Egbert of Wessex
Egbert of Wessex was the West Saxon king who broke the Mercian supremacy over the English at Ellandun in 825, took Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex from Mercia in the same year, received the submission of Mercia itself and of Northumbria in 829, was listed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as the eighth ruler of all the southern English, and founded the line of kings, his grandson Alfred among them, that ruled Wessex and then England without a break until 1066. He was of the royal kindred but of a branch that had not held the throne, and his father Ealhmund had been briefly king in Kent. Offa of Mercia and Beorhtric of Wessex drove him out about 789, and he spent three years, or thirteen in another reading of the Chronicle, at the court of Charlemagne, which is where a West Saxon may have learned how a king ran a kingdom. Beorhtric died in 802, poisoned by his wife in the story Asser tells, and Egbert came home and took the throne, beating off a Mercian raid the same day. For twenty years the Chronicle records nothing but a campaign into Cornwall in 815. Then in 825 the Mercian king Beornwulf marched into Wiltshire and Egbert beat him at Ellandun, near Swindon, in a battle the Chronicle remembers for the slaughter. He sent his son Aethelwulf into Kent with an army and the Kentish, the South Saxons, the Surrey men and the East Saxons submitted; the East Angles killed Beornwulf and asked Egbert's protection. In 829 he conquered Mercia and everything south of the Humber, struck coins at London as king of the Mercians, and led an army to Dore on the Northumbrian border, where the Northumbrians came to terms. Mercia got its king back within a year, but the southern kingdoms never went back. His last decade was the first of the Danish wars. The Danes beat him at Carhampton in 836, and in 838 he beat them and their Cornish allies at Hingston Down. He died in 839, having taken care to have the West Saxon council confirm the succession to his son, and was buried at Winchester.
- Lived: 770 CE – 839 CE
- Nationality: Anglo-Saxon
- Roles: king, monarch
