This is a list of monarchs of the Kingdom of the West Saxons (Wessex) until 886 AD. 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 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Latin, the prevalent languages of record at the time in England.
This was a period in which spellings varied widely, even within a document. A number of variations of the details below exist. Among these are the preference between the runic character thorn (ÃÂ, lower-case þ, from the rune of the same name) and the letter eth (àor ð), both of which are equivalent to modern â¨thâ© and were interchangeable. They were used indiscriminately for voiced and unvoiced â¨thâ© sounds, unlike in modern Icelandic. Thorn tended to be more used in the south (Wessex) and eth in the North (Mercia and Northumbria). Separate letters th were preferred in the earliest period in Northern texts, and returned to dominate by the Middle English period onward.
The character â (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 characters, and the letters W and U. W was occasionally rendered VV (later UU), but the runic character wynn (÷ or ÿ) was a common way of writing the /w/ sound. Again the West Saxons initially preferred the character derived from a rune, and the Angles/Engle preferred the Latin-derived lettering VV, consistent with the thorn versus eth usage pattern.
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 Wessex royal line was traditionally founded by a man named Cerdic, an undoubtedly Celtic name cognate to Ceretic (the name of two British kings, ultimately derived from *Corotëcos). This may indicate that Cerdic was a native Briton and that his dynasty became anglicised over time.
A number of Cerdic's alleged descendants also possessed Celtic names (see the list above), including the 'Bretwalda' Ceawlin. The last man in this dynasty to have a Brittonic name was King Caedwalla, who died as late as 689.
This is seen as evidence for a British influence on the emerging Anglo-Saxon elite classes within the ongoing debate about whether the Romano-Britons were forcefully expelled or gradually assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain.