The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  Because the contemporary ground-level of the settlement at Thirlings had been truncated by weathering and the plough, no floor levels were recovered; finds were few and, in keeping with many other sites in the region, unrevealing: the odd iron knife, a few beads, some loom-weights. The building sequence, which in plan offers so much potential for tracing the fortunes of a thegnly estate complex, did not ultimately offer the stratigraphic detail which such a sequence needs. If the site at Sprouston is ever excavated, one has to hope that it will yield a few more secrets.

  Until three or four years ago there was another conspicuous gap in the archaeological evidence for the mechanism of the early estates: there were no industrial or craft sites to match the stupendous metalworking, weaponry and art which we know to have been accessed by the Bernician kings; there were no peasants or artisans. That missing site has now been found after a rescue excavation in advance of quarrying was carried out under the direction of Clive Waddington.*7 Conveniently, Lanton lies a mile or so to the north-west of Yeavering, just across the symbolic and physical divide of the River Glen. Here, revealed by mechanical stripping of the topsoil and then excavated by hand, were the remains long sought by archaeologists of cart sheds and weaving huts, of metal-working shops, of the manufacture of polychrome glass beads and, glory of glories, contemporary pottery. Pottery is the stock-in-trade of archaeologists but is rarely recovered from Early Medieval sites in the North. We are not sure why: a combination of acid soils consuming sherds of ceramics hand-made and fired at low temperatures, a very small pottery industry and perhaps other unrecognised factors such as fastidious curation.*8 But at Lanton Quarry the remains of more than forty vessels were recovered. Here, then, is evidence for those industries the Bernician kings required to maintain their prestige, status and power: the material trappings of kingship. Here the royal paraphernalia of sword and knife, of bronze cauldron and whetstone, of drinking horn, draughtsboard and marten-fur mantle were crafted almost within sight of the great royal palace where such wonders were displayed and distributed while the king feasted with his nobles and planned his summer campaigns. It was not for another fifty years, until the reign of Aldfrith, probably the first literate ruler of the Northumbrians, that books as objects became the treasured possessions of kings. From then until now, even philistine rulers like to have beautiful books around them. It makes them feel cultured, intelligent. More importantly, perhaps, we see in the more modest domestic structures at Lanton, and at New Bewick to the south-east, as we do at West Heslerton in the Vale of Pickering and on many other sites in South and East England, the evidence for what one might patronisingly call the ordinary folk: the unfree and the slaves who were tied to their land and whose comfort must come either from basking in the reflected glow of regal power or, if they were lucky, a tiny share of a silver dish and a morsel of sweetmeat from the royal table.

  It has often been asked whether these people—the architect/builders, the smiths, the weavers, the peasants of the field—were British or Anglo-Saxon. In a sense it does not matter; it probably did not matter to them in any modern nationalistic sense. There has been an irresistible temptation for archaeologists to see in the variety and form of Early Medieval burials a distinction between ‘native’ and ‘Germanic’; to see in the English language, in personal and place-names an indigenous underclass bossed by an invading elite; to see the culture of the Britons wiped from the pages of history by a pervasive foreign immigration. Gildas and Bede are equally responsible for much of that narrative and our experience of the modern world affords us some sympathy for that view. But it doesn’t really stand up. The nationalist antipathy between Celt and Saxon has been overplayed, even if in some respects it must have existed and been traded upon from time to time, especially by those, like Bede, who had axes to grind. The institutions of early Northumbria, particularly of Bernicia, were a hybrid form with strong roots in ancient British custom, even if they owed some of their idiosyncrasies to the catastrophe of imperial meltdown. The population, if one wants to play the ethnicity card, were similarly hybrid but with a very strong genetic bias towards indigenous Britons and a balancing bias towards Germanic language and mythology.

  The patronage of Anglian warlords ensured the supremacy of a cultural elite; the strength of indigenous institutions, landscapes and territories ensured their survival. Kings mostly bore Germanic names and claimed descent from Germanic gods; but what of the supposed founders of Wessex, those kings with names like Cerdic and Cædwalla which sound much more Welsh than English? What of the marriages between British princesses and English athelings? What of Anglo-British alliances like that of Penda and Cadwallon? Even Bede, who hardly likes to admit it, was very much au fait with British place-names and customs; he may, even, have spoken some Brythonic. And how did Rædwald, that archetypal heathen Anglian king, acquire the stunning bronze hanging bowl decorated with very British-looking escutcheons with which he was buried, if not from his protégé Edwin whose own, probably ‘British’ smiths at Lanton could manufacture such glories?

