THE KING LOST KINGDOM

Battered by the Vikings, outshone by King Alfred, Mercia has long been painted as the also-ran of the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet, writes Max Adams, this mighty Midlands kingdom was at the very heart of the emergence of England

- Max Adams

Alfred and Bede. These are the two figures who tower over the first half-millennium of the history of Anglo-Saxon England. There’s a reason for that, of course: they wrote this history.

The Venerable Bede chronicled the conversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons and the triumph of the kingdom of Northumbria over its southern foes up to about 730. As for King Alfred, it was during his reign that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle documented the rise of Wessex and his own stunning victory over the Great Viking Army in the ninth century.

Seen through the prism of those writings, Northumbria and Wessex very much dominate the stories we tell about the Anglo-Saxon world before 900. When we think of the great milestones of early English history, we invariably think of the two kingdoms that occupied the northern third and south-western corner of what’s now England .

So where does that leave the third great kingdom of the Anglo-Saxon era – Mercia? Without a chronicle to match those produced by Bede and the scribes of Alfred, Mercia’s story can be pieced together only in fragments, like odd strips of film left on the cutting-room floor of history. Largely for this reason, the kingdom that dominated swathes of south-central Britain from the end of Roman rule to the unification of England has been relegated almost to a footnote.

Yet when these strips are assembled, they reveal a truly remarkable story – one every bit as thrilling and consequential as those of Wessex and Northumbria. From obscure origins, in the early seventh century Mercian warlords began to assert their independence from their neighbours, and went on to dominate English politics, culture and trade. By the eighth century, they were making waves in continental Europe; one even styled himself Rex Britanniae: King of Britain. And they lie at the very heart of Anglo-Saxon history.