Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, Episode 3, The Mercian Supremacy.

We left the situation last time, with a brief period of civil war that brought to the throne

of Mercian a young prince called Offer, of the line of Pender's brother Ayoa.

His predecessors had been able to claim a degree of dominance over the Kingdom's south

of the Humber, but all that was now gone.

Or Mercian control over East Anglia and the East Saxons anyway, and in Kent, Ethelbert

II had re-established the line of Oysuk, some of Hengast, independent of Mercian control.

Ethelbert II was an interesting case between the two kingdoms to the west, in modern-day

summer setting Gloucestershire, with an area the control of which flipped flopped between

the two.

An under Ethelbert, Mercian had dominated.

But in fact, Wessex held the older claim, and when Ethelbert died at the hands of his bodyguards,

the new king of Wessex Kuhnwolf just moved straight back in.

And of course no one south of the Humber managed to tell Northumbria what to do, despite the

fact that the stability of rulers that enjoyed was most definitely now a thing of the past.

Off I was every bit as aggressive and ambitious as Ethelbert.

But his career allows him to lay claim to be the greatest and most magnificent king before

Alfred, and he was to prove that he had a grander and a wider vision than Ethelbert,

and even than Wolfhira.

The question facing him was whether he could succeed where Wolfhira and Ethelbert had promised,

but really failed in the end to fully deliver.

It would also have been lovely to know what Bede would have thought of offer, but sadly

...