On the basis that it was Ségéne who travelled to Oswald and not the other way round, one might also speculate that the abbot of Iona had an ulterior motive: to ordain Oswald as king (Iona’s king) on the same basis that Colm Cille had ordained Áedán, with an adjuration to foster the founding saint’s interests—or else. If such an ordination did occur, the stage was Bamburgh, the ‘paternal seat of antiquity’ of the Bernician royal house and the place where a fragment of a stone throne, now in the castle museum, has been recovered from excavations. Bamburgh lies just a few miles south of, and in clear sight of, Lindisfarne and when Bede tells us that Aidan, on arrival, chose the mythical island as the site of his first monastery, one suspects it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. Oswald must, during his long exile, have told his Ionan hosts about this magical spot:
As the tide ebbs and flows, this place is surrounded twice daily by the waves of the sea like an island and twice, when the shore is left dry, it becomes again attached to the mainland.129
They cannot have been unmoved either by its periodic remoteness, its resemblance to Iona, or its proximity to the caput of the Bernician kingdom. I suggest, then, that one of the Ionan party who accompanied Oswald’s army attempted to found a monastic establishment at Heavenfield; that this mission was unplanned, irregular and institutionally unsuccessful; that Oswald sent to Iona for a more formal mission as previously arranged and that Ségéne came to Northumbria himself, bringing the more experienced and politically astute Bishop Aidan, to lend full weight to the embassy. I suspect that his visit was additionally designed to conduct a formal ordination like those orchestrated by Colm Cille. This is hinted at by Adomnán, who tells his readers that after Heavenfield Oswald was ordained by God as emperor of all Britain.130 Such an ordination would have been uncomfortable for Bede to describe since, as he readily admits, he believed the Ionans of Oswald’s day to be in the wrong regarding the Easter controversy and other Roman orthodoxies. Such ordinations were, even in Bede’s day, probably regarded as uncanonical and perilously close to the heathen inauguration rites practised at places like Dunadd (and probably at Bamburgh or Yeavering under previous kings) in the bad old heathen days of their unenlightened forebears.
I may here be reading too much between Bede’s lines. The whole thing does not quite add up. There is an awkwardness to his narrative of Oswald that masks some ambivalence on his part. The fact that in his earlier Chronica Maiora of 725, a sort of dry run for the Ecclesiastical History, Bede does not even mention Oswald’s part in the Northumbrian conversion, leaves one with suspicions.*2 More than a few historians have speculated that the pagan overtones of Oswald’s reign, which emerged strongly after his death, may have made him an equivocal figure for Bede to deal with. One thing seems clear: unlike his uncle and predecessor Edwin, Oswald is not recorded as having had to convene a council and go through the motions of debating the merits or otherwise of Aidan’s presence in the kingdom. This was an executive decision; and who would argue?
Whatever troubles Bede had in reconciling conflicting accounts, or his own views of Oswald, his admiration for Aidan is perfectly genuine. Once the right man had been installed in the right place the mission proceeded at pace and with what Bede regarded as unqualified success:
From that time, as the days went by, many came from the country of the Irish into Britain and to those English kingdoms over which Oswald reigned, preaching the word of faith with great devotion. Those of them who held the rank of priest administered the grace of baptism to those who believed. Churches were built in various places and the people flocked together with joy to hear the Word; lands and property of other kinds were given by royal bounty to establish monasteries, and English children, as well as their elders, were instructed by Irish teachers in advanced studies and in the observance of the discipline of a Rule.131
