, and they will not attack him, they will generally obey him. But at the same time they carry on 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 southeastern England together as more of a a coherent single unit.

he has m meetings, royal meetings, which also combine the bishops of his kingdom. That was 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 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 and

position himself, try and situate himself as the 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 Eilderman, more as aristocrats within Offa's regime. see a situation where maybe Athelbald is considering himself or positioning himself as

kind of first among equals, but Offa is sort of taking that and thinking, now I'm gonna turn myself into actual king of all of these people. So that there will no longer be that sense of equality that we're all kings. I'm gonna be the king and you're all gonna be subject to me. Eventually, yes. And you can see that what this involves in a place like, say, Sussex, you know, 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 once, actually, in Sussex, which is a slightly, slightly unusual place in that respect. And there's one of these characters called Osla. Uh who issues a charter in seven eighty, which is important because it's the only one that survives in original form from Sussex. before the age of the Vikings. So this is produced in Sussex at that point in seven eighty. He calls himself Duke

Soothsaxorum, Eeldeman of the South Saxons. So he's not calling himself king anymore. This is after Other has 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 uh fifteen years later, the bishop decides he isn't satisfied with just the local aildermans

document saying he's got this piece of land. Instead he goes on a big trek all the way up into the Midlands to um Earthlingborough near uh near Northampton, which is a a hill fort that Offa used as a uh a royal estate, uh a royal hall. And so he turns up there, he gets an addition made to this document saying, Offer and his son recognize that this grant is acceptable is going to be upheld by the Mercian 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 Alfred's kingdom doing 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 starting to be run, basically.

Yeah, yeah. Um 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 Offa is kind of famous for. If people know Offa's name, it's probably most likely in association with Offa's dike. I wonder if you could tell us what we know about Offers Dyke. Why is it important? 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 Dyke 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 ninth century, the late ninth century, it was associated with Offa. There's a a character called Asser, who was a a Welsh scholar that wrote a biography of Alfred the Great.

and he mentions casually that Offa, the King of the Mercians, had a a great big dike built from sea to sea between the Welsh and the Mercians. And There's no reason to doubt that, that clearly this was thought of as as offers construction already in the eight hundreds. And the phrasing that Asin 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 the barbarians as they saw it to the north. So for Offer to build a dike that did something similar suggests that he's now claiming that in a sa in essence the Welsh have become the barbarians. You know, the Britons are now on the other side, and the English, and particularly 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 it's positioned in the landscape to try and look imposing from the west. They're choosing a course, they're choosing

crests of hills and things like that to induce a sense of awe from those who'd be looking up at it from the west. So that suggests they really are concerned about wanting to make a 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 uh determined individual or army that's trying to come over from the West, but it's certainly going to to slow them down and deter them, and is also going to communicate that this is this is marking the territory of a major player, someone who's got the wherewithal to erect.

a construction like this can also put together a big army and chase you back and come and destroy your farm and your homeland. That's I think what it's trying to show. There are still lots of unanswered questions, but it's definitely one of the major achievements who offers Rain. Yeah, uh that allusion to to Rome and and Hadrian's Wall is interesting as well because that kind of positions the dyke 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 Offa is saying, 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 h whilst he's stopping people from the West coming east, he's also demarking the edge of his his own authority without any real hope, I guess, of moving it any further west. I think that's right. It's not necessarily that he couldn't go further west. I think Offa's 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 recognized 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 certainly is interested in Wales, and there are records from Welsh annals of

raids, military campaigns that the Mercians undertake into Wales and occasionally that the Welsh undertake into Mercia, but it's mostly the Welsh getting the sharp end in this period. You know, Offa is 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 the Second. So I wonder if you could talk us through 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 seven ninety four. This is recorded uh for the first time in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle in the ninth century.

Pretty much everything beyond that is hazy. We don't know why he was killed. We don't know what the background was to his death. We don't know exactly how long he'd been king. We don't know how he related to previous kings. We do have a few coins of him that survive, a grand total of four of them. And uh these show that he had some sort of

He was definitely there in the seven nineties, apart from anything else. Uh, 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 Offa, it may be that he rules with Offa, 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 Anglo 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 Anglo Saxon England. This isn't Henry the Eighth, this isn't later periods when it

much more commonplace to do that. Executing anyone at that level is rare, and to do it 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 Saint's life that was written about Ethelbert about 300 odd years after this, in the in the 12th century. And It's difficult to know how much 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 Offa's daughters.

