Part 1

Transcriber’s Note: Minor errors of punctuation and printing have been repaired, but the transcriber does not fancy she knows the writer’s meaning better than he knows it himself, and has left the rest alone.

VESTIGES OF

THE SUPREMACY OF MERCIA

IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND

DURING THE EIGHTH CENTURY

_With T. Kerslake’s Compliments, Bristol, 1879._

CONTENTS.

PAGES

1-8-9, &c. ST. WERBURGH.

2-14, &c. BRISTOL.

3-5. WICCIA.

6-7. ANGLO-SAXON.

10. FEMALE NATIONAL SAINTS.

11, &c. ÆTHELBALD. OFFA.

11-12. 50. ST. BONIFACE.

13. AVON FRONTIER.

14. 56. BATH. HENBURY.

15-17. NORTH DEVON.

18. 22. CORNWALL.

19-21. ST. CUTHBERT.

23. 25. 36, &c. KENTISH HOO.

26-39, &c. CLOVESHOE.

28-29, &c. CLIFFE AT HOO.

40. HIGHAM FERRY.

41-42. MIDDLESEX.

43. CEALCHYTHE.

44-45. ACLEAH.

46. PARISHES.

47. WERBURGHWICK.

49-51. HAETHFELTH. HERUTFORD. &C.

53-58. ST. HELEN. OFFA.

56-58. HASTINGS. SUSSEX.

59. LONDON.

60-63. DEDICATIONS.

61. HOLY ROOD.

62. ST. ETHELBERT. MARDEN. ST. MARY.

ERRORS.

Pages 24, 25 in Notes; _for_ p. 119-121, 125 _read_ 15-17, 22.

” 27. Note _for_ 1565 _read_ 1863.

” 7, line 3, _for_ “knut--” _read_ “Knut--”.

” 11, 12, 34, _for_ Bonifatius _prefer_ Bonifacius.

” 47, _for_ appanage _read_ apanage.

Various others, including some introduced after the proofs had been finally revised by the writer, by some one who fancied he knew the writer’s meaning better than he knows it himself.

VESTIGES OF THE

SUPREMACY OF MERCIA

IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND

DURING THE EIGHTH CENTURY.

(_Reprinted from the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archæological Society_).

_Bristol_, 1879.

VESTIGES OF THE SUPREMACY OF MERCIA IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND, DURING THE EIGHTH CENTURY.

By THOMAS KERSLAKE.

“… residual phenomena …, the small concentrated residues of great operations in the arts are almost sure to be the lurking-places of new chemical ingredients.… It was a happy thought of Glauber to examine what everybody else threw away.”--SIR J. F. W. HERSCHELL.

Having sometimes said that the date of the original foundation of the lately-demolished church of St. Werburgh, in the centre of the ancient walled town of Bristol, was the year 741, and that a building so called has, from that early date, always stood on that spot, I have been asked how I know it. I have answered; by the same evidence--and the best class of it--as the most important events of our national history, of the three centuries in which that date occurs, are known. That is, by necessary inference from the very scanty records of those times, confirmed by such topical monumental evidence as may have survived. But this fact in itself is, also, of considerable importance to our own local history; because, if it should be realized, it would be the very earliest solid date that has yet been attached to the place that we now call Bristol. We are accustomed to speak, with a certain amount of popular pride, of “Old Bristol,” and in like manner of “Old England,” but without considering which is the oldest of the two. The position here attempted would give that precedence to Bristol.

* * * * *

It need scarcely be mentioned that what we now call England is no other than an enlargement of the ancient kingdom of the West Saxons, by the subjugation and annexation of the other kingdoms of the southern part of the island. A subjugation of which the result is that our now ruling sovereign is the successor, as well as descendant, of the Saxon Kings of Wessex, and of the supremacy which they ultimately achieved. Of course this was only the final effect of a long series of political revolutions. It was preceded by others that had promised a different upshot: one of which was the long-threatened supremacy of the Anglian kingdom of Mercia; by Penda, a Pagan king, and afterwards, during the long reigns of Æthelbald and Offa, his Christian successors in his kingdom and aggressive policy.

