Edwin’s campaign against Cwichelm later in the same year, after his wounds had healed, was in the nature of a punitive raid during which no fewer than five ‘kings’ of the Gewisse were slain.86 Cwichelm himself survived and one must infer that the kings in question were either sub-kings under tribute to Cwichelm or leaders of substantial warbands under his personal command—possibly brothers and cousins. There could now be no doubt that Edwin was the most powerful warlord among the English, able to strike at will over large distances across both land and sea. If he now chose to adopt the Christian religion, who would challenge either his authority or that of the one true God? And it has to be remembered that this was not about personal salvation, whatever the Pope had written; this was about the acceptance of theoretical Roman ecclesiastical authority over the ruling class of Northumbrians, the land-holding warriors. But, yet again, Edwin delayed. Bede’s oddly split narrative of these events, which seems to preserve three incompatible accounts of Edwin’s internal musings, tries to marry political, spiritual and providential anecdotes which must, I think, reflect genuine political complexities and doubts in the king’s mind. We can read this in several ways. Edwin was not a rash man: all the evidence suggests that he weighed political considerations with great care before he acted. Bede describes him as a man of ‘great natural sagacity’ who ‘would sit for long periods in silence… deliberating with himself as to what he ought to do’.87 Is this a man of brooding self-doubt, or one deeply sensitive to the potential consequences of his political and moral decisions? It is hard to say, but the Edwin who emerges from Bede’s pages, if a great warlord, is also more than that: he is a politician and a man of tangible sensibilities.
In attempting to give a consistent narrative thread to these complexities Bede would have us believe that now, after so many apparent signs of divine favour, Edwin was brought to a final understanding of his obligations by Paulinus, who at last revealed to the king that it was he who had appeared to him in the vision many years before at Rædwald’s court when his fate looked so bleak at the point of betrayal. Paulinus was either a shameless opportunist who had heard Edwin’s story of the vision and substituted himself for the stranger in the night; or he had in fact met and cultivated Edwin during his exile and was now calling in the marker. If the latter was the case, he had waited an improbably long time to produce his IOU and wave it in front of his patron. This is how Bede, no doubt conflating several oral versions circulating down to his own day, describes the cathartic encounter with, once again, Edwin cast as Faust:
One day Paulinus came to him and, placing his right hand on the king’s head, asked him if he recognised this sign. The king began to tremble and would have thrown himself at the Bishop’s feet but Paulinus raised him up and said in a voice that seemed familiar, ‘First you have escaped with God’s help from the hands of the foes you feared; secondly you have acquired by His gift the kingdom you desired; now, in the third place, remember your own promise; do not delay in fulfilling it but receive the faith and keep the commandments of him who rescued you from your earthly foes and raised you to the honour of an earthly kingdom.’88
That Paulinus had such intimate access to the Northumbrian king is in itself remarkable, even if they had met before in other circumstances. There is no suggestion that Edwin and Paulinus enjoyed a personal friendship like that attributed to Oswald and Ségéne on Iona. Even so, Edwin’s intimates might very well have resented his access to their lord. Tensions between spiritual and secular advisors have troubled many rulers over the centuries, especially if those advisors are close to the female head of the royal household. Paulinus had some experience of such tensions from his time in Kent; Bede’s portrayal of Edwin suggests that he too was sensitive to the dangers of jealous interest. But his store of political capital was overflowing. Edwin, after a triumphant return from the raid on the West Saxons, now embarked on a series of political consultations culminating in a summit meeting, which forms the backdrop to the most famous passage in Bede. The strong sense of theatre that Bede conveys shows the necessity for Edwin to make a grand political event out of negotiations that must substantially have taken place in private, and over many months. The context, given Edwin’s probable childhood conversion at the court of Gwynedd, is laden with irony.
