Modern Uses of The Term 'Mercia'
The term ‘midlands’ is first recorded (as ‘mydlande’) in 1555. It is possible therefore that until then Mercia had remained the preferred term, as the quote from Trevisa above would indicate.
John Bateman, writing in 1876 or 1883, referred to contemporary Cheshire and Staffordshire landholdings as being in Mercia. The most credible source for the conceit of a contemporary Mercia is Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels. The first of these appeared in 1874 and Hardy himself considered it the origin of the conceit of a contemporary Wessex. Bram Stoker set his 1911 novel, The Lair of the White Worm, in a contemporary Mercia that may have been influenced by Hardy, whose secretary was a friend of Stoker’s brother. Although ‘Edwardian Mercia’ never had the success of ‘Victorian Wessex’, it was an idea that appealed to the higher echelons of society. In 1908 Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of Birmingham University, wrote to his counterpart at Bristol, welcoming a new university worthy of:
the great Province of Wessex whose higher educational needs it will supply. It will be no rival, but colleague and co-worker with this university, whose province is Mercia…. At this period, prior to World War I, regional identities within England were being debated with the prospect of separate Home Rule parliaments being established.
The British Army has made use of regional identities in naming larger formations. After the Second World War, the infantry regiments of Cheshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire were organised in the Mercian Brigade (1948–1968). Today "Mercia" appears in the titles of two regiments, the new Mercian Regiment (which recruits in Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Worcestershire and parts of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands) and the Royal Mercian and Lancastrian Yeomanry.
The West Mercia Constabulary was created in 1967, combining the police forces of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire.
Telephone directories across the Midlands reveal a large number of commercial and voluntary organisations using ‘Mercia’ in their names. In the early 1980s, Mercia Television was an unsuccessful contender for the Midlands franchise, then owned by ATV. It was won by Central Independent Television. Mercia (formerly Mercia FM) is a commercial radio station broadcasting from Coventry founded in 1980 as Mercia Sound.
In 2012 a new football league was formed called the Mercian Regional Football League.
There are currently two main organisations campaigning for Mercian self-determination. Sovereign Mercia seeks independence for Mercia as a modern technological state, whereas the Acting Witan of Mercia advocates a return to an agrarian subsistence economy.
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