One of two fates awaits a supplanted dynasty: to be traduced, or to be forgotten. Although this milder one has been the lot of the Mercian Empire, yet it is believed that distinct, and even extensive, traces can still be discerned, beyond the original seat of its own kingdom, of its former supremacy over the other kingdoms of England. In fact, this name itself of “England,” still co-extensive with this former Anglian supremacy over the Saxons, is a glorious monumental legacy of that supremacy, which their later Saxon over-rulers never renounced, and which has become their password to the uttermost parts of the earth.

But it is with the encroachments of Æthelbald upon Wessex that we are in the first instance concerned. South of Mercia proper was another nation called Huiccia, extending over the present counties of Worcester and Gloucester, with part of Warwickshire and Herefordshire, and having the Bristol river Avon for its southern boundary. It is barely possible that it may have included a narrow margin between that river and the Wansdyke, which runs along the south of that river, at a parallel of from two to three miles from it; but of this no distinct evidence has been found. Some land, between the river and Wansdyke, did in fact belong to the Abbey of Bath, which is itself on the north of the river, but that this is said to have been bought--“mercati sumus digno praetio”--from Kenulf, King of the West Saxons[1], makes it likely that it was the river that had been the tribal boundary.

Until divided from Gloucester by King Henry VIII., the Bishopric of Worcester substantially continued the territory, and the present name of Worcester = Wigorceaster = Wigorniæ civitas (A.D. 789), no doubt transmits, although obscurely, the name of Huiccia; and the church there contained (A.D. 774) “pontificalis Cathedra Huicciorum.” The name may even remain in “Warwick,” and especially in “Wickwar” = Huiccanwaru; but such instances must not be too much trusted, as there are other fruitful sources of “wick,” in names. In Worcestershire names, however, “-wick” and “-wich” as testimonials are abundant. Droitwich = “Uuiccium emptorium” (A.D. 715), almost certainly is so derived, in spite of its ambiguous contact with the great etymological puzzle of the “Saltwiches.”[2]

At all events, within a hundred years from Ceawlin’s first subjugation of it, Saxon Wiccia had become entirely subject to Anglian Mercia. But there can be no doubt that its earliest Teutonic settlers were West Saxons. Even now, any one of us West Saxons, who should wander through Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, would recognise his own dialect. He would, perhaps, say they “speak finer” up here, but he would feel that his ears are still at home. If he should, however, advance into Derbyshire, or Staffordshire, or Eastern Shropshire, he would encounter a musical cadence, or song, which, though far from being unpleasant from an agreeable voice, would be very strange to him. He would, in fact, have passed out of Wiccia into Mercia proper: from a West-Saxon population into one of original Anglian substratum.

What was the earlier political condition of Wiccia before it fell under the dominion of Mercia: whether it was ever for any time an integral part of the kingdom of Wessex, or a distinct subregulate of it, is uncertain. Two of the earlier pagan West-Saxon inroads (A.D. 577-584) were of this region, and happened long before that race had penetrated Somerset. It is not to be believed that any part of later Somerset, south of Avon, was included in either of these two pagan conquests of Ceawlin; nor even the south-west angle of Gloucestershire itself, that forms the separate elevated limestone ridges between the Bristol Frome and the Severn. There are some other reasons for believing that these heights immediately west of Bristol--say, Clifton, Henbury, and northward along the Ridgeway to about Tortworth--remained, both Welsh and Christian, for nearly a century afterwards; and that they were only reduced to Teutonic rule along with the subjection of Saxon Wiccia itself to Anglian Mercia. The record in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the conquest of A.D. 577 plainly indicates the course of it, by the names of the places concerned--Bath, Dyrham, Cirencester, and Gloucester. It was not any river that was the instrument of advance; but, flanked and supported by the ancient Foss-way, the continuous elevated table-land of the southern limb of the Cotswolds, still abounding with remains of military occupations of yet earlier peoples. This is separated from the more western height by a broad belt of low land, then a weald or forest, since known as Kingswood; which, the line of the places named in the annal of the conquest, plainly indicates to have been purposely avoided: the district west of it, therefore still continued British. As to Ceawlin’s second expedition, A.D. 584, it most probably extended from Gloucester to the country between Severn and Wye, as far as Hereford,[3] and into the now Saxon-speaking Worcestershire. But that Ceawlin followed the Severn, and penetrated Cheshire to an unimportant place called “Faddiley,” is not only unlikely, but rests entirely on a single philological argument, concerning that name, too refined and unpractical for the burden laid upon it[4], and inconsistent with the later associations of the name itself.

