The route through France was designed according to taste, as any tourist itinerary is. There were any number of churches where a Latin-speaker might find hospitality; there were shrines of great holy men like St Martin at Tours; there were the dangers of the road and opportunities to see natural wonders. The Rhône Valley became a well-trodden trail leading south through Lyons to the Roman city of Arles, from where many pilgrims, dreading the Alpine passes in winter, continued to the coast at Marseilles and took passage by boat to Ostia and Rome (the journey on which poetic pilgrim Percy Shelley would perish twelve hundred years later).
At Lyons, the principal city of Gaul, full of architectural splendours, pomp and dignity (as well as seedy court politics, urban squalor and poverty) Wilfrid and Biscop parted; according to Eddius, Wilfrid found himself the protégé of Archbishop Dalfinus*2 who wished to adopt him as his son and confer on him great estates and the hand of his daughter in marriage. Dalfinus was overwhelmed by Wilfrid’s peaceful gentleness and saintly mind, we are told. However irritating the sycophantic tone of his partisan biographer, and in spite of history’s negative judgement of his later career, Wilfrid’s charisma, his immediate electric effect on those who met him, is unmistakeable.*3
Dalfinus’s flattery detained Wilfrid at Lyons for a year before he continued his journey to the holy city. In Rome Archdeacon Boniface, a papal counsellor, acted as his enthusiastic spiritual and canonical guide. Wilfrid assiduously visited the shrines of the martyrs, studied the books of the gospels and was taught the orthodox forms for the tonsure, the calculation of Easter and other ecclesiastical niceties. In the magnificent colonnaded basilica of Constantine, which contained the shrine of the founder of Christian Rome, the apostle Peter, he was blessed by Pope Eugene. During his months in the city Wilfrid saw many wonders and collected quantities of gifts and relics. On the return journey he was detained in Lyons for a further three years, taking the Roman tonsure, until Dalfinus was allegedly murdered by Queen Baldhild.*4
Wilfrid finally returned to England at about the time that Eata was being given thirty or forty hides at Ripon to found his new monastery. On his appearance at the court of Northumbria Wilfrid, now in his mid-twenties, had the same effect on Alhfrith as he had on so many others. He charmed, he wooed; he was adored. Alhfrith gave him a ten-hide estate on which to found his own monastery in the Roman manner. No-one has yet been able to identify the Stanforda which Eddius Stephanus identifies as the site of this new foundation (Stamford in Lincolnshire, Stamford Bridge near York and Stainforth in the Pennines have all been suggested). He rose quickly within the ranks of Alhfrith’s retainers and in the king’s estimation.
In Wilfrid’s deposition of Eata from Ripon a year or two later in about 660, we are forced to read several narrative strands. There is Alhfrith’s growing sense of self-confidence, his willingness to challenge his father’s authority and perhaps his response to a Deiran constituency resentful of Bernician overlordship (both temporal and spiritual); his fear of a stepbrother growing in years and in potential threat (Ecgfrith was probably about fifteen in 660 and is thought to have married a year later). Alhfrith must also have been sensible to the growing number of kingdoms to the south whose churches were spiritually and politically allied to the Roman cause: in all senses, North and South met in Deira in the late 650s. Then there is Eanflæd’s role at court. She was Roman in outlook, having been raised and educated in Frankia and at Canterbury. She must promote the interests of her sons (the last, Ælfwine, was born in about 661) and daughters, if necessary at the expense of her stepchildren. There is Wilfrid, her former protégé, now at Alhfrith’s court, very much the bright young thing and thoroughly Roman and Frankish in outlook. In his patronage of Wilfrid it is possible to see an attempt by Alhfrith to advance his cause both by asserting independence from his Lindisfarne-affiliated father and by attaching himself to the Deiran party and the sensibilities of his stepmother. Would he, like Oswine and Œthelwald, over-play his hand?
