This is a list of monarchs of

Wessex la, Regnum Occidentalium Saxonum , conventional_long_name = Kingdom of the West Saxons , common_name = Wessex , image_map = Southern British Isles 9th century.svg , map_caption = S ...

until AD 886. For later monarchs, see the

List of English monarchs This list of kings and reigning queens of the Kingdom of England begins with Alfred the Great, who initially ruled Wessex, one of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which later made up modern England. Alfred styled himself King of the Anglo-Sax ...

. 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 (as far as is known) in contemporary

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

(Anglo-Saxon) and

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

, 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 Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

character '' thorn'' (Þ, lower-case þ, from the rune of the same name) and the letter ''

eth (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , a ...

'' (Ð or ð), 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 (Wessex) and ''eth'' in the North (Mercia and Northumbria). Separate letters ''th'' were preferred in the earliest period in Northern texts, and returned to dominate by the

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...

period onward. The character ⁊ ( Tironian ''et'') 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 (later UU), but the runic character ''

wynn Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, ƿynn, and ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound . History The letter "W" While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph , ...

'' (Ƿ or ƿ) 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.

List

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(1,1,1) 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:(line,black) width:6 shift:(0,5) 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:(5,-4) anchor:till barset:Rulers from:519 till:534 color:w text:"

Cerdic Cerdic (; la, Cerdicus) is described in the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' as a leader of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, being the founder and first king of Saxon Wessex, reigning from 519 to 534 AD. Subsequent kings of Wessex were each cla ...

" from:534 till:560 color:w text:"

Cynric Cynric () was King of Wessex from 534 to 560. Everything known about him comes from the '' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle''. There, he is stated to have been the son of Cerdic, who is considered the founder of the kingdom of Wessex. However, the 'Genealogi ...

" from:560 till:591 color:w text:"

Ceawlin Ceawlin (also spelled Ceaulin and Caelin, died ''ca.'' 593) was a King of Wessex. He may have been the son of Cynric of Wessex and the grandson of Cerdic of Wessex, whom the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' represents as the leader of the first grou ...

" from:591 till:597 color:w text:"

Ceol Ceol (also known as Ceola or Ceolric) was King of Wessex from 592 to 597. Ceol was the son of Cutha (or Cuthwulf), the son of Cynric of Wessex. He reigned from either 591 or 592 to 597. According to the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'', he began his re ...

" from:597 till:611 color:w text:" Ceolwulf" from:611 till:643 color:w text:"

Cynegils Cynegils () was King of Wessex from c. 611 to c. 642. Cynegils is traditionally considered to have been King of Wessex, but the familiar kingdoms of the so-called Heptarchy had not yet formed from the patchwork of smaller kingdoms in his life ...

" from:626 till:636 color:w text:" Cwichelm" from:643 till:645 color:w text:" Cenwalh (first reign)" from:645 till:648 color:m text:"

Penda Penda (died 15 November 655)Manuscript A of the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' gives the year as 655. Bede also gives the year as 655 and specifies a date, 15 November. R. L. Poole (''Studies in Chronology and History'', 1934) put forward the theor ...

" from:648 till:674 color:w text:" Cenwalh (second reign)" from:672 till:674 color:w text:" Seaxburh" from:674 till:674 color:w text:" Cenfus (disputed)" 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 INE, Ine or ine may refer to: Institutions * Institut für Nukleare Entsorgung, a German nuclear research center * Instituto Nacional de Estadística (disambiguation) * Instituto Nacional de Estatística (disambiguation) * Instituto Nacional Elec ...

" 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 Cynewulf (, ; also spelled Cynwulf or Kynewulf) is one of twelve Old English poets known by name, and one of four whose work is known to survive today. He presumably flourished in the 9th century, with possible dates extending into the late 8th ...

" 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

Genealogy

The chart shows their (claimed) descent from the traditional first king of Wessex,

, down to the children of Alfred the Great. A continuation of the tree into the 10th and 11th centuries can be found at

English monarchs family tree This is the family tree for monarchs of England (and Wales after 1282) from Alfred the Great to Elizabeth I of England. The House of Wessex family tree precedes this family tree and the family tree of the British royal family follows it. As to ...

. The tree is largely based on the late 9th-century '' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'', the West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List (reproduced in several forms, including as a preface to the manuscript of the Chronicle), and

Asser Asser (; ; died 909) was a Welsh monk from St David's, Dyfed, who became Bishop of Sherborne in the 890s. About 885 he was asked by Alfred the Great to leave St David's and join the circle of learned men whom Alfred was recruiting for his ...

's ''Life of King Alfred''. These sources are all closely related and were compiled at a similar date, and incorporate a desire in their writers to associate the royal household with the authority of being a continuation of a unified line of kingship descended from a single original founder. One apparently earlier pedigree survives, which traces the ancestry of King

back to Cerdic. This first appears in a 10th-century manuscript copy of the " Anglian collection" of

Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies A number of royal genealogies of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, collectively referred to as the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, have been preserved in a manuscript tradition based in the 8th to 10th centuries. The genealogies trace the succession of th ...

. The manuscript is thought to have been made at Glastonbury in the 930s during the reign of King

Æthelstan Æthelstan or Athelstan (; ang, Æðelstān ; on, Aðalsteinn; ; – 27 October 939) was King of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 to 927 and King of the English from 927 to his death in 939. He was the son of King Edward the Elder and his fir ...

(whose family traced their own royal descent back to Cerdic via a brother of King Ine), but the material may well date back to the earliest reconstructable version of the collection, ; and possibly still further back, to 725–6. Compared to the later texts, this pedigree gives an ancestry for Ceolwald as son of Cuthwulf son of

Cuthwine Cuthwine, born c. 565, was a member of the House of Wessex, the son of King Ceawlin of Wessex. Cuthwine's father Ceawlin was deposed from the throne of Wessex in 592 by his nephew Ceol. Therefore, Cuthwine never inherited the throne. Cuthwine ...

which in the later 9th-century texts sometimes seems confused; and it states

as son of Creoda son of Cerdic, whereas the ''Chronicle'' annals go to some length to present Cerdic and Cynric as a father-and-son pair who land in and conquer the southern part of Wessex together (a narrative now considered spurious by historians). Many of the links shown are disputed.

Egbert Egbert is a name that derives from old Germanic words meaning "bright edge", such as that of a blade. Anglo-Saxon variant spellings include Ecgberht () and Ecgbert. German variant spellings include Ekbert and Ecbert. People with the first name Mid ...

, who became King of Wessex in 802, was probably of Kentish origin, and his ancestry back to Cerdic may have been invented to legitimize his claim to the throne of Wessex.Heather Edwards (2004)
Ecgberht
''

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') was published on 23 September ...

'' There are also a number of discrepancies between different sources.

Key

The red border indicates the monarchs
The black border indicates the close relatives of the monarchs (parents, spouses and children)
The blank box indicates other relatives.

Notes

References

Barbara Yorke Barbara Yorke FRHistS FSA (born 1951, Barbara Anne Elizabeth Troubridge) is a historian of Anglo-Saxon England, specialising in many subtopics, including 19th-century Anglo-Saxonism. She is currently emeritus professor of early Medieval histor ...

(1995), ''Wessex in the early Middle Ages'', A & C Black, ; p
79
83; table p
81
{{Wessex monarchs