The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  Aidan probably knew this story; perhaps he had told it to Oswald with the express purpose of teaching the new king his Christian responsibilities. Equally, one might look to the gift-giving role of kings at important feasts and see more of Beowulf than Christ in the gesture. Oswald could not distribute coin; he had no mint. But he could, if tradition demanded, distribute wealth in precious metal by weight, or by division of a known quantity. Was the silver dish in question made bespoke for just such a division and given, as Bede must, a providential and divinely inspired polish? Or was it a piece of Roman tableware, recycled battle booty?

  Who were these multitudes of poor? Early English, and for that matter British, society emerges from the historical and archaeological sources as socially ordered. Those who were free were valued higher than those who were unfree; the unfree belonged to the land, whose ownership might be transferred; they themselves were bound to it. Labour and patronage were opposite halves of the same equation: the lord protected the labourer in return for his or her toil. There does not seem to be much room for multitudes of dispossessed peasants. Are these the rural dwellers who, by historical accident—the death of an heirless warrior, perhaps—had been left without a lord and therefore subsisted in grinding misery outside the system so that only the king, as their ultimate lord, might be appealed to for succour? If this is true, the arrival of a Christian, compassionate king was timely: the Annals of Ulster recorded that in the winter of 635 a ‘great snowfall killed many’, a reminder that the elements wielded a power stronger than kings or holy men.

  And then, what does one make of Aidan’s blessing of the king’s right hand? By Bede’s day the story of Oswald’s incorrupt arm and its adventures post-mortem was already the subject of cult attention. But Oswald’s Irish moniker Lamnguin and its association with an Irish silver-armed god suggests that Oswald’s right arm already had form. It was, to be sure, the martial arm, the sword-wielding, gift-giving and sceptre-carrying arm of the king. Dare one suggest that, like the god Nuada Airgetlám, Oswald had lost an arm or the use of it in battle; that the nickname Lamnguin was ironic (as most such nicknames were); that the arm in question was a prosthetic of some sort, or withered, and that Aidan’s gesture was trading on that irony? This is too much to infer from the sources; nevertheless, Oswald’s right arm carries a significance that predates his death in battle and Bede may have known more than he admits of its history in myth and reality.

  During the fourth century various emperors, particularly Constantine, were keen to alloy aspects of both the pagan divine and the Christian in their ceremonials. The acceptance of a single, universal, omnipotent being forced compromise on secular leaders because they had been used to being treated and received as gods in their own right. Conversion seems to comprise an act of self-emasculation. The impression a king or emperor wished to make on those he visited on his peripatetic journeys was ‘one of regular imperial arrival, a safeguard of general security and... interest in the various parts of the empire’.145 Something of the ceremonial aspect of this adventus survived into the sixth century at least in Constantinople. One cannot directly argue from late Roman emperors to Early Medieval kings, but it is easy to imagine that pagan warlords undergoing conversion, like Oswald and Edwin, were reluctant to discard aspects of the pagan divine in their own being. Why should they? There was ample motive to retain divine elements in ceremonials of adventus, to maintain their propaganda value. Again, Bede’s treatment of Oswald betrays discomfort in bending the oral traditions of this charismatic king to his providential purpose when Oswald, a committed Christian, was trying very hard to retain the most potent imagery of pagan tribal totemism. Bede, in fact, might be overdoing the poverty of Oswald’s Easter reception party. They may conceivably have been his landed constituency: the free seekers of patronage and protection basking in his glory, rather than the unfree, unwashed masses. In that case the gift of silver can be seen not as poor relief and humility but as a token of condescending royal favour: one foot in Beowulf, one in the New Testament, with feasting, charity and the eucharist naturally enough being blended into a set of rituals associated with the arrival of the king and the consumption of the region’s surplus—a dividend of royal power and prerogative. Aidan’s raising of the king’s right hand is as much a triumph for Aidan and his God as it is a token of the king’s literally incorruptible moral virtue. Edwin emphasised his Romanitas by having standard-bearers walk in front of him; Oswald accomplished it by acts of Christian humility and largesse that Bede could not but approve of.

