The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  In Eanflæd’s ‘request’ we also see the inception of a trend for male and female lines of Northumbrian royalty to compete for the disposal of royal lands to the church as a tool of political influence, with family members being placed strategically to maintain and develop dynastic interests. In its maturity this trend became a policy which embraced the acquisition of holy relics—such as those of Oswald, Edwin and their like—to enhance the dignity of the foundation and attract more gifts to enrich it; it became greedy for land and prestige and eventually its success would attract the wrong sort to the holy endeavour. By Bede’s day the practice had got out of hand—disastrously so. But in its infancy it was a brilliant conception; and it seems to have been Eanflæd’s idea.

  Aidan cannot have approved Oswiu’s treatment of the Deiran sub-king. What his reaction was we cannot say because he did not long survive the atheling. Bede tells us that his death came just twelve days after Oswine’s; long enough to have heard the news: perhaps it broke his heart. But he seems to have been ill for some time. His last days were spent not on Inner Farne or at the mother-house on Holy Island but at what Bede describes as a villa regia, not far from Bamburgh. Realistically this can only mean Yeavering where, Bede says, Aidan had a church and a cell in which he would often stay so that he might preach in the neighbourhood (and reinforce his role at the tribal heart of Bernicia). As he grew weaker his companions constructed a tent for him at the west end of the church (at Yeavering this must mean Building B: immediately to the east of the king’s great hall). The tent, in all probability made of sewn hides like Roman military tents, was actually attached to the wall: a sort of lean-to construction perfectly suitable for the summer months. One imagines him being pressed to take up more comfortable residence in the royal apartments, and refusing on the grounds either of humility or disgust with the king; who can say?

  So it happened that he breathed his last, leaning against the buttress which supported the church on the outside. He died on 31 August, in the seventeenth year of his episcopate. His body was shortly afterwards translated to the island of Lindisfarne and buried in the cemetery of the brothers.*4

  Bede recorded that later, in Penda’s last campaign against Bernicia, the church was razed, but the buttress survived the fire miraculously and was retained in the remodelled structure. Later, the church was burned down again, this time by carelessness and again the buttress survived, eventually to be placed in honour inside the third incarnation of the structure. This narrative, which Bede must have learned from the community on Lindisfarne where the story would often have been told, is so rich in archaeological and personal detail that it is irresistible to compare it with Brian Hope-Taylor’s report of his excavations at Yeavering. The match is almost perfect; almost but not quite. Building B was indeed built with external buttresses, as many of the halls at Yeavering were. The original was burned down. It had a western annexe, but only as an addition to its rebuilding after the first fire. There is the nice possibility that the annexe was constructed over the place where Aidan died, to sanctify it within the house of God. This church also burned down, but this time it was not replaced; by this phase of the township there were far fewer buildings. So it may be that Bede’s second rebuild is unhistorical; or the third church was built elsewhere in the Yeavering complex—perhaps as building C4 a little to the north-west; or the township in question was not Yeavering but another ‘not far away’ from Bamburgh. I believe Yeavering to be a convincing candidate.

  Aidan’s legacy is profound. Without his shining qualities of determination, humility, moral authority and patient exhortation it is doubtful if Oswald’s ambitions for a Christian Northumbria would have come to fruition. He played an absolutely key role in educating the sons of Æthelfrith in the duties of Christian kings and retaining the spiritual essence of the Irish church in its English incarnation. There was something, even, of the shaman in Aidan, as there had been in Colm Cille: these high-born Irishmen were bred to wield a certain sort of tribal, semi-divine power. They possessed immense charisma; their words bore more than spiritual weight. They did not consider themselves inferior to any below God; certainly not to their secular lords. They were capable of healing and cursing, of influencing by prophecy and of conferring powers on those whom they favoured. Bede knew that this had been a special generation and, identifying himself so fervently with its virtues, he bitterly regretted its passing.

