After centuries in the shadows, Mercia has suddenly become fashionable. Recent months have brought us Max Adams’s The Mercian Chronicles (ironically, as the kingdom had no chronicles of its own) and now a biography of its greatest ruler in Rory Naismith’s Offa: King of the Mercians.

The traditional historiographical neglect of a realm which encompassed the entire Midlands and dominated much of the rest of England for a 150-year period from the mid-seventh century is no accident. If history is written by the victors, it is even more decisively shaped by the survivors. Wessex, arch-survivor among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, had Alfred the Great, able propagandist as well as effective leader against the Vikings, to order The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a work tirelessly dedicated to promoting a narrative of his kingdom’s superiority.

So, despite Offa eclipsing Alfred in both the length of his reign (thirty-nine years to Alfred’s twenty-eight) and the size of his realm (stretching from the Humber down to London and the Thames), in the popular memory he is largely remembered for the massive earthwork that formed Mercia’s western frontier.