The Kingdom of Mercia

Once the powerhouse of the Anglo-Saxon world, the kingdom of Mercia dominated not just Wessex but nearly all its neighbouring realms. At its height, Mercia held sway over regions that include modern Birmingham and even London. Though the kingdom eventually faded with the rise of Alfred the Great, its story—and its influence—were far from over. In this episode, Matt Lewis sits down with historian Annie Whitehead to uncover the enduring legacy of the Mercians. From the fierce warrior-king Penda, to the empire-building Offa, to the legendary Lady Godiva, the people of Mercia helped shape the foundations of the English nation in ways both dramatic and surprising. MORE Rise of Wessex Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/rise-of-wessex/id1564113746?i=1000652251685 Listen on Spotify https://shows.acast.com/gone-medieval/episodes/rise-of-wessex Why The Early Middle Ages Matter Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/why-the-early-middle-ages-matter/id1564113746?i=1000685286123 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5p8dCfFlVpRPr9brE59tIP Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis, edited by Ella Blaxill and Amy Haddow and produced by Rob Weinberg. The Senior Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 0:42Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 1:19Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 1:56Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Christmas break means that all those outside the Gone Medieval Dungeon are off partying. So we've got a handpicked repeat from our huge back catalogue for you. This is a great episode that I did with the wonderful Annie Whitehead about the rise of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom at the heart of England. Definitely no bias in this episode from this Mercian, I promise. This episode is part of a series we did about the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, so you can find Northumbria and Wessex in there too. So sit back and enjoy the story of the rise of Mercia.

• 2:40Matt Lewis?

  The year is 641 AD. After years of tension and hostility between the great kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria, the reign of Oswald is over. The legendary ruler of Northumbria has been slain.

• 2:59Matt Lewis?

  In Bede's account of Oswald's death, the Northumbrian warlord is killed by Pender, the last pagan king of the Mercians in a great battle at a place called Mazefield. Bede writes that Pender removes Oswald's head and hands to display them on stakes, perhaps as an offering to his pagan god of war. It's a momentous defeat. Pender returns to Mercia victorious.

• 3:34Matt Lewis?

  For some, the death of a mighty ruler like Oswald isn't a cause for celebration, but for the Mercians, it was no small feat. One that could only be achieved by a kingdom of strong, ambitious rulers with a multinational significance.

• 3:52Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. In our cycle through the most significant kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon period, we've arrived at frankly, the best one. And I say that as someone who grew up within its bounds. So obviously, it's beyond debate here. Last episode, we traced the rise and fall of the Northumbrian Kingdom, its religious clout and its recurring conflicts. This episode, we're looking at its almost perpetual enemy, the Kingdom of Mercia. We discovered how before a unified England existed, the British Isles were divided up into petty kingdoms, each vying for power with varying degrees of success.

• 4:36Matt Lewis?

  Mercia was one such kingdom, and it had more success than most, to put it lightly. Occupying the English heartlands, the mighty Midlands, Mercia's reach was vast. At its most powerful, its territory included London and almost all the land south of the River Humber. Mercia dominated Anglo-Saxon politics for three centuries.

• 5:04Matt Lewis?

  It was the last Anglo-Saxon kingdom to adopt Christianity. It remained for a long time, a realm of sub-kingdoms, a federation of tribes acting together under one ruler. Some of the best-known figures in medieval history ruled during this period, the most legendary being Pender and Offa. And Lady Gudiver should surely get an honourable mention here too. As we've already heard, Pender was the last pagan ruler of Mercia, whilst Offa was the most powerful ruler in the kingdom's history and one of the greatest of all the Anglo-Saxon monarchs. That's right, he's the Offa, as in Offa's Dyke.

• 5:47Matt Lewis?

  Mercia and Northumbria were staunch enemies and during Mercian supremacy, fierce battles were fought between the two kingdoms with Mercia coming out on top by the 8th century. But much like the Northumbrians, it too fell foul of infighting and instability just a century later. This ultimately led to its steep decline, which saw in turn the rise of Wessex. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. More on that kingdom in the next episode. Tragically and mystifyingly, a lot of Mercia's history has been lost. Perhaps it was burnt in Viking raids on monasteries, churches and libraries,

• 6:29Matt Lewis?

  where it was strategically misplaced. And here, I'm looking at you, Alfred. So, if we're going to try and unearth the story of Mercia, who better to invite back to the podcast than Annie Whitehead, whose book, Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom, is the perfect companion to this discussion. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Annie.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you for having me.