Make no mistake: this was the deliberate founding of an institutional church on an Irish model with the full backing of Britain’s newly enthroned overlord. There is nothing here of the ambivalence of Edwin and Paulinus, no pillow talk or letters and bribes from Rome. Aidan, Oswald’s bishop, was a man of exemplary faith, humility and leadership; moreover, he was not content to minister merely to the king’s household and Bernicia’s aristocratic elite. The failure of the first Ionan mission shows that whatever royal patronage might do, conversion of the plebs, a priority for the church of Colm Cille, was different from and much harder to accomplish than the mere political acknowledgement of the nobility. It shows how ambitious Iona was, and how much political capital they were prepared to invest, that they sent Aidan and so many others over. For more than fifteen years the Irishman and many, many more of his countrymen preached the Irish species of Christianity, a blend of desert asceticism, personal godliness and tribal affiliation, among the plains and hills of the North Sea coast. The youth of the Bernician, and perhaps Deiran, nobilities were educated in Latin and in Bible studies: the first literate English in the North. On Lindisfarne Aidan constructed a modest cluster of wooden buildings of hewn oak, roofed with thatch in the Irish style. There would have been a small church, cells for the monks, and a guesthouse for receiving visitors. On a tiny offshore isle, later associated with St Cuthbert, monks could retreat for periods of solitude and contemplation. A watchtower was built at some point during the seventh century, and a dormitory; but, in the tradition of the mother-house on Iona, architectural pretension was wholly absent. There was no pomp, no splendour, except perhaps in the possession of treasures given by the king himself. Miles to the south, and in plain view of Bamburgh, the island of Inner Farne provided Aidan and later Cuthbert and other monks seeking solitude a desert place whose only inhabitants were the seals and seabirds of that famous wildlife sanctuary.132 As scholar Michelle Brown has suggested, the presence of fasting monks visible from the royal apartments of the Bernician kings might have been partly intended to concentrate their minds and remind them of their Christian responsibilities.133
There was sufficient land on Lindisfarne, some three-quarters of a square mile of farmland, to grow crops and pasture animals. There was ample fishing both inshore and offshore and seals may have been hunted in the tiny Farne archipelago. The island, like Iona, was not deserted when the monks arrived. In the late sixth century, when Lindisfarne was still known by its British name of Inis Metcaud, the Bernician king Theodoric had been besieged here by a British army. Excavation has shown that there had been activity on the island since the Mesolithic period, probably exploiting the rich year-round marine resources of the coast. In the Early Medieval period there was a farming settlement on the north side of the island at Greenshiel, later consumed by sand dunes; and it is quite likely that the site of the much later castle on its iconic and exotic-looking hill had been the site of a fortress—possibly that of Theodoric and possibly surviving in the late seventh century as the fortress known as Broninis.*3
The monastic enclosure of Aidan’s day has not yet been traced with certainty, although the reconstruction suggested by Deirdre O’Sullivan and Rob Young134 makes plausible use of the topography of the island to produce a plan which would mirror in size and shape its Ionan model, focusing on the market place of the present village at the south end of the island. The church probably stood on the site of the later Benedictine abbey, close to its harbour and sheltered, like Iona Abbey, from the worst of storms. At low tide the island was reached by walking across the sands along a route still marked and known as the pilgrim’s way so that in a sense Lindisfarne had two protective valla: the ditched and banked enclosure built by the sweated labour of the monks, and that provided by God in the form of the tides. At high tide boats might have plied the short distance to the mainland or ferried goods and monks along the coast to north or south. There is a cluster of suggestive wic- names on the sandy coast between Berwick-upon-Tweed, some eighteen miles to the north, and Bamburgh to the south, which suggests that beach markets may periodically have been held in the vicinity, perhaps under the protection of royal patrons at
Bamburgh. Windswept it may have been, but Lindisfarne lay at the core of the Bernician kingdom.
Aidan, and the monks who joined him from Ireland, did not spend their days wholly in devotion to their own spiritual needs. Aidan himself walked among the scattered settlements of the hills and coastal plain bringing his word to the ‘ordinary’ people. Some of these ordinary people might already have been Christians, especially if they regarded themselves as in some way ‘British’—that is to say, the folc of Brynaich, not Bernicia. If so, they are likely to have been more sympathetic to Aidan’s brand of the faith than they had been to the Catholic, urbane version touted by Paulinus.