  Like the hybrid tradition of the seventh-century church which forged British, Irish and Continental traditions into a unique monastic and literary culture, we ought really to see Northumbria, and perhaps the bulk of England, as a blend of sophisticated, self-confident native institution and people with an invigorating German self-consciousness and vision of which the Idings are perhaps epitomes. If the underclasses of the seventh century were tied to their land, so were their ancestors. Most of the population in most of the settlements in most of Britain stayed where they were in the centuries after the Imperial administration withdrew or was ejected. If Gildas’s fleeing Britons are real, they are the upper crust of nobility, those with horses and servants and enough portable wealth to survive exile in Brittany, the land over the sea which they made their own. In the archaeological record of the Early Medieval period the invisibility of many of the natives may have much to do with an inability to observe, particularly to date, the continuity of ‘native’ settlements into the sixth century and beyond. But, however tempting it is to ask if Oswald’s pole-axed skull is British or German by virtue of its DNA, the more complex reality of life in Early Medieval Northumbria is much more interesting.

  *1Harleian MS 3859 gives Maxim Guletic as progenitor of the line of Dyfed; Jesus College MS 20 gives Maxen as progenitor claimed by the kings of Glywysing. In effect, Maximus functions at the head of the genealogy as a mythological tribal god of war.

  *2A ‘Celtic’ quarter-day festival held on the first day of May, or the day before, best known from its Irish name. The Brythonic version was Calan Mai and the Mai element may be reflected in the name of the tax called metreth, a form of British cattle tribute traditionally rendered on or about May Day.

  *3EH III.24; see also Chapter XVI.

  *4It is arguable whether kings gave away portions of royal estates or whether, even in Oswiu’s day, they were careful only to alienate second-rate or under-developed lands, perhaps those which had been without a lord for some time.

  *5Smith 1991; and see Chapter XVIII.

  *6Colm O’Brien tells me he thinks the alignments are in fact down to topography, with the north–south aligned buildings edging a rise on which the main complex stands.

  *7Waddington 2010; and at New Bewick Colm O’Brien and Tim Gates recovered the plan of a sunken-featured building belonging to a putative Early Medieval village: Gates and O’Brien 1988.

  *8Pottery is malleable and as a folk-art form it is sensitive to cultural change; often it is possible to date its production; when fired hard it is almost indestructible. It also breaks easily and is often discarded, so in most periods it is abundant. Its paucity on Early Medieval sites makes it hard to date. Its absence could be explained by its relatively high value in the period; if people took much more care of their pots, or recycled and mended them, perhaps keeping sherds as heirlooms, then pottery is less likely to have found its way into archaeological deposits.

  XII


  Oh brother, where art thou?

  Daroð sceal on handa, gar golde fah

  The javelin in the hand,

  the gold-glittering spear

  The destiny of the Early Medieval king, pagan or Christian, was to die on the field of battle. The greatest warriors were charismatic and dauntless, unencumbered by doubt or tactical nicety, falling on their prey with such impetuosity that the enemy, committing the smallest mistake, might never recover. Oswald was battle-hardened, a commander of repute, skilled and resourceful and at the height of his powers. He was able to draw on the forces of great numbers of elite warriors: the companions of his exile; the gesiths of Bernicia, Deira and many other lands; of aspiring athelings, young-bloods and many a campaign veteran. And yet the fate of his father, uncle and cousins was his too. For Bede, his death in battle sealed Oswald’s reputation as the ‘most Christian king’, the first and greatest royal martyr.*1 It pre-figured his extraordinary post-mortem career and epitomised the life and death of the best sort of king: martial with his enemies, generous to his warriors and to the church; humble in the company of God’s appointed priests and munificent with his people.