• 6:51Matt Lewis?

  It's wonderful to have you back. To start us off with, can you just talk a little bit about what area of England Mercia covers? So whereabouts are we?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Right, so it's essentially what we would think of now as the Midlands, but it's a bit more than that because it's not just what you think of as the South West Midlands. It incorporated the East Midlands and at its height, at its most powerful, it's sort of ranged from everywhere south of the Humber, really, right down and sometimes including London, Kent, Sussex. So it's difficult to explain because the borders were so fluid throughout the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period. But essentially, if you think the Midlands and then some, you've kind of got it.

• 7:37Matt Lewis?

  And how did or why did Mercia emerge from the local petty kingdoms? So I think like a lot of other Anglo-Saxon realms, it begins off as a fractured group of tribal groups that eventually morph into this one single kingdom that covers such a huge area.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  We don't really know the process, and it's true of all the major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. We don't quite know how they managed to establish themselves. So obviously absorbing the British kingdoms that were there beforehand, whether it was through violence or whether it was a question of, you know, protection sometimes from the other English, as it came to be, kingdoms. So we do know of one in six two eight, there's reference to Pender fighting the West Saxons. And afterwards came to terms, this is how it's put. And the idea is that the area there at Cyren says to where they were fighting, part of the Old Kingdom of the Huche. And at that point, that area came under Mercian control.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  For the time being, they kept their kings. Later on, they lost them. Some old historians thought that Pender actually created this kingdom. Now the thinking is it probably existed beforehand. So whether he was protecting it from the West Saxons or taking it from West Saxon control, we're not entirely sure. But we can kind of assume that this is what was going on with the other tribal areas, that they were gradually peacefully or otherwise being absorbed. And perhaps what they needed or required was better served by coming under one umbrella than another. So there may have been an element of protection going on. But the process is not really understood or known, unfortunately.

• 9:23Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think we tend to think that it's always violent conquests, but it could just be more of an alignment of ideas, or that they're stronger together than they were apart, or that they feel they need the protection of a particularly effective warlord during that period. It's not necessarily that everybody's going in, burning everything and claiming control.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we do have instances of particularly the Mercians, and it makes sense because they're so close to the Welsh, actually allying themselves with the Welsh against other English kingdoms. So very much a question of, you know, shared interests and possibly a little bit of, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing. And the Mercians in particular, as I say, based where they are, ideally placed to take advantage of those sort of cross-border alliances. It's a difficult one because we have so little in the way of written sources, particularly for Mercia, where we essentially have none. So, yeah, we're not really sure, unfortunately.

• 10:19Matt Lewis?

  How then does Mercia, as it grows, begin to gain an upper hand amongst the Heptarchy? So we kind of see this swinging around of power. We've had Northumberland rise to the fore. How and when do we see Mercia begin to pick up the mantle of being the most important member of the Anglo-Saxon group of kingdoms?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  So it's really the eighth century where it comes unto its own and is at its largest. But I think Pender, I mean, he's the famous pagan seventh-century warlord, kind of started that process. The Mercians really stayed a federation, and Professor Simon Keans has pointed this out, that even in the later period, their eldermen were still really being drawn from the leaders of tribes, rather than being appointed centuries. So I think it always maintained that sort of bit of difference, although we have this document called the Tribal Hydage. Nobody knows who drew it up, what it was for, and when it was drawn up.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  But if it was a Mercian document, it lays out all the different tribes. And you can see how Mercia was really made up of different areas. So we've got the Huiche, as I've mentioned, which was obviously at one point a kingdom on its own, the Magansati, the people called the Reikin dwellers. So it's always been a little bit of a federation. But Pender seems to have been the one who turned it into one unit. And I'm probably going to be quite controversial here. I don't see him as an aggressor.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  I see him as defending Mercia and territory from the Northumbrians, who in the 7th century were all powerful, they had the supremacy. Yes, he killed two of their kings. Yes, he definitely meant to, but it was, I think, more a question of to try and stop Northumbrian expansion. He wasn't going looking for a fight necessarily. So I think he was the first one. And obviously, we hear about him because we've got Bede, who's chronicling the history of Northumbria. And obviously, he's going to pay attention when somebody comes in and kills two of the kings, two of whom he really admired. So yeah, Pendle, I think, started

