Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ Mercian heartland, was elevated into an archbishopric, with its incumbent safely in Offa’s pocket.

      The creation of the archbishopric of Lichfield opened the way to another project that was even closer to Offa’s heart: to ensure the succession of his son, Ecgfrith. He proclaimed him king of Mercia in his own lifetime; he also decided that he should be anointed. The ceremony also took place in 787. We do not know where or who performed it. Perhaps it was the new archbishop of Lichfield. Or perhaps the papal legates. Or perhaps, since Offa never did things by halves, it was both together.

      At any rate, Ecgfrith’s is the first recorded consecration in English history, and it deployed the whole panoply of the Church to declare that the boy was inviolably royal and his father’s unchallengeable successor. The ceremony was a Christian adaptation of the inauguration rites of Old Testament kings. But, as so often in Anglo-Saxon England, it was a hybrid, since it combined Judaeo-Christian anointing with older Anglo-Saxon traditions that went back to Sutton Hoo and beyond. For the boy was invested, not with a crown, but with a cynehelm, a royal helmet.

      Offa’s handling of the coinage was almost as novel. He issued a new-style coinage, in which the coins were bigger and thinner, had a better bullion content, were stamped with his image and prominently displayed his name and title of Rex M[erciorum] (‘king of the Mercians’) in bold capital letters. Offa was not quite the first English king to mint such a coinage. But his is incomparably the most important, in terms of both quality and quantity. Millions of coins seem to have been struck and they show an exuberant variety of ‘portrait’ types: some use Roman models; others appear to be based on the representations of the kings of Israel in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Obviously, Offa cared about the image-making power of the coinage. But it was its economic and fiscal functions that mattered more. The numbers struck reflected Offa’s takeover of the wealth of the south-east; they helped that wealth to grow, especially by trade with Francia, and, in turn, they allowed Offa to tap the burgeoning economy for his own purposes.

      A similar balance between image-making and practicality is to be found in the greatest achievement of his reign and the work for which he is still popularly remembered: Offa’s Dyke. It originally stretched from sea to sea along the Welsh frontier. This is a distance of 135 miles or double the length of Hadrian’s Wall. It consists of a ditch, originally six feet deep, backed by an earth rampart that was about twenty-five feet high. The rampart was probably reinforced with timber, and its siting displays great tactical ingenuity, commanding, as it does, long views into Wales.

      But what was it for? Did it mark an agreed frontier, as an act of peace? Or was it a warlike gesture: to defend Mercia against Welsh attacks and to provide Offa with a forward base from which to launch his own campaigns against the Welsh? The latter now seems much more likely. In which case the Dyke was ‘a work of almost studied contempt for the Welsh’. For, by a strange reversal of roles, its building would suggest that it is the former Anglo-Saxon invaders who now see themselves as rich and civilized while the Welsh have become wild, untrustworthy raiders. In short, it is the Welsh, the Dyke says, who are the barbarians now.

      But does that mean that Offa had gone the whole hog and imagined himself in turn as an imperial Roman? There is some evidence to support this view. And certainly, it is what happened to the Anglo-Saxons’ Frankish cousins across the Channel. For these are the years of the Carolingian revolution. It took place in two stages: the first royal, the second imperial. In 751, Pepin the Short, who had usurped the Frankish throne, was made king by the new royal inauguration ceremony of anointing. Forty-nine years later, his son Charlemagne, who had succeeded his father in 768 and had expanded the frontiers of Francia to run from the banks of the River Ebro to those of the Elbe, was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope on Christmas morning 800. The renewed empire was intended to be both Roman and Christian and Charlemagne took himself seriously in both capacities: he was soldier of the Faith and reformer of the Church, on the one hand, and, on the other, restorer of the Roman Empire, whose inheritance of law, language, literature, architecture and forms of government he was determined to revive.

      Pepin and Charlemagne were thus Offa’s contemporaries and the latter at least was well known to him. They had diplomatic relations; unsuccessfully negotiated a marriage alliance and corresponded. The only surviving letter from a European ruler to an Anglo-Saxon king is from Charlemagne to Offa in 796. In it he recognized Offa ‘to be not only a most strong protector of your earthly country, but also a most devout defender of the holy faith’. He also addressed Offa as ‘brother’ and acknowledged him as an equal. Offa, for his part, was influenced by Charlemagne’s revival of the apparatus of Roman power. But there is no sign that Offa understood or imitated its cultural dimension.

      On the other hand, Englishmen played an important role in the Carolingian achievement and one, Alcuin, who was born in Northumbria and educated at York, was a central figure in the regime as a sort of minister for culture and education. Finally, Offa’s takeover of the southeast of England brought him into close and direct commercial contact with Francia. This is why he modelled his changes in the currency on Pepin’s monetary reforms. Pepin also provided the ultimate model for Ecgfrith’s anointing. But there was a more immediate input since Alcuin, acting as envoy from Charlemagne, had accompanied the papal legates on their mission to England in 786. He played a major part in the ensuing Church Council; probably attended Ecgfrith’s coronation and returned to England on another diplomatic errand a few years later. Alcuin’s correspondence thus provides a sort of commentary on the apogee of Offa’s power and on the nemesis which followed soon after.

      At first, all seemed well. Offa was, Alcuin wrote in one letter, ‘the glory of Britain’; in another, he saw him as having ‘the kingdom … of all the English’ within his grasp. And in Ecgfrith he had provided a worthy heir. Alcuin called the boy ‘my son’; enjoined him to learn ‘authority’ from his father and ‘compassion’ from his mother and saw him as ‘the hope of many’. It is not hard to see why. For, irrespective of Ecgfrith’s personal qualities, Alcuin interpreted his anointing, which he may have helped to devise, as the promise of a new, better monarchy: more ordered, more Christian and better attuned to its responsibilities to the people of God. In short, Alcuin seems to have hoped that the ceremony of 787 would lead to a renewed kingdom of the English, just as the Carolingian revolution had restored the kingdom of the Franks and would, in the fullness of time, revive the Roman Empire itself.

      But it was not to be. Offa died on 29 July 796. Ecgfrith duly succeeded. But he died less than six months later, on 17 December. The hopes had been cheated and ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king’ had failed at its first English test. Alcuin was forced to ask why. His answer was that the sins of the father had been visited on the son. ‘For you know very well’, he wrote to a leading Mercian noble, ‘how much blood his father shed to secure the kingdom on his son.’

      There were sins of omission on Offa’s part as well. Though Alcuin had expressed his delight that Offa was ‘so intent on education’, there is no evidence that it came to very much. Certainly, there is nothing to compare with the Carolingian or the Northumbrian achievement: there is no Mercian renaissance or chronicle, no Life of Offa, no writings by the king himself. In short, if Offa were attracted to ideas of empire, it was to imperium in its simplest, crudest sense as the mere absoluteness of power. His conquest of the south-east, his construction of Offa’s Dyke, his bloodlettings and regicides can all be read as embodying that. But it was not enough. Indeed, in the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, it may have been worse than useless. Or, in Alcuin’s own words: ‘this was not a strengthening of the kingdom but its ruin’.

      But we must not anticipate. The man who emerged victorious from the power struggle which followed the royal deaths of 796 was Cenwulf. He, at best, was only a distant member of the royal kindred. But his style was pure Offa, as his treatment of Kent shows. The Kentishmen took advantage of the succession crisis and the consequent temporary eclipse of Mercian power to rebel and erect a certain Eadbert as their own king once more. But Cenwulf exacted a terrible revenge. The revolt was suppressed and Eadbert taken СКАЧАТЬ