The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  I have decided after long deliberation about the English people… that the idol temples of that race should by no means be destroyed, but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place relics in them. For if the shrines are well built, it is essential that they should be changed from the worship of devils to the service of the true God. And because they are in the habit of slaughtering much cattle as sacrifices to devils, some solemnity ought to be given them in exchange for this. So on the day of the dedication or the festivals of the holy martyrs, whose relics are deposited there, let them make themselves huts from the branches of trees around the churches which have been converted out of shrines, and let them celebrate the solemnity with religious feasts.30

  Gregory was designing his conversion policy on the hoof. First his missionaries are to wreck the pagan shrines; now they are to place altars in them. They are not to ban the heathen practice of sacrifices, they are to adapt them; the heathen festivals are to be realigned with Christian festivals and the sacrifices turned into celebratory feasts. Not for nothing are our Christmas and Easter amalgamations of pagan and Christian tradition. But whatever instructions were now issued by Gregory, he had already advised Augustine to use his own discretion in adapting to local conditions with which the Pope recognised he was unfamiliar.

  Gregory’s liberal pragmatism contrasts sharply with Augustine’s apparent rigidity of style and lack of self-assurance. The fact is that very few, if any, pagan shrines of the small number which have been excavated and the larger number identified from historical or place-name evidence, have ever been shown unequivocally to have been converted into Christian churches. If it happened, it was a rare event. It is as if Gregory’s first advice, to destroy, to suppress and to found new churches on new sites, became the modus operandi of the Roman party.

  The impact of the mission was greatest at the high table of politics, where endowments of bespoke churches on royal lands became the fashion. Those for whom conversion carried no political weight—in other words, most of the population—probably underwent little or no spiritual transformation in the seventh century. As many as four hundred years later the Archbishop of York could complain that the peasantry were still practising pagan rituals at sacred groves and springs, and that local priests were either turning a blind eye or indulging in such rituals themselves.31

  The first phase of Augustine’s mission took three or four years. By 601 he had gained the trust and support of the political elite of Kent, the most influential kingdom in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Bishoprics were to be founded at Rochester, to serve East Kent, and in Essex. Ultimately, having founded the site of the future St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Archbishops of Canterbury would transfer their metropolitan see there.

  At about the same time that King Æthelfrith of Bernicia was consolidating his position as the new power in the land at Degsastan far to the north, Augustine embarked on the next, most risky phase of the Gregorian mission. With Æthelberht’s help, Bede wrote, Augustine summoned the bishops of the British churches to a meeting on the borders of Hwicce and Wessex at a place which in Bede’s day was called Augustinaes Ac—Augustine’s Oak. Despite the full weight of Early Medieval scholarship behind the search, the actual site has not been discovered, although somewhere in the region of Worcester is likely and a Roman road crossing of a river in the area south or west of Cirencester would be plausible.32 In a sense it does not matter. The meeting, or series of meetings, must have taken place within or on the edge of the so-called imperium of Æthelberht, because it was arranged under his protection. Augustine urged the British bishops, representatives of an imperial Roman church now hopelessly out of step with contemporary practice, to realign themselves with their mother church. It is the Europe question again.

  There is little doubt that the British bishops were stubborn in their refusal to accept Rome’s, Augustine’s and Æthelberht’s authority. That Augustine was lacking in the more subtle and persuasive aspects of diplomacy there is a strong suspicion. The British, a subject nation, were not inclined to be lectured on the subject of religion by the come-lately Lloegr. The core issues under scrutiny seem to modern sensibilities trivial in the extreme: calculation of the date of Easter, details of church liturgy and canon law, the shape of a monk’s haircut. However that may be, these were issues of the greatest importance for Christian communities for at stake was the unity of the Universal Church. The dispute was long and tedious and in the end Augustine was forced to produce a miracle of healing (blind man’s sight restored) to convince the British of his credentials. Finally they agreed to hold a conference, which all the senior figures of the British movement should attend. This in itself must have been problematic, for the British diocesan church had been based on urban Roman civil life. It was a religion of estate owners, magistrates, senior military officers and perhaps the mercantile classes. The monastic movement, which had penetrated Wales from the sixth century, owed its origins and loyalties to the desert fathers for whom diocesan urbanity was more or less anathema. For these self-denying seekers of solitude the hermit, not the bishop, stood alone as the exemplar of ascetic spirituality. And somewhere in the mix were the British kings who, if they were nominally Christian, were interested in a tribal variant of the faith, something like that practised by the Irish. How could these disparate factions be united?

