Mercia Av Annie Whitehead

Many people know about Wessex, the ¿Last Kingdom¿ of the Anglo-Saxons to fall to the Northmen, but another kingdom, Mercia, once enjoyed supremacy over not only Wessex, but all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. At its zenith Mercia controlled what is now Birmingham and London ? and the political, commercial paramountcy of the two today finds echoes in the past.Those interested in the period will surely have heard of Penda, Offa, and ¿helfl¿ Lady of the Mercians ? but remarkably there is no single book that tells their story in its entirety, the story of the great kingdom of the Midlands.Historically, the records are in two halves, pre- and post-Viking, in the way they have been preserved. Pre-Viking, virtually all the source material was written by the victims, or perceived victims, of Mercian aggression and expansion. Post-Viking, the surviving documents tend to hail from places which were not sacked or burned by the Northmen, particularly from Wessex, the traditional enemy of Mercia. The