Once when the purple loostrife was blooming along the River Wye I walked from Chepstow in Monmouthshire to Prestatyn in either Flintshire or Denbigshire. When I reached Prestatyn I didn't have the money for a busfare home so I walked back to Chepstow and then west to Cardiff.
Those were the days when Baxter was a gleam in an Abdominal Aorta's eye. Ivan Ivanovitch was a character in a short book written by a disgraced Soviet artillery officer, and oddly enough Bobby's origins are buried in 1970's attempts by Soviet Intelligence Officers to use machines to comb through the billions of words of information in multiple languages collected from thousands of eavesdropping devices.
The route I took from Chepstow to Prestatyn followed or attempted to follow, the track of a ditch the son of Thingfrith, a descendent of Eowa by the name of Offa, had ordered dug across the Western borders of Mercian Land. Offa was a hard nosed bitter, money grubbing, son of a bitch who became Paramount Chief of Mercia, or King of Mercia, after a series of tribal wars and a bunch of assassinations of people with names like AEthelbald, not to be mistaken with AEthelbald of Wessex who was buried in Sherborne Abbey in Dorset.
The ditch is called Offa's Dyke, I wouldn't put it past the son of Thingfrith to engage in that sort of thing, which would explain why he put his Queen on one of the gold coins he had minted for use in toadying up to the European Christian Bigwigs so the Arch Bishop of Cantebury would make more effort to be nice to Mercians......
The point is that once upon a time I was a fan of Alfred of Wessex and his capacity for myth making, this admiration required me to examine the Mercian claim to have produced the First King of the English. And yes! Of course it's true, in my own pursuit of an aura that would engage those distant days with a sense of purpose hithertofore I had failed to share with the English, I had spent far too many hours with the Battle of Maldon, a poem about real men of genuine Saxon heritage having the crap beaten out of them in Essex by Vikings.
Rightly so, as everyone should know, no one is whole until they have lost.
And lo it was Godrick son of Odda who stole his lords splendid horse and ran from the fight. Saxon men thought their Lord was engaged in a cunning strategic withdrawel. The damned Vikings pretty much wiped them all out, but being Saxon and not Mercian everyone died incredibly bravely. No news that I can remember of Godrick son of Odda's fate.
