The King in the North
Page 43
A Note on Place-Name Elements
Our maps are still full of names whose origins lie deep in our cultural and linguistic past. Many of our rivers—Avon, Ouse, Derwent, Eden, to name but a few—have names with Brythonic roots. There are hundreds of names of Anglo-Saxon origin ending in -ham, -ton, which denote the settlements or farms which are later called vills. Often these start with a personal name—Acklington, for example, which was the settlement named for a man, a dreng perhaps, called Eadlac. The Old English ending -wic is particularly interesting. It means farm, as in Keswick (cheese farm) in Cumbria, or Goswick (goose farm) in Northumberland; but it might also denote a periodic, opportunistic beach market (see p.170)—for example Lundenwic (London), Gypeswic (Ipswich) and so on. A surviving place-name element much loved by archaeologists is eccles: Eccles in Lancashire, famous for its liquorice cakes, and Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire are examples. The Welsh equivalent is egwlys. Both derive directly from the Latin ecclesia, which identifies the place as the site of a Romano-British church. Not all eccles names are ancient in origin, which confuses matters slightly. The Anglo-Saxon suffix -botl, as in Harbottle or Shilbottle, denotes a (probably stone) building (the words bastle and bastille are later versions); -ley means a clearing in a wood and -shaw is the wood itself. The large numbers of -ing and -ingaham names refer to settlements claimed by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Ovingham in the Tyne Valley is the ‘farm of Ova’s people’; while a mile up the road Ovington is the ‘village of Ova’s people’s farm’. Modern English offers examples of pleonastic (or tautological) place-names, built up from the same word in different languages and reflecting successive waves of cultural influence. Torpenhow in Cumbria (pronounced ‘Trepenor’) means ‘hill hill hill’ in Brythonic, Welsh and Old English. Place-names are one of our cultural treasures, an open-source book that offers a fascinating window on to early medieval Britain.
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Picture Section
1. Bamburgh Castle, ancestral seat of the Idings, an indomitable fortress on Northumberland’s wave-torn North Sea coast. Oswald’s incorrupt right arm was brought here after his death in battle.
2. Almost nothing remains of the seventh-century fortress at Bamburgh, except the site of Oswald’s gate, a ‘hollowed entrance ascending in a wonderful manner by steps’, and the rock-cut well preserved in the keep.
3. The medieval Abbey of Iona, visited annually by many thousands of tourists, is much reconstructed. But its setting, within the original Columban vallum, still gives a fine sense of place and isolation.
4. Two hundred years after Oswald, his name, and those of Edwin and Oswiu, are included in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as those of kings who exercised imperium over all Britain: the so-called Bretwaldas.
5. The Franks casket, an eighth-century Northumbrian carved whalebone box decorated with scenes of Christian and pagan mythology. The siege it depicts is one of the very few surviving representations of the nature of warfare in this period.
6. A magnificent bronze hanging bowl retrieved from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, decorated with distinctly British enamelled escutcheons. Could it have been a gift from King Edwin of Northumbria to his sponsor, King Rædwald of East Anglia?
7. Yeavering Bell, near the River Glen in north Northumberland: the ‘holy mountain’ of the Bernicians and their British forebears. Below the Iron Age hillfort on its twin summits lies the ‘whaleback’ plateau on which the Anglo-Saxon palace of Yeavering was built.
8. Brian Hope-Taylor’s plan of the palace of Yeavering in King Edwin’s day, showing the great cattle corral, mead hall, feasting area and the unique grandstand. The royal township never had need of defences.
9. The gilded Anglo-Saxon artefact known as the Finglesham buckle, depicting a spear-wielding, horned helmet-wearing Woden. The Anglo-Saxon god and his British counterparts draw on ancient animistic representations of a mythic warrior who embodies the tribal luck-in-war of the Anglo-Saxon kings.
10. At Heavenfield on Hadrian’s Wall, in 634, Oswald raised a cross the night before his battle with Cadwallon, in a perhaps conscious echo of the Emperor Constantine some three hundred years earlier at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.
