The Anglo Saxon Kings of England: The History of the Before (Part Four)
For centuries, after the Romans left, Britain was ruled by the seven kings of the Heptarchy. This was a time of rival realms and rival claimants, a time of petty kingdoms and tribute extracted at the point of a sword.
This was a time where might made right, where the most powerful of the kings earned the right to be called the Bretwalda, and where power was gained and wielded through battle. This was a time where kingdoms were overthrown, only to rise again.
Somewhere in this ill-documented mess it was also the time of King Arthur, with a heavy emphasis on “maybe”. Not the fictionalized Arthur of the later medieval romances, nor an Arthur like any of the modern versions, each of which offers a gloss only on the accumulated characterization that came before, none ever approaching the reality.
As we have noted before, searching for King Arthur is a pyre on which more than one promising historian has burned their career to ash. For the problem is not that we can’t find Arthur for lack of detail. The problem is we know pretty much what happened through these decades and centuries, and nowhere in what we know is there space for this king.
Any one of the Bretwalda of the Anglo Saxon centuries could be Arthur. All of them could be, but none of them are. If you need closure as to who this great king really was, when he really existed, then you must understand him as a later creation, taking all that was great from the Bretwaldas (and the Romano-British that came before) and merging them into one character.
He was of a time, and that time is coming to an end. The story of the last Bretwaldas of Britain is the story of a country which finally came together, united by the greatest Saxon king of Britain in history. It is also a story of bitter defeat and conquest, a story of a lost world which would never return but which remains only beneath the surface: in words and phrases, in the old places of a new country, and in stories.
This final, greatest chapter starts in the dying years of the eighth century, and with a king of Mercia, the last from this kingdom to hold the power which gave him the right to call himself High King of Britain. Our narrator for this story, the Venerable Bede, never gave him that title of course, but then he was the enemy.
This last king was called Cœnwulf, and with his story the time of Mercia ascendant draws to a close. A new kingdom will rise to supplant it, its old enemy Wessex. And it is the kings of Wessex who, at the end of the story of Anglo Saxon Britain, came closest to truly uniting the kingdoms, creating for the briefest of moment a single, Saxon kingdom.
