=14. Offa and Eadburh.=[34]--There was in Mercia in recent times a certain valiant king, who was dreaded by all the neighboring kings and states. His name was Offa, and it was he who had the great dike made from sea to sea between Wales and Mercia.[35] His daughter, named Eadburh, was married to Beorhtric, King of the West Saxons. The moment she had possessed herself of the king’s good will, and practically the whole power of the realm, she began to live tyrannically, after the manner of her father. Every man whom Beorhtric loved she would execrate, and would do all things hateful to God and man, accusing to the king all whom she could, thus depriving them insidiously either of life or of power. And if she could not obtain the king’s consent, she used to take them off by poison, as is ascertained to have been the case with a certain young man beloved by the king, whom she poisoned, seeing that she could not accuse him to the king. It is said, moreover, that King Beorhtric unwittingly tasted of the poison, though the queen had intended to give it, not to him, but to the young man; the king, however, was beforehand with him, and so both perished. =15. Eadburh’s Further Life.=[36]--King Beorhtric therefore being dead, the queen, since she could no longer remain among the Saxons, sailed beyond sea with countless treasures, and came to Charles,[37] King of the Franks. As she stood before the dais, bringing many gifts to the king, Charles said to her: ‘Choose, Eadburh, between me and my son, who stands with me on this dais.’ She, without deliberation, foolishly replied: ‘If I am to have my choice, I choose your son, because he is younger than you.’ At which Charles smiled and answered: ‘If you had chosen me, you should have had my son; but since you have chosen him, you shall have neither me nor him.’ However, he gave her a large convent of nuns, in which, having laid aside her secular habit, and assumed the dress worn by the nuns, she discharged the office of abbess for a few years. As she is said to have lived irrationally in her own country, so she appears to have acted much more so among a foreign people; for, being finally caught in illicit intercourse with a man of her own nation, she was expelled from the monastery by order of King Charles. Henceforward she lived a life of shame in poverty and misery until her death; so that at last, accompanied only by one slave, as I have heard from many who saw her, she begged her bread daily at Pavia,[38] and so wretchedly died.