With the flight of Bishop Paulinus, Roman Christianity in Northumbria was in disarray. A Christian baptized into the Irish tradition, Oswald sent to Iona for a monk bishop who would refound the Northumbrian church there. They sent Aidan and in 635 the king gave him the tidal island of Lindisfarne as the seat of his bishopric. Thus was inaugurated the monastery on Holy Island, destined to be the numinous heart of Northumbrian golden age culture. For the next thirty years the Irish clergy, with growing ranks of Northumbrian acolytes, were to prove an essential ingredient in the mix of Northumbria’s golden age.
The first Irish mission to Britain had been that of St Columba or Colm Cille (c. 520–97), who was probably of royal kin and descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages of Meath. He was ordained at an early age and was associated for a time with Kells, then a royal residence, before founding monasteries in Ireland at Derry and Durrow. Then, in his mid-forties, he crossed the North Channel on a personal pilgrimage, possibly of penance, and together with twelve companions established a monastery on the island of Iona. The Book of Durrow is one of the inspirational manuscripts associated with what is sometimes called the Hiberno-Saxon tradition of illuminators, of which the two masterpieces are the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Sometime in the 660s the Anglian churchman Ecgberht crossed over to Ireland and established himself at Rath Melsigi (probably Melfont in County Louth). This monastery attracted Englishmen such as Wilfrid and Willibrord, interested in the ways of the Irish missionaries or peregrini, as they are commonly termed in a technical sense (see below). Probably the most famous of these was St Columbanus, who had founded such monasteries as Luxeuil in the Vosges mountains and, most famously, Bobbio, near Piacenza in Italy.
Aidan’s monastery on Lindisfarne recruited English boys for training as missionaries among their still largely pagan compatriots. Aidan himself, though he did travel his diocese on foot, had little English and he seems to have been most effective in his mission at court, where the king, a fluent Irish speaker, interpreted for his ealdormen and thegns. But top down conversion was the Anglo-Saxon royal way, as well as the Roman way. Being a king, Oswald wanted results, though systematic missionary campaigning in partnership with the authorities was not the Irish style, in fact was ‘unique as far as the Irish are concerned’.7 Aidan was followed by Irish monks, some ordained as priests, who could baptize as well as preach. They and their Anglo-Saxon disciples were basically responsible not just for the conversion of Northumbria but also for continuing the work begun by Paulinus south of the Humber.
In general Irish monks undertook pilgrimage for spiritual self-improvement rather than as a missionary vocation. The Latin term peregrinus (pilgrim) is often used in a technical sense for these Irish religious travellers, who combined pilgrimage with missionary activity. One might preach to the locals; he might move on; a group of peregrini might found a monastery, less to work among the surrounding community than as a retreat. Island monasteries like Iona were favoured. When St Wilfrid arrived in pagan Sussex, years later, a small Irish monastery had been established in the woodland wastes by the coast at Bosham for some years, with no discernible effect on the locality. Wilfrid converted the entire kingdom in short order.
Oswald of Northumbria: royal saint or pagan icon
In a reign of eight years Oswald so dominated affairs throughout Britain south of Pictland that, in Bede’s view, he achieved the imperium. He annexed the kingdom of Lindsey, where Mercia also had an interest, and married the daughter of Cynegils of Wessex on the condition that her father convert to Christianity. Oswald stood godfather and, as we have seen, is named as joint donor when Cynegils confers Dorchester-upon-Thames on Birinus, first bishop of Wessex, as the seat of his diocese: a practical exercise of the kind of authority implicit in the word imperium.
It seems that Oswald’s influence reached even into Kent. Bede tells us that Edwin’s widow sent her children across the Channel to the court of the Merovingian King Dagobert for fear of Oswald. He also claims that the kings of Dál Riata and Pictland recognized Oswald’s supremacy, while another contemporary flatteringly refers to him as ‘ordained by god, imperator of the whole of Britain’ [totius Britanniae imperator a deo ordinatus].8 But, despite Oswald’s victory at Heavenfield, Penda was still a threat and on 5 August 642 the pagan king of Mercia defeated and killed his Christian Northumbrian rival at the battle of Maserfelth. The location of Maserfelth is still disputed, favoured candidates being Oswestry (i.e. ‘Oswald’s tree’) in Shropshire and a site in Lindsey.