Although he had been given a horse by a Deiran sub-king, Oswine, as befitted his rank and dignity, Aidan later gave it, or one like it, away (much to Oswine’s horror) to a pauper.*4 Aidan was by no means an unequivocal figure for Bede: his adherence to Irish practice in matters of Easter observance and the form of the monastic tonsure were inimical to the Jarrow monk’s Roman orthodoxy. But:
Such were his love of peace and charity, temperance and humility; his soul which triumphed over anger and greed and at the same time despised pride and vainglory; his industry in carrying out and teaching the divine commandment, his diligence in study and keeping vigil, his authority... All these things I greatly admire and love in this bishop and I have no doubt that all this was pleasing to God.135
Bede, in placing Oswald and Aidan at the heart of his conversion narrative, was speaking loud and clear to his contemporaries, both bishops and kings. The education of Christian kings was a primary function of the senior churchmen in the land. Royal power came with royal responsibility. Oswald, who had been educated by Colm Cille’s successors, can have been in no doubt how those responsibilities were to be exercised.
Aidan’s spiritual and moral superiority affected all those whom he met. It is quite possible that Oswald knew Aidan from his days in exile; in any case, the friendship that developed between them was mutual and genuine. Aidan was no sycophant or court groupie: he spent little time as a retainer. Bede says that if he was summoned by Oswald to feast with him at a royal estate, Aidan would attend with one or two of his monks, eat a little food for form’s sake, and then hurry away to be with his people or to pray.136 He would occasionally have entertained senior members of Oswald’s retinue as a matter of formal hospitality, but evidently did not seek their company for its own sake. He gave money and gifts to the poor and disdained to curry favour with the rich, whom he was known to rebuke or correct without fear. He was also known to purchase those whom poverty, injustice or ill luck had rendered slaves, and release them or train them as priests. The Bernician nobility must, at first, have thought him a very odd fish, but can have been in no doubt of his moral authority or the favour in which he was held by the king.
Aidan’s relationship with Oswald was cemented by the king’s habit of acting as his translator from Irish to English. The king would spend many hours in prayer with his hands on his knees and the palms turned upward, from matins until daybreak.137 Oswald also endeared himself to Aidan by his sympathetic behaviour. Bede’s set-piece story is, as so often, staged at Easter, when Oswald and Aidan had sat down to dinner. They were eating rich foods off a silver dish, perhaps in the great hall at Yeavering or in the fortress at Bamburgh...
They had just raised their hands to ask a blessing on the bread when there came in an officer of the king, whose duty it was to relieve the needy, telling him that a very great multitude of poor people from every district were sitting in the precincts and asking alms of the king. He at once ordered the dainties which had been set in front of him to be carried to the poor, the dish to be broken up, and the pieces divided amongst them. The bishop, who was sitting by, was delighted with this pious act, grasped him by the right hand, and said, ‘May this hand never decay.’138
And so the seed of the later cult of Oswald was sown in an act of spontaneous generosity. Well, perhaps. The story has so many features of interest that it deserves a closer look. To begin with, Bede situates his readers (senior churchmen and, more importantly, contemporary kings) in the context of Oswald’s expanding imperium. Oswald, as reward for his patronage of Aidan, was granted ‘greater earthly realms than any of his ancestors had possessed’.139 In contrast to Edwin’s reign, the reward came after the proof of virtue, not in anticipation. By the end of his reign, Bede claimed, he held sway over all the peoples and kingdoms of Britain. That may or may not be true. His humility and kindness to strangers and the poor is set against this imperial backdrop as a moral fable which spoke loud and clear to Bede’s own times.