But if Wiccia became West-Saxon in 577-584, it did not long remain undisturbed by its Anglian northern neighbour. About fifty years later (A.D. 628), it is recorded in the Chronicle, that the rulers of Wessex and Mercia, fought at Cirencester, “and then compromised.” This shews that hitherto, for fifty years, all Wiccia had been ruled by Wessex: also that, except what reduction of territory may be represented by a Mercian inroad as far as Cirencester, it still continued under Wessex. But although this exception itself did not last many years longer, this is enough to account for our finding a Saxon people under Anglian government. In another fifty years, Wiccia is found to have become a subregulate, governed by Mercian sub-kings, and constituted a separate Bishopric, an offshoot from Mercian Lichfield; and from that time the kings of Mercia and their sub-reguli are found dealing with lands in various parts of Wiccia, even to the southern frontier, as at Malmesbury and Bath; and by a charter of Æthelred, King of Mercia, dated by Dr. Hickes, A.D. 692, the newly instituted cathedral in the city of Weogorna, is endowed with land at a place well-known to us by what was, even then said to be an “ancient name,” Henbury (“vetusto vocabulo nuncupatur heanburg.”[5])

Much needless demur, if not excitement, has of late years been stirred up by some of the learned,[6] at the name “Anglo-Saxon,” for the oldest condition of English. They allege that this designation is “a most unlucky one,” and that in the first half of this century it was the cause of a “crass ignorance” of the true relations of continuity in this nation before and after the Norman conquest. Those who remember that time, well know that this imputed ignorance did not prevail: that if the most ordinary schoolboy, had then been asked, why William was called “the Conqueror,” he would have at once, rightly or wrongly, answered “because he conquered us,” and that he was only less detested than “Buonaparte,” because he was at that time farther away. They have now lived to be astonished to find that, by their own confession, the higher scholars of this later age are terrified by a fear of confusion in this rudimentary piece of learning. So these learned men put themselves into the most ludicrous passions, and--let us try to humour them--King “knut”-like scoldings at the tide, and Dame Partingtonian mop-twirlings, to cure us of such a dangerous old heresy. For old it is, and deeply rooted. Those “Anglo-Saxon” kings who assumed the supreme rule of the kingdoms of both races, so called themselves: and the entire “Anglo-Saxon” literature has been only so known in modern Europe, for the last three centuries; not only at home, but in Germany, Denmark, France, and wherever it has ever appeared in print. Yet another most learned and acute and sober Professor has been lately tempted to join the “unlucky” cry: saying that “It is like calling Greek, Attico-Ionian.”[7] Why “Greek?” Why not “Hellenic?” Is not “Greek” an exotic, and as barbarous as “Attico-Ionian” or “Anglo-Saxon?”

But in our concern with the Wiccians we are exempt from this newly raised dispute. Here we have a great colony of a Saxon people who very soon fell under the dominion of Anglian kings, and so remained until a later revolution, the final supremacy of Wessex, made them once more Saxon subjects. The Wiccians, at any rate however, had become literally Anglo-Saxon: a Saxon people under Anglian rule. Shakespear was a Wiccian, born and bred--if one, who has taught us so much more than any breeding could have taught him, can be said to have been bred amongst us--at any rate he was born a Wiccian, and thereby an Anglo-Saxon, in the natural and indisputable sense: a sense earlier, stricter, and more real than that which afterwards extended the phrase to the entire kingdom. Wiccia was no doubt colonized by the Saxons, while the Saxons were yet pagan; and afterwards christianized by their Anglian Mercian subjugators. Not so the Saxons of Somerset, who were already Christians when they first penetrated that province.[8]

