All hail the 'glory of Britain'

Offa: King of the Mercians Rory Naismith (Yale, £30)

- Edited by Kate Green

THERE was in Mercia in fairly recent times a certain vigorous king called Offa, who terrified all the neighbouring kings and provinces around him, and who had a great dyke built between Wales and Mercia from sea to sea,’ wrote the 9th-century monk Asser in his The Life of King Alfred. That probably remains the extent of most people’s knowledge of Offa, although Sir Frank Stenton, the doyen of 20th-century Anglo-Saxon historians, made a case for him as the first ‘king of the English’. Stenton’s argument has since been discredited, however, and some charters referring to Offa as ‘rex Anglorum’ have been shown to be 10th- and 11th-century forgeries. Rory Naismith, in an absorbing study likely to be the standard text on its subject for years to come, argues that Offa was never ruler of all England in the manner of Athelstan in the 10th century and did not wish to be. Yet he was the most illustrious of the old English kings of the Heptarchy, the period before the Viking invasions when several of the seven kingdoms (Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, Sussex and Kent, whittled down to four after Offa’s death, making it a Tetrarchy) played pass-the-parcel as to which of them claimed overlordship. Following the Northumbrian supremacy, and preceding that of Wessex, Mercia at its peak controlled about one-third of the area of England.