By 698 the new monastery on Lindisfarne had produced an extraordinary monument to the new Northumbrian Christian civilization in the form of the Lindisfarne Gospels. This was a version of the Four Gospels of the New Testament but was decorated with beautiful illuminated letters and patterns, patterns which mingle Celtic designs and the sort of Anglo-Saxon shapes found on the buckles of the East Anglian Raedwald.
The Lindisfarne Gospels were made by monks living in communities which were becoming very much the rule in England by the end of the seventh century. Irish Christianity was notable for its monks’ austere way of life. The earliest Irish and Scottish monasteries tended to be sited in remote places like islands or on hills, and the monks’ cells would be beehive shaped, pleasant in summer and freezing cold in winter. But with the spread of Christianity, as a result of intermarriage between English rulers and of the energy of the Northumbrian and Irish missionaries, monasteries of a more sophisticated kind were built. They grew into large, powerful institutions, with many different rooms such as the scriptorium, where manuscripts were copied, and herb gardens outside. They provided schooling and were increasingly important communities in themselves. They started to have their own farms of sheep and dairy, particularly as the wealthy bequeathed land to monasteries in return for the monks’ saying Masses for their souls. Seventh-century women participated too. Soon there were many communities of what were called ‘double monasteries’, foundations where men and women lived side by side but in separate buildings. The Old English word for monastery is minster and towns with ‘minster’ at the end suggest that they were once religious communities–for example, Westminster, Minster Lovell and Upminster.
It was owing to the energy of King Oswy that the English Church achieved a much needed national unity, for there was constant quarrelling between the different Christian sects of the Roman, Celtic and Scots and Irish Churches. The dominant issue in their quarrel was the date of Easter, but the real problem was that the Church in England lacked a harmonious national organization. Although he was only a simple warrior, or perhaps precisely because he was a warrior, Oswy decided in 664 that how to calculate when Easter fell and a host of other matters should be determined once and for all.
Oswy called a national Church Council at the monastery built by the Northumbrian princess Abbess Hilda at Whitby on the windswept east coast of Yorkshire. Hilda was a great administrator whose abbey became a training school for Church statesmen. Her monastery produced at least five outstanding ecclesiastics including Wilfrid of York and became a place where kings and princes sought advice on government. Here too in the 680s lived Caedmon, a humble lay brother who would compose some of the earliest extant Anglo-Saxon religious poetry.
Bede described the shyness of this poor lay brother attached to the abbey who, because he was uneducated, performed all the tasks of a servant. In the refectory or dining room at meal times (for monks and lay brothers ate together to emphasize the brotherhood of man) the educated monks would amuse themselves inventing elegant verse. Caedmon was always too embarrassed to speak when he saw the harp coming round the long table towards him. He would quickly find an excuse to leave. One night in the stable where he slept in order to take care of the monastery’s horses he had fallen into a melancholy sleep, all too aware of his ignorance. Suddenly someone appeared to him in his dreams and said, ‘Caedmon sing some song to me.’ Caedmon replied that he could not sing and that was why he had left the hall. But the other insisted that he should sing. ‘What shall I sing?’ asked Caedmon. ‘Sing the beginning of created things,’ said the other. And Caedmon, in the muck of the stable, found that the most beautiful verses were coming out of his mouth as he sang the praises of God the Father who had made and preserved the human race. The story goes that when Abbess Hilda heard the exquisite poetry he was speaking she ordered that Caedmon should no longer be a lay brother but should be given a proper monk’s habit.
It was at this abbey that the churchmen of the many separate kingdoms in England bowed to the power of the bretwalda Oswy and assembled in what was the first British conference, the Synod of Whitby, attended by all the great figures of seventh-century British Christendom in a bid to stop the bickering between the Irish and Roman Churches. The Irish Church had become a law unto itself during the Dark Ages when it lost contact with Rome. By 664 it was in effect a separate and rival organization which frequently disagreed with the papacy, whether on the date of Easter or on the tonsure–Irish monks were tonsured (shaved) at the front from ear to ear while Roman monks were tonsured on top. In daily life as the Church began to occupy an increasingly central position within the Northumbrian state this was beginning to create a number of practical problems.
