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Interesting post... I've been thinking quite a lot about the function of Offa's Dyke the last little while. I agree that it may be erronious to make the automatic assumption that this was a defensive structure, without evidence to directly support that claim. I mean, just consider the sheer length of the thing! The manpower necessary to defend such a long structure would have been phenomenal. Even if it functioned on the basis of a series of connected guard forts, as did Hadrian's Wall, it would have been terribly easy for Welsh raiders to penetrate into English territory, given that this was never a stone fortification, but at best a wooden palisade, which is vulnerable to fire/axe/escalation when undefended. The logistics of defending such a structure seem dubious from the start, given that early English society/economy wasn't organized (like their Roman predecessors) to support a large standing army of the size necessary to defend such a monumentally long wall. There would have been no one left in the villages to farm or husband the animals! I realize that Anglian lords kept household warriors, but this elite was never large enough in number to hold something as long as the Dyke -- not without leaving the heartlands undefended, which I feel is something that these lords, ever mistrustful and at war with one another, would never have considered allowing to happen. Excavating the dyke could have been managed with slaves and peasants, but defending it would require real soldiers.
The idea of the dyke as a defensive structure brings to mind an old Buddhist saying, by, err, Shanti Deva, I believe (8th C.E.). I'm going to mangle it, I'm certain, but it goes something like this: "When deciding to take a walk, why would you cover the world in leather when it is easier to wear shoes upon your feet?". It seems to me that Offa's Dyke is like trying to cover the world in leather, when it would have been much more tenable (and cost-effective) to build defensible strongholds, where your forces are centralised rather than dispersed.
Which brings me to the idea that perhaps the dyke was not intended so much as a defensive wall by its builder(s) -- whoever that might have been -- but rather as more of a symbolic barrier, which states: "Everything on this side of the ditch belongs to me, so don't think you can keep crossing over it without any consequences. You can keep everything on your side -- I don't want it anyway." I guess it's like the proverbial line in the sand. It wouldn't necessarily imply a state of war between the two sides (something we are too quick to assume), but rather an uneasy and somewhat informal truce, marked by periods of raiding, skirmish, and settlement into border areas where resources are scarce. This is all conjecture, of course; an exercise in trying to put myself inside the head of whoever might have excavated this ditch, given its dimensions and the rather obvious gaps that occur along its length. I guess until more formal research is undertaken, we'll never actually know for sure.
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