List of monarchs of Wessex
This is a list of monarchs of the Kingdom of the West Saxons until 886 AD. While the details of the later monarchs are confirmed by a number of sources, the earlier ones are in many cases obscure.
The names are given in modern English form followed by the names and titles in contemporary Old English and Latin, the prevalent languages of record at the time in England.
This was a period in which spellings varied widely, even within a document. A number of variations of the details below exist. Among these are the preference between the runic character thorn and the letter eth, both of which are equivalent to modern ⟨th⟩ and were interchangeable. They were used indiscriminately for voiced and unvoiced ⟨th⟩ sounds, unlike in modern Icelandic. Thorn tended to be more used in the south and eth in the North. Separate letters th were preferred in the earliest period in Northern texts, and returned to dominate by the Middle English period onward.
The character ⁊ was used as the ampersand in contemporary Anglo-Saxon writings. The era pre-dates the emergence of some forms of writing accepted today; notably rare were lower case characters, and the letters W and U. W was occasionally rendered VV, but the runic character wynn was a common way of writing the /w/ sound. Again the West Saxons initially preferred the character derived from a rune, and the Angles/Engle preferred the Latin-derived lettering VV, consistent with the thorn versus eth usage pattern.
Except in manuscripts, runic letters were an Anglian phenomenon. The early Engle restricted the use of runes to monuments, whereas the Saxons adopted wynn and thorn for sounds which did not have a Latin equivalent. Otherwise they were not used in Wessex.
Timeline
ImageSize = width:1050 height:auto barincrement:12
PlotArea = top:0 bottom:30 right:150 left:20
AlignBars = justify
DateFormat = yyyy
Period = from:519 till:886
TimeAxis = orientation:horizontal
ScaleMajor = unit:year increment:50 start:550
ScaleMinor = unit:year increment:10 start:520
Colors =
id:canvas value:rgb
id:w value:purple
id:m value:green
id:d value:yellow
id:eon value:black
Backgroundcolors = canvas:canvas
BarData =
barset:Rulers
bar:eon
PlotData =
align:center textcolor:black fontsize:8 mark: width:6 shift:
bar:eon color:eon
from:519 till:645 color:w text:Wessex
from:645 till:648 color:m text:Iclingas (Mercia)
from:648 till:886 color:w
width:5 align:left fontsize:S shift: anchor:till
barset:Rulers
from:519 till:534 color:w text:"Cerdic"
from:534 till:560 color:w text:"Cynric"
from:560 till:591 color:w text:"Ceawlin"
from:591 till:597 color:w text:"Ceol"
from:597 till:611 color:w text:"Ceolwulf"
from:611 till:643 color:w text:"Cynegils"
from:626 till:636 color:w text:"Cwichelm"
from:643 till:645 color:w text:"Cenwalh "
from:645 till:648 color:m text:"Penda"
from:648 till:674 color:w text:"Cenwalh "
from:672 till:674 color:w text:"Seaxburh"
from:674 till:674 color:w text:"Cenfus "
from:674 till:676 color:w text:"Æscwine"
from:676 till:685 color:w text:"Centwine"
from:685 till:688 color:w text:"Cædwalla"
from:688 till:726 color:w text:"Ine"
from:726 till:740 color:w text:"Æthelheard"
from:740 till:756 color:w text:"Cuthred"
from:756 till:757 color:w text:"Sigeberht"
from:757 till:786 color:w text:"Cynewulf"
from:786 till:802 color:w text:"Beorhtric"
from:809 till:839 color:w text:"Ecgberht"
from:839 till:856 color:w text:"Æthelwulf"
from:856 till:860 color:w text:"Æthelbald"
from:860 till:865 color:w text:"Æthelberht"
from:865 till:871 color:w text:"Æthelred"
from:871 till:886 color:w text:"Alfred the Great"
barset:skip
Use of Celtic names
The Wessex royal line was traditionally founded by a man named Cerdic, an undoubtedly Celtic name cognate to Ceretic. This may indicate that Cerdic was a native Briton and that his dynasty became anglicised over time.A number of Cerdic's alleged descendants also possessed Celtic names, including the 'Bretwalda' Ceawlin. The last man in this dynasty to have a Brittonic name was King Caedwalla, who died as late as 689.
This is seen as evidence for a British influence on the emerging Anglo-Saxon elite classes within the ongoing debate about whether the Romano-Britons were forcefully expelled or gradually assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain.