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I was born in the borderland - in Coventry, in the county of Warwickshire. Or at least it was in Warwickshire when I was born - a few years after I was born it had drifted into the new country of the West Midlands.
A few hundred years earlier Coventry was not in Warwickshire - an invention of the Saxons of Wessex who annexed it in the early 10th century - but instead on the borders of the Forest of Arden in the kingdom of Mercia.
Given these drifting borders, the etymology of "Mercia" is interesting - it comes from the Old English (West Saxon dialect) Mierce or Myrce (Merce in the Mercian dialect itself), meaning "boundary folk". Ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *mereg-, "edge" or "boundary".
The root of the word also gives us march or mark (as in the Welsh Marches), meaning any kind of borderland. The borders of Mercia - the borders of the borderland - were never fixed. At one point it had annexed or gained submissions from East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex
After this Mercia's borders shrank back again until it was eventually annexed by King Alfred of Wessex. Coventry remained on the border (I'm not sure which side) as a trading/market post between King Alfred's Saxon Mercia and Danelaw England.
The history of Coventry is a lesson in the impermanence and flexibility of borders
These thoughts brought to you whilst reading "Of Mud & Flame", a sourcebook for Penda's Fen (Penda being a former king of Mercia), and the quote "the edge is where the centre is" morphing into the similarly paradoxical "the Borderlands are in the Midlands"
