For centuries, after the Romans left, Britain was ruled by the seven kings of the Heptarchy. This was a time of rival realms and rival claimants, a time of petty kingdoms and tribute extracted at the point of a sword. This was a time where might made right, where the most powerful of the kings earned the right to be called the Bretwalda, and where power was gained and wielded through battle. This was a time where kingdoms were overthrown, only to rise again. Somewhere in this ill-documented mess it was also the time of King Arthur, with a heavy emphasis on “maybe”. Not the fictionalized Arthur of the later medieval romances, nor an Arthur like any of the modern versions, each of which offers a gloss only on the accumulated characterization that came before, none ever approaching the reality. As we have noted before, searching for King Arthur is a pyre on which more than one promising historian has burned their career to ash. For the problem is not that we can’t find Arthur for lack of detail. The problem is we know pretty much what happened through these decades and centuries, and nowhere in what we know is there space for this king. Any one of the Bretwalda of the Anglo Saxon centuries could be Arthur. All of them could be, but none of them are. If you need closure as to who this great king really was, when he really existed, then you must understand him as a later creation, taking all that was great from the Bretwaldas (and the Romano-British that came before) and merging them into one character. Header Image: Eighteenth century depiction of Alfred the Great, the last and greatest Bretwald of Anglo Saxon Britain and the first true king over all Anglo Saxons. Source: Samuel Woodforde / Public Domain.
The Anglo Saxon Kings of England: The History of the Before (Part Three)
For the six centuries between the end of Roman occupation and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Britain was not a united kingdom. It was, instead, a mishmash of tribal domains, petty kings and infighting. Chief amongst these were the seven Anglo Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Five of them crowded round the south east of the island: Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. The other two, Mercia and the enormous kingdom of Northumbria, were further west and further north, each as large as the five smaller kingdoms in its own right. The story of these seven kingdoms is the story of Anglo Saxon Britain. Their struggles for power, imperium in the old Roman form, are the backdrop for six hundred years of history. Out of these conflicts arose a series of High Kings of Britain, so called Bretwaldas (Britain rulers) of the Anglo Saxons. These kings, from Kent, Anglia and then for half a century from Northumbria, were elevated almost entirely by their strength in arms. They were, in reality, warlords. Our guide to these less documented times has been the monk Bede, who lived in the seventh and eighth centuries. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People is the clearest and most detailed account of the Bretwaldas, even if Bede himself did not invent the term. Header Image: The Heptarchy of Anglo Saxon England. The kings of Mercia are represented by the central shield with the red saltire cross. Source: John Speed / Public Domain.