Writing a century after the king-saint’s death, Bede retails many miracles attributed to Oswald, both to his relics and even to the blood-soaked ground where he fell. Behind all these anecdotes seems to loom the backdrop of a pagan king cult. After the battle, his dead body was taken up and ritually dismembered under the gaze of the pagan King Penda. The head and the four limbs were then hung from the branches of a tree: ‘In this hanging of parts of the king’s body we can almost detect a ritual offering to Woden the god of war and himself known as the Hanging God.’9 For two centuries the head was venerated at Lindisfarne; later, Willibrord’s foundation at Utrecht claimed to hold it in a reliquary and there are numerous other marvels as the cult spread in Europe.
Besides the dismemberment of the body, some of the Oswald stories display other pagan elements. A horse fell into convulsions and was cured after rolling on the very patch of ground where the king fell. That a horse should benefit from the saint’s miraculous powers seems odd, until we remember the important role of horses in Anglo-Saxon pagan beliefs. Horses were believed to conduct the souls of their masters to paradise after death.10 A burial excavation at Lakenheath, Suffolk, in 1998 revealed the skeleton of a warrior of the early Anglo-Saxon period, sword in hand, with the skeleton of his horse, legs flexed, lying at his side.11
The most famous of all Oswald relics was the right forearm and hand (important in the pagan cult of the praying sacral king), which apparently remained fleshy and firm long after death. At one Easter banquet, Bede tells us, the king had been distributing food to a crowd of beggars. When supplies ran out, he called his smith to break up the silver platter into coin-size pieces for distribution. Bishop Aidan made a blessing: ‘May this arm never perish.’ Four centuries later, transported south from its shrine at Bamburgh, the right arm was still working its magic in Peterborough Abbey. The cult was to become widespread on the Continent. In one version a raven is mysteriously involved and the pagan Germanic associations are echoed in other ways.
From the battle of Maserfelth to the Synod of Whitby
From the start, dynastic and religious policy were enmeshed: the church hoping to exploit court influence to win converts and acquire endowments; kings supporting the missions as a way of projecting their influence. In 643 Oswiu recovered the severed head and arms of his dead brother, intending to create a royal cult. He founded a new church to St Peter on the rock at Bamburgh, the ancestral home of the Bernician dynasty, to accommodate the arms, which were enshrined there in a silver reliquary before the 730s. The head was assigned to Lindisfarne. One feels that the popular allure of this royal cult owed a good deal to its association with pre-Christian beliefs and customs and that the church’s version aimed to sanitize it. The imperishable forearm (testified as incorrupt by Alcuin in the late eighth century) remained at Bamburgh until the 1050s.
Politically, the death of Oswald split the two kingdoms once again. While his brother Oswiu succeeded in Bernicia, Deira broke away under their cousin Oswine, whose father, Osric, had been the ruler who had led the kingdom back to paganism during the dark days after Maserfelth. Despite this ancestry, Bede considered Oswine the perfect Christian king, while the Deirans themselves long resisted the rule of Oswiu. He, however, was determined to achieve a united kingdom.
Setting aside an earlier British/Irish wife, Oswiu now embarked on a marriage that made dynastic sense but had religious complications. He sent south to the court of Kent where his cousin, the Roman Catholic Eanflæd
of Deira, was still living in exile. The two were well within the degrees of kinship considered incestuous by church law, but Rome made no objections, although the pope would surely have been informed about the marriage of this Christian princess. Oswiu saw the marriage as the way to affirm his dynastic rights in Deira; Rome may well have hoped for more far-reaching consequences. Either way, the Deirans were not impressed. Oswiu prepared to invade. What followed involved breaches of both the Christian and pagan codes that governed the world of the Anglo-Saxon noble. Oswine disbanded his army in the face of the enemy, itself shameful, and then went into hiding with one of his honoured companions, a gesith for whom loyalty to one’s lord was supposed to be an absolute obligation. In fact this man betrayed Oswine to his enemy, King Oswiu, who had him killed. Still the Deiran nobles refused to accept Oswiu as king and chose a remote cousin of Oswine’s to lead them.
Oswiu married one of his daughters to Penda’s son Peada, who converted to Christianity, and a son to Penda’s daughter Cyneburh. He also persuaded Sigeberht, king of the East Saxons, to be baptized. Penda’s response to what we might call Oswiu’s ‘religious diplomatic offensive’ came on 15 November 655. At the head of a massive army, and with the East Angles and the men of Deira at his side, he confronted the heavily outnumbered Bernician king at the River Winwaed, possibly near Leeds, and was himself destroyed.
