The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the Birth of the Anglo-Saxon State, AD 630–918 Max Adams
Event details
The eighth century has for long been a neglected backwater in British history: a shadow land between the death of Bede and the triumphs of Ælfred, which saw the rise of Wessex as the dominant Anglo-Saxon kingdom and the eventual unification of England.
But before the hegemony of Wessex, the kingdom of Mercia - spread across a broad swathe of central England - was the dynamic heart of a kingship that discovered the means to exercise central political authority for the first time since the Roman empire. That authority was used to construct trading networks and markets; develop strong economic, cultural and political links with the Continent, and lay the foundations for a system of co-ordinated defence that would be reinvented by Ælfred at the end of the ninth century. This is also the period in which England's much-loved and studied place names were largely formed and when the geography of our parishes was crystallised.
Two kings, Æthelbald (716-757) and Offa (757-796) dominate the political landscape of the rising power of Mercia. During their reigns monasteries became power houses of royal patronage, economic enterprise and trade. Offa constructed his grandiose dyke along the borders of the warlike Welsh Kingdoms and, more subtly, spread his message of political superiority through coinage bearing his image. But Æthelbald and Offa between them built something with an even more substantial legacy - a geography of medieval England. And they engineered a set of tensions between kingship, landholding and church that were to play out dramatically at the dawn of the Viking Age.
Join Max Adams, author of The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the Birth of the Anglo-Saxon State, AD 630–918, as he re-connects the worlds of Oswald, Bede and Ælfred in an absorbing examination of the landscape, politics and society of a fascinating century of change.
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You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
Portrait image credit: Kona Macphee, Royal Literary Fund
About the speaker
Max Adams is a writer, archaeologist and woodsman whose work explores themes of landscape, knowledge and human connectedness with the earth. He is the author of Admiral Collingwood, Aelfred's Britain, Trees of Life, the bestselling The King in the North, In the Land of Giants and The First Kingdom. His latest book is The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the Birth of the Anglo-Saxon State, AD 630–918.
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