Adomnán, kinsman and successor as abbot on Iona, believed that the island was granted to Colm Cille by the Dál Riatan king Conall mac Comgaill (558–74). Although Bede says that it was a gift of the Pictish king Bruide, this probably reflects Bede’s respect for his contemporary Pictish correspondents rather than a genuine tradition.37 The likelihood is that Colm Cille knew Conall, that he travelled first to Dunadd, as Oswald would fifty-odd years later, and asked for the king’s protection and patronage. Conall’s motive for granting Colm Cille a landed estate, even one as apparently modest as Iona—just three miles or so in length—suggests that Colm Cille’s reputation as a powerful holy man and senior scion of the Cenél Conaill preceded him; accepting such a man into his sphere conferred kudos on him and his court. Colm Cille was said to have banished evil spirits from the island on landing there; it is unlikely that such a fertile strip of land had not previously been settled and so presumably he dispossessed and deported its heathen inhabitants too. There is a sinister story, not written down until the twelfth century but sufficiently widespread in oral tradition to give it some credence, which suggests that Colm Cille maintained at least one foot in the pagan Irish past. It relates how the saint asked one of his companions to volunteer to be the first to be buried on the island, as it were to consecrate the soil, to put down roots. The monk Odhráin duly volunteered and, according to the most lurid account, was buried alive in a grave with Colm Cille’s blessing.38 This idea of a blood sacrifice to consecrate holy ground is not unique in Irish mythology; heathen rituals were not easily discarded. The Abbey’s cemetery is to this day called Relig Oran, the burial site of more than forty Scottish kings and one or two other important personages from Oswald’s nephew King Ecgfrith of Northumbria to John Smith of the Labour Party. The place has a potent sense of timelessness, despite the casting of many of its ancient stone crosses into the Sound by the agents of Protestant English tyrants.
The original monastery on Iona was built within a vallum, or bank, more or less on the site of the present, more recent and much more imposing structure. The cells, churches and guest houses were built of wood, probably hewn oak, and roofed with heather, turf or thatch as some Donegal houses are to this day. The monks cultivated the machair on the west side of the island and probably kept sheep, but they must have had access to a range of resources on Mull and the mainland: there are many references in the Life of Columba to monks fetching timber and other materials from across the seas of the Inner Hebrides. The island community also had a forge and was capable of building both wooden ships and curraghs. In time, the mother-house on Iona gave birth to other foundations, on Tiree and the Garvellach Islands, on Jura and perhaps elsewhere. These, like the original foundation, must have been gifts of the king. Considering that these were the lands of the Cenél Loairn means that King Áedán*3 was capable of granting lands that lay outside his own immediate tribal territory in Kintyre. His growing power and Colm Cille’s career seem to run on parallel tracks. Adomnán mentions more than thirty Columban foundations, spread through the islands of the Inner Hebrides and on the Scottish mainland. Many of them must have been located to take advantage of fertile soils like those on Iona. How many involved the displacement of indigenous inhabitants is not clear, although Adomnán makes reference to a disgruntled farmer to whose coppice-wood the monks had helped themselves:
Once St Columba sent his monks to bring bundles of withies from a plot of ground belonging to a layman so that they could be used in building a guest-house. They went and did this, filling a boat with withies. On their return they came to the saint and told him that the layman was much distressed…39
The rest of the episode relates how Colm Cille, equally distressed at this public relations faux pas, sent the farmer some miraculous grain, which he sowed and harvested within three months. It implies tensions between Iona and the population of its hinterland; it also suggests that the monks were enterprising in their use of local resources. Since they were after coppice-wood, cut every eight to ten years or so, they cannot have been ignorant of the fact that it was owned and managed by someone, although Colm Cille was canny enough to ensure a more than adequate compensation for the offence. It shows too that the monks had craft that could carry freight. There is the implication, furthermore, that the strains of corn grown by the monks were superior to those grown by the natives of the region: monks were the great agricultural innovators of their day. Elsewhere in the Life they carried structural timber over the sea to Iona, towing it on rafts: no mean feat in those waters.40
Colm Cille is supposed to have returned to Ireland and founded other monasteries at Derry, which seems to have been an early emporium, and Durrow, probably in order to maintain economic and diplomatic links with his kin in the hinterland of Ireland. He made an expedition up the Great Glen to convert the Picts, during which time his legendary battles with King Bruide’s chief druid Broichan gave rise to many miracles, including banishing a monster from the River Ness (not the Loch, as is commonly supposed). Colm Cille and his successors, like their secular counterparts, travelled widely, visiting and living off their subordinate foundations. Unlike secular lords, however, they established permanent, settled estates, lands held in perpetuity. In time these came to represent a threat to royal authority, but in the late sixth and seventh centuries they functioned as stable economic caputs or estate centres and may have played a substantial role in increasing the agricultural productivity of the land in Ireland and in Britain.
