Bretwalda

Bretwalda is an Old English word meaning 'ruler of Britain'. It is only recorded in the late 9th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 829. It is given to some of the rulers of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from the 5th century onwards who had achieved overlordship of some or all of the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

The rulers of Mercia were generally the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kings from the mid 7th century to the early 9th century but are not accorded the title of bretwalda by the Chronicle, which had an anti-Mercian bias. The Annals of Wales continued to recognise the kings of Northumbria as "Kings of the Saxons" until the death of Osred I of Northumbria in 716.

Bretwaldas

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 827 (corrected by historians to 829), records the conquest of Mercia by Ecgberht, King of Wessex, making him king of all England south of the Humber. Ecgberht is described as the eighth bretwalda, ruler of Britain, and the eight are listed with descriptions:^[2]

Ælle, king of the South Saxons
Ceawlin, king of the West Saxons
Æthelberht, king of the people of Kent
Rædwald, king of the East Angles
Edwin, king of the people of Northumbria
Oswald, Edwin's successor
Oswiu, Oswald's brother
Ecgberht, king of the West Saxons

The list is taken from Bede's list in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, of seven kings who ruled over the southern kingdoms, with the addition of Ecgberht's name.^[3]^[4]

Etymology

The first syllable of the term bretwalda may be related to Briton or Britain. The second element is taken to mean 'ruler' or 'sovereign'. Thus, one interpretation might be 'sovereign of Britain'.^[5]^[6] Otherwise, the word may be a compound containing the Old English adjective brytten ('broad', from the verb breotan meaning 'to break' or 'to disperse'),^[7] an element also found in the terms bryten rice ('kingdom'), bryten-grund ('the wide expanse of the earth') and bryten cyning ('king whose authority was widely extended').^[8]

The latter etymology was first suggested by John Mitchell Kemble^[9] who alluded that "of six manuscripts in which this passage occurs, one only reads Bretwalda: of the remaining five, four have Bryten-walda or -wealda, and one Breten-anweald,^[9] which Kemble translates as 'ruler of all these islands'; and that bryten- is a common prefix to words meaning 'wide or general dispersion' and that the similarity to the word bretwealh ('Briton') is "merely accidental".^[9]

Contemporary use

The only contemporary use of the term Bretwalda is in manuscript A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 829. Manuscript A is a recension of the original "common stock" of the 890s, and in the view of the historian Sarah Foot Bretwalda is unlikely to have been the original spelling.^[10] Other manuscripts of the Chronicle used similar terms such as Brytenwuldu and Bretenanwealda in the entry for 829. The term is also used in some spurious documents.^[11]

The historian Simon Keynes comments:

Bede's list is best understood as the product of personal reflection on his part. It is likely, in the same way, that the chronicler's use of the term "bretwalda" did not represent Ecgberht's succession to a recognised office, with powers and responsibilities particular to itself, but rather a flight of fancy, important to the chronicler but of no real importance in the unfolding course of political development.^[4]

Foot argues that "where Bede had envisaged a wide-ranging power, the chronicler appears to have conceived of an office, or wide rulership."^[10]

Modern interpretation by historians

For some time, the existence of the word bretwalda in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was based in part on the list given by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica, led historians to think that there was perhaps a "title" held by Anglo-Saxon overlords. This was particularly attractive as it would lay the foundations for the establishment of an English monarchy. The 20th-century historian Frank Stenton said of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler that "his inaccuracy is more than compensated by his preservation of the English title applied to these outstanding kings".^[12] He argued that the term bretwalda "falls into line with the other evidence which points to the Germanic origin of the earliest English institutions".

