A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Benedict returned to Rome and there (as we saw in chapter 2) encountered Theodore of Tarsus, the newly appointed seventh archbishop of Canterbury. They journeyed together and Benedict was able to introduce Theodore at the court of King Ecgberht of Kent. For a time he served as abbot of the monastery of Canterbury until Theodore’s assistant, Adrian, arrived. After yet another Rome visit Biscop returned for a time to Northumbria.

  For twenty years he had been tracking the north–south route across the shifting frontiers of warring semi-barbarian Christian kingdoms, all the time buying books, assembling treasures and making useful contacts. It was now time to begin a project that was to feed back into Europe’s culture for generations to come. In the year 673, on a tract of land given to him by King Ecgfrith, he began the building of the monastery of St Peter at Monkwearmouth, with the help of stonemasons recruited in Gaul/Francia, and apparently following a Continental layout. In 678 he was in Rome again, this time with Ceolfrith, who would succeed him as abbot at Monkwearmouth, and returned with a cantor in church music. Back in Bernicia, he began building the monastery at Jarrow, some seven miles north of Wearmouth on the River Tyne. As at St Peter’s, archaeology has revealed that the main stone buildings were decorated with coloured paintings, sculptures and coloured window glass and plaster.

  Wilfrid, appellant to Rome

  St Wilfrid of Ripon and York, the third of our networking clerics, is remembered (thanks to one of the finest biographies from the Middle Ages, written by his disciple Eddius) as the most brilliant and substantial figure in England in the seventh century and, so far as the records go, in Europe. As the son of a gentleman, the boy was expected to attend to the needs of the house guests, ‘whether they were kings’ companions or their slaves’, in the family home. But undefined trouble with a hostile stepmother led him to leave, about the year 648, aged fourteen. He evidently left without his father’s blessing since, his biographer tells us, he himself found the funds to ‘clothe, arm and mount both himself and his servants’.

  Wilfrid would not win his sainthood through the Christian virtue of humility. Court politics was tied in to church politics. King Oswiu followed the tradition of Iona, with Lindisfarne the kingdom’s senior episcopal see. Queen Eanflæd, baptized as a child at York by Bishop Paulinus and then exiled in Kent, adhered to the Roman tradition. Wilfrid became her protégé. About the year 652, after a brief time at Lindisfarne, he left Northumbria for Kent and the court at Canterbury, where the queen still had friends. From there, aged just twenty, a young aristocrat of substantial private means, he set out for his first sight of Rome in company with Biscop Baducing, some five years his senior and a very rich man. James Campbell has gone so far as to surmise that ‘had Biscop wished to provide his father with a really lavish, old fashioned burial – ship, . . . splendid personal adornments – the likelihood is that they would hardly have dented his resources.’13 One pictures him and Wilfrid as a couple of eighteenth-century milords on the Grand Tour, rather than as pious eight-century pilgrims.

  In Rome Wilfrid set himself to master the Roman method of the computus, the calculation for the date of Easter. On his return journey he strengthened his Continental allegiances, with a three-year stay at Lyon, where he also became a monk. Back in England in the early 660s, he was made abbot of Ripon. About 663 the Frankish churchman Agilbert, who for some years had been a bishop in Wessex, ordained Wilfrid priest at Ripon. Agilbert’s name, equivalent to Æthelberht, has led to the suggestion that he may have had ties with the royal house of Kent. The following year, 664, he led one of the factions at the historic Synod of Whitby (then called Streanæshalch) convened by King Oswiu at the abbey under the aegis of its abbess, Hild, to settle the Easter controversy.

  Related to the royal house, she had been baptized by Bishop Paulinus at York in 627, aged thirteen, together with King Edwin. She was well into her thirties when she decided to become a nun, possibly with the idea of joining her sister at Chelles, near Paris (see chapter 2). In fact, she was installed by Aidan as abbess of the convent of Hartlepool, and then by King Oswiu at his new foundation at Whitby. It was a ‘double’ foundation, that is for both men and women, with no fewer than five bishops among its alumni during Hild’s abbacy. Archaeology has revealed evidence of its Continental contacts. King Edwin’s relics were buried here, as were Hild’s, though later translated to Glastonbury.