Out of Colm Cille’s friendship with King Áedán and his successors and his increasing authority and reputation among monks grew a Columban imperium or paruchia. Iona became a centre of learning and of a sort of tough-love monastic ideal which won many disciples and admirers, among them Bede. Colm Cille’s uncompromising but humane sense of moral authority, backed up by his judicious employment of miracles, curses, prophecies, medicinal cures and native wisdom, made him a religious and political force to be reckoned with in brokering relations between the kings of Ulster and Dál Riata, Pictland, Strathclyde and beyond. In 575 he was present at, and may have convened, a conference at Druim Cett, now an uninspiring low mound on a golf course outside Limavady near Derry/Londonderry. This momentous meeting between King Áed mac Ainmirech (a distant cousin of Colm Cille) of the Northern Uí Néill and Áedán mac Gabráin of Dál Riata confirmed the latter’s primacy in its relations with the Uí Néill. At the same time Colm Cille predicted, effectively ordained, Áed’s son Domnall as royal heir.41 That Colm Cille and his successors as abbot, nearly all of them of the Cenél Conaill, should constitute in effect the royal church of the Dál Riatan kings and play a part in brokering their relations with the kings of Ulster, demonstrates the continuing status of the foundation on Iona. The iconic showpiece of this relationship was Colm Cille’s blessing of Áedán as king of Dál Riata after the death of his predecessor in 574 and before the meeting at Druim Cett.42 Colm Cille was at first reluctant to ordain Áedán, preferring his brother, until a persistent vision persuaded him to accept Áedán as God’s choice. Such a story was a necessary part of the narrative theatre which Adomnán felt appropriate to this momentous event. The ceremony was performed on Iona, rather than at the secular royal site of Dunadd where a legendary rock-cut footprint, still to be seen, was the traditional stage for the ceremonial inauguration of kings. So we have king and patron travelling all the way to Iona to be endorsed by its holy man. If this represents the sort of biblical anointing which Saul underwent at the hands of Samuel in the Old Testament, then it is the first such coronation in Europe (long predating that of Wamba in Visigothic Spain in 672 or Pippin of Frankia in 751).*4 The ‘Dei Gratia’ on our coinage, the legitimising of kings by God’s top civil servants, starts here. It must be said that a number of historians doubt that so much can be read into Adomnán’s account; or at least, they believe his narrative to be retrospective wishful thinking. If nothing else, the story indicates the value placed by the Columban community on its relations with kings.
