Why does Bede not mention Edwin’s involvement in that battle, or at least his part in its cause if, as seems certain, he knew of it? The answer is that Bede’s providential narrative, in which Edwin was converted by Bishop Paulinus, a member of Augustine’s entourage, could not be compromised by a more equivocal portrayal of British involvement in the conversion. He had already denounced the British as wicked, their failure to convert the English their principal sin. Edwin cast as a British Christian would utterly compromise Bede’s narrative purpose.
After Chester, Edwin was no longer safe in Gwynedd, having brought Æthelfrith’s wrath down on his hosts and their allies. He had by now, it seems, married Coenburh, daughter of King Cearl of Mercia, and had two sons, Osfrith and Eadfrith. Given the pragmatism of seventh-century politics the straightest way to read this is that Gwynedd and Powys were keen to ally with Mercia against Northumbria and that Edwin was primed for a marriage that would cement such an alliance and give him the most powerful backers in his fight for Deira.
If Edwin had threatened Æthelfrith’s dynastic poise before, now he presented a triple threat: he had sons by a Mercian princess; Mercia was a growing power on his southern borders; Mercia and the British kingdoms in Wales were in alliance. No king could allow such a threat to go unchallenged. The fact that there is no record of a campaign against Mercia in the two years after the Battle of Chester can be interpreted in several ways. Either—and it seems unlikely—Æthelfrith did not take this combined threat of Mercian power and Deiran prince seriously; or he believed that the devastation of Chester had obviated that threat for the time being. Perhaps he had taken British hostages at Chester and could consider their sting drawn. He may have already been planning a campaign against Mercia; if so, it was a campaign pre-empted by Edwin’s next move. Or, his eyes may have followed Edwin’s travels towards the East. The next we hear of the exiled prince is that at some time between 616 and 617 he took up residence with King Rædwald of East Anglia, who now became the focus of Æthelfrith’s homicidal antipathy.
Rædwald has generally been regarded as the king of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, the unique and extraordinarily rich funerary monument near Woodbridge in Suffolk that almost defines public perceptions of Dark Age kings. He was also fourth in Bede’s list of the kings who ruled over all the southern kingdoms. Once tributary to Æthelberht of Kent, he emerged in the second decade of the seventh century as an ambitious, bellicose, well-connected and capable leader, just in time for Edwin to avail himself of Rædwald’s growing powers of military patronage. Rædwald’s identification as the Sutton Hoo king, by a combination of religious probabilities, coin evidence and a lack of other suitable candidates, is ironic. His shadowy existence on the periphery of history is mirrored by the lack of solid evidence for a body in the famous Mound 1 of the royal cemetery. We do not know the exact dates of his reign, for he plays only a small, if important, bit-part in Bede’s grand drama and no East Anglian chronicle survives from this period. He had certainly married and produced children by about 600, at which time his kingdom was subject to the imperium of Æthelberht of Kent. Under that Christian king’s patronage he himself underwent a form of conversion but, as Bede disparagingly noted, his conversion was half-hearted: he placed a Christian altar alongside the pagan idols in his temple, a case of having one’s communion cake and eating it. He was not among those converts who established a seat for a bishop. Bede blamed his half-heartedness on his wife and ‘certain evil teachers’ and recorded that he died, as he was born, a pagan.57
East Anglia was almost as well placed as Kent to take advantage of the trading basin of the North Sea. Many of the artefacts in the Sutton Hoo treasure have close parallels with finds from not just Kent and Frankia, but as far away as Sweden. It was a kingdom apparently built on robust cultural and economic foundations. The North and South folk were divided geographically by the River Waveney, as Norfolk and Suffolk—the names are first recorded in the eleventh century but are probably much older—are still. Its principal emporia were the riverine port of Gipeswic, Ipswich on the Orwell, and further north at Dommoc, Dunwich, where the first East Anglian ecclesiastical see was established in 632. They gave easy access both to North Sea coasts and Continental trading centres like Dorestad (now Wijk bij Duurstede on the Dutch Rhine), Quentovic (near modern Étaples on the River Canche) and Hedeby (near Schleswig on the German–Danish border). Ipswich lies just fifteen miles or so west of Sutton Hoo and was firmly established as a major trading centre by the middle Anglo-Saxon period, with one of the few early thriving centres of pottery production. So Rædwald, like Æthelberht of Kent, may have had a source of wealth independent of agriculture and conquest. This is reflected in the stupendous richness of the artefacts recovered from Sutton Hoo and in the longevity of the East Anglian kingdom, which survived independently until the Viking depredations of the ninth century. Between East Anglia and its expansionist neighbours to the north and west were the fenlands of the Wash, a patchwork of small kingdoms such as Gyrwe, Spalda, Wixna and Willa which would ultimately be swallowed by Mercia.*1 To the south was the kingdom of the East Saxons who, for much of the seventh century, were also tributary to Kent. Despite East Anglia’s economic and geographical advantages, Rædwald’s reputation as a great overlord seems not to predate his association with Edwin.