  The Synod of Whitby and after

  The problem posed by the computation of Easter comes from the fact that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the anchor date for many major festivals in the Christian year, is related to the Jewish Passover, which in turn is related to the Jewish lunar year. And since the lunar calendar is moveable relative to the solar calendar, and since Christians celebrate Easter according to the lunar date, elaborate calculations are required to determine the date. The following of Rome on the matter of Easter, just as following Rome in the use of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate bible and the Gregorian chant of the musical rite, was a marker of Rome’s authority in western Christendom. So the decision at Whitby would not only be important to the Northumbrian court but also, through Northumbrian missionaries in the German territories and the Frankish church, in Europe. (The date of Christmas is no problem because it is fixed relative to the pagan Winter Solstice festival of the solar year.)

  Oswiu favoured Iona over Rome, but one feels his real interest was a unified observance rather than the triumph of a doctrine. The lineup of the opposing parties was: for Iona, Abbess Hild and the bishops Colman of Lindisfarne and Cedd of the East Saxons; for Rome, Queen Eanflæd, Bishop Agilbert the Frank and Wilfrid, who acted as Oswiu’s English interpreter and spokesman. As the technical debate ploughed on, Wilfrid observed that his side was advocating the system ordained by the pope in Rome, the successor of St Peter, holder of the keys of heaven. Colman had to admit this was so. At this point the king smilingly intervened to rule that since St Peter must surely know the answer, the Northumbrian church would follow the Roman way. (Bede reports the debate but in fact, after his death, Rome later came to adopt the computus proposed by Bede himself.)

  Later that year Oswiu nominated Wilfrid bishop of York. He crossed the Channel to be consecrated at Compiègne, where, with ceremonial pomp exceeding anything to be seen in England, he was borne into the oratory, by nine bishops seated upon a golden throne. But, then, everything to do with Wilfrid would appear to have been more than life-size. For St Peter’s, Ripon, he commissioned a copy of the Gospels in lettering of purest gold done on purpled parchment and bound in a gold case studded with costly gems. According to his biographer, Wilfrid’s church at Hexham, with its columns and side aisles, grand proportions, winding passages and spiral staircases, was unequalled by any structure north of the Alps; it was, need one add, designed by Wilfrid himself. Both here and at Ripon he built crypts as if to imitate that feature in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

  Because of Wilfrid ’s two-year absence on the Continent, the king made Chad bishop in his place. Canterbury intervened to depose Chad and restore Wilfrid, but when, in 677, Theodore went on to divide the diocese of York its bishop made his way to Rome to appeal to the pope. (On his way, this being Saint Wilfrid, he took time off to make the first conversion of the Frisians, having with him relics of St Oswald; see chapter 5). It was the first such appeal to the papal see and was a welcome boost to its authority at a time when it was in protracted controversy with the emperors at Constantinople over which was the ultimate authority in the universal church. Rome accepted the division of the York diocese but ordered the restoration of Wilfrid and authorized him to appoint the new bishops. But Rome also provided that the numerous monasteries (‘the kingdom of monasteries’) owing allegiance to Wilfrid be exempt from visitation by other bishops and be subject direct to Rome – a further accretion of papal influence.

  Two kings and a bishop

  In May 670, six years after Whitby, Oswiu died. He was followed by his son Ecgfrith, who checked the resurgent power of Merc
ia with a victory over its king, Wulfhere. But Bishop Wilfrid at York remained the dominant figure on the northern scene. Thanks to his persuasion the king’s wife, a virgin for twelve years of marriage, took vows as a nun. But King Ecgfrith rejected the papal settlement regarding York and, with the concurrence of Theodore of Canterbury, in 678 Wilfrid was forced into exile. No doubt there was political calculation behind the king’s decision: from Stamford (in modern Lincolnshire) to Perth in Scotland Wilfrid had spiritual rule of a ‘kingdom of churches’ of his own foundation to match the king’s secular realm.

  Naturally Wilfrid took his case to Rome again and meanwhile stayed for a time in Sussex, where, as we have seen, he converted the kingdom and founded the see of Selsey. Next he was given a bishopric by the king of Wessex, who also endowed him with extensive lands on the Isle of Wight.

