Offa and the Mercian Wars Read Online Free PDF Page A

introduced an obligation on landowners in 749 to supply labour for work on bridges as well as fortresses. A sixth of the river crossings mentioned in charters between the seventh and tenth centuries were bridges, many of which crossed substantial water features. At Fambridge in Essex the River Crouch is a quarter of a mile wide, and although no bridge survives today, the name clearly implies its former existence (Rackham). A wooden causeway across the Thames marshes at Oxford has been dated to the reigns of Offa or his successor Coenwulf, and tree ring evidence has produced a date for the bridge at Cromwell, on the Trent near Newark, of between 740 and 750 (Brooks).

Chapter 2
The People of the Frontier
    The Mercians first appear as a distinct group in the accounts of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relating to the early seventh century. By then they were already a long-established people, with some of their oral traditions – such as the genealogies of their kings – going back several hundred years. Attempting to trace their origins, however, takes us into the most obscure and controversial period in the whole of English history. According to the conventional view the ‘English’ people were easily distinguished by their Germanic language and culture from the ‘Celtic’ or ‘British’ occupants of northern and western Britain, and this difference is said to have originated with the mass migrations of Anglo-Saxon tribes from the Continent after the fall of the Roman Empire. Until the 1970s it was generally accepted that the present inhabitants of most of England were descended from these migrants, who had displaced the aboriginal Britons with various degrees of force. Since then a growing revisionist movement has cast doubt on this view, with estimates of the size of the immigrant contribution declining to the point where many archaeologists now deny that there is any evidence for an Anglo-Saxon migration at all, preferring to think in terms of imported fashions and cultural influences rather than people (Pryor, 2004).
    In the past the waters have been further muddied by politically motivated ideas of history. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English scholars often shared the prevailing contempt for the peoples of the ‘Celtic fringe’ and wished to emphasise the distinctness of the English and their supposedly superior political institutions, while more recently Celtic nationalists have also found it convenient to accentuate the same differences. Even today opinions tend to be so polarised that it is worth pointing out that the extreme migrationist view originates not from some Victorian ideologue, but from no less an authority than the Venerable Bede.
    Bede’s account of the coming of the English begins with the troubles which afflicted the Britons after the departure of the Roman armies early in the fifth century AD. The inhabitants of the former Roman province, now mostly converted to Christianity, are described as timid and demoralised, hiding in terror behind their fortifications while the barbarian Picts and Irish plundered the country. In the 440s they wrote to the Roman consul Aetius in Gaul, begging for help: ‘The barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us, drowning or slaughter.’ But Aetius was already fully occupied with the war against Attila and his Huns, and no help could be sent. Meanwhile the Britons had rallied and temporarily driven off the invaders, but famine, followed by a terrible plague, caused many deaths and weakened them still further. Fearing that their enemies would soon return, they followed the advice of one of their kings, Vortigern, and hired German-speaking Saxon mercenaries from the Continent to defend them.
    This, says Bede, happened during the reign of the Roman emperor Martianus, who came to the throne in the year 449. Vortigern brought over