Visit to Wulfrun (Wolverhampton)

Little visit to Wolverhampton, art gallery and St Peters. Wolverhampton was born at a time of national turmoil and the woman from whom the city and its inhabitants derive their names was in the thick of it.

Wulfruna was a Saxon noblewoman who lived over a thousand years ago in the Kingdom of Mercia. The exact dates of her birth and death are not known but the Saxon Chronicles of that time give us sufficient information about Wulfruna to build up a picture of an interesting and important life.

Wulfruna lived at a time when Mercia dominated Saxon politics. Saxon England was a loose, and sometimes tension ridden, federation of seven kingdoms. The three dominant ones, Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, seemed to be in a constant state of mutual hostility. Mercia's period of dominance was sandwiched between the decline of Northumbria, following defeat at the hand of the Picts late in the seventh century, and the rise Wessex in the tenth century, after the Danish Vikings had done with pillaging and laying waste to Mercia.