The action takes place in a hall, the natural theatre of the Anglo-Saxons, where an Easter feast has been prepared. Bede offers few details of the scene, but it can be peopled with the ranks of the Northumbrian elite; with perhaps unmarried women of the court acting as cup-bearers and oiling the wheels of alliance and patronage; with aspiring warriors and elderly, time-expired gesiths; with hunting dogs and nameless children. Then there are the king’s functionaries. One of these is identified, perhaps surprisingly, as an officer whose duty it was to relieve the poor. This man must be an ealdorman, perhaps past his military prime, an almsgiver holding in effect a sinecure of the king in return for loyal service in the past; one of his father’s men, perhaps. In later years such men will be called King’s Almoners. Who are the other functionaries? Elsewhere in Bede, in saints’ lives and various prose and verse works, we catch sight of a few of them. Bede tells us of those whose job it was to compute the dates of kings, probably another formal function;140 there must also have been king’s messengers and couriers. King Ine of Wessex retained a group of British horsemen, perhaps for the purpose of escorting such couriers. Either formally, or as occasion arose, there must have been some sort of equivalent of ambassadors, of the sort so conspicuously portrayed in the story of Edwin’s attempted assassination (also at Easter). There would have been a hunt master: kings have always been enthusiasts for the chase. Edwin also had his chief priest, Coifi, and one might speculate that for Oswald the same role was fulfilled by Aidan. In addition there were reeves, who administered royal estates, standard-bearers, bards and poets (scops, or praise-singers); perhaps also architects and the king’s own specialist metalworker or jeweller. How many of these spent their days in the company of the king is a matter of speculation. Aidan may have been unique in choosing his own manner and timing of attendance on the king who was, after all, one of two lords whom he was required to serve.
It might come as a surprise to learn that Oswald charged an officer with almsgiving; whether this was a specifically Christian innovation is hard to say. The story suggests that as the king proceeded on his tour of royal estates, the poor of the locale would converge in the hope of having a petition heard, of receiving the leftovers of the feasting, or in expectation of a more formal distribution of alms. Early texts understandably offer little insight into poverty; the most graphic account is given in Æthelwulf’s eighth-century poem De Abbatibus which includes the tale of an abbot who disguised himself and crept out of the monastery to give comfort to the poor who were immersing themselves in the warm rubbish (hot ashes, or worse?) discarded by the monks. That the multitude in Bede’s narrative was allowed to crowd into the palace precincts is an indulgence in itself; it implies at the very least that the king did not fear popular uprising.
Oswald’s response, having the silver dish on which his food was to be served cut up and distributed, sounds suspiciously like the key element in a ceremonial ritual, one which reappears in the later historical record as the Maundy service of the medieval kings, during which the monarch would also wash the feet of the poor as Christ had done in an act of penitential Easter humility. But it may be an amalgam of several ceremonials, including some variation of the Easter eucharist. Quite what the poor were supposed to do with a piece of silver is a moot point; but then, Maundy money is not exactly a negotiable food coupon. Clovis, the Frankish king whose conversion in about 500 seems
to have been a well-known story (Bede certainly knew of it), showered the people of Tours with gold and silver coins on receiving the consulship from the Emperor Anastasius.141 And the Irish monk St Gall, a companion of Columbanus on the Continent in the late sixth century, distributed to the poor a silver cup which had been destined for an altarpiece.142 There might even have been a tradition inherited from late Roman Continental practice of provincial governors distributing largesse. Aidan, charged with educating Christian rulers in their responsibilities, may have been shepherding Oswald through a rite practised by kings in Ireland, or Dál Riata. An early fifth-century hoard of Roman silver including more than one thousand seven hundred coins, found at Ballinrees, County Londonderry, in 1854, shows that Irish kings were able to access such riches.143 Then there is this intriguing story told by Cogitosus in his Life of St Brigid, one of Ireland’s three great saints.
Her miracles are great, but this one is especially admired. Three lepers came, asking for alms of any kind, and she gave them a silver dish. So that this would not cause discord and contention among them when they came to share it out, she spoke to a certain person expert in the weighing of gold and silver, and asked him to divide it among them in three parts of equal weight. When he began to excuse himself, pointing out that there was no way he could divide it up so that the three parts would weigh exactly the same, the most blessed Brigid herself took the silver dish and struck it against a stone, breaking it into three parts as she had wished. Marvellous to tell, when the three parts were tested on the scales, not one part was found to be heavier or lighter by a breath than any other. So the three poor people left with their gift and there was no cause for envy or grudging between them.144
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