Subsequent annals of the Chronicle shew that Wessex long remained impatient of the loss of Wiccia. In A.D. 715, a battle is shortly mentioned at a place, usually, and not impossibly, said to be Wanborough, a remarkable elevation within the fork of two great Roman ways a few miles south of Swindon. But our business is with three later entries in the Chronicle, for the three successive years 741, 742, and 743; of which the first for A.D. 741, will be first here submitted as the record of the final subjection of Wiccia, and the establishment of the Bristol Avon as the permanent southern frontier of Mercia. The other two Annals will then be otherwise disposed of.

These are the words of the Chronicle:--

A.D. 741. Now Cuthred succeeded to the West-Saxon kingdom, and held it sixteen years, and he contended hardly with Æthelbald, King of the Mercians.

A.D. 742. Now was a great Synod gathered at Cloveshou, and Æthelbald, King of the Mercians was there, and Cutbert, Archbishop [of Canterbury], and many other wise men.

A.D. 743. Now Æthelbald, King of the Mercians, and Cuthred, King of the West-Saxons fought with the Welsh.

We have in these three Annals a specimen of that condensed form and style, that is common to this ancient text and still more venerable primæval records; and which invites and justifies attempts to interpret them by the help of any existing external monuments.

There are still known in England thirteen dedications of churches or chapels in the name of St. Werburgh, although, perhaps, not more than half of them are any longer above ground.[9] Seven, however, out of the thirteen are within the counties of Stafford, Chester, Shropshire, and Derbyshire: that is, they are within the original kingdom of Mercia, wherein, as the posthumous renown of the saint never extended beyond a nation, or rather a dynasty, that long since has been extinct and forgotten, we might have expected to have found them all. But the other six are extraneous, and three of them great stragglers. These must have owed their origin to political and military extensions of the influence of that kingdom, and these, it is intended to show, are found in places where Æthelbald, one of the three Mercian aspirants for English empire, has made good a conquest. This dedication may, therefore, be believed to have been his usual method of making his mark of possession.

St. Werburgh was the daughter of Wulfhere, the second Christian King of Mercia, who was the son of Penda, the last pagan King. Æthelbald was the grandson of Eawa, a brother of Penda, probably the Eoba, who, in the Annales Cambriæ, A.D. 644, is himself called “rex Merciorum;” so that Æthelbald and Werburgh were what we should call second cousins.[10] Wulfhere, A.D. 675, was succeeded by his brother Æthelred, who placed his niece Werburgh at the head of three great convents of women, with a sort of general spiritual charge of the female portion of the newly christianised kingdom. She is said to have died about A.D. 700, for it is noted that on opening her coffin in the year 708, her body, after eight years, was found unaltered, and her vestments undefiled; and from this time, sealed by this reputed miracle, the renown of her sanctity soon grew to beatification; and when, eight years afterwards, her kinsman Æthelbald began his reign, she had achieved the reputation and precedence of the latest national saint. She was, however, one of a family of whom many of the women have transmitted their names, from immediately after their deaths to our own times, attached to religious foundations. Among these, that of her aunt, St. Audry, still lives in Ely Cathedral: and this example may serve as a crutch to those who find it hard to realise the unbroken duration of churches, with these names, direct from the very ages in which the persons who bore them lived; for the continuity of this name at Ely is a matter of open and undisputed history, unaided by mere inference, such as our less conspicuous case requires. There are some, also, who stumble at finding all the female saints of particular provinces to have been members of one royal family. But of this we have an analogy pervading the entire area of our own every-day life, in the active assistance in all benevolent purposes, received by the clergyman of nearly every parish, from the leisured daughters of the more wealthy families. In those missionary days, the kingdoms of the newly-converted rulers were the only parishes, and the king and his family were as the squire and his family are now; and the greater lustre, which then shone out around the name of each, was as that of a little candle, in their wider world, compared with what would be its effect in a general illumination now. The earlier British churches have presented us with the same phenomenon. The numerous progeny, of children and grand-children, of Brychan of Brecknock, have nearly all left their names in many churches in South Wales, and even in the opposite promontory of Cornwall and Devon.

