1 - Introduction

Summary

King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tarn worth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.

‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’

Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns, no. 1

This book is an attempt to recover a coherent picture of two seventh- and eighth-century Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in western England, centred on the Avon and Severn valleys and bordering on Wales. The Anglo-Saxons of this area are now almost forgotten, because, unlike their Northumbrian counterparts, they have left us no narrative history nor early saints' lives. Historians have had nothing like Bede's Historia ecclesiastica or Stephen's Vita S. Wilfridi to retell and reinterpret. Yet much can be pieced together from extant letters, poems, manuscripts and land charters; early charters in particular survived in large numbers, notably at Worcester, partly because the area lay outside the main sphere of Viking attacks in the ninth and tenth centuries. The range of fragmentary and disparate sources presents problems in assembling and interpreting the material, but I hope to show that the challenge of combining very varied types of evidence is worth taking up. For me, Wilhelm Levison's England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (The Ford Lectures for 1943) was a particularly inspiring demonstration that evidence often compartmentalized as ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ can be combined. I want to show that Levison's broad approach can in turn coexist with the English tradition of interdisciplinary regional studies.