  Oswiu’s continued patronage of Lindisfarne as the mother-house of the Northumbrian church, and as part of the Ionan paruchia, remained firm—at least for the time being. Aidan was succeeded first by an Ionan priest, Finan (a relative of the king: he was a kinsman of Fina, the Irish princess who bore Oswiu’s first child); then by another, Colman. The Northumbrian church did not, indeed it could not, yet produce its own great holy men. But many of Northumbria’s noble youths, perhaps the second sons of the king’s gesiths, were being attracted in numbers to the monastic life and would graduate as a famous generation of English monks, priests and bishops. The missionary and ascetic zeal of the Ionan mission was not easily dissipated. For thirteen years after Oswine’s death, Aidan and his successors were able to marry the spiritual values of Iona with those Columban political ambitions which Oswiu well understood. He could not achieve the fruition of his policies until he had decisively ended the threat posed by Penda. He was not yet in a position to do so; but with the threat of Deiran rebellion staunched by Oswine’s dispatch he was able to extend his reach towards the southern kingdoms and began to draw the Mercian fire. And in Oswine’s place he chose a deputy to rule over the Deirans: Œthelwald, son of Oswald. By 651 the atheling was probably sixteen years old, sufficient to begin recruiting his own warband and build a court suitable to his rank. His birthright ought to ensure both his and the Deirans’ loyalty to Oswiu—in theory, at least.

  *1EH IV.23 The location of this tiny monastery is unknown; there was a settlement existing at Chester le Street (Kuncacæster) on the River Wear in this period; the later Wearmouth monastery lay further downstream opposite modern Sunderland.

  *2Bede’s prose Life of Saint Cuthbert (PLC X) uses the term uterina of her. This can mean either that Bede believed Æbbe to share the same mother, Acha, as Oswald and Oswiu but not the same father; or possibly that she was Oswald’s twin. Much debate has failed to achieve a consensus on the father; if not Æthelfrith, then whom? Perhaps she was born posthumously in about 617; might that distinguish her as having, in Bede’s eyes, no father? Alternatively Acha could have had an otherwise unknown first husband, but this is most unlikely.

  *3During an antiquarian picnic expedition along the Breamish Valley in June 1861 a small silver cross with an Alpha and Omega on one side and the inscription AGLA or ACGA on the other was produced by a farmer at Hartside; it has not been seen since, but it may have belonged to a monk of Hexham whose bishop, in Bede’s day, was Acca. Proceedings of the Berwickshire Naturalists Field Club 1862, Anniversary Address, page 242.

  *4EH III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 265. 31 August was Bede’s pridie kalendarum Septembrium.

  XV

  Promises, promises

  Cyning sceal on healle

  beagas dælan

  The king in his hall

  shares out rings

  It comes as something of a surprise to hear from Bede that Penda, the pre-eminent heathen warlord of the mid-seventh century, tolerated the preaching of Christianity in Mercia. He did not despise Christians, we hear: only hypocrites.203 That is to say, he reserved his contempt for those kings who, having converted, failed to practise what they preached. Bede was trying to set the stage for the conversion of the Mercians and Middle Angles and, given what he had previously said of Penda, he had some explaining to do. The context was, broadly, the acceptance of the faith by several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the early 650s and specifically the conversion of Penda’s son Peada. Bede revealed something of his own prejudices here as well as trying to unknot the complexities of a rash of diplomatic initiatives in which
sometimes Oswiu and sometimes his son Alhfrith took the lead.

  Bede, writing with the benefit of hindsight in the 730s, identified three strands of Christianity active in the first decades of the English conversion. His bias against British Christians is blatant and uncompromising. They were not just wrong; they were wicked.*1 Not only had they failed to step into line after the Augustinian mission; they had wilfully refused to obey the instruction of the Papacy and, worse, they had neglected their holy duty to assist in the conversion of the heathen English. Their kings, Cadwallon in particular, had made war on the Christian English of Northumbria. Even their own priests (and Bede is flagrant in his partisan use of Gildas’s sixth-century rantings) believed they had lost God’s favour as a result of their impiety, infidelity and rapine. Perhaps Penda felt the same way about his contemporaries in Powys, Gwynedd and beyond. One of Bede’s difficulties was that, in traducing British Christians and tarring them all with same brush, he found it difficult to discuss those British Christians in English territories who had kept the faith alive against all odds; and so they have effectively been written out of the Bedan narrative. The history of the Borders churches, with which Bede must have been familiar, is passed over; so too are the probable British origins of one or two of his heroes: Cuthbert, for example.

