Chris Peers - OFFA AND THE MERCIAN WARS: The Rise and Fall of the First Great English Kingdom

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It was the misfortune of the ancient royal line of Mercia that it ceased to produce great war leaders just at the time when the English people, gradually coalescing into a single nation under the pressure of the Viking invasions, needed them most. Hence a genealogical accident has led historians ever since to see Wessex as the true precursor of England, and to this day accounts of the English (and later British) monarchy still tend to begin with Alfred the Great. The most eminent of his predecessors men such as Raedwald, Edwin, Penda, and even Offa himself remain in relative obscurity. In the popular imagination they appear if at all as barbarian warlords, ruling over primitive kingdoms that just happened to have been located on what became English territory, but which had little in common with England as we know it today. And yet things might have turned out very differently.

If Offa had left behind a long-lived heir and a secure line of succession, or if Aethelflaed had been succeeded by the warlike son that the times seemed to require, the political centre of gravity might have remained in Mercia for much longer. It is even possible that if the Anglo-Saxons had been united sooner under Mercian leadership they might have been better able to resist both the Vikings and the Normans. It is hard to imagine an alternative history in which Tamworth or Lichfield became the capital of a united England the economic dominance of the port of London would eventually have overshadowed all rival political centres in any case but the role of the Mercian kings as the first to exercise real authority over the Anglo-Saxons south of the Humber might have been more widely acknowledged.