That in and of itself is not a crazy idea. We know Other's 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 his two favourite poets who will sing ancient songs to him about his family's legends and history. Uh he eventually gets to Hereford, which is where Offa is based at that time, and um At that point his wife, Offa's wife Kunathrith, engineers the uh the deception of Offa. She she um

She's not very happy about Ethelbert coming to try and claim one of the daughters. So she lies to Offa, says that he's coming to try and take over Offa's kingdom. And so that means when Offa has him taken and 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 Offa leads the charge in honoring 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, that Ethelbert wanted to marry one of Alpha's daughters and something went awry. that is that that might have some kind of truth to it.

Yeah. Uh an offer seems to have had a bit of a 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 through a little bit about what sources we have to draw on for for Offer's story and why there might be problems with some of those sources. The major problem is that most of the certain the textual written sources about Offa 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 Alfred the Great, a hundred years after Offa's time, and they draw for the period of Offa's reign on texts from Canterbury, on records from Canterbury.

And that's that's a problem for Offa because Canterbury was not a place where he was particularly popular. They were not fans of Offa. His name was Mud there. So they they don't say that much about him, and what they do say is O 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 warmonger, 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, hugely interesting letters, which are written to people in England, in Northumbria and in Others Kingdom, by a character called Alcuin. And he's a a Northumbrian scholar, cleric, who

spends a lot of his career in mainland 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 Offa on a couple of occasions. He writes to members of Offa's family, people at his court, And these are really valuable for showing you a little bit about what else is going on in Offa's Kingdom, albeit very much

in echo at several removes. And once Offa dies, Alcowin carries on writing for a few years after that point, and there he becomes a bit more critical of Offa. He he challenges him for having spilt a lot of blood in order to raise his son up to the throne. We know that Otha's son had been made king in seven eighty seven and then he inherits the kingdom as soul ruler after his father's death in summer seven ninety six.

So what Alcuin is referring to about this bloodshed is a little bit of a mystery. It could be Ethelbert of East Anglia being killed. It could be something else if he's referring to Edgefrith, his son, becoming king in the seven eighties. Other than the letters of Alcuin and the Anglo Sasson Chronicle, there 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 Humber to issue silver pennies in his own name on a large scale. over a thousand coins of 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 Mercia, 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 wouldn't s quite say portraits, because it's not necessarily what he actually looked like, but they show images of how they imagined Offa. And these illustrate how they considered him comparable to

Constantine the Great and uh the biblical king David, these these great touchstones of how kingship should be practiced in the early Middle Ages. Charlemagne was really keen on David. others were really keen on him and also in Constantine. So Offa and his his agents, they're alive to that. There is a another narrative that can be teased out about Offa's representation, but you're not going to get it from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle.

Yeah, yeah. Uh and it seems like coinage is is an important factor. We can see From that, I guess, offers understanding o 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 dike to Hadrian's wall.

uh or at least, you know, in the minds of others that Hadron's wall was connected to the dike and perhaps the coinage is reflecting that too, because he you know, he's using he's importing a lot of Carolingian silver, which is demonstrating his connections over to the continent.

My understanding is he models some of those coins on Islamic styles too. So he's again e 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 state crack.

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. Uh 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 Offa does 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 Charlemagne and his father Pippin III. And he's also looking to other traditions. You mentioned Islamic.

Islamic precedents and those come out with a completely unique coin, a gold coin. There weren't 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 eighteen forties 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 Offa Rex, the the words of a rex inserted into the Arabic. They're inserted 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 would have be been a bit more hesitant about imitating a coin that said, There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet because it's actually thought that This gold coin of offer may have been made for uh a payment to the papacy, a gift to the papacy. There is a reference in a set of decrees made by papal legates who visited England in seven eighty six.

to a meeting with Offa and then in subsequent years it's claimed that Offa at this point said he would offer to St. Peter every year three hundred and sixty-five gold pieces. And so this may well be one of those gold pieces that's actually made for being 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. Uh some Roman emperors had issued coins in the name of their empresses, 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 other techniques. The census has begun. Check your mail and complete it online today. Census.gc.ca It's easy to fill out. And completely confidential. A message from the Government of Canada.

