November 06, 2008
Rex Anglorum, the First 1200 Years - Part the First
As a supplement to my ongoing series about the history of monotheism (aka "In the Beginning, Man Created God" - which you can access with the links to the side), I thought I'd start a new series, on a part of history I've tended to geek over in the past.
The English Monarchy is an institution which has existed for over 1700 years, and over the time its been in existence, the throne of England has been occupied with a whole varied host of characters - heroes, villains, nice guys, bad guys, pacifists, murderers, the religious, the atheistic, straights, queers, Danes, Frenchmen, Welsh, Scots, Germans and yes, even the occasional woman.
So let's start right from the beginning, with the first person to claim the title "King of the English", or, as it was in those days where Latin was trendy, "Rex Anglorum". It superseded the previous Anglo-Saxon title "Bretwalda", which was a sort of Saxon term for "overlord".
Part the First: Offa of Mercia (774-796)
We're going back into the past, back over one and a half millenia, to Dark Ages England, a land that for the past few centuries has been inhabited by a variety of Germanic peoples, who have spent the best part of the era wresting control of Britain from the native "Brythons".
These Germans, variously Angles, Saxons and Jutes, have formed lots of little kingdoms in Britain and, like most people of German ancestry, are spending most of the time drunk and beating each other up. (Ah! Now we see where English people get it from!)
One of these petty kingdoms is Mercia, situation in the centre of what is now modern England, and ruled by a guy named Offa.
Above: According to some anonymous mint, this is Offa. Check out the nose hair!
I know what you're thinking. That's a ridiculous name. Well, that's thank to later invaders, who seem to have eliminated most Anglo-Saxon names from the English language, true "English" names are nearly non-existant, meaning only obsessives like J.R.R. Tolkien can remember more than a dozen or so.
So, despite having a name dangerously close to the word for animal entrails, Offa was a pretty important guy, even beyond the British Isles. Though it remains in doubt whether he ever truly called himself "King of the English" (some believe it to be a result of tenth century forgeries), he was certainly pre-eminent amongst the English kings, and presided over a cultured and intellectual court, and was even called "brother" by Charlemagne, a Frankish ruler who was at that time ruling over most of Western Europe. He contended with the Pope in Rome, and successfully maintained the independence of the Mercian dioceses.
He is also known for "Offa's Dyke" which sounds pretty naughty and scandalous until you discover it was just a bit of earthwork separating his kingdom from the Welsh. Lame.
Above: Scarcely even a spot for a little boy to stick his finger in.
The best remnants of Offa's reign are the coins his kingdom produced - which were of a higher standard than even those from the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne. Copying Byzantine designs, Offa even included his wife on one of the coins. His wife, named Cynethryth (try saying that twelve times fast), thus remains one of the few Anglo-Saxon women we have any sort of artistic depiction of.
In a particular bizarre incident, Offa copied some gold dinars from the Abbasid Caliphate and inadvertently copied the design, including the Arabic profession of faith in Allah (those horribly misspelled). Fundamentalist Muslims claim this means Offa was a secret Muslim and hence England an Islamic state ripe to be "reconquered", but Muslims claim this sort of thing all the time so they can be safely ignored.
Unfortunately for the Mercians, Offa was mainly in the overlord thing for himself, and, after the end of his reign, Mercia was swiftly overtaken as other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms came to the fore. The next person to claim the title "Rex Anglorum" would be from the Kingdom of Wessex.
Coming Soon: Part the Second: Egbert of Wessex