  The most significant aspect of the relationship between king and cleric for later history is Oswald’s donation of gifts and lands for Aidan’s community to support themselves. In this, Oswald set a Northumbrian precedent, the effects of which no-one anticipated at the time, although by Bede’s day it had become a consuming political issue. There is nothing to suggest that Edwin thought of such a thing. We learn very little from Bede about the practical aspects of Oswald’s patronage of the church. Church buildings, he says, were founded in various places in the kingdom; he does not say where and we can guess at few of them. Personal gifts were made to Aidan, as to others of noble rank; it was part of the tribal system of patronage and distribution. Æthelberht of Kent had conferred on Augustine lands and estates ‘suitable to his rank’. Oswald, with the Irish example more relevant than the Kentish, regarded the church of Aidan as the Irish kings would: as a tribally affiliated institution legitimising, supporting and ministering to the king and his family and court and with spiritual authority over the needs of the faithful (and prospectively faithful).

  In the case of Bernicia, as in Kent, there is a question of the potential survival of British Christianity. In Canterbury a Roman church still stood; whether it retained a British congregation is much less certain. That there were Christians in north Britain in the Early Medieval period has long been suspected by archaeologists and historians; there were evidently still communities further south in the Pennines in the middle of the seventh century. Bernicia and Gododdin in particular may have had a substantially British population, both ethnically and linguistically, even in Oswald’s day. The archaeological evidence is most obvious in the form of long cist graves: that is, stone-lined interments, aligned east–west, which may date from the fourth century onwards and which occur both singly and in cemeteries from East Lothian southwards as far as the Tweed and now, demonstrably, at Bamburgh.

  The monastery to which Cuthbert first belonged, Old Melrose, has been identified as a possible British survival on the basis that Bede used its Brythonic name, Mailros, in referring to it. Two stone inscriptions, one now missing, in the Peebles area, refer to a sacerdos and an episcopi, both terms for a bishop.146 Then there are the so-called Eccles names. These are places in which the Latin ecclesia, for church, has been preserved via Primitive Welsh egles, in names such as Eccles, just north of the River Tweed, and Eaglescairnie in East Lothian.147 One of these, the hilltop Eccles Cairn to the east of Yetholm near Yeavering, is close to the heartland of Oswald’s kingdom. There has been much speculation that the Tweed Valley was the core of a British kingdom in the fifth and sixth centuries—perhaps even the kingdom of Bryneich, which later became Bernicia. Some historians argue that this kingdom was influenced, if not wholly converted, by the mission of Ninian, the British saint of Whithorn, on the coast of Galloway; at Stobo, in Tweeddale, a church and well are associated with St Mungo, otherwise known as Kentigern, the late-sixth-century saint said to have had dealings with the semi-mythical Myrddin, or Merlin. That the Germanic kings who ruled over Bernicia in the latter part of the sixth century were heathen is attested by the direct evidence of early burials and totemic and sacrificial behaviour at Yeavering; but that is not to say that there was no residual practice of Christianity north of the River Tyne. How such populations may have reacted to the arrival of Aidan’s mission (or that of Paulinus before) can only be guessed at; possibly he was just another lord, if an unconventionally benign one. In the next gene
ration churchmen of the Roman persuasion like Wilfrid would have no compunction in depriving British churches of their lands in favour of their own foundations and communities.

