Offa
Offa
Offa, King of Mercia, died 29 July, 796. He was one of the leading figures of Saxon history, as appears from the real facts stripped of all legend. He obtained the throne of Mercia in 757, after the murder of his cousin, King Æthelbald, by Beornraed. After spending fourteen years in consolidating and ordering his territories he engaged in conquests which made him the most powerful king in England. After a successful campaign against the Hestingi, he defeated the men of Kent at Otford (775); the West Saxons at Bensington in Oxfordshire (779); and finally the Welsh, depriving the last-named of a large part of Powys, including the town of Pengwern. To repress the raids of the Welsh he built Offa’s dyke, roughly indicating for the first time what has remained the boundary between England and Wales. Offa was now supreme south of the Humber, with the result that England was divided into three political divisions, Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex. His next step was to complete the independence of Mercia by inducing the pope to erect a Mercian archbishopric, so as to free Mercia from the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hadrian I sent two legates, George and Theophylactus, to England to arrange for the transfer of five suffragan sees of Canterbury (viz. Worcester, Leicester, Lindsay, Elmham, and Dunwich) to the new Archbishopric of Lichfield, of which Higbert was first archbishop. This was effected at the Synod of Celchyth (787), at which Offa granted the pope a yearly sum equal to one mancus a day for the relief of the poor and for lights to be kept burning before St. Peter’s tomb. At the same time he associated his son Ecgferth with him in the kingship. He preserved friendly relations with Charlemagne, who undertook to protect the English pilgrims and merchants who passed through his territories. Many charters granting lands to various monasteries are extant, and, though some are forgeries, enough are genuine documents to show that he was a liberal benefactor to the Church. The laws of Offa are not extant, but were embodied by Alfred in his later code. The chief stain on his character is the execution of Æthelbert, King of the East Angles. In all other respects he showed himself a great Christian king and an able and enlightened ruler.
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Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which misdates his death by two years; most of the chief medieval historians, WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY, MATTHEW PARIS etc., and later standard works, LINGARD etc.; MACKENZIE, Essay on the life and institutions of Offa (London, 1840); THORPE, Ancient Laws and Institutes (London, 1840); KEMBLE, Codex Diplomaticus œvi Saxonici (London, 1839-48); JAFFÉ, Bibl. rerum Germanarum, IV: Monumenta Carolina (Berlin, 1864-73); HADDAN AND STUBBS, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, III and V (Oxford, 1869-1878); GREEN, Making of England (London, 1885); BIRCH, Cartularium Saxonicum (London, 1885-93); SEARLE, Anglo-Saxon Bishops, Kings, and Nobles (Cambridge, 1899); HUGHES, On Offa’s Dyke in Archœologia (1893), III, 465 sqq.
EDWIN BURTON. Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XICopyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, February 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Offa
an Anglo-Saxon prince, who flourished as king of MERCIA for about forty years, in the second half of the 8th century, is noted in ecclesiastical history for the dependent relation in which he placed his part of Britain to the papal see. He was a valiant soldier and ambitious ruler; and as he extended his possessions largely, his negotiations with Rome become of importance to every student of English ecclesiastical history. He compelled the king of Kent to acknowledge his authority, and at the instigation of Cynedrida, his wife, he put to death Ethelbert, king of East Anglia, and seized his states. Charlemagne called him the most powerful of the Christian kings of the West, and maintained friendly relations with him, except during a short period when traders in Offa’s dominions committed depredations upon Frankish merchants. But though Offa was successful in his acquisition of temporal power, he lost much by ecclesiastical relations with Rome, upon the good-will of which he finally came to be very dependent. Anxious to establish the ecclesiastical independence of his kingdom from other British territory, he appealed to pope Adrian the same pontiff who wrote in defense of image-worship to send an archbishop’s pall to Higbert, bishop of Lichfield, making the six other bishoprics between the Thames and Humber subject to him instead of archbishop Eanbert of Canterbury. It is no great credit to pope Adrian that he consented so easily to this project, for which there was no reason but the worldly ambition of Offa; and his honesty is somewhat impeached by it, inasmuch as Offa began a practice, which was long afterwards continued, of sending a yearly present in money, called Peterpence, to Rome. The Saxon law speaks of this present as the king’s alms. It was not a tax paid to the pope, but to the king’s officers; it led, however, afterwards to further encroachments of the bishop of Rome. A council of the English Church, held at Cliff’s-hoe, A.D. 803, censured this royal act as surreptitious and deceitful. King Offa was also the first prince since the days of St. Augustine to receive a papal legate for the ordering of British ecclesiastical affairs. The legates came ostensibly to renew the faith and peace that had connected England with Rome ever since Augustine’s mission. Their object was, however, to give public papal countenance to Offa’s ecclesiastical departures. Offa died soon after his cruel slaughter of king Ethelbert, overcome with remorse. He was succeeded by his son Egferth, who reigned only a few months. Offa is commended by the learned Alcuin as a prince of engaging manners, and studious to promote good Christian morals among his people. At the same time the prelate does not disguise that these better qualities were tarnished by deeds of avarice and cruelty; and he mentions it as a probable mark of divine vengeance that his only son Egferth, whom he had made the sharer of his throne, died a few days after his father, in the flower of his age. Among the oppressive acts of Offa towards the Church, he seems to have usurped the property of bishops and abbots in the monasteries; not suppressing the religious houses, but giving them as preferments to his friends, particularly one at March, in Cambridgeshire, and the abbey at Bath, which he made bishop Heathored of Worcester surrender to him. To establish his power the more, he enriched the abbeys of Bredon and Evesham, founded by his grandfather, with lands taken from the same bishopric or its dependent monasteries. But at a late period of his life he was led, by remorse of conscience, to found the famous abbey of St. Alban’s, which he endowed with large estates in Hertfordshire, and which became one of the most splendid of the old Benedictine houses in early Norman times. Offa compiled laws which are mostly included in the Anglo- Saxon code of Alfred the Great. See Churton, Early Engl. Ch. ch. x; Soames, Anglo-Saxon Ch. (Lond. 1856, 12mo), p. 101104; ejusd. Latin Ch. during Anglo-Saxon Times (ibid. 1848, 8vo), p. 146 sq.; Inett. Origines Anglicanoe (see Index in pt. ii of vol. ii).