  Ecgfrith continued Northumbria’s expansionist war-making with raids into Ireland and Pictland, where on 20 May 685 he was killed at the battle of Nechtansmere. He was succeeded by his halfbrother Aldfrith, called ‘the Learned’ (d. 705). An exile during the previous reign, he had found refuge among the Irish and had acquired a mastery of the language. Theodore, the ageing archbishop of Canterbury, brokered an agreement between Wilfrid and the king and for a time peace reigned. But, with his once great diocese divided and his influence reduced, Wilfrid took himself to Mercia, where he lived for a decade under the protection of King Æthelred and fostered the mission to Frisia. Where once he had ruled as a ‘clerical emperor’ in England, now he was principally confined to the foreign mission field of Frisia. In 703, however, the new archbishop of Canterbury decreed Wilfrid suspended from episcopal powers. Again Wilfrid went to Rome; again he won a partly favourable judgement. He and the archbishop were reconciled in 705. In the same year King Aldfrith died and was succeeded by Osred. For St Boniface, writing years later, his reign (706–16) marked the onset of Northumbrian decline. As to Wilfrid he lived three years into the new reign and died aged seventy-five, at Oundle in the territory of the Middle Angles, part of the kingdom of Mercia where he had been very active in the later part of his life. He left a will in the aristocratic mode, designating his successor as abbot at Ripon and bequeathing his extensive wealth between his following, the poor and two important churches in Rome. A great prince of the church had died; at Ripon he was immediately acclaimed a saint. His feast day is 12 October.

  The waning of the kingdom

  King Osred must have had some redeeming qualities since Wilfrid had adopted him as his spiritual son. For Boniface his principal offence seems to have been his abuse of the network of wealthy minsters that had sprung up within the ‘rhythms of elite secular life’. Often built in the precincts of Roman fortress or ‘city’ complexes, always richly endowed, usually centres of artistic output as well as meditation, they could be the private bailiwicks of noble or royal families, often with the ‘aspects of a special kind of nobleman’s club’. Remembering the duties of monastic hospitality, the convention of the itinerant court, and the fact that minsters comprised female as well as male establishments, one can appreciate that when Boniface referred to King Osred on a fornicating rampage through the kingdom’s nunneries he was almost certainly not speaking metaphorically.14

  Political rivalry and in-fighting made Northumbrian society increasingly lawless and the rewards for successful violence and oath breaking ever more tempting. Towards the end of his History Bede recounts the tale of a pious local man called Dryhthelm, who warned his family of the dangers of hell awaiting those who fell for such temptations – revealed to him in what, today, we would call an ‘out of body experience’. He had died and a man in a shining garment had guided him through the realms of the afterlife (rather as Virgil would lead Dante through Hell). They pass through three zones of sinners in various degrees of discomfort awaiting paradise until the final glimpse through a dazzling haze of the perfect in thought, word and deed, who have entered paradise immediately after their death.

  In some ways the passage anticipates the evolving concept of Purgatory, to which this Anglo-Saxon perception seems to have contributed. But the notion of an ‘interim paradise’ has been called ‘a necessary, influential and ideologically charged concept . . . within Anglo-Saxon England’.15 Such an idea of an afterlife abode with various levels would seem also to chime with the Norse Asgard, the home of the gods, where are to be found twelve ‘mansions’. The chief of these was Valhalla, the hall of Odin and the destiny of warriors slain in earthly battle. Anonymous Old English religious poems tell of heaven (‘heofon’) as a treasure-filled hall (echoes of the booty-filled mead hall of the heathen warrior world), of its entrance through a huge door ‘bound with precious treasure and wrapped with wonderful fastenings’ and of warriors thronging in ‘the heavenly kingdom where the Trinity rules the glorious mansions’.16 As in the Franks Casket, discussed below, the heroic tradition has parallels with Christian imagery (see page 86).

