transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] From long-lost viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Janega, and some of the world's leading historians, as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. 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 the latest ground breaking 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. In the year 794, the bright promise of a royal marriage swiftly turned into a bloody tragedy. Young King Æthelbert II of East Anglia arrived at the court of the great Mercian King Offa. Æthelbert had just one aim, to marry Offa's daughter, Elthrith, and bind their two kingdoms together. The undisputed master of central Britain, Offa ruled the Mercian heartland of the West Midlands and was troubled by this unexpected visitor. Perhaps he was just wary of an ambitious young rival, but his fears were exacerbated by his own queen, who insinuated that Æthelbert had not come as a suitor seeking marriage, but rather that he'd come to depose Offa and seize his crown. The story goes that, swayed by his wife's whisperings, Offa summoned an assassin who led Æthelbert 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 Offa'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, Offa was remembered as a great conqueror, the builder of the great dike and the maker of a kingdom, but above all else, the murderer of a young man only seeking an honourable marriage. Whenever chroniclers and historians picked up their pens and 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. Offa, Rory says, actually cemented Mercian'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 and successful, and who carefully constructed his image and that of the royal family, making a lasting impact on how kingship was practised and conceived across England. Rory, welcome to Gone Medieval. It's great to have you with us.

Speaker 2:
[04:31] Thank you very much for asking me. I'm glad to be here.

Speaker 1:
[04:32] 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. It'd be really great 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 Offa's early life. Do we know about his origins, his family? How does he rise to power in Mercia?

Speaker 2:
[04:52] Not a lot is the short answer. He kind of springs out of nowhere in 757 to become king of the Mercians. And then he rules for nearly 40 years. There is one source, one charter, which mentions casually that Offa came from the territory of people called the Huitche, who lived in and around what's now Worcestershire. It's not clear if that's 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 40 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 20s or 30s, so he'd be in his 60s or 70s 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 Mercia and Royal dynasty, he's 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 Athelbold, who was also around for a long time, for 41 years, between 716 and 757, offers 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 7th 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 got a claim, but he's probably picked out by the ruling establishment as someone who is a fine, strapping young Atheling, he's a guy they can work with, he's someone who is going places.

Speaker 1:
[06:39] And that's probably not necessarily that unusual Anglo-Saxon kingship in that they tended to have this sort of elected element where you would have a pool of candidates from which you pick the most likely or the preferred one. Do we think maybe is Offa's rise a result of that or is it an ending of the dynastic line that had previously held the throne?

Speaker 2:
[06:57] It's probably something like that. Choice rather than election is maybe a better way of putting it because there's no sign that they sort of line them all up and say, okay, we want you. It's more like how you nominate the head of a committee or something like that. You know who the viable people are and then you give someone a tap on the shoulder and they know that 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 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'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 Offa dies, his son follows him as king. But unfortunately for Offa, his poor old son dies after just four months. So that's pretty much the end of his direct line of kings 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 blood on the throne.

Speaker 1:
[08:10] Yeah. And when Offa becomes king of Mercia, what does the kingdom of Mercia look like geographically, but also politically and culturally?

Speaker 2:
[08:19] Well, the name of Mercia comes from a term that means border, frontier, like the word march, like marcher lords, things like that. The old language is mearche. And this is a slightly on the edge, on the fringe kind of place. You could plausibly call the Mercians the frontiersmen, something like that. In Beowulf, Grendel, the monster is described as a meachstapa, someone who walks on the border, someone who walks on the marches. And historically, that meant it was probably the frontier with the Britons. By the 8th 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 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 Offa has 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 South. Not all of that area had historically been thought of as the Mercians, the territory of the Mercian people, but it's come to be recognized as the territory of the Mercy 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 mostly in rural settlements. They're not in big towns. London is an exception to that, and the Mercian kings have been very keen to try and get control of London from the 660s onwards. So that's well established by the time Offa is king. And generally, the Mercians are well positioned as the dominant political figures in the Southern part of England by the 8th century. He's clearly the top dog.

Speaker 1:
[10:23] Yeah, yeah. And does he inherit a reasonably stable government or do we see him making reforms to try and create a more stable government in Mercia?