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Yeah, I and I think the the coins mentioning Cunefrith, his wife, are are really interesting. So I think if I understand it correctly, there's there's four coins 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 you 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 he's putting himself out there, but I wondered if we we could take the opportunity to to understand what we know about Cunith his 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 not as many as there are of Offa, 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 connected in some way with Cunithrith's 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 um we do know that there is one other example like these, which is directly inspired by Cunaathrith. There is one single coin known of Charlemagne's queen, Fastrada, and this was only found within the last five years or so. And we know it's it's modelled on coins of Cunathrith because it's of a it's of a type which only begins a year or two after the coins of Cunithrith must have stopped being made.

And it also imitates the way the inscription is arranged on Coonuswith's coins. So it shows very clearly that Charlemagne and his family are looking at what Offa is up to with his coins And then applying that to what his queen is doing. Again, it's a it's a dialogue. It's not just one side imitating the other. Other than that, Kunathrith is.

a hugely interesting character. Apart from the coins, she comes up a lot in charters. She very often attests immediately after Offa or Offa and his son. They form a a sort of very tight family unit.

You do see some other queens who appear in that way, but not as often as Kunathrith does. She does stop appearing so regularly the end of the reign, and her coinage also stops near the end of the reign. 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 Offa's death in support of her son, and then of the king who comes along after her son, uh Kernwolf.

She's referred to in several of the letters of Alcuin. She's referred to as being the the manager of his household, which is a hugely important position'cause of course that means you control access to the king. She gets it in the neck from some later chroniclers. I mentioned the stuff about Ethelbert of Ethelbert of East Anglia. There's also a a wonderful, impressively wacky text called The Lives of the Two Authors.

that was written at St Albans in the thirteenth century. And this is all about the two kings called Offer. One is uh a very legendary figure who was originally from a part of northern Germany called Angeln, which is 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 Cunithrith is a supposedly an exiled Frankish princess. There's no no great weight to that and she's seen as generally a villain. But everything from Offa's own time is actually a lot more positive. She seems to have been a major part of how he practised his kingship and ran his kingdom.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And I wondered if we could we could zoom our lens out a little tiny bit.'Cause I just wanted to to have a quick conversation about the idea of the heptarchy, because I know that's something you're not necessarily fond of of thinking of Anglo Saxon England as these kind of seven monolithic 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 a heptarchy is It is helpful in some sense. They recognise that it's not just one kingdom, you know. 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 eleven hundred.

people tried to rationalize the fairly complicated picture that they encountered from things like Bede's 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

the ones that there were, hence you come up with a hectarchy. I think it's 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 Bede. There's about

a dozen or more groups who are said at some stage to have a have a king or are referred to as what Bede called a provincia. This is where we get the word province from in modern times, but in Bede's mind 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.

Uh there's a list of some of these relating to the the midland territory of Mercia, which is now referred to as the tribal hydage. That refers to thirty old groups, only one of whom are the Mercians.

and some of whom we know had their own kings from Bede and from other texts. By the time you get into the the eighth century and you got a bit more of a grip on what the political geography looks like, there's really only about in fact fewer than 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 Other's reign into the ninth 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 the ninth century. So the short answer is you probably never have exactly seven But you do have a law. Yeah. Yeah. It's just interesting that you know the the temptation I suppose is just to think the whole Anglo Saxon period was the the gentle consolidation towards seven, which then becomes one. The picture is a little bit more complex than that.

And I wonder if we could then return to trying to think about Offa's 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 Mercius swallows those kingdoms by the end of Offa's reign? That's certainly what Other 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 Other dies, they try and break away from Mercy and Rule. These characters who are probably related to the previous dynasties turn up and they kick out. whoever represented mercy and authority there in case of Kent, that means the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Because by the time Offa dies in seven ninety six, they've appointed an archbishop who was originally from Lincolnshire, he's associated with the Mercian regime, and so when this new king called Iadbek Pran turns up from mainland 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 coins of a character called Eodwald, who was probably a member of the previous dynasty. So Offa 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 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 the offer was only partway to the top when he died. And so trying to keep these places in the Mercy and fold prove to be a tall order. It's one of the things that dominates the activities of Mercy and Kings from offer right through to the the eight twenties, the eight.

and beyond into the ninth century. They're trying to keep that that larger territory intact.

