The Anglo-Saxons Divided Their Conquest Into Seven Kingdoms
The Anglo-Saxons created England and gave her their language, but England did not come into being as a country until several hundred years after the Anglo-Saxons’ arrival. In the meantime, they divided their conquered territory amongst themselves into small statelets, which eventually coalesced into seven major kingdoms that came to be known collectively as the “Heptarchy”.
The peoples of those kingdoms – Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria – shared a common language, culture, socio-economic conditions, and a pagan religion. However, the similarities did not keep those kingdoms from being fiercely independent, jealously guarding their own prerogatives, and seeking gains at their neighbors’ expense.
At first, the Anglo-Saxons were focused upon their common enemy, the indigenous Britons, and exerted their energies towards further conquests and expansion at the natives’ expense. Once the initial wave of conquests slowed down, and the borders with the Britons had stabilized, the kingdoms of the Heptarchy began vying amongst themselves for dominance.
Warring against each other became something of a national pastime amongst the Anglo-Saxons, until a king Penda of Mercia (reigned 626 – 655) emerged as the fiercest and of the competing warrior kings. One of the last pagan Anglo-Saxon kings, Penda defeated and personally killed some of his rival kings, and sacrificed the Christian king Oswald of Northumbria to the pagan god Woden.
Penda gave rise to a period known as “The Mercian Supremacy”, during which Mercia dominated the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, without uniting the various kingdoms into a single entity, however. That unification would not arrive until more than a century later, when the catastrophe of the Viking descent upon the Anglo-Saxons, and the resistance it engendered, forged what would become “England”.