Edwin’s arrival at the court of Rædwald by 616/17 came at a pivotal moment in their fortunes. Edwin had few options left to him as an exile: wherever he went Æthelfrith was determined to kill him. With Rædwald, himself protected by the greater imperium of Kent, he might be safe. Æthelfrith’s first attempt to persuade Rædwald to hand him over or kill him, offering money and silver, failed. A second attempt, backed with a greater treasure, failed too. There were threats.
At some point during this year of swaying fortunes Æthelberht, Kent’s great Christianising king and pseudo-imperator of southern Britain, died, precipitating a dramatic shift in the balance of power. For one thing, his son Eadbald spurned Christianity and took his stepmother as a wife (deplored by Bede). It may even have been the old king’s death that determined Æthelfrith to lean on Rædwald. Rædwald must now be his own man. One of his first instincts seems to have been to follow the Kentish lead, renounce his skin-deep Christianity and apostatise, probably reflecting conservative political pressures among his nobility. Then, when Æthelfrith sent a third mission to his court ‘offering even larger gifts of silver and threatening to make war on him if Rædwald despised his offer’,58 Rædwald succumbed. Without the backing of Æthelberht he was politically weak. In the aftermath of the Battle of Chester and on the back of twenty years of war-mongering, Æthelfrith’s reputation was sublime; his threats were to be taken seriously. Rædwald agreed to his terms. Implicit in this situation was that by handing Edwin, or his body, over, Rædwald was swapping a southern Christian overlord for a northern pagan one. On such decisions seventh-century political fortunes swung from one extreme to another.
It was now, in this moment of crisis, that Edwin is supposed to have made the Faustian pact that forms a set-piece milestone of Bede’s history. Bede rightly saw Æthelberht’s death and the apostasy of Eadbald and Rædwald as critical blows to the ongoing success of the Augustinian mission: its fate hung in the balance. It is entirely in keeping with his providential theme that a miraculous intervention should now alter the course of history. A ‘very faithful friend’59 of the exiled prince, on hearing that Rædwald was to betray him, came to him in his room to warn him as he was retiring for the night. Taking him outside where they might not be heard, he offered the Deiran atheling a means of escape to a place where none of his enemies would find him. One suspects this meant either a fast horse-ride to the marshy fastnesses of the fens, a sort of dress-rehearsal for Alfred’s hiding in the Isle of Athelney some two and a half centuries later, or a discreet cross-channel boat to Frankia where Æthelfrith’s threats would mean nothing.*2 But Edwin, paralysed by fear of surrendering to a sort of fatalistic ennui, refused, dismiss
ed his friend and was left alone in the night to contemplate whatever the dawn might bring...
He remained long in silent anguish of spirit and ‘consumed with inward fire’, when suddenly at dead of night, he saw a man silently approach him whose face and attire were strange to him.60
A desultory conversation followed: why was Edwin sitting alone outside in the night? What business was it of the stranger’s? He knew the cause of Edwin’s sorrow; what would the young prince give for deliverance from his perils? Anything. What would he give for the destruction of his enemies and his restoration to a kingdom that would surpass all those of the English before him? Again, anything. Then:
If the one who truly foretold all these great and wonderful benefits could also give you better and more useful counsel as to your salvation and your way of life than any of your kinsmen or parents ever heard, would you consent to obey him and to accept his saving advice?61
Who could refuse? Edwin was only too pleased to sell his soul to the one true god. After all, he was probably already a Christian. What had he to lose the night before his betrayal? The Jesuitical stranger now made a sign, placing his right hand on Edwin’s head so that he might know him again when the time came to redeem his promise, and then disappeared in an instant, so that Edwin might know that this was no ordinary man, but a spirit. Hot on the spirit’s vanishing trail Edwin’s friend returned to give him the news that Rædwald had changed his mind, dissuaded by his queen. She had taxed him with his friendship with Edwin, and with dishonouring himself. The king had resolved to help restore Edwin to his throne. It had been a long night.