11. A crude but evocative carving from Maryport, on the coast of Cumbria, of a spear-wielding, naked, horned God. Perhaps representing the British battle deity Belatucadros, it is a potent reminder of the more virile and bellicose aspects of Early Medieval kingship.
12. Oswald remains the archetype of the chivalrous knight beloved of medievalists and of the pre-Raphaelite painters: Ford Madox Brown’s portrayal (1864–6) of King Oswald and Aidan, first bishop of Lindisfarne, is mere fancy—Aidan was not the sort to kneel to any earthly king.
13. Lindisfarne’s medieval priory and the unmistakeable outline of its castle. Beneath these monuments lie the remains of Aidan’s first monastery and the fortress besieged by British forces in the 580s.
14. A view of Bede’s World in Jarrow, showing the reconstruction of the hall at Thirlings. The walls are of hazel wattle and daub, the roof of thatch. It gives a strong sense of the pleasures and privations of Early Medieval life.
15. A plan of Thirlings Manor, an Anglo-Saxon site in north Northumberland. The excavation here shows how a dreng of Oswald’s day must have laid out his hall and farm, part of whose surplus he must render to a great lord, or to the king.
16. A holy well dedicated to Oswald has been incorporated into a garden on the appropriately named Maserfield Road in Oswestry, Shropshire, close to where Oswald met his bloody end in battle with Penda’s Mercians in 642.
17. The crypt at Hexham is all that remains of the marvellous stone church built by Wilfrid in about 674. From here Wilfrid spread the cult of Oswald.
18. This strip of gold with a Latin inscription, part of the ‘Staffordshire hoard’ discovered in 2009, belonged to a Christian warrior. Archaeologists have considered the possibility that the hoard is a remnant of the treasure surrendered—around the year 650—by Oswiu of Northumbria to Penda of Mercia to prevent further devastation of Bernicia by Mercia or its British allies.
19. Nothing remains above ground of the abbey at Whitby where the council of 664 determined the fate of the Irish church in England; excavations have shown that an Anglian town once stood on the headland.
20. The opening of Cuthbert’s tomb in 698, as depicted in a twelfth-century illuminated miniature. After eleven years buried in the church at Lindisfarne, Cuthbert was exhumed and found to be miraculously incorrupt: the start of a great legend and enduring cult.
21. The Cuthbert Gospel: the oldest surviving English book, in its original seventh-century binding—a subtle but exquisite masterpiece.
22. The opening page of St Mark’s Gospel, from the Lindisfarne Gospels, perhaps the most famous of all Early Medieval books. Produced on Holy Island around the year 700, the Lindisfarne Gospels are a touchstone of Northumbrian pride today, as they have always been.
23. A head relic of Oswald created in Germany in the twelfth century, when his cult was widespread on the Continent, tapped into the ancient superstition of the ‘luck in the head’.
24. A seventh-century coin from Kent shows a mail-shirted warrior with a bird on his arm, with a cross at his side, standing in what might be a ship or a dish. Is this an early depiction of Oswald the saint?
25. A seventeenth-century silver Kreuzer from Zug in Switzerland shows how long the cult of Oswald survived in Continental Europe.
26. A stained-glass window from the church of St John Lee, near Heavenfield, where Oswald raised his cross, captures the moment when the returning prince invoked the spirit of Colm Cille in his quest for victory over Cadwallon.
&nb
sp; Notes to the Text
ABBREVIATIONS
HB
Nennius’s Historia Brittonum
EH
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
ASC
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
LC
Life of Colomba
HA
Historia Abbatum
WLG
Whitby Life of Gregory
AC
Annales Cambriae
PLC
Bede’s Prose Life of St Cuthbert
VW
Vita Wilfridi
HTSC
Historia Translationum Sancti Cuthberti auctore anonymo
HSC
Historia de Sancto Cuthberto
Chapter I
1 Nennius: Historia Brittonum (HB) 70; ed. J. Morris 1980.
2 Rackham 2006, 150.
3 Beowulf trans. and ed. Alexander 2014–31.
4 Ecclesiastical History of the English People (EH) (Historia Ecclesiastica) III.5.
5 EH II.5.
6 HB 57; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) Recension E sub anno 617.
7 Groves 2011.
8 Retrieved from an online article by Project Director Graeme Young: www.btinternet.com/~graemeyoung/BowlHole.htm 13.07.2012.