Yeah, yeah. And how much do we know then about his relations with kind of the other two major powers in in England at the time, Wessex and Northumbria? Does he ever set his sights on them or are they a 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 papal legged

come in seven eighty six. There's a fairly detailed record of where they go, who they meet, what they do, and it says that they first have uh a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, then they have a meeting with Otha and the King of the West Saxons.

Offers clearly the one in the driving seat, but the King of the West Saxons is the only other one who gets a seat at the table. Then the legates split up, one goes to Northumbria and one goes to Wales. So Northumbria and Wales are treated as 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 Mercia. In the first part of Walpha's reign, it's ruled by a character called the Kuna Wolf

who at several points fights against offer, and they certainly don't always win, the bet West Saxons don't always win. After he dies in seven eighty six, the Kingdom of the West Saxes is taken over by a character called Beotrick, and he is much more amenable to the Mercians. He marries one of Offa's daughters, he joins forces with Offa to expel

Edgebert, who then becomes king in eight oh two. He's the grandfather of Alfred the Great, and so the first thing we know about him is he's booted out by Other and Beotric, and he has to spend time in in Francia. Northumbria is also a a different proposition. There's no indication that Offa ever wants to take over Northumbria, invade Northumbria.

Uh in fact the main interaction we know of between Offa and Northumbria comes when in seven ninety two one of his daughters marries the king of the Northumbrians. And so that's uh that's a very kind of soft demonstration of power. You know, you marry someone who is Especially if you're the one who arranges the marriage, it's generally a sign that you're the one who's in a a superior position, but it's more of a recognition of respect.

And just building on that that idea, so we we've got offer in control of a fair chunk of England, but not going near or after kind of Wessex and Northumbria probably and not Wales. But we do have some text that seem to refer to Other as King of the English. And I think a God medieval audience will know that we we normally associate that with Athelstadt. How does that mean? 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 later times, at least until very modern times, that there's not really much interest in portraying Otha as a king of the

English until really the twentieth century. There was a great scholar 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 whose getting to that position before Athelstan does. It's a way of saying that 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

uh 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 kingship of the English in the same way Athelstan understood it. And I think that's not what Offa 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 tenth 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 of 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 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 in Latin, which is what most of these sources are written in. Angli is where you get English from in later times, but it also just means Angles, or even potentially an Anglian kingdom.

or multiple Anglian kingdoms. So it could well be that that's what Offa is reaching for. It's a way of recognizing either that he's a king of English peoples beyond the Mercians, Or it's sort of another way of just saying it's basically an alternative way of saying King of the Mercians, because of course they are also an Anglian 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 Offa's at his at the peak of his power, is they much prefer calling him King of the Mercians. And that implies King of the Mercians and of all the people who are subject to the Mercians. So it's not necessarily any less. It's just a different way of imagining what his position looks like, what his power looks like.

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It is quite interesting that those things can be quite fluid, isn't it?'Cause we would tend to think today of titles being really distinct and we're we're clear about what they mean. But it seems that in in this period, people are happy to be known as King of the Mercians, King of the Angles, King of several Angle Kingdoms. You know, it it doesn't necessarily have to be pinned down to one thing that 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. 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 from 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 could get this written up. But you can see that actually the people who get these grants then have to go and 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 Offa is referred to a number of different ways, other Mercian kings 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 in something like that. Uh in fact on his coins, Otha is is referred to sometimes just as Offa Rex M, Offa Rex Merciorum, King of the Mercians. uh offer o f R A, O-F-R-M, Offer Rex Mercurium, Offer Rex Anglorum. 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 of people like Athelstein where you've got a bit more of a party line going on at the centre.

Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. Uh we've mentioned a couple of times about Offa's 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. Uh, he doesn't get on well with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's in power for most of his reign. This is a a man called Yan Bacht, it's a fairly unusual name, and he's he's linked to the Kentish royal dynasty, so he's predisposed not to be a fan of Offa.