• 12:36Speaker 02

  the process, definitely, and made sure that perhaps his borders were defined. And for whatever reason, as I say, we don't know how he absorbed these other tribal kingdoms under the Mercian umbrella, but he seemed to stop there. He kept Northumbria at bay, rather than trying to take it over, which was probably sensible, because Northumbria was vast and huge and powerful.

• 13:01Matt Lewis?

  I'm pretty sure us folk in the Midlands are still a pretty conciliar, you know, non-aggressive, defensive bunch. It sounds exactly like Friday Night in Wolverhampton. But do you think Mercia's location, kind of being central, played a part in that rise? Or was it luck? Or was it the actions of particular rulers?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  I think it's probably a combination of all those things. It's interesting that, I mean, I mentioned Bede. Northumbria had its supremacy in the 7th century, and then obviously Wessex in the later portion of the period. And at those times, they had their writers who were championing them. So Bede, obviously, very pro Northumbrian, very pro Christian. And then later on, you've got Alfred the Great's biographer, Assa, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. So obviously, they're going to play up the part that their own kingdoms played in historical events. We have absolutely nothing for Mercia. So everything we've got is from someone else's perspective.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  But in spite of that bias, it still managed to be successful. There is an element of luck, luck by which I mean force of personality, force of military leader. The luck that the Ebb and Flow, so towards the end of the seventh century, the Northumbrian dynasty that had ruled successfully for most of the seventh century died out. And then they were subject to an awful lot of infighting and loads of different claimants coming forward and either being successful or being murdered or a little bit of both. That wasn't happening in Mercia during the eighth century. So after Pender's dynasty died out, Mercia didn't fail.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Because of the strength of the almost unrelated kings who came next, they were strong. Mercia ruled for the whole of the eighth century by just two kings for a whole century. So there was stability, just pure luck of the draw, I think, in that respect. You know, a dynasty fails in Northumbria and it all topples. A dynasty fails in Mercia and it becomes even stronger than it was before. So, yeah, very much the luck of the draw, I think. And location, I don't know whether that played a huge part, except to say that it's a lot easier to get to other kingdoms from Mercia perhaps. I mean, I would say the same in this day, as you know, if you're in the Midlands, if you're in Birmingham, it's easy to get pretty much anywhere else in the country.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  So that might have played a part as well, yeah.

• 15:33Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and I guess if you're a strong Mercia, that's fine. But if you're not a strong Mercia, that brings its own problems and it's easy for everyone else to get at you as well. You're sort of in between everybody else, you've got lots of borders with lots of other people.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely true, mm.

• 15:47Matt Lewis?

  And we've mentioned Pender a couple of times and he's obviously one of the most famous rulers of Mercia. He was a pagan, sort of quite famously, and I guess that's why we get this bad impression of him from Bede, because Bede is championing Christian Northumberland against pagan Mercia. How unusual was it for Pender to still follow pagan religion at this point in English history?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  I think it's not that unusual, because this is the period where the kings are gradually converting, and it's a process that only really started in the 7th century. So, Pender's first nemesis, Edwin of Northumbria, took quite a while to convert to Christianity. And I think there was a little bit of personal agro between the two, because prior to marrying a Christian princess of Kent and converting, Edwin had been married to a kinswoman of Pender's, possibly his cousin, and put her aside. Pender had form in that regard, because one of the West Saxon kings repudiated Pender's sister, we're told, and Pender chased him

