The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  Oswald’s vigorous promotion in the decades and centuries after his death shows that his spiritual patronage was as effective as his lordship had been in life. Whatever the complex psychological reasons for attaching personal success in health and fortune to the veneration of the relics or memory of a dead royal martyr, it seems that Oswald’s luck did not run out on the battlefield at Maserfelth: his presence, potency and charisma were still being felt hundreds of years after his passing, reinforced by Bede, Alcuin and other chroniclers and by the preservation and multiplication of the physical properties of those virtues. Kings, peasants, monks sought to associate themselves with Oswald, to belong in some sense to the empire of his glorious legend. As the embodiment of the luck of first his own people, the Bernicians, and later the English as a whole; as a talisman to kings and as a tap root into a more animistic British past, Oswald succeeded as no other early saint, except perhaps Cuthbert, was able. Famously generous, brilliant in battle, a fighter against all odds and winner of Christian glory in death against a great enemy, Oswald was the first quintessential English hero. Not until the early nineteenth century, perhaps, did England acquire an equally potent replacement in that self-invented, charismatic and fatally brilliant warrior-martyr and secular saint, Horatio Nelson.

  *1Translation is the act of disinterring human remains and placing them in an above-ground container.

  *2Colm O’Brien has hunted for parallels in the New Testament and elsewhere; so far the search for the hagiographer’s direct source has been unsuccessful. I am most grateful to Colm for several discussions on this intriguing aspect of the incorruption narrative.

  *3I have excavated Bronze Age burial monuments in the Cheviot Hills where collected remnants of such excarnation rituals—that is, when the body is exposed on a scaffold to be scavenged by birds—have been very carefully curated in a wholly non-Christian context.

  *4Symeon, Libellus de Exordio XXI; Stevenson 1993, 655–6. Reference to ‘part’ of the bones of St Aidan reflects the author’s reading of Bede’s account of Colman taking Aidan’s relics with him to Mayo after Whitby in 664.

  *5An extensive study of three of these royal women has been made by Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel 1995.

  *6Bede’s prototype for the chronology of the Ecclesiastical History, his Chronica Maiora of 725, gives almost all credit for the conversion of the Angles to Edwin. Thacker 1995, 112.

  *7See Chapter XIII.

  *8Thacker 1995, 102.

  XX

  Men of letters

  A sceal snotor hycgean ymb

  þysse worulde gewinn

  The wise man must always consider

  this world’s conflicts

  With the rule of Oswald’s nephew Ecgfrith it must have seemed that the luck of the Idings was finally running out. Married twice to virgin queens, he failed to produce an heir. Impetuous military campaigns led to disastrous defeat for the armies of Northumbria and to his death in a Scottish glen at the hands of the Picts in 685. The savaging of his host at Nechtansmere seems to have been commemorated in stone in a great carving at Aberlemno in Angus, which survives as a memorial to his folly; later historians see in this year the beginning of a permanent decline.*1 Never again would a Northumbrian king wield imperium over the larger part of Britain. Fifty years later, with the death of its pre-eminent chronicler Bede, Northumbria’s continuous narrative history is virtually discontinued for three hundred years.

  Even before Ecgfrith’s untimely death in battle at the age of about forty his failure to produce a legitimate son caused consternation among the Bernician nobility and in the mother-house of her church. Unwillingly called to the bishopric of Lindisfarne in 685, Cuthbert’s wish to retire to the privacy of Inner Farne in his last years was thwarted by the burdens of his unwonted office. His value as a man of great humility and wisdom drew him reluctantly into the debate over the succession. It also shows us that half a century after Aidan’s arrival, church and monarchy had become twin facets of a complex state. In a story calculated to illustrate Cuthbert’s visionary talents and his political identification with the Idings, Bede relates how Ecgfrith’s sister, Ælfflæd, sent for Cuthbert to consult with her...

  He went on board a ship with the brethren and came to the island which lies at the mouth of the river Coquet from which it receives its name. It is famous for its companies of monks, and it was here that the same abbess asked him to meet her. Having got into conversation with him, suddenly, in the midst of their talk, she fell at his feet and adjured him by the terrible awe-inspiring name of the King of heaven and of His angels, that he would tell her how long Ecgfrith her brother would live and rule over the kingdom of the English. ‘For I know,’ she said, ‘that through the spirit of prophecy in which you abound, you can also tell me this, if you wish.’284

  Anyone acquainted with the political narratives of the period recognises in this request a prompt by a senior member of the ruling dynasty for a holy man of paramount reputation to nominate or ‘ordain’ a successor to the throne of Northumbria. Here again we see how women of the royal family could be prominent in the machinery of dynastic patronage: Ælfflæd was attempting to arrange the endorsement of a successor to her childless brother. Cuthbert’s reluctance to be drawn into such a discussion is understandable: he had spent much of his career as a monk trying to avoid the worldly affairs of kings. But he was not quite as ingenuous as Bede liked to paint him. On being more or less forced to accept the bishopric by Ecgfrith, shortly after his meeting with Ælfflæd, he extracted a heavy price in expanding Lindisfarne’s property portfolio with large estates. Later we find him warning Queen Iurminburh to flee after a prescient vision of Ecgfrith’s death. And it must not be forgotten that as a youth he had fought in the king’s army. He had a distaste for matters of secular society and state, but he was not naïve. He, like the king’s sister, knew the potential consequences of a vacant throne for both the fortunes of the Idings—the patron founders and protectors of Lindisfarne—and for the future of the whole kingdom. For him there was only one choice.

