BRETWALDA

by H A CULLEY

  Leaving his warband to fend for themselves he led one last desperate charge by his gesith and fought like a demon to reach Oswiu. If he could take the Northumbrian king with him he’d die happy. He never got near him. He was cut down by an arrow through the neck before he got within thirty yards of the Northumbrian shield wall.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN – AFTERMATH

  WINTER 655 – 656 AD

  Sixteen year old Ehlfrith had just completed his training as a warrior when his father sent for him to travel to Eoforwīc to become Sub-king of Deira. This time there was no election or coronation. Oswiu was in a powerful position now and there was no opposition when he decreed the amalgamation of the two witans – that of Bernicia and of Deira into one. Even then they weren’t allowed to elect the sub-king. He was an appointee of his father.

  Several of the eorls who had sided with his nephew were replaced and the Eorl of Elmet was quietly rewarded with a small chest of gold. Next Oswiu turned his attention to Mercia. For the moment he allowed the bed-ridden Peada to remain as King of the Middle Angles but he declared himself as King of Mercia. He advanced on Towcester, Penda’s capital, with his gesith and a large warband and set about replacing many of Mercia’s eorls; either exiling them or forcing them to enter a monastery. His one regret was that he’d failed to capture Wulfhere, but he had taken Penda’s youngest son, Æthelred, as a hostage. The boy seemed almost pleased to be back in Oswiu’s care.

  ‘Do you think you can hold onto Mercia and Middle Anglia, especially when we need to invade Gwynedd in the spring,’ Ceadda asked.

  ‘Probably not, at least in the long term. But I need to make sure that Mercia is no longer a threat to Northumbria.’

  ‘What are you going to do about Peada?’

  ‘That rather depends on him. He’s allied to me by marriage and so I’m rather hoping that he will accept me as his overlord. If not, I’ll replace him.’

  Satisfied that Mercia was subdued, at least for the moment, Oswiu set off for Cair Lerion whilst Catinus returned to Bebbanburg. Before he left the king had confided in him that he would be moving his capital to Eoforwīc. He would still visit Bebbanburg and Yeavering, of course, as well as the more northern parts of his realm, but the kingdom’s administration would now be located at Eoforwīc which was more central. Effectively this meant that Catinus would be lord of Bebbanburg. His one regret was that, having been reunited with his brother Conomultus, Oswiu’s chaplain, he would now see far less of him.

  Oswiu’s arrival at Cair Lerion coincided with a torrential downpour and high winds. The sentries were sheltering from the driving rain and so Oswiu rode into the town with his gesith and a sizeable warband before anyone was aware of his presence.

  The news of the battle and the death of Penda had reached the town days before but, with Peada’s hereræswa dead and their king incapacitated, there was no one except Alchflaed left to take charge. The eorls were skulking in their halls miles away and the reeve and the custos had fled.

  She had breathed a tremendous sigh of relief when she heard that Penda had been killed but was still undecided about what to do. The father might be dead but it was the son who had violently abused her, and he was still alive. When her father stalked into the room, shaking the water from his cloak, whilst she was washing her husband’s gaunt frame she was dumbstruck. She hadn’t known he was coming and his arrival brought conflicting emotions to the surface.

  Her father had been almost a stranger whilst she was growing up and he had forced her to marry Peada. She debated whether to tell him of the abuse she’d suffered at his hands; after all Oswiu had specifically tried to protect her by saying that her chastity should be respected until she started to menstruate. But she had been, by definition, a woman for the past three months. She doubted that her father would understand if her husband’s so-called love making was on the brutal side. Many men were like that.

  Then she caught sight of Conomultus behind Oswiu just as she curtsied to her father. Her heart lightened as the chaplain had been her confessor before she left Bebbanburg and she trusted him. She was even more pleased to see the servant she had sent to warn her father was standing behind Conomultus.

