Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  The Pope wisely suggested that churches should be built where the old pagan temples had been - ‘in order that the people may the more familiarly resort to the places with which they have been accustomed’.

  Rather than sacrifice to Mother Earth, the pagans were encouraged to pray to the mother of Jesus, the Virgin Mary. And our modern calendar shows the live-and-let-live interaction between old and new: Sun-day and Moon-day were followed by Tiw’s-day, Woden’s-day, Thor’s-day and Freya’s-day, named after the Germanic gods of war, wisdom, thunder and love respectively. Saturn’s-day was another pagan hangover - from the Romans in pre-Christian times. The feast of Easter gets its name from Eastre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of dawn and fertility.

  As Ethelbert cannily studied Augustine and his companions, he came to the conclusion that the Christians posed no threat to him. On the contrary, he liked what they had to offer - learning, piety, discipline, and a ready-made band of activists who were keen to go out and spread these solid virtues among his people. Augustine helped the king draw up the first Anglo-Saxon law code. The Christian magic was a potent and modern magic, and he had a special reason for urgency - Augustine and his missionaries warned all they met that the end of the world was nigh and that God’s terrible judgement was at hand. Fourteen hundred years later we speak of the early Church, but Gregory, Augustine and their fellow-believers did not know they were only at the beginning of a very long story. They believed that time was short. Jesus could be coming back to earth at any moment - maybe that very night, ‘like a thief’, as he promised in the Bible - and King Ethelbert decided not to take the chance that these learned newcomers with their documents and paintings might be wrong.

  Ethelbert was baptised, and he invited Augustine to make Canterbury the headquarters of his missionary efforts, giving him the land and money to build the first Canterbury Cathedral. To this day, Canterbury remains the headquarters of the Church of England, and Archbishops of Canterbury sit on the throne of St Augustine.

  KING OSWY AND THE CROWN OF THORNS

  AD 664

  AUGUSTINE AND HIS FOLLOWERS WERE NOT the only missionaries at work converting the pagans of Anglo-Saxon England in the years around AD 600. For nearly half a century, Celtic monks from the island of Iona off the shore of western Scotland had been travelling around, preaching Christianity to the inhabitants of northern England. Their teachings were inspired by the kidnapped St Patrick (see p. 33), who, after escaping from slavery in Ireland, could not rid himself of the ‘cry of unbaptised children’. He had returned to convert his Irish captors - and, according to legend, had also rid Ireland of snakes in the process.

  The graphic emblem of the Irish missionaries was the Celtic cross, the symbol of Christianity surrounded by a sunburst. Irish monks happily sought inspiration in Celtic culture, incorporating the sinuous geometric patterns of its imagery into their Christian manuscripts. They shaved the front of their heads in the tradition of the Druids and had their own date for Easter. So in the early seventh century England’s patchwork of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was being converted from two directions, with north and south practising Christianity in different ways.

  The problem came to a head when King Oswy of Northumbria married Eanfled, a princess from Kent, who came north with her own chaplain and other followers. They practised their religion in the manner that Augustine had established - including the latest Roman way of calculating when Easter should fall. Christ had been crucified in Jerusalem as the Jews were gathering for the feast of Passover, so Easter’s timing had to relate to the Jewish lunar calendar which ran from new moon to new moon in a cycle of 291/2 days. But the Christian church used Rome’s Julian calendar, which was based on the annual 3651/4-day cycle of the sun - and whichever way you try, 291/2 into 3651/4 does not go.

  ‘Such was the confusion in those days’, related the historian Bede, ‘that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one year, so that when the king [Oswy] had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the queen [Eanfled] and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday.’

  Oswy decided to call a conference to sort out this clash of timing and to resolve the whole range of differences between the rival bands of priests - among them the vexed question of the correct religious hairstyle, or tonsure. Down in the south clergy shaved a bald patch on the top of their heads, leaving a thin circle of hair all round the head just above the temples, in memory of Christ’s crown of thorns. This was the Roman tonsure that contrasted with the Druid-like hairstyle of the Celtic monks, who shaved the front of their heads along a line going over the top of the scalp from ear to ear, with the hair behind their ears tumbling down in long, flowing and sometimes greasy locks. Not for the last time in English history, hairstyles were vivid and visible symbols of divided loyalties.

  The two sets of holy men squared off at a synod, or church council, held in 664 at the Abbey of Whitby, high on a hill overlooking the rugged Yorkshire coast.

  ‘Easter is observed by men of different nations and languages at one and the same time in Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and throughout the world,’ argued the Roman, southern English side. ‘The only people who stupidly contend against the whole world are those Irishmen . . .’

  ‘It is strange that you call us stupid,’ retorted the Irish spokesman, citing the support of the gospel writer St John, and, more pertinently, St Columba, who had founded the great monastery of Iona from which so many of the Irish monks had come.

  In the end it was the King who resolved the arguments. The Canterbury side had based their case on the authority of St Peter, who was believed to have brought Christianity to the city of Rome and to whom Jesus Christ had said, ‘I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’ These words from the Bible impressed King Oswy mightily.