The Northumbrians’ success in battle was, no doubt, an important element in their wealth. War booty was a prime source of income for a warrior society. As it advanced, the northern kingdom absorbed British kingdoms on the Pennines, such as Elmet, while their British enemies further west could exploit the gold mines of North Wales. Nor should one forget that Eboracum (later York) was one of the richest of Roman centres. The conquest of Pictish territories to the north (at one point the Bernician kingdom embraced what is now Edinburgh – ‘Din Eidyn’ or ‘Edwin’s burh’, according to rival theories) no doubt yielded profits.
Most theories relating to post-Romano-British society and the transition to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms rely on speculation. The archaeological evidence for continuity can be ambiguous and limited even at such extensive and complex settlements as West Heslerton in North Yorkshire. But a peaceful transition from late Romano-British occupation to Anglian overlordship in the southern regions of Northumbria would have yielded dividends in terms of agrarian organization and prosperity.
Northumbria was secure and, in a gesture of triumph that would have been understood by every warrior, King Oswiu annexed to himself land in North Mercia reputedly 7,000 hides in area – exactly the extent of the lands that Hygelac, king of the Geats, awarded to Beowulf when he slew Grendel. He also founded twelve monasteries, among them Gilling, the site of Oswine’s murder, and Whitby (then called Streanæshalch). Deira was obliged to accept his son, Alchfrith, as its sub-king. But even now Northumbria’s southern kingdom still followed an independent line, above all in religion.
In addition to the short-lived dynastic alliance with Peada (to whom he gave the kingdom of Southern Mercia, but who died soon after that), Oswiu dispatched Irish and English clergy into Middle Anglia and beyond, and persuaded Sigeberht, king of the East Saxons, to accept both baptism and Cedd, of Lindisfarne, as bishop. Cedd built a church dedicated to St Peter at Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex, which is the oldest Anglo-Saxon building still more or less intact. Built on the site of a Roman fort about 653, using the original brick, it was in later generations used as a farm building. At the time it was an outpost of Northumbrian Irish Christianity, deep in the sphere of influence of the archbishops of Canterbury. Cedd also built a church at Tilbury, a further encroachment by the Ionian–Bernician bishop well beyond the boundaries of Northumbria but a fitting extension of influence for an appointee of Oswiu, holder of the imperium in Britain.
But now, under Alchfrith, Deira was going the Roman way. He ejected the Irish monks at the monastery of Ripon and in their place established his mother Queen Eanflæd’s dynamic favourite, Wilfrid. There were numerous points of difference between the Roman and parts of the Irish church: points of doctrine and biblical teaching; the style of the monks’ tonsure; and the date for the celebration of Easter. There were at least four systems for its calculation, one of which was used in the Roman church and by Canterbury, and another used in parts of Ireland and at Iona and Lindisfarne, and hence in Northumbria. The Northumbrian court was blessed with two factions: the king’s, what one might call the Iona/Lindisfarne party, and the Canterbury Queen’s party. At the very least it was inconvenient for the court to be celebrating this major religious event on days that might vary by as much as four weeks – and was led up to by forty days of fasting. But Oswiu and Eanflæd had accommodated the inconvenience for the best part of twenty years. Why was it that in 664 the king decided to settle the allegiance of the Northumbrian church? It is hard not to see Wilfrid as the prime mover.
Kings and noble clerics
It is now time to look at three of the most influential men in seventh-century Northumbrian society and politics, all born around the year 630 and entering their teenage years when King Oswiu came to the throne in 642, and all churchmen of aristocratic family: Cuthbert (d. 687); Benedict Biscop (originally Biscop Baducing, i.e. descendant of Baduc, d. 689); and Wilfrid (d. 709). Their careers, in different ways, illustrate the court church network in action; it could be close – Eanbald II, archbishop of York, apparently travelled his diocese accompanied by a sizeable guard of armed retainers, having given protection to enemies of the king.
