Historic Mercia was annihilated by the Norman invaders after the Conquest in 1066 and its territory, along with that of the other English regions, was forcibly added to the Norman Empire. The Conquest also destroyed the region’s ancient organic democracy and imposed an hereditary absolute monarchy in its stead, under which the people were reduced in status from freemen to ‘subjects of the crown’. This set the essential political trend for the following millennium and new hierarchical political and social systems ensured the suppression of the indigenous people. The imposition of the Norman feudal system created a huge underclass of English serfs tied to foreign lords and marked the origins of the iniquitous modern class system.

Today, little has changed. Mercia remains locked inside a crumbling empire, Norman in origin, which shows little inclination to release the English regions from its weakening grip. The anachronistic hereditary monarchy continues to thrive and symbolise the impotence of the millions of ‘subjects of the crown’, who are obliged to fund it, whilst only small concessions to real democracy have yet resulted from the determined efforts of countless English radicals over the centuries.

We, representatives of the Mercian Constitutional Convention, assembled on 29th May 2003 in the heartland of Mercia to reaffirm and declare the legal independence of the region under The Constitution Of Mercia, which we have now published and which is available to all the people of the region upon request. We have spent over two years in careful deliberation and embrace this Constitution in order to re-create Mercia as an autonomous region, constructed as an organic democracy, based on holistic principles.

This Yahoo group is to promote discussion of the above, in association with our website http://www.independentmercia.org