22 June: Mercia

Today is Mercia Day, so here are 10 things you might not know about the historic kingdom of Mercia:

1. Why choose June 22^nd as Mercia Day? Because it’s the feast day of St Alban, the first recorded British Christian martyr, believed to have been beheaded in what is now St. Albans in Hertfordshire, sometime during the 3rd or 4th century. Mercia’s Flag, a gold (or yellow) saltire on a blue field, was used by the Abbey of St Albans.

2. The Kingdom of Mercia was centred around the River Trent and its tributaries, and covered what we would today call the Midlands of England.

3. The name derived from an Old English word derived from the Mercian dialect, Merce, meaning "borderland". The words march and mark come from the same root.

4. Mercia was the dominant kingdom of Anglo Saxon England for about 300 years, between 600 and 900. The other kingdoms of England at the time were East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex, and together these kingdoms were known as the Heptarchy. Mercia was a very wealthy area, as evidenced by the fact that the largest hoard of Anglo Saxon Gold ever discovered was the Staffordshire Hoard.

5. Mercia was ruled by a succession of kings although there was no capital city as such. The royal court tended to move around. One of the best known kings of Mercia was Offa, the one who built Offa’s dyke, a long earthwork forming a border between England and Wales. He liked to spend time in Tamworth. He also established currency, around the 800s, known as Offa's "penny", which remained in use for about 500 years.

6. There was a female ruler at one point, too. She was called Æthelflæd, and she was the eldest daughter of Alfred the Great. She ruled Mercia from 911-918, although she was never officially crowned queen. Aethelflaed extended and improved the fortifications her father had built, and built defences around many towns such as Stafford, Warwick, Runcorn and Tamworth. Also, she may have come up with the idea of the three-looped Stafford Knot, the symbol of Staffordshire. The story goes that she looped her girdle around two of her allies to signify their bondship.

7. The last Mercian king was Ceolwulf II, who died in 879.

8. Mercia was the last of the English kingdoms to convert to Christianity, under King Peada, who converted to Christianity around 656. The Diocese of Mercia was founded this same year. The first bishop was called Diuma, and he was based at Repton.

9. Some well known writers have been inspired by the area, including JRR Tolkien, who incorporated the Mercian dialect into some of his work, the Kingdom of Rohan, otherwise known as the Mark (see fact 3). The Mercian dialect is the basis of the language of Rohan. Bram Stoker set his 1911 novel The Lair of the White Worm in Mercia.

10. Although Mercia is historic, the name is still used by a number of contemporary Midlands institutions and organisations. In 1967, for example, the police forces of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire were combined into the West Mercia Constabulary, which changed its name to West Mercia Police in 2009. There are two regiments, the Mercian Regiment, founded in 2007, and the Royal Mercian and Lancastrian Yeomanry, founded in 1992 as part of the Territorial Army. In 2012 a new football league was founded, called the Mercian Regional Football League.

Character birthday

Dougal McGregor, an 18^th century Scottish warrior who was transported to the present day during the Constellations’ experiments with wormhole travel. He stayed on Constellation station for a while, but demanded to be returned to Scotland. The nearest the Constellations managed was a town in Northern England called Petterton. The Constellations assumed it would be easy enough to travel to Scotland from there. Instead, he met Desi Troyes (Destroyer) and teamed up with him and his companions. McGregor has a tendency to uncontrollable berserker rages, often triggered by some "Sassanach" ill-thought out comment, such as someone referring to him as "Scotch" or "British". McGregor is an expert swordsman, and wormhole travel gave him an immunity to psionic attacks. Read about him in Over the Rainbow.

Over the Rainbow

'We're not in Trinity anymore,' says Leonard Marx, quoting a line from an old Innovian  movie. The moon is different; the planes flying overhead are different. Nobody has any idea where they are or if it's possible to get home. 

In this strange new world, people from the highly technical Innovia and the less advanced Classica must co-operate in order to survive. In addition, travel through the inter-dimensional wormhole has given some people unusual and unexpected powers.

Innovia mourns the loss of its superhero, Power Blaster, last seen carrying a nuclear bomb to the upper atmosphere away from the inhabited Bird Island. They don't believe he could possibly have survived.  Power Blaster has survived, but is close to death and stranded in the new dimension. He is nursed back to health by a Classican woman, Elena. She has no idea who he is, only that she is falling in love with the handsome stranger.  

Shanna sets out to discover what happened to Nathan Tate, who didn't return from his hiking holiday, not knowing her life is about to be turned inside out and upside down. 

Meanwhile, Desi Troyes, the man responsible for the catastrophe, is at large on the new world, plotting how he can transfer his plans for world domination to the planet he now finds himself on - Earth. 

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