What is to be made of this? To begin with, it is striking that Edwin is alone, unaccompanied by his wife Coenburh and their two young boys or even by his gesiths, his closest companions. This might be dramatic licence; it might just be inferred, though, that Edwin was isolated from his circle, for whatever reason. And then we must suspect strongly that this Bedan narrative is retrospective miracle-working, a story embroidered in its many retellings. But there is no need to doubt the essentials of it, even if the shrunken timescale is incredible and the Mephistophelian conversation apocryphal. The stranger’s identity at least is clear: he is otherwise revealed, though not by Bede, as the all-too-real Paulinus, one of Augustine’s companions in the mission to Kent.62 What was Paulinus doing in East Anglia? Was he part of a diplomatic mission from Kent? If so, we must suppose that at this point Æthelberht was still alive, so Bede’s timeframe is unconvincing. The geography of the story is not obvious, either. Bede has it that Edwin was living with Rædwald as a retainer; but again, if this was at court, where were Edwin’s family and companions? The stone, apocryphal or not, on which Edwin sat contemplating his doom, suggests that the court was on the road, perhaps between estates. We might read this as a crisis that comes on them all unexpected, so that Edwin himself has no chance to present his case to the king or to hear beforehand of Æthelfrith’s latest messenger arriving. More credibly, a series of events, times and places have been conflated to make a good story better.
One ought, perhaps, to separate the casus belli from the retrospective need to explain Edwin’s ultimate conversion. Edwin might have met Paulinus before he became king, either at Rædwald’s court before Æthelberht’s death, or in Kent itself. But Bede’s requirement to make prophetic capital out of the meeting, or vision, allows us to dismiss its coincidence with Rædwald’s musings on his fate. That Edwin was about to be betrayed by Rædwald there is no reason to doubt, although the context and timing may be more pragmatically reconstructed. Æthelfrith’s embassies forced Rædwald into a corner from which he could extricate himself either by breaking his bond with Edwin and submitting to Bernician overlordship, or by conducting a pre-emptive assault. His councillors, who may have included both his queen and Edwin, persuaded him to take the bold option; but we cannot rule out the possibility that it was Rædwald himself who led the hawks. We may allow the sequence to extend over a period of weeks or months between Edwin’s arrival in East Anglia, Æthelfrith’s first embassy to Rædwald, and the final decision, probably in the first months of 617.
Rædwald does not come well out of Bede’s account but that is to be expected, because for Bede an apostate king was the very worst sort. If he was to become a divine instrument it was through no virtue of his own; he had none. So his vacillation, and the revelation that his wife had stiffened his resolve, suits Bede’s purpose all too well. Nevertheless, it is plausible that the unnamed queen planted in her husband’s mind the brilliant, pre-emptive scheme that he was to carry out with such devastating conviction late in 616 or in 617. She may even, in the heroic style of the Finnsburg episode in Beowulf, have literally laid his sword in his lap—a gesture no warrior could refuse.63 In later centuries, among the warring ‘surnames’ of the Borders, the placing of a set of spurs on a husband’s empty dinner plate was intended to produce a similar effect.