Oswiu may have seen the Romanisation of his court and satellite as a moral threat; more likely he recognised it as a political challenge to be met and then exploited. He must already have been considering the administrative problems posed by the multiplication of monasteries, abbots and their reciprocal relations with the courts of Bernicia and Deira and the mother-house of Lindisfarne. He appears to have maintained his personal allegiance to Iona but he was far too canny and experienced a politician to allow sentiment to guide his strategy. He had not been deaf either to the wisdom of his Irish mentor Aidan or that of his worldly Gallo-Kentish wife.
Oswiu was the first Northumbrian king we know of who deployed sub-kings to rule Deira. Historians have often seen this as an aspect of his military and political weakness. I think it more likely that, just as he was willing to explore novel relations with the church as a means of political expression, so he was experimenting with political structures, realising that a more complex form of kingship was required to successfully manage his new imperium—probably, after Penda’s destruction, the greatest in extent of any seventh-century king.
The world was changing, growing larger. It was not enough to conquer and subdue neighbouring kingdoms: one must consider their administration and the patronage of their nobility. Young men of noble blood had, for the first time, a choice of career either in the king’s host or in the church. The church offered men with a diverse range of talents, with intellectual rather than martial zeal—men like Wilfrid and Cuthbert—a chance to forge careers which, dependent as they were on royal patronage, meant they must also exploit political opportunities as they arose. The admirable and unworldly spirituality of the Irish church might not sufficiently meet the new challenge. Oswiu and his brother had enjoyed intensely personal relations with Aidan and his successors and with their mentors on Iona. The abbot and bishop of Lindisfarne fulfilled a broad pastoral role but was able also to act as a personal chaplain and supernumerary advisor to the king (not unlike, in this respect, a tribal chief-priest: a Coifi). With the accretion of more numerous and larger estates came necessarily a managerial role equal to that of a great landowner. That role would lend them increasing power: Aidan’s eventual successors, the prince-bishops of Durham, were potentates in their own right. Moreover, one thing above all separated the ranks of churchmen from their secular friends and lords: they could write. Edwin may have been the first king to exploit this magical talent, if it was he who commissioned Paulinus to draw up the Tribal Hidage. Did Oswiu also realise the administrative and legal potential of the written record? There is one small item of evidence that he did, in a remarkable entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle where Oswiu’s mark on written history is his signature, a simple cross that adorned the re-endowment of Medehamstede in 664.*5
And then, there was the anomalous set of relations between the abbots of the new houses and their bishop. If Ripon was founded originally as a daughter-house of Lindisfarne—as, presumably, all the other new monasteries were—to whose rule did Wilfrid now submit? Oswiu, I think, did not require a direct challenge from his son to make him aware of the need to resolve these issues. But Wilfrid’s overly large presence on the field of play may well have precipitated him towards decisive action. That, and the death in 661 of Lindisfarne’s second abbot/bishop, Finan. His successor, Colman, was an Irishman of equally impeccable Ionan credentials and just as ‘frugal and austere’ as his predecessors.218 Oswiu, Bede says, ‘greatly loved’ his new bishop; he may also have seen in his arrival the opportunity to embark on much-needed reform with a man who might, by virtue of his relative inexperience and recent arrival, be channelled in a progressive direction.
