THIS essay considers some aspects of the ethnic composition of the Mercian kingdom and hegemony to the death of Penda, king of the Mercians c.633–c.655. The early Mercians appear in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica as an ‘English’ group; we are told that they are of Anglian stock, and Bede treats them throughout as a part of the gens Anglorum, if often a morally dubious part. It will be argued here that the situation was rather more complex than Bede implies. Three zones of interaction between the Mercian kingship and the Britons will be proposed: firstly an ‘outer zone’ consisting of kingdoms which formed part of and contributed to Penda's hegemony; secondly, an ‘inner zone’ made up of groups more closely tied to the Mercian kingship; and finally, a ‘core zone’, the people of the early Mercian kingdom proper. It will be argued that as one moves from the periphery to the centre, British elite culture becomes less prominent, but that even in the heartland of the earliest Mercian kingdom there was in the early seventh century a British element among the elite.

The paucity of literary sources relating to Mercia is well-known and has long been an impediment to the study of this kingdom. Those texts which exist are mainly narratives, Bede's Historia ecclesiastica being the principal. Furthermore, the literary sources we possess are of an almost exclusively non-Mercian origin.