  Oswald’s internal policies focused on the success of the Ionan mission and on the mechanics of royal patronage; externally he was an expansionist, as were so many of his contemporaries. Followers must be rewarded; a king must win glory: wars must be fought and treasure taken. His near neighbours were either subjected by conquest or they submitted. Further afield he forged alliances aimed at limiting the power of Mercia, the most obvious threat to Northumbrian supremacy. The fatal campaign of 642 seems to have been planned as a pre-emptive strike against an alliance between Penda of Mercia and King Cynddylan of Powys. The culminating battle of the campaign was fought at Maserfelth on 5 August 642. We cannot be sure of the circumstances of the battle or the events that led to it. What is certain is that Oswald was cut down by the enemy, perhaps by Penda himself; that Penda’s brother Eowa was also killed; and that the field of battle was held by the Mercians and Welsh. Bede adds some telling details of his own regarding Oswald’s last minutes.

  It is also a tradition which has become proverbial, that he died with a prayer on his lips. When he was beset by the weapons of his enemies and saw that he was about to perish he prayed for the souls of his army. So the proverb runs, ‘May God have mercy on their souls, as Oswald said when he fell to the earth.’176

  Bede goes on to say that ‘the king who slew him ordered his head and hands to be severed from his body and hung on stakes.’ The defeat, then, was absolute: the army of Oswald utterly destroyed. His earthly ‘luck’, the luck of the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings, which was such a crucial and yet intangible element of kingship, had finally and irrevocably run out. His comitates, the close companions and veterans who had accompanied him into exile and in his triumphant return, must surely have perished with him. There was no-one left to guard his physical honour in death, to attempt retrieval of his body from the blood-soaked battlefield. If his passing marked the beginning of the next chapter in Oswald’s career as saint and martyr, the disastrous reversal of fortunes at Maserfelth spelled potential disaster for Bernicia and the Idings; it might also have spelled disaster for the Ionan mission to Lindisfarne, whose tender shoots had been protected by their king. It was in the natural order of things that Bernicia’s subject kingdoms should now regard themselves as free of all tributary obligations. Would Deira reassert its independence? Would rivals fight for the throne? For the next thirteen years Penda was the Dragon of the Island, the supreme warlord of English Britain. It was left in the hands of Oswald’s brother Oswiu, eight years his junior, to ensure that Bernicia survived to fight another day.

  The circumstances of Oswald’s fatal campaign against Penda have been the subject of much spilled ink over the years. All judgements hinge on the identification of Maserfelth and any number of suggestions have been made to provide a definitive location. On the face of it, there is only one reasonable candidate. Since at least the twelfth century Oswestry, the otherwise unpretentious market town that nestles against the Welsh mountains a mile or so east of Offa’s Dyke between the rivers Severn and Dee, has been claimed as the place of Oswald’s death. The obvious derivation of the name from Oswald’s tree or cross—a reference to the wooden stake on which his severed head was impaled—is matched by the Welsh form Croesoswald. There is a church here dedicated to Saint Oswald which may well predate the Norman Conquest. There is also a holy well with the same dedication. Why, then, doubt Oswestry as the site of Oswald’s martyrdom?

  The problem lies firstly with the fact that Oswestry lies in the historic kingdom of the Wrocansætan, well outside core Mercian territory, hard against the foothills of the Welsh mountains: what on earth was Oswald doing there? What, for that matter, was Penda doing there?*2 The second issue that niggles historians is that neither Maserfelth, nor its Brythonic equivalent Cocboi or Maes Cogwy, variously cited in the Nennian Historia Brittonum, the Welsh Annals and several later Welsh poems, has survived. This has allowed both place-name specialists—and place-name studies, where only fools and angels dare to tread, are best left to specialists—and historians of the period to suggest alternatives. There is a Makerfield (Romano-British Coccium) in Lancashire; and it has been argued that Oswestry, which does not appear in the Domesday Survey of 1086, was invented to appropriate a late cult of Oswald. Others have suggested that a site in Lindsey, along the road system where so many other battles were fought in this period and where the cult of Oswald saw a great flowering in the late seventh century, would better fit the known geopolitics of Oswald’s reign. This is special pleading, though.*3

