Abstract

One of the important functions of national history is to discover the origins of the unity and nationhood of a particular people. The kingdom of England emerged only in the mid-tenth century, when the kings of Wessex conquered the Danelaw and brought all of England into a single kingdom. The concept of the “Empire of Britain” was one expression of this sense of English unity in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This was a very different situation from that of the earlier Anglo-Saxon period, when there were as many as a dozen kingdoms of the English. Yet even before the tenth-century unification under Wessex, the English did experience a degree of political unity under powerful kings who were able to dominate all or most of the other English kingdoms. In the eighth century, the dominant Mercian kings Aethelbald, Offa, and Ceonwulf were overlords of the other English kings, and their hegemonial position was expressed in charters by the grand titles that were applied to them — rex Britanniae, rex Anglorum, rex totius Anglorum patriae, and even imperator