  After a short time he said: ‘Do not say that these are lacking; for he will have a successor whom you will embrace with as much sisterly affection as if he were Ecgfrith himself.’ She answered: ‘I beseech you, tell me where he is.’ He said: ‘You see how this great and spacious sea abounds in islands? It is easy for God to provide from any of these a man to place over the kingdom of the English.’ So she understood that he was speaking of Aldfrith, who was said to be the son of Ecgfrith’s father, and was then in exile among the islands of the Irish, for the study of letters.285

  Aldfrith, returning to Bernicia in 685 even as Ecgfrith’s body was being carried by his comitates not to Bamburgh but to Iona for burial, would be England’s first literate king, a sign of the extent to which Christian culture had penetrated Northumbrian society.286 And he was not just literate: he was a scholar of high repute whom some historians have suggested was responsible for setting down in words two of Anglo-Saxon England’s greatest poems, Beowulf and Widsith.287 Bede tells us that Aldfrith ‘ably restored the shattered state of the kingdom, although within narrower bounds’.288 As part of this restoration he expanded the use of coinage introduced on a very small scale by his brother under whom, for the first time, there is evidence of an attempt to stimulate trade by developing an emporium at Jarrow.289 We cannot yet say if it was as a result of frequent journeys between Britain, Ireland and the Continent by clerics seeking enlightenment, relics, books and craftsmen that stimulated kings’ interest in international trade in the eighth century; but we must suspect it.

  The island alluded to by Cuthbert during his interview with Ælfflæd was Iona. Aldfrith was studying in the monastery of Colm Cille when he received the news that Ecgfrith had died; here also he became friends with Adomnán, Colm Cille’s hagiographer and successor as abbot. Aldfrith was not the only highly literate traveller to pass through the hands of the Iona community: Aldhelm, the most learned man of his time before Bede and autho
r of a number of serious religious works, who had studied at the Canterbury school founded by Theodore and his monk Hadrian, may have met Aldfrith on Iona; they corresponded as friends in later years. Perhaps the most exotic of visitors in Adomnán’s day was the Gaulish bishop Arculf who, attempting to return home to Gaul from an extended journey to the Holy Land, was blown off course and duly found himself in the Inner Hebrides. Adomnán made good use of his luck in persuading Arculf to let him compile from his anecdotes a book on the holy places, including plans of important buildings. Adomnán later took a copy of this book, known by its Latin title De Locis Sanctis, to Northumbria and presented it to his friend King Aldfrith. Bede was privileged to be able to read and then abridge it for a wider audience.

  Aldfrith, whose Irish name was Flann Fina by association with his mother, was a character more in sympathy with Aidan and, perhaps, Oswald than he was with his bellicose brother Ecgfrith. He was no warrior. Bede, who regarded him as illegitimate, nevertheless admired his learning; but, as an unashamed devotee of the more martially inclined of his ancestors, perhaps regretted that Aldfrith did not embark on wars of conquest or seek to extend the frontiers of Northumbria to their former bounds. Nevertheless, Aldfrith presided over a kingdom of astonishing and lasting creativity: the era of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the near-complete Bible manuscript known as the Codex Amiatinus; of the Stonyhurst Gospel; of the marvellous monastery at Jarrow in which Bede was to live and die; of the gaunt but affecting architecture of the church at Escomb in County Durham, which is the most complete surviving monument of its day; of the great stone crosses at Ruthwell and Bewcastle. Not least of that kingdom’s achievements was to produce Bede himself, a giant of Early Medieval scholarship whose list of works covers every branch of learning and whose erudition was and is staggering. His books are not just marvels of scholarship but evidence of a sort of early industrial revolution, which required animal husbandry and processing on a dramatic scale to produce thousands of sheets of perfect vellum; inks and paints for writing and illumination; leather for bindings; glass for windows. The noise of the copyists in the scriptorium there, reading out loud as they wrote, must have sounded to the contemporary ear like a swarm of bees.

  Take Bede alone and here is a fitting legacy for the luck and achievements of the Idings, not just in fashioning the first Anglo-Saxon state sufficiently robust to survive the deaths of its kings but in forging a hybrid culture of Angle and Scot, Briton and Irish, whose exuberance and craft, sophistication and heroic scale is an enduring linguistic, architectural and literary monument.

