The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  I beheld the array from the highland of Adowyn,

  And the sacrifice brought down to the omen fire;*4

  I saw what was usual, a continual running towards the town,

  And the men of Nwython inflicting sharp wounds;

  I saw warriors in complete order approaching with a shout,

  And the head of Dyvnwal Vrych by ravens devoured.158

  That a verse about the war between Strathclyde and Dál Riata found its way into the heroic poetry of the men of Eidyn (Edinburgh) is no great surprise. Eugein was very probably in alliance with the king of Eidyn in opposition to the combined warbands of Dál Riata and Bernicia. Oswald was duly repaying his obligations to his host and sponsor and pursuing his own northern ambitions by fighting against Britons. It was no more than his father had done before him. Whether the siege—obsesio as the Annals of Ulster describe it—of the Castle Rock at Edinburgh was successful is not recorded. All we can say for sure is that with the death of Brecc an era of Dál Riatan hegemony ended; that Oswald by implication lost a powerful northern ally; and that the battle between Britons and Lloegr for control of central Scotland continued through to the end of the century, with mixed results. Oswald may have been able to style himself overlord of North Britain and may have now regarded Dál Riata as a tribute kingdom.*5 Strathclyde and Gododdin may also by the end of Oswald’s reign have submitted to him. There is no evidence that he suffered personal military defeat in any of these campaigns. Bede, then, in describing Oswald’s unprecedented influence over most of the other kingdoms of Britain, was doing him no more than justice. The military luck he seemed to possess, reinforced by the potent virtus of Colm Cille, had carried him very far in a very short time.

  Oswald’s years as king were busy. His intense military, political and diplomatic activity mirrors the first decade of Edwin’s rule and, probably, of Æthelfrith before him. One wonders, though, what sort of kingship this made for? How did kings in an almost permanent state of war plan for statehood, if indeed they had an idea of statehood? Edwin was able, after securing his borders, seeing off the competition and generating the wealth which came from territorial expansion, to consider more stately aspects of kingship. He had time to think about maintaining the highways; about the social and political aspects of religious conversion. Even so, he did not create a state that was capable of surviving him. There is no sense that he envisioned his church as an arm of state control, of economic and social stability. He did not found towns or trading settlements, even if he possessed a list of what his subject territories owed him; he did not even, as his father-in-law Æthelberht had, commission a set of written law-codes to define the rights and responsibilities of Northumbrians. His kingship, like those before him, was founded on customary right and on what had always been. There is no hint of what we would understand as a civil service except, perhaps, those enigmatic officers whose job it was to ensure that a woman with a newborn child might traverse his lands in safety or quench their thirst by the roadside.*6 And we do not know who they were, apart from Bede’s allusive reference. That is a concept of security, of the king’s peace. Edwin had heard of the sorts of governance which existed in Rome and in Frankish Gaul—his bishop, Paulinus, was Roman; his wife a product of Kent and Gaul—but he had not seen or experienced it, unless we count the construction of the Yeavering grandstand as an embodiment of the idea of state function. There is a vague idea of Romanitas, a picture perhaps of the civic institutions of Rome that Paulinus had known. But this is not really evidence of statehood.

  It is worth reiterating that Oswald, despite his Bernician pagan heritage, was Irish in upbringing and outlook, Irish Christian in education. Was his ambition to construct the foundations of a Christian state, or was he actually more pagan in mentality than Bede would have us believe? Was kingship just a life-interest, as land-holding was, as it had been for his very heathen father? What sort of a king was Oswald? What sort of king would he have made if he had lived longer?

  To begin at the beginning, we see in the careers of Ida, Ælle and Cerdic, the legendary founders of royal Anglo-Saxon dynasties, little more than the leaders of warbands. To call them kings is to flatter them. Bede allows such men no more than the term duces. The equally obscure Arthur was, according to the Nennian account, a dux bellorum, leader in battle, a probable military rank of the late Empire.159 This idea, of a people choosing or appointing a dux purely for the duration of a military campaign, is very much in line with the ancestral Germanic tradition of the ‘leader in time of war’, who stood down in peacetime—in theory at least. By the seventh century this concept was defunct: war or peace, the king was the king. But a king might emerge from among a group of competing warband leaders who claimed eligibility by birth: Penda appears first as the leader of a warband and Bede withholds the title king until later in his career.

