5 - Royal Succession and the Growth of Political Stability in Ninth-Century Wessex

Summary

Domestic politics could prove even more dangerous than war to an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon king. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's tale of the death of King Cynewulf of Wessex is a case in point. After a reign of almost thirty years, Cynewulf fell victim to the vengeance of a discontented West Saxon noble, the brother of his deposed predecessor. In 786 he was ambushed and murdered in an attempted coup d'état. The killer, Cyneheard, and eighty-four of his supporters were then slaughtered by the late king's household warriors in what one might call an unsuccessful Dark Age ‘election’. The throne of Wessex passed to a nobleman named Beorhtric, whose relationship to his predecessor is unknown, though the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle assures us that ‘his true paternal ancestry’ went back to Cerdic, the semi-legendary early sixth-century founder of the West Saxon kingship.

These confusing and bloody events arose from the uncertain nature of royal succession in the kingdoms of eighth- and ninth-century England. As David Dumville and Barbara Yorke, among others, have demonstrated, any man who claimed descent from a previous king could strive for the throne. In Wessex this embraced all nobles who belonged to, or asserted that they belonged to, the various branches of the House of Cerdic. The descent of the crown within the collateral kin-groups that made up the stirps regia depended more upon ad hoc considerations, such as the relative strengths of the claimants' retinues or the wealth of their coffers, than upon any settled constitutional principle.