Offa. CHAP. 8. cattle, having laid waste the country to a vast extent. At the approach of Offa the Welsh retired, and he compelled them to relinquish to him that part of their own territory which lies between the Severne and the Wye. This track of land he peopled with Saxon soldiers and their families, whom he ordered to throw up a rampart, defended by a large ditch, by means of which he separated his conquests from the rest of Wales. This rampart, which is in length about four and twenty miles, extends from the mouth of the Dee to the junction of the Wye with the Severne, and was called Clawdh Offa, or Offa's dyke.*-In the year 785, Offa associated his son Egfrid with him in the government; and about the same time, considering it to be inconvenient and derogatory to his dignity, that the bishops of Mercia should be subjected to the Archiepiscopal See of Canterbury, he resolved to elevate Lichfield to the rank of an archbishopric; and, with some difficulty, he obtained the concurrence of the Pope in his purpose. The second daughter of Offa, named Elfleda, was married to Ethelred king of Northumbria. Adelfrida,† his third daughter, was rendered the unconscious means of a crime which has cast a horrible blemish upon the conduct of this mighty sovereign. Ethelbert, the young king of the East Angles, a prince of great bodily and mental endowments, sought an alliance with his powerful neighbour. He solicited the hand of Adelfrida, and came, as an acknowledged suitor to her father's court, which was then held at Mordon or Morchampton in the neighbourhood of Hereford. Preparations were made for the nuptials, when, on the evening preceding the day appointed for the marriage, the expectant bridegroom was suddenly conveyed into one of the cells of the palace, and there assassinated. It is said that Offa was instigated to this treacherous deed by Kendrida, his queen, whom he afterwards shut up in a nunnery; but instead of abjuring this violation of the sacred laws of honour and hospitality, he immediately took means to profit by it, and, marching a numerous army into East Anglia, he seized upon that kingdom and united it to Mercia. Whether Offa experienced the anguish of conscientious remorse for this atrocious deed, may be doubted, notwithstanding his subsequent submission to the priesthood, his donations to the church and his pilgrimage to Rome. The monasteries of that period always benefited by the crimes of princes. Offa obtained complete absolution from the papal see, and secured the praises of the Saxon monks by his donations. His liberalities at Rome were magnificent. He gave 365 mancas, to be disposed of by the pope. Ina, the king of the West Saxons, had previously founded a college at Rome for the education of English youth, and had ordered a penny to be collected yearly of every family throughout his dominions. Offa extended this tax to Mercia and East Anglia. In the course of time it began to be called Romescot, or Peter's pence, and the popes pretending that it was a tribute paid by England to St. Peter and his successors, converted it to their own use, until it was abolished at the Reformation.-But the piety of Offa did not diminish his ambition or his warlike activity. On his return from Rome he was surprised by a fresh irruption of the Welsh, who had demolished part of the rampart and filled up the ditch he had caused to be made on their boundaries. They penetrated as far as Hereford, but Offa speedily levied an army and repulsed the invaders. He followed them, and obtained a decisive victory over them, in which the king of North Wales was slain. After the battle, with a barbarity not unusual at that period, Offa put to death all his prisoners.*—About two years before the death of this powerful prince, the Danes made their first descent with considerable force upon the coast of Northumberland. They burnt Lindisfarn monastery, and encouraged by their success they returned the next year, and having pillaged the monastery of Tinemouth, they greatly extended their ravages. Ethelred requested the aid of Offa, his father-inlaw, who sent his victorious troops into Northumbria. The Danish invaders were driven back to their ships, and many of them perished in a sudden and violent storm on the English coast. Offa died in 796, after a reign of thirty-nine years, and was buried in a chapel near Bedford, which has since been destroyed by the inundation of the river Ouse. He left a son and three daughters. His eldest daughter, Eadburga, to the cruelty and resolution of her mother Kendrida, added dissoluteness of character. She poisoned her husband, Brithric, king of Wessex, and with the plunder of his treasury fled to France. She had been the accuser, the seducer and betrayer of worthy men.† When in the presence of Charlemagne, that monarch said to her, "Take your choice, whom will you have, my son or me?"