  The conference was held at a place called by Bede Bancornaburg, identified as Bangor Is-coed (Bangor-on-Dee) on the banks of the River Dee. The British party consulted with a famous wise man who advised that Augustine, should he prove to be godly and true, ought to be listened to and treated with respect. To the question, how shall we know if he is godly and true, the wise man suggested that the British set him a test: they should arrive after the Kentish party. If Augustine rose to greet them he would prove himself meek and gentle of heart, a true servant of Christ; if not, it would demonstrate his arrogance. The British came. Augustine remained seated.

  The tale as Bede tells it suggests that he got his information from a British, perhaps a poetic, source; it also sounds like retrospective simplification of a more complex set of events; and yet, it seems to capture the essence of the thing. Augustine mishandled the conference; he disregarded or was ignorant of protocol-obsessed British sensitivities and by the time he came to offer his most generous concession to the British church it was too late. The outcome was disastrous for the Roman mission and such was Augustine’s frustration with his seemingly inflexible opposite numbers that he ended his participation with an invective against the British: a warning that their churchmen would suffer death at English hands.

  The fulfilment of Augustine’s prophecy-cum-curse cannot be precisely dated but it can be firmly laid at King Æthelfrith’s door. The de facto unification of Bernicia and Deira after the Battle of Degsastan in 604 did not satisfy his appetite for expansion; indeed, that appetite could not be satisfied, for the only way to reward his ever-expanding warrior elite was to endow them with the fruits of fresh conquest: it was a self-sustaining cycle which only stopped when there was no more lebensraum. Early Medieval kings had not yet begun to understand the political economics of agricultural profit or bulk trade. They were warlords whose wealth was counted in cattle on their lands and in the scrap metal of war booty hoarded in iron-bound chests in their golden halls. Æthelfrith had no concept of statehood, of a society proof against the death of its warrior king. His ambition was to be glorified in song and saga, to defend his dynasty against competition, to fight enemies abroad and feast on the produce of his kingdom in the mead halls of his estates. The evidence for these years of accumulation is to be found in the palace at Yeavering, where increasing architectural splendour and pretension are written in the design, construction and geography of its buildings. But Early Medieval kingdoms were ephemeral: no political institution, no infrastructure, no fortification apart from Bamburgh survives to testify to Æthelfrith’s greatness. If there was a Northumbrian emporium, history r
ecords nothing of it. No poetry of praise to this most aggressive and successful warrior king has come down to us.

  Bede’s measure of the man is his slaughter of the monks who rejected Augustine’s civilising proposals. We do not know when the slaughter happened, but it was remembered by British, English and Irish sources, somewhere between 612 and 616. Bede tells us that Æthelfrith collected a great army against the ‘city of the legions which is called Legacæstir by the English and more correctly Caerlegion by the Britons’.33 This is Chester. Bede, almost certainly drawing on British sources preserved by a later Mercian monastery, says that before the battle Æthelfrith saw a group of priests standing apart from the armies of the Britons, in a safe place. These priests came from the same monastery at Bangor-on-Dee where Augustine had been rebuffed a decade or so before. Æthelfrith can have had no interest in fulfilling a prophecy; he was curious, though, to know what these monks, numbering as many as a thousand, were doing there. He was told that they were praying for their soldiers. Understanding only too well the value of having an effective god on one’s side in the hour of battle, Æthelfrith pragmatically had the lot of them slaughtered, before attacking and defeating the main army. Archaeologist David Mason believes that the burials discovered at the Roman site of Heronbridge just to the south of Chester, during excavations in the 1930s and 2000s, laid out in orderly fashion in mass graves and exhibiting a preponderance of fatal sword wounds, provide evidence for mass battle-graves of the victorious dead.34

