my_torah

A little while ago, I read the book Germania by Simon Winder. I was struck by the contrast between England, where one can trace a single thread of history over a thousand years back to Æthelstan, and Germany, which for most of its history consisted of numerous small countries (nominally under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire), and where both the geography and the threads of its history were an all bar untraceable fractal mess, with names looming out of the morass then fading back into it.

Then I read the book Unruly, about the kings and queens of England, and saw how prior to Æthelstan, the same was pretty much true of England. It occurred to me that the British monarchy could be compared to a river system: Downstream it consists of a single wide channel with the occasional tributary flowing into it, but near its headwaters there are a large number of small streams, and no clear indication of which of them is the most important, or the longest.

So I decided to see if I could make a visual representation of this for the monarchs of Great Britain (I decided to leave Ireland out, as it's complicated enough as it is), and here is the result (click through for a zoomable PDF):

( View piccy )

• This shows the principal kingdoms only: client kingdoms are omitted (so no Kingdom of Fife, for example). (This also gives me a nice historical cut-off; nothing goes further back than Coel Hen (Old King Cole), since his antecedents were under Roman overlordship.) Even so, there's a lot more kingdoms than I had realised, and a few not represented because none of the names of their kings have come down to us, though I did include Dunoting in this category to show how the Kingdom of Northern Britain kept splitting again and again in the immediate post-Roman period.
• Some of the earliest kings were legendary and may not have existed. I tried to stay clear of out-and-out myth, though, which is why you won't see King Arthur (though you will see Vortigern).
• I started trying to give names in their original form, but gave up once I realised (for example) I no way had the ability to restore the names of the kings of the Old North from the Welsh forms their names have been transmitted in.
• Arrows with closed heads lead from the last king of a kingdom to the king who took over rule of that kingdom, whether by forcible or peaceful means. (The single arrow with an open head was because there wasn't enough space to indicate how East Anglia was at times ruled by kings of Mercia and also show its kings down to the last.)
• Names in bold are the historically more important kings you might have heard of.
• I had no idea before I started it what a mess Wales (and to a lesser extent the Old North) would turn out to be. Rather than lines of small kingdoms flowing together to form larger ones, as elsewhere in this sceptred isle, kings would divide their kingdoms amongst their children, but you'd also end up with kings reigning multiple kingdoms (which is why Hywel Dda in particular appears multiple times). I had no idea that Wales only reached the state of a unified principality (apart from briefly once or twice beforehand) with its very last king prince, Llywelyn.
• It's well known that when Henry I tried to ensure that his daughter Matilda would succeed him, her cousin Stephen, with the backing of many of the country's barons, rose against her and England was engulfed in an extremely bloody civil war (known as the Anarchy) for decades. What I only discovered through making this chart was that there had been a successful queen regnant in England before: Seaxburh of the Gewisse (the earliest name of the West Saxons, whose kingdom, Wessex, would eventually come to unify England).
• Tolkien fans might like to amuse themselves searching for the following names on the chart: Meriadoc, Madoc, Caradoc (and various variants of it), and Ælfwine.
• I was taught that as the kingdoms of the Angles and the Saxons grew, they displaced the native British kingdoms until they were eventually confined to the north (Scotland) and west (Wales and Cornwall). Since the 1980s, genetic evidence has shown that the picture for much of England is less of displacement rather than absorption. But I was surprised to discover that the first king of the Gewisse (= Wessex), Cerdic, had a Brythonic name (another variant on Caratacos/Caradog), as did one or two of his descendants (Cædwalla). Could the West Saxons have originally been led by a Briton?