Twenty acres of land from his waste in Ruleystal, between these boundaries, namely between Denisesburn and Divelis, beginning to the east upon Divelis and rising to the great road which leads up to the forest of Lillewude.121
If Denisesburn is now lost, Divelis is not: it is Devil’s Water, a stream which rises from the moors south of Hexham and which is joined by the Rowley Burn just below the hamlet of Steel (Ruleystal). Who the Denises were, Bede does not say and we cannot tell. Steel seems an improbable place for a battle; indeed, Bede does not say that the battle was fought here, only that Cadwallon, together with his immense force, was destroyed here. Steel lies about five miles south-west of the river crossing at Corbridge, as the crow flies. The Devil’s Water enters the River Tyne a mile or so upstream. This places the action on the east bank of the Devil’s Water until the road from Corbridge—anciently a drove road across the moors—crosses the gorge just below Steel, at the ford of Peth Foot where the two streams join. It is possible that there was a Roman road in the vicinity. If so, it was more pack-horse trail than metalled military road, a difficult route which led across some of the bleakest fells of the North Pennines. Its destination must have been Whitley Castle, the extraordinarily well-defended Roman hilltop fort near Alston, which seems to have been associated with state control of the Roman lead mining industry. Is it possible that Cadwallon knew of it and sought to use it as a redoubt?
The most plausible reconstruction of the battle is that Oswald, coming on Cadwallon’s camp at Corbridge in the very early morning and with the British host unprepared, forced the enemy to flee either in loose formation or in a full-scale rout until they were overcome and overwhelmed at the river crossing. Here, Cadwallon was cut down, surrounded by his most loyal warriors, their bodies left to pollute the stream with blood. It is a more or less continuous climb from the haughs at Dilston all the way to the confluence of the Rowley Burn and Devil’s Water; the crossing is not easy and at that precise point flight on to the moors, perhaps encumbered by four hundred days’ worth of booty, was no longer possible. From Peth Foot it is a short, steep climb on to the ridge above. To the left is the tumbling course of Denisesburn; to the right, the gorge closes in on the Devil’s Water. Here, perhaps, a last stand was made in a vain attempt to allow Cadwallon time to escape across the ford and on to the moors; if so, it failed. Oswald’s relatively insignificant force, by a combination of stealth and impetuosity, had pulled off a most improbable victory, one of the greatest significance for the subsequent history of Northumberland and, indeed, Anglo-Saxon England.
Oswald’s triumph ensured not just that he was accepted as the rightful and legitimate king of Bernicia but also, through his mother Acha’s pedigree, the termination of Edwin’s line and his undisputed claim as a great warrior of Deira. The two historically hostile rival kingdoms which had been held together by main force under Æthelfrith and Edwin were now united under a single house and a king with the immediate military, political and fiscal capital to create a kingdom in his own vision: one in which church and state were mutually reinforcing facets of the same divine dynastic purpose.*13
*1His death at the hands of Eugein I of Strathclyde at the Battle of Strathcarron in 642 is versified in the Dyfnwal Frych (Domnall Brecc) stanza of Y Gododdin (see p.194).
*2See p.122, under the year 623.
*3Fordun: Chronica Gentis Scotorum; the theme is expanded convincingly by Marsden 1992, 112ff but the lateness of the source means it must be treated with caution.
*4The existing manuscript dates to the fourteenth century and is evidently a miscellany of Welsh-language sources including the pre-Christian stories called the Mabinogion. Most historians believe the Triads, from which the Cadwallon stanza is taken, to preserve elements of authentic Early Medieval oral tradition.
*5HB 57; Presumably the same Rhun attested by a gloss in the Historia Brittonum as the man who baptised Edwin while in exile. Rhiein means ‘queen’ in Brythonic.
*6In my view the nationalistic interpretation of some of the politics of this period is inappropriate; it owes much to Gildas, and the actual evidence for British solidarity against Lloegr is thin.
