bretwalda

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The term first appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's annal for 829. The A version says Egbert of Wessex was the eighth king who was bretwalda (ruler of Britain). The other versions use ‘brytenwalda’ (wide ruler). There is dispute as to which term is ‘right’. More significant is the relationship of the term to Bede's statement that there were seven rulers who had imperium over much or all of our island: the earliest Ælle of Sussex (late 5th cent.), the latest Oswiu of Northumbria (d. 670).

If, as is likely, ‘bretwalda’ is an early term, it is of a poetically glorifying kind. Bede's observation on imperium, and who held it, derives from some topos of grouping rulers in sevens (to be found later in Nennius' idea of seven Roman emperors who ruled in Britain). Two questions arise. First, whence did Bede get his information? Why, for example, dig up the exceedingly obscure Ælle? Second, granted the almost infinite obscurity of early political arrangements, may not Bede be transmitting traditions which derive from something which lay between the poetically rhetorical and the institutionally defined?