Speaker 2:
[10:33] He inherits big ambitions. He inherits big boots to try and fill his... I won't say too much about Bjornred, this very short-lived character that Offa kicks out in the course of 757. But Athelbold had been another very successful ruler, but in quite a different way. Athelbold is very much an overlord. He dominates lots of surrounding kingdoms, but in more of a personal way. That's just to say, you still have kings of East Anglia, Wessex in the Southwest, Kent in the Southeast and so on. But they recognize Athelbold is the more kingly king, the more powerful king. They recognize that he is 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 Offa 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 coherent single unit. He has meetings, royal meetings, which also combine the bishops of his kingdom. 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 monetary system, a coinage system, which embraces that whole territory as well, and which excludes coins from foreign kingdoms. He's doing quite a lot to try and position himself, try and situate himself as the single king within this whole territory. And that includes systematically demoting local kings or encouraging them to think of themselves more as aildom and more as aristocrats within Offa's regime.

Speaker 1:
[12:25] Can we see a situation where maybe Athelbold is considering himself positioning himself as kind of first among equals, but Offa is sort of taking that and thinking, now I'm going to turn myself into actual king of all of these people. So there will no longer be that sense of equality that we're all kings. I'm going to be the king and you're all going to be subject to me.

Speaker 2:
[12:44] 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 unusual place in that respect. And there's one of these characters called Oslack, who issues a charter in 780, 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 780. He calls himself Dux Suet Saxorum, elder man of the South Saxons. So he's not calling himself king anymore. This is after Offa 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 15 years later, the bishop decides he isn't satisfied with just the local elder man's document saying he's got this piece of land. Instead, he goes on a big trek all the way up into the Midlands to Earthlingborough near Northampton, which is a hill fort that Offa used as a royal estate, royal hall. And so he turns up there, he gets an addition made to this document saying Offa and his son recognize that this grant is acceptable, is going to be upheld by the Mercy and 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 Offa'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 the way Offa's kingdom is starting to be run basically.

Speaker 1:
[14:35] Yeah. And before we come back to some of 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 dyke. I wonder if you could tell us what we know about Offa's dyke. Why is it important? Do we have any sense of why it was built and what it was for?

Speaker 2:
[14:55] There have been an awful lot of ideas about what Offa's 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 ploughing it away, walking along it with a bit too much enthusiasm, for all kinds of reasons. There are many parts of it which are difficult to trace. We do know that already by the ninth century, the late ninth century, it was associated with Offa. There's a cant called Asa, who was a Welsh scholar that wrote a biography of Alfred the Great, and he mentions casually that Offa, the king of the Mercians, had a great big dike built from C to C between the Welsh and the Mercians. And there's no reason to doubt that, that clearly this was thought of as Offa's construction already in the 800s. And the phrasing that Asa 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 Amsonite Wall, which were built by the Romans to protect the Roman province and the Britons from the barbarians as they saw it to the north. So for Offa, to build a dike that did something similar suggests that he's now claiming that in a sense, 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 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 recognized recently from careful surveys of the dyke, that 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 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 a determined individual or army that's trying to come over from the west, but it's certainly going to slow them down and deter them and is also going to communicate that 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 of Offa's reign.

Speaker 1:
[17:51] Neil Milliken Yeah, that allusion to Rome and Hadrian's wall is interesting as well because that kind of positions the Dijk as something really symbolic in terms of creating a boundary, a border between, you know, the Romans did it 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 whilst he's stopping people from the west coming east, he's also demarking the edge of his own authority without any real hope, I guess, of moving any further west.

Speaker 2:
[18:31] I think that's right. It's not necessary 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 recognizes 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. Offa is the aggressor in most of these cases.

Speaker 1:
[19:19] If people know anything else about Offa, it might well be related to the murder of Ethelbert II. So I wonder if you could talk us through a little bit about who Ethelbert is, how he comes into contact with Offa, and why Offa is often thought of as having had him killed.

Speaker 2:
[19:33] Ethelbert was king of the East Angles, and we know that he dies in the year 794. This is recorded for the first time in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the 9th 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 these show that he had some sort of, he was definitely there in the 790s apart from anything else. 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 understand what's going on with those. There are a couple of interesting details in the very, very brief record of this in 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 VIII. This isn't later periods when it's 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 Offa 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 12th century. And it's difficult to know 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. No, Offa'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 favorite poets who will sing ancient songs to him about his family's legends and history. He eventually gets to Hereford, which is where Offa is based at that time. And at that point, his wife, Offa's wife, Cunethrith, engineers the deception of Offa. 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 honouring him. So there's a lot of reasons to doubt aspects of that story, but it's always possible that the core of it, that Ethelbert wanted to have one of Offa's daughters and something went awry, that might have some kind of truth to it.