Over the later 20th century, this assumption was increasingly challenged. Patrick Wormald interpreted it as "less an objectively realized office than a subjectively perceived status" and emphasised the partiality of its usage in favour of Southumbrian rulers.^[13] In 1991, Steven Fanning argued that "it is unlikely that the term ever existed as a title or was in common usage in Anglo-Saxon England".^[14]^: 24 The fact that Bede never mentioned a special title for the kings in his list implies that he was unaware of one.^[14]^: 23 In 1995, Simon Keynes observed that "if Bede's concept of the Southumbrian overlord, and the chronicler's concept of the 'Bretwalda', are to be regarded as artificial constructs, which have no validity outside the context of the literary works in which they appear, we are released from the assumptions about political development which they seem to involve... we might ask whether kings in the eighth and ninth centuries were quite so obsessed with the establishment of a pan-Southumbrian state".^[15]

Modern interpretations view the concept of bretwalda overlordship as complex and an important indicator of how a 9th-century chronicler interpreted history and attempted to insert the increasingly powerful Saxon kings into that history.

Overlordship

A complex array of dominance and subservience existed during the Anglo-Saxon period. A king who used charters to grant land in another kingdom indicated such a relationship. If the other kingdom were fairly large, as when the Mercians dominated the East Anglians, the relationship would have been more equal than in the case of the Mercian dominance of the Hwicce, which was a comparatively small kingdom. Mercia was arguably the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom for much of the late 7th though 8th centuries, though Mercian kings are missing from the two main "lists". For Bede, Mercia was a traditional enemy of his native Northumbria and he regarded powerful kings such as the pagan Penda as standing in the way of the Christian conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. Bede omits them from his list, even though it is evident that Penda held a considerable degree of power. Similarly powerful Mercia kings such as Offa are missed out of the West Saxon Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which sought to demonstrate the legitimacy of their kings to rule over other Anglo-Saxon peoples.

Notes

^ O'Brien O'Keeffe, Katherine, ed. (2001). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A Collaborative Edition, 5, MS C. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-85991-491-8.
^ Whitelock, Dorothy, ed. (1979). English Historical Documents, Volume 1, c. 500–1042 (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. p. 186. ISBN 978-0-415-14366-0.
^ Bede (1994). McClure, Judith; Collins, Roger (eds.). The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 77–78. ISBN 978-0-19-953723-5.
^ ^a ^b Keynes, Simon (2014). "Bretwalda or Brytenwlda". In Lapidge, Michael; Blair, John; Keynes, Simon; Scragg, Donald (eds.). The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (2nd ed.). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. pp. 76–77. ISBN 978-0-470-65632-7.
^ Webster, "Kingly titles", Online dictionary, archived from the original on 16 May 2008, retrieved 16 September 2009.
^ Dunham, Samuel Astley (1834), Europe During the Middle Ages, Books.
^ St Clair Feilden, H. (2009), A Short Constitutional History of England, BiblioBazaar, p. 33, ISBN 978-1-103-28759-8.
^ Kendall, Calvin B.; Wells, Peter S. (1992), Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo, University of Minnesota Press, p. 111, ISBN 978-0-8166-2024-1
^ ^a ^b ^c Kemble, John Mitchell (1876). The Saxons in England: A History of the English Commonwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest. Vol. II. London: Bernard Quaritch. pp. 19–21.
^ ^a ^b Foot, Sarah (1996). "The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest". Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 6: 40 n. 65. ISSN 0080-4401.
^ Whitelock, English Historical Documents, p. 186 n. 2
^ Stenton, F. M. (1971), Anglo-Saxon England (3rd ed.), Oxford: University Press, pp. 34–35.
^ Wormald, Patrick, Bede, Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum, pp. 118–119.
^ ^a ^b Fanning, Steven (1991), "Bede, Imperium, and the Bretwaldas", Speculum, vol. 66.
^ Keynes, Simon (1995), "England, 700–900", in McKitterick, R. (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. II, c. 700 – c. 900, Cambridge: University Press, p. 39.

References

Fanning, Steven. "Bede, Imperium, and the Bretwaldas." Speculum 66 (1991): 1–26.
Wormald, Patrick. "Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum." In Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. P. Wormald et al. Oxford, 1983. 99–129.