Make Mercia Great Again

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Now is the moment to make Mercia great again. That's the message that Max Adams, author of the Mercian Chronicles, wants us to take on board. In conversation with David Musgrove, In today's episode, Max explains why Mercia has been overlooked in comparison to its neighbouring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Wessex, and argues that we ought to know more about its role in the development of England.

So let's get straight to it. Why should we know more about and care more about the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia? As a Northumbrian exile, I'm very conscious of a Northumbrian bias, which partly comes from the Venerable Bede, of course, the great early medieval historian. And then there's a sort of southern Wessex bias that comes to us from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. So we know a lot about the famous kings and queens of Wessex and Northumbria, but, you know, I've been conscious for a long time that there's a period in between the, I suppose, the Golden Age of Bede and Lindisfarne in Northumbria and King Oswald and the age of the Vikings, which is where

We have the story of King Alfred fighting back against the foreign invaders. In the middle, there's this period where a tribal barbarian society emerging from the end of the outwash of the Roman Empire suddenly gets its act together and begins to see how a state might be built, a nation almost, might be built from the fragments of the tribal peoples who have survived the Roman Empire or emerged from it. And the giant, of course, among these early medieval Mercian figures is King Other, and yet the age of Mercian supremacy, when Mercia really is the maker and shaker and pusher, the driver of this move towards a state, comes from the people he inherits Mercia from in the eighth century. While Bede is writing about the decline of Northumbria, Mercia is busy doing things in the Midlands, coalescing into a kingdom that is militarily strong, that begins to build a sort of network of trade, rediscovers some of the assets, the infrastructure that the Romans left behind, and manages to construct this idea of a literate Christian state that

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