Edwin was now king of Northumbria. Rather than waiting around to see what her brother would do to the children of his usurper, Acha gathered them around her and fled into exile to Dal Riada. Unlike with Æthelfrith, there is no indication that Edwin sought to hunt down Æthelfrith’s heirs, but neither was Acha sufficiently sure of his reaction to return with them. So Oswald grew up in exile, a stranger among people very different from his kin. The kingdom of Dal Riada straddled the Irish Sea, stretching from Ulster to Argyll, and its people were Gaels and they were Christian; growing up among them, Oswald and the rest of his family were altered fundamentally.
When Edwin was, in turn, killed, Oswald returned at the head of a small army and killed his uncle’s killer, taking the throne of Northumbria. Having accepted Christianity in exile, once he was king Oswald sent to Iona, where he had received the faith, for missionaries to bring the new religion to his own people. The first bishop was a failure, but the second, Aidan, by his humble and simple approach, won many converts. Bede tells the story of the Easter feast, where Oswald breaks his silver plate to give to the poor, and then writes of his death in battle, after an eight-year reign, at the hands of the last great pagan king of the Anglo-Saxons, Penda of Mercia.
That, in a nutshell, is it. Not much on which to base a novel. But the work of scholars and archaeologists over the last few decades has allowed us to flesh out the story and give it much more muscle. Where before the professors of Old English, Old Welsh and History had little to do with each other, now they fruitfully collaborate, allowing the collation of the poetic and allusive records of Old Welsh with the more prosaic chronicles of the Anglo-Saxons, to much mutual benefit. Years of work have been spent trying to work out which names in one language correspond to which names in the other, and I have shamelessly piggybacked upon this work. Through such painstaking work I have assembled the hints that suggest Penda had a brother named Eowa, that his kingship was contested and by no means certain, and that the monks of Iona were implicated in Cadwallon’s defeat. This last deduction arises from the lines of poetry quoted in the story, when Cian laments his fallen lord:
From the plotting of strangers and iniquitous
Monks, as the water flows from the fountain,
Sad and heavy will be the day of Cadwallon.
The lines come from the Red Book of Hergest, a collection of Welsh poems written in the late-fourteenth century but containing material that is much older.
This brings us, neatly, to J. R. R. Tolkien. For according to a learned authorial conceit, the source of his tales of Middle-earth was the Red Book of Westmarch. Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University and one of his aims was to create a mythology for England, as the Red Book of Hergest, which contains the Mabinogion and other material, could be said to preserve the mythology of the Britons.
Many if not all the writers and scholars involved in Anglo-Saxon studies first came to the field through reading the professor’s stories – and I am one of them, so it is no accident that this story is called Oswald: Return of the King, in tribute and homage. Tolkien writes of Oswald in his seminal essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and the parallels between him and Aragorn – rightful king in exile returning to claim the throne – are obvious.
Oswald: Return of the King is imaginative history and, as such, it is as near a true story as I could write. Although the events of the story happened many centuries ago, there remain some surprising physical traces of those times. The inscription on the gravestone of Cadwallon’s father, Cadfan ap Iago, can still be seen, taken from the churchyard and embedded into the wall of Llangadwaladr Church, near Aberffraw on Anglesey. And not just stone has been preserved: extraordinarily, Oswald’s skull has been preserved and lies in St Cuthbert’s coffin in Durham Cathedral. Bamburgh Castle has been much rebuilt over the centuries, but St Oswald’s Gate survives, a stone testimony to the impregnability of the fortress of the Idings.
One point that needs comment is the use of human sacrifice by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Although there is documentary evidence that Germanic tribes from the first century and the Norse of the tenth and eleventh centuries practised human sacrifice, there is no direct historical account of its use by the Anglo-Saxons. The excavations at Ad Gefrin by Brian Hope-Taylor found many, apparently sacrificed, ox skulls but no human remains. However, a number of graves, notably those at Sewerby, Finglesham and Mitcham, have bodies of people who appear to have been killed to accompany the main funeral, while at Sutton Hoo there are a number of bodies that appear to have been executed or sacrificed (possibly both at the same time). The consensus among scholars is that the Anglo-Saxons, while coming from cultures that frequently practised human sacrifice, only rarely resorted to rendering people to the gods, probably only doing so at times of crisis or opportunity.
I have tried throughout to keep to what we know or, at least, can reasonably infer. The only place where I knowingly break from the historical record is at the end, where I have Oswald’s final battle taking place in winter rather than high summer as Bede records. To be honest, this was because I forgot at time of writing that Bede records the battle as taking place in August, but the memory lapse became, I hope, a fruitful artistic decision: this is a winter’s battle in implication if not time, and I decided to keep it as such.
