King Offa of Mercia (Northern England)

[Navid Masud]

Written by Abdun Nur (Steven Jewett)


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King Offa came to the throne after a period of civil war and ruled Mercia (meaning: land of the border people) for 39 years (757 - 796 AD). He was a clever statesman, politician and organiser, being fair and kind-hearted in everything that he did. The wealth and security created by the people of Mercia with Offa’s custodianship, had great influence, socially and culturally, throughout their land.

Mercia was split into seven small sub-region, and each of these was split again into many, many even smaller sub-regions. Each one functioned independently, local autonomy for each small sub-region, with King Offa as the King, but not the Christian King concept, the Islamic Caliph (custodian) concept.

This is detailed in the 'Tribal Hidage' document established within Offa‘s reign, it presents the Islamic structure of small autonomous communities, the word ‘Hidage’ means unit, and describes a tribal unit.

If you go back to 54 BC modern archaeology suggests, the population of Britons at the time could have numbered as many as ten million. Caesar himself remarks that the population of Britain was huge, so the population of king Offa’s era would have been extensive.

The system of allodial land rights (also an Islamic concept, but not exclusively) was in use throughout Mercia before William the Bastard arrived in 1066 AD.

The law system of Mercia under King Offa, was completely free of any influence of Roman law, it was based on the original laws of the ancient tribes that settled Britain, those that migrated over from the Continent, already possessing an elaborate and developed legal system. In general, if a crime was committed then there was a victim, and it was up to the victim - or the victim's family - or the community the family existed within, to seek justice. This is a form of natural law, as expressed within the Qur’an.

The Jesuit historians contend that the people of Powys (a region of Wales), beginning in the 8th century fought with their Anglo-Saxon neighbours to the east, but the Welsh were able to thwart attempted invasions. Logically this can not be supported, if this was the case why would King Offa have built a defensive dyke.

A massive bank and ditch was constructed, and survives today as a potent symbol of the ancient origins of both nations, the dyke was built as a defensible (if not heavily defended) earthwork specifically erected against the belligerent 8th century kingdom of Powys, it ran 64 miles when originally constructed.

The question should be why did the people of Cymru (Wales), only attack Mercia during Offa’s reign?

I contend the sovereign powers subjugating the welsh peoples were Christian, the vessels of the Roman Catholic empire, and it was through these insidious forces of manipulation, that conflict was generated between these neighbours, so leading to the dykes construction.

During this same historical era from 711 AD, the people of Spain began to live Muslim, after 45 year (756 AD) of guidance from the Muslims of Damascus, the indigenous people established self administration.

The people of Portugal were part of the same transformation, slowly developing with their Spanish counterparts, known then as Al-Garb Al-Andalus, meaning The West of Paradise.

As early as 722 AD the Roman Catholics attacked these people, completely removing freedoms by 1249 AD, so complete a purging the only mosque left partially standing within Portugal is in Mertola, and that was converted to a Roman Catholic church after the Reconquista (meaning re-conquest), interesting use of name, re-conquest meaning the Christian Roman Catholics had previously conquered these people and were re-establishing their subjugation.

This relentless unprovoked assault of the Roman Catholics on the peoples of Spain and Portugal lasted 516 years, the Reconquista was essentially completed in 1238 AD, when the only remaining Muslim state in Iberia, the Emirate of Granada, became a vassal of the Christian King of Castille. This arrangement lasted for 250 years until dishonoured by the Roman Catholics, who launched the Granada War of 1492 AD, which finally expelled all Muslim authority from Spain. This is important to understand as it demonstrates two things, firstly that if Mercia was an Islamic region it was not alone, and its neighbours were local, secondly the Roman Catholics attacked these regions just as they attacked Mercia.

Within the Iberian region the indigenous peoples establish the Pact of Umar (717AD), to protect those who were inclined to be Christian or Jewish or whatever they wished, to exist without conflict. It would not be unreasonable to conclude this same pact would have been established in Mercia, if indeed it too was transforming to an Islamic region, free of usury, sovereignty and a free society of equals.

A treaty to establish protection for all.

Offa's silver penny was the forerunner of modern coins, these coins are remarkable for the beauty of their execution, far exceeding in correctness, Offa also minted gold coins, an example has survived that’s shown on the home page of this website. It was discovered in 1841 C.E., and is displayed in the British Museum.

This coin is a simulation of the Muslim Dinar in circulation during the eighth century.

The centre text reads "There is no Deity (God). (There is) Only Allah, The One, Without Equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah,’ and the further declaration, engraved around the margin of the coin, ‘Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah, Who sent him (Muhammad) with the doctrine and the true belief to prevail over every religion."

Obverse: The centre text reads "Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah with the name of the King Offa Rex written upside down within that text." The text around the circumference reads "In the name of Allah. This (coin) was minted in 157 A.H." (157 A.H. corresponds to 773-774 C.E.).


