Offa s dike építése
Offa was King of Mercia from 757 to 796 AD. His kingdom covered the area between the Trent/Mersey rivers in the North to the Thames Valley in the South, and from the Welsh border in the West to the Fens in the East. At the height of his power, however, he also controlled Kent, East Anglia and Lindsay (Lincoln), and had alliances with Northumbria and Wessex, sealed by the marriage of two of his daughters to their Kings, Aethelred and Beorhtic respectively. He was, therefore, effectively an early King of England. He influenced the setting up of a third Archbishopric in England at the Cathedral at Lichfield and near his principal residence at Tamworth. Offa was also influential in international affairs, having diplomatic and trading links with Charlemagne the poweful continental king based in Francia, together with contact with the Papacy.
Offa’s Dyke is a linear earthwork which roughly follows the Welsh/English boundary. It consists of a ditch and rampart constructed with the ditch on the Welsh-facing side, and appears to have been carefully aligned to present an open view into Wales from along its length. The origins of the Dyke are shrouded in mystery so that many of its aspects are speculated upon rather than being fully understood. The Dyke appears to have been constructed in response to events in the border region involving the Princes of Powys, but whether it was intended as an agreed boundary, as a defensive structure with long lost additional fortifications, or for some other use, is not known.
It is thought to have been started in about 785 AD and to have taken several years to build. Much of the Dyke is still traceable along the 80 miles from the Wye valley to Wrexham. In places it still retains most of its original impressive dimensions while in other parts it has disappeared due to 1200 years of farming activity and its presence can only be detected by archaelogical work. History has bequeathed us many fascinating and intriguing monuments and here, in Wales, we are well endowed with such relics. None of them, however, is more striking than the magnificent remains of Offa's Dyke.
The Encyclopedia of Wales makes what is surely the definitive statement about the dyke and its purpose when it comments that: "The separateness of Wales is signified in the border landscape by the presence of this monumental earthwork, the biggest engineering project in Europe at the time of its construction in the eighth century."
Offa's Dyke is a huge ditch, in places over 60 feet in width, backed by a high earth bank, that runs for almost the full length of Wales. It follows, largely, the Welsh-English border and was built in the eighth century by Offa, king of the powerful Saxon province of Mercia that butted onto the eastern flank of Powys.
The dyke was a frontier line between Mercia and the smaller Welsh kingdoms to the west, in particular Powys and was, in its own way, as significant as Hadrian's Wall in the north of England. Offa, an immensely powerful chieftain, was king of Mercia between 757 and 796 AD. The very fact that he could raise or command a workforce of several thousand to dig and build the dyke gives testament to his strength, although the dyke was probably built by workmen from the various areas through which it passed rather than by one self-contained group of navvies.
The great European king and emperor Charlemagne officially recognised Offa's position and power - a significant tribute to a fellow king or leader in a time of considerable unrest. The monk Asser, in his 10th century Life of Alfred, first attributed the dyke to King Offa, stating that he not only commanded and terrified all of the neighbouring chieftains and war leaders but that he "had a great dyke built between Wales and Mercia from sea to sea." The reference to the earthwork running from "sea to sea" is a little misleading as there are missing sections of the dyke, particularly in the north and south, and the ditch probably never ran for the full length of the border.
The full distance from the Wye to the Dee is about 150 miles - Offa's Dyke probably stretched for about 60 or 70 of these. An earlier earthwork, Wat's Dyke, runs almost alongside Offa's Dyke for some of its length, particularly in the Knighton area. The two ditches are rarely more than a few miles apart and, occasionally, come together in one united whole when the original engineers felt it was unnecessary to dig a new embankment.
The dyke runs straight as an arrow in some parts - a tribute to the technological skill of the men who excavated it - but then by-passes hills and other major landmarks, always cutting around the Welsh side of the obstacle. The aim, clearly, was give people on the Mercian or English side of the dyke a clear and open view into Wales. With the displaced earth from the dyke piled high on the eastern side, its purpose was to denote or define the frontier rather than to defend it. The dyke would have regulated access to and from Wales while, at the same time, checking or halting border raids. It was also a hugely effective statement by King Offa, an example of power politics at its best.
The dyke may well have been patrolled by Offa's soldiers or even been provided with a system of early warning beacons but it was not garrisoned, like Hadrian's Wall, with detachments of troops. At this distance it is not always possible to tell. But, of course, the legends surrounding the dyke are many and varied and many of them make great stories.
