The Kingdom of Mercia went rapidly from being the foremost power in 8th-century England to being conquered in less than a decade. What happened? MJ Porter explains a time of unrest, loss, and rival kings.
Son of Mercia, the first book in a new series set in the ninth century, occurs against a backdrop of civil war in Mercia.
One of the better known Saxon kingdoms, Mercia is considered the dominant kingdom during the eighth century. But what happened to make it fall from such a lofty position that, by the beginning of Son of Mercia in AD825, it was very much struggling to survive?
A period of extended stability came to an end 30 years before AD825. King Offa died in July 796. His son, Ecgfrith, survived him for only six months. Who then was to rule in place of Ecgfrith, the man to whom his father had been so desperate to leave the command of the kingdom that rumour has it, he’d done away with any other rival claimants?
The person who emerged to lead Mercia was Coenwulf. He would rule for over 20 years but would also suffer from a son dying before inheriting the kingdom.
It’s said by Alcuin, a man renowned for leaving a vast collection of letters after his death, that there were no people of ‘old stock’ to rule Mercia on King Ecgfrith’s death in a letter dated to AD797. As such, Coenwulf was a ‘new’ king, disrupting the line of succession which had run for nearly a hundred and fifty years since the days of the pagan king, Penda.
His brother Coelwulf succeeded Coenwulf, and for three years, he seems to have been successful. There was a great victory against the Welsh kingdom of Powys, but all the time, stresses were bubbling amongst the ruling elite of Mercia. In AD823, tensions reached a head. Coelwulf found his position usurped by a rival, Beornwulf. Whatever was going on in Mercia, and it is hard to piece it together from the few pieces of information known, it seems as though no one was happy – not the men of the church, not the men of the king’s council, and Mercia had strong enemies as well.
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And so we come to the usurper king, Beornwulf. He went to war against the kingdom of Wessex, losing at the still-unidentified battle of Ellendun in AD825. This battle is presumed to have taken place somewhere in the kingdom of Wessex. The immediate outcome of the fight is hard to categorise. But, at some point, either then or in the years immediately after it, Mercia lost control of the kingdom of Kent, which it had controlled for many decades.
Ecgberht, the King of Wessex, installed his son as king of Kent in the years after the battle – it’s impossible to say precisely when. King Æthelwulf would succeed to the whole of Wessex on his father’s later death.
Perhaps as a response to this failure and loss to the Mercian kingdom, King Beornwulf, eager to save face, went to war against the kingdom of the East Angles, another province that Mercia had previously controlled but which had attempted to break away from the Mercian hegemony.
King Beornwulf died in this battle. It must be assumed he left no heir as Ludeca succeeded him. Little is known of King Ludeca other than that he too died in action against the king of the East Angles.
Beornwulf claimed no descent from the previous kings of Mercia. Neither it seemed did Ludeca. And certainly, the man to succeed Ludeca was even more obscure. King Wiglaf.
So little is known about these years and these men that historians are forced to consider the alliteration in the names of Mercia’s kings. It’s a well-known phenomenon that noble families in Saxon England often named children using similar elements of their names. As such, Mercia has a ‘W’ dynasty and a ‘B’ dynasty. The connections are genuinely that tenuous during this little understood period.
But Wiglaf, ruling from AD827, was to have as little success as his two predecessors. He lost his kingdom. And not just to anyone, but to Ecgberht, the King of Wessex, desperate and finally able to have his vengeance on the Mercian kingdom who’d forced him into exile nearly thirty years earlier.
What was to happen? The once-mighty kingdom of Mercia was weak, ineffectual, surrounded by enemies, and it had no strong ruling dynasty on which to stake its future. Wessex was ascendant, the kingdom of the East Angles adept at killing Mercian kings, and underneath all this, the problem of the Raider (Viking) attacks was beginning to make itself felt.
And so to Son of Mercia, and how to tell the story of this complex and little understood time? With so many possible main characters dying in rapid succession and the need to give a bird’s eye view of what was happening, Son of Mercia focuses on young Icel.
He’s an orphaned youth at the Mercian court of Tamworth, just starting to realise that his world is no longer as stable as he thought. This series will take Icel on a journey of self-discovery through a turbulent time in Mercia’s history, and indeed, in that of Saxon England.
Son of Mercia by MJ Porter is published on 16 February, 2022. It’s the first book in her The Eagle of Mercia Chronicles.
MJ Porter is the author of many historical novels set predominantly in 7th to 11th-century England and Viking Age Denmark. Raised in the shadow of a building that was believed to house the bones of long-dead kings of Mercia meant that the author’s writing destiny was set.
Other Historia features relating to this period include:
In Search of Mercia by Annie Whitehead, author of Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom
A life of war in Anglo-Saxon Britain by Edoardo Albert
Bebbanburg 2020: the lessons I learned from a seventh-century siege by Matthew Harffy
The Battle of Brunanburh by Hilary Green
Anglo-Saxon women with power and influence by Annie Whitehead
Oswald: Exile, King, Saint by Matthew Harffy
Horses in battle at the time of Alfred the Great by Chris Bishop
Twisting the Tale: should historical fiction stick to the facts? by Chris Bishop
The power of alliance in the Viking Age by Matthew Harffy
Review: Warrior by Edoardo Albert with Paul Gething by Matthew Harffy
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War by Edoardo Albert
Images:
- Gold mancus of Coenwulf of Mercia: © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Map showing Mercia at the height of its territorial power, 781–796: Rushton2010 based on Hel-hama via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Penny of Beornwulf of Mercia (FindID 610864): Adrian Marsden for Wikimedia (Attribution-ShareAlike License)
- Entry for 827 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle listing the eight bretwaldas, beginning with Ecgberht: Mike Christie for Wikimedia
- Tamworth Castle, author’s own work, December 2021