  ‘Well daughter, I see that you are taking care of your sickly husband as a good wife should. What is wrong with him? The rumours say that your nurse was slowly poisoning him.’

  ‘Penda certainly killed her for it, whether or not it was true, father,’ she replied, meeting his eyes.

  ‘Hmmm. I need him back on his feet. If he’ll swear loyalty to me I’ll leave him as King of the Middle Angles.’

  ‘Cannot I rule them as your vassal, as I’m currently doing?’

  ‘You, a woman? And no more than a girl at that. Out of the question. The nobles would never accept you.’

  ‘They seem to be doing so at the moment.’

  ‘That’s because you’re my daughter and they are afraid of me. No, it might serve in the short term, but not for long.’

  Peada had woken during the conversation and now waved a feeble hand for attention.

  Oswiu knelt by his bed and asked what he was trying to say.

  ‘Wasn’t the wise woman,’ he croaked out. ‘Poisoned by Alchflaed.’

  His head dropped back, exhausted by the effort.

  ‘Is this true? Were you in on the plot to poison him?’ Oswiu asked incredulously.

  ‘He raped me the first night we arrived here and has beaten and raped me ever since,’ she replied with some heat. ‘If I was poisoning him it was only to stop his unbearable treatment of me. I’d rather die than endure that one moment longer.’

  ‘Can this be true?’

  ‘It is Cyning,’ the boy behind Conomultus spoke up. ‘My mother is amongst those who have helped to treat the whip marks on the queen’s back and to cleanse and sew her up her private parts after he viciously raped her. This has gone on from the day the queen arrived here.’

  ‘Thank you. It took courage to tell me that.’