-She, amorously inclined, chose his son, because he was the younger, and thus lost the protection of both. The king, however, made her a present of a monastery, and there, under the hypocritical mask of sanctimonious apparel, she carried on a criminal intercourse, with a vulgar fellow of her own country, who had been the companion of her flight. She was apprehended and ejected from the monastery by the command of the king; and afterwards wandered as a wretched outcast, begging bread along the highways and at the gates of castles, until she expired, destitute of every means of subsistence, in the streets of Pavia. The second daughter of Offa was named Elfleda. She was married to the revengeful tyrant of Northumberland, Ethelred, who suffered for his atrocious abuses of power by the enmity of his subjects.- Etheldritha, after the murder of her lover, the youthful sovereign of East Anglia, assumed the veil at Croyland, and lived to an old age, in a state of penitence which was greatly aggrandized by the calamities of her family. Under the reign of Offa, the kingdom of Mercia attained its greatest extent. On the north it continued to be bounded by the Mersey and the Humber; while on the east it reached to the German ocean and the fens of Cambridgeshire. Its southern limits were the Thames and the Avon. On the west, the Dyke of Offa divided it from Wales. Within these limits were included the counties of Chester, Derby, Lincoln, Leicester, Rutland, Huntingdon, Northampton, Warwick, Stafford, Hereford, Worcester, Shropshire, Bedford, the southern part of Nottingham, and the The memory of this tragic event has been transmitted to the present time in an old Welsh melancholy air, called Morfa Rhuddlan, which may be found in E. Jones's collection of Welsh music. † Bonorum semper accusatrix, alteri paratum et datum porrexit. Chronica de Mailros. Ibid. CHAP. 8. Offa. Offa. CHAP. 8. greater part of Middlesex and Hereford, were his original dominions. The higher parts of Nottingham, to which the princes of Northumbria pretended to have some claims, were conquered by Offa, who wrested from Wessex the counties of Oxford and Gloucester. From the Welsh he obtained part of Flint, Denbigh, Montgomery and Radnor. The kingdom of East Anglia, comprising Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridge, he also united to Mercia. He thus possessed the absolute sovereignty over twenty-two counties, and the predominance over the whole Heptarchy. It has been already mentioned that Offa erected Lichfield into an archbishopric: he also framed or compiled a body of laws, denominated the laws of the Mercians, a great part of which were subsequently inserted in the laws of King Alfred.The name of Offa was respected by foreign princes, and an intimate de, gree of friendship existed between the Mercian sovereign and Charlemagne of France. Some letters of these two monarchs to each other are still extant. Egfrid. Kenulph. Egfrid, the only son of Offa, who had been associated with his father during many years, in the government, possessed the sole dominion of Mercia only five months. His latter days were passed in severe bodily sufferings, during which he enriched the monks and made great benefactions to the monastery of St. Albans. Kenulph succeeded Egfrid, and possessed not only the Mercian crown but the paramount sovereignty of England. He was the fifth in descent from Kenwalch, the younger brother of the heroic Penda. In the second year of his reign he invaded Kent with a formidable army, and having laid waste the country, he took prisoner Edbert, surnamed Pren, the sovereign, whom he carried captive to Mercia. Kenulph caused the eyes of the Kentish prince to be put out, and declaring his kingdom tributary to Mercia, he placed on its throne his own natural brother Cuthred. As Canterbury was now become a part of his own dominions, Kenulph had little reluctance to restore to that archiepiscopal see, its former jurisdiction over the bishops of Mercia and East Anglia. He did this at the instigation of Athelard, a prelate of great address, who pointed out to the Mercian king that this would be the best means to reconcile the people of Kent to his sway. Kenulph wrote a letter to the pope, accompanied with a present of 120 mancas, which he sent by Athelard. Leo III. then pontiff, was highly gratified by the application, and in his answer, he calls Kenulph his most dear, most excellent, and most sweet son, and assures him that the archbishop Athelard had sufficient sanctity to conduct the souls of his subjects from the lowest depths of hell to the happy ports of heaven. Athelard, on his return, summoned a council, which met at Canterbury in the year 803, and there the decree of the pope, restoring that see to all its ancient rights, was read with great solemnity. Two years previous to this occurrence, the Northumbrians invaded Mercia, under the command of their king Eardulph, but were quickly opposed by the Mercian monarch at the head of a large army. As the forces on both sides were preparing for battle, the thanes and prelates of each nation assembled in council, and by their persuasion the two sovereigns entered into a treaty of peace and amity.