And there's even a a letter which refers quite casually to how Offa and Jan Beth just didn't get along. They were not fans of each other. And this is probably one reason why one of Offa's great projects alongside things like Offa's Dyke is creating a new archbishopric. Canterbury was an archbishopric, York was an archbishopric, and in seven hundred eighty seven he creates Lichfield as an archbishopric for the kingdom of the Mercians, and it

probably had as its jurisdiction basically everything north of the Thames except Essex. So Mercia. Middle Angles, East Anglia, Lincolnshire, that whole area is assigned to a new archbishopric for a period of about 15 years. Exactly why Offa does this is not completely clear. It was thought, certainly at Canterbury in the ninth century, that this was a a ploy, this was a manoeuvre so that he could have his son elevated to the kingship.

yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r in seven eighty seven. But there is a another letter from well, in in part of the correspondence with the popes in in the seven nineties, which refers to how Offa had made the case to Pope Hadrian, who was the Pope in seven eighty seven, that everyone in England was onside about creating this 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 sons to the kingship. It's not necessarily as as cynical as is as is sometimes thought. And within mercy, of course, this would be regarded as probably a good thing. In Canterbury it was not. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, they framed this explicitly as Canterbury losing part of its province. So that's how they understood it.

We do know that that after Other's 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 off his 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 eight hundred three they've disestablished the Archbishopric of Lichfield and they've gone back just to having Canterbury. The Pope is instrumental in doing all of this, both creating it and then dismantling it fifteen, sixteen years later. Offer seems to have been seen as a pretty tough cookie in Rome. There's a wonderful letter from Pope Hadrian in the seven eighties, where he is very concerned about having heard a rumour that Offa and Charlemagne

are joining forces to depose him, to remove him as Pope. And he's he's trying to work out what on earth is going on. Is there any truth to this? Clearly he imagines that Offa 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 popes 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 seven ninety two they appoint a new guy called Athelheard, who's much more friendly towards him. So then things probably get a little bit more rosy for Offa in Canterbury.

And y you also mentioned Charlemagne there, who is obviously a a contemporary of Offa and one of the the really significant European players throughout this entire period. Do we have a sense of what kind of relationship Offa might have had with Charlemagne? Did they were they in contact with each other? They certainly were in contact with each other. In in many ways they are kind of

phrenemies would be one slightly facetious way of putting it in in in modern terms. When they write to each other, and there are a couple of letters that that survive, written from Off from Charlemagne to Offer and they're actually probably ghostwritten by Alcuin, who's working closely with Charlemagne at this point. One of them is just very specific and business like.

Uh 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. Uh and then it goes into a lot of specifics about trade, uh, and how to handle

exiles who are living in in Charlemagne's kingdom, how to handle travellers going through Charlemagne's kingdom, who are heading 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 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 Offa both reform their coinages at Possibly exactly the same time. It's so close that it's it's really not possible to say for sure who did it first. It's around the year seven ninety-two, seven ninety-three. There is a a specimen of one of the very nicest, most handsome coins of offer.

that was found in the gardens of Saint Emram's Abbey in Regensburg, which is where Charlemagne was based. at the time when he conceives his own coin reform. So it may well be that they were looking at the coins Offer was issuing at that point, thinking about what what the other guys were doing.

Sometimes things were not so friendly. We notice at some point around about the year seven hundred ninety, there's a failed marriage negotiation between Offa and Charlemagne. It's instigated by Charlemagne's son, who slightly unhelpfully, is also called Charles. He tries to arrange to marry one of Offa's daughters. Now Offa is not not very keen on this, in part because in in Francia, in Charlemagne's kingdom, normally princes would marry members of the Frankish aristocracy.

And so if Offa 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 it to be a daughter called Bertha, who is one of Charlemagne's dearest daughters, but who also shares a name with the Frankish princess who married Ethelbert of Kent a couple of hundred years earlier. Charlemagne does not like this idea. Charlemagne flips out he said he not only says no in emphatic terms, but he also calls a halt to all trade going from Francia to England over this this political dynastic slight.

And Alcuin is probably brought in to try and resolve this, although it doesn't actually work very well. He clearly doesn't succeed in ironing this out. But then they bring in another Frankish abbot. Who's a well-known figure to offer? He's uh 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 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 it's so easy to imagine them kinda, you know, uh in a little

tug of war across the channel about who is 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 of who is who's overlord, perhaps a little bit too. And But they both seemed very aware that they were involved in that game and neither of them was gonna 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 many how much they've got in terms of resources. Charlemagne is is king by this stage of basically all of Western Europe, France, big chunk of Germany, half of Italy, huge area of land. Whereas Offa's territory is about

half the territory of modern England, you know, in in those terms there's no real comparison. But at the same time, Offa's got the advantage of being across the sea, and he's one of the very few figures with wh whom Charlemagne does, at least in diplomatic context, in these letters, he does refer to Other as a peer, as another king with whom he interacts as a 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 Francia for lots of other prestige goods that they can't get in England. And

culturally there's there's a lot more I mean there's not nothing going on in Office Kingdom. 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 this stage.

