The most detailed historical record illuminating the identities and activities of early English kingdoms is provided by Bede in the Historia Ecclesiastica, a work which, although valuable, is highly reflective of its author's own monastic concerns and milieu. Bede described how from the late fifth to the late seventh centuries, a series of kings held 'empire' over all the kingdoms south of the Humber. Three of them were Northumbrian and were thus overlords of all the English people. Alternative sources, such as the epic poem Beowulf, allow the thought world of
This warrior nobility to be investigated. The hegemonies established by early English kings could fall as rapidly as they rose. Success depended on war, the acquisition of booty and rewarding of followers. Feuds, assassinations and civil wars marked the early history of Northumbria, Wessex and Mercia. Successful kingdoms were those which were able to expand at the expense of their Celtic neighbours. By the eighth century the dominance previously held by Northumbria was on the wane and Mercia began to conquer all the kingdoms of the Midlands and the South-east. The warlike Offa (757-96) was the first king to issue a royal coinage on a really significant scale and to profit from the commercial consciousness developing in southern England. He used monastic property to consolidate royal power in newly subordinated kingdoms holding a tight stranglehold over Kent and temporarily appointing an archbishop at Lichfield. However, the Mercians were to lose their hegemony with a defeat by the rising kingdom of Wessex at
Ellendun in 825. The most enduring legacy left by Offa was the great dyke he built on the Welsh border which was less a negotiated frontier and more of a basis for future raids.
The ninth and tenth centuries were marked by the impact of Viking raids. In 865 the Great Army reduced a land that had once held several kingdoms to one where Wessex alone survived as a focus of English resistance under Alfred. Eastern England was marked by permanent Danish settlement. Vikings captured York in 867 and East Anglia in 869. In 874 the eastern part of Mercia became Danish territory. English fortunes revived when Alfred won a notable victory at Edington in 878 which was marked by King Guthrum's acceptance of Christianity and a treaty which created a frontier dividing England roughly along a diagonal line from Chester to London. This was to be a key area in the struggle for subsequent control of England under Alfred's descendants. By 924 Edward the Elder had overrun the five Danish boroughs of Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham, Stamford and Leicester.
Athelstan (924-39), Edmund (939-46) and Eadred (946-55) eventually secured the submission of the north despite facing formidable opponents such as Eric Bloodaxe. By the end of his reign Eadred ruled a united England from within a vastly expanded Wessex.
Separate regions were welded into a single political society through the use of ealdormen although the north remained much more independent than the old unit of Mercia.
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