Admiral Collingwood

by Max Adams

  We do not know what Oswald looked like except that, like all warrior kings of the age, he probably wore his hair long and sported an extravagant moustache. Even by the standards of the day his was a short and bloody rule, his end summary and brutal. In death his severed head and arms were displayed on stakes at a place which came to be known as Oswald’s Tree or Oswestry and his skull, a sacred possession of Durham Cathedral, exhibits a sword-cut wide enough to accommodate three fingers. His post-mortem career was as extraordinary as his life and death had been. Many miracles were said to have taken place where he fell and in later times his relics (rather too many of them, in truth) were valued for their virtue and potency right across Europe.

  Oswald’s historical significance is greater even than the sum of his parts. He forged a hybrid culture of Briton, Irish, Scot and Anglo-Saxon which gave rise to a glorious age of arts and language symbolised by his foundation of the monastery on Lindisfarne and the sumptuous manuscripts later crafted there by Northumbria’s monks. His political legacy was in part responsible for the Crusades and for Henry VIII’s break with Rome; and for the idea that Britain is a Christian state. He was the model for Tolkien’s Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. If popular history needs a heroic figure from the age of Beowulf, there is no need to invent, or re-invent one. Oswald was the real thing.

  There are songs and memorial inscriptions and a substantial body of poetry surviving from the so-called Dark Ages, some of which celebrate the lives and deaths of ordinary folk: ceorl*2 and dreng, husband and wife. The written history of the period is very much concerned with kings and queens, with exiled princes, warriors and holy men; but the politics are instantly recognisable as that of any group of competing elite families: sibling rivalry, marital rows, betrayal and plotting for dynastic advantage are all there. Oswald was the product of such rivalries. He was born in about 604 into a family where politics were played for the highest possible stakes. For no-one were those stakes higher than for his mother.

  It was not easy being a seventh-century queen—particularly so in the case of Acha Yffing. She was the mother of six sons, a daughter and a stepson. Her husband was a great, perhaps the greatest, Early Medieval warlord: Æthelfrith Iding, king of Bernicia and Deira, overlord of North Britain; but in the long campaigning summer of 616 he was far away from his Northumbrian homeland, fighting British kings and massacring Christian monks on the marches of what is now Wales. Like his father and grandfather before him, he would die sword-in-hand. The British called him, with bitter irony, Eadfered Flesaur: Æthelfrith the Twister.

  As a woman Acha is virtually invisible. Her grave is unknown. Dr Tony Wilmott, Senior Archaeologist at English Heritage, informs me that a gravestone fragment recovered from excavations at Whitby Abbey in the 1920s bears the name ahhae+; if this is indeed the last resting-place of Oswald’s mother, it suggests that she survived until the mid-650s and was influential in the founding of the royal cult of the Idings at Whitby under Oswald’s brother, King Oswiu. After the death of Æthelfrith her fate is obscure, although there are two small clues. One is the destiny of her sons. The other is a name on a map. Acha, a minuscule hamlet close to the site of an ancient dun, or fort, lies nestled on the sheltered south coast of the Scottish island of Coll in the lee of low hills, which protect it from the pounding swell of the open Atlantic. If the place stands as a record of her residence there it is intriguing, because at least two of her sons, Oswald and Oswiu, were educated on the island of Iona, no more than twenty miles to the south, in the famous monastery of Saint Columba (more properly Colm Cille). One of those quirks that litter our hotchpotch linguistic heritage is that the Germanic name Acha is close to the word achaidh, which means, in Old Scots Gaelic, ‘field’ or ‘pasture’. So the name Dun Acha might have come into being to denote a fort with or near a field. We will never know. There are, though, good reasons for believing that Acha might have journeyed far to the north and west with her children in the aftermath of her husband’s violent death.