• 16:55Speaker 02

  literally across the country, and this guy ended up in exile in East Anglia for three years. So, there was obviously a little bit of personal aggression between Pender and Edwin. So, I'd say Edwin took his while to think about converting. I think a lot of times it was maybe political considerations, and perhaps Pender didn't need that. We do know that the king of the South Saxons was still pagan in the lifetime of Pender's son, because Pender's son, Wolfhera, stood sponsor at his baptism. And Bede mentions a couple of other kings up and down the country who converted to Christianity and then apostatized. So, I think things were a little bit fluid throughout the early to middle portion of

• 17:37Speaker 02

  the 7th century. So, Pender was perhaps not that unusual, but he seems to be one of the last ones who hung on and decided not to convert. But, very significantly, Bede, who got no reason to say anything good about Pender at all, does, and does say that he was religiously tolerant, and he did allow preachers to come into Mercia, missionaries to convert, whoever. So, he was obviously so- It's not for me, but I'm not going to stop anybody else. Because he's quite famous and because Bede was quite interested in him, we hear about his paganism. But I don't think he was the last man standing in that regard.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:54Matt Lewis?

  And when does Mercia officially convert to Christianity? And how significant a change was that for Mercia?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  We have to assume it was with his son, Wolfe Herer. So Pender ultimately wasn't successful. He was killed in battle by a Northumbrian king. And for three years, Mercia was controlled by Northumbria. And then Pender's son Wolfe Herer came out of hiding, we don't know where, and managed to overthrow the Northumbrians. We know he was Christian, and all of Pender's children were Christian.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And it's notable that the majority of his children and grandchildren were actually remembered as saints. So Anglo-Saxon saints, slightly different. You don't have to do a lot in Anglo-Saxon England to be remembered as a saint. It's not like nowadays. Most of his granddaughters became abbesses, founding monasteries and abbeys. All of his sons were Christian and one of them actually retired to become a monk and again was remembered as a saint. So essentially, I think that the official paganism died out with Pender. And then religiously, in that regard, Mercia was no different from any of the other English kingdoms from that point onwards.

• 21:11Matt Lewis?

  And I guess that would allow someone like Bede to become favourable of Mercia then, because suddenly it's a Christian kingdom that is doing the right religion in Bede's view.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yes, and also, again, going back to the troubles that beset Northumbria. Christianity wasn't working out too well because the Christian kings were behaving in a very un-Christian-like manner in Northumbria in the eighth century. And Bede and other Northumbrian scholars were absolutely horrified about that. So perhaps by contrast, Mercia was behaving itself once Pender had gone.

• 21:41Matt Lewis?

  And one of the other prominent names amongst the rulers of Mercia is Ophir. So when does Ophir rule and sort of what does he contribute to Mercia's development?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Ophir came to prominence midway through the eighth century, so seven five seven, and his predecessor, Afabold. He was killed by his own bodyguard, so we're told. And we don't know whether Ophir had anything to do with that. And killed by your own bodyguard, you might imagine that this is some kind of, essentially, a palace coup. But it doesn't look like Ophir was amongst those men because he'd made no appearance at court beforehand. He's not present for any witnessing of any charters. It's quite possible that he was in exile, which happened a lot in all the kingdoms. You find these strong, powerful kings emerging from exile because they've been a threat to the incumbent.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  So we're not quite sure where Ophir came from or what had been done beforehand. He inherited a very strong kingdom by this point and was able to sort of reinforce what had gone on before. He was very keen to try and establish his own dynasty. Because he wasn't especially related to any of the previous kings. Looks like he was descended from a brother of Penders. And he was very keen to ensure that his line continued to the point where he had his son anointed in his own lifetime. Didn't do him any good. That son only reigned for five months. I have in my new book, which is coming out next year, made reference to the fact that I'm

• 23:20Speaker 02

  pretty sure that this was not a natural death. And it's very significant that when this son of Ophir's died after reigning for only five months, a Northumbrian scholar said that he died for the sins of his father. And there's lots of mention about a lot of bloodshed going on in Ophir's reign. So we can sort of hazard a guess as to how non peaceful it was. But again, we don't know. And I said in my book, History of Mercia, that Ophir is a man that's very difficult to get to know, because we just don't have any sources relating to Mercia

