Free Offa and the Mercian Wars by Chris Peers

international brotherhood among the nobility, despite the Mercians’ unchivalrous behaviour towards their victim: Hlothere’s involvement came about because Imma had once been in the service of his aunt, the Northumbrian queen Etheldreda.
    A conclusion which is increasingly finding favour is that most seventh- and eighth-century armies consisted entirely of professional or semi-professional warriors, the thegns belonging either directly to the king or to one of his noble vassals. Where Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives specific dates for the campaigns and battles which they mention it is clear that they usually occurred between August and November – in other words, during the period between the gathering of the grain harvest and the onset of winter weather. This need not mean, however, that the men who fought these wars were not available earlier because they were personally involved in the harvesting. The need to collect supplies of bread to accompany the army, and the hope of seizing the enemy’s grain without the labour of harvesting it oneself, would be sufficient to account for this timing.
    Ine imposed fines for avoiding military service, depending on the rank of the offender. A gesith paid 120 shillings and forfeited his land if he held any; if he had no land he was fined half that amount. A ceorl had to pay thirty shillings. However, the code does not specifically state that all ceorls had to serve, or in what capacity. A man who could afford to pay thirty shillings would in any case have belonged to the wealthiest stratum of his class, and was probably obliged to fight as an exceptional condition of a particular grant of land. Armies would therefore have been predominantly aristocratic, with a much higher proportion of men carrying expensive swords and wearing armour than the occurrence of these items in the population as a whole would suggest. They might also have been all mounted on horseback and so highly mobile, although Imma’s story shows that peasants would accompany large expeditions to transport supplies, presumably in carts, which must have slowed the army down. Small raiding parties would probably have been expected to live off the land.
    What do we mean, though, by ‘large’ and ‘small’ in this context? How big were the armies which fought the Mercian Wars? Writers on this subject usually quote from Ine’s laws, which defined any armed force of over thirty-five men as a ‘here’ or raiding army. This does not of course mean that this was a typical size for armies, merely that it was considered too big to be dismissed as a mere band of robbers, and so perhaps required the attention of the king rather than being left to local leaders to deal with. It does suggest that the ‘thousands’ of casualties in the battle accounts of Henry of Huntingdon and others are wild exaggerations, but another of Henry’s observations may receive unexpected support. He was aware of the paradox that many of the Anglo-Saxon battles which he describes lasted a whole day and involved heavy losses on both sides without leading to a decisive result, whereas the conflicts of his own day were usually over in a much shorter time. His explanation was that the warriors of an earlier age had been stronger, and possessed more stamina and courage, than their feeble descendants of the twelfth century, who were liable to run as soon as the fight turned against them. This sounds like a typical eulogy for the ‘good old days’ when ‘men were men’, but might have a basis in fact. Henry was writing at the time of the ‘Anarchy’ of King Stephen’s reign, when England had been relatively peaceful for two generations, and its military caste may indeed have lacked the professionalism of the veterans who had fought in the relentless wars of Penda, Aethelbald and Offa. Perhaps in their time men such as Imma would have been instantly distinguishable from