Edwin’s army was destroyed by the combined forces of Gwynedd and Mercia. It does not look as if, like Æthelfrith, he had been caught without his full host; whether he was defeated by superior tactics or by two armies acting in concert to outflank him cannot be known. Unlike the battlefields of later English wars, the sites of Early Medieval battles have never been archaeologically identified, let alone excavated: we simply do not know how their dispositions were made. If Cadwallon’s forces included a complement of mounted skirmishers, as some British armies seem to have done, their participation may have been decisive, cutting off Edwin’s line of retreat to the north. That both Edwin and one of his sons were killed in what Bede describes laconically as a fierce encounter suggests an overwhelming defeat. What followed makes it certain.
Bede portrays the year after Hæthfelth as the darkest of days in Northumbrian history. Those who compute the dates of kings, he tells us, struck the whole year from the annals; this is one reason why the chronology of these events is fluid, compounded by the timing of the battle at Hatfield in October, which may—or may not—be the start of Bede’s new year: infuriating. But he portrays vividly a sense of the complete collapse of Edwin’s imperium which was the inevitable outcome of his death, demonstrating the bald truth that Edwin, for all his politicking and ersatz Romanitas, had not created a state robust enough to survive him. Neither Paulinus, nor Æthelburh; neither the influence of the great Dagobert of Frankia nor his own ambitions for a Roman-style overlordship of North Britain enabled Edwin to transcend the ancient realities of Dark Age kingship. It was personal, it was based primarily on leadership in war; it was barely institutional. Five years of Christianity, embracing as it did only the line-toeing political elites of the Anglian North, left barely a mark, like straws in the wind. There was no state except the person of the king and in his passing the state also passed.
Deira and Bernicia very quickly adopted kings from their own royal stock. Eanfrith returned from exile in Pictland to claim Bernicia, while a cousin of Edwin’s, Osric son of Ælfric, was chosen by the Deirans. Edwin’s second son, Eadfrith, was forced to submit to Penda (having presumably survived the battle at Hæthfelth) in the hope that he might at least be ransomed for some fantastic treasure or perhaps be allowed to rule as a sub-king. He was later put to death during the reign of Oswald. The armies of the Northumbrians, devastated by their crushing defeat, were unable to prevent Cadwallon from ravaging the North. Bede, deeply prejudiced against a man in whom he saw the wickedest of Christians, far worse than any pagan, portrays him laying waste the lands of Northumbria:
With bestial cruelty he put all to death by torture and for a long time raged through all their land, meaning to wipe out the whole English nation from the land of Britain. Nor did he pay any respect to the Christian religion which had sprung up among them.100
This was not a war of submission or annexation; it was a rampage of pillage and plunder—at least, that is what Bede wishes us to believe as he wipes his historical slate clean in preparation for the return of God’s chosen king: Oswald.
Christianity’s hold on the English of the North had been, it is true, skin deep. Both Eanfrith (a pagan like his father) and Osric repudiated the Roman faith, presumably as a matter of political expediency in the chaotic aftermath of defeat. Edwin had not been a Christian by conviction; nor were his immediate successors. Paulinus’s career had, one suspects, more the flavour of personal ambition than the proselytising fervour with which one associates the impending Irish mission. Penda, to whom Deira must now be tributary, was an unreconstructed heathen; Cadwallon held the Roman church in absolute contempt, with the memory of the slaughter of Chester reinforcing his desire for revenge over Edwin’s people. The new faith which had promised so much had conspicuously failed to deliver its most important reward: the benefits cited by the pagan chief priest Coifi of enhanced patronage for those who followed their king into catechism and the baptismal waters of Swale and Glen. One wonders with wry curiosity how Coifi, if he survived the initial disaster of Hæthfelth, argued his way to rebuilding the idols and temples he had defiled six years before.