The set on which the drama was played out is that of Beowulf’s Heorot: a great mead hall lying at the centre of a villa regalis somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds; the lighting is provided by a great fire burning in a pit at the centre, and by lamps of oil or wax. The walls are hung with banners and glittering arms, the trophies of lost companions and dead foes. Great doors at either end are embellished with carvings: dragons’ heads, ravens and other serpentine beasts. Tribal totems stand grisly guard outside. In the middle of each long side there are doors too, part perhaps of the symbolic furniture of precedence and rank. The king sits at the centre with one of these doors at his back. Along the length of the hall are tables ranged in order of precedence: the king, his battle-proven, landed companions; unlanded warriors; retainers of the household. The queen and her entourage are present, Æthelburh playing the part of political hostess to perfection, judiciously flattering her male guests and sweetening them with the mead cup. The twin spiritual forces of Christianity and the heathen gods are represented by Paulinus and by Coifi, the chief priest of the Deirans.
Bede liked to portray such events as spontaneous. It is much more likely that proceedings were stage-managed, just as modern political summits are. Agendas are agreed beforehand; suitable spokesmen are chosen. Lines are rehearsed, little is left to chance and all those present know their parts. Many such councils must have met to debate alliances or prospective military campaigns. The traditional executive role of the Germanic king was confined to his status as ‘king in war’. The wholesale conversion of a kingdom’s elite was a matter of great political moment. Are we seeing the emergence of a concept of statehood, an idea of an institution which might exist outwith the physical person of the king? Perhaps. If so, there is a precedent. The Early Medieval historian Edward James has identified a similar three-part process, taking place over perhaps a decade, in the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis around the turn of the sixth century.*4
Coifi, the chief priest, is Bede’s first witness. He is strangely keen to renounce his former religion. The core of his argument seems to be that for all Edwin’s success in war and diplomacy he, Coifi, has seen little reward:
None of your followers has devoted himself more earnestly than I have to the worship of our gods, but nevertheless there are many who have received greater benefits and greater honour from you than I do…’*5
It is as if the arrivals of Paulinus and Æthelburh have cut his lines of patronage. Bede’s purpose in deploying him is to show that the head of the pagan priesthood sees little value in pursuing the worship of idols and the divination of auguries. Coifi goes on to advise scrutiny of the case for Christianity and its acceptance if it should prove ‘better and more effectual’. The speech may be concocted from anecdotal material circulating in Bede’s day, or it may be based on notes taken by the only persons present capable of making a written record—Paulinus and his deacon James. Either way, it does not carry much conviction. Indeed, there have often been suggestions that the entire Bedan account is in fact that of Paulinus. The testimony of Bede’s second witness has the air of a practised rhetorical form, one that a proselytising priest like Paulinus might well have rolled out as part of a sort of DIY conversion kit:
Another of the king’s chief men agreed with this advice and with these wise words and then added, ‘This is how the present life of man on earth, King, appears to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns*6 in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters at one door and quickly flies out th
rough the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it.’89
The third in Bede’s trio of witnesses is Paulinus: tall, stooping (he must have been at the very least in his late forties), with black hair, thin features and classic Italian aquiline nose, he gave off an air of gravitas and moral authority.90 Although Bede furnishes his account of the priest with the first pen-portrait in English history, he fails to record his words, lending weight to the idea that it was Paulinus who set down the account of Edwin’s conversion. He leaves Coifi to summarise the findings of the council and to recommend with admirable zeal the destruction of the idols and temples which were the outward symbols of their worthless religion. Coifi it is who symbolically rides out from the king’s palace on a stallion with spear in hand and sword at his side to defile the chief shrine of the Deirans at a place which today is called Goodmanham.