Speaker 1:
[22:43] Yeah. An Offa seems to have had a bit of an image problem that he maybe didn't have in his own day, but later writers weren't particularly kind to Offa, 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 Offa's story and why there might be problems with some of those sources.

Speaker 2:
[23:03] The major problem is that most of the, certainly 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. 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 don't say that much about him. What they do say is 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 Offa 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 Offa's kingdom by a character called Alcuin. And he's 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, Alcuin carries on writing for a few years after that point. And there he becomes a bit more critical of Offa. He challenges him for having spilt a lot of blood in order to raise his son up to the throne. We know that Offa's son had been made king in 787, and then he inherits the kingdom as sole ruler after his father's death in summer 796. 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 Edgeworth, his son, becoming king in the 780s. Other than the letters of Alcuin and the Ancients and Chronicle, there really aren't that many written sources. But you can go some way towards rethinking, even rehabilitating Offa if you turn to material sources, so particularly his coinage. And this is very, very rich indeed. He's the first king south of the Humber to issue silver pennies in his own name on a large scale. There are over a thousand coins of Offa that survived. 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 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 the Biblical King David. 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 agents, they're alive to that. There is another narrative that can be teased out about Offa's representation, but you're not going to get it from Angus Axon Chronicle.

Speaker 1:
[27:07] Yeah, yeah. And it seems like coinage is an important factor. We can see from that, I guess, Offa's understanding 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. We've seen his possible connection of the dike to Hadrian's Wall, or at least in the minds of others, that Hadrian's Wall was connected to the dike. And perhaps the coinage is reflecting that too, because he's importing a lot of Carolingian silver, which is demonstrating his connections over to the continent. My understanding is he modeled some of those coins on Islamic styles too. So he's again, expressing 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 using coinage as part of his statecraft?

Speaker 2:
[27:58] I think definitely you can. It's a two-way street. It's also how other people are responding to Offa, 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 major narrative sources. 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 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 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 1840s, 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 words Offa 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 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 Offa may have been made for 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 786 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 365 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. Some Roman emperors had issued coins in the name of their empresses, but it shows how Offa is taking on board all kinds of different ideas and practices and making them his own through the coinage and through other techniques.

Speaker 1:
[31:16] Yeah, and I think the coins mentioning Cunifreth, his wife, are really interesting. So I think if I understand it correctly, there's four coins of her, 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 we don't have examples of that from anywhere else in Western Europe at the time, which kind of suggests that Offa is doing something unique, something different, that he's putting himself out there. But I wonder if we could take the opportunity to understand what we know about Coonithrith, his wife. What kind of player is she? She's obviously significant enough that he'll put her on coins.

Speaker 2:
[31:55] Definitely, and her coins are hugely interesting. There's a few more of them that have turned up in recent years. 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 Offa's ones, and that might suggest they're connected in some way with Coonithrith's own expenditure money, her own movements, her own activities. They're made by at least two moneyers, one in Mercia, one in Kent. We do know that there is one other example like these, which is directly inspired by Coonithrith. There is one single coin known of Charlemagne's queen, Faestrada, and this was only found within the last five years or so. We know it's modeled on coins of Coonithrith because it's Offa type, which only begins a year or two after the coins of Coonithrith must have stopped being made, and it also imitates the way the inscription is arranged on Coonithrith'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 dialogue. It's not just one side imitating the other. Other than that, Coonithrith 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 sort of very tight family unit. You do see some other queens who appear in that way, but not as often as Coonithrith does. She does stop appearing so regularly near 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, Coonwolf. She's referred to in several of the letters of Alcuin. She's referred to as being the manager of Offa's household, which is a hugely important position because of course that means you control access to the king. She gets it in the neck from some later chronicles. I mentioned the stuff about Ethelbert of East Anglia. There's also a wonderful, impressively wacky text called The Lives of the Two Offas that was written at St. Albans in the 13th century. This is all about the two kings called Offa. One is a very legendary figure who was originally from a part of Northern Germany called Angeln, which is one of the places that's thought to feed into the name of the Angles. Then the second Offa is Our Offa. This text draws parallels between these two figures. It makes up an awful lot of swashbuckling detail. One of these swashbuckling details is about how Junior Thrith is supposedly an exiled Frankish princess. There's 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 practiced his kingship and ran his kingdom.