  Then there was the tribal chief, the senior aristocrat from the senior clan who combined ideas of tribal divinity with the function of war leader. Gildas’s five British tyrants appear as tribal chiefs, based in fortified strongholds, often hillforts, with hereditary rights to eligibility: the sons of tribal chiefs, if Irish, were rigdomna or kingworthy; in the English kingdoms they were athelings. Æthelfrith fits the bill of tribal chief par excellence, as do Rædwald, Áedán mac Gabráin, Domnall Brecc and Cadwallon—and so, for that matter, does Oswald. In their cases the title king is, as it were, a courtesy but even Bede was sometimes unsure in his use of the term.160 Their sons might succeed—would be eligible to succeed—but their successor would be chosen by acclamation among the senior nobility of what amounted to the kingdom. That term is also loaded. As is evident from the Tribal Hidage, kingdoms came in all sizes, from the bijou three hundred-hide Gifla and Færpinga (unlocated but somewhere in the Midlands) on the scale of Rutland or Flintshire, to the more or less coherent kingdoms of Kent, East Anglia, Deira and Bernicia. Kings came in commensurate shapes and sizes which reflected the lands over which they held sway. To compare Æthelberht of Kent or Æthelfrith of Northumbria with the unnamed and unknown chief of the Gifla is not to compare like with like.

  The overlord, the wielder of Bede’s imperium, was the king who was able to subdue, conquer or otherwise render tributary lands beyond his ancestral homeland. Æthelfrith became overlord of, first, Deira, then his own Bernicia, then probably Rheged, East Anglia, Mercia and Lindsey. Edwin exercised similar imperium as, with extended authority, did Oswald. But overlordship was not an extension of kingship; it was not a higher form of authority, only wider; and overlordship vaporised as instantly as kingship on the death of its wielder. It could not be inherited.

  Only later in the seventh century, in the persons of Oswiu of Northumbria and Ine of Wessex do we see individuals who might, just might, be called heads of state. Only under those kings was there a concept of statehood and of kingdom that we might recognise: one that survived the death of the person of the king. The extent to which Oswald envisioned such a state and had ambitions to achieve it is a moot point.

  Historians long ago recognised that in both Britain and Ireland there existed other shades of kingship. In Bede’s principes, præfecti and duces there are minor grades of English authority below the office of king (rex; plural reges). In Ireland it was rather the other way around: there were hundreds of kings, over whom authority might be exercised by high-kings and kings of all-Ireland. In Northumbria a rash of underkings pockmarks Bede’s Ecclesiastical History from the reign of King Oswiu onwards. Most of these are junior members of the ruling dynasty acting as deputies and/or rivals in Deira. I have already speculated that Edwin’s cousin Osric might have fulfilled this role in Bernicia during Edwin’s reign and been able to both discharge the duties of a tributary king and enjoy the benefits of lordship over a significant territory. Penda’s son Peada is described by Bede as princeps—prince, a sub-king who might expect to succeed his father, just like Oswiu’s sons Alhfrith and Ælfwine.161 Elsewhere Bede uses a variety of terms to denote what are later called ea
ldormen, really deputies, drawn from the most senior ranks of the nobility and, perhaps, from collateral lines of the ruling dynasty.