And just to bring Offa's story kind of to a close, how how much do we know or how much don't we know about Offa's death? What happens to him in the end? We know that he dies in july seven ninety six. We know that he's buried probably in Bedford or somewhere near Bedford. There it's also claimed at St Albans he was buried there, but there's the that's 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. Al Qin does have this reference to the father oh or rather the son being punished for the sins of the father.

This is O Otha's son then dying quite soon afterwards. But again he doesn't say exactly why Edgefrith dies. It's i 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 that Other and his son just died of of natural causes.

and then Mercia is 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 Elderman describing aristocrats, offers widow coming together to try and keep the show on the road, you know, keep the Mercian kingdom intact and gradually to restore its dominance in these eastern and southern areas.

Yeah. And it seems like for Mercia, the eighth century was the story of two kind of really long standing rulers with a you know slight blip in between. Um But Other 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 the next rightful ruler. And then it all falls apart kind of almost immediately.

Does Offa have a legacy in Mercia, in England more widely? And how should how should we think about Offa today? I think Offa 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 Kernwolf, the next Mercian King, and then in turn the West Saxon rulers, uh 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 Other 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 ruler, I think Offa doesn't fare so well. I think that he's seen basically as a villain, a warmonger, 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 already mentioned that's one place which claimed his burial, Uh St Albans was probably f refounded by Offa in seven ninety three. It's got it's got Roman roots, there's probably some kind of monastery there beforehand, but Offa puts it on a much

sure a footing in his reign, and for that reason they preserve a very, very positive image of him. They're swimming hard against the channel of anti offer, against the current of anti offer,

Feeling. You've even got this wonderful set of drawings of Offa made by Matthew Parris, this great historian artist of the the 13th century, which show Offa riding to battle to defeat his enemies, Offer patronizing this new church of St. Albans, doing all these glorious things that that um were very much a good thing as medieval things were understood.

In much more recent times, very modern times, Offa I think has been to some extent rehabilitated as a kind of symbol for the old provincial order in England. So in the Midlands, particularly the West Midlands, the area of Offers Dyke, he's quite widely used for street names. There are statues of him. He's seen as a a figurehead for regional identity. Uh there's a great set of of poems that feature Offa quite prominently by Jeffrey Hill, where Offa is a kind of

representative of how he understands that regional identity. There's even a a band named after Offa. To my knowledge, he's the only Anglo Saxon king to have a a band named after him, a a a very good folk rock ensemble called Offerex. So like I say, I think he's come back onto the on onto 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, Athelstan, the sort of course that takes you towards England. This is a course that takes you towards Englishness, if not towards England as a as a single coherent entity under Mercian rule.

Yeah, I was I was thinking as you were saying that, he seems like someone the the Victorians and that kind of nineteenth century historians might have liked as someone who contributed something towards the formation of England and Englishness and the the institutions of government. They tended to like people who they thought had moved that project.

forwards towards their day of of empire and offer things like someone you can see kind of helping take a step forward on that. He's he's building something that starts to look like Englishness. That's right, and you can see that the beginnings of this this warmer attitude towards offer do start in the the later Victorian period. There's a uh a a scholar in the eighteen seventies who starts trying to just look on the Mercian supremacy more positively. In fact, the Mercian supremacy as a term

starts to gain currency in the nineteenth century. And then it's cemented by this guy in the eighteen seventies, by Frank Stenton in the beginning of the twentieth century. And they take Offa in particular to some extent the other Mercy Kings too, but particularly Offa 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 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 a growing awareness that that the Mercians are pointing in the right direction in the eighth century. Well thank you so much for for joining us for this roar. It's been absolutely fascinating and and hopefully, you know, we've got to know offerers a bit more than just a man who built a big pile of earth from uh all the way along the Welsh coast and there's clearly so much more to his reign.

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, Rory. Thank you for having me. 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. Yeah.

on Charlemagne and on Beowulf too. There are new instalments of Gone 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.

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