Defeat and Death
When Wulfhere attacked Oswiu's son Ecgfrith in 674, he did so from a position of strength. Stephen of Ripon's Life of Wilfrid says that Wulfhere "stirred up all the southern nations against ". Bede does not report the fighting, nor is it mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but according to Stephen, Ecgfrith defeated Wulfhere, forcing him to surrender Lindsey, and to pay tribute.
Wulfhere survived the defeat, but evidently lost some degree of control over the south as a result; in 675, Æscwine, one of the kings of the West Saxons, fought him at Biedanheafde. It is not known where this battle was, or who was the victor. Henry of Huntingdon, a 12th-century historian who had access to versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle now lost, believed that Mercians had been the victors in a "terrible battle", and remarks upon Wulfhere having inherited "the valour of his father and grandfather". Kirby, however, presumes Æscwine was sufficiently successful to break Wulfhere's hold over Wessex.
Wulfhere died later in 675. The cause of death, according to Henry of Huntingdon, was disease. He would have been in his mid-thirties. His widow, Eormenhild, is thought to have later become the abbess of Ely. Æthelred, Wulfhere's brother, succeeded to the throne, and reigned for nearly thirty years. Æthelred recovered Lindsey from the Northumbrians a few years after his accession, but was generally unable to maintain the domination of the south achieved by Wulfhere.
Read more about this topic: Wulfhere Of Mercia
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—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy...and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 7:1-4.
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
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