Bede would have us believe that the resolution of these difficulties was prompted by a more domestic, personal conflict. Eanflæd had come from Kent bringing Roman rituals and services and her own chaplain, Romanus. James the Deacon had been observing Roman practice in the observation of Easter and other ceremonies these thirty years. At Lindisfarne, Finan had had his own internal antagonist
, another Irishman called Ronan who had spent time on the Continent and was now a fervent supporter of orthodox practice, much to Finan’s very real irritation. With such tensions in the air, Bede tells a story of disharmony and dysfunction at the heart of the Northumbrian court:
... it is said that in these days it sometimes happened that Easter was celebrated twice in the same year, so that the king had finished the fast and was keeping Easter Sunday, while the queen and her people were still in Lent and observing Palm Sunday.219
There is no doubt that in Bede’s day and for a hundred years before, the Irish method of calculating the date of Easter had been regarded as outdated and anomalous by Rome. Blood had been spilled after Augustine’s disastrous meeting with the British bishops in 604; pressure had been applied; many southern Irish churches had submitted and been brought into line with papal orthodoxy as far back as the 630s when a delegation was sent from Ireland to Rome and returned in no doubt of what Catholic rectitude required. A letter survives, written by Cummian of Clonfert to Oswald’s friend and mentor Ségéne, abbot of Iona, about the time that Oswald was returning to Bernicia to reclaim his patrimony. Begging the paruchia of Colm Cille to fall into line, he famously described the position of those he saw as bigoted reactionaries:
Can anything be more absurd than to say of our mother the church—Rome errs, Jerusalem errs, Antioch errs, and the whole world errs, the Irish and Britons alone are in the right?220
Iona held out for almost another century. For the church of Colm Cille it was not so much that the precise method of calculation of Easter was doctrinally critical; it was a matter of the independence of the Ionan paruchia from any outside attempt to regulate its rule and observances; it was a matter of culture. The arguments on both sides have such profound echoes for our contemporary relations with Europe and attempts to harmonise various political and economic practices across the Continent that it is no wonder that the debate has held such fascination for historians. Easter was not the only issue, either. The form of monastic tonsure and various other disciplinary matters touched sensitive nerves on both sides; it came down to arguments about papal authority and discipline and the desire to belong, or not belong, to a united European vision. Plus ça change...
Bede’s account of chaos at court is surely an exaggeration. The king and queen had been married for twenty years and somehow muddled along; they may have led comparatively separate lives or been content to tolerate each other’s personal tastes and loyalties, for all we know. Besides, as the historian Richard Abels has pointed out, the number of years in which the difference in Easter calculation might have affected the court in this way was very small: in the twenty-two years after Oswiu’s marriage to Eanflæd in 643 Easter was celebrated on the same day by both Roman and Irish reckonings no fewer than nineteen times.221 Crisis? What crisis?
*1Stephen identifies himself in the preface to his Life; in EH IV.2 Bede referred to Wilfrid’s singing master as ‘Æddi, surnamed Stephen’. The assumption that the two are the same has led to a traditional ascription of the Life to Eddius Stephanus.
*2VW IV; this is a mistake on Eddius’s part: Dalfinus was apparently the Count of Lyons; his brother Annemundus was archbishop; Colgrave 1927, 153.
*3He reminds me of one other historical figure above all: the vain, death-or-glory genius Nelson whom men would follow into any adventure, whose presence almost literally and magically lit up every room into which he walked, if only his mood was right. There is an essential fragility in the type: it must be loved unconditionally, pampered, indulged. If it is nourished, it repays the devotion of its followers tenfold. Denied, it can turn very nasty indeed.
*4Baldhild lived a remarkable life, having been born into a noble, possibly royal Anglo-Saxon family and sold into slavery in Gaul before becoming the wife of Clovis II. Under his successor Clotaire she retired to her monastery at Chelles and died in about 680. She almost certainly knew Hereswith, the sister of Saint Hild (see p.313), who also retired to Chelles after marriage into the East Anglian royal family.
*5Laud (E) version of the ASC sub anno 656; the re-endowment was sponsored by Penda’s son King Wulfhere, brother of Peada, and confirmed by Oswiu in about 664. Other signatories, all of whom contributed a single + as their mark, included several kings, Cyneburh the wife of Alhfrith, Deusdedit the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the young abbot of Ripon, Wilfrid. This is one of the earliest accounts of a written charter of endowment, confirmed by a Papal Bull of Vitalian. It indicates that the church, at least, recognised the value of a king’s signature and a written record of endowment as evidence of title deed.
XVII
The Bay of the Lighthouse
God sceal on heofenum,
dæda demend
God is in heaven,
the judge of deeds
Whitby is a bustling and atmospheric north Yorkshire fishing port variously inundated by black-coated, mascaraed Goths bearing well-thumbed copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, ice-cream-licking daytrippers, folk musicians and the odd archaeologist on pilgrimage to the ruins of the famous abbey which stands defiant on the cliffs above the town like a Caspar David Friedrich painting: by turns eerie, wind-blasted and steeped in piously romantic mythology.