  Bede was slightly less uncomfortable with the Irish question. The Irish, he believed, were wrong, stubbornly so, in their reluctance to accept the orthodoxy of the (true) Catholic church of which he, Bede, was such an ardent disciple. But the Ionan mission which Oswald had fostered provided an exemplar of ascetic virtue for which Bede could not hide his admiration, and many of his contemporaries suffered by comparison. Most of the missionary conversions of the southern English had, in the first instance, been undertaken by Irish monks or those Englishmen whom they had trained. The Augustinian church had perfomed very little missionary work: it was diocesan, essentially urban, and its English mission was to restore the system of bishoprics which ministered to the existing faithful (however many of them there still were) by converting, or reconverting, their kings.

  Bede, too, despised hypocrites. He gave heathen warriors like Penda and Æthelfrith comparatively sympathetic treatment: they possessed the virtues of their faults; they were God’s instruments of retribution. The Christian life must be one of virtue, humility, generosity and forgiveness, as exemplified by Aidan. Those very rare kings who lived up to the divine responsibilities of their office (Oswald, Oswine) were constant reminders of the failings of others, especially Bede’s contemporaries. God had not granted dispensation to kings to break His rules; those who, like Oswiu, committed terrible crimes, must pay. Even so, Bede was sufficiently Anglo-Saxon in his outlook to accept the necessity of a just war, or one fought in defence of the fatherland.

  From the dynastic muddle of the early 650s Bede tried to draw his providential message; it was by no means straightforward. Alhfrith was Oswiu’s son by Rhieinmelth; half-Briton, he had been born before Oswiu’s succession and might therefore be regarded as ineligible to succeed; he had a sister, Alhflæd, of marriageable age. Oswiu’s second marriage, to Eanflæd, had by now produced their first and his third son, Ecgfrith. He was too young to be a direct threat to anyone, but his birth must have underlined for Alhfrith the long-term weakness of his own position. There was also Oswald’s son Œthelwald to consider: he was absolutely eligible to succeed his uncle and bore the genetic stamp of his illustrious father. He had replaced Oswine as sub-king of Deira in about 651, but whether this was Oswiu’s initiative or his own independent challenge, is unclear. To these three Northumbrian athelings one must add Talorcan, king of the Picts. He was the son of Eanfrith, the half-brother of Oswald and Oswiu who had briefly ruled Bernicia before Oswald; succeeding to the Pictish throne in about 653 Talorcan might claim right of succession over at least Bernicia. Here are the makings of a particularly knotty and melodramatic Dark Age soap opera.

  Like all the best soap operas this Shakespearean epic-in-the-making involved intermarriage between two great houses engaged in bitter conflict. Alhfrith married Penda’s daughter Cyneburh and his sister Alhflæd married Penda’s son Peada. Historians have often tried to read into this double alliance a sort of share-price index: was Oswiu’s gifting of his daughter a sign of his weakness, hoping to stave off further Mercian attacks; or was it the other way round, with Penda hoping for a peaceful alliance so he could consolidate his rule at home? Were both kings more afraid of their own sons than their traditional enemies, or were they all just playing their hands expediently without a long-term plan, waiting to see how the dice fell? Well, the clues are there to be read. Bede places the initiative with Peada, whose father had installed him as sub-king of the Middle Angles (broadly modern Leicestershire and Northamptonshire). Bede says that Peada directly asked Oswiu for his daughter, and we might read into this the act of a prince asserting independence from his father by making a powerful ally. Oswiu, in time-honoured fashion, required that Peada become a Christian. Peada accepted these terms with the apparent enthusiastic support of Alhfrith, his recently acquired brother-in-law and evident friend. It all seems very clubby, although it is hard to imagine that the parental in-laws, Penda and Cynewise, were on the guest-list.

