The Anglo Saxon Kings of England: The History of the Before (Part Three)
For the six centuries between the end of Roman occupation and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Britain was not a united kingdom. It was, instead, a mishmash of tribal domains, petty kings and infighting.
Chief amongst these were the seven Anglo Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Five of them crowded round the south east of the island: Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. The other two, Mercia and the enormous kingdom of Northumbria, were further west and further north, each as large as the five smaller kingdoms in its own right.
The story of these seven kingdoms is the story of Anglo Saxon Britain. Their struggles for power, imperium in the old Roman form, are the backdrop for six hundred years of history.
Out of these conflicts arose a series of High Kings of Britain, so called Bretwaldas (Britain rulers) of the Anglo Saxons. These kings, from Kent, Anglia and then for half a century from Northumbria, were elevated almost entirely by their strength in arms. They were, in reality, warlords.
Our guide to these less documented times has been the monk Bede, who lived in the seventh and eighth centuries. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People is the clearest and most detailed account of the Bretwaldas, even if Bede himself did not invent the term.
Bede however gives us a Christian view of the history of the Anglo Saxons, one dotted with miracles and angelic interventions. For a fuller, and perhaps more dispassionate picture, one must turn to the other great work of Anglo Saxon history from this period: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Here we have the first use of the word Bretwalda. Here we have a complete list of the High Kings of Anglo-Saxon Britain, written in the late ninth century under that most famous and powerful of kings of a united Saxon Britain: Alfred the Great.
This was the text which the Normans used to compile their history of the island after their conquest two hundred years later. These two sources, Bede’s (which copied Gildas, an earlier monk) and the Chronicle, are together our only real guides to this part of history.
Both contain details of the Bretwalda and the dynastic struggles which, for more than a century, defined Britain. Both agree as to who earned the right to the title, but then when they come to the death of Oswiu of Northumbria in 670 something strange happens.
The Chronicle records that there was no other Bretwalda after Oswiu for 150 years. According to this text, there were subsequent kings of Northumbria who are dubbed “King of the Saxons” with the implication that this is the same. But they are not Bretwaldas, and there is a very good reason for that.
The fact is the title was always one seized by force, and the subjugation (more or less at the point of a sword) of the other Anglo Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy. This did not suddenly stop when Oswiu died. But something did change.
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