Speaker 1:
[34:48] Yeah, interesting. I wondered if we could zoom our lens out a little tiny bit, because I just wanted to have a quick conversation about the idea of the Heptarchy, because I know that's something you're not necessarily fond of thinking of Anglo-Saxon England as these kind of seven monolithic kingdoms. I wonder if you could talk us through how you think we should think about the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms during this period.

Speaker 2:
[35:09] I'll do my best. It's probably worth just saying, first of all, that the idea of the Heptarchy is... It is helpful in some sense. They recognize that it's not just one kingdom. 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 1100. 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 ones that there were, hence you come up with a Heptarchy. I think 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 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. There's a list of some of these relating to the Midland territory of Mercia, which is now referred to as the tribal hideage. That refers to 30-odd 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 8th 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 Offa's reign into the 9th 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 9th century. So the short answer is you probably never have exactly seven, but you do have a lot.

Speaker 1:
[37:21] Yeah, it's just interesting that the temptation, I suppose, is just to think the whole Anglo-Saxon period was the gentle consolidation towards seven, which then becomes one. And the picture is a little bit more complex than that. I wonder if we could then return to think about Offa's relationships with his immediate neighbours. So we've seen that Kent, East Anglia and Sussex, he's looking to basically take them over. Can we consider that Mercia swallows those kingdoms by the end of Offa's reign?

Speaker 2:
[37:49] That's certainly what Offa 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 Offa dies, they try and break away from Mercia rule. These characters who are probably related to the previous dynasties turn up and they kick out whoever represented Mercia authority. In case of Kent, that means the Archbishop of Canterbury because by the time Offa dies in 796, they've appointed an Archbishop who is originally from Lincolnshire. He's associated with the Mercian regime. And so when this new king called Iadbech 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 Eadwold who was probably a member of the previous dynasty. So Offa suddenly 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 hearts and minds of the people who mattered in these regions on the side as well, and that was a harder hill to climb. I think that Offa was only partway to the top when he died, and so trying to keep these places in the Mercy and Fold proved to be a tall order. It's one of the things that dominates the activities of Mercy and Kings from Offa right through to the 820s, the 8th state and beyond into the 9th century. They're trying to keep that larger territory intact.

Speaker 1:
[39:29] Yeah. And how much do we know then about his relations with the other two major powers in England at the time, Wessex and Northumbria? Does he ever set his sights on them, or are they a bit too big for him to have a go at at this point?

Speaker 2:
[39:44] 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 legates come in 786, there's a fairly detailed record of where they go, who they meet, what they do. And it says that they first have a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, then they have a meeting with Offa and the King of the West Saxons. Offa's 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 Offa's reign, it's ruled by a character called the Cunawulf, who at several points fights against Offa, and they certainly don't always win. The West Saxons don't always win. After he dies in 786, the kingdom of the West Saxons is taken over by a character called Beortric, 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 802. He's the grandfather of Alfred the Great, and so the first thing we know about him is he's booted out by Offa and Beortric, and he has to spend time in Frankia. Northumbria is also a different proposition. There's no indication that Offa ever wants to take over Northumbria, invade Northumbria. In fact, the main interaction we know of between Offa and Northumbria comes when in 792, one of his daughters marries the king of the Northumbrians. And so that's a very kind of soft demonstration of power. 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 superior position, but it's more of a recognition of respect.

Speaker 1:
[41:38] And just building on that idea, we've got Offa in control of a fair chunk of England, but not going near or after kind of Wessex and Northumbria probably are not Wales. But we do have some texts that seem to refer to Offa as king of the English. And I think a Gone Medieval audience will know that we normally associate that with Athelstan. How does that title come to be attached to Offa? Is that him trying to project himself as something like that, or people misunderstanding his power later?

Speaker 2:
[42:07] I think it doesn't actually get picked up by people in late times, at least until very modern times, that there's not really much interest in portraying Offa as a king of the English until really the 20th century. There was a great scholar called Sir Frank Stanton who tried to use a certain group of charters which refer to Offa in this way as grounds for thinking of him as someone who's getting to that position before Athelstan does. It's a way of saying that the Mercians actually 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 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 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 10th 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 later times. So the fact that it happens with Offa 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 Latin, which is what mostly 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 another way of just saying, 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 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.