In the aftermath of Hæthfelth Queen Æthelburh, her two surviving children Eanflæd and Uscfrea and her stepgrandson Yffi, took refuge at the court of her brother, King Eadbald of Kent, along with Paulinus and most of his followers and whatever treasure they could carry. The queen, fearing that Edwin’s children were not safe from the threat which the restored sons of Æthelfrith might pose, later sent them to the court of Dagobert where, with the exception of Eanflæd, they all died in infancy; thus was the male line of the Yffings extinguished by a combination of battle and ill-fortune. Paulinus later became bishop of Rochester and lived out his years there, although the pallium the Pope sent to confer on him the metropolitan status he so craved at York arrived too late. York would not get its first archbishop for another hundred years. The only survivor of the Pauline mission in the North was James the Deacon, who ministered from a small church somewhere in the neighbourhood of Catterick*2 and survived long past the restoration of Christianity under Oswald to be present at the Synod of Whitby in 664.
The fates of Eanfrith and Osric were ignominious, as befitted two apostate kings. Bede has them presiding over a period of unparalleled chaos, as if God’s wrath had been visited on them in a narrative which can only have been inspired by the Old Testament and the apocalyptic rantings of Gildas. Unless Bede’s partisan account is to be taken literally, the background and timing of the events he describes so vividly must be teased out. First, it is worth looking at the archaeological evidence, such as it is. The few settlement sites of this period that have been investigated in Northumbria offer equivocal evidence of the sort of violence which would be compatible with Cadwallon ravaging the whole of the kingdom.101 York offers no evidence for such a campaign; Edwin’s stone church, still roofless at his death, was later completed by Oswald. At West Heslerton, in the Vale of Pickering, there is no sign of disruption to normal community life. But at Yeavering almost the entire township was burned to the ground at a time Hope-Taylor identified as the horizon between Edwin and Oswald. The Yeavering evidence comes with a health warning: there was very little independent dating for the excavations, which took place before the days of radiocarbon assays. Hope-Taylor interpreted the razing of the township at the end of what he called Post-Roman Phase IIIc as an episode of wanton destruction and very naturally, being wholly acquainted with Bede’s account, associated it with Cadwallon—but it is a circular argument. As it happens, his timing of this sequence has never seriously been challenged, so compelling is the case for that phase marking the pagan/Christian boundary; and the grandstand, which was not razed but certainly damaged by fire prior to reconstruction, has only ever been realistically assigned to Edwin (or Æthelburh and Paulinus). That the grandstand survived might, by some, have been regarded as providential; just as likely it testifies on behalf of the excellence of Yeavering’s outstanding builders.
Leaving aside the possibility that Edwin’s palace at Yeavering was burned down by a successor—perhaps Eanfrith or Oswald, wanting to wipe the Deiran stain from their tribal heartland—or by an accidental fire, we must also be careful not to assume that because Yeavering was burned, the whole of Northumbria was laid waste. Only once has a comprehensive wasting been visited on historical Northumbria: the so-called Harrying of the North in 1069–70 by William I left the region practically without viable settlement or infrastructure. Some have estimated that a hundred thousand people were killed. It was afterwards and for more than fifty years a land devoid of economic potential, one reason why the Domesday surveyors did not record its renders. Not until the twelfth century did kings think it worth providing incentives for the natives to take up their ploughs and bring life back to the land.
No such genocidal wasting occurred in the year or years after Hatfield. Oswald succeeded to a functioning and economically productive kingdom. So Cadwallon’s activities, brutal as they probably were, must be
placed in context. And to grasp that context it is worth attempting a reconstruction of events following Hatfield, as minutely as is possible given the gaping holes in Bede’s narrative. It is inevitably speculative.
Anno 632: Winterfilleð
In the aftermath of the slaughter of Hæthfelth, Penda returns with his army to Mercia, laden with booty and glory. He uses this victory to press his claims to be accepted as king of Mercia, where he subsequently reigns for more than twenty years. Cadwallon is not satisfied. He determines to ensure that Britain (by which he means that part of Britain which we call Wales) will never again be subject to Anglian domination. He aims to terminate the lines of Northumbrian kings. So he sets up winter quarters on the southern edge of Deira, and my candidate for this overwintering site is the Roman town of Isurium Brigantum, Aldborough, near modern Boroughbridge. Bede, in describing the events of the following year, uses the term oppido municipio, a fortified town. Despite the temptation to identify the site with York, some historians are uncomfortable with such a description for the former Roman colonia. Other candidates that spring to mind include the ancient British stronghold at Stanwick or, indeed, Doncaster; but Aldborough, the civitas capital of the Brigantes, is more likely: two days’ march north of Hatfield and not much more than a day from York. It enjoys lines of retreat to the south-west, controls all movement along the Great North Road and is readily defensible.
