by H A CULLEY
I was eleven when this story begins and my father was two years short of forty. I had known vaguely that I had a great-uncle called Eadwulf who had been King of Northumbria for a few months before the boy king, Osred, took the crown from him. Now Eadwulf’s son, Eardwine, was challenging the present king, Eadbehrt, for the throne.
I found it all very confusing until my father explained it to me. The descendants of Ida – the man who had built the original fortress of Bebbanburg – were æthelings, meaning throne-worthy. Ida’s grandson, Æthelfrith, had united the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira to form Northumbria - literally the land north of the River Humber. His sons and grandsons had ruled Northumbria until the last king of his house, Osric, had died.
That was when the problems started. There had been a couple of usurpers before this - my great-uncle Eadwulf being one of them - but now there were a number of nobles descended from one of Ida’s many sons who had a claim to the crown. The strongest of them, Eadbehrt, had been elected by the Witan when the previous king, Coelwulf, abdicated and became a simple monk on Lindisfarne.
Both Renweard and I were at the monastery on Lindisfarne being educated at the time and the former king was a great curiosity to us boys for a while. However, novelty is short lived and soon he became just another member of the community.
When I left there at fourteen to return to Bebbanburg and join other boys my age to be trained as warriors, I found out that Eadbehrt had been a controversial choice to succeed him. One of the original royal family, Otta, was still alive in exile. It was also whispered that Osred had raped a nun when he was thirteen and that the bastard born of their sacrilegious union was now the Ealdorman of Berwic, which lay at the mouth of the River Twaid to the north of Bebbanburg. His name was Æthelwold Moll and he was a great friend of my father’s.
Like his brother, King Osred, Otta had the reputation for being an irreverent wastrel and had been passed over in the past. Now he was said to be a reformed character and many thought he had a better right to the throne than Eadbehrt. Privately I thought that Ealdorman Æthelwold probably had a better claim than any, if the stories were true, but I kept my thoughts to myself.
However, it was Eardwine who first challenged King Eadbehrt in the spring of 745.
‘This is bad news for our family, boys,’ my father told us one night in the hall at Bebbanburg as we sat around the central hearth watching the smoke – or most of it – curl lazily upwards to be sucked out of the hole in the roof by the strong easterly wind off the sea.
‘Your grandfather, Swefred, allowed his brother, Eadwulf, to become a monk and escape King Osred’s justice after he was defeated by him, something the boy king never forgave him for. As you know, Eadwulf reneged on his sacred vows and became a warrior in Ireland. He married and had a son, my cousin Eardwine. Eadwulf died in some minor war but his son landed in Cumbria a month ago with an Irish warband.
‘We have to tread very carefully. We have always been loyal to the king appointed by the Witan, but many will believe that we are tainted by our relationship to Eardwine. What is worse, we are likely to be the losers whoever wins: Eardwine because he blames Swefred for defeating his father and sending him into exile and Eadbehrt because he doesn’t trust us. Needless to say, my cousin’s revolt will have made matters far worse.’
I was now a trained warrior and a member of my father’s gesith – the companions who formed his bodyguard – whilst Renweard was in his last year of military training. We realised at that moment that what had at first seemed of little relevance to us up here in the North, remote from the politics of the court at Eoforwīc in the south of Deira, was likely to have a significant effect on our lives.
‘What do we do, father,’ Renweard asked whilst I was still trying to make sense of all this in my mind.
Instead of replying, he turned to me.
‘What do you think, Seofon?’
‘Well,’ I replied slowly after thinking through the options. ‘There is little to be gained by siding with Eardwine. He will want revenge on us whatever we do. However, if we support Eadbehrt then, hopefully, he might well regard you as a loyal subject from now on.’
‘I couldn’t have put it better. Well done. Go and tell Uurad to call out the fyrd. In two weeks time we march to join the muster at Hexham.’
‘Even me, father,’ Renweard asked hopefully.
‘No, your mother would never forgive me if I took you to war before you’ve finished your training. However, I have an important job for you. I want you to stay here and help your mother and the reeve to prepare to defend our home.’
~~~
I felt immensely satisfied with life as I rode behind my father and Uurad on the road to Hexham. The weather was fine but there had been enough rain in the past week to keep the roads from being too dusty. As we travelled down the old Roman road to Alnwic the sheep on the hillsides looked incuriously at us and the cattle carried on eating grass. It was an idyllic pastoral scene and it seemed inconceivable that we were off to war.
I was in charge of the Bebbanburg banner and that made me extremely proud. Of course it was furled and kept in the baggage wagons during the journey, but it would be unfurled so I could carry it for the last few miles to let King Eadbehrt know that the men of Bebbanburg had arrived.
We weren’t alone. Æthelwold Moll had ridden down from Berwic and when we reached Alnwic, their ealdorman - Eochaid - joined the column. Eochaid complained to my father that he was too old for this sort of thing now, but if that was the case he could have stayed at home and let his eldest son take his men to the muster. He was approaching sixty, twenty years older than my father so the king would have understood.