*7Much debate surrounds the exact extent of Early Medieval Rheged; for a summary and opinion see McCarthy 2002.
*8A letter very similar in style and intent was written by a later Northumbrian, Admiral Collingwood, to the Emperor of Morocco in 1808 asking for his help and support (especially horses) against the wicked godless Napoleon in Spain and invoking, with extraordinary prescience, the wisdom and authority of the Qur’an. The idea of appealing to enlightened self-interest has a pedigree much older than the eighteenth century.
*9The association with Oswald may belong to a later church dedicated to the saint after the death of King Ælfwald in 788.
*10John of Fordun, who died around 1384, wrote a five-volume history called Chronica Gentis Scottorum, in which he seems to have drawn on independent sources now lost to us.
*11The doyenne of Northumbrian archaeology, Dame Rosemary Cramp, has made the point that Oswald’s deployment of the cross might also have tapped into Bernician sensibilities about the potency of tribal totem poles. Several examples were excavated by Hope-Taylor at Yeavering, like that which was the focal point of the grandstand. Cramp 1995, 30.
*12EH II.1 Bede says Cadwallon boasted that his army was irresistible: how would he know what Cadwallon said, unless this is another adverbial clue to a lost battle elegy?
*13One thing niggles. Cadwallon had chosen his camp well if, as I suppose, he was stationed at Corbridge. His natural line of retreat was south and east, along Dere Street, where he knew the topography and might even have mentally envisaged tactical redoubts. Why, then, did his army cross the river and turn not left but right, to the south-west towards the fatal choke-point at Steel and their doom? Did he believe that the difficult road to Whitley Castle was a better bet for retreat than the fast road south? Did his army split into two in the fog of battle? Did Oswald’s tactics include a detachment aimed at cutting of his retreat along Dere Street? I do not know.
IX
Holy islands
Til sceal on eðle... domes wyrcean
A good man shall gain honour
in his own lands
In 635 Oswald Iding, at the age of thirty, was undisputed overlord of all the lands north of the Humber up to the Firth of Forth. With an impeccably legitimate claim through his parents to both Northumbrian kingdoms and with a martial reputation to match his father’s, his political capital was immense, far greater than most athelings could boast on becoming king. How would he spend it? He could, like Edwin, have delayed weighty decisions on faith and politics until he felt secure within his borders, deferring the repayment of his moral debts. He might have embarked on an immediate campaign of conquest of the weak southern kingdoms. He could have allied himself by marriage to one of the northern British kingdoms, to Dál Riata or Mercia. These were the conventional tactics of a young man out to prove to himself and his subjects that he was made of the right stuff. The political reality of Oswald’s first years in power shows breathtaking ambition and vision, the sureness of touch of a man with little self-doubt. It begins, though, with apparent modesty, with the establishment of a small community of monks on a windswept island off the coast of Bernicia.
As is so often the case with Bede, the story he tells is neither straightforward nor, at first sight, terribly revealing. He manipulates a seemingly simple narrative to suit his overall providential purpose; he omits much that one would like to know; and in trying to cover up those unsightly stains with which heroic tales are in reality marked, he leaves a subtle trail of clues which we have to unpick, one by one. He is at perhaps his most disingenuous when writing of Oswald.