  It is possible, then, that the early donations of land to the Irish mission in Northumbria included lands which had been held by British monasteries and churches. More likely, such donations came from the royal portfolio. This begs a very basic question: how did kings know what they owned and, by extension, what they might give away? To suggest that kings could donate any piece of land within their kingdom is to read Early Medieval landholding wrong. Kings knew very well what they owned; or rather, what was potentially in their gift. The core of the royal property portfolio was the royal shire, with the villa regia at its heart collecting renders and playing host to the peripatetic king at various times during the year. Bamburgh was a likely Early Medieval shire, given—that is, its surplus in the form of a render of goods, foods and service was given—to Bebba by Æthelfrith or his family as dower.*5 With the render came the right to dwell in the palace or hall, to manage and administer and probably, at the local scale, to judge. There is no suggestion that the farming inhabitants of such estates moved around or, indeed, cared much in whose name they laboured. Given the multitudes of poor, perhaps lordless subjects who crowded at Oswald’s Easter door, it is reasonable to suggest that the first grants to monasteries might have included lands which had no lord, that the poor were in effect being handed over to the protection of the church in return for labour. If that is the case, one begins to see an element of social progression—albeit perhaps accidental—in the extension of church lands in the later seventh century, at least in its early stages.

  Generally kings gave, or ‘alienated’ land with only a life-interest as a reward to warriors who had served them on campaign and who were of an age, around twenty-five at least, when they required estates to provide income (in effect an army pension like that of the Roman legionary settling in his colonia) and an establishment in which to marry, raise children and maintain a hall. These lands were effectively held by lease and returned to the royal portfolio on the death of the ‘owner’. This form of landholding ensured a more or less constant circulation of estates with which kings rewarded their warriors. Some estates in lands conquered on campaign were alienated from their native incumbents and redistributed, so that the size of the king’s army might grow until such time as the king died in battle, when the redistribution game was reset to zero and began again under a new lord and patron. There is a limited amount of evidence for the existence of what we would call freehold land, estates that were passed direct from father to son as customary right; but in extent such lands must, in Oswald’s day, have been quite small.

  Lindisfarne apart, there is no contemporary record of those lands gifted to Aidan to support his monastic mission. However, a fascinating document survives from the eleventh century which traces the history of the community of St Cuthbert from its origins in Aidan’s day to its arrival in Durham in the tenth century, into whose narrative were interpolated records of lands granted by various means to the community. There are possible elements of retrospective claims here, not to say of downright fraud, in asserting historic grants after the fact. Nevertheless, the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, or HSC, is accepted by historians as substantially reflecting the accumulation of estates by the Lindisfarne establishment, especially during the seventh and eighth centuries under Oswald and his heirs. Although the text has to be treated with caution, it is extraordinarily revealing about the process of alienation and even more so about the geography of early shires and estates.148

  The first grant to be directly referenced, in Section Three of the Historia, dates to around 651 under King Oswiu; but Section Four appears to record a monastic tradition of the earliest territory of Lindisfarne, which may preserve in essence the original land grant made by Oswald in 635. It describes the ‘boundary of the territory of Lindisfarne’, including the lands which later became Islandshire (the townships between Berwick and Bamburgh but not including the latter) and Norhamshire (along the south bank of the Tweed). Assuming Colm O’Brien’s reconstructed Gefrinshire, whose estate centre was Yeavering, to be strictly the preserve of the king, and Bamburghshire to be similarly inalienable, the remainder of the earliest grants (that is, under Oswald and Oswiu) consisted of the valley of the Bromic or River Breamish from its source down to perhaps the boundary formed by the Roman Devil’s Causeway road (now roughly the A697 between Powburn and Wooler).*6 These ‘shires’, unlike the later county shires, seem to have consisted of groups of ten to twelve townships, or vills ,*7 with a single more or less central place to which renders, in the form of food and services, were gathered for the consumption of a gesith and his family and retinue. One might best see them as a sort of grand estate whose social and cultural function was to support the warrior elite of the kingdom. That their boundaries can largely be reconstructed, that they still make geographic sense, is one of the more remarkable features of recent Early Medieval studies.