  Oswiu became very thoughtful and left the room without saying another word.

  ~~~

  Hild reined in her donkey on top of the ridge above the estuary of the River Esk and looked down on the settlement below her. The warehouses and the halls of the merchants together with the hovels of the poor were scattered on either side of the river with a narrow wooden bridge linking the two. It seemed to her to be a more prosperous place than Hartlepool to the north, where she was currently abbess.

  As a member of the Deiran royal house – Oswiu’s mother had been her great aunt – she had been selected by Bishop Aidan to be abbess of a small monastery at the young age of twenty. Now she was to become abbess of the new foundation at Whitby. Brother Wigmund kicked his donkey up the rest of the slope and pulled it to a halt beside her.

  ‘I don’t think that beast likes you very much,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘The feeling is mutual, abbess.’

  Wigmund was to be the prior of the new monastery and he would be in charge of the monks.

  ‘What do you think of the site?’

  Hild gestured across the estuary to the peninsula on the south side on which the first few courses of stone that would support the walls of a large church could be seen. Œthelwald had halted the construction two years ago and Oswiu had been furious when he found out. Now that he was now longer King of Deira, work had started again.

  They rode slowly down to the bridge, paid the fee to cross, and fifteen minutes later they arrived at the masons’ yard. Building in stone was not a skill that many Angles, Saxons or Jutes possessed, so the master mason and his assistants had come from Frankia, where stone buildings were becoming more common.

  ‘Sister, brother, welcome,’ one of the masons said brushing the stone dust from his clothes with his hands as he approached. He had spoken in Latin. Few of the masons from Frankia could speak the language of the Anglo-Saxons, which was beginning to be called English. Latin was the lingua franca of educated Christians and both Hild and Wigmund proba
bly used it more than English.

  ‘Thank you. Are you the master mason, the man they call Clovis of Paris?’

  ‘No, I’m his assistant, Sigmund. Master Clovis is supervising the building of the scaffolding so that we can start work on the higher courses of stonework.’

  The two followed Sigmund to where a small man with a muscular torso was directing the construction of a framework of wooden poles with timber floors every five feet or so. The structure extended for twenty feet and Hild assumed that they would raise the walls to the top of the scaffolding and then move it along to build the next section.

  ‘How is the wall braced to stop it falling inwards or outwards?’

  ‘Well, abbess, the walls are built on a much wider wall of stone which is sunk as much as ten feet or more into the ground. Columns are built inside which will eventually support the roof. The outer walls are tied to these columns by stout lengths of timber as the wall gets higher. In Frankia we have to build buttresses to hold the walls in place as well, but the churches there are bigger than this one will be.’

  ‘How do the columns stay in place,’ Wigmund asked. ‘The round stones appear to be just placed one on top of the other.’

  Sigmund smiled. ‘There are rods of bronze running up through the columns which secure each stone in place.’

  Hild noticed that a few carpenters had started work on another framework a little distance from the wall and asked about it.

  ‘That’s the crane that will lift each block of stone up so that it can be placed correctly. In Frankia we cut and dress the stones so that they are a uniform size and have flat faces, but that takes time. King Oswiu wants the church finished next year and so we are using undressed stone of various sizes with mortar filling the inevitable gaps.’

  ‘Where does the stone come from? We didn’t see any quarries on our way here.’

  Sigmund pointed to the wharfs that lined the river below them.

  ‘It’s shipped in by sea, a barge is being unloaded onto carts at the moment. The stone itself is limestone which is being cut from cliffs further up the coast.’

  When Clovis had finished supervising the work on the scaffolding and the crane he came bustling over to meet the abbess and the prior, making profuse apologies for not meeting them on arrival. They spent the next two hours discussing the layout of the rest of the monastery and which building should be of stone and which could be timber. Clovis wasn’t interested in the latter; local labour would build them.

  ‘I hear that King Oswiu has dedicated his daughter, Ælfflæd, to the Church,’ Wigmund said to Hild as they rode away from the site.

  ‘Yes, to fulfil a pledge he made to God before the Battle of the Winwaed.’

  ‘I presume that she will stay with her mother until she is of an age to become a novice?’

  ‘It appears not. She is to be brought up by me at Hartlepool until Whitby is finished.’

  Wigmund was astounded. Ælfflæd was scarcely a year old.

  ‘And has Eanflæd agreed to this?’

  ‘Hardly. I hear rumours that they are no longer on speaking terms and she has denied Oswiu her bed. I wouldn’t normally have agreed to accept a child who is still on her wet nurse’s teat, but I was left with little option.’

  Wigmund didn’t reply but privately he thought that Oswiu had been extremely foolish. It wouldn’t have hurt to let the girl stay with her mother until she was older. She could hardly start her training to be a nun at the moment.

  When they left Hild was satisfied that Whitby would have the most impressive church north of Cantwareburg; far more impressive than the small stone church that Finan had built on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.

  ~~~

  Oswiu decided that Whitby and dedicating his baby daughter to the Church wasn’t enough to thank God for his victory. He regretted his wife’s reaction to the latter but he was convinced that she’d understand why he’d done it, given time.

  His bother Oswald had built a stone church at Eoforwīc to replace the mean timber one constructed on the orders of their uncle, King Edwin; the man who had usurped their father’s throne. But he wanted something grander to commemorate the slaying of his nemesis, the pagan Penda, so he decided to found a monastery with an impressive church like the ones on the Continent that he’d heard about.

  Early in 656 he sailed north to discuss his ideas with Finan and arrived at Lindisfarne on a clear, calm afternoon in early February. He also had another matter he needed to talk to him about.

  ‘I need to make confession to you, Finan.’

  The Bishop of Northumbria looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Why do you need to make confession to me? Father Conomultus is your chaplain.’

  Oswiu looked uncomfortable.

  ‘He was there when I committed this sin.’

  ‘I see. Very well. You’d better tell me what’s troubling you.’

  ‘I had intended to leave my daughter’s husband, Peada, as King of the Middle Angles after I took the crown of Mercia. However, he had treated her most shamefully after I had specifically told him that he was not to take her to the marriage bed until she was no longer a child. Not only did he disobey me, but he did so in the most degrading and foul way.