  Acha was the daughter of Ælle, king of the region called Deira between the rivers Humber and Tees. We can place her birth, perhaps, at one of the royal estates of the Deiran kings on the Yorkshire Wolds within three years or so of 585. It is reasonably likely that King Ælle was deposed either by Æthelric, the father of her future husband, or by Æthelfrith himself. He was the first to join the two ancient territories of Bernicia and Deira and unite them as one kingdom of the peoples north of the Humber: the Norðanhymbrenses or Northumbrians.*3 He probably did so by force. We can place their marriage close to the year 603, and the birth of Acha’s first child, Oswald, a year later. Marriages of political convenience or alliance were absolutely normal in the higher reaches of Early Medieval tribal society. Sometimes the marriage cemented an alliance ensuring the future prospects of both families and kingdoms; sometimes it reflected the superiority of one king over another, who must offer a daughter to seal his submission; at other times it might be designed to put an end to a feud. The male offspring of the union might be regarded as legitimate potential rulers of a united kingdom—if they survived.

  The status of potential kings, nobles of sufficiently high birth, came with the Anglo-Saxon epithet ‘atheling’. It was not an equivalent to the modern concept of the heir to the throne, because on the death of an Early Medieval king all bets were off; it rather encoded the right to be considered a possible legitimate king of the future—a future which must be secured by arms or the overwhelming political will of an aristocratic elite.

  That a daughter might be offered, willing or unwilling, to a future husband, especially one who was complicit in the deposition or murder of her father, is unpalatable; but it does not mean that royal women lived passive lives as mere atheling breeders and cup-bearers to their lords and masters. Far from it. The seventh century is outstanding for the number of women who played active, sometimes decisive roles in the fortunes of kingdoms, both earthly and spiritual. They are not to be underestimated. They had their own queenly agendas, engineering lines of patronage for their families, acting as brakes on hot-headed husbands, as brokers of deals, as pacifiers and landowners in their own right. Moreover, they might possess great tracts of land and wield the powers of patronage that came with such wealth. For the Beowulf poet the ideal was ‘a noble Princess, fit to be the pledge of peace between nations’. She ‘would move among the younger men in the hall, stirring their spirits; she would bestow a torc often upon a warrior before she went to her seat’. But her over-riding political role was not lost to the poet: ‘She is betrothed to Ingeld, this girl attired in gold… The Protector of the Danes has determined this and accounts it wisdom, the keeper of the land, thus to end all the feud and their fatal wars by means of the lady.’3

  Politics and status notwithstanding, in the year 617, after perhaps thirteen years of marriage, Acha Yffing found herself in a peculiarly unattractive and invidious position. We cannot know if her husband was the murderer or sponsor of the murderer of her father, even if we suspect it. But we do know who killed her husband, ambushing him on the southern borders of his lands where the old Roman Ermine Street crossed the River Idle near Bawtry in South Yorkshire.

  Acha had a brother: two, in fact. Little is known about one, except that he sired two famous granddaughters and caused a small war of conquest. The other was called Edwin. As adults he and Acha can hardly have remembered each other. Edwin, born a year or so after his sister, had been in exile these many years. Deiran atheling without a homeland, freelance warrior, he sought protection and patronage where he might in the kingdoms of the Britons and the Southern English. Through all this time Acha’s husband took a close, almost obsessive interest in Edwin’s career: he spent some years trying to have him killed. Æthelfrith’s failure to bribe Edwin’s protector (the king in question, Raedwald of East Anglia, was put off by some harsh words from his queen) was fatal. Edwin lived to kill his persecutor on the field of battle and claim Northumbria for himself.

  Acha may have considere
d waiting for her brother Edwin that late summer of 617, to ascertain his intentions towards her and her sons. That she did not speaks volumes for her state of mind and the advice of her counsellors. Shakespeare’s nephew-killing Richard III was a dynastic pragmatist. So was Edwin; and so was his sister. As far as one can tell, on hearing of the death of her husband she gathered her children, her personal treasures and a group of loyal warriors and fled north. Edwin, reclaiming his kingdom, would have summarily dispatched his nephews without a thought for sisterly sentiment.

