Penda of Mercia and the Welsh borderlands in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica

Chapter one examines one of the earliest and most historically significant surviving Anglo-Saxon texts, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. This chapter argues that Bede’s narrative of Anglo-Saxon religious and ethnic cohesion also depicts a distinct culture in the borderlands in the seventh century, shared between the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys, formed in opposition to cultural changes brought about by the conversion of surrounding Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Roman Christianity. Bede has long been understood as highly critical of both the heretical Britons and the heathen Mercians, but in his hostility, he preserves important details about the life of king Penda of Mercia which provide a window into the culture of the borderlands as a region which stands apart from Bede’s narrative of ethnic division between Anglo-Saxons and Britons. Several early Welsh poems reflect the same perspective from the west: the borderlands not as a site of strife, but a nexus of Anglo-Welsh culture.