With St Aidan’s death and the accession of the fiery Bishop Colman to Lindisfarne and the bishopric of York, the issue led to a ludicrous antagonism between the two branches of the same faith. Some people had been converted by Irish Scots and some by Roman missionaries, so that their disputes were beginning to take up energies better used elsewhere. At the Synod of Whitby Wilfrid of Ripon was in favour of the Roman way of reckoning. ‘Why’, he asked with some resonance, should a small number in ‘the remotest of two remote islands, the Picts and Britons, be different from the universal Church in Asia, Africa, Egypt, Greece, Italy and France?’
It was left to King Oswy to decide. He came down in favour of the Church founded by St Peter, in preference to what had in effect become a detached Church founded by St Columba. But at this pronouncement Bishop Colman, who was a strict adherent of St Columba, flew into such a rage that he resigned his bishopric at Lindisfarne, stormed back to Iona and eventually returned to Ireland. Oswy’s Synod had done the English Church a great service. Christianity in England was now run by the Roman Church, which had the virtue of being an efficient, permanently staffed, wealthy international organization as opposed to the Irish Church’s reliance on the enthusiasm of individuals. A few years later the country benefited from the pope’s choice of a brilliant priest from what is present-day Turkey named Theodore of Tarsus as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Despite the importance we attach today to the ancient archbishopric, hitherto the Archbishop of Canterbury had had little actual power outside Kent. But over the next twenty years Archbishop Theodore’s organizational skills transformed the English Church into a rationalized whole. In 672 its first canons gave Theodore and his successors at Canterbury authority over all the English Church, with power to create dioceses and make new bishops, a landmark in English religious history. All the bishops (the planned total of twenty-four had now been reached) of the different kingdoms, Mercia, Northumbria and so on, were to be under the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Training schools were set up to ensure that each bishop had so many monks and priests to help with his work as well as schools for gifted children, whatever their means. As a result of Theodore’s Greek-speaking background Greek and Latin were taught again to the inhabitants of England as well as the ancient curriculum of the Seven Liberal Arts: the Trivium and the Quadrivium.
The English Church gained a sense of national unity from the Church Councils which Theodore called on a regular basis. As religious enthusiasm swept the country with the aid of the well-to-do, a large number of monasteries were built all over England, particularly in Northumberland. The monks began to produce alliterative religious poetry like the Germanic verse of their forefathers. Talented poets in their midst were most likely responsible for the fusion of Christian values and the Saxon warrior past, which by the eighth century had produced two of the greatest Anglo-Saxon poems, The Dream of the Rood and Beowulf. If they were not written by monks they were certainly copied down in manuscript by monks in their scriptoriums and transmitted as the Anglo-Saxon version of Christian culture to future generations. They also memorialized the lives of those around them. They painted pictures not of the fabulous monsters of their Nordic ancestors’ dour imaginations but of the real people they saw around them: English ceorls working in their fields or
hunting hares with ermines, nobles on their horses flying hawks from their wrists. As the wealthier classes’ children were educated in monasteries, their pleasures became more cultivated. They wrote gnomic verses, simple poetry. Once they had been taught to read and write by the Latin-speaking monks, the cleverer might enjoy Anglo-Saxon riddles derived from Latin literature, as well as that literature itself, including Virgil’s Aeneid (which Bede had certainly read) and Pliny’s Natural History.
Christianity had become a power throughout the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, as important as the kings and their lords. Other than the monastic communities themselves, the key element in each diocese was not the parish priest, of which there were few, but the bishop, who then had an itinerant preaching role. At first there were very few parish churches because they took time and money to build. In areas where there were none, Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus allowed people to worship in the fields, which is why standing crosses were often erected instead of altars. Elaborately decorated with new foreign motifs like the Byzantine-style vineleaves of Theodore’s craftsmen, they may still be seen at Bewcastle in Cumbria and at Durham.
