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Concept
Penda of Mercia
Summary
Penda (died 15 November 655) was a 7th-century king of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in what is today the Midlands. A pagan at a time when Christianity was taking hold in many of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Penda took over the Severn Valley in 628 following the Battle of Cirencester before participating in the defeat of the powerful Northumbrian king Edwin at the Battle of Hatfield Chase in 633.
Nine years later, he defeated and killed Edwin's eventual successor, Oswald, at the Battle of Maserfield; from this point he was probably the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon rulers of the time, laying the foundations for the Mercian Supremacy over the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. He repeatedly defeated the East Angles and drove Cenwalh the king of Wessex into exile for three years. He continued to wage war against the Bernicians of Northumbria. Thirteen years after Maserfield, he suffered a crushing defeat by Oswald's successor and brother Oswiu, and was killed at the Battle of the Winwaed in the course of a final campaign against the Bernicians.
The source for Penda's life which can most securely be called the earliest, and which is the most detailed, is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed c. 731; chapters II.20, III.7, III.16–18, III.21, III.24). Penda also appears prominently in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, whose sources and so reliability for this period are unclear, and in the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum, which adds a little more possibly reliable information to Bede's account. He seems also to be mentioned, as Panna ap Pyd, in the perhaps seventh-century Welsh praise-poem Marwnad Cynddylan, which says of Cynddylan: 'pan fynivys mab pyd mor fu parawd' ('when the son of Pyd wished, how ready was he'). Penda and his family seem to have given their names to a number of places in the West Midlands, including Pinbury, Peddimore, and Pinvin.
The etymology of the name Penda is unknown. Penda of Mercia is the only person recorded in the comprehensive Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England with this name.
Official source
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