Anno 632: Blotmonað
Cadwallon’s army needs feeding and entertaining over the winter months, so he forces the donation of the renders of royal estates within reach of his camp. Campodonum, a lost villa regia thought to be in the area of modern Dewsbury, is one royal site recorded by Bede that suffered such a fate and was then burned down—a precedent for Yeavering, perhaps. Cadwallon concentrates on royal estates as targets for two reasons: for their punitive value in diminishing the power, prestige and economic potential of the house of Yffing; and because these are central collection points for the renders of the royal shires—half the work of the looter has been done for him. Their barns stand full of grain and cattle, their halls hang with weaponry and embroidered cloth and their treasuries are heaving under the weight of scrap metal and jewels accumulated by Edwin’s retinues over seventeen years. By November, the Anglo-Saxon Blotmonað (slaughter month), as winter closes in, they are well-provisioned and occupied in securing their camp. Their poets compose verses of praise and glory on a new, triumphant chapter in the history of the Britons.
Osric, Edwin’s cousin, must during these months take counsel with the Deiran nobility, what is left of them. At some point over the winter he emerges as the chosen king of Deira and is inaugurated at what Julian of Toledo called, in a Visigothic setting, the ‘seat of paternal antiquity’—solium paternae antiquitas—the urbs regia of the Deirans somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds near Goodmanham—maybe at Goodmanham; or conceivably at York.102 His genealogy, back through generations of Yffings and legendary heroes such as Soemil and Sigegar and culminating in the godly seed of almost all the English kings, Woden, will be recited to remind all those present that he has a legitimate claim to the kingship. Far to the north, Eanfrith is making his bid too. He receives permission from the Pictish king Bridei to leave his court and rides from Pictland to Bamburgh (or Yeavering) where he also takes counsel and is endorsed, as the eldest son of Æthelfrith, son of Æthelric, son of Ida etc., etc., kings of Bernicia time out of mind (eighty years, at least), at his ‘seat of paternal antiquity’. He spends the winter of 632/3 in the secure, rocky fortress of Bamburgh by the sea, receiving submissions from Bernician nobles and drawing on the oaths of their sons for the warband he will soon muster.*3 News reaches him that Cadwallon is overwintering in Deira.
Anno 633: Ðrimilcemonað
In the late spring or early summer of 633 Osric moves against Cadwallon; perhaps he has been besieging him in the oppido municipio (Aldborough) since the melting of the winter snows. He prepares for a long wait. But Cadwallon’s warriors are stir-crazy and ready for action; Cadwallon, in Bede’s account, ‘suddenly broke out with all his forces, took Osric by surprise, and destroyed him with all his army’.103 The surprise element may reflect the British propensity for the dawn ambush. Cadwallon has proved himself unpredictable and a flexible military strategist. The sally is brilliantly successful: Osric’s host is destroyed. Incidentally, there is circumstantial support for my suggested timing in an early eighth-century calendar of saints, which gives Osric’s feast day as 8 May, at the beginning of Ðrimilcemonað (May: the month when cows can be milked three times daily).*4
At any rate, Cadwallon is not yet satisfied, for, as Bede says,
After this he occupied the Northumbrian kingdoms for a whole year, not ruling them like a victorious king but ravaging them like a savage tyrant, tearing them to pieces with fearful bloodshed.104
A more realistic reading of Bede’s apocalyptic prose is that Cadwallon spends the summer living off Deiran royal estates, looting treasure—not just metallic hardware but also furs of otter and marten, rich cloth, amber, ivory, dyestuffs and other portable exotics—and dispatching any pretender who is brave or foolish enough to take to the field. There is now no suitable candidate for the Deiran kingship; no great noble of the line of Yffings to raise his war-cry. But this is not a pogrom: think of the humble James the Deacon beavering away near Catterick for the souls of his small flock of Christians. Deacons, rural villages, are for the most part beneath Cadwallon’s radar. What seems extraordinary, if we accept the Bedan chronology, is that Cadwallon stays in the North for a whole year without, apparently, losing half his army to homesickness and the needs of the Venedotian harvest. Two reasonable inferences can be drawn: either he declines to leave until he has dealt with the Bernician Idings or he does actually have pretensions to become king of Northumbria—or at least Deira. Perhaps he has no kingdom to return to in Gwynedd, having been deposed at home after the disastrous defeats at Edwin’s hands in the 620s and, according to Welsh sources, time spent in exile first on Priestholm and later across the seas. We cannot tell; historians, like the hard-boiled detective, run into the mysteries of human motivation. But stay he does.
