List of monarchs of Wessex facts for kids

This is a list of the early rulers of the Kingdom of the West Saxons, also known as Wessex, up until the year 886 AD. For kings and queens who ruled after this time, you can look at the List of English monarchs. While we have many clear records for later kings, the information about these earlier rulers can sometimes be a bit unclear.

The names of these kings are given in modern English. You'll also see their names and titles as they were written in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Latin. These were the main languages used for writing records in England back then.

Back in those days, spelling wasn't as fixed as it is now. Even within the same document, words might be spelled differently! Some letters, like the ones that sound like "th" today (Þ or ð), were used in different ways. Also, the letter "W" was sometimes written as "VV" or with a special old letter called wynn (Ƿ or ƿ).

List of Kings

Here is a list of the kings who ruled Wessex.

Timeline of Rulers

Family Tree

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

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 [B] manuscript of the Chronicle), and Asser'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 Ine back to Cerdic. This first appears in a 10th-century manuscript copy of the "Anglian collection" of Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies. The manuscript is thought to have been made at Glastonbury in the 930s during the reign of King Æthelstan  (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, c. 796; and possibly still further back, to 725–726. Compared to the later texts, this pedigree gives an ancestry for Ceolwald as son of Cuthwulf son of Cuthwine which in the later 9th-century texts sometimes seems confused; and it states Cynric 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).

See Also

• You can find this article in Spanish here: Anexo:Reyes de Wessex para niños
• List of royal consorts of Wessex (the wives of the kings)
• Governors of Roman Britain
• List of legendary kings of Britain
• Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies (family histories of Anglo-Saxon kings)
• List of English Monarchs