Within months of the victory at Heavenfield the king requested from Iona a bishop to minister to him and his people. Edwin had waited a decade before paying off his Faustian debt to Paulinus. Oswald was a believer whose military triumph had been won in the name of
Colm Cille and God (perhaps more than one god). He saw the conversion of his people to Christianity, if that was what it was, as a gift to them, not a political imposition. Bede is insistent that the initiative was the king’s:
Oswald, as soon as he had come to the throne, was anxious that the whole race under his rule should be filled with the grace of the Christian faith of which he had had so wonderful an experience in overcoming the barbarians.*1 So he sent to the Irish elders among whom he and his thegns had received the sacrament of baptism when he was an exile. He requested them to send a bishop by whose teaching and ministry the English race over whom he ruled might learn the privileges of faith in our Lord and receive the sacraments. His request was granted without delay. They sent him Bishop Aidan, a man of outstanding gentleness, devotion and moderation…
This is all very well. It sets up Bede’s account of Lindisfarne, of Colm Cille and the founding of Iona and Aidan’s ministry. But two chapters later Bede admits that Aidan was not, in fact, the first missionary of the Irish church to Northumbria; that the original mission had not gone according to plan. The first bishop sent from Iona found the Northumbrians resistant to the good news which he brought, as well they might—it had not done Edwin or his subjects much good and their most recent experience of a Christian king was Cadwallon. The bishop was ‘unreasonably harsh’ on his ignorant audience, rubbing them up the wrong way and preaching over their heads.122 Believing the pagan English to be unwilling converts ‘because they were intractable, obstinate and uncivilised’123 he returned to Iona where he was debriefed at a conference. His failure, if we accept this story, must have been of the greatest concern to Abbot Ségéne who was both a friend of Oswald and the motivating force behind the Northumbrian mission. The fact that the elders of Iona convened a summit to address the issue testifies to their concern. Bede would have us believe that a monk called Aidan, present at this conference, spoke eloquently of a more gentle, persuasive means of appealing to the heathen mind and, in the manner of such things, was unanimously chosen to head a new mission to Oswald’s court, was consecrated bishop, and despatched.
Who consecrated Aidan, when there was no incumbent bishop in the community, is a nice question. It is more likely that Aidan was already a quite senior figure in the Irish church, but it makes a better story if he is plucked from the ranks of Iona’s own community of monks. The Martyrology of Donegal,124 a very late seventeenth-century compilation whose author seems to have had access to sources independent of Bede and Adomnán, lists Aidan’s first bishopric as Inis Cathaigh—Scattery Island, a famous and early monastery and bishopric on an island at the mouth of the River Shannon in County Clare. If this is true, Aidan was no mere monk but a rather heavyweight bishop; and from a high noble family, if the Martyrology is to be believed.
This begs several more questions, though. Why does Bede bother to insert a complication in the story of Aidan’s dispatch, two chapters after its natural place? Then again, why wasn’t a better candidate for such a crucial posting chosen first time around? And why did that better candidate, that is to say, Aidan, not accompany the Bernician atheling on his campaign of conquest in the first place? After all, they had had seventeen years to plan the foundation of an Iona in the East; and to have their man in place alongside Oswald in the hour of triumph would have been no more than prudent. Why give the new king an opportunity to forget or defer payment on his promise?
There is another issue here. We know that Bede had specific sources for the Oswald account: Lindisfarne, where naturally enough stories of the king’s reign would have been handed down as part of the lore of the founder; Iona, where Bede had correspondents and where there was substantial interest in historic ties to Northumbria; and Hexham, where the founder and first bishop of that establishment, Wilfrid, was instrumental in fostering the cult of Oswald. The insertion of a story about the failure of the first mission into an account of Aidan’s ministry shows that, as in other split narratives, Bede was trying to reconcile two apparently contradictory stories. Which is which? Bede need never have mentioned the original failure; he did not even know the name of the bishop—if indeed the man was a bishop.
Bede, I think, told the story about the initial failure for two reasons. First, he took his duties as a historian seriously; he knew the story and felt he ought to tell it. Second, it redounded to Aidan’s great credit that he overcame the difficulties of the challenge, just as Augustine had forty years previously. It made that mission, and Aidan, all the more special. As to how these two accounts came into his possession, the questions to pose are these: in whose interests was it to cultivate a story about a failed initiative, and in what circumstances did that earlier initiative try its hand?