Once Æthelfrith’s embassy had been rejected, blows must decide the issue. Leaving no time for the Northumbrian king to gather his army for an assault on East Anglia, Rædwald attacked him with all his available forces, including those of his son Rægenhere and Edwin’s own warband, which can hardly have been very large. The place where they met and overwhelmed Æthelfrith lay on the east bank of the River Idle, which Bede describes as the border of the Mercian people. Common consensus has identified the location as Bawtry, the Roman town that straddles the Idle where it is crossed by the Great North Road between Lincoln and Doncaster. This is well to the south of Northumbrian territory among the marshy wetlands of the Humber headwaters in the marches of Mercia and Lindsey, the latter tributary to Northumbria. Æthelfrith, given the outcome, cannot have had anything like a full complement of arms. What was he doing there? Did he believe that a small force hovering menacingly a week’s march from Rædwald—at Lincoln, say—would produce the desired effect? Did he completely underestimate Rædwald, or merely the political forces working on the East Anglian king? If he was advancing south when he was caught, he ought to have set up a defensive position on the west bank of the Idle. Another possibility is that he was outflanked, caught by a surprise assault from the north and found himself trapped on the east bank, as Bede says, between Idle and Trent with no hope of a retreat.
The subsidiary question is: how did Rædwald’s army get there? Three routes suggest themselves as possibilities: west from, say, Ipswich to Ermine Street and then a forced march north along the old Roman road; no more than a week at most. This would have allowed Æthelfrith to dictate the site of battle. A bolder option was to take his army north through his own territory, the ancestral lands of Boudicca’s Iceni, to Brancaster, then make an amphibious dash across the Wash in rowing galleys (like the one in which he was later buried) and conduct a lightning strike from Burgh-in-the-Marsh west to Lincoln and beyond. But there is a third route that cannot be lightly dismissed: a fleet, sailed right up the Humber estuary and down the Trent and Idle, the way the Vikings would later attack direct into a hinterland. That way, Æthelfrith had no line of retreat to the north, no chance of reinforcement: he must stand and fight.
These questions cannot be resolved but one might offer the following scenario. The battle will have been fought on foot. The traditional view of Early Medieval warfare would have two shield walls trying each other’s resolve, noble warriors and their retainers in the front rank. The shield clash is likely to have been preceded by skirmishing at a distance with javelins or angons and archers firing arrows, before closing for sword-combat.64 Any overwhelming disparity in numbers, as Bede suggests there was, was fatal for the defenders: sheer weight would force them into rout or destruction. There was no orderly retreat along the Roman road towards the safety of the ancient fort at Doncaster and so the possibility that the East Anglian host came out of the north must be allowed. There is no doubt that the fight was bloody. Rædwald’s son fell in battle and King Æthelfrith was killed. The low rise called Barrow Hills just to the south-east of the site of the Roman fo
rtlet at Bawtry may indicate where many of the casualties were buried. It was a coup of spectacular proportions which transformed Edwin from a wolf at bay to king of the English north of the Humber and Rædwald from a self-doubting Kentish vassal to overlord of the southern English. Edwin had avenged the death of his father and rid himself of his persecutor. Bernicia’s twenty-four-year domination of the northern English, Æthelfrith Flesaur’s hard-won but brittle empire, dissolved overnight. That a warrior king of Æthelfrith’s stature and experience could be brought down by an apparently minor competitor shows how fragile the military state was in the early seventh century. There was no defensive infrastructure; no attempt after the battle to prevent Edwin from securing the kingship of all the Northumbrians. The battle, the death of the king, was all. Æthelfrith had not, in more than two decades, constructed the framework of a state that might survive him; that was not the way of the warrior. His queen and their children fled to the courts of the Scots. Edwin must now try his hand at ruling the lands of his father.
Riding north along the ancient road between Bawtry and York, Edwin’s army had successively to ford the Trent at Littleborough, the Don at Doncaster, the Aire at Castleford and the Wharfe at Tadcaster. It is not possible to say how many of Rædwald’s warriors accompanied him; possibly his force was very small, although it might have swelled as he progressed. At each bridge or ford they laid themselves open to ambush. They were vulnerable to attack from Mercian warbands and from the British king Ceretic of Elmet, where Edwin’s nephew, Hereric, had been given sanctuary. At each villa regalis or royal estate beyond the Humber, king’s men must have come to submit to their new Lord; many would have done so with a mixture of trepidation and hope, for these were Edwin’s ancestral lands, the kingdom of Deira. There had not been a Deiran king for a generation. Lines of patronage had been monopolised by Bernicians. Aspiring warriors and time-served landed nobles would now compete for the king’s interest.
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