• 23:59Speaker 02

  at this time that come from Mercia. But we know he wasn't just a bloodthirsty warlord because he had trading deals with the Emperor Charlemagne. He tried to get the influence of the Church of Canterbury away from Mercia. He actually set up his own Archbishop brick in Lichfield, which didn't last long. And that may be because he needed a different Archbishop to anoint his son because the Archbishop of Canterbury wouldn't do it. His wife was a very, very strong character, and she actually had coins minted in her own name. She's the only queen that we know of that had this. And I was listening to

• 24:39Speaker 02

  a lecture by historian Vanessa King recently, and she suggested that these coins were perhaps indicative of this woman's agency, that she might actually have been ruling Kent for Ophir because he had control of vast swathes of the south of England. So he had trading agreements. He reformed a coinage. He was trying to get his son anointed and establish a dynasty. So it's not all brutal warfare. There was a lot of that as well. I'd say ultimately it didn't do him any good, but it did establish him as probably one of the best known Anglo-Saxon characters, I would think. And yet ironically, we know that he actually promulgated his own laws, and as far as we know, he was the only Mercian

• 25:22Speaker 02

  to do so, but they didn't survive. We only know about them because Alfred the Great said he incorporated them into his own laws. And again, I detect a little bit of West Saxon bias because Alfred used other rulers' laws and they were preserved and offers weren't kept. Who knows what was lost to the Vikings as well. A lot of documents were burned and Mercia obviously suffered very badly during the Viking incursions. So that might be a reason that we've lost a lot of documents as well. But Offa certainly considered himself to be a major player on the international stage and considered himself to be on an equal footing with Charlemagne. And I'm not entirely sure that Charlemagne felt the same way about him.

• 26:07Matt Lewis?

  I was going to say, actually, it's really interesting when you talk about those trade agreements, particularly on the international stage and dealing with Charlemagne. It's one of the elements of Anglo-Saxon England that I think we often overlook. We tend to think of all of these kingdoms fighting with each other for supremacy within England, and we don't allow for the international aspect to them. They were just kingdoms in their own right, in the same way that England would become. And they had relations with overseas powers. You know, Northumbria had really strong trading links with the continent throughout its supremacy. And there's no reason that Mercia shouldn't have done the same. I think it's an aspect of Anglo-Saxon England that we often forget about.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And particularly, I mean, just straying a little bit, Kent had such strong links with Francia particularly. I think possibly for Mercia it was harder just because of the geography. Obviously, Mercia doesn't have a coastline to this day. You know, the Midlands doesn't have a coastline, so that makes it slightly more difficult. But at this time, London was part of Mercia. You've got the Thames. Again, we have Charlemagne's letters to Offa. We don't have Offa's letters to Charlemagne. They obviously existed at some point. But there is talk of trade and even the Items that were traded and at one point they did have a big spat and there was a sort of trade embargo because Offra had upset Charlemagne and.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  But this is real diplomatic political stuff going on and it just shows, you know. Offa's predecessor, Athabold, was actually able to free the Bishop of London from the tolls on ships. So you can see that there's trading going on and there's trading agreements and there's tolls and taxes being taken or exempted. There's commerce going on as well as fighting.

• 27:50Matt Lewis?

  We probably can't talk about Offa without mentioning Offa's dike. It's obviously something, you know, it's not a million miles away from me. Quite often it just looks like a bit of a pile of earth. I've grown up without a clue what Offa's dike was and what it was for. Am I alone in not knowing what Offa's dike is?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  You're certainly not alone because I don't know either. So I mentioned Assa, the biographer of Alfred the Great. And he had a lot to say about the Mercians, actually. He had a lot to say about Offa's daughter. Who married a West Saxon king and accidentally poisoned him and. Assa said this is the reason why West Saxon queens were no longer called queen. I think the guy she was married to was actually a Mercian, a puppet of Offa's. But Assa also talked about Offa and how he built or ordered this dike to be built. And because we know that Mercia was rich.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  And they weren't just fighting all the time. It's perfectly feasible and believable that Offa had the resources, the equipment, the labour. Assa said that this dike went from coast to coast, but I know that archaeologists disagree with that assessment. And if it didn't go coast to coast, then it wasn't much good if it was a defensive thing, if it was a border demarcation. We know that Offa fought the Welsh, but we also know that the relations between Wales and Mercia were again very fluid, fluctuated, depended entirely on the leaders. So sometimes