Speaker 1:
[45:07] It is quite interesting that those things can be quite fluid, isn't it? Because we would tend to think today of titles being really distinct, and we're clear about what they mean. But it seems that 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 doesn't necessarily have to be pinned down to one thing 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.

Speaker 2:
[45:33] It 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 charters, you might think those are the closest to the king's own view because these stem ultimately from meetings where Offa 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 have nowadays that you see on coins or in something like that. In fact, on his coins, Offa is referred to sometimes just as Offa Rex M, Offa Rex Merciorum, King of the Mercians, Offa O F R A, O F R M, Offa Rex Merciorum, Offa Rex Anglorum. They like to mix it up a lot. So, yes, it is quite fluid. And 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 people like Athelstan, where you've got a bit more of a party line going on at the centre.

Speaker 1:
[46:57] Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. We've mentioned a couple of times about Offa's relationship 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?

Speaker 2:
[47:12] He works well with some members of the church, certainly. He doesn't get on well with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's in power for most of his reign. This is a man called Jan Bercht. It's a fairly unusual name, and he's linked to the Kentish royal dynasty. So he's predisposed not to be a fan of Offa. And there's even a letter which refers quite casually to how Offa and Jan Bercht 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 Dike is creating a new Archbishopric. Canterbury was an Archbishopric, York was an Archbishopric, and in 787, he creates Litchfield 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 9th century that this was a ploy, this was a maneuver so that he could have his son elevated to the kingship. Because that's one of the first things we know this new Archbishop does. He crowned Edgefrieth King in 787. But there is another letter from well, in part of the correspondence with the Popes in the 790s, which refers to how Offa had made the case to Pope Hadrian, who was the Pope in 787, that everyone in England was on side 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 son to the kingship. It's not necessarily as cynical as is sometimes thought. And within Mercia, of course, this would be regarded as probably a good thing. In Canterbury, it was not. In the Angus Saxon Chronicle, they framed this explicitly as Canterbury losing part of its province. So that's how they understood it. We do know that after Offa'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 Offa's 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 803, they've disestablished the archbishopric of Litchfield, 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 15, 16 years later. Offa seems to have been seen as a pretty tough cookie in Rome. There's a wonderful letter from Pope Hadrian in the 780s, where he is very concerned about having heard a rumor that Offa and Charlemagne are joining forces to depose him, to remove him as Pope, and 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 travelers 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 Offa 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 792, they appoint a new guy called Applehaired, who's much more friendly towards him. So then things probably get a little bit more rosy for Offa and Canterbury.

Speaker 1:
[51:00] You also mentioned Charlemagne there, who is obviously a contemporary of Offa and one of 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? Were they in contact with each other?

Speaker 2:
[51:16] They certainly were in contact with each other. In many ways, they are kind of frenemies, would be one slightly facetious way of putting it in modern terms. When they write to each other, and there are a couple of letters that survive, written from Charlemagne to Offa, and they're actually probably ghost written by Alcuin, who's working closely with Charlemagne at this point. One of them is just very specific and business-like, 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. Then it goes into a lot of specifics about trade and how to handle exiles who are living in Charlemagne's kingdom, how to handle travelers going through Charlemagne's kingdom, who are 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 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 is so close that it's really not possible to say for sure who did it first. It's around the year 792, 793. There is a specimen of one of the very nicest, most handsome coins of Offa that was found in the gardens of St. 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 Offa was issuing at that point, thinking about what the other guys were doing. Sometimes things were not so friendly. We know at some point around about the year 790, 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 very keen on this, in part because in Frankia, 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 tiny solution, which is he makes a counterproposal 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 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 not only says no in emphatic terms, but he also calls a halt to all trade going from Frankia to England over 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 Offa. He's 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 says to Offa and 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.

Speaker 1:
[54:57] Mason It's so easy to imagine them in a little tug of war across the channel about who is senior, who is the best king, who is the most progressive, the most splendid person, and playing that really careful politics game of who is who's overlord perhaps a little bit too. But they both seem very aware that they were involved in that game and neither of them was going to be fooled by it.

