There are others, laymen who have no love for the monastic life nor for military service, who commit a graver crime by giving money to the kings and obtaining land under the pretext of building monasteries, in which they can give freer reign to their libidinous tastes; these lands they have assigned to them in hereditary right through written royal edicts... thus they have gained unjust rights over fields and villages, free from both divine and legal obligations...296
How had this come about? In the first place, it was the reductio ad absurdum of the practice we begin to see under Oswiu and Eanflæd: the use of monastic donations as a tool of political and familial patronage. In Alhfrith’s hijacking of the Ripon donation; in Eanflæd’s Gilling intervention after the death of Oswine, those roots were sown. Not until the death of Aldfrith, apparently, was this policy so heedlessly followed that kings began to alienate lands in bulk and without regard for the implications. Aldfrith’s son, Osred, was only eight when he succeeded in 705. In such vulnerable times it is not surprising that the Idings’ capital assets should be sold in exchange for the support of the military elite. But that land could not easily be recovered to the royal portfolio; and the effect on the land itself, on its bonded and semi-bonded drengs, ceorls and serfs, can only be imagined. It is possible that gesiths now holding hereditary rights in the vills were incentivised to develop the economic potential of their lands; we cannot say. If that was the case, the kings had in any case surrendered their right to tax it; they had not yet developed a means of doing so. In the eighth century, in Mercia, powerful kings began to experiment with ways in which they could bring back some of the landed surplus into the royal fisc; and by the time the shires and townships of Northumbria emerge into the historical record in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a complex range of services, dues and obligations had been reimposed on land. But the Northumbrian state was never able to enjoy imperium over the other kingdoms again. It could not afford to.
That there had been licentiousness and a relaxation of the monastic rule during the century between Heavenfield and Bede’s letter to Egbert is hardly surprising—at least on a small scale. With the expansion of the church some dilution of the quality of its guardians—and they had been men and women of outstanding virtue and capabilities—is no revelation. The monastery of Oswald’s sister Æbbe at Coldingham on the Berwickshire coast had, even during the founding abbess’s life, attracted criticism for alleged debauchery of which Æbbe herself was, apparently, unaware. God punished that community by burning it down.297 And who could blame a generation of young men who, dazzled by the artistic brilliance and dignity of the great monasteries at Jarrow, Hexham, Whitby and Lindisfarne, thought that career a better bet than yomping with the king’s host when there were in reality not many new lands to conquer. Behind this lack of opportunity for martial glory, for treasure and the rewards suitable to a young gesith’s rank lies, ironically, the motivation for young, unmarried men from Scandinavia sailing over the sea to look for opportunities—and treasure—at the end of the century. In the unprotected monasteries of Northumbria, which must have seemed like the eighth-century equivalent of a turkey shoot, they saw rich pickings. The monasteries were unprotected because the church, or what pretended to be the church, owned all the land with which earlier kings had been able to sustain their armies. In 793, with the first raid on Northumberland’s vulnerable coastal monasteries by Viking pirates, the whirlwind descended.
One is tempted to see in the career of that turbulent priest Wilfrid a portent of things to come. Often in conflict with his sponsoring kings, a great lover of wealth and its trappings, jealous of his possessions and, at his death, perhaps the richest man in Europe, Wilfrid was only too well aware of the potential for the church to use its capital assets in trading blows with secular powers; but no-one, not even his harshest critics, would claim that Wilfrid was in any sense a fake, a secular lord masquerading as a monk to avoid military duty. His monastic foundations were grand, especially by comparison to the modest intentions of Aidan and Cuthbert, and most of them were passed down to collateral members of his family; but they were real.
The process of alienation which Bede described in apocalyptic terms can be observed at a more subtle level in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, that ancient record of the lands given to Lindisfarne from its founding by Oswald in 635.
Historians have tended to concentrate on what the Historia tells us about land-holding, and rightly so. But the document also reveals the variety of ways in which monastic entrepreneurs could acquire sometimes very large tracts of land.