There were recognized ranks of aristocratic status. A king’s companion, an established man of property or count (comes in Latin, gesith in Old English), came above a minister or knight (miles in Latin, thegn in Old English), but probably began his career as one. Then there were men of ‘ceorlisc’ standing, what we might call the minor gentry (like Alcuin’s family, in all probability), who as modest landholders were free but expected to defer to others of higher social status. Bede tells us that Benedict Biscop, churchman and artistic patron, was aged about twenty-five and a ‘minister’ of King Oswiu when the king gave him possession of land due to his rank. Virtually the same career pattern of royal land gifts raising a young warrior to the rank of companion is to be found in Beowulf. And the imagery of Christian warfare is always in the background. One of Biscop’s young relatives, Eostorwine, was a household warrior of King Ecgfrith (reigned 670–85) until aged twenty-four, when he laid down his arms and ‘girded himself for spiritual warfare’ as a monk.
Documentary sources, though scant, reveal a body of mid-seventh-century nobles both extremely wealthy and extremely powerful (others were landless and vagrant). Nor were the accoutrements of nobility necessarily discarded in holy orders. In one of his letters St Boniface deplores flamboyant styles in clothes by high churchmen and berates some who still bear arms after taking orders. And yet quality arms were as much part of the noble’s lifestyle as the monk’ tonsure was part of his. A father was expected to kit out his son’s debut at court, if only for the family honour. To appear at court poorly equipped would be a shameful thing.
Young noblemen tended to resent being bossed about by other young noblemen, however holy. Ceolfrith, Bede’s abbot at Monkwearmouth Jarrow, was forced to resign and withdraw from the abbey because of jealousies and violent criticism from some of the noble brethren on account of his strict discipline. According to Boniface there were English churchmen who dressed in garments embellished with ‘dragons’ (oriental silks?). On the other hand, life in the church could offer challenge and openings to intelligent and ambitious minds.
Cuthbert, the first of our nobleman clerics, was being recognized as the unofficial patron saint of the Northumbrians within a generation of his death in 687; in 1987 he was focus of a notable 1,300th anniversary celebration. He entered the monastery of Melrose on the River Tweed aged about fourteen; the fact that he made his arrival mounted on horseback, carrying a spear and attended by a servant backs the assumption that his family were members of th
e nobility. Tradition speaks of him guarding his lord’s sheep, but in a society where, witness Old English law codes, sheep rustling was rife (as, according to press reports, it is again today on England’s northern fells) this could as well have been the armed service of a retainer as the duty of a peasant shepherd. (The shepherds carved on the mysterious Franks Casket (see page 86) carry spears.) In fact, Cuthbert may first have considered the military way – an anonymous ‘Life’ speaks of the boy having served with an army ‘in the face of the enemy’. In the early 650s, before Winwaed, with the pagan forces of Mercia constantly probing the defences of Bernicia and with ‘noblemen from many a kingdom flocking to serve the bountiful Oswine of Deira’, a warrior’s career would have been a natural choice for a young Christian aristocrat. After Winwaed, service in the militia dei, the ‘army of god’, would have made more sense. Cuthbert had easy relations with the royal family: he rose to be first prior and then bishop at the royal foundation of Lindisfarne; the gold and garnet pectoral cross, preserved as his in the treasury at Durham Cathedral, is a nobleman’s jewel. And yet St Cuthbert was, and is, honoured for his humble piety. Raised against his will to be bishop of Lindisfarne in 685, he ended his days as a hermit on the island of Inner Farne, the death of this ‘child of God’, Bede’s favourite name for him, ‘being signalled to his community on Lindisfarne by the waving of torches from the cliff top’.12
Cuthbert is one of that select band of medieval personalities in England, like Julian of Norwich or Henry V, who still enjoy recognition status. Of greater importance in the story of Northumbria’s European Golden Age, Benedict Biscop (i.e. the bishop) was originally a prominent young courtier in the hall of King Oswiu. (In later life he would appoint a deputy for his religious duties precisely because he was so often called away to consult with kings.) In 652/3, when they were both about thirty, he left England for Rome in company with Wilfrid, another young noble. This was the first of numerous visits. In 666, returning from his second trip, Biscop stopped off at the monastery on the Iles Lérins, across the bay from Cannes, thus anticipating Lord Brougham’s preferred Riviera retreat – though, in contradistinction to his lordship, taking the tonsure as a monk. Only six years earlier the monks had adopted the monastic Rule of St Benedict; Baducing adopted Benedict as his new name in religion.
A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Page 11