Offa In The Canterbury Roll

“This Offa, of the seed of Woden, transferred the bones of St. Alban to the monastery where they now are, which he himself had founded, and he gave to St Peter the tribute of one penny from every house in his kingdom for ever. This King ordered the head of St. Ethelbert to be cut off in the year 590. ”
Offa, son of Thingfrith, became the ruler of Mercia having succeeded his predecessor Beornred in 757. He reigned for some thirty nine years between 757 and 796, achieving a great deal of things during the time of his reign, expanding and consolidating the borders of his kingdom. However, the full range of achievement during Offa’s reign is significantly limited in scope within the Canterbury Roll’s commentary, although a plethora of Offa’s
By including this information in the commentary, it appears as though the Roll maker is trying to suggest a degree of piety to Offa’s character, a fact that benefits the perception of Offa among the Christian readership of the Canterbury Roll. Offa himself may have done this to propagate perceptions of piety to align himself with the religion of his people, perhaps even attempting to develop a cult that would rival the popularity of the cult of St. Augustine. In addition, in another example of Offa’s piousness, Offa is said by the Roll to have given regular tribute from across his kingdom to the papacy in Rome. Thus an apparent trend of glorifying Offa is evident in the Roll Maker’s commentary of Offa’s reign, as evidenced by the first three elements of the
Ethelbert. The inclusion of this execution, and the terms in which Ethelbert is described as a saint, and not a king as he was in his lifetime, plays significant contrast to the preceding deeds ascribed to Offa within the Roll’s commentary. It is true that Offa did indeed order the execution of Ethelbert, having done so as an act of political ambition to secure and expand his kingship, as king Ethelbert of East Anglia embodied an affront to Offa’s power. It is logical that the Roll maker has referred to Ethelbert as a saint and not a king in order to emphasise to the Roll’s audience the viability of a king who does both good and bad deeds. The motive for this can be found in the political circumstances of the Roll maker’s own time, during which England was witnessing a devastating civil war after which Lancastrian monarchs would emerge within whom possessed a similar duality in character to that of