  ‘She told me that after enduring such treatment for many months she obtained a poison from the healer called in to treat her for her injuries. The woman took pity on her and gave her a powder to administer to Peada which was slowly killing him. Penda found out and executed the healer. Peada was beginning to recover when Penda was slain at the Winwaed. I went to visit him shortly afterwards and found him still very weak.

  ‘Alchflaed told me what had happened and made a full confession to Father Conomultus. He sympathised with her, I think, and made her fast for a month as penance, so my daughter told me. I have thought long and hard about the situation. I need stability in southern England and I knew Mercia would be difficult enough for me to rule over without adding Middle Anglia. I needed Peada to rule it as my vassal. However, I could not forgive the way he had treated my child, and certainly couldn’t allow him to continue his abuse of her once he’d recovered. I therefore told her to continue to administer the poison until Peada eventually died. I heard yesterday of his demise.’

  ‘I see. Would it not have been just as effective a solution if Alchflaed had left Peada and entered a monastery?’

  ‘In a way, yes. But it would have left the problem of who would rule Middle Anglia. I no longer trusted Peada, nor could I forgive him.’

  ‘But you expect God to forgive you?’

  ‘I make no claim to be as wise or as altruistic as God is, bishop.’

  ‘No, but you should strive to be.’

  ‘What is done is done.’

  ‘Yes, it is. Who will rule Middle Anglia now?’

  ‘I had hoped that my daughter would marry one of my nobles so I could make him king, but she has had enough of marriage. She wants to enter a monastery and become a nun and I was unable to dissuade her. I will therefore have to subsume it into Mercia and rule it myself.’

  ‘Will you endow a new monastery as penance for your connivance in Peada’s death?’

  ‘Yes, I’d already decided to do so to give thanks to God for Northumbria’s deliverance from the scourge that was Penda. I have already gifted the land at a place called Ripon as the site. There are a few settlements and isolated farms there at the moment but the land is fertile and there is scope for expansion. I’m sure settlers will flock there once work starts.’

  ‘Excellent. I even know of a monk who might make a suitable abbot. He was a novice here at Lindisfarne but he didn’t get on with his fellow novices, including your chaplain. He finished his education at Cantwareburg and at Rome and had gained something of a reputation as a scholar in Frankia, where he now resides. I believe he has good relations with some of the master masons and tradesmen who have built some of the grand cathedrals there. I’m sure he could persuade some of them to come and work at Ripon.’

  �
��I’m surprised that you recommend a Roman monk.’

  ‘Sadly, we Irish monks are humble folk and there are none who can match the Roman clerics when it comes to building in stone. You only have to compare our poor little church here with that at Whitby to see what I mean.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Wilfrid.’

  If Oswiu had known the strife that Wilfrid would cause him and the Northumbrian Church he would never have agreed to his return but, sadly, he thought that Finan’s proposal was a good one and he agreed that he should write to Wilfrid.

  Meanwhile Oswiu returned to Eoforwīc to plan his campaign against Cadafael of Gwynedd. He was now recognised as Bretwalda of much of England and of Caledonia, but Wales was still the stronghold of the original inhabitants – the Britons – and Gwynedd and Powys, in particular, had been Northumbria’s adversaries for too long.

  Author’s Note

  This story is based on the known facts, but written evidence is patchy and there is some confusion in the main sources about events, dates, names and even relationships between family members. The main events are as depicted, even if the detail is invented. The chronology of events has sometimes been altered in order to suit the story but this is, after all, a novel.

  ANGLO-SAXON ORGANISATION AND CULTURE

  The leaders of the Anglo-Saxons were constantly at war with one another. Borders kept shifting and smaller kingdoms were swallowed up by larger ones. Kings had to pay their warbands and that took money, hence the need to plunder your neighbours.

  The population was sparse and scattered. Agricultural methods were primitive and the crop yields were poor. The peasantry were there to feed the kings, his nobles and their warriors.