The historical facts of the name and local fame of this royal personage are all that we are concerned with. Otherwise, in some later times, it has been adorned with the usual amount of miraculous fable. The most notable of the miracles credited to her is, that one of her corn-fields being continually ravaged by flocks of geese, at her mere command they went into voluntary exile. As this is said to have happened near Chester, it is easy to refer the story to the monks there, who alone were interested in gilding her shrine with it; and her relics were not translated there till nearly two hundred years after her death. At any rate, the citizens of Bristol are living witnesses that her name is no safeguard of her heritage against the devastations of wasteful bipeds, who are not only unwise, but also unfledged. This imputed miracle is more transparent than is always the case with such embellishments of the lives of those who were the first to accept the new faith, and to promote it with active earnestness. In it may, at once, be discerned an ordinary incident of her pastoral or predial economy, exaggerated to a miracle in an age which preferred supernatural to natural causes.

The career of Æthelbald is, of course, more widely known, holding, as it does, a prominent place in the general history of the times. His reign extended from A.D. 716 to 755, and was chiefly employed in extending his sovereignty by the subjugation of neighbouring kingdoms, and by his munificent patronage of the church. In the first year of his reign, he at once showed a disposition to commemorate his own friends, by dedicating churches in their names, by using this method of perpetuating, at Croyland, the recent memory of Guthlac, his kinsman and protector in exile. It seems, however, that the pagan manners of the northern mythology are not purged for several generations after conversion: but, as appears from another example, of the practical paganism of the Dukes of Normandy, down to our William the Mamzer, unless attended with more than the average cruelty and injustice of the times, meet with only a qualified reproach, until they are in conflict with church discipline and law. The celebrated severe, but friendly and respectful epistolary rebuke from Bonifatius,[11] Archbishop of Mainz, contains a heavy indictment against both Æthelbald and his predecessor Coelred, and their courts, while it acknowledges his prosperity, munificence to the church, and his just administration.

* * * * *

Having these specially national or tribal circumstances in view, it is thought that the six dedications of St. Werburgh that are found beyond the original Mercia must have had special causes, which it is believed can be found in the transactions that are recorded in the three successive Annals of the Chronicle above recited; and that the dedications and the Annals will therefore be found to mutually account for each other. The seven churches within Mercia, without any doubt each has its own history, mostly connected with Æthelbald: perhaps all except the present Chester Cathedral, which arose out of the translation, nearly two hundred years later, of her relics to that place, from her original shrine in one of her three convents. But these home dedications do not fall within our purview, which is limited to the wanderers.

When the Chronicle, A.D. 741, says that Cuthred of Wessex contended with Æthelbald of Mercia, it can only mean that he attempted a reprisal of some portion of Wiccia: but it appears from the Annal of 743, that in the two years the combatants had become allies. The frontier between Mercia and Wessex had been finally determined; and there we find the name of Æthelbald’s recently beatified kinswoman, thrice repeated, along his own north bank of the Avon--at Bath, at Bristol, and at Henbury. It should be noticed that otherwise than these three, thus placed with an obvious purpose, none whatever are found throughout the whole length and breadth of Wiccia, the other seven being scattered within Mercia proper.[12] It is hence inferred that these three dedications are contemporary with each other, and the immediate result of the transaction of A.D. 741. It may also be worth noting that one of the still surviving dedications of St. Werburgh within Mercia, at Warburton, is similarly situated within the northern frontier, the river Mersey; and probably records a similar result of Æthelbald’s inroad of Northumbria, entered in the Chronicle at the earlier date of 737: also, according to Bæda, A.D. 740.[13]

The St. Werburgh at Bath is no longer in existence, but its site is still on record. It was less than a quarter of a mile north of the Roman town, and about a quarter of a mile from the departure of the western Roman road, now called Via Julia, from the Foss Way, and between them, and very near to both.[14]