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Updated: May 24, 2025
"They may speak for themselves," said the leader, confronting Alfred. "Art thou a Mercian and a friend of King Edgar? Under which king? Speak, or die!" "I seek King Edgar. My name is Alfred, son of Ella of Aescendune." "Who sheltered the men of Wessex, and entertained the impious Edwy in his castle." "We had no power to resist had we wished to do so." "Which you evidently did not.
Through the live-long day Fought the people of Wessex, Unshrinking from toil, While Mercian men, Hurled darts by their side. Fated to die Their ships brought the Danes, Five kings and seven earls, All men of renown, And Scots without number Lay dead on the field. Constantine, hoary warrior, Had small cause to boast. Young in the fight, Mangled and torn, Lay his son on the plain.
The kingdom of Essex was conquered with equal facility, and the East Angles, from their hatred of the Mercian government, which had been established over them by treachery and violence, and probably exercised with tyranny, immediately rose in arms and craved the protection of Egbert.
The crushing defeat at Burford, though it had brought about revolts which stripped Mercia of all the conquests it had made, was far from having broken the Mercian power. Under the long reign of Offa, which went on from 758 to 796, it rose again to all but its old dominion.
All local distinctions, the distinction of Saxon from Mercian, of both from Northumbrian, died away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. The Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new national feeling, of a new patriotism. In his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the defeats of Englishmen by the Danes.
Æthelwealh had got himself into complications with Wessex by accepting the sovereignty of the Isle of Wight and the Meonwaras about Southhampton from the hands of a Mercian conqueror. Perhaps Æthelwealh then repaired the old Roman roads which led from his own ham at Chichester to Portsmouth in Wessex, and broke down the mark, so as to connect his old and his new dominions with one another.
Through the reign of Eadward the Elder it is copious, and a Mercian Chronicle is imbedded in it: it then dies down into a series of scant and jejune entries, broken however with grand battle-songs, till the reign of Æthelred when its fulness returns. Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable mass of historical material for the age of Ælfred and his successors.
This last prince, having made a vow of chastity, notwithstanding his marriage with Keneswitha, a Mercian princess, daughter to Penda, went in pilgrimage to Rome, and shut himself up during the rest of his life in a cloister. Brompton, p. 738, 743. Aella, the founder of the monarchy, left the crown to his son Cissa, who is chiefly remarkable for his long reign of seventy-six years.
Frome, six miles away over the border in Somersetshire and on this same new way to the west, has shaken off its ancient air of bucolic peace and now prints books and weaves cloth and does a little in the manufacture of art metal work. The town, nevertheless, is very pleasant despite its strenuous endeavour to make money in a way Mercian rather than West Saxon.
As it rose I heard the fall of props that had kept it in place, and I bade Sighard have a care. I feared it would let him through suddenly as these props fell; but it had been roughly hinged at one end with thongs. He rose, and he and the Mercian heaved on the door and threw it back.
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