I was slightly in awe of his sons, although I would never have admitted it. Acwulf was twenty five and Bryce was four years younger. There was also a daughter – Hilda – who was about five at the time. It caused quite a stir when she was born because his wife, my aunt Guthild, was over fifty and had shown no sign of being pregnant. Everyone accepted Hilda as Eochaid’s and Guthild’s daughter but it was rumoured that her birth mother was, in reality, one of the slaves that worked in the hall.
The elder son helped his father to rule the shire whilst Bryce was captain of his gesith. Both teased me, not unexpectedly as I was the youngest member of Ulfric’s gesith, but they had known me since I was a baby and it was all good natured. To be honest I enjoyed the attention.
The king’s encampment looked enormous to me, about four times the ground covered by the settlement below the stronghold at Bebbanburg and that had a population of four hundred. Of course, here there were leather tents of various sizes instead of huts and instead of the thegn’s hall there was a large tent in the middle of the rest. Obviously it belonged to the king and that’s where my father and the other two ealdormen headed whilst the captains led the men off to find somewhere to camp.
The three ealdormen rode up to the king’s tent with their banner bearers so I was lucky enough to be present at the meeting.
The king wasn’t alone in the tent, apart from a few servants another man was sitting with him. They looked so similar that I would have known him for his brother, Ecgbert, Archbishop of Eoforwīc, even if it hadn’t been for the cleric robes and the large gold pectoral cross. One of the last acts of the previous king, the saintly Ceolwulf, was to persuade the Pope to raise Eoforwīc to be an archdiocese. It hadn’t pleased the Archbishop of Cantwareburg overmuch as it challenged his position as the Metropolitan of All England; nor had the creation of a fourth diocese in Northumbria – that of Whithorn in Galloway – pleased the Bishop of Hexham as he’d lost Cumbria from his see.
‘Welcome.’ Eadbehrt said. ‘I’m glad you’ve chosen the right side, Ulfric. I half expected you to support your wretched cousin.’
As a greeting it could have been warmer.
‘I don’t know the man, Cyning, and our fathers hated each other. This branch of the family has ever been loyal to the true King of Northumbria. I can’t think why you thought
otherwise.’
It was as close to a rebuke as my father dared to go.
‘You won’t be aware of the latest developments,’ Eadbehrt said, scowling at the riposte. ‘The Picts have decided to support your cousin.’
This clearly puzzled my father. He’d told me some time ago that their king, Óengus mac Fergus, didn’t want war with Northumbria.
‘How do we know this, Cyning?’ he asked.
‘Because a party of my scouts has reported them streaming over the River Kelvin heading for Lothian,’ he replied impatiently.
‘Surely that’s more likely to be the Britons from Strathclyde? If it was Óengus and his Picts they would have had to cross Strathclyde territory to get there.’
From the ruddy hue of his face it was evident that the king was close to losing his temper.
‘Brother, I think Ulfric may be correct,’ the archbishop said softly before Eadbehrt could say anything more. ‘It does make more sense. Why would the Picts aid Eardwine? What do they have to gain? He’d hardly likely to have offered Lothian to Óengus; it’s too big a part of the kingdom. On the other hand he could well have offered Teudebur the Cumbrian part of Galloway back.’
Eadbehrt’s rage visibly diminished as he thought about what Ecgbert had said.
‘You may be right, I suppose. We need to find out.’
His eyes narrowed as he looked thoughtfully at my father.
‘How many horsemen have you got, Ulfric?’
‘Twenty five in my gesith and thirty eight of my warband are mounted.’
‘Sixty men should be sufficient. I want you to go and find out who these invaders are and in what strength they’ve crossed the Kelvin. I don’t want you to just report what you find; bring back captives who I can question myself. Understand?’
‘Yes, Cyning,’ my father replied stiffly.
The king couldn’t have made his distrust any plainer. It was obvious why he had chosen us; if we all got killed he wouldn’t shed any tears.
~~~
I sat beside my father on the ridge as the wind whipped around us and the rain hit us horizontally. It made seeing any distance difficult and, for all we knew, there could be thousands of our foes in the valley below us and we’d have been none the wiser.
‘This is hopeless,’ Uurad muttered. ‘We can’t see anything from up here and if we go down there, where they are likely to be, we’ll run into them and get wiped out.’
‘You’re right. The best thing we can do is to seek shelter and hope for better conditions tomorrow,’ my father muttered with a curse or two thrown in.
We were travelling light and so we were unencumbered by such luxuries as tents or cooking pots. Lighting a fire in such conditions was out of the question in any case. I was starving but all I had to eat was a lump of stale bread with mould growing on it and a lump of cheese that was nearly as hard as the bread. I’d be lucky if I had any unbroken teeth left by the end of the week.
That night I tried to sleep wrapped in my sodden cloak but without much success. I was actually glad when my turn to stand watch came round. I was surprised at how stiff I was until I’d moved about a little. I took over from another warrior who disabused me of the notion that at least I could now exercise my stiff limbs.
‘Stand against this tree,’ he instructed me in a soft whisper, ‘and don’t move a muscle. Keep awake and keep your eyes peeled. If you move any enemy out there will know where you are and you’ll end up with your throat cut.’
