ABSTRACT
The thirty years are a period of high importance, since in them the Mercian supremacy over Southern England, which had seemed so well established in the days of Aethelbald and Offa, reached its end, and the royal house of Wessex came to the front. The personal character of the reigning monarch was the main factor that settled with which of the great kingdoms the hegemony should reside all through the seventh and eighth centuries. The same was the case at the commencement of the ninth, and the fact that Ecgbert of Wessex and not some Mercian or Northumbrian king was the leading figure in England at the moment when the stress of the great raids commenced, had no small part in determining the future history of the whole island. At the commencement of the ninth century, however, it would have been impossible to foresee any such future for the house of Wessex.
