495 to 594. Legendary foundation of Wessex
The very beginnings of the chronology of Wessex present a puzzle, in that key events are recorded twice, under different years. The West Saxons (once called "Cerdic and Cynric" and once "the West Saxons") arrive at Cerdicesora in 495 and in 514. They found the kingdom in 500 and in 519, fight against the Britons in 508 and 527, and Cerdic dies and Cynric succeeds in 516 and 534. These duplicated events are all 18 or 19 years apart, which may be significant because later Christian scribes sometimes recorded annals on Easter tables of 19-year duration, and an obvious way of backdating events would be to put them in an earlier 19-year cycle (see Harrison, pp.127-8). That seems to be what has happened here, perhaps to make the West Saxon line seem older and therefore grander, just as genealogies were sometimes extended backwards by adding more noble ancestors (see entry on c.450 to 512). More recent work by David Dumville, working from all the variants of reign-lengths given in the Chronicle and elsewhere, suggests that immediately behind the sources available to us there is a version which placed the beginning of Cerdic's reign in 527?540, most probably in 537/8 (see Dumville, pp.50-51); since this is another 19 years on from 519, the suspicion must be that the West Saxon entries in the Chronicle were in fact backdated by 19 years twice, and the original dates were probably closer to:
Cerdic: 538-54
Cynric: 554-81
Ceawlin: 581-88
Ceol: 588-94
Ceolwulf: 594-611
After Ceolwulf's reign the variations that exist tend to be limited to a year or two, and this is probably because the next king, Cynegils, was baptized in 635 and after that literate clerics will have been available to keep records from then on.
What with all the chronological dislocation that seems to have gone on, it seems a fairly hopeless task to put the Chronicle's catalogue of battles from 508 to 592 into this revised and shortened framework. In any case, some of them are probably later inventions to explain place-names (such as the 508 battle when "Natanleod" was killed, although Netley Marshes are more likely so named for OE næt, "wet"), and some are at places which can no longer be identified (such as Cerdicesleag, where Cerdic and Cynric are supposed to have fought in 527). Others are fights against the Britons at times and places where the archaeology demonstrates the Anglo-Saxons were already well established (such as Old Sarum, where Cynric is supposed to have defeated the Britons in 552, though Anglo-Saxon material appears in the area at least half a century earlier, see Yorke, p.32). The battles dealing with the Isle of Wight are dealt with separately (see entry on 514 to 544). Of the rest, Cynric and Ceawlin are said to have fought the Britons in 556 at Barbury, Ceawlin and Cutha to have fought Æthelberht of Kent in 568 at Wibbandun (see entry on 581?588), Cuthwulf (Ceawlin's brother) to have fought the Britons in 571 and Ceawlin and Cuthwine (his son) to have fought the Britons in 577 (discussed below), Ceawlin and Cutha (? for Cuthwulf) to have fought the Britons in 584 at Feþanleag (perhaps another battle invented for the place-name, as it means "battle-field" or "troop-field"), and a great (internecine?) battle to have been fought at Woden's Barrow in 592, at which Ceawlin was driven out, a year before his death. Only two of these battles, that between Ceawlin of Wessex and Æthelberht of Kent, and that at Woden's Barrow in which Ceawlin was driven out, emerge unscathed from this sifting, and both should probably be redated (the fight with Æthelberht to 581?588, and that at Woden's Barrow to 587 or 588). (For a later battle at Woden's Barrow, see entry on 715.)
The two battles placed by the Chronicle in the 570s are interesting because they look as though they are deliberate inventions reflecting later political realities. In 571 Cuthwulf fights the Britons at Biedcanford (unidentified), and captures the four towns of Limbury, Aylesbury, Bensington and Eynsham. In 577, Ceawlin and Cuthwine fight the Britons at Dyrham, and kill three British kings, Conmail, Condidan and Farinmail, and capture the cities of Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath. These entries have been used to map the progress of West Saxon advance against the Britons, but this is unsound because archaeological evidence shows that most of these areas were already surrounded by Anglo-Saxons long before the 570s (see Sims-Williams, pp.31-2). Sims-Williams further notes that the use of English (rather than British) names for the four places captured in 571 suggests anachronism, and wonders whether the annal may have been fashioned by a West Saxon chronicler some time after the later battle in 779 between Cynewulf of Wessex and Offa of Mercia in which Offa captured Bensington (see Sims-Williams, pp.32-3). A similar backdated pro-Wessex political statement can be seen in the annals dealing with the Isle of Wight, in which the founders of Wight (Jutes, according to Bede) are said to be nephews of the West Saxon Cerdic, which is extremely unlikely (see entry on 514 to 544). The three British kings supposedly slain in 577 cannot be identified as 6th-century individuals, though Sims-Williams points out that Condidan, probably for Welsh Cynddylan, matches the name of a Welsh ruler in the Wroxeter region who was killed in the mid-7th century, and suggests that behind the 577 annal there might be a Welsh triad naming British kings killed by the English torn out of context (see Sims-Williams, pp.33-4). Gloucester, Bath and Cirencester are in the territory of the Hwicce, which over the 7th and 8th centuries becomes a Mercian province, but in 628 Cynegils and Cwichelm of Wessex fought Penda of Mercia for Cirencester, and seem to have lost. The annal for 577, then, may also reflect a West Saxon chronicler's belief of who should have owned the land at some later point rather than a reflection of who actually held it in the 6th century.
D. Dumville, "The West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List and the Chronology of Early Wessex", Peritia 4 (1985), pp.21-66
K. Harrison, The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to AD 900 (Cambridge: 1976)
P. Sims-Williams, "The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle", Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983), pp.1-41
B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (London: 1995)