  I see no good reason to doubt Oswestry as the site where either Oswald’s body parts were displayed or where he died—not necessarily the same thing. The battlefield must, I think, be near by. Maserfelth and Maes Cogwy both mean ‘border-field’, which suits Oswestry. There are precedents for Bernician kings waging campaigns in the region (Æthelfrith at Chester in 616; Edwin on Anglesey in the 620s); and Oswald had a perfectly reasonable motive for a pre-emptive strike against Penda’s growing power-base. Historians have, I think, generally neglected a likely Bernician interest in this part of the world. In the heart of modern Cheshire, some miles to the north-east of Oswestry and close to the zone of Æthelfrith’s campaign of 616/17, are the famous brine springs at Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich, all of which were developed as settlements by the Roman state and jealously protected right through the Middle Ages. The Nennian list of The Wonders of Britain seems to refer to the Cheshire springs ‘from which salt is boiled, wherewith various foods can be salted; they are not near the sea but rise from the ground.’*4 Early Medieval kings took a keen interest in salt and regarded it as a royal perquisite. Was Oswald protecting what he saw as interests of the Bernician crown from attempts by Powys and Mercia to take control of them? Or was he trying to muscle in on an operation in which Powys and Mercia wished to retain a duopoly interest?177 And had his father set a precedent when he fought at Chester? There is, as it happens, a striking cluster of apparently early dedications to Oswald in this area. It includes churches at Chester itself; at Brereton, Lower Peover and Winwick in Cheshire.178 Are these the faint echoes of statements of loyalty to Northumbrian kings or examples of its patronage protecting areas of interest?

  There is another clue that historians have generally failed to exploit. Bede says that the ‘great battle’ in which Oswald fell was fought at ‘a place called in the English tongue Maserfelth’.179 Bede often gives Anglo-Brythonic translations; but only rarely does he imply that the place was known primarily by a Brythonic name, for which he offers a translation more familiar to his readers. Maes Cogwy was, it seems, a place referred to mainly by its British name. It was probably, therefore, in or close to a British kingdom, which allows it to be placed reasonably on the western edge of Mercia where it marched with Powys.

  If we accept Oswestry, or somewhere very near it, as the site of Maserfelth and of Osw
ald’s martyrdom and many subsequent miracles, a plausible reconstruction of his last campaign can be attempted. Penda is the key. He first appears in a notice of 626 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, when he supposedly becomes king of the Mercians. In 628 he fights against Cynegisl and Cwichelm, father and son kings of the Gewisse, at Cirencester. All three survive and an ‘agreement’ is made; perhaps borders are negotiated, hostages exchanged, treasure and tribute surrendered. But we cannot say who emerged the stronger. Penda, we gather, is ambitious, if not yet powerful. Four years after the Cirencester stand-off, he makes common cause, perhaps as a junior partner, with Cadwallon of Gwynedd in the assault on Edwin at Hæthfelth. Cadwallon it is who installs himself in Northumbria while Penda returns to Mercia with his prize, Edwin’s son Eadfrith. Bede does not yet allow him the title ‘king’ but calls him an ‘energetic member of the royal house’: dux, perhaps, not rex. In 642 he fights with and kills Oswald as Rege Merciorum; two years later Cenwalh of Wessex (Oswald’s brother-in-law), having married Penda’s sister, repudiates her and is expelled by Penda. At an unknown date in the following few years he is at war with East Anglia, to whose court Cenwalh has fled, and then a series of devastating campaigns takes him into the heart of Bernicia.

  Penda’s brother Eowa seems, for much of this time, to have been the senior member of the family—he, after all, was the great-great-grandfather of the celebrated eighth-century Mercian king Offa. He is cited by both the Historia Brittonum and the Welsh Annals as a victim of the conflict at Maserfelth and the Mercian historian Nicholas Brooks has argued that he fought on Oswald’s side. If this is true, we must envisage Oswald’s foray into Mercia as a campaign in support of a tribute king against his chief rival, and brother, the rising star Penda; it is Penda’s survival and later dealings with Bernicia which tempt us into thinking he was the senior Mercian in 642. The location of the final battle in the campaign suggests that Penda and his ally King Cynddylan of Powys were massing a force on the Mercian border for an all-out assault on Eowa in the Mercian heartlands.*5 August is late in the year to begin a campaign, so I envisage a period of a month, or two months, of manoeuvre and stand-off. Oswald either marched his army across the Pennines through the old kingdom of Elmet to Chester, as his father had probably done; or south to Doncaster and then south-west to join Eowa at Lichfield, all along Roman roads. Were there also contingents from the south: from Hwicce, where some historians believe Oswald had installed Bernician athelings as a client dynasty; or from Wessex, on whose support Oswald ought to have been able to count?