Penda of Mercia

The Horde was buried sometime between 655 and 675 CE, a tumultuous time for Mercia.

King Penda had been slain in 655, an event that began a power struggle in the region.

The items are believed to be spoils of battle.

Perhaps the items were buried to keep them out of the hands of their owner's foes.

Unhappily, the virtues of the king and the affection of his subjects were no protection from misfortune, and the checkered life went down in ruin and defeat.

Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, a wretch inured to crime, entered into a confederacy with Cadwallagh, King of North Wales, and, after vowing to compass the destruction of all the Christians in the island, marched against King Edwin.

the royal northumbrian was neither slow to mass his troops nor meet his archenemy but the triumph that had so often attended his arms was not vouchsafed in this inauspicious hour and when the terrible waves of battle rolled against each other at the village of hatfield near doncaster In the October days of 633, his throne and crown went down in the fierce storm, though brave men flung themselves before his banners and struggled with the savage foe as long as life lingered in their hacked and bleeding frame.

Falling with honour in the van of battle, Edwin breathed out his life amidst the roar of the contending hosts, and so the day darkened ere the night closed on Christian Northumbria.

Meanwhile, Mercia, centered around the Trent Valley, was a different kind of power.

Its monarchs, first Penda and then Offa, cultivated an ambitious overlordship over all kingdoms south of the Humber.

Offa's reign, circa seven fifty-seven to seven ninety-six, saw the construction of the Great Dyke against Welsh rivals, signaling Mercia's desire to assert political supremacy through both military and infrastructural means.

Mercian influence reached beyond the borders, as evidenced by their patronage of church foundations such as Lichfield and even a brief archbishopric.

He negotiated alliances with neighboring kingdoms while maintaining an assertive stance against Mercian incursions.

So, even though the annals remember him mainly for his martyrdom at Maserfield against Penda of Mercia, what often slips under the radar is how Oswald's brief reign cemented a unified Northumbria that could then project religious and cultural influence into the rest of Britain.

If you move forward a few centuries to thirteenth century England, there's a man named Robert Grosseteste, whose name might not ring bells with casual history buffs, but who was, in many ways, a precursor to modern science.

He served as Bishop of Lincoln and was an astronomer, mathematician, and natural philosopher, the kind of Renaissance man that the later universities would only see again at Oxford during the sixteenth century.

Welcome to the Proper British History Podcast.

Today we explore what really happened when a king went mad and how Britain had to decide who would rule.

George III's breakdown began in the late eighteenth century with a wave of seizures and erratic behavior that left his advisors scrambling to keep order.

The king's servants reported shouting, confusion, and bouts of extreme agitation that were unprecedented for an English monarch.

Contemporary papers even suggested he might have been poisoned or possessed.

These episodes continued into the seventeen nineties, and by eighteen oh one George III was declared mad in public terms.

Treatments were largely empirical.

Physicians employed cold baths, opium tinctures, and early versions of hydroporphyrin therapy, but none proved effective against the neurological flare-ups.