George Borrow, the Welsh writer and historian, declared that for many years any Welshman discovered east of the dyke would have had his ears cut off - Englishmen found west of the earthwork were summarily hanged. There is little truth in the statement but it is all part of the legend of the dyke. A long distance footpath, opened in 1971, follows much of the original route of the dyke, stretching from Beachley on the Severn to Prestatyn on the north Wales coast. It is an atmospheric and often unfrequented area of the country, giving the walker a good impression of what it would have been like on Offa's Dyke in the eighth century.
Now, a new book written by two archaeologists who have been studying the Dyke for the past 15 years explores the specifically Mercian and English context for its creation. In Offa’s Dyke: Landscape & He gemony in Eighth-Century Britain, Keith Ray and Ian Bapty explore how the Dyke may have been built and what it achieved, and consider what can be learned from it. Here, writing for History Extra, Keith Ray explores the history of Offa’s Dyke…
What makes a simple earth ditch-and-bank dug along the frontier between Wales and England 1,200 years ago potentially fascinating to any historically-minded person living in Britain in the 21st-century? For one thing, its length: the earthwork itself covers a distance of more than 80 miles (129km) and it ranges across a former frontier that spanned 115 miles (185km) - the latter extending from the shores of the Dee estuary in the north to Severn Estuary near Chepstow in the south. As such, this ‘great work’, built at the command of Offa of Mercia, one of the most remarkable kings to have ruled much of Anglo-Saxon England, is Britain’s (and arguably Europe’s) longest ancient earthwork.
Another remarkable thing about Offa’s Dyke is the way in which so much of it has survived: a long-distance trail, the Offa’s Dyke Path, follows much of its course, especially in the historic counties of Gloucestershire, Radnorshire, Shropshire and Montgomeryshire. It is, however, the context of Offa’s Dyke’s building that provides most relevance to life today, because there are some remarkable similarities between events in the world of late eighth-century England and today’s Europe: warfare at the peripheries of the continent, mass-migration and, above all, Britain’s relationship with Europe were matters of considerable concern as the expansionary Kingdom of Mercia was trying to dominate all the other kingdoms and peoples of England (and especially the remaining powers of Northumbria, East Anglia, Kent and Wessex) during the reigns of Offa (757-796) and Coenwulf (796-821).
At the same time, this ‘Mercian regime’ was trying to annexe territories of the Britons of Wales and was seeking to rival the continental empire of Charlemagne, the charismatic leader of the Kingdom of the Franks, crowned by the Pope (in 800) as Holy Roman Emperor. Silver penny of Offa, King of Mercia. 8th century. The supremacy of Mercia within late eighth and early ninth-century-England was reinforced by many means, including (alongside military muscle), strategic marriage-alliances, control over the Church, assassination, new forms of taxation and new duties of military service.
Among those duties was one to perform ‘bridge-work and fortress-work’, and this was probably the mechanism whereby a large work force was assembled to do the necessary aligning, quarrying, ditch-digging, soil and turf and stone mounding. This was carried out across a terrain replete with high moorland, steep-sided valleys, river-crossings and hilltops along what has become the borderland between England and Wales. So why was the Dyke built? Firstly, it served as a deterrent: it demonstrated the might of Mercian mobilisation - any kingdom with the resources to create such a massive work could surely crush any would-be invaders. Secondly, the Dyke bolstered Mercia’s standing as a European power.
This monumental act of building also boasted clear resonances back to the works of Roman emperors. Both Offa and Coenwulf seemingly used the Dyke as a base for carrying out military expeditions right across Wales, and the way in which the Dyke traverses the landscape resonates closely with Roman frontier works - Hadrian’s Wall in particular. Offa and Coenwulf did not see themselves as ‘kings of the English’, however, as some past Anglo-Saxon historians have suggested. They saw themselves, rather, as ‘emperors of Mercia’. The manifest destiny of the latter kingdom was, in their world-view, to absorb all the English into Mercia...
But how much do we really know about Offa’s Dyke? There are lots of reasons to attribute the building of the Dyke to King Offa, including a direct reference to the then 100-year-old structure by King Alfred of Wessex’s biographer, Asser. However, the details of its construction are much more difficult to establish, as several archaeologists have discovered. It is still uncertain whether the Dyke was built in one go or whether its course linked up a series of pre-existing barriers built across ridge-top routes and river-valley trackways.
It is also hard to date the Dyke accurately, due to the difficulty in finding material incorporated within or under it that belongs exactly to the period of its construction. The Dyke clearly post-dates Roman period settlements, because these have been found sealed beneath it. However, turf incorporated within its bank may also pre-date it by some time, and the activities of burrowing animals over the centuries may have introduced material that considerably post-dates its creation.