  Towards the end of the seventh century a minor dynasty of such men appears in the far north of the Northumbrian territory in the persons of Beornæth (described as a sub-regulus by Eddius), Berht (whom Bede calls duce), Berhtred (whom he calls dux regius) and Berhtfrith (princeps or præfatus) of Dunbar, who seem to succeed one another as the king’s men between Bernicia and the Forth. Berhtfrith is described by Eddius Stephanus, the biographer of St Wilfrid, as ‘a chief man, next in rank to the king’.162 Those five ‘kings’ recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, whom Edwin slew in Wessex in 626 after the abortive attempt on his life, ruled under Cwichelm and must, in reality, have been præfecti even if they were of royal stock. In East Anglia, in Mercia, in Kent and elsewhere, kingship was occasionally shared by competing members of the same or rival dynasties until such time as one died or was ousted by the other. In Northumbria in the seventh century the lines were relatively clear. Those sub-kings or exiled athelings who threatened the authority of the king were dispatched and the resulting regal stability is one reason for the success of the Northumbrians as wielders of imperium over their rivals for the bulk of that century. Six kings managed to rule all the Northumbrians between 600 and 700: none was displaced by a sub-regulus; none (unless one counts Æthelfrith) was killed by an internal rival; and none of the four athelings known to have served as sub-reguli in the seventh century—Œthelwald, Oswine, Alhfrith and Ælfwine—ever succeeded their fathers in the overlordship of Northumbria.

  By the time that English kings were being Christianised in the first half of the seventh century their rights and obligations were beginning to crystallise. A law code, written for Æthelberht of Kent, survives to indicate some of these; others can be inferred from the pages of Bede and other contemporary sources. If leaders were no longer kings solely in time of war, territorial protection and expansion remained the first items in their job descriptions. They must make war on their enemies and protect their people from external attack. With those responsibilities went the right and requirement to raise armies, define borders by treaty or earthwork, negotiate alliances and marry usefully; to collect tribute from the defeated and subjugated; to propagate heirs for the ruling dynasty. Kings chose their principes and præfecti, their duces and reeves. In the mead hall they feasted, shared treasure and gave gifts of rings and swords, ensuring that lines of patronage remained dynamic. Kings were also repositories of the animistic pride and fortune of their people, the embodiments of the Germanic and British gods of war and weather, fertility and luck. They were law-givers and judges, the inspirers of poets, the patrons of metalsmiths and builders. They must conspicuously consume the surplus of the land and at the same time ensure the wellbeing of those who claimed them as their lord by sharing their wealth.

  Although they did not yet exercise fiscal control over trade—there was really no such thing as a town in seventh-century Britain, and no functioning coinage—they do seem to have controlled some of the goods which entered their kingdoms: salt, for example, luxury items like wine and olive oil, and the fur of the pine marten.163 The locations of opportunistic, or at least intermittent, beach markets and fairs close to centres of royal power shows that kings were interested in trade and traders; but they can have been only dimly aware of the potential for trade as a sustainable source of revenue in a coinless realm.

  The kings who were able to fulfil all these functions and who stayed alive for more than ten years or so must, in some sense, have contributed to the long-term success of their kingdoms. The absorption of smaller polities into greater ones, which marks the second half of the sixth century and much of the seventh, is the story of those kings whose success in war was matched by skill in maintaining good relations with their nobility and nurturing the agricultural potential on which basic economic wealth was founded—or at least not ruining it. But was the latter an accidental by-product of the former? Did kings have any idea what an agricultural economy meant, except in terms of their consumption of its surplus? The answer is that they must have had some idea, because there was a relationship between the fertility of the land and that of the warrior elite whose sons must be strong and plentiful, sufficient to man their warbands. And more than that, the success of the harvest was intimately connected with the ‘luck’ of the person of the king. Measuring the extent to which they were willing or able to affect that economy in any practical sense is a more difficult question.

  Kings’ rights and responsibilities were customary, an accretion of precedent and myth, of main force and military might. The kingdoms from which the earliest Anglo-Saxon states emerged have an appearance of fragility. So much was vested in the person of the king that his death brought the kingdom to its knees. And yet, there was a robustness to the institutions and political economies of the seventh-century kingdoms that allowed kings of sufficient maturity, vision and longevity to forge the makings of something more. Oswald inherited a kingdom ravaged by a year of apostasy, anarchy and rapine; and yet, within a year of his victory at Heavenfield he was acknowledged as overlord of most of Britain south of the Forth; had established a new church on lands which he was able to gift because he, or someone in Bernicia, knew what and where they were. That could not have happened had the economic and social bases of the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira been dismantled by Cadwallon. The robustness of the machinery of kingship allowed it to recover rapidly from terrible reverses. That robustness was a function of how land was held, managed and administered. Its essence was the institution called the scir, or shire.