• 29:25Speaker 02

  they got on really well and sometimes they didn't. So the idea that you sort of build a defensive dyke, and again, why defensive? I don't think Offa had anything to fear. It doesn't make a lot of sense. It may have been a demarcation, but there were gaps in it for trading. Honestly, we don't know. And the archaeologists don't know, more importantly. So whether the question will ever even be answered, I don't know. But it's the thing is probably what Offa is most famous for. And yet again, like with so much of Mercia and with so much of even the really pivotal reins, so many questions that we just can't answer.

• 30:03Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's frustrating that we have this thing called Offa's dyke and we don't know what it is, what it's for, what it's meant to do, why it's there. It's frustrating. When Mercy was at its height, what would you say it was known for? I guess it's difficult because as we've said, we don't know too much about Mercia, but was it known for war, for art, for culture, for literature, for religion?

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Probably not so much for religion any more than any of the other kingdoms. And again, and I'm sorry to keep going back to it, this is partly because of the sources that we have and their origins. But there are some little bits and pieces that give us clues as to what was really going on. Because there are poems that have survived that were written by a man named Cunowulf, and his name suggests that he was a nobleman. He wrote quite long poems and he wrote in an Anglian dialect that is probably associated with Mercia, possibly Northumbria, but most people think he was a Mercian. And these

• 31:07Speaker 02

  are quite long poems, mostly of a religious nature. We also know that Alfred the Great was famous for two things, essentially beating back the Vikings. Apparently, single-handed, with no Mercian help whatsoever. And being very conscious of a lack of education amongst his people and of wanting to do something about that. But what I enjoy immensely is the fact that he had to get Mercians in to help him with that. And a later chronicler, who a lot of time we have to take what this later chronicler, William of Mainsbury, says with a pinch of salt, but he said, I'll just quote, "Since there was no good scholar in his kingdom, Alfred sent for Werth, who was the Bishop of Worcester."

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And he wasn't the only one, because Plegmond, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he wasn't the first Mercian Archbishop of Canterbury, was also invited to Alfred's court. The preface to the translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care acknowledges the help of four men, including this Plegmond Archbishop of Canterbury. So the standards of literacy that were improving in Wessex, that was boosted by people from Mercia. And so Professor Simon Keynes actually calls it an intellectual achievement in Mercia, even though anything that was written is now lost. But we know it was going on because of what we hear from the West Saxon sources. So that's interesting.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  So again, levels of literacy in Mercia must have been high at that time. If you're calling on people from the Mercian court, stands to reason that that's because, as William of Mainsbury said, there weren't those people available in Wessex, and so they had to ask for mercy and help.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over a hundred dollars off your first year at camtasia pro dot com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:30Matt Lewis?

  When and why did Mercia then begin to decline?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Bit of a perfect storm. So Athelbold and Offa reigned for almost entire 8th century. So Athelbold succeeded in 716, Offa died in 796. So for virtually the whole of that century, you've only got two kings. Between the death of Offa and the last Mercian king in 878, just got some statistics here for you. There were more than a dozen reigns, and one of those reigns lasted for 25 years. So you can see there were an awful lot of kings. And as I said in my book, some of those kings had their reigns interrupted. Few of them succeeded or preceded members of their own branch of the family.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  The king who ruled for 25 years was succeeded by his brother, who only lasted for two years. He was then replaced by another king, who was killed in battle a few years later, succeeded by another, who was killed in battle. He was succeeded by a king who reigned twice, had his reign interrupted by the King of Wessex, who was, and you'll talk about this in another episode, he was the founder of Alfred's dynasty. Essentially, three branches of the Mercian royal family at this point, and they're all fighting, and their names either began with B or C or W, and they're all so familiar, I'm not going to mention- Only of them by name, but these branches were all fighting for control.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  So it's a real echo of what had happened in Northumbria the previous century, where you've got loads of contenders for the throne. Claiming maybe even just an ounce of royal blood and lots of murders ensuing, famously in Mercia's case, a couple of child or young adult murders. One particular child, Saint Wistun, who was actually, because of these complicated family relationships, had two royal grandfathers. Both of his grandfathers had been king. He apparently objected to somebody from another branch of the royal family wanting to marry his widowed mother. And he ended up murdered because of it. So it's shades of Northumbria just happening a century later. And I think the problem is it's just circumstances.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  You know, you can run out of members of particularly strong dynasty and somebody else equally strong will come in or not. And as we move into the ninth century, it was very much a question of or not. And Mercia unraveled because of these dynastic struggles and tussles. We also have two other elements to this rapid decline. One was this founder of the Alfredian dynasty, King Edgburt. Now, he'd been driven into exile by Offa and actually harbored at the court of Charlemagne, which is one of the reasons that Offa and Charlemagne didn't always see eye to eye. Edgburt was King Alfred's grandfather and nobody knew at the time, but he was about to establish this really strong dynasty,

