Mercia, kingdom of

An Anglo Saxon kingdom centred on the modern day English counties of Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Southern Derbyshire and North Warwickshire. 'Mercians' meant 'borderers' and was applied presumably because the Mercian kingdom lay between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the east and the Welsh or British kingdoms in the west.

The most significant Mercian rulers were Penda (c.626-55), who first established Mercian power, Aethelbald (716-57) and Offa (757-96). Under the latter Mercian power reached its zenith and it extended its hegemony across East Anglia, into parts of Wales and south of the Thames. This position of dominance in Anglo-Saxon England was ended, first by the rise of Wessex, whose army under Egbert defeated Beornwulf of Mercia at Ellendun in 825, and then by the Danes who settled permanently in Mercia from the 870s. The last independent king of Mercia was Burgred who was expelled in 874, but even he had relied on his alliance with Kings Aethelred and Alfred of Wessex.

Mercia was finally annexed by Wessex in 919 when Edward the Elder seized the daughter of the late Aethelred and Aethelfleda of Mercia, but by this time it had already become, strategically and politically, a part of the neighbouring kingdom.

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