He ordered his companions to set fire to and destroy the shrines and enclosures. Whether that meant razing the entire temple complex to the ground is unclear; if that was the case it was in contravention of Pope Gregory’s advice to convert the temples to Christian use but one doesn’t imagine Paulinus demurring at such actions, instead watching with a quiet smile of satisfaction on his saturnine features. As for Edwin’s chief priest, did he undergo baptism and train for the priesthood, or retire quietly on a small grace-and-favour estate for playing his part so well? As an archaeologist, I am sorely tempted to speculate on what Coifi’s eventual burial might have looked like. Was he buried with spear and sword in hand, or with Byzantine Saul and Paul spoons*7 in his palms, gold-leaf crosses on his eyes and a chalice at his side? Or both, as ambivalent kings like Rædwald and Sæberht seem to have been furnished with. There was an intriguing burial at Yeavering which looks suspiciously like that of a heathen priest and is probably contemporary with these events. The so-called Grave AX lay at the west end, just outside the entrance to one of the great halls (Building A4). The ghost of a stain in the soil indicated the inhumation of an adult male in the flexed position—partially on its side with knees bent. Laid across the body, running the length of the grave, had been a wooden object bound with bronze fittings which seemed to designate the occupant as a person of special rank or function—as did his position of honour. Yeavering’s brilliant excavator, Dr Brian Hope-Taylor, thought that the object might be a ceremonial staff and the idea that this was the grave of Coifi, Edwin’s chief priest, is an attractive one.91 The individual could equally, as Hope-Taylor himself suggested, have been a standard-bearer with his tufa or even the surveyor-general of the township’s buildings.
Within a year Edwin, all ‘his nobles and a vast number of the common people’ (gentis suae nobilibus ac plebe) were baptised by Paulinus and his deacons. It was a political triumph for the king and a personal one for the Italian missionary, who thus fulfilled Gregory’s original intention to install a bishop in the ancient Roman colonia at York. Deira was now Christian, in name at least. Paulinus embarked on a programme of catechism and baptism that led to mass immersions in the swift brown waters of the River Swale at Catterick.*8 Later, he built a church at a royal residence called Campodonum, probably near Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, while work also progressed on a stone church to replace his oratory at York.
Now secure in the king’s own territory, Paulinus and his entourage moved north into Bernicia where, Bede relates somewhat disingenuously, the rest of the Northumbrians gladly received the grace of baptism. It must have been a strange event; but no Bernician ambitious to enjoy the fruits of patronage of this most successful king could afford to spurn the chance of joining his new club. The warrior elites of early England were nothing if not pragmatic. The place where hundreds of Bernicians underwent the rites of salvation was another royal residence, one with the strongest heathen overtones: Yeavering. For thirty-six days from morning until evening Paulinus and his deacons immersed the prospective faithful in the River Glen, one of England’s most historically blood-filled rivers.
Yeavering is pre-eminent among the excavated settlements of Early Medieval Britain, investigated in the 1950s and 1960s by an archaeologist of rare talents who was in many respects far ahead of his time. Brian Hope-Taylor’s exquisite monograph92 describes an extraordinarily detailed landscape of royal architecture and social space but also seems to bridge the often-defiant chasm between history and archaeology. Here Hope-Taylor believed that he could actually identify structures commissioned by the historical King Edwin for precisely this Bedan scene: the wholesale conversion of the Bernician nobility. The excavations identified the literal and physical manifestation of the stage on which this Shakespearean drama was played out against a magnificent backdrop: the primeval, sensuously atmospheric hills of the Cheviot massif.
The grandstand at Yeavering is unique in archaeology. Surviving below the topsoil as a pattern of post-settings in deep arcing trenches, it has left behind the unmistakeable form of a segment of a circle, looking from the air like some sonic wave from an echo-locator. Its focal point, towards the north-east, was a dais or platform of the sort one used to see on newsreels for the ceremonial launching of great ships. Beyond that, aligned as if by a meticulous town-planner, an imposing series of magnificent timber halls, the archaeological reality of Beowulf’s Heorot, stressed the royal splendour of the setting. Beyond them lay another unique structure, the great enclosure: an enormous cattle corral.*9 Other domestic apartments fanned out to the north while behind the grandstand, to the south-west, were an ancient pagan cemetery focused on a succession of timber posts and a complex of ritual buildings, where sacrifices were made to the gods of Bernicians and huge feasts were prepared for the visits of kings.