For the first hour I was too petrified to move but I began to feel sleepy and thought that if I moved about quietly that should be alright. Besides I needed to take a piss. I was just about to edge away from the tree when I thought I saw something move.
It wasn’t the first time I thought that. Staring out into the darkness with the rain pattering on the leaves had convinced me several times that I was about to be attacked but it was just my imagination. This time it wasn’t. I could just make out a figure in the gloom and then I definitely heard a twig snap.
I didn’t know what to do. No-one had actually told me what should happen if I suspected that we were about to be attacked. If I yelled out a warning the man a few yards away from me would probably attack me and, although I was trained, I had never actually fought anyone for real. The odds of me winning a fight were not good.
I had put my heavy shield against the tree with my spear and my sword and seax were in their scabbards. I tried to ease my seax out of its sheath as slowly and quietly as I could. The figure stopped for a moment and I thought that he’d spotted me. However, a few seconds later he continued to move, not towards me but to my left.
I held my breath and waited until he was two yards away and then I leaped out and thrust the point of my seax through his neck. I was rewarded by a metallic smell as hot blood sprayed over my face and byrnie. I remember cursing silently at the thought that now I’d have to clean it – a stupid reaction because I’d have to clean the rust off it anyway once the rain stopped.
The man gurgled and collapsed. The sound must have warned the others with him because they gave up all pretence at stealth and rushed towards the clearing where my father and his men were asleep.
‘Wake up,’ I yelled. ‘We’re under attack.’
I prayed my warning was in time. Everyone slept fully clothed and in their byrnies, if they had them - or leather jerkins if they didn’t - with their weapons beside them so that they could lay their hands on them in the dark. Luckily most had enough time to get to their feet and arm themselves with spear and shield. The attackers must have thought that we were only a small scouting party because we later estimated that there was scarcely more than a dozen of them.
By the time I’d checked my opponent was truly dead and made it back to the clearing it was all over. Not only had we escaped with barely a scratch – two men had flesh wounds that were soon stitched up – but we had managed to capture two of our foes alive. One was a middle-aged man and the other was a boy a year or so younger than me. That was good news, but the even better news was that the boy was the other warrior’s son.
‘If the man won’t tell us what we want to know, then torturing the boy should make him more talkative,’ Uurad told me with a grin. ‘You did well tonight, not only have you killed your first man but you saved us a few lives with your warning. Now go and find the body; anything valuable on it belongs to you.’
The threat to his son made the father only too willing to tell us what we wanted to know. They were indeed Britons from Strathclyde. We might not have seen anything from the ridge the previous afternoon, but they had seen the three of us sitting on our horses on the skyline and, thinking that we were just a few scouts, they had been sent to follow us and kill us. They had located us in the dark and the rain because they could hear the horses that we’d hobbled near our camp. Men could be very quiet but horses seldom are.
Of course, I was delighted by the praise my fellow warriors heaped upon me but Uurad brought me down to earth.
‘You were lucky, boy. If that man you spotted had gutted you instead of the other way around we might have been killed in our sleep. Next time, slip away silently and wake me instead of trying to be a hero.’
~~~
The weather slowly improved over the next few days. The Briton had also told us that they were going to join up with Eardwine and his Irish mercenaries. By this time the Cumbrians and the men of Luncæstershire arrived and we set off for the junction of Ewes Water and the River Teviot where the Britons and the Irish were due to muster. It was a part of Lothian that was largely uninhabited.
It seemed to me to be a strange place to gather an army as the foraging parties would have a hard time finding enough for the army to eat, but my father pointed out that from there they would have an easy march along Teviotdale and the valley of the River Twaid to the east coast. He added that nearer to Hawic there would a lot more farms and settlements; we needed to intercept them as quickly as possible.
From Hexham we wound our w
ay north up the valley of the North Tyne before crossing some hills before dropping down into Redesdale. It had taken us three days of hard marching but we knew we couldn’t afford to slacken the pace. Hawic was still four days away and it was likely that Eardwine had reached there by now. The local ealdorman had sent a messenger to his family before we left Hexham so they and the local population should be safely hidden in the Cheviot Hills by now, but the settlement would have suffered.
That evening my father came back from a meeting of the war council grim faced.
‘It seems we have another impossible mission,’ he told us when his gesith and the leaders of the warband and the fyrd had gathered. ‘This time I’m to take my horsemen and those of Eochaid and Æthelwold and try and delay the enemy until the king can catch up with us. I gather that that my grandfather and Eochaid did something similar in the war against the Picts nearly twenty years ago.
‘They held a pass and tricked the Picts into thinking that the whole Northumbrian army was on the reverse slope. That’s not going to work a second time, especially as they are traversing a river valley.’
‘So, what do we do, lord?’ Uurad asked.
‘They’ll have to cross a small river at its confluence with the Teviot. There is a small settlement on the east bank called Gedwearde which has a hall with a palisade, so I’m told.’
‘Can they not cross further down?’
‘Not without considerable difficulty. The water at the confluence of the two rivers is quite treacherous and below Gedwearde the land either side of the river is marshy. There is one crossing place opposite the settlement and that is man-made. We need to get there first, remove the stones under the water and improve the defences on the east bank.