Did Oswald really yearn to lay down his sword and become a monk? We do not know. Yet Bede, in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (our key source for this poorly documented time), portrays Oswald as a saint very much for his life rather than for his martyr’s death. That he was a convinced believer of the new religion is certain. Yet it is significant that when he turned for aid in building and evangelizing his kingdom, he sent to Iona and the people of Ireland, where Christianity had found its first secure footing outside the old boundaries of the Roman Empire. Oswald turned to a version of Christianity that was monastic, peripatetic and inclined to leave everything at the drop of a psalter and set off on wild peregrinations to lonely outcrops of rock set amid heaving oceans – the monks of Ireland were hugely influenced by the anchorites of Egypt but, looking around, they saw themselves sorely lacking in desert. So they settled for the next best thing: the sea (and, failing that, boggy islands in the middle of marshes). Through to the reign of Alfred the Great two hundred years later, it was not unknown for monks to set off in a coracle without thought of maps or even, sometimes, oars or sail, trusting to God to bring them to land, in this world or the next.
That there had been a profound change among at least some of the Anglo-Saxons is indicated by Sigeberht’s abdication from his throne to take up the monastic life. Many more kings would follow his lead in the years to come, laying down sword and taking to their knees. Indeed, I suspect this was one of the reasons for the success of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxon warrior class: it offered hope beyond the walls of the world and a way out of the battle-defined limits into which they had been born. So, given Oswald’s evident faith, I think it reasonable that he too hoped one day to lay down his sword.
The Britain of the seventh century was a violent place. Peace was established through fear: the fear of a king’s strength. And a king could only maintain that strength by attracting new warriors to his side, men lured by the promise of gold and glory that a successful king scattered, open handed, to his followers. But this placed the kings of the time onto the treadmill of endless war; for only by waging regular campaigns could they reap gold and glory from defeated opponents and attract new men to their households. It was a brutal and bloody business, and not one of the kings of Bernicia and Deira before Oswald died in his bed.
The land was changing, melting and reforming as petty kingdoms rose and fell, but what it would become was at this time still far from clear. When the Romans left, the legions officially sailing home in ad 410 although Roman strength had been steadily drawn from Britain for decades before, they left a land that was quite thoroughly Romanized in the south, but far less so in the n
orth – and of course, Roman rule stopped at the Wall. However, there is no doubt that the kingdoms that succeeded Roman rule saw themselves very much as Roman, maintaining a largely Christian civilization in the face of pagan pirates. The Romans had built a series of forts along the southern and eastern shores of Britain and northern France and Belgium, the Saxon Shore, to defend against these raiders, but as the army and navy withdrew, the local civilian populations were faced with coming to some sort of terms with these seaborne raiders. According to legend – and Bede, but he is writing about events that occurred centuries before – the Britons chose to employ Saxon warriors to keep the other Saxon warriors out. This proved to be a mistake. The Saxon mercenaries sent word across the grey sea that this land was rich, fat and fit for the taking. Others followed (according to tradition the Angles and the Jutes, although it is likely other peoples such as the Frisians also arrived), and Britain, unlike the rest of Europe, disappeared into a virtually prehistoric darkness. Not that the native British church was uneducated; Gildas, a bishop who lived in the sixth century, wrote the lament On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain that provides our only contemporary account of the desperate events of the fifth and sixth centuries. But the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes were pagans and uninterested in recording the tale of these years in any other way than through the song poems of their scops – and those words, sung and recited over the thrum of a lyre to a hall of drunken warriors, are lost to us.
Whether the Angles and the Saxons displaced entire populations of Britons, pushing them into the more marginal, and definitely more mountainous, western parts of the island in a form of early ethnic cleansing, is still a subject of much scholarly debate. The majority view appears to favour the idea that warrior parties beheaded local principalities by killing the king and his warriors, and then installed themselves as rulers, taking local wives and concubines and forcing through a cultural and linguistic transformation at the point of their swords. If there had been major population displacement, we would expect fields to run fallow and then become forest, but palaeobotany finds little evidence that there was any significant reforestation in this period. According to this view, the elites among the Britons were killed or, as Gildas says, fled abroad, leaving the labour to continue to work the land for new masters.