What is clear from even a limited re-study of the form of the Offa’s Dyke earthwork and its positioning within the landscape is that it was a more complex construction than has previously been suggested. It builders deployed, for instance, careful scarping of natural slopes incorporated within it at several places, and careful adjustment of individual short lengths or segments along its course, to make it look bigger than it actually was. In this way the Dyke was designed to impress: not only by its huge span, but also in how it was to be seen from the west, dominating the landscape.
Besides being built to impress, the Dyke was also designed to exclude the Welsh from their former lands and was probably used as a means to raise revenue by customs control and to monitor what was going on in the area immediately to its west. Indeed, the Dyke was positioned to overlook approaches from that direction - surveillance was as important then as it is today.
Offa's Dyke on Llanfair Hill north of Knighton, Powys. The landscape the Dyke crossed was part of an evolving frontier that needs to be seen in the context of the development of ‘march-lands’ dividing off emergent states of the period from the surrounding peoples. This was exactly what the Franks were doing in continental Europe with the creation of the frontiers of the emergent ‘Carolingian Empire’, replete with customs-points.
The location of particularly complex stretches of the Dyke may correspond to notably sensitive ‘political places’ along the frontier where centres of Welsh power may have existed by later sites of Powis and Montgomery castles. This frontier, of which the Dyke formed the key - but not the only - component, may also have been made to work by creating ‘hybrid’ groups along its length. As such, mechanisms for creating and sustaining a Mercian version of what in medieval times became part of the ‘Welsh marches’ probably also included the formation of new frontier administrative units in which Welsh and English communities lived side-by-side under Mercian control.
In c895 AD Bishop Asser, with the benefit of hindsight and in the setting of Alfred’s newly-ascendant West Saxon kingdom in the late ninth-century, saw Offa’s Dyke fundamentally as a vainglorious exercise by an unscrupulous and ruthless king. While this was no doubt true (within 50 years of Coenwulf’s death the Danes had sliced Mercia in two and had all but crushed Wessex in military victories), we can alternatively see the Dyke as a measure of how ‘Mercian Britain’ could envisage a future relationship with Europe on as near-equal terms as has ever been achieved since then.
By laying down the origins of conscripted armies; economic power through trade and a regulated currency; a court culture in which queens as well as kings held sway; and the first formal ‘diplomatic missions’ (such as the one in 789 that failed to successfully negotiate an alliance between the dominant power of Europe - Francia - and Mercia), Offa’s kingdom provided a first glimpse of the role a newly-assertive Britain could play in a wider international setting.
Offa's Dyke - Britain's largest monument
Карта маршрута Offa s Dyke и связанные точки интереса
- Участок от Wye valley до Wrexham
- Путь Offa s Dyke Path через Gloucestershire, Radnorshire, Shropshire и Montgomeryshire
- Связь с Wat's Dyke поблизости Knighton
Технология и организация строительства
The decision to go ahead with the dyke was a huge one with the question of whether it could be achieved being highly debatable. The dyke was most probably built using some slave labour and by the enlisting of men from the various villages in Mercia. These men would have been accustomed to working long hours with hard work, and the chances are that once you had completed digging your section you would have been allowed to go home, so there was more incentive to work harder!
Before building the dyke, King Offa and his men would have had to plan the route carefully so that particular settlements were included on the English side, and also so that the line followed the less tricky topography and always tried to keep a good view to the west. It is thought that the route may have been laid out using beacons from hill to hill along the route, and that these would have then been used as sighters.
The wall-like structure was designed to impress and to mark the frontier, while also enabling some control over movement and taxation in the borderlands. The landscape the Dyke crossed was part of an evolving frontier that needs to be seen in the context of the development of march-lands and Mercian influence in the region.
Историческое значение и современное наследие
Сегодня становится ясно, что Offa s Dyke представляет не только оборонительную линию, но и мощное выражение политической мощи Мерсии и её амбиций на европейской арене. Долгий путь вдоль границы стал основой для современного пешего маршрута Offa s Dyke Path, демонстрируя устойчивое наследие эпохи. В историческом контексте dyke связывает римские пограничные идеалы с раннесредневековой политикой маркальных границ и интеграции стран.
Средневековые и современные исследования подчеркивают сложность конструкции и её стратегическую роль в формировании пограничной системы между Англией и Уэльсом. Offa слияние политических, экономических и военных инструментов создал образ раннего британского государства, которое пыталось установить международное равновесие и влияние на континенте.