  What lends this flurry of betrothals high political significance is that Peada received baptism from Bishop Finan of Lindisfarne in a grand ceremony accompanied by ealdormen and gesiths and their servants at one of Oswiu’s principal royal estates: a place which Bede called Ad Muram.204 Infuriatingly we do not know what Bede means by this ‘At-the-Wall’, despite the attempts of many generations of historians to pin it down. He tells us that the place was so called ‘because it stands close to the wall which the Romans once built across the island of Britain’, and that ‘it is about twelve miles from the east coast’. We have modern villages called Wall, Walbottle, Wallsend and so on which fit the first part; but none of these is twelve miles from the sea. Walbottle has most often been suggested as a candidate for Ad Muram (Old English botl denotes a settlement); another is Newburn, a known villa regia and crucially the lowest fording point across the River Tyne. But twelve walking or rowing miles from the east coast at Tynemouth would bring a traveller to Pons Aelius, the site of a Roman bridge across the River Tyne and later the city of Newcastle. On the south side of the bridge an early monastery was built at Gateshead (Ad Capra: the goat place); the north side would be the natural focus for a villa regia; Hadrian’s Wall certainly passes close by, and the natural pairing of monastic establishments on opposite sides of a river makes logistical sense. However, the archaeological evidence for an important early Anglo-Saxon settlement beneath the Norman keep at Newcastle is not as yet convincing. Nor do we know what state the Pons Aelius was in during the seventh century; there has always been a ferry crossing here but, if we knew that the bridge was still functioning, that would strengthen Newcastle’s case as a place of more than passing importance.205

  Either way, Bede is referring to a significant location on the southern flank of Bernicia. It is made more significant by another baptism which took place there at ‘about the same time’, to use Bede’s unhelpful phrase.206 The conversion of King Sigeberht of Essex Ad Muram ‘at the instance of King Oswiu’, together with that of Peada, begins to look like a concerted attempt to outflank Penda politically by extending Oswiu’s military and spiritual imperium over Penda’s eastern neighbours. Penda’s response was predictable. Within a year of these events he had invaded East Anglia and killed its Christian king Anna at the Battle of Bulcamp. Anna had been responsible for the conversion and restoration of another of Penda’s enemies, Cenwalh of Wessex, and had recently annexed the lands around Ely; his strategically crucial position on Penda’s east flank made him an obvious target for the Mercian king to strike.

  Now Penda unleashed his full fury against Oswiu. The details of this campaign are frustratingly few. The Nennian account is back-to-front, and obviously so; reconstructed, it should go something like this:

  Th
e kings of the British... had gone forth with King Penda in his campaign to the city called Iudeu... Then Oswiu delivered all the riches that he had in the city into the hands of Penda, and Penda distributed them to the kings of the British, that is the ‘Distribution of Iudeu’.207

  Bede’s more polished version does not substantially contradict this bald account of a great Northern ‘congregation’ against the Northumbrians:

  About this time King Oswiu was exposed to the savage and insupportable attacks of Penda... Oswiu was at last forced to promise him an incalculable and incredible store of royal treasures and gifts as the price of peace, on condition that Penda would return home and cease to devastate, or rather utterly destroy, the kingdoms under his rule.*2

  The critical issue is the identification of Iudeu, which Bede does not mention in the context of this narrative but which he does identify in a much earlier, general account of the geography of Britain.208 In describing the Forth–Clyde isthmus he says that the Picts and the Irish were separated by two long arms of the sea. Halfway along the eastern branch (the Firth of Forth) was the city of Giudi. This is patently the same as the Nennian Iudeu. Historians have traditionally identified the city—that is to say, a fortress—with Stirling, on the grounds that it had natural defences and was so often the site of later conflicts. If Penda was able to drive Oswiu’s forces all the way up to the Forth then Bernicia was in dire straits. But there are other ways of reading these accounts. Neither states that Penda besieged Oswiu in Urbs Giudi, so we might infer an alliance at-a-distance between Penda and, say, the Picts and Britons of Strathclyde, which would suit the general political situation of the mid-seventh century. The incalculable riches handed over as tribute to prevent further devastation must have come from Oswiu’s treasury, accumulated from tributes exacted from the Picts and other nations during his reign; it seems that by the terms of the alliance the treasure was distributed between Penda’s British allies and himself. The tribute did not end there: Bede says that Ecgfrith, Oswiu’s young son by Eanflæd, was given as hostage into the care of Penda’s queen, Cynewise. This set the seal on what was evidently supposed to be a treaty to end the conflict and render Bernicia, if not Deira, subject to Mercian imperium. The balance of power had shifted decisively; except that one of the parties did not see things that way.