Foreword

A Possible Anglo-Saxon Execution Cemetery at Werg, Mildenhall (Cvnetio), Wiltshire and the Wessex-Mercia Frontier in the Age of King Cynewulf

“…Indeed, it was the ingenious suggestion by Barbara Yorke that the 8th-century king Offa took his own name and that of his dyke from his ancestor that inspired a similar view of the Wansdyke by the author of this paper and one of the editors of this collection.77 Such a process might be read as both ideological in intent, by engaging a workforce in a collective enterprise whose physical outcome was heavily culturally loaded in terms of its naming (after Woden, that former deity transmogrified into an ancestor in the West Saxon Royal Genealogical List), and original in its organisational capacity (perhaps through the much debated use of labour by obligation). 78 If Cynewulf's two grants to Bica were strategic as well as reward-driven in nature, all too little if anything has been identified about what else might have comprised such a defensive effort in the face of Mercian land grabs beyond Wansdyke, but perhaps the grants of Mildenhall and Little Bedwyn provide hints: key landscape locales along the frontier were placed into the hands of faithful and powerful men like Bica.79 Although Mercia has long been known through an examination of its charters to have exacted military obligations (trinoda necessitas) from beneficiaries of land grants from the mid-8th century,80 in Wessex the obligation of military service by the land-owning classes appears to have been automatic at this time. 81 It is useful at this point, then, to reflect on certain other charters belonging to this period issued in the name of Cynewulf, although these documents have among them particular problems of attribution and location.…”

“…The event takes place at the fortified residence of a lady usually held as Cynewulf's mistress. 86 Three particular aspects of the tale are relevant here: it is often considered as a description of the transition of society from a kin-based to a lordship-based one; it provides evidence for fortified estate centres in 8th century Wessex, and its location, although much-speculated upon, is unknown.…”

“…In 779, only a year after the Little Bedwyn grant, Cynewulf lost a fight with the Mercians, now ruled by Offa, at Bensington on the River Thames in Oxfordshire.75 From that point until a further battle in 802-this time between men from Wiltshire and from the kingdom of the Hwicce-at Kempsford in Gloucestershire, also on the River Thames, West Saxon power in the border region was subjugated. From 802 onwards, however, at least Northern Wiltshire and Somerset became permanent territorial gains for Wessex 76.…”