However, many scholars, particularly those who look to the linguistic evidence and the dearth of place names showing signs of originating in the language of the native Britons, argue that there must have been significant population movement to explain the loss of local names. The idea goes like this. You are the new warlord ruler of a small kingdom at the head of the River Ouse. You’ve taken a local woman as concubine, you’ve still got the local peasants digging the fields to keep you in clover, and one day you’re out riding when you come to a new part of your land and you see a hill with a distinctive summit. Naturally, you summon a convenient peasant and ask him, “What is that hill called?” He will give the local name and you, new master of this land and speaker of a different language, will take it, adapt it to your own ears and make it your own. What you won’t do is give it an entirely new name in your own language, that none of the local people know, so when next you are round this way and ask for directions to the hill, none of the peasants will know where you mean.
But this is what happened. There are vanishingly few place names in what became England that bear the linguistic trace of the Celtic- speaking peoples who must once have named hills and rivers and valleys. Therefore, the argument runs, there must have been few speakers of the old language left of whom to ask, “What is the name of that river?” when the new rulers arrived, so therefore the land must have been cleared of its previous inhabitants.
The argument is set to run and run, and even DNA markers are unlikely to solve it in the short term. But whatever the answer, what is clear is that the identity of Britain changed profoundly between the fifth and seventh centuries. Where before there was mainly a division between Romanized and un-Romanized parts of the country, by the seventh century the Britons were well on the way to becoming the Welsh (and the Bretons, as many fled across the narrow sea to Brittany); the Irish, who were later to become the Scots, were spreading from Ulster across the Irish Sea to Argyll; the Picts (who were the Scots at the time, only there wasn’t yet a Scotland because most of the Scots were still Irish) were fighting it out with the Britons (who were also living in Scotland, which wasn’t yet Scotland); and the English were only getting the first glimmerings of an idea that they might, in fact, be English, but were for the most part still thinking of themselves as Angles or Saxons.
This was the cooking pot into which Pope Gregory sent his missionary delegation in ad 596 to the kingdom of Kent. From this mission came Paulinus, with the sister of the king of Kent, to Edwin in Northumbria, and a re-emergence into the light of history.
For that history, we are indebted to Bede (672/73–735) above all others. Writing about a century after the events of this book, he could speak to people who had themselves had the story from the lips of some of the protagonists. Monasteries in particular are memory institutions, carrying through the years the concerns of their brethren. In the Northumbrian church, Bede had a rich seam of memories, which he mined thoroughly, as well as corresponding with churchmen through the rest of the country.
Although he had his purposes, as do all writers of history, yet I am convinced one of the main ones was simply to do what it says on the cover: to tell the history of the English people. In this book, I hope to have done the same but through the medium of imaginative history, bringing to as much life as I am able the people of a time very distant from our own, but one whose battles and survivals played a crucial part in creating the country in which we live today. By the end of the so-called Dark Ages, Britain had become England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the peoples and languages had coalesced, and local boundaries such as counties had been formed for many centuries (can anyone born in Britain fail to delight in the fact that the county of Hampshire is a significantly older political entity than France?). These kings of small kingdoms, these leaders of tiny armies, played a critical part in the foundation of everything we are today, and, I would venture to say, few were as important as Oswald, Lamnguin, the Whiteblade that flashed for a few short years through the darkness of those times.
If you would like to read more about the kingdom of Northumbria, I would direct you to the first volume in The Northumbrian Thrones trilogy, Edwin: High King of Britain, which tells of the events before this book. The trilogy will conclude with Oswiu: King of Kings, which will tell of what happens after Oswald’s fall. For a non- fiction account of the history and archaeology of Northumbria, see the book I co-wrote with archaeologist Paul Gething, director of the Bamburgh Research Project, Northumbria: The Lost Kingdom (published by The History Press) as well as The King in the North by Max Adams (a fine account and a truly wonderful, Tolkien- inspired map of Northumbria). For an overview of the Anglo-Saxon world there’s no better place to begin than The Anglo-Saxon World by Nicholas Higham and Martin Ryan; and for the fascinating but seldom covered history of northern Britain, Alex Woolf’s account in From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070 is definitive.
Northumbria’s pre-eminence among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms waned during the eighth and ninth centuries, so during the Viking incursions of the ninth century it was left to Wessex, and its king, to save England. There is a reason only one ruler in English history has earned the title ‘Great’. In Search of Alfred the Great: the King, the Grave, the Legend (co-written with archaeologist Katie Tucker) says why he deserves it.
1. These are the opening lines of Beowulf in Old English.
2. This is the Old English name for the place that later came to be called Bury St Edmunds after St Edmund was buried there in the ninth century.
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