Some Saxon churches, like the important example at Brixworth in Northamptonshire and the Lorna Doone church St Mary the Virgin at Oare in Somerset, survive to this day. But the majority were either destroyed by the Danes or rebuilt by the Normans. As the centuries went on, parish churches tended to be erected as private buildings by wealthy individuals. From this came the large number of lay patrons in England who derived their right to appoint a priest from having built the church on their own land. By the late tenth century, the tithe, a tenth of the farmer’s crops, was legally owed to the Church to support the parish priest. A hundred years later the English lord saw it as part of his duty to give the Church a third of his manor lands’ income.
On the death of Oswy in 670 Northumbria began to lose her position as the dominant kingdom in England to Mercia. Oswy’s son Egfrith had not inherited his father’s practical nature and wasted his kingdom’s resources on fruitless attempts to expand north into the country of the elusive Picts. The eighth century in England is generally known as the period of the Mercian Supremacy under two powerful kings–Ethelbald (716–57) and Offa (757–96).
The period was also to be celebrated for the flowering of the Northumbrian Church in what has been called the heroic age of Anglo-Saxon Christianity as the traditions established by the zealously pious Northumbrian kings and monks at Lindisfarne came to fruition. Its Irish roots gave it a strong pietistic strain as well as the profound sense of mission of its great founders like St Aidan. By the late seventh century the English Church was sending missionaries back to Germany to convert the lands of their heathen forebears. The mission to Saxony was begun by the Bishop of York Wilfred of Ripon, when he was wrecked off the coast of Frisia. It was continued by his pupil St Willibrord and by Willibrord’s contemporary St Boniface.
Strong links were also established between the Northumbrian Church and the new regime in France, where the great tradition of English scholarship of the eighth century helped create a revival of western learning–what is called the eighth-century Carolingian Renaissance. Among the fruits of these contacts was the Palace School founded by the greatest of the Carolingian kings, Charlemagne, where young Frankish nobles and promising boys from poor families could be educated. The blond, magnificent Charlemagne, who could neither read nor write himself, set great store by education. The heathen German Saxons who were given a choice of ‘Baptism or death’ by his conquering soldiers would have been surprised to know that Charlemagne slept with a slate beneath his pillow, hoping to learn by osmosis the magic letters he found so difficult.
In England the power of Mercia meant that for the first time King Ethelbald began to style himself King of All South England, while Offa his successor simply called himself King of the English. This he was certainly in a position to do: except in Northumbria and Wessex, where the ancient house of the West Saxons continued in very reduced circumstances, King Offa directly ruled most of the rest of the country. A superb soldier who introduced a magnificent struck coinage with fine silver pennies in imitation of Roman currency, he also adopted Roman methods to keep the Welsh British out of England, constructing his famous Dyke from sea to sea which can still be seen today. Offa was a notable protector of the Church, which he encouraged as a source of stability and education, supporting it with grants of land and building many abbeys.
During the long reigns of the two strong Mercian kings which between them covered almost the whole century, England prospered as never before. From being the barbarians of Europe, the English had become renowned for their orderly way of life and exemplary scholarship. Charlemagne corresponded with Offa and called him ‘brother’, an epithet he accorded to very few people, and Offa made the first extant European trading treaty on behalf of the English with Charlemagne. It provides for reciprocal rights of free passage for merchants visiting France or England to be enforced by local officials.
In 787 with great pageantry and ceremonial King Offa’s daughter Eadburgha was married to Beohtric, the King of the West Saxons. The marriage brought even more of the West Saxons’ territory within Offa’s orbit: he had already annexed all the West Saxons’ land north of the Thames. Such was Offa’s prestige that he could persuade the pope to split the see of Canterbury in two in order to give Mercia its own archbishopric at Lichfield in Staffordshire. However, despite King Offa’s unique position abroad and at home it was during his reign that an external force of far greater magnitude first began to threaten England.