  The Venerable Bede, first historian of the English and an accomplished investigator, could write only sketchily in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People of events which took place fifty years or so before his own birth:

  During the whole of Edwin’s reign the sons of King Æthelfrith his predecessor, together with many young nobles, were living in exile among the Irish or the Picts…4

  Bede had good reason to know of such things, for he had distinguished correspondents on Iona, the principal monastery and school of Dál Riata (which is what he means when he talks of the Irish); for their part, the Iona chroniclers had special reasons for recording the presence of Oswald at their monastery. He was their Northumbrian king. Bede does not say that their mother Acha went with them. But to risk her brother’s vengeance would have been suicidal. Besides, when the boot was on the other foot—that is to say, when King Edwin was himself killed—Bede records that his queen, Æthelburh, did not hesitate to take her children with her into exile among her relatives at a very safe distance: Paris, to be exact.

  Pagan queens who lost their kings in war did not necessarily find themselves disposable or politically irrelevant. Their potential role as negotiators, as counsellors or as senior representatives of their dynasties might save them. A widowed queen of Kent married her stepson on his accession, although it ended ill: Bede reported with satisfaction that the offender was afflicted by madness and possessed of unclean spirits.5 Heathen dowagers may on occasion have been executed or left to live on the equivalent of a pension—a small estate perhaps. But the arrival of Christianity in the days of Edwin and Oswald subtly changed the status of noble women. The sanctuary of the monastery came to offer a relatively comfortable, peaceful retirement, as it also became an attractive career option for royal women who were not destined to be queens.

  Acha, then, probably carried her children into exile. It is not immediately clear exactly why she chose the Scottic court of Dál Riata as a place to seek sanctuary but she was not the first Northumbrian to do so and perhaps her sons could claim paternal relations at their court.*4 If, as historians infer, her six natural sons were baptised and educated on Iona, she would not have been able to live with them: Iona was forbidden to women. There was an island sanctuary close by in the Sound of Iona, however—Eilean nam Ban—where she and her daughter Æbbe might live in the company of other women. But there is always the chance that she was given the little dun on the island of Coll, facing south towards Iona and only a day’s hard rowing away.

  Oswald went into exile with his brothers and a group of young nobles when he was twelve years old. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Bernician king-list in the Historia Brittonum, both compiled a couple of hundred years later, give him five brothers and a sister, Æbbe.6 Oswald also had a half-brother, Eanfrith. He was the son referred to by Bede as living in exile among the Picts; he married a Pictish wife and his son, Talorgen, became king of that enigmatic northern nation. Of the ‘uterine’ brothers—those borne by Acha—one, Oswiu, is equally certain: he succeeded Oswald as king of all Northumbria and reigned for twenty-eight hugely significant years. The four others can be permed from two lists which do not quite agree but which include: Osguid, Oswudu, Oslac, Oslaph and Offa.*5 In a sense, it matters little whether they were all real or not; none of them appears again in the historical record. If they survived childhood fevers and early adventures on the field of battle to return to their fatherland with Oswald, no historian recorded it. But the sums add up. Oswald was born in 604, a year or so after his parents’ marriage. King Æthelfrith died in about 617, which leaves a period of twelve or thirteen years in which Acha might plausibly have borne all six alliterative sons and one daughter. Oswiu, born in about 612, would fit into that sequence as the fifth child. Oswald, Oswiu and Æbbe, the survivors, lived to play their parts on the grand stage.

  There is a point at which academics run out of firm ground and either retreat or risk ridicule. Leaving them behind, the sword-and-sandal historical novelist leaps into the quicksand of imagination and uncertainty, which leads sometimes to insight, often to fantasy. The biographer is left beached with a risk-assessment form to fill in. The academic archaeologist or historian cannot do other than project conventional wisdom on to the unknown. They must ask what so-and-so would have done following the cultural rules of the time. They must balance probabilities and err on the side of caution. They must rationalise. They will allow an average man three score years and ten; they weigh the accidents and balls-ups and offer a balanced probability.

  The real world, it is all too clear, is full of irrationality, whim, chance event and unintended consequence. Who would dare to suggest without a trustworthy record that England’s seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore—a contemporary of Oswald—would be a Greek from Asia Minor, plucked from his studies in Rome at the age of sixty-seven and sent to England without knowing anything of the language or culture of the English; that he would set the essential foundations for ecclesiastical organisation which survives in the modern Anglican church; and that he would die as Archbishop twenty-one years later at the age of eighty-eight? Nobody would bet on such a thing. The academic cannot project more than ordinary likelihood on to the invisible lives of historic figures; novelists must make them up.