Anno 633: Weodmonað
August is the month for weeding fast-ripening crops. Most of the followers of an army want to be at home. Perhaps Cadwallon’s warriors and their retinues are hooked on bloodlust and the acquisition of yet more treasure. It is a pity that no heroic poem survives to tell of the last great victory of the British princes over Lloegr; we have only Y Gododdin to remind us of their mindset:
Because of wine-feast and mead-feast they charged,
Men famed in fighting, heedless of life.
Bright ranks around cups, they joined to feast.
Wine and mead and bragget, these were theirs.105
Whether through mead-soaked song and carefully calculated gift or by hard bargaining and rule of fist, Cadwallon persuades his warriors to keep going; and now they head north to confront Bernicia. This, surely, is the Britons’ chance to avenge the legendary defeats of Gododdin and Chester; perhaps Cadwallon even razes the villa regia at Catterick, the very walls on which those poetic ravens were glutted, on his way north. By the autumn of 633 he may already have campaigned further north; may already have looted and burned Yeavering.
Anno 633: Winterfilleð
Cadwallon must find a defensible site for his second winter in the field, with good lines of retreat set in a fertile landscape, royal estates within reach from which to plunder and feed his host. Since there is only one location at which one can place Cadwallon with any confidence in Bernicia, I suggest that is where he sets up his camp: at Corbridge, the apparently long-abandoned Roman garrison town of Corstopitum.*5 Corbridge guards the crossroads where the Roman Stanegate leads west, parallel to Hadrian’s Wall through the Pennine gap at Gilsland and where Dere Street runs north through the wild fells of Cheviot towards Din Eidyn and the lands of Gododdin and Strathclyde. Furthermore, the Roman bridge here commands a
critical crossing of the River Tyne at its highest navigable point and is probably still functional in the early seventh century; if not, the river can be forded just downstream. It is the most strategically dominant spot in southern Bernicia and a safe distance from Eanfrith, overwintering at his tribal stronghold of Bamburgh. It is the Bernician king who must make a move. Meanwhile, Cadwallon’s army plunders the royal estates of the Bernician lowlands from Newburn on the lower Tyne perhaps as far as Whittingham beyond the Simonside Hills.
Anno 634: Eostermonað
This period of looting and his own military weakness prompts Eanfrith to sue for peace. What is so striking is that Eanfrith, who ought to have at his disposal retinues from both Pictland, where he has been exiled these many years, and northern Bernicia, does not seem to feel strong enough to attack Cadwallon. Given that Cadwallon is isolated in foreign territory and has been in the field for more than a year it is surprising, to say the least, that Eanfrith does not believe he can match him or is too timid to make the attempt. There must be a suspicion that Eanfrith’s Pictish hosts are uncomfortable with the idea of supporting a bid for the Bernician throne against British opposition and will not back Eanfrith’s bid with substantial military resources; Oswald will face the same problem. In describing Eanfrith’s approach to the parley Bede uses the term ‘unadvisedly’—inconsulte—just as he has used the term ‘rashly’—temerarie—for Osric’s assault. There is a suspicion of coupled adverbs here that has the whiff of poetry about it: are these the slight fragments of a heroic poem or a lost annal to which Bede has access? It is hard to say. Why does Eanfrith, as Bede records, so ‘unadvisedly’ come to negotiate with Cadwallon with a mere twelve companions? The number is biblical, to be sure; it may be meaningless in terms of real numbers. What it suggests is that Eanfrith either comes to Cadwallon’s camp under an accepted flag of truce, or at least feeling reasonably secure; or that he has no other option but to attempt to play a concealed hand. It is possible that this is because it is still early in the year, before the campaigning season. If so it is a fatal miscalculation. Cadwallon has no hesitation in killing him out of hand.
The King in the North Page 14