Mercia

The Midland kingdom that dominated England for a century and then lost everything to the Danes. Mercia's name means the border people, and it grew along the Welsh march and the Trent valley, in country with no natural frontier - which meant it had to be aggressive to exist. Penda, the last pagan king of any consequence in England, killed two Northumbrian kings in battle and made Mercia the leading power before dying at the Winwaed in 655. Its height came under Aethelbald and then Offa, who ruled from 757 to 796, styled himself king of the whole of England in some charters, corresponded with Charlemagne as something close to an equal, and issued a silver penny coinage that set the English standard for centuries. Offa's Dyke, the earthwork running most of the length of the Welsh border, is the largest construction project in early medieval Britain and still marks much of the line. Mercian supremacy ended at Ellandun in 825, and the Great Heathen Army destroyed the kingdom outright in 874, leaving the east under Danish rule. What remained survived as a West Saxon dependency under Aethelflaed, Alfred's daughter, who fortified towns and campaigned against the Danes in her own name. Repton and Tamworth were its principal centres. The Staffordshire Hoard was buried in its heartland. Lichfield was briefly raised to an archbishopric by Offa to escape Canterbury's authority. The kingdom's name survives in the modern Midlands. Offa's coins carry his portrait in Roman style. Aethelflaed is one of very few early medieval women to have ruled a kingdom in her own right.

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