Speaker 2:
[55:20] Neil No, I think that's right. There's not really any contest if it came down to how big your kingdoms are, how much they've got in terms of resources. Charlemagne 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. 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 whom Charlemagne does, at least in diplomatic context, in these letters. He does refer to Offa as a peer, as another king with whom he interacts as a notional equal, even though, as you already eluded to with the silver, Offa is, by this stage, almost entirely dependent on Frankish sources for the silver that's going into his currency. He's probably dependent on Frankia for lots of other prestige goods that they can't get in England. Culturally, there's a lot more. There's not nothing going on in Offa's 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.

Speaker 1:
[56:36] And just to bring Offa's story kind of to a close, how much do we know or how much don't we know about Offa's death? What happens to him in the end?

Speaker 2:
[56:45] We know that he dies in July 796. We know that he's buried probably in Bedford or somewhere near Bedford. It's also claimed at St. Albans he was buried there, but 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. Alcuin does have this reference to the father, or rather the son being punished for the sins of the father. This is Offa's son then dying quite soon afterwards. But again, he doesn't say exactly why Edgefrith dies. It's, 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 Offa and his son just died 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 elder men, the surviving aristocrats, Offa's widow coming together to try and keep the show on the road, keep the Mercian kingdom intact and gradually to restore its dominance in these Eastern and Southern areas.

Speaker 1:
[58:06] Yeah, and it seems like for Mercia, the 8th century was the story of two kind of really long-standing rulers with a slight blip in between. But Offa has put a lot of work into building this state, into building his dynasty, into positioning his son, having him crowned in his lifetime, positioning him as 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 we think about Offa today?

Speaker 2:
[58:37] 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 recognized an overlord into one larger kingdom. And you can see that Kernwolf, the next Mercian king, and then in turn, the West Saxon rulers, 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 Offa had used to tie his kingdom together, in terms of 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 modern times. The main exception to that was St. Albans. I already mentioned that's one place which claimed his burial. St. Albans was probably re-founded by Offa in 793. It's got Roman roots, there's probably some kind of monastery there beforehand, but Offa puts it on a much surer 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-Offa, against the current of anti-Offa feeling. You even got this wonderful set of drawings of Offa made by Matthew Paris, this great historian artist of the 13th century, which show Offa riding to battle to defeat his enemies, Offa patronizing this new church at St. Albans, doing all these glorious things that were very much a good thing, as Medieval kings 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 Bins, the area of Offa's dike, he's quite widely used for street names. There are statues of him. He's seen as a figurehead for regional identity. There's a great set of poems that feature Offa quite prominently by Geoffrey Hill where Offa is a kind of representative of how he understands that regional identity. There's even a band named after Offa. To my knowledge, he's the only Anglo-Saxon king to have a band named after him, a very good folk rock ensemble called Offa Rex. So like I say, I think he's come back 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 single coherent entity under Mercian rule.

Speaker 1:
[61:46] I was thinking as you were saying that, he seems like someone the Victorians and that kind of 19th century historians might have liked as someone who contributed something towards the formation of England and Englishness and the institutions of government. They tended to like people who they thought had moved that project forwards towards their day of empire. Offa seems like someone you could see kind of helping take a step forward on that. He's building something that starts to look like Englishness.

Speaker 2:
[62:15] That's right. You can see that the beginnings of this warmer attitude towards Offa do start in the later Victorian period. There's a scholar in the 1870s 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 19th century. Then it's cemented by this guy in the 1870s, by Frank Stenton in the beginning of the 20th century. They take Offa, in particular, to some extent, the other Mercian 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 the real story lies with Alfred the Great and his dynasty. I don't think that's ever lost sight of. But there is a growing awareness that the Mercians are pointing in the right direction in the 8th century.

Speaker 1:
[63:12] Well, thank you so much for joining us for this, Rory. It's been absolutely fascinating. And hopefully, we've got to know Offa a bit more than just a man who built a big pile of earth from all the way along the Welsh coast. And there's clearly so much more to his reign and the period in which he lived and the relationships that he's building across Britain, but across Europe too. It's been absolutely incredible to get to know him a little bit better. Thank you very much, Rory.

Speaker 2:
[63:37] Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:
[63:38] It's been a pleasure. 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 broadly on Charlemagne and on Beowulf too. There are new installments 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. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just Gone Medieval with History Hit.