I’m always surprised how my medieval history lectures accidentally stumble into topicality.
For some time it has been an unanticipated bonus of the 14th-century England class. Climate change, building on the flood-plain, global pandemics, wage restraint, government borrowing are all cutting-edge topics from the reign of Edward III, not to mention that of Elizabeth II.
But if the 14th century seems pretty topical, the Anglo-Saxons have suddenly begun to feel even more so.
Take our patch of Anglo-Saxon England, for example. For four centuries or so they called this the kingdom of Mercia. This was not because the kings of that ilk were especially merciless, though this was sometimes the case. The name “Mercia” derives from the Old English mierce, meaning “the people on the frontier”. Our word “Marches” comes from it.
Mercia represented the last filling-station before the land of the Celts. The Mercians were the border people, with special dispensation to keep the Welsh wolf from the Saxon door.
Now, shift your gaze considerably eastwards, across the Continent to the bottom right corner of Europe. The word “Ukraine” – in Russian – means exactly the same. They are the people of the border, Russian on one side, Tartar on another, Holy Roman Empire on another.
It’s this sense of a country which is partly one thing, and partly another, that gives the current crisis in Eastern Europe its meaning. Frontier lands have always been flashpoints and points of division, as anyone from the Balkans will tell you.
Is there a lesson, then, for Ukraine to learn from its namesake, 1,600 miles and 1,200 years away? Probably not, but I’ll tell you anyway. In 874 the invading Viking army placed a puppet king – Coelwulf by name – on the throne of Mercia. It allowed the Danes to have control of Middle England without having to go to the bother of conquering it.
Five years later King Alfred of Wessex did a deal with the Viking leader, whereby the Mercians were partitioned into an English western half and a Danish east. And that effectively put paid to Mercia as an independent country. Any modern parallels, of course, are purely accidental.
Kiev, by the way, was a Viking city.
* Dr Chris Upton is mixing his centuries at Newman University Birmingham