  *1Brooks 1989a, 66; the same custom may have precluded Eanfrith from the Bernician succession.

  *2EH III.11; and see Chapter XVIII.

  *3The kingdom of the Hwicce is one of those which emerges from the mists of post-Roman Britain with a mention in the seventh- or eighth-century Tribal Hidage, levied at seven thousand hides like Essex and Sussex. Its probable geographical extent has been linked by historian Nick Higham with both the medieval diocese of Worcester and the British civitate of the Dobunni. Higham 1995, 156.

  *4Thought to be a reference to Anglo-Saxon offerings to their battle gods.

  *5I have avoided reference to the term Bretwalda, which first appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle nearly two hundred years after Oswald’s day, in the entry for 829. Oswald is one of those kings listed, but it is a word loaded with connotations and there is no sound evidence that seventh-century kings used it of themselves. Bede wrote a list of those kings who possessed some sort of overlordship, which the Chronicle compiler used; but to equate this with Bretwalda is inappropriate.

  *6EH II.16. Bede cites the story of the woman and newborn child as a proverbial saying; in the same place he records that Edwin cared so much for the good of his people that he ‘caused stakes to be set up and bronze drinking cups hung from them’ so that travellers might slake their thirst.

  XI

  Holy shires

  Hærfest hreðeadegost,

  hæleðum bringeð, gæres wæstmas

  Harvest time is most prosperous,

  it brings men the year’s crops

  Bracing oneself against a winter gale coming out of the north-west, with the ramparts of the Iron Age hillfort of Old Bewick at one’s back and the huge vista of the Cheviot Hills spread out across the horizon it is hard to see, beneath the bleak magnificence of these snowfields, how Northumberland has ever been hospitable to human life. The chiselled outlines of blank fields, skeletal trees and empty skies offer little hope of bounty. You have to wait until after the spring equinox, at the end of the Anglo-Saxon Hreðmonað (Hreða was the name of a rather obscure goddess), when the days become longer than nights. Now the northern lands catch up with those far to the south. For six months they will enjoy more sunlight and plants take immediate advantage of the lengthening days to accelerate their growth until, in September, they ripen in time for harvest.

  Sit, lat
er in the year, with a picnic lunch at Old Bewick, where the medieval monks of Eglingham used to bring their bees in the summer to feast on the pollen of purple heather, and take in the same view. Meadow flowers abound, insects buzz, buzzards hover on thermals rising from the vale. The land is alive. Clouds still scud towards you across the hills, seemingly only just above head-height, hurrying on towards the North Sea; a few linger over the dome of Cheviot itself at a shade under two thousand seven hundred feet. Nearer, the entrance to the ancient shire fastness of Bromic is unmistakable, guarded by the mouth of the Breamish gorge at Ingram and the rocky fortress of Brough Law which, in its heyday around the first century bc, boasted walls fifteen feet high of pink pyroclastic rock which glowed like a beacon at sunrise.

  On the green hills tiny white dots show that the ubiquitous flocks of black-face Cheviot sheep are out on their high pastures. Saint Cuthbert, born in these parts in 634, the year of Heavenfield, experienced a vision of an angel while taking his turn watching the sheep and would have been entirely at home with the scene. On one occasion, when he was far away from home and needed shelter for the night, he came across a shepherd’s dilapidated shieling and, pulling straw from the roof for his horse, was blessed with the gift of half a loaf and a piece of meat, still warm, which fell into his hands from the rafters. Even then, this was a bounteous land.

  In the middle distance the hills give on to rolling meadows and arable fields of wheat and barley, dotted with fox coverts and the glint of sun off twisting blue–black becks. This is a rich, fertile landscape, well mannered and crisply maintained by the great landed estates which still own most of it: the Percys of Alnwick, the Greys of Chillingham, the Lilburn estate and others. There is little woodland except on the steep sides of sinuous denes, for the soil is too good to waste on growing trees. The earth is easily cultivated without the need for a heavy plough; the land is well drained and, if anything, there is not quite enough rainfall for the present-day farmer’s liking.