Mercia

Was Mercia really this militarily agressive and expansionist power?
Or was it really what the very name suggests it was - a lawless no-man's-land, a romantic waste, where kingship and gangsterism were scarcely to be distinguished and hoards-worths of loot just happened to go missing? Where the old pagan ways lasted longest, furthest from the light of Christian civilisation from either south or west!

And indeed the sort of place, even hundreds of years later, where one would expect Beowulf to be written! (Or indeed, over a thousand years later, The Lord of the Rings!)