  There is no point pretending that Oswald’s childhood can be reconstructed. We do not know his birthplace; we cannot say if he was healthy or happy; there is no point picturing him gazing wistfully at the island of Lindisfarne from the ramparts of his home and wondering about his destiny as an atheling. Still, his childhood has a context and a geography that are real and tangible. The seventh-century landscape of his homeland survives in its essence: you can go there and look at it for yourself.

  Oswald was a child of the Bernician royal family, which, inevitably, traced its origins to the pagan god Woden. Bede believed the Bernicians to be Angles, said to have emigrated from the ancestral lands of Angeln around the base of the Jutland Peninsula some time in the middle of the fifth century. Their seat of power lay on the coast of north Northumberland at the fortress of Bamburgh; the lands that they claimed to rule lay broadly between the River Tyne and the River Forth. The brooding, massive castle, which stands there today on a sand-blasted outcrop of the igneous Whin Sill that forms the spine of Hadrian’s Wall, is a caprice of the Victorian arms manufacturer William Armstrong (1810–1900). His grand house at Cragside near Rothbury is full of technical wonders: a pioneering hydro-electricity supply, a novel passenger lift, a water-powered roasting spit, a Turkish bath. An indefatigable industrialist, like a Bernician overlord he patronised the elite artisans and craftsmen of his day. The house is sumptuous in every detail: grotesquely so, almost. His occasional guests, who over the years included the Shah of Persia, the King of Siam, the Prime Minister of China and the Prince and Princess of Wales, might well have believed themselves transported back to the golden-gabled hall of Beowulf’s Heorot.

  An entry in the Historia Regum, a work traditionally attributed to Symeon of Durham but which may preserve parts of an eighth-century chronicle, describes the fortress as it must have been in the Early Medieval period:

  The city of Bebba is extremely well-fortified, but by no means large, containing about the space of two or three fields, having one hollowed entrance ascending in a wonderful manner by steps. It has, on the summit of the hill, a church of very beautiful architecture, in which is a fair and costly shrine. In this, wrapped in a pall, lies the uncorrupted ri
ght hand of St Oswald, king, as Bede the historian of this nation relates. There is on the west and highest point of this citadel, a well, excavated with extraordinary labour, sweet to drink and very pure to the sight.*6

  The entrance at the north-west corner of the castle, known as St Oswald’s Gate, survives. The original wooden palisade of the British fortress, later replaced by a stone rampart and recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ‘E’ version under the year 547, must lie beneath medieval and later walls. The church of St Peter, mentioned by Bede, likely stood on the site of the present church at the east corner of the citadel. The great hall, which must have crowned the height of the stronghold, probably lay to the east of the medieval keep. A fragment of a carved stone chair discovered in the nineteenth century is likely to be part of the original throne of the Bernician kings, their ‘seat of paternal antiquity’.*7

  That real people lived and died here is all too evident from recent excavations of an Early Medieval cemetery just to the south-east among the sand dunes that periodically swallow the coastline here. The evocatively named Bowl Hole, first revealed by chance after a great storm in 1816, has yielded more than a hundred graves dating to the century either side of Oswald’s birth.7 These were well-fed people who had grown up not at Bamburgh itself but apparently all over Bernicia; their teeth had munched on rich food, although many suffered childhood stress—scarlet fever, perhaps. Some of the men appear to have been buried with parcels of food, perhaps from their funeral feasts. Only one or two had suffered weapon injuries, which would tell of great deeds in battle; maybe the real warriors never made it home to be buried here. There is no evidence for the interment of kings; there is a royal cemetery somewhere in Bamburgh that still awaits discovery when the sands shift one more fateful time. What is so fascinating is the range of styles of burial at the Bowl Hole: some in stone-lined cists (a thoroughly British Christian rite), some flexed on their sides, some lying supine and others prone, on their faces. Not all of them were born locally, either: at least one, judging by the chemical traces left in his teeth, was born on the west coast of Scotland—on Iona, perhaps.8 Was he a companion of Oswald?