• 37:30Speaker 02

  which then gave rise to West Saxon supremacy. The third crucial factor is that the Vikings came and they hit Mercia hard. So a perfect storm and you can just see how things roll on in history. It's your right place, right time, wrong place, wrong time. And all these events just conspired to weaken Mercia.

• 37:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and I think we often give all of the credit for resisting the Vikings to Wessex without allowing that there was plenty of mercy and resistance going on in there as well, wasn't there?

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely, yes. It's interesting because we've got, as I mentioned earlier, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is very much, at this stage, a history of Wessex and the West Saxons. And it's talking about every time the Mercians were calling on help from the West Saxons. This is not the true picture. The Mercians were fighting back. At times, they were lending aid to the West Saxons. I think it's just, it's not so much that history belongs to the victor. I think it's more a question of history belongs to whoever writes it. And Alfred the Great, and then after that, his son, Edward the Elder, they were dictating what was being recorded.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  And so we end up with this version of events that very much favours the West Saxons and makes them look like they were in total control. But I think the truth is that they couldn't have done it without the Mercians, any more than the Mercians could have survived on their own. And there was a joint partnership, and we know this, because when we don't have, as it were, paper evidence, we have other stuff, we have archaeological evidence, and we have coinage evidence. And we know that one of the last kings of Mercia, Chell Wolf II, who was dismissed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a foolish king's thane, and apparently he gave away vast swathes of Mercia to the Vikings, and he was a turncoat and a disgusting individual.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  But actually, he seems to have been working, he was a legitimate king, by the way, he wasn't a foolish king's thane, a legitimate king, working side by side with the West Saxons. And we have coins known as the Two Emperors, which show him and Alfred. And they're very famous because there's recently been a legal battle where some detectorists found some of these two emperor coins and didn't declare them. So we know from this numismatic evidence that the Mercians and the West Saxons were fighting together. As they were during Lady of the Mercians tenure, whether she was actually physically fighting or not,

• 40:10Speaker 02

  she was working side by side with first her husband and her father, and then later on her brother, to push back the Vikings. And you and I chatted in an earlier podcast about the strategic planning that went into that campaign. All airbrushed out of the main part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But as I say, when you're writing a chronicle for your king, you paint him in a good light, which is what the West Saxon scribes did.

• 40:35Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, big shout out to our Ethel Fled Lady of the Mercians episode that we did before as well. It's wonderful, extra colour to what we're talking about here and a fascinating character in her own right, too. So essentially, I'm taking away from this that the people of the Midlands are concilia, very modest, very peaceable, very learned. We don't write chronicles about ourselves, but we're actually the cleverest people in the kingdom. Does the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia have a legacy beyond the fact that all Midlands people are still like that?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  We perhaps might gloss over the incident in Offusrein where he was beheaded the East Anglian king.