  Historians cannot agree on the importance of the Battle of Chester or Æthelfrith’s motives in making war on the British so far beyond his own borders. It does not seem to have been a war of conquest. He may have been looking for an easy victim to satisfy his warriors’ demands for booty and glory.*11 He might have decided to pre-empt any British alliance with the rising power of Mercia in the Midlands. Could he perhaps have been provoked by word that his nephew, the Deiran atheling Edwin, was living among the Britons of these parts? If that was his motive, it went unfulfilled. Within two years his nephew would slay him on the battlefield.

  *1The heresy in question was inspired by the writing of a British monk, Pelagius, who preached against the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo. Pelagius argued that moral perfection could be attained via man’s free will without the intervention of divine grace; such ideas were regarded as dangerously egalitarian.

  *2Gildas: De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, a letter of complaint to the British clergy and ‘five tyrants’, written by a clergyman some time between 490 and 540.

  *3EH I.22. Imperial Rome called the natives generically Britons, among whom they recognised many tribes like the Cantiaci in Kent or the Votadini (Gododdin) of Lothian. The Britons called themselves Cumbrogi and later, as Welsh speakers still do, Cymry, meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’. The English called them Wealas, or Welsh, ‘foreigners’ or more pejoratively ‘slaves’.

  *4The wic suffix was also applied to farms and other settlement sites but emerging research is showing that wics on estuarine or coastal sites were probably associated with trading.

  *5See Chapter V.

  *6The so-called Honorian rescript of 410. Zosimus, Historia Nova, Book VI, chapter 10.2.

  *7Arnold 1988, 58. Canterbury was Durovernum Cantiacorum.

  *8Bede and the author of the Whitby Life of Gregory give slightly different versions. In essence, Gregory saw some pale-skinned, fair-haired slave boys being sold in the market in Rome and enquired where they were from. He was told that they were Angli and replied that they were surely non Angli sed angeli (not Angles but angels). On being told that they had been taken from Deira he offered the bon mot that they had been plucked de ira—from the wrath of God.

  *9See Glossary, Appendix C, p.413.

  *10Pallium: a band of white cloth worn across the shoulders.

  *11But see Chapter XII for an equally pragmatic motive.

  IV

  Coming of age in Dál Riata

  Mæst sceal on ceole...

  sweord sceal on bearme

  The mast belongs on the ship...

  the sword belongs

  in the lap

  British annalists called Oswald Iding Lamnguin—‘Whiteblade’—but this is not a British epithet, like Flesaur. It is Irish, and must have been given him during his exile among the Scots of Dál Riata.*1 Between the ages of twelve, when he fled Bernicia, and thirty, when he returned, Oswald was transformed from an English heathen refugee into a crusading Irish Christian prince.

  The cultural adventure shared by Northumbrians and Irish, which was to have such profound effects on Early Medieval European culture, had its origins in the exile of an Irish prince, Colm Cille. In 563, at the age of about forty-one, he sailed from his homeland in Tír Conaill, now County Donegal, to Iona and founded a monastery there under the patronage of the king of Dál Riata. Colm Cille, or Columba as later Latin writers called him, belonged to the Cenél Conaill, a branch of the powerful Northern Uí Néill clan. He is supposed to have been born in the village of Gartan in the rolling green cattle country of the extreme north-west of Ireland. It is a land of great beauty and around every corner, it seems, lies the site of an ancient church, a holy well, a cross. It has been brutalised by successive invaders and tyrants and yet something of its early landscape is recognisable in its townlands, ballyboes and raths, embellished by the haunting and affecting art of their high crosses and the tumbledown remains of early monastic burial grounds.