9 Young 2003, 18.
10 Tolkien 1936.
11 Henry IV Part I, Act I, Scene 1.
Chapter II
12 EH V.15.
13 Life of Columba (LC) (Vita Columbae) I.37.
14 Sharpe 1995, note 127.
15 Fleming 1998.
16 EH I.34.
17 Retrieved from the admirable Staffordshire hoard website: www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk.
18 Current Archaeology 236: The Inscriptions.
Chapter III
19 Caesar De Bello Gallico V.14.
20 Yorke 1990, 27 and Brooks 1989a, following Alan Everitt.
21 EH II.3.
22 HB 31.
23 HB 37.
24 EH II.1.
25 Hodges 1982, 69.
26 For example, the most recent analysis of imported pottery and glass in Campbell 2007, 109–24.
27 EH I.25.
28 EH I.26 Colgrave and Mynors 1969.
29 EH I.26; Historia Abbatum (HA) 1.
30 EH I. 30. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 108–9.
31 The Law of the Northumbrian Priests, usually attributed to Archbishop Wulfstan II, who died in 1023. Trans. Thorpe 1840, Volume 2, 291–302.
32 Eagles 2003.
33 EH II.2.
34 Chester Archaeological Society report: online at www.chesterarchaeolsoc.org.uk/heronbridge.html.
Chapter IV
35 Charles-Edwards 2000, 69.
36 Barry 1964.
37 EH III.4.
38 Sharpe 1995, 360ff.
39 LC II.3 Trans. Sharpe 1995.
40 LC II.45.
41 LC I.10.
42 LC III.5.
43 LC I.9.
44 LC III.5. Quoted by Adomnán from a lost work by Abbot Cumméne the White. Sharpe 1995.
45 Bartlett 2003.
46 Dickinson 2005.
47 Alcock 2003, 166ff; see also discussions by Cessford (1993), Hooper (1993) and Higham (1991).
48 Edited with an invaluable commentary by Bannerman (1974).
49 Bannerman 1974, 146ff.
50 Bannerman 1974, 149.
51 Campbell 2007, 116–17.
52 LC I.28; Sharpe 1995, 54.
Chapter V
53 EH II.12 Colgrave and Mynors 1969.
54 Quoted by Marsden 1992.
55 Morris 1980, 46.
56 Morris 1980, 46.
57 EH II.15.
58 EH II.12. Colgrave and Mynors 1969.
59 EH II.12.
60 EH II.12. Bede’s internal quote is from Virgil’s Aeneid iv.2. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 179.
61 EH II.12.
62 Whitby Life of Gregory (WLG) 16.
63 Beowulf lines 1142–5.
64 Underwood 1999.
65 Myres and Southern 1973; Mortimer 1905, 247ff.
66 Oppenheimer 2007.
67 Fowler 1997, 245ff.
68 Powlesland 1997, 105ff.
69 Adams 1984.
70 Cramp 1995, 24.
71 Higham 1995, 156; Kirby 2000, 9.
72 Higham 1993, 89.
73 Roberts 2010.
74 Sherlock and Welch 1992.
Chapter VI
75 Bruce-Mitford 1968, 25.
76 HB 63; Annales Cambriae (AC) sub anno 616; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 410.
77 Breeze 2009, 123.
78 EH II.9, Colgrave & Mynors 1969, 163.
79 Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters. Trans. by O. M. Dalton (1915) vol. 2: 138–75 Book 8, Letter 6.
80 EH II.9.
81 Koch 2006, 671.
82 EH II.10.
83 EH II.11.
84 EH II.9.
85 In an essay submitted for the Award in Continuing Education programme, Centre for Lifelong Learning, University of Sunderland, 2009.