The island of Lindisfarne was first given to Aidan to establish a monastery from which to convert the Northumbrians, in imitation of that built by Colm Cille on Iona in about 565. Oswiu had made his first donation at Gilling in expiation of his crime in murdering Oswine. A few years after this, in 655, he made his famous donation of twelve ten-hide estates to fulfil a promise made in anticipation of his victory against Penda. Donations as thanks for victory are a recurrent theme in the Historia.
Ecgfrith gave more land to Lindisfarne after Cuthbert ‘raised a boy from the dead’; and then there is that curious donation of Carham after the victory against King Wulfhere of Mercia in 674, even though Wilfrid, and not Cuthbert, had accompanied the king into battle.298 His prayers, at a distance, had been sufficient to earn an earthly reward. The fifth entry in the Historia records that after Cuthbert reluctantly agreed to become bishop of Hexham, then Lindisfarne, in about 684, Cuthbert (meaning the community of Lindisfarne) was given lands in York, at Crayke a few miles to the north of York, and at Carlisle. Ecgfrith’s motives in granting these lands are a matter of speculation, but in part it must have been payment for Cuthbert’s agreement to be bishop and, therefore, for Cuthbert’s political and spiritual support for Ecgfrith and his immediate family.
After this there is a break in the sequence of donations to Lindisfarne until 737, when Ceolwulf, the king to whom Bede dedicated his Ecclesiastical History, abdicated, took the tonsure and retired to the holy island ‘with great treasure’.299 More than a hundred years after that king’s death Bishop Ecgred supposedly translated his bones and those of Cuthbert (and Oswald) to a new see at Norham on the River Tweed and ‘rewarded’ the community with two vills; such, perhaps, was the value of those relics. The same bishop built more churches at Gainford and elsewhere on the River Tees, and gave those lands to Lindisfarne also. The motives for some of these donations are obscure, but they were surely made in the expectation of spiritual, political or material return and they must stand for the otherwise unrecorded but apparently large numbers of vills which were alienated by Osred and his successors for naked profit or short-term political interest.
King Osberht, who was king of Northumbria in the middle of the ninth century, attempted to seize back two vills from the control of St Cuthbert’s community, presumably marking a point where kings realised the need to recycle some of these lost lands. Much good it did him; he died within a year. Well before Bede’s death, it is clear, land—and the renders and services which could be extracted from it—had become a commodity to be traded for all sorts of benefits and motives, both high and low. Monasteries found that they needed cash, or its equivalent, to build and restore churches (how, one wonders, did Cuthbert’s successor at Lindisfarne purchase enough lead to clad the church there?); to buy books and the relics of saints so that their establishments might reflect and enhance their reputations and influence.
Kings must also have needed cash to replace lost opportunities for winning booty, for lost tribute from subject kingdoms, and to support their peripatetic progress through a decreasing number of royal estates. In parallel, the alienation of royal lands to the secular nobility diminished both the pool of land that could be used to support the military elite, and the pool of young unmarried males from whom that elite was recruited. The process, gradual or not, was sufficiently noticeable to set off alarms in the mind of Northumbria’s historian. It is comprehensible; that does not
make it anything but reckless.
It would take the singular military, moral and diplomatic skills of Alfred the Great towards the end of the ninth century to impose a replacement set of obligations on the people of England so that they might organise resistance to the Danish armies of Halfdan, Guthrum and Ivar the Boneless. Even Alfred’s determination to carry out monastic reform was insufficient to save Northumbria’s once-great houses. Melrose was destroyed in a raid by Kenneth MacAlpin in 839; Lindisfarne was abandoned in 875; Hexham Abbey was burned to the ground in the same year; Monkwearmouth and Bede’s Jarrow were deserted at about the same time and not re-founded for two hundred years; Ripon lasted until 948 before being razed. By the time William I embarked on his genocidal rampage through Northumbria in 1069–70 there were almost no functioning monasteries in the land which had given rise to such a golden age of art, culture and spirituality. Only the tiny band of monks who still devotedly carried their saints’ relics around with them in a fragile wooden coffin, who clung tenaciously to the memory of what they had owned and been, kept the spark of Oswald’s and Cuthbert’s legacy alight and kindled its revival at Durham.