  By virtue of his father’s ancestry Colm Cille was eligible for the kingship of the Uí Néill—the Irish term is rigdomna, equivalent to the English atheling—but from an early age he was trained for the priesthood. Irish society in the sixth century was intensely tribal and competitive. Its hundreds of warlords and high kings were peripatetic, always on the move, living off the fruits of labour of those tied to the soil just as Bernicia’s kings did. Ireland’s social structure was a complex hierarchy of ancient customary rights and obligations with varying grades of free and unfree farmers and a warrior class bearing strong similarities to the thegns and gesiths of the early English kingdoms; indeed, the Irish gaescedach, meaning spear and shield, to denote a noble warrior, is demonstrably the same word as Old English gesith.35

  Wealth came from the land: cattle especially, because the mild, wet Irish climate offers lush pasture year-round; but in the plains between its mountains, woods and bogs the land of Ireland also produced cereals, flax for linen and wool from sheep. The common dog whelk, an inhabitant of its more sheltered coasts, yielded a famous and immensely valuable purple dye which was a mark of rank and wealth across Europe. Christianity arrived in Ireland in the fifth century in the missions of Patrick, the northern British slave and self-appointed apostle, and Palladius, the Gaulish bishop. Their legacy was an Irish diocesan church adapted to mirror its tribal affiliations and which developed alongside a strong monastic movement so that bishop and abbot competed for the patronage of kings and for control over large tracts of productive farms, sometimes across tribal boundaries. Such was the status of Ireland’s senior churchmen, themselves drawn from the ranks of tribal elites, that their legal value was on a par with those kings. But Ireland was not exclusively Christian by any means. Colm Cille himself may have been born a pagan (Colm Cille means ‘Dove of the Church’; his given name seems to have been the more earthly Crimthain, or ‘Wolf’) and at least one high king, his contemporary King Diarmit, was probably unbaptised.

  Colm Cille was more than mere aristocratic deacon, more than just a founder of monasteries: he was a giant among the figures of his heroic age, a broker and wielder of power beyond his apparent means, a man of immense charisma and political influence whose personal achievement leaps from the pages of his hagiographer. Whatever the truth behind his exile—interference in a battle for the high kingship of Ireland or the illegal copying of a book—the idea that he came to Iona by chance is hard to credit. He was said to have sailed in a curragh with the obligatory twelve companions from his native shore unti
l he could no longer see Ireland. This story follows the traditional Irish form of maritime pilgrimage familiar to those who know the account of Saint Brendan’s epic journey across the North Atlantic. The ideal for the Irish monk was peregrinatio, the devotional journey abroad for Christ, looking back not just on his homeland but also on material wealth, family and comforts.

  Colm Cille and his companions, mainly young, unmarried male nobles of his own kin with little chance of inheriting wealth of their own, are supposed to have landed on the southernmost point of Iona,*2 still called Port na curraich, the harbour of the curragh. In Greencastle’s Inishowen Maritime Museum, on the banks of Lough Foyle, contemplating the sea-going characteristics of one of these tarred-canvas and oak lath marvels, the author met a man who had rowed in a curragh with Wallace Clark, the great historian of the traditional Irish craft. These boats were and are so flexible, he told me, that oars with very thin blades have to be used because anything larger imparts too much torque on a frame designed to give with the waves, to ride them like a porpoise. In 1963, fourteen hundred years after Colm Cille’s departure, Clark and a group of fellow-enthusiasts re-enacted his journey in their own craft, an open vessel appropriately furnished with twelve oars. The coast of the Kintyre Peninsula lay just a day’s rowing away to the east, clearly visible from as far west as Mallin Head; Iona had been reached within a week.36