  And yet... and yet did not Oswald Iding sow a wind that his descendants in the eighth century would reap as a whirlwind; which would almost overwhelm medieval kings from Richard I (‘the Lionheart’) to Henry VIII and very nearly shake the edifice of the English polity to its foundations? Did no-one see it coming in the trickle of monastic donations made to the humble Irish monks by Oswald and his clever brother? The answer is yes: at least one man tested the wind and saw the storm coming, even if he did not see it coming from the sea.

  In 734, exactly one hundred years after Heavenfield, Bede wrote a letter to his friend the bishop of York—a letter that survives. Egbert was no ordinary bishop, but a cousin of King Ceolwulf, brother of a future Northumbrian king, Eadberht, and an early teacher of Alcuin. Bede, too infirm, as he says, to make the visit to York to see his friend, was writing within a year of his own death; probably conscious of it. In part we are reading the nostalgic admonitions of an old man who sees, or believes, that the church of his day is a shadow of what it was in the glorious days of the seventh century under those kings whose lives are so subtly drawn by Bede himself. In these days, he wrote...

  it is reported of some bishops that they have no men of true religion or self-control around them, but instead are surrounded by those who give themselves up to laughter, jokes, storytelling, eating, drinking and other seductions of the soft life...290

  In part it is a complaint written to a fellow-cleric whose brother is the king—and, therefore, there is something of an open, public appeal for reform and for the continuation of God’s (and Oswald’s and Aidan’s) work in converting and ministering to the Northumbrian people...

  because the places in the diocese under your authority are so far apart that it would take you more than the whole year on your own to go through them all and preach the word of God in every hamlet and field, it is clearly essential that you appoint others to help you in your holy work; thus, priests should be ordained and teachers established who may preach the word of God...291

  For we have heard, and it is indeed well-known, that there are many of the villages and hamlets of our people located in inaccessible mountains or in dense forests, where a bishop has never been seen in the course of many years...292

  Bede wants more bishops: he is demanding diocesan reform from the one man who, with the king, can achieve it; and Bede is probably the one cleric in the kingdom with sufficient intellectual authority to make such a demand. His hope for the fulfilment of Gregory’s original plan for twelve Northumbrian sees would never happen; but in the year of his death the archbishop’s pallium, which had been promised to Paulinus more than a hundred years before, was finally sent.

  The letter to Egbert is also absolutely striking in what it reveals about the state of the English church in Bede’s day, as if the lid of discretion he applied to his contemporaries in the Ecclesiastical History has, in semi-private, been lifted. It is our primary source for understanding what had become of the legacy of the conversion. Since the death of Aldfrith in 705 it had evidently been the practice of kings to alienate more and more lands to the church in return not just for political support but also for even more venal reasons; in response, a whole generation of young men, it seemed, had turned away from the traditional ways of the folc. In the penultimate chapter of the Ecclesiastical History, Bede had hinted at his intense discomfort:

  In these favourable times of peace and prosperity, many of the Northumbrian race, both noble and simple, have laid aside their weapons and taken the tonsure, preferring that they and their children should take monastic vows rather than train themselves in the art of war. What the result will be, a later generation will discover.293

  Bede had a pretty shrewd idea, and he used his letter to Egbert to reinforce his message unambiguously. There are many monasteries, he says, which do not deserve the name, having nothing of real monastic life about them.

  Such places which are, in the common phrase ‘useless to God and man’, because they neither serve God by following a regular monastic life nor provide soldiers and helpers for the secular powers who might defend our people from the barbarians, are both numerous and large.294

  Bede’s fears were twofold: he saw the end of religion and the loss of the Northumbrians’ ability to defend the homeland:

  It is shocking to say how many places that go by the name of monasteries have been taken under the control of men who have no knowledge of true monastic life, with the result that there is nowhere that sons of the nobles or retired soldiers can take possession of.295

  The social contract on which Northumbrian tribal society was based had been ruptured. Since time immemorial, and probably long before the arrival of the Idings, it had been based on the gift of land for a life-interest in return for military service and food renders. Those renders and services supported a royal military elite whose function in representing their people was to protect the land, display prestige and conquer weaker territories. The character of the political and economic geography of Britain was predicated on land-holdings defined and bounded as units of render held for a life-interest, the hides, to a hierarchy of central places: vill and villa regia. The commutation of these renders to prayer, which formed the principal ecclesiastical contract enabling the settlement of monks in religious communities to serve the needs of the faithful and pray for the founding patron or donor, removed such lands from the portfolio of the king; removed them in perpetuity. In r
eturn for the extraction of such lands from their natural cycle of life-interest transfers, the church brought stability, capital investment and agricultural and economic progress, along with the everlasting salvation of the founding patron. Oswald did not foresee the wholesale transfer of lands to any gesith who wished to avoid what was in effect the national service. In plain, modern terms this was a tax dodge fashioned by faux conscientious objectors. Oswiu had not seen it in his modest donation of twelve ten-hide estates; neither Ecgfrith nor Aldfrith had over-indulged in their purchase of prayer and legitimacy. But their successors did. While there were now many young men of fighting age who had no prospect of being able to acquire land, marry, raise children and live a virtuous secular life...