Not to contradict the Word of Pete, but it seems to me that the differences in the history of England are fairly small. This is set centuries before there were Viking raids and Danegeld. On the other hand, there is little difference other than time between
Anglo-Saxons and Danes.
After the Roman Empire left Britain, various Germanic peoples –
Angles,
Saxons,
Jutes,
Frisians and
Franks – started building settlements on the island.
Tamworth is supposed to have been founded by Angles from the region where Denmark gradually transitions into Germany, so "Norse" isn't too far off.
Scribe found the books in 650. Based on her apparent age and two instances of "years pass", I estimate that it's now around 660 to 665. By this time, the Anglo-Saxon invaders had conquered most of what is now England and formed an unstable patchwork of small kingdoms, which warred both among each other and against the Celtic
Britons.
Anglo-Saxon and Celtic kingdoms around the year 600:
Some excerpts from
the Wikipedia article on Mercia:
Quote:
The name "Mercia" is Old English for "boundary folk", and the traditional interpretation is that the kingdom originated along the frontier between the native Welsh and the Anglo-Saxon invaders. However, P. Hunter Blair argued an alternative interpretation: that they emerged along the frontier between Northumbria and the inhabitants of the Trent river valley.
Aha! There are the Trents!
Quote:
The earliest person named in any records as a king of Mercia is Creoda, said to have been the great-grandson of Icel. Coming to power around 584, he built a fortress at Tamworth which became the seat of Mercia's kings.
Quote:
[One] Mercian king, Penda, ruled from about 626 or 633 until 655. [...] In 633 Penda and his ally Cadwallon of Gwynedd defeated and killed Edwin, who had become not only ruler of the newly unified Northumbria, but bretwalda, or high king, over the southern kingdoms. When another Northumbrian king, Oswald, arose and again claimed overlordship of the south, he also suffered defeat and death at the hands of Penda and his allies – in 642 at the Battle of Maserfield. In 655, after a period of confusion in Northumbria, Penda brought 30 sub-kings to fight the new Northumbrian king Oswiu at the Battle of Winwaed, in which Penda in turn lost the battle and his life.
The battle led to a temporary collapse of Mercian power. Penda's son Peada [...] succeeded his father as king of Mercia; Oswiu set up Peada as an under-king; but in the spring of 656 he was murdered and Oswiu assumed direct control of the whole of Mercia. A Mercian revolt in 658 threw off Northumbrian domination and resulted in the appearance of another son of Penda, Wulfhere, who ruled Mercia as an independent kingdom (though he apparently continued to render tribute to Northumbria for a while) until his death in 675. Wulfhere initially succeeded in restoring the power of Mercia, but the end of his reign saw a serious defeat by Northumbria. The next king, Æthelred, defeated Northumbria in the Battle of the Trent in 679, settling once and for all the long-disputed control of the former kingdom of Lindsey.
This Lord Pendon may be holding his rally during the revolt in 658, or it may be a few years later, after the rise of Wulfhere, if the Trents are still subservient to Northumbria and Pendon wants to conquer them (on behalf of king Wulfhere of course).