  ‘I tell you,’ said the King, ‘if Peter is guardian of the gates of heaven, I shall not contradict him. Otherwise when I come to the gates of heaven, there may be no one to open them.’

  Heaven and earth seemed very close in a world where life was so fragile. King Oswy plumped for the Roman Easter, the Roman tonsure and the overall authority of the Pope in Rome, tying England more firmly to the church’s ‘world headquarters’, with Canterbury confirmed as the local ‘head office’. The first reaction of the long-haired monks who had argued the Celtic case was to leave Northumbria disgruntled, returning to Iona and eventually to Ireland. There they discovered, however, that some Irish churches were already calculating Easter according to the latest Roman system - and the Roman tonsure eventually followed. In due course razors would shave the necks and scalps of all Irish monks in the Roman crown-of-thorns style.

  Six years later, in 670, King Oswy, whose voice had been so decisive in Rome’s victory, died as he was setting out on a pilgrimage to the Holy See of St Peter in Rome. His body was brought back to Whitby to be buried at the site of the historic synod by the sea, and if his spirit did manage to find its way to the gates of heaven, we must presume that St Peter was waiting there for him with the keys.

  CAEDMON, THE FIRST ENGLISH POET

  C.AD 680

  CAEDMON WAS A HERDSMAN WHO LOOKED after the farm animals at the monastery of Whitby. His Celtic name tells us he was of native British descent, like so many others, as a labourer for the new Anglo-Saxon masters of the land.

  Caedmon was something of a dreamer - and very shy. When guests gathered for the firelit evenings of song and recitation with which the people of the time entertained themselves he would shrink away when he saw the harp heading in his direction. He would slip quietly back to his home in the stables - and it was on one such evening, lying down in the straw to sleep among the animals, that he had a dream. The cowherd saw a man beside him.

  ‘Caedmon,’ said the stranger, ‘sing me a song.’

  ‘I don’t know how to sing,’ he replied. ‘I left the feast because I cannot sing - that’s why I’m here.’

  ‘But you shall sing to me,’ insisted the man.

  ‘What shall I sing?’ aske
d Caedmon.

  ‘Sing the song of creation,’ came the answer.

  At once, in his dream, Caedmon found himself singing to God in a rush of poetry that he was astonished to hear coming from his own mouth - ‘Nu scylun hergan, haefaenricaes uard’ - ‘Now shall we praise the keeper of the kingdom of heaven.’

  When he awoke next morning, Caedmon found that he could remember the whole verse from his dream, and that he could compose more. There and then he created an entire song, the ‘Hymn of Creation’. He recited it that same morning to his boss the reeve - the manager of the abbey farm - who was so impressed that he took the cowherd along for a meeting with the head of the monastery, the abbess Hilda.

  Hilda was a lively and welcoming woman. As Abbess of Whitby she had been hostess of the great synod that had argued over Easter and hairstyles some twenty years earlier, and now she gathered together a group of clerics to audition this cowherd who could sing. When they heard Caedmon’s ‘Hymn of Creation’, the learned panel agreed that his gift of composing could only have come from God, and that the stranger in his dream must have been an angel. To test him, they picked out another theme, a story from the Bible, and next day he brought them more visionary verses that had come to him in the stable during the night.

  Hilda was delighted. Caedmon should give up tending the cattle, she suggested. He must become a monk - and as the cowherd came to know the great stories of the Bible, so the inspiration flowed. He sang of the creation of the world, of how the human race had started and how the children of Israel had found themselves entering the Promised Land. He sang of Christ coming down to earth, of how God’s son was crucified and then rose miraculously from the dead. And he also sang darker songs - warnings against the flames of hell and the terrors of the Last Judgement. Caedmon was like one of the cows that he used to tend, wrote a fellow-monk. He transformed everyday words into poetry, just as a cow, by chewing and ruminating, turns humble grass into green, fresh-smelling cud.

  The cowherd stunned his listeners because his sacred verses were in the earthy language of ordinary people. By tradition, holy things had to be said in Latin, the language of the Church. In those days church services were all in Latin - as was the Bible. Speaking Latin was the sign of being educated and therefore superior. But now Caedmon was daring to sing hymns in Anglish, or englisc, the racy and rhythmic language of the Angles that was spreading across the island. Englisc was the language of the Anglo-Saxons’ pagan sagas. In making poetry from the language of the less privileged, Caedmon, who died in the year 680, could be compared to a folksinger or even a modern rapper - and in Anglo-Saxon terms his ‘Hymn of Creation’ was certainly a popular hit. It survives as part of his story in no fewer than twenty-one hand-copied versions.

  Every modern pop song bears a credit line - ‘Copyright: Lennon-McCartney’, or whatever. Below the earliest surviving poem in English, composed one night in a stable on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, are written the words: ‘Caedmon first sang this song.’