-Kenulph was a liberal benefactor to the church. He not only restored the ecclesiastical supremacy of the See of Canterbury, but he founded the monastery of Winchcomb, and made considerable donations CHAP. 8. to the bishopric of Worcester. A short time before his death, Kenulph Kenulph. entered Wales, and laid waste the kingdom of Powis. He reigned over Mercia twenty-four years. He died in 819, and was buried at Winchcomb in Gloucestershire. Kenelm was the only son of Kenulph, and was seven years old at his Kenelm. father's death. He had two sisters, Quendrida and Burgelmida; the former, desirous of elevating her lover to the throne, resolved to put the young king, her brother, to death. For this purpose she engaged Ascobert, the tutor of Kenelm, to conduct the boy into a wood at the close of the day, and to murder him there. The place where this deed was committed is called Cowbach, and forms a part of the parish of Clent in Staffordshire.* The author of the Polychronicon says, the body was thrown into a well. Several old writers speak of the miraculous discovery of the body. The following legendary account is from William of Malmsbury. "After the perpetration of this bloody deed, the inhuman sister seized upon the kingdom, and prohibited any enquiry after her lost brother. But this horrible fact, concealed in England, was made known at Rome by supernatural revelation, for, on the altar of St. Peter there, a white dove let fall a paper, on which, in golden letters, was narrated the death of Kenelm, and the place of his burial. Upon this the Pope sent over an envoy to the English * Shenstone commemorates this event in his 23rd Elegy. "Born near the scene for Kenelm's fate renown'd, I take my plaintive reed, and range the grove, Fast by the centre of yon various wild, Soft o'er his birth, and o'er his infant hours, But soon the bosom's pleasing calm is flown; And views her Kenelm with a rival's eyes. How kind were Fortune! ah! how just were Fate! Would Fate or Fortune Mercia's heir remove! How sweet to revel on the couch of state! To crown at once her lover and her love! See garnished for the chase, the fraudful maid, Erdswick gives this old Latin translation of a Saxon couplet: "In Clent, in Cowbach, under a thorn, Kenelm. CHAP. 8. kings to inform them of the murder of Kenelm. The whole being thus miraculously revealed, the body was taken out of the hole where it had been hidden, and with great solemnity conveyed to Winchelcombe in Gloucester." Ingulph says, the body of this martyr was discovered by a ray of extraordinary brilliancy beaming over the spot during the whole of the night. Bernulph. The iniquity of Quendrida was not long successful. The Mercians, inCeolwulph. dignant at her conduct, placed on the throne Ceolwulph, her uncle. The state was then divided into factions, and in the second year of his reign Ceolwulph was deposed, and a wealthy thane, named Bernulph, who was in no degree connected with the royal family of Mercia, was elevated to the sovereignty, in the year 821. He was a brave warrior, but the dissentions of the preceding reigns had weakened the kingdom. The East Anglians and the people of Kent, though reduced by Offa and Kenulph to the condition of tributaries, were always ready to join the sovereigns of Wessex in their attacks on Mercia. At this time the crown of Wessex was possessed by the illustrious Egbert, who from the moment of his ascending the throne, had formed the project of uniting the kingdoms of the Heptarchy under the dominion of his own sceptre. Egbert fermented the troubles of Mercia and its dependencies; but Bernulph resolved not to await the attack which he perceived was preparing to be made. He marched at the head of a large army into the territories of his foe, and engaged the king of Wessex at Ellandanum (now Wilton*) near Salisbury. The battle was fierce and sanguinary, and the victory was on the side of Egbert. Bernulph retired into Mercia, where he remained unable to bring another army into the field, while the troops of Egbert wrested the kingdom of Kent from the power of Mercia. At the same time, the East Angles seized this opportunity to throw off the Mercian yoke, and gave ear to the emissaries of Egbert, who offered to protect their independence. They took up arms and placed themselves under the command of one of the thanes, but Bernulph marched into their country and engaged them with great impetuosity. He was, however, defeated and slain. Ludican. Wichtlaf. The Mercians elected for their king, Ludican, a near relation of Bernulph. He continued the war with the East Anglians, and endeavoured, without success, to reduce them to their former subjection. After a reign of two years, he was defeated and slain in an engagement with the insurgents. During the usurpation of Bernulph and his relative Ludican, Mercia continued to be a prey to dissention. The people were oppressed, and the army which Kenulph had left numerous, well-appointed and victorious, had nearly perished in the ill-conducted wars of the two last monarchs. On the death of Ludican, the thanes and people of Mercia unanimously elected Wichtlaf to the sovereignty. This powerful thane is called Dur Wicciorumt by Ingulph, and his son Wigmund had espoused Elfleda, the The castle of Wilton had seven towers, and stood on the south side of the town. The battle (says Camden) was so bloody on both sides that the river (the Willey) was stained with the blood of near relatives. + The Wiccii were the inhabitants of the east banks of the Severne. The word is derived from the Saxon expression, meaning brooks; and the title of Wichtlaf was probably the same in import as that of the Count of the Marches which divided Mercia from Wales. |