• 41:12Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we'll forget that.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  We'll forget that, we'll forget that. Yeah, I think they literally ran out of kings and then the West Saxons took over, but their history didn't stop. And there were some really influential characters that contributed to pre-conquest history, even so, because even when Mercia stopped being a kingdom, it still maintained its status as one of the four big earldoms, as they were eventually known. And we've got a lot of very feisty characters, a lot of them female. And Offa, probably one of the most well-known Anglo-Saxon names, even for people who perhaps don't know so much about this period of history, but also Lady Godiva famously.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  And so much more than just a naked horse ride, which I don't believe actually happened. And she was a member of a hugely powerful and hugely influential family, one member of which was Elphiva of Northampton, who was king of New

• 42:14Speaker 02

  First life and ruled Norway on his behalf, a woman you wouldn't like to cross, I would say. Lady Godiva, hugely influential, basically founded Coventry, she was the one who wanted to build the abbey there. In that same branch of that family, we've also got Lady Wolvern, after whom the city of Wolverhampton is named. And in that same family, again, we have Yalgth or Edith, as her name would probably be pronounced now. Who was a queen twice over, uniquely, she was a queen of Wales. Now, normally leaders of Wales weren't known as kings, more often princes, but her husband was known as King of Wales, King Griffith.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  And after he died, she came back to Mercia for a wee while and was then married to a certain chap called Harold Godwinson. And so she became Queen of England and but for a quirk of fate, all our royalty would have been descended from the Mercians, so. Hugely influential people, even after it stopped being a kingdom, but I think even into modern times, I mean, we know that Birmingham is the second city. We've got the industrial heartland of England is in the Midlands, the jewellery quarter of Birmingham, the silversmithing tradition. The potteries of what's known as the Black Country now, the canal networks.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  And if we remember that at its apogee, London was part of Mercia as well. You've got all of this trading, the industrial heritage is all part of the Midlands as we know it today. So it's kind of lived on, even the name hasn't completely disappeared because it's still there in the police force. I think a couple of other institutions as well. So I think its legacy is ongoing because right from early on and right through the Industrial Revolution. And further on than that, it's been the powerhouse, the industrial heart of the country. And also they don't exist now, but for a long time, the saltworks, most of those were in.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Mercia and places like Nantwich, a lot of the places that ended inwich, which is generally market, but in Mercian cases, these were saltworks and hugely important. And charters relating to the establishment of saltworks date from Arthur Bolles' reign. So we know how important they were. So it's always been this sort of hub of industry and very important and important politically as well.

• 44:49Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. I've grown up with the name Mercia around me. As you say, it's on police cars in the Midlands with the West Mercia Police Force and things like that. So it is a name that still exists today and it's fascinating to link it back to 1500 years or more of history. And I grew up in Wolverhampton, so I grew up looking at that statue of Lady Walfruna outside St Peter's Church, the woman after whom the city I grew up in is named. It's incredible to have all of that wealth of history in an area that I think often isn't connected with those things. It's very much remembered for the industrial revolution these days, I think, but its medieval history is probably even more fascinating.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. And as I say, I think a lot of the names that you instantly associate with Anglo-Saxons history, even if you don't know much about it, obviously people will know Alfred the Great. But as I say, Pender, Offa, Affaflad, Lady Godiva, and one guy, he was apparently at one point voted the most evil man in English history, Eadric Strione, was a Mercian and the names of prominent people that he murdered or connived to murder is just incredible. But again, a really, really important name and lots of people have heard of him. So characters, and I think that's what first drew me to Mercia, even when I was studying the period back at uni. It's always the Mercians seemed to be the most colourful, charismatic characters.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  There's something very attractive about its history. It's just a shame that we don't have more of their side of the story.

• 46:18Matt Lewis?

  We're even the best at being the worst, what can I say, you know, we're just so good at everything. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Annie. It's been absolutely fascinating to talk a bit more about Mercia. I apologise for championing the Kingdom of Mercia as well.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Oh, never apologise for that.

• 46:32Matt Lewis?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode or revisiting Mercia if you've heard it before. You can find the links to the other episodes in the series, including the Rise of Northumbria and the Rise of Wessex in the show notes below. 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. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Happy New Year to you all. I hope 2026 will bring you health and happiness.

• 47:17Matt Lewis?

  Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 47:44Speaker 01

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