For those English athelings taken into fosterage on Iona, even a generation after the death of the great holy man, the significance was equally great. Colm Cille’s favour was equivalent to a badge of legitimacy for aspiring kings; it was a token of his confidence; and his blessing was a sure sign that God would aid the princes of his choice. Colm Cille’s successors as abbots may not have had quite the élan and authority of the founder, but their endorsement was still of a very high value. The implication, echoed in the modern anointing of prospective political leaders by the barons of the press, is that great men of wisdom only back winners. The implied threat in that endorsement is that the withdrawal of patronage in the future would be damaging, as Yaweh warned David in the Book of Kings and as Colm Cille made absolutely clear to his king:
Make no mistake, Áedán, but believe that, until you commit some act of treachery against me or my successors, none of your enemies will have the power to oppose you. For this reason you must give this warning to your sons, as they must pass it on to their sons and grandsons and descendants, so that they do not follow evil counsels and so lose the sceptre of this kingdom from their hands.44
I think that Oswald, aged twelve, his brother Oswiu, just five years old, their infant sister Æbbe and mother Acha sought protection from King Eochaid Buide at his fortress stronghold of Dunadd, as Colm Cille had from Buide’s great uncle Conal. On the face of it, this is hard to credit: Æthelfrith had comprehensively defeated Áedán at Degsastan in 603/4. Áedán’s forces seem to have been led to that fate by a Bernician atheling, Hering son of Hussa, whose dynastic interests the king had supported against the rising power of Æthelfrith Iding. Buide would have been acting well within the bounds of Early Medieval reason had he dispatched these refugees by the sword or refused them protection; and they in turn must have felt some foreboding about their reception. Unless, that is, there was already an understanding between these landless Bernician exiles and the Dál Riatan king.
The clue to resolving this apparent paradox lies in an entry in three of the Ulster Chronicles for the year 628 recording a battle fought at Fid Eoin on the Irish mainland, between King Conadh Cerr of Dál Riata and Maelcaith mac Scandaill, king of Cruithne.*5 Militarily it was a disaster for Dál Riata. Conadh Cerr was killed, along with several of the grandsons of Áedán. The crucial detail is the notice in the Tigernach annal, one of the Irish chronologies which was probably based on an original compiled on Iona, that one of these grandsons was Oisiricc mac Albruit rigdomna Saxan: Osric son of Ælfred, Saxon atheling. Áedán, then, had a grandson who was an English prince. Some historians have been sceptical of such notices, believing them to be unhistorical. But an Osric, son of Ælfred, can be placed on the margins of the Bernician dynasty. The Nennian genealogy discussed in the appended essay on the Bernician king-list contains an odd entry: Ealdric genuit Ælfret. Ipse est Ædlferd Flesaur: ‘Ealdric begat Ælfred; that is Æthelfrith the Twister’.*6 It seems that Æthelfrith’s father Æthelric had four sons: Ælfred, Æthelfrith, Theobald and Ecgulf. If Ælfred was a son of Æthelric and bore a son called Osric, then Osric was a cousin of Oswald and probably of similar age. That fits the notice of him dying at Fid Eoin, fighting alongside Oswald who was almost certainly present too. More significantly, Osric is cited as a grandson of Áedán. If his father was Ælfred, his mother must have been an un-named daughter of Áedán. Eochaid Buide, it seems, was host to several Iding athelings, one of them his own nephew. In reciprocating his patronage and protection, they fought for him in his dynastic wars.
Acha could legitimately seek protection for her sons from Eochaid Buide because they were his kin. It was of secondary importance that his father had hosted rivals for the Bernician kingship and been defeated by her husband, Æthelfrith. In the political grammar of the seventh century, they would now be brought up as his foster-sons. At appropriate ages, around sixteen (in Oswald’s case from about 620 onwards), they would join his warband and fight in his army. When a suitable opportunity arose they might ask for release from his lordship and seek to press their ancestral claims in their fatherland. Osric would have done so had he survived. The quid pro quo was that on reclaiming their kingdom they would recognise their foster-parent and political patron as overlord and, perhaps, foster members of his kin in turn. They might also be expected to marry daughters of his house, to reinforce bonds tied in battle. As it happens, a late Scottish source hints at a betrothal between Buide’s son Domnall Brecc and Oswald’s sister Æbbe, which was unfulfilled because of the Bernician princess’s desire to become a nun.45
Training in the skills of the warrior and the culture of the mead hall was part of the fostering process; but Oswald’s apprenticeship in the warband of Buide was in striking contrast to the Germanic norm. Anglo-Saxon elite warriors rode to the battlefield but fought on foot, perhaps in the shield wall, perhaps in skirmishing formations. They used a large variety of swords, javelins, lances, battle knives—the famous scramaseax*7 included—and the large linden shield, which suggests that there was a concomitant variety of battle scenarios, including single combat. The talismanic value of warrior arms should not be underestimated. Zoomorphic metal and painted ornaments on shields, typically birds, dragons and fish, gave added protection and inspired a strong sense of martial valour in a warrior;46 the same probably applied to brooches, belt-fittings and sword embellishments, the essential trappings of masculine nobility. Some of these items ended up buried with their owners, as if to continue the symbolic value in death; others found their way into hoards of battle-scrap, like the contents of the Staffordshire hoard.
