Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers Read Free Book Online Page B

might have been eminently practical. Hydatius confirms some of Gildas’ apocalyptic account when he says that a plague devastated ‘almost the whole world’ in the 440s, and although it has been argued that this is too late to be responsible for the situation in Britain it need not have been unique. Remains of the black rat, alleged to be the carrier of the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages, have been found in fifth-century deposits, and black rats are mainly creatures of towns and sea ports. Professor William McNeill has argued that Mediterranean civilisation was experiencing a prolonged period of stress from the second century AD onwards as a result of new diseases brought in via trade contacts with Asia, and it is not unlikely that people in Britain understood that their afflictions were somehow connected with Rome and its works.
    One further obstacle to the idea of continuity between Britons and Anglo-Saxons needs to be addressed. Why would the devoutly Christian Bede make up or promote a story which depicts his own ancestors as mass murderers who dispossessed the rightful owners of the country by force and treachery? The answer no doubt lies in his explicit view of the English as ‘God’s chosen people’ by analogy with the Israelites of the Old Testament. His main grievance against the British of his own day was a theological one, deriving from the split between the Roman and Celtic churches over such matters as the authority of the Pope and the calculation of the date of Easter. Such matters were taken very seriously in the eighth century, when the conversion of the English was still a recent event, and the hold of the Catholic Church must still have seemed precarious. There seems also to have been a longstanding grievance over the allegation that the British churches had never tried to convert their neighbours, who had had to languish in heathen superstition until a mission arrived from Rome at the end of the sixth century. Bede was therefore predisposed to regard the Britons who followed the Celtic tradition as immoral, cowardly and lazy – especially as he was aware of the work of Gildas, who had said as much about his own people. It was therefore logical to identify the Britons with the Canaanites, whose violent dispossession by the Israelites on God’s orders is described in the Book of Joshua. There was no reason to question Gildas’ lurid account of the massacres perpetrated by the invaders of England, and since the conquest must have been God’s will, the use of force tended to reinforce rather than undermine its legitimacy.

Chapter 3
Kingdoms and Armies
    Whatever really happened during the sparsely documented fifth and sixth centuries, it is generally agreed that by the beginning of the seventh the process which would lead to the growth of the first true English kingdoms was well under way. We seem to be able to detect traces of a period in which the country was divided among a large number of small tribes, the results either of invasions or of local movements for autonomy after the end of Roman authority, which had gradually coalesced into larger political units. West of the Mercian heartland along the River Trent, for example, two once-independent peoples, the Magonsaetan and the Hwicce, retained their own rulers but were coming under increasing Mercian influence, culminating in the eighth century with the downgrading of their kings to ‘subreguli’, ‘sub-kings’, and eventually ‘ealdormen’ or ‘earls’, recognised to be of noble blood but no longer royal even in their own estimation.
    If we assume that every group which is identified by a distinctive name had been independent in the immediately post-Roman decades, we can envisage the sixth century as a time of incessant small-scale warfare reminiscent of the ‘Warring States’ era of ancient China, in which the strongest prospered at the expense of their neighbours, emerging