The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  Acha may have considered 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 right 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?

  The combination of rocky citadel, imposing location and magnificent buildings, together with the technical marvel of the well (recently excavated and found to be rock-cut to an extraordinary depth of one hundred and forty-four feet) reflected the power and pretensions of the Bernician kings.9 No child growing up there could fail to have his or her imagination stirred by such a back yard, standing indomitable against the batterings of the North Sea and all would-be invaders.

  Those whose imaginations struggle with black and white plans of walls and post-holes must visit Bede’s World in Jarrow where, in the shadow of Bede’s own monastic church, cows, geese and pigs with convincing Dark Age grunts and smells provide the backdrop for halls and sunken huts, which would have been the entirely familiar playgrounds of the children of Æthelfrith and Acha. Literary support for the mentality and motivations of those who used them comes from the greatest early Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf; and no less a critic than the scholar J. R. R. Tolkien made the explicit link between Beowulf and Oswald as long ago as 1936.10 So, if we cannot portray Oswald physically as an individual, we can at least picture his milieu and his circumstances. For a start, he was the oldest of his several natural brothers but he had a half-brother who was probably somewhat older than him—perhaps twenty years older.*8

  Father and half-brother spent much of the year campaigning in foreign lands for glory and the rewards of conquest. King Æthelfrith, we know, fought against the Scots of Dál Riata, the British of the Forth and of Gwynedd and the fabled King Urien of Rheged; he was a busy warlord. At other times the peripatetic Bernician kings progressed through their estates, consuming the fruits of tribute rendered from the fertile Northumbrian soil. Several of these estates can be reconstructed in outline. Their principal palace site, Yeavering (Bede’s Ad Gefrin), which lay at the foot of an imposing Iron Age hill fort and ‘holy mountain’ on the northern edge of the Cheviot Hills, was brilliantly excavated in the 1950s and early 1960s. The site of Old Yeavering in the dale of the River Glen is a place to pause and absorb a sense of history and myth. Glendale now is a forgotten corner of England, nestled within sight of the Scottish border in a dramatic natural amphitheatre. But it has featured in more than its fair share of history, as a strategic corridor for armies entering or leaving northern England and a bottleneck ripe for ambush. Here in 1513 an English army inflicted a terrible defeat on the Scots at Flodden Field; just to the east, below Humbleton Hill, is the site of another Anglo-Scottish conflict, immortalised in Shakespeare’s Henry IV as the place from where noble, soil-stained Sir Walter Blunt brought news of Earl Douglas’s discomfiture and Harry ‘Hotspur’ Percy’s capture of the Earl of Fife: a ‘gallant prize’.11 Earlier, almost lost in the mists of time, the Annales Cambriae record the River ‘Glein’ as the site of the first of Arthur’s legendary twelve battles.

  In the days of Kings Æthelfrith, Edwin and Oswald the greatest architectural feats since the end of the Roman Empire stood here as symbols of royal power: a palace complex, noble halls of great technical complexity and grandeur and, wonder of wonders, a grandstand unique in its period. In a pagan temple offerings were made to the gods and tribal totems of the Bernicians; immense herds of cattle, the surplus wealth of the land and the tributary tax of subject kingdoms were corralled and counted; and the family of Æthelfrith could take comfort from the knowledge that the most powerful warlord in early Britain was unchallenged by any other earthly force. So complacent were the Bernician kings in their golden hall that no defences were ever constructed at Yeavering, a place of tribal assembly, judgement and ritual since time out of mind.

  During great festivals, the cream of Northumbrian society gathered in the mead halls of Bamburgh, Yeavering or one of the other royal vills.*9 Mead flowed, tall tales grew taller, gifts of rings and torcs were made, alliances cemented or broken, troths plighted and promises made and regretted. Small boys being small boys, no doubt conversations were overheard which were meant to be private and neglected cups were drained by aspiring warriors who should have been in bed.

  One wonders what status Oswald enjoyed with his father and half-brother. His moral authority among younger siblings was one thing, but half-siblings are another; jealousies are easily fostered. Anglo-Saxon warlords did not name heirs; kings were chosen by the political elite from a pool of athelings, those whose blood and personal attributes entitled them to be considered; those who survived. In his time Eanfrith would make one disastrous bid for the kingdom of Northumbria; Oswald would wait his turn. His relationship with his father was terminated when he was twelve. Oswald would not see his home or native land again until he was twenty-nine.

  *1The epigraphs which head each chapter are from a work generally known as Anglo-Saxon Maxims II, because there is something similar in the Exeter Book known as Maxims I. British Library Cotton MS Tiberius B.i ff. 115r-v. The translations are adapted from Tom Shippey’s Poems of learning and wisdom in Old English. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 1976.

  *2See Glossary, Appendix C, p.409.

  *3Rex Norðanhymbrorum, king of the Northumbrians: the term was first applied by Bede to King Edwin in II.5 of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum), abbreviated to EH by historians.

  *4See Chapter IV.

  *5Oswudu has been left out of the genealogical table In Appendix B, p.408, because I suspect him to be the same as Osguid, mis-transcribed.

  *6Historia Regum (HR) sub anno 774. Symeon’s authorship of the Historia Regum is no longer acceptable. Hunter-Blair 1964.

  *7See Chapter VII.

  *8The dynamics of such families haven’t changed much; my own mother was one of eleven and the second-hand mythology of that Midlands family growing up during the Second World War is enough to fill the imagination with plenty of food for thought.

  *9Vi
lla regia: a royal estate. See Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 188. See also Glossary, Appendix C, p.415.

  II

  The Sound of Iona

  God sceal wið yfele;

  geogoð sceal wið yldo

  Good shall contend with evil;

  youth shall contend

  with old age

  Setting out on a journey today from Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast to Argyll in the Atlantic West of Scotland you might, for the sake of the scenery, follow the lush, seductive folds of the Tweed Valley west towards Selkirk on the other side of the modern border, then join the A68 as it shoots northward to Edinburgh. You are warned of blind summits and sudden crests, for the road—having been constructed by Roman legions nineteen hundred years ago—makes few concessions to the land’s contours. You make faster progress as you head west again along the valleys of the Forth and Clyde on the smooth, dark tarmac of the M8, a few miles to the south of, but parallel to, the most remote symbol of Rome’s imperial territorial ambitions, the Antonine Wall. After negotiating Glasgow, the city on the River Clyde founded by the legendary St Kentigern in the years before Oswald’s birth, you might drive west past the Erskine Bridge and towards the ancient British fortress on Dumbarton Rock or, if you had more time, take the ferry from Gourock to Dunoon, drive up and up through the foggy pass of Glen Eck, then skirt Loch Fyne via the oyster bars and the welcoming hotels of Inveraray. From there the road either hugs the sea loch contours of Knapdale towards Kilmartin and Dunadd, or tackles another pass to negotiate Glen Array, winding around the top of Loch Awe before the descent to Oban, the principal port on the west coast. Even in a modern car on modern roads one has a sense of journeying into another world, of time and history passing by.