After King Offa died, Coenwulf (or Cenwulf) (died 821) was King of Mercia from December 796 to 821. He was a descendant of a brother of King Penda, who had ruled Mercia in the middle of the 7th century. He succeeded Ecgfrith, the son of Offa; Ecgfrith only reigned for five months, with Coenwulf coming to the throne in the same year that Offa died. In the early years of Coenwulf's reign he had to deal with a revolt in Kent, which had been under Offa's control. Eadberht Præ n returned from exile in Francia to claim the Kentish throne and Coenwulf was forced to wait for papal support before he could intervene.

When Pope Leo agreed to anathematize (curse, dedicate to evil) Eadberht, Coenwulf invaded and retook the kingdom; Eadberht was taken prisoner, and was blinded and had his hands cut off.

Coenwulf also appears to have lost control of the kingdom of East Anglia during the early part of his reign, as an independent coinage appears under King Eadwald. Coenwulf's coinage reappears in 805 indicating that the kingdom was again under his control.

It seem that after King Offa, greed and stupidity reigned sovereign over Mercia, sovereign criminals began to erode the freedom King Offa had established. But only slightly, the population continued for the most part to reject Christianity.

Why would I say this?

In 1049 AD pope Alexander II, declared William the Bastard’s (Guillaume le Bâtard - propergated by the Roman Catholics as William the Conqueror), marriage to the daughter of Baldwin of Flanders incestuous and among other penances he was forced to undertake was to go on a crusade, the first Crusade of the Papacy.

In 1066 William obtained a blessing for the conquest of England, Alexander II empowered William the Bastard with a Papal ring (A new ring is cast in gold for each Pope), the standard of St. Peter and a Papal edict to present to the English clergy, he also received a consecrated banner in support of the subjugation of Mercia (this banner signifies a solemn dedicated purpose of sacred religious sanctification (the establishing of the setting aside for special use or purpose)). William organized a council of wanton war at Lillebonne and openly began assembling an army of Mercenaries, criminals and aristocratic vermin in Normandy. Offering promises of stolen English lands and titles, he amassed a considerable invasion force, quotas for the supply of ships imposed on the Norman nobility indicate a fleet of around seven hundred and seventy ships.

Over the next five years until 1071 war raged throughout Mercia, in addition, sovereign Kings periodically attempted to take sovereignty from William, the people of Mercia fought and were worn down, the promise of easy wealth emptied Europe of every low life and thief it held, to fight against the Mercian’s.

William employed a method of harrying the population, which entailed the destruction of every building, field, animal, person and possession his mercenaries and the Christians from the surrounding kingdoms, now under Williams dictatorship, came across within Mercia, after the land was burnt his men sowed the fields and land with salt, to stunt growth; after this treatment the land did not recover for more than 100 years. William is said to have eliminated the native aristocracy in as little as four years. He fell upon the English of the North like a raging lion, so that the area was depopulated and impoverished for many decades.

In 1083, Matilda his wife died, and William became even more tyrannical over the realm he brutally subjugated, with the aid of the Roman Catholic Empire.

The people suffered horrifically in a baron land of death, those that survived were starving, weak and defeated, William showed no mercy, to children, women or men, this wholesale extermination continued until his death in 1087 AD.

The death toll is unknown, but the majority of the enormous population of Mercia disappeared. Due to the scorched earth policy, much of the land was laid waste and depopulated, a fact to which the Domesday Book, written almost two decades after William began, readily attests.

The only logical reason Pope Alexander II would have wished to destroy the entire population of Mercia, would have been if they were Muslim, a Muslim would never consent to the insanity of the Roman Catholic enslavement.

This is historically demonstrated by the Muslims within the Iberian region, as they had to ultimately leave their ancestral homes, their businesses, their heritage, and travelled into a land they did not know, to escape the Roman Catholic persecutions, and enslavement both physical and mental.

To this day the people of Mercia are slaves, we still suffer under the same constrictive controls, the minds of the people have been subjugated so deeply with the passage of almost a thousands years, they fail to comprehend their condition.

The feudal system has altered over time, but still functions, the rights of allodial ownership have continued to be denied to us, and the Roman Catholic Crown still pulls the strings behind a wall of deceit. Our legal system has been replaced with Roman Law, our possessions leased back to us through taxation, our physical bodies the property of the Crown Corporation.

They condition and indoctrinate the population to not only be compliant to their dictates, but to be so subjugated, they enthusiastically force those around them to be just as compliant.

They have removed the coinage monetary system, and replaced it with a fiat monetary system, resulting in a constant defrauding of the people, taxes expand while services decline, fiat money values constantly erode, so the burden builds, economically enslaved, mentally subjugated, socially isolated; has the Roman Catholic assault ever reduced?

They educate only enough to allow function, they do not want the bulk of the people to see things clearly, a developed mind is a dangerous tool against an establishment of liars, thieves and subjugators, a criminal body in control of a dullard population.

[Navid Masud]

By Chris Hedges


This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.


Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.


There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”


It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.


I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.


“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”


China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Chris Hedges' Columns

The American Empire Is Bankrupt


Posted on Jun 14, 2009

Wikimedia Commons


By Chris Hedges


(Page 2)


“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”


The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.


There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.


To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.


“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”


The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.


“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”


The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite. Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.