  In fact, eighth-century Northumbria, which saw Bede’s dedication of his History to King Ceolwulf, the European prestige of the cathedral school at York and its library, and the glory days of Hexham, was often on the edge of political anarchy. Sixteen kings in a hundred years: murders, depositions, abdications, usurpations, nobles contesting with the royal kin. Ceolwulf was briefly deposed in a nine-year reign before abdicating to retire into a monastery. For some twenty-odd years King Eadberht (735–58) reigned in relative stability represented by more or less regular coinage issues. For Alcuin (born about 740), given as a child into the care of Archbishop Ecgberht, brother to the king, these were happy years for the kingdom, ‘ruled over in harmony by the one wearing upon his shoulders the pallium sent by the pope, the other wearing on his head his ancestors’ ancient crown’. Eadberht abdicated to become a monk at the urgings of the patrician Æthelwold Moll. Murdered by palace servants after the briefest of reigns, Eadberht’s son was in fact succeeded by Æthelwold Moll. His six-year reign (759–65) brought a degree of stability to the proceedings. Of high noble standing, though not of royal blood, his claim may have been no worse, if no better, than that of Eadberht. As to him, David Rollason thinks it ‘notable’ that he accepted only after his brother had achieved the influential position of archbishop and states flatly ‘That the Northumbrian church was also involved in the dynastic disputes is beyond doubt.’17 There are indications that Alcuin himself had kinship links with the patrician king.

  Moll’s son Æthelred was driven from the throne after having ordered the killing of three courtiers in 779. His successor, Ælfwold, was murdered following a conspiracy by the ‘patrician’ Osred II (788–90), who was himself forcibly tonsured and exiled on the Isle of Man. Osred was deserted by his ‘soldiers’ while attempting a comeback in 792 and murdered by order of Æthelred, who had regained power. Then came another ‘patrician’, Osbald, king for a reign of twenty-seven days in 796. Alcuin knew about all this and in a letter speaks of the ‘blood of kings, princes and people shed through you and your family’. The turmoil continued. In 806 King Eardwulf was driven from the kingdom; he found sanctuary, according to a Frankish source, with Emperor Charles the Great who ordered his restoration. Whatever the role of great churchmen in dynastic disputes they seem to have brought the kingdom another problem, through evolving the concept of chartered bocland to secure landed endowments in perpetuity. Unscrupulous laymen realized that by founding a family monastery they could convert land into an hereditable possession by such a book or charter. The number of private monastic foundations rose and the stock of loan land available to the king in his capacity as gift-giver, and so his ability to recruit warriors to his service, went down. The defence of the kingdom suffered.

  The ninth century would see the continuing decline of Northumbria. The sack of Lindisfarne in 793, which seems such a marker to us, was probably less significant for the Northumbrians than the rise of Ecgberht of Wessex, who was claimed to have ravaged the northern kingdom and forced tribute. In 867 the Great Heathen army took York and the k
ingdoms of the Northumbrians were a thing of the past. But the glories of their golden age live on.

  Carvings and calligraphy

  When he came to the throne King Aldfrith was a man in his early fifties. Educated at Iona, he was fluent in Irish and in Bede’s opinion of ‘great learning’ (doctissimus). He was reputed to have offered Benedict Biscop land equivalent to eight peasant farms for a Mediterranean manuscript on cosmography: a man of culture.

  The mysterious carved box known as the Franks Casket (after the benefactor who bought and donated it to the British Museum) has teased people ever since its discovery in the early 1800s in a private house in the French village of Auzon, Haute Loire. It is Anglo-Saxon work of unknown provenance and is presumed to have been taken to the continent in the eighth or ninth century. It would have found an admiring audience of educated nobles and learned clerics at Aldfrith’s court. Oblong in shape, it comprises two side panels, two end panels and a lid, carved from whalebone ivory (a whale – the whale? – features among the carvings).

  Three pairs of scenes are depicted, each of which seems to oppose a pagan episode with a theme of Christian thought. It seems the designer must have had access to variant biblical readings and commentaries, variants that were to be found in books in Northumbrian libraries.18 The themes of kingship and empire, recurrent in the pages of Bede and Beowulf; of exile, a common experience of royals and nobles; of salvation and the afterlife, all seem present in the casket’s riddling interplay of words and images. The scene depicting the legendary Weland the Smith of pagan mythology is typical of the kind of cross-cultural fusion of Christian and English aristocratic culture that led one commentator to suggest that a churchman might have commissioned the piece. (One scholar has even proposed that Beowulf itself, a work using aristocratic secular stories in an essentially Christian context, may have been produced in a monastery or community of clergy.)