Under later English kings the over-riding need to provide opportunities for young, unmarried members of a new military elite to gain glory and fighting experience would lead to an extraordinary age of crusades and of military expansionism. That fundamentalist cause would follow a familiar pattern of purity and self-denial, community spirit and pious zeal followed by cynicism and degrading licentiousness (and more tax evasion) so graphically traced in the history of the Knights Templar. Periodically kings would try to bring land that had been carelessly alienated back into the royal portfolio. Henry VIII’s policy of recycling it all in a single (or double) tranche of dispossessions led to a new religion and a new phenomenon called the middle class; it saved the Tudor monarchy from bankruptcy, even if that policy is implicated in the outbreak of civil wars in the 1640s.
The age of imperialism and capital that followed did not materially change the nature of the game. In the 1820s, during the near-revolutionary atmosphere of the Reform crisis in Britain, the prime minister, none other than the Duke of Wellington, argued that democracy was a dangerous thing: had not the patronage system worked sufficiently to win the long wars against France? He was right: Britain was able to field a large number of exceptionally gifted military, and especially naval, commanders who had been promoted through a system which Oswald and Oswiu—and for that matter Colm Cille—would have recognised. That it retained power and influence in the hands of a social and economic elite is not in doubt; that it was anti-democratic is perfectly true. That it worked in the invention of a new British imperium—and an idea of God-given greatness, which can be directly traced to Bede and thence to Oswald—is demonstrable. It was not in the interests of the great and powerful to promote the careers of cowards and incompetents; their performance reflected on the judgement of the patron. And so the military elites of the seventh century and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were just that. They comprised the best of the best, picked, trained and encouraged by their patrons and supported on landed estates sufficient for them to avoid the shattering boredom, poverty and ignorance of the labourers in the fields. The rules of patronage have not changed; probably will not change.
Who bears the blame for the alienation of Northumbrian lands into the wrong hands, if not the kings who granted them? Who appointed the abbots and bishops who failed their communities? The rules of patronage which bound king, church and land in an eternal knot still apply; sometimes they are broken. Promise, reward and legitimacy retain their potential to create heroes and villains: the currency may have changed a little, the sums still work out the same.
Did Oswald see it all coming? I think not.
*1Nechtansmere has usually been identified with Dunnichen in Angus; but the Early Medieval historian Alex Woolf has recently argued convincingly for the merits of Dunachton, further to the north and west on the shore of Loch Insh. Woolf 2006.
Timeline: AD 672 to 735
ABBREVIATIONS
EH—Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
HB—Nennius’s Historia Brittonum
ASC—Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
AU—Annals of Ulster
ATig—Annals of Tigernach
Names of battles are shown in bold
672
King Drust expelled from Pictland. Ecgfrith crushes Pictish uprising with the help of Beornheth of Dunbar. Bruide mac Beli succeeds to Pictish kingdom.
—Ecgfrith’s Queen Æthelthryth becomes a nun at Ely; Wilfrid thus loses his principal royal patron.
—Synod of Hertford: Theodore begins process of dividing Britain into dioceses.
—First documented reference to the people of Nordanhymbrorum (EH IV.5).
—Bishop Chad dies.
673
Foundation of Hexham Abbey by Wilfrid on estate given by ex-Queen Æthelthryth.
—King Egbert of Kent dies; succeeded by his brother Hlothere (685).
—Ecgfrith marries Iurminburh of ?Kent or Frankia.
—Bede born on land owned by soon-to-be founded Wearmouth monastery.
—Cenwalh, king of Wessex dies; his widow Seaxburh attempts to take control but fails.
674
King Wulfhere of Mercia invades Northumbria and is repelled. Lindsey annexed by Oswiu, later recovered by Æthelred of Mercia in 678–9. Northumbria now too big for one bishop: dispute with Wilfrid?
—Ecgfrith grants estate at Carham to Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (not Wilfrid) in thanks.