The bulk of the grandstand structure measured fifty feet from front to back. Nineteen feet to the rear of the widest arc four great post-holes indicated where buttresses had supported the immense weight of the back tier—an estimated twenty feet off the ground.93 Hope-Taylor had no doubt that the whole construction sloped up from front to back, exactly like the terrace of a Greek or Roman theatre. No-one can say for sure why the grandstand was built, but Hope-Taylor’s conclusion was that it was constructed to formalise the proceedings of Paulinus’s mass conversion, in suitably impressive surroundings. Later archaeologists have approached the excavator’s historical synchronisation of his findings with caution, almost with over-caution: it seems just too good to be true. But the uniqueness of the historical occasion and the singularity of the structure are hard to ignore and there are other reasons for believing Hope-Taylor’s interpretation. Much discussion has revolved around the grandstand’s possible precedents elsewhere in the archaeological record. There seem to be none. If the building is to be placed in Edwin’s reign, one must seek its inspiration.
Two lines of thought can be traced. One is the existence of surviving Roman structures which Edwin might have seen during his years of exile, or in his own lands. York, it is true, possessed surviving Roman masonry, but no theatre. Colchester, in the kingdom of the East Saxons, had an amphitheatre and an out-of-town theatre at Gosbecks during the Roman period. Closer to home, Aldborough on the Roman road north-west of York, which had been the civitas capital of the Brigantes tribe, had an amphitheatre. Chester, which Edwin might have visited in his days in Gwynedd, also boasted an amphitheatre. These structures had, naturally enough, been built of stone in pure Mediterranean style; and Edwin’s evident desire to embrace the trappings—or what he thought of as the trappings—of the fallen empire of the giants, might certainly have encouraged him in the desire to have his own copy. It suited his idea of imperium which, as Bede says, was expressed by the carrying of a thuf or tufa, an iron standard or staff like that from the Sutton Hoo burial, before his
train, and by his royal progress with standard-bearers walking before him.94 Not for nothing had Edwin revived York, the city of Constantine the Great’s elevation to the Imperial purple, as a place of royal significance.
Another equally plausible thought is that the grandstand was inspired by Paulinus. This was a man who had spent his early life in the mother city, who would have walked among the splendours, such as they still were in the year 600, of ancient Rome. More than that, even, Paulinus had spent twenty years or so in Canterbury, where the Roman theatre (about twice as big, front to back, as the Yeavering grandstand) could still be seen, and entered, in the centre of the town right down to the early seventh century.95 That Paulinus might have suggested the erection of the grandstand to his patron is intriguing; that he was able to commission its construction is remarkable. The builders of the palace complex at Yeavering were masters of woodcraft; did they envision Paulinus’s idea from drawings, or a model? Did Paulinus bring craftsmen over from the Continent? I favour the former scenario. Probably no-one had ever built such a thing in wood, but it was certainly not beyond the capabilities of local engineers and craftsmen for whose skills Hope-Taylor’s admiration leaps from the pages of his sumptuous account.
There is a third, even more intriguing context for this enigmatic structure. A recent re-evaluation of Hope-Taylor’s account of the grandstand draws attention to a contemporary Frankish law code that expounds the role and use of a staffolus.96 This was essentially a post, perhaps not unlike a tribal totem pole, a focal point for dispensing the king’s law and for his quasi-divine role as tribal head. Yeavering’s grandstand has a post-hole as its focal point, which fits perfectly the notion implied by the Lex Ripuaria, and the re-use of Roman theatres as places of Continental tribal assembly is well-established. What makes this proposition so apt for Yeavering is that the Lex Ripuaria is generally regarded as a product of the court of Dagobert I, and Edwin’s queen Æthelburh was also a product of that court. Did Æthelburh’s influence extend beyond her husband’s conversion to its physical embodiment at the tribal assembly place of the Bernicians beneath their holy mountain of Yeavering Bell? Was the grandstand, in fact, the conception of a Frankish woman, realised by Bernician craftsmen to emphasise both her husband’s imperium and her priest’s spiritual hegemony over the north? It is tempting to believe that, subtle politician as he was, Edwin deployed his queen to win the hearts and minds of his subject peoples by flattering and perhaps intimidating them with magnificence—imposing on the vulgar, as a later social historian would have it.*10 Curious readers trying to envision this Dark Age marvel will be happy to know that in late 2012 approval was given for a project to recreate the Yeavering grandstand at Bede’s World in Jarrow, in a suitably Early Medieval setting.
The King in the North Page 12