86 ASC sub anno 626.
87 EH II.9 Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 167.
88 EH II.12. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 183.
89 EH II.13 Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 185.
90 EH II.16.
91 Hope-Taylor 1977, 67–9; 200–1.
92 Hope-Taylor 1977; for a modern appreciation and critique of his work see Frodsham and O’Brien 2005.
93 Barnwell 2005, 177.
94EH II.16.
95 The latest investigation of this theatre has not yet been published in detail; information accessed from www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/04/2011/canterburys-roman-theatre-revealed, April 2011.
96 Barnwell 2005, 180ff.
97 EH II.16.
Chapter VII
98 EH II.20 Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 203.
99 Higham 1993, 89.
100 EH II.20 Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 203.
101 For definitive surveys, now a little out of date, see Cramp 1988 and Higham 1993; Alcock 2003.
102 Collins 1977, 41.
103 EH III.1. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 213.
104 EH III.1. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 213.
105 Y Gododdin stanza 51, with poetic trans. Clancy 1970.
106 EH II.20.
107 EH II.9.
108 Bede’s Prose Life of Saint Cuthbert (PLC): 27. Farmer 1983, 79.
Chapter VIII
109 National Maritime Museum, Greenwich: image A0765.
110 Red Book of Hergest 15, trans. William Skene; there are various websites offering annotated versions.
111 I am indebted to Dr Hermann Moisl for this information.
112 Fairless 1984.
113 An example is illustrated from a buckle plate in grave 95 at Finglesham, Kent. Wilson 1992, 118.
114 Wilmott 2010.
115 LC I.1.
116 Wallace-Hadrill 1988, 89.
117 EH III.2.
118 EH III.2.
119 Woodfield 1965.
120 Wallace-Hadrill 1988, 90.
121 I quote from the work of the late Hexham historian Tom Corfe (1997), who did much to explore and clear up the difficulties surrounding the site and context of the battle.
Chapter IX
122 EH III.5.
123 EH III.5.
124 Todd and Reeves 1864, 231.
125 EH III.2.
126 O’Sullivan and Young 1995, 41: figure 21.
127 LC I.1.
128 Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 229.
129 EH III.3.
130 LC I.1.
131 EH III.4; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 221.
132 EH III.16.
133 Brown 2006, 159.
134 O’Sullivan and Young 1995, 41.
135 EH III.17; McClure and Collins 1995, 137.
136 EH III.5.
137 EH III.12.
138 EH III.6.
139 EH III.6; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 231.
140 EH III.2.
141 Gregory of Tours
, History of the Franks II.38; I am indebted to Colm O’Brien for an interesting discussion on the potential significance of Oswald’s gesture.
142 Lanigan 1822, 433.
143 Colm O’Brien, personal communication.
144 De Paor 1997, 218.
145 McCormack 1972, 730.
146 Thomas 1981, 291.
147 Thomas 1981, 263–5; Stancliffe 1995, 78.
148 South 2002.
149 Joliffe 1926.
150 O’Brien and Adams 2012.
Chapter X
151 EH II.20; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 205.
152 EH IV.14.
153 Eagles 1989.
154 Stancliffe 1995, 60.
155 Brooks 1989b, 161.
156 EH II.20.
157 Brooks 1989b, 167.
158 Y Gododdin, stanza LXXX; trans. Project Gutenberg.
159 HB 56.
160 Campbell 1979.
161 Higham 1995, 26.
162 Vita Wilfridi (VW): LX; Colgrave 1927, 131.
163 Sawyer 1977, 148; 153.
Chapter XI
164 Joliffe 1926, 41.
165 EH III.17.
166 Adams 1999; O’Brien and Adams 2012.
167 Wilmott 2010; Roberts 2010; see also the paper by Rob Collins 2012.
168 Collins 2012, 19.
169 Stuart Laycock, Britannia: The failed state. The History Press 2008.
170 EH II.14.