—Wearmouth monastery founded by Benedict Biscop on land given by Ecgfrith.
675
King Wulfhere of Mercia dies. Succeeded by his brother Æthelred.
—Foundation of Bardney monastery by Æthelred of Mercia and Osthryth, daughter of Oswiu. Endowed with Oswald’s trunk and legs.
—?Foundation of monastery at Abingdon under King Cenwalh of Wessex, possibly at villa regia; possibly a double monastery.
—Death of Colman on Inishbofin, County Galway.
676
Cuthbert retires to Inner Farne to contemplate.
—King Æthelred of Mercia attacks and subdues Kent.
—A comet appears, wrongly dated by Bede to 678 (EH IV.12).
678
Archbishop Theodore visits Northumberland at Ecgfrith’s request. Sends the Picts (at Abercorn) Bishop Trumwine, a friend of Bede’s. Divides see into four (Lindisfarne–Bernicia, York–Deira, Lindsey and later Abercorn) and curtails Wilfrid’s power.
—Wilfrid expelled (Bede EH V.24); travels to Rome to seek intervention from the pope; prophesies doom to Ecgfrith.
679
Battle of the River Trent: Ecgfrith’s younger brother Ælfwine is killed but battle is indecisive. Archbishop Theodore oversees peace treaty between Mercia and Northumbria (to include recovery of Lindsey).
—Death of Æthelthryth (Etheldreda) at Ely.
—Benedict Biscop makes fifth and final journey to Rome.
679–?82
Probable date of Arculf’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land and, on his attempted return, his arrival by ‘accident’ at Iona where he is interrogated by Adomnán.
680
Abbess Hild dies at Whitby (burial place unknown). Eanflæd becomes abbess of Whitby jointly with her daughter Ælfflæd.
—Wilfrid returns from Rome brandishing a papal missive. Ecgfrith dismisses it. Wilfrid is imprisoned in Broninis (unknown), finally at Dunbar.
—Bede enters Wearmouth monastery aged between five and seven.
—Abercorn established with Northumbrian bishop on the Forth.
—Synod of Hatfield.
—Possible date for translation of Edwin to Streanæshealh (cf Ian Wood 2008).
681
Wilfrid is released into exile in Mercia after the queen falls ill. In Sussex he converts the pagan Saxons, who abjure paganism because of a three-year drought. Rain falls on the day of their baptism (EH IV.13).
—Probable date of foundation of Selsey Abbey and before 685 establishment of cult of St Oswald there.
—Jarrow monastery founded (see 685) by Benedict Biscop on land granted by Ecgfrith; first abbot is Ceolfrith.
683
Death of Æbbe, abbess of Coldingham and uterine sister of Oswald (aged ?seventy-five).
—Death of apostate Sighere of Essex; succeeded by Christian brother Sebbi.
684
Ecgfrith dispatches pre-emptive force to invade Ireland (in pursuit of Aldfrith?) against advice of church (including Cuthbert).
—Cuthbert visits Ælfflæd, sister of Ecgfrith, at Coquet Island; discusses succession.
—Synod of Twyford (?Whittingham) where Theodore and Ecgfrith persuade a reluctant Cuthbert to become bishop of Hexham, which he swaps with Eata for Lindisfarne (in the following spring). Lindisfarne is given substantial estates at York, Carlisle and Crayke.
685
Cuthbert consecrated at York; visits Carlisle with Iurminburh and has vision of Ecgfrith’s death.
—Monastery dedicated at Jarrow on 9th Kalends of May (23 April) by Ecgfrith.
—Ecgfrith launches pre-emptive strike on Northern Picts.
—Army (including Beornheth of Dunbar and King Ecgfrith) is slaughtered 20 May at Battle of Nechtansmere (Dunnichen or Dunachton); called Linn Garan in HB.
—King Aldfrith (Ecgfrith’s half-brother) succeeds, probably under the influence of Cuthbert on Lindisfarne; Aldfrith may be on Iona at the time of Cuthbert’s prophecy.
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