In 664, even as God’s judgement was visited on His people by a virulent outbreak of what is suspected to have been bubonic plague, churchmen and women gathered here from all parts of the island and beyond to debate the Paschal controversy. The summer had begun portentously with an eclipse of the sun on May Day.222 Despite various problems with Bede’s identification of Streanæshealh most archaeologists and historians believe that Whitby is the place he meant and that his translation into Latin, sinus fari, can reasonably be interpreted as meaning ‘the Bay of the Lighthouse’. The lighthouse in question has never been found, but it would fit well within the string of Roman signal stations which dotted the Yorkshire coast in the late fourth century after a great seaborne invasion of the British province by Picts, Scots and Saxons: the so-called Barbarian Conspiracy.
As an Early Medieval conference centre, Whitby was admirably placed. It has a fine, sheltered port accessible from anywhere along the east coast of Britain and from the ports of Northern Gaul. All along that coast or its navigable riverine arms lay important royal or ecclesiastical sites and, perhaps as importantly, it was familiar to the merchants of the North Sea littoral, that great trading basin which connected Britain economically, culturally and linguistically with the Low Countries, Scandinavia and the kingdom of the Franks. Between the Tees and the Humber are several candidates for early wic sites where coastal traders could beach their shallow-bottomed craft; indeed, a town which today looks rather cut off from the world was a perfectly central place in the mid-seventh century, with a harbour capable of accommodating substantial sea-going craft. Not for nothing were early monasteries—Iona, Derry, Lindisfarne, Whitby, Jarrow and Wearmouth, for example—sited on significant nodes in what the researcher Cowan Duff has termed the European Ecclesiastical Superhighway, linking the British Isles with Gaul, Rome, Byzantium and the Holy Land.223 By the end of the seventh century churchmen and women were seasoned travellers, with reasons to travel and a network of safe, comfortable staging posts whose incumbents shared a common culture and the language of the Roman Empire. The communications revolution of our own times can hardly be more significant than this key element in the survival of the cultures of late antiquity.
That is not to say that the convening of a council here was not a major logistical undertaking. If Whitby was one of Oswiu’s twelve ten-hide foundations then it could hardly have been expected to support the large numbers of delegates and their entourages who must have arrived in a steady stream during the late summer months of 664—very likely, did they but know it, bringing the deadly plague with them. The council was a royal initiative, and royal estates must therefore have been pressed into catering, transport and construction service even if the ecclesiastical participants might be content to spend some of their t
ime in fasting: talking is hungry work. Summonses to the Council must have been sent out in good time, accommodation organised or built, stabling and fodder prepared and provided; the monastery’s smiths and farriers must have worked double shifts unless the kings brought their own establishments with them.
The great gaunt ruins of the Benedictine abbey built in the thirteenth century on the headland at Whitby have almost nothing in common with the foundation credited to Edwin’s great-niece Hild in the late 650s. She, the daughter of that Hereric who was murdered at the British court of Elmet during Edwin’s reign, was baptised by Paulinus and after her great uncle’s exile probably went to live with her sister Hereswith who had married into the royal family of East Anglia. Hild’s formative spiritual education took place under Aidan at Lindisfarne during the Deiran rapprochement of Oswiu’s reign, so that when the king invited her to found the monastery at Whitby her outlook was that of Rome overlain with Iona: her sympathies were Irish; her establishment is likely to have been modest and, in layout, similar to that at Lindisfarne. But she had already been abbess of both the unnamed monastery on the north bank of the River Wear and that on the headland at Hartlepool. Streanæshealh presented her with a chance to initiate an ideal community in both spirit and material form. If, as seems likely, she had much in common with her cousin and successor Queen Eanflæd we might see the inception, in this great gathering, of the idea of Whitby as the Deiran royal cult centre which it later became.
The King in the North Page 32