List of monarchs of Wessex

This is a list of monarchs of Wessex until 927. For later monarchs, see the List of English monarchs. While the details of the later monarchs are confirmed by a number of sources, the earlier ones are in many cases obscure.

The names are given in modern English form followed by the names and titles (as far as is known) in contemporary Anglo-Saxon English and Latin, the prevalent 'official' languages of the time.

This was a time when spellings varied widely, even within a document. A number of variations of the details below exist. Amongst these are the preference between the runic letter "Thorn" (Þ) and the letter "Eth" (Ð), both of which are pronounced "Th" and were interchangeable. They were used indiscriminately for voiced and unvoiced sounds, unlike modern Icelandic. Thorn tended to be more used in the south (Wessex) and eth in the North (Mercia and Northumbria). "Th" was preferred in the earliest period in Northern texts.

The character "⁊" (tironian et) was used as the ampersand (&) in contemporary Anglo-Saxon writings. The era pre-dates the emergence of some forms of writing accepted today; notably rare were lower case and the letters "W" and "U". W was occasionally rendered "VV", but the runic letter "wynn" (Ƿ) was the normal way of writing the "W" sound. Again, in the earliest period, the Angles/Engle preferred 'VV', whilst the West Saxons preferred the letter derived from a rune. (Compare "thorn" (Þ, from the rune of the same name) and "eth" (Ð).)

Except in manuscripts, runic letters were an Anglian phenomenon. (The early Engle restricted the use of runes to monuments, whereas the Saxons adopted Wynn and Thorn for sounds which did not have a Latin equivalent. Otherwise they were not used in Wessex).

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.

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