Less noble foot soldiers, over whom much speculative academic ink has been spilled, are a more enigmatic component of Early Medieval armies. For them the spear and small buckler-type shield called a targe may have been the normal weapons. They are much less likely to have worn mail armour or helmets. There is little evidence that the bow, a common enough hunting weapon of the period, was deployed in military encounters, probably because of the close-fought hand-to-hand nature of the shield wall. But the whalebone Franks casket from around 700, now in the British Museum, depicts bowmen raining arrows down on a besieging army from the ramparts of a fortress like Bamburgh.
At least some elite Pictish warriors seem to have fought on horseback, if the pictorial evidence of battle scenes such as those carved on stones at Aberlemno in Angus is anything to go by.47 Lacking stirrups, they threw their light spears or javelins before engaging closely with short swords. Picts and Irish did not possess the large offensive linden shields of the English but used light targes, round or square, which would have been useless in the shield wall. The armies of Dál Riata are likely to have specialised in amphibious assault using methods that would become familiar in the Viking Age.*8 Among Picts, Irish and Britons the dawn ambush was a speciality. These opportunistic tactics might later give Oswald the edge against enemies whose more static, formulaic strategies left them vulnerable to routing. Although Oswald cannot be placed unequivocally in any one battle during his exile, it must be inferred that he played a full part in the military programmes of his hosts both on the Irish mainl
and at Fid Eoin, and in battles against the neighbouring Picts. In one or more of these battles he earned himself the nickname Whiteblade.
In warrior society the great cattle-raid or hosting, at the very least annually, was a king’s obligation; it seems, indeed, to have been part of the ritual of inauguration, a rite of arms. The purpose of the hosting—in Irish slógad—above and beyond naked blood-lust and manly high spirits, was three-fold: to plunder neighbouring kingdoms, especially for cattle but also for booty and slaves; to demonstrate the horsemanship and weapon-skills of the king and his elite warriors; and to train young nobles in the arts of war. Without such regular martial exercise a tribe could not be prepared for the predations of its enemies and neighbours or attract young warriors to its ranks. Given the inherent reciprocity of such activities, it can hardly be said to have been economically productive. Even John Wayne couldn’t endow the tit-for-tat cattle raid with dignity or sense. The true extent of hosting by the kings of the British Isles in Oswald’s day cannot even be estimated because raids of this sort, while they were celebrated in epics like the Táin Bó Cúailnge or Cattle Raid of Cooley, did not rate a mention in any of the extant chronicles or annals. In a sense, one might argue the negative: if raids for cattle and plunder worth mentioning, they must have been at the common end of frequent.
By the end of his apprenticeship Oswald was skilled in the use of the sword and spear, and he rode a horse with neither saddle nor stirrup, a considerable skill in itself. Whether he bore into battle the heavy linden shield of his countrymen or the small targe of his hosts’ army is an intriguing question, which cannot be answered. He might well have possessed a mail shirt and may, as an atheling, have been entitled to wear a helmet of the sort retrieved from Sutton Hoo or York’s Coppergate. In attending the king he would be entitled to wear the full array of noble paraphernalia: silver armbands and brooch on a gold-embroidered cloak dyed purple with the mucus of the humble dog-whelk; a sword hanging at his side in a jewelled scabbard. His hair would have been worn long and he probably sported the moustache of his rank. As an exile, however, he would still be lacking the essential entitlement of a great man in his own kingdom: land. The confidence with which Oswald returned to Northumbria to fight for his kingdom entitles us to paint a picture of a warrior at the full height of his martial powers.
The King in the North Page 7