Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers

eventually from the spiral of violence as newly fledged kingdoms. In fact there is little evidence that this century was any more warlike than the ones which succeeded it, and most of the kingdoms may have come into being by intermarriage between closely related neighbours, whether ‘British’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’, and other essentially peaceful processes. Edward James has suggested that the English kings may have extended their power in a similar fashion to Clovis, ruler of the Franks on the Continent in the late fifth century. According to his biographer Gregory of Tours, Clovis employed various devious means in preference to naked force, using Roman-style law codes and (after his conversion to Christianity) calling church councils to confer their reflected authority on him. He also systematically hunted down and assassinated other claimants to royal status, including his own relatives, and would express feigned astonishment at the ease with which their leaderless tribes and kingdoms fell into his hands, publicly attributing his success to divine favour (E. James, in Bassett).
    From about 600 onwards, however, we start to see the English kingdoms fighting significant wars among themselves. It is sometimes argued that there was a significant ritual element in Anglo-Saxon warfare, with armies travelling by customary routes and meeting by mutual arrangement at some well-known landmark. In the seventh and eighth centuries each kingdom seems to have fought a major battle about once every twenty years, or once in a generation (Halsall, in Hawkes). This might reflect the requirement for a newly enthroned king to seek validation of his rule by success in war, or for a new generation of warriors to obtain glory and plunder. The ‘hazelled field’, ‘holmganga’ and other forms of formalised combat described in Scandinavian sources are often mentioned in support of this thesis, but their relevance to conditions in England seems to have been assumed without convincing evidence (see, for example, Pollington; Underwood). If early Anglo-Saxon kings ever issued formal challenges to each other to meet in battle or single combat like the Viking heroes, we do not hear of it.
    An alternative interpretation sees the motivation for most of the wars of our period as economic or dynastic, and recognises that averaging out the frequency of recorded battles obscures the existence of extended periods of violence which we would call major wars. Penda of Mercia, for example, fought battles on average about once every three years between 628 and 654. These were certainly large-scale engagements by the standards of the time, as nearly all of the armies which Penda defeated were commanded by kings, at least five of whom met their deaths in the process. This was warfare at an intensity seldom equalled until the campaigns of Napoleon, but then Penda was fighting to establish the independence of his new kingdom against several longer-established neighbouring powers.
    Mercia was doomed by its geographical position to be a country won and maintained by the sword. Its location in the centre of the country often obliged it to fight on several fronts in rapid succession: against the Welsh to the west, the Northumbrians to the north, the East Angles in the east and the West Saxons in the south. At the same time its central location gave it the advantage of interior lines of communication of which an energetic leader could take advantage to pick off his enemies one by one. As a rich agricultural country it supplied large numbers of warriors, but, being isolated from the coastal ports and trade routes, it was relatively poor in terms of the means to reward and recruit those warriors. Salt works at Droitwich and lead mines in the Peak District were exploited in late Anglo-Saxon times, and a late ninth-century charter tells us that tolls on Droitwich salt ‘had always belonged to the king.’
    The excavation of rich warrior burials