Shortly after his daughter’s magnificent nuptials in Wessex, three enormous ships appeared off the Dorset coast, each of them almost eighty feet long and seventeen feet wide–the size of a large house or hall. The ships, which had sailed from Denmark, put in to the harbour at Portland, full of strange, grim men from the north. Instead of responding civilly when one of King Beohtric’s officials asked them to accompany him so that they could be registered in the nearest town of Dorchester, as was the practice in those peaceful times, the foreigners turned on the customs official and killed him. ‘These’, says The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ominously, ‘were the first ships of the Danishmen which sought the land of the English nation.’ There were many more to come.
Those three ships are the first mention in English history of a fearsome Scandinavian people called the Vikings. For the next 200 years they would destroy much of the newly erected structure of medieval Christendom by their lightning raids. The Vikings’ name came from the old Norse word vik meaning creek or fjord and they themselves were land-hungry young men from the creeks of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Brilliant sailors at a time when the nations of north-west Europe had forgotten the art of seamanship in favour of agriculture, the Vikings were also enthusiastic traders and adventurers who roamed the seas, bartering hides from their own countries with whatever took their fancy in foreign ports. But they also had the bloodlust that Christianity had damped down in the Angles and Saxons. The Vikings sacrificed to their cruel old gods of Thor and Odin with death and destruction, believing that only by bloodshed would they reach the afterlife.
For some time in the early years of the ninth century rumours had been sweeping the Scandinavians that Charlemagne’s conquest of the Frisians, the north German policemen of the Baltic, meant that there were no longer any Frisian warships protecting western seas. Very rich pickings were to be had there. At the same time there had been a rapid increase in the numbers of Scandinavian people, something of a population explosion. The Vikings were landless young men who took to raiding to feed themselves as there were not enough fields to support them beside their narrow Norwegian fjords. Self-sufficient and independent, used to ruling themselves in their isolated hamlets and lonely forests, they were irked by the strengthened powers of the monarchy under powerful kings in Denmark and Norway, like Harold Fairhair, the first King of Norway. Pastures new were what they needed, and these they sought with a vengeance. The coasts of
eastern England and the north coast of the Frankish Empire, as Charlemagne’s sprawling lands were known, were now at the mercy of any Viking expedition strong enough to overcome resistance at the point where they landed. And again and again they would come, from the icy capes of the Baltic to Britain’s fertile and warmer shores.
Fifty years earlier in 732, western Christendom had just succeeded under Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel in defeating the Muslim warriors who had conquered Spain, beating them in the Pyrenees and throwing them out of France. But now Christian European civilization was in danger again as the Viking ships harried the north European coasts.
The 300-year era when the Vikings overran Europe displays many similarities to the earlier ‘Dark Ages’. Once again, particularly during the ninth century, much of the learning which had been cultivated so painstakingly to replace the devastation of the German migrations vanished. The light given to Europe by Christianity flickered and very nearly went out. Today it would be as if all our public libraries and publishing houses and schools were burned to the ground systematically, with never enough time to rebuild them.
Unfortunately for England many of her most important monasteries which were centres of learning like Lindisfarne were especially vulnerable to the Norsemen, owing to their founders’ wish for solitude. Situated on unprotected promontories jutting out to sea, or on islands far away from the king’s soldiers, they were sitting ducks. The Vikings had no sense of their sacredness but thought only of the chapels’ famous gold chalices and jewelled ornaments.
The Norsemen’s shallow-draught boats were designed to travel swiftly up rivers and estuaries. Their longboats with their vast striped single sails, their snapping dragon-head prows, their shields hung out over the side and huge chainmailed warriors became the sight on the horizon most dreaded by coastal dwellers. The Vikings were stealthy fighters and often moved by night. They would put down their oars, take up their broadswords, disembark and kill the helpless monks even if they were at prayer, before seizing all the gold and silver which the monasteries had collected over two centuries. They would then be off, leaving buildings in flames behind them and despair among the survivors.
The Story of Britain Page 7