  THE VENERABLE BEDE

  AD 672/3-735

  WE KNOW ABOUT CAEDMON THE COWHERD, Hilda the abbess, the Angles and the angels, and the insults that the Irish and English monks hurled at each other as they argued about hairstyles and the timing of Easter, thanks to the writings of the very first English historian, the Venerable Bede. To modern ears, it is a weird and even pompous-sounding name - ‘venerable’ meaning ancient and worthy, ‘Bede’ being an old word for prayer. But Bede the man was anything but pompous. He was a down-to-earth and rather humorous character - as you might expect of a Geordie lad, born in Northumbria near Monkwearmouth, now part of modern Sunderland. Bede spent most of his life in Jarrow on the banks of the River Tyne, where the modern Geordie accent, according to linguists, can be traced back to the Old English dialect spoken by Bede and his fellow-Northumbrians in Anglo-Saxon times.

  The boy was just seven, and quite possibly an orphan, when he was handed into the care of the local monastery. In Anglo-Saxon England monks operated the only schools, and they trained their pupils in harsh conditions. In winter it was so cold in the Jarrow cloisters that pens slipped from the fingers of the priestly hands - while summer brought flies and infection. When plague struck the monastery in 685, the only survivors who could scratch up a choir were the twelve-year-old Bede and the old abbot, who managed to keep the services going between them, chanting and responding to each other across the chapel.

  Today there is a Bede Station on the Newcastle to South Shields line of the Tyne and Wear Metro. If you get off the train and walk past the oil tanks and electricity power lines of modern Jarrow you soon come to the very chapel where Bede and the abbot kept the singing alive thirteen hundred years ago. Sometimes there is only a thin curtain between the past and ourselves. In those days the Jarrow monastery was surrounded by green fields, and from its ruins you can get an idea of how Bede lived his life, studying and writing by candlelight for more than fifty years in his small stone cell.

  He wrote with a sharpened goose quill that he dipped in acid. ‘Encaustum’ was the monks’ word for ink, from the same Latin word that gives us ‘caustic’, meaning ‘biting’ or ‘burning’. Darkened with iron salts, Bede’s ink literally bit into his writing surface, which was not paper but parchment - scraped animal skin. The parchment would have been stretched out initially on a wooden frame that prevented the skin from shrinking back into the shape of the lamb, calf or kid from which it came. It could take as many as five hundred calfskins to make one Bible.

  On this primitive but very effective and durable surface, Bede worked magic. He wrote no less than sixty-eight books - commentaries on the Bible, a guide to spelling, works on science, the art of poetry, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, grammar, the lives of Christian martyrs and a book of hymns. From his bright and simple Latin prose we get to know a man who was also interested in carpentry, music and the movement of the tides, which he studied and measured on long walks along the sands and rockpools of the blowy Northumbrian coast. Bede took a particular interest in cooking. He kept his own store of peppercorns, precious spices transported by traders from the other side of the world, to pound and sprinkle on the bland monastery food. He could be frank about the drawbacks of the monkish life. Writing of King Saul’s two wives, he ruefully admitted: ‘How can I comment on this who have not even been married to one?’

  It is largely thanks to Bede that today we date our history from the birth of Christ - the ad method of dating that gets its name from the Latin anno domini (‘in the year of our Lord’). The Romans had based their dating system on the accession dates of their emperors, but in his work On the Reckoning of Time, written in 725 ad, Bede took up the idea that the Church should not rely on this pagan system, particularly since it was the Romans who persecuted Christ. How much better to date the Christian era from the birth of Our Saviour himself! Six years later Bede put the system into practice when he wrote the book for which he is principally remembered - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

  To this day, Bede’s vivid narrative brings alive the texture of a turbulent time. He was a storytelling monk with a human touch, describing the terrible effects of famine in the land of the South Saxons where whole families, starving, would hold hands and jump off the white Sussex cliffs in tragic suicide pacts. In a credulous age he had a sceptical wit, poking fun, for example, at the legend that St Patrick had rid Ireland of snakes. This must mean, he wrote, that if any snakes happened to come over in a boat from Britain, they only had to inhale the scented Irish air to breathe their last.

  This gentle dig at the Irish Christians reflected Bede’s prejudices. He was English and proud of it. For him, the Angles and Saxons were God’s chosen people, and his history tells us little about the Scots, and still less about the Welsh, of whom he disapproved heartily as troublesome heretics. He believed that life had a purpose, that men and women can shape their own destiny through hard work and faith - and for him that destiny was Christian and English.

 
; But Bede’s proudly local story contains scenes and ideas with which anyone could identify today. Imagine yourself among a group of Anglo-Saxon nobles discussing the pros and cons of the new Christian faith, when one of them comes up with this interpretation of life:

  It seems to me that the life of man on earth is like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your captains and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall. Outside, the storms of winter rain and snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one window of the hall and out through another. While he is inside, the bird is safe from the winter storms, but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. So, man appears on earth for a little while - but of what went before this life, or of what follows, we know nothing.

  Bede’s own sparrow flight across the hall of life was lengthy by Anglo-Saxon standards. He died when he was sixty-two, surrounded by his pupils, who were helping him finish his last work, a translation of the Gospel of St John into ‘our language’, that is, from Latin into englisc.

  ‘Learn quickly now,’ he told them, ‘for I do not know how much longer I will live.’

  He dictated the final chapter, then turned to one of his pupils. ‘I have a few treasures in my little box,’ he said. ‘Run quickly and fetch the priests of our monastery, so I can distribute to them these little gifts which God has given me.’