There was a cult of Aidan at Lindisfarne in the late seventh century and I suspect that is where the story of the first failure came from. Since the monks of Lindisfarne were deeply implicated in the history of the Northumbrian church, Bede could hardly avoid telling their story. Further, I suspect that the mission to Northumbria, in the immediate wake of the victory at Denisesburn, may have been in some respects unofficial, focused on the site of Oswald’s cross where Colm Cille had appeared to him: that is to say, at Heavenfield. As I hinted above, it would seem natural if the first missionary to Northumbria had been one of the monks in Oswald’s warband, a man who remained at Heavenfield in order to cultivate the shoots of the conversion in its most holy place, but who proved unequal to the task.
Is there any evidence of an early mission at Heavenfield? There is. Bede says that many miracles occurred at the site of the cross; he narrates the story of a Hexham monk, Bothelm, whose fractured arm was cured by a poultice of moss that had grown on the cross.125 He says that the brethren of Hexham Abbey had long been in the habit of making a pilgrimage to the site on the anniversary of Oswald’s death. He also says that lately (presumably in the first quarter of the eighth century) a church had been constructed on the site. There is something else, too. From the air a striking and unusual sub-rectangular field pattern, shaped like a playing card, immediately to the south-west of the present church at Heavenfield (and centring on the site of Hadrian’s Wall turret 25b) suggests an enclosure pre-dating the military road; it consists of the sort of stone field walls familiar all over Northumberland. Some of the stones are re-used Roman masonry, but that is not by any means unusual around here. It cuts across the two ditches of the Wall on the north side and straddles the Wall itself at precise right angles. The centre of the enclosure is about where the turret would have stood, and that turret is probably where Oswald made his camp and set up his cross. Without at least a geophysical survey it is impossible to determine how old the enclosure is or what it enclosed, except that it must predate the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 because it is neatly bisected by General Wade’s military road. Only excavation could prove its authenticity, date and exact nature. As I noted above, the interior of the turret was excavated in the 1950s and the results are open to question: was the void in the centre a later ‘disturbance’, or the setting for a cross? In any case what is so absolutely striking is the enclosure’s shape and size. Superimpose its outline on aerial photographs, at exactly the same scale, of the monastic enclosure at Iona and that reconstructed for Lindisfarne by Rob Young and Deirdre O’Sullivan126 and the dimensions are very similar: six hectares internally and the same proportion of length to breadth. Dare one suggest that Iona’s first mission, perhaps an informal initiative of the fighting monks in Oswald’s warband, resulted in the founding of a monastery, on the Iona pattern, at the site of Oswald’s vision of Colm Cille; and that, the mission having failed for the reason cited by Bede or because of a lack of official backing, the monastery lay undeveloped but the site of the cross retained its magical powers of healing and luck until the time when it became part of Wilfrid’s Hexham hegemony and was revived as a royal cult site? Here is a hypothesis that might, in the foreseeable future, be tested archaeologically by geophysical prospection.
So much for the story of
the first mission. There is another complication that needs to be accounted for in the story of Aidan’s deployment. The crucial tale of the vision of Colm Cille appearing to Oswald the night before battle seems to have been told in person by the king to his friend Abbot Ségéne. This is the testimony of Adomnán, whose predecessor Abbot Failbe heard it from Ségéne who heard it in person from Oswald.127 The clear implication is that at some point between 634 and his death in 642, Oswald met with his old friend and mentor. But where and when? That Oswald should travel to Iona is not, perhaps, inconceivable, but to journey so far from one’s heartlands has been the undoing of many a king and I doubt if Oswald would have risked being absent for a long period in his first years. One is left with the conclusion that Ségéne travelled to Northumbria to meet with Oswald. This is not in itself surprising, given the importance already attached to the mission. Did he, perhaps, accompany the first bishop, whose name is offered in a much later Scottish source as Corman?128 Or, more plausibly, did he travel with Corman’s replacement, Aidan, to make sure that the second mission did not fail?
The King in the North Page 17