  The fact that such units of land, carefully defined by reference to watersheds and river mouths, could be described and understood as coherent territorial units under the seventh-century kings suggests that these were already-existing economic polities. The Breamish Valley can be shown to possess the same territorial and economic coherence in the later prehistoric and Roman periods, which implies a continuity in rural land division and, perhaps, society, if not in the structures of the state. If Britannia collapsed in the decades after the withdrawal of Roman Imperial administration in around 410, perhaps no-one had told the inhabitants of the far North. Its land-holding institutions, as was realised many years ago, may substantially be British survivals.149

  Apart from piety, what were Oswald’s and his successors’ motives in giving away land to the church? It must have been evident from the start that such lands could not readily be reclaimed or recycled by kings. The relationship between king, cleric and monastic establishment did not work like that. One way in which it was expressed was that the renders owed by those parcels of land were not lost but were ‘commuted to prayer’; but the effective alienation was complete. If kings were to trade the uncertainties of pagan mortality for the everlasting joys of the next world and enjoy the stamp of legitimacy offered by the authority of God and Colm Cille, it stood to reason that the prayers offered for their salvation by the monks who enjoyed their patronage must also be everlasting. That is to say, the kings’ tenure in heaven was envisioned as freehold and the monks’ earthly tenure must also be freehold: as the early English put it, bocland or book-land as opposed to laenland or leasehold.*8 This permanent ‘alienation’ of land from the king’s property portfolio had immediate implications. Firstly, monks and abbots, given security of landed tenure, could invest physical capital in their lands: the sweat-equity of labour—clearing scrub and woodland for fields; building barns for storage and so on—and the material equity of permanence—stone buildings with lead roofs, for example. The monastic community, unlike the heathen kingdom, did not collapse or disband on the death of the abbot. This injection of capital into the newly Christianised landscape led to economic stability and increasing surplus. It led eventually to freedom for the monks to pursue artistic and educational ambitions. One might even see in this apparently ingenuous precedent set by Oswald the beginnings of a sort of agricultural capitalism, a process which by the end of the century was to produce the scriptoria of Jarrow, Wearmouth and Lindisfarne and their magnificent, costly books.150 Now that there was a sanctioned and protected church among the English of the north-east, monks from Iona and from the Irish mainland flocked to the region as missionaries and disciples of Aidan. The knowledge, skills and labour to exploit this new landscape of capital came freely; and they were thoroughly Irish.

  The other implication for kings of the granting of so much land to the church was that less land was available for them to donate as laenland to warriors in reward for military or other service. The odd shire h
ere or there could be lost to the royal portfolio without damage to the king’s fisc, effectively his exchequer, especially if monasteries were responsible for agricultural innovation and if the lands they were given were not the most productive. But the wholesale alienation of royal estates, which became the norm in later decades, sowed the seeds of social, political and military disaster.*9 The almost inevitable inference to draw is that the Bernicia of Oswald’s day was rich in agricultural holdings but, perhaps because of the second-hand patronage the kingdom had suffered under Edwin, was short of earthly warrior-tenants.

  There is nothing in Aidan’s career that foreshadows the Machiavellian pomp and majesty of the medieval prince-bishops of Durham, his lineal if not spiritual successors. His relationship with Oswald was one of mutual respect, even a sort of reserved friendship. As an instrument of Ionan political authority his role was to ensure the loyalty of Northumbrian kings to the paruchia of Colm Cille, although it seems unlikely that he issued Oswald with the sort of admonitory prophecy that would threaten doom to the Idings if they betrayed the founder saint; he probably did not need to. The bishop-abbot of the Irish church was a chief priest of immense authority, unafraid of kings or kingship; he served, after all, what he believed to be a greater lord. But there is no hint that Aidan or his immediate successors were intent on carving out a political hegemony for material benefit—far from it. Aidan, unlike Paulinus, saw himself both as a monk and as a missionary among the pagan English (and perhaps the indigenous Christians) with a pastoral role familiar to modern readers from the careers of Benedict of Nursia and Francis of Assisi. Until the later seventh century Lindisfarne retained its modesty, the ideal of its monks being personal isolation and self-denial combined with benevolent pastoral work.