The Anglo Saxon Kings of England: The History of the Before (Part Two)

The year is 633 AD. Edwin of Northumbria, High King of the seven Anglo Saxon kingdoms of England, is dead. The Brewalda, “Britain Ruler,” has fallen in battle in the prime of his life.

His own kingdom, one of the largest Anglo Saxon kingdoms to have ever existed, had grown greatly under his rule. This warrior king, well used to a life of battles and campaigns, had expanded his personal twin kingdoms to the point where they straddled the island of Great Britain, from Dunstable castle in the east to the Welsh promontory of Anglesey in the far west.

No other English king would achieve this mastery over a single kingdom until Edward I, 650 years later. But, in his life of incessant warfare Edwin finally overreached, and faced a Welsh king who would prove his equal.

Cadwallon ap Cadfan, supposedly the foster brother of Edwin, first appears four years before Edwin’s death in 629 AD. Bede, our principal source for much of the history of this time (largely because he is often our only source for much of the history of this time) calls him King of Gwynedd, a kingdom which had existed in Wales since the Romans left.

Cadwallon, who killed a Bretwalda but did not become one, probably because Bede considered him an enemy of Anglo Saxon Britain (Unknown Author / Public Domain)

Bede is usually accurate when describing the kings of the Heptarchy, the seven Anglo Saxon kingdoms of Britain, but he is sometimes a little hazy when talking about their enemies, and he certainly hated Cadwallon. It is possible that Cadwallon was king of another kingdom entirely in the region, there being so many dotted about the place at this time.

Furthermore, the story of Edwin’s downfall does not start with Cadwallon. Instead it starts with another unruly client kingdom, that of Elmet in what is now Yorkshire, and the local King Cerdic who needed to be brought to heel by the Bretwalda.

A lot of the job of being a king at this point was riding out and about with your army and reminding the locals near your strongholds that they owed you money, or goods. Edwin was not particularly bloodthirsty in his constant warfare, and much of the time it was enough for him to be seen in the company of an awful lot of fighting men for the surrounding client kingdoms to suddenly remember they owed him fealty.

However Edwin does appear to have been a skilled tactician when it did, occasionally, come to the crunch. His own kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia absorbed a few surrounding kingdoms during his reign, spoils to the victor.