The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  There is one other possibility for Eanfrith’s apparently weak hand. That is the suspicion that in warrior society (it is true of the Franks, another Germanic people) only a son born while his father is king is eligible to succeed. It may be one reason why Edwin, Oswald and Oswiu all marry—in Edwin’s and Oswiu’s case re-marry—and produce heirs after they became king. We must allow, then, for the explanation that Eanfrith was not recognised as a legitimate king by the Bernician elite and that, therefore, his really was a weak hand.

  It is worth considering Cadwallon’s position at this point. Bloodthirsty he may be, bent on revenge against Edwin and his house and the Northumbrians in general—he can have no love for the sons of Æthelfrith, after all. He may, as Bede suggests, desire to wipe the entire race of the Northumbrians from the face of the earth.106 More likely, having amassed sufficient treasure and having excised the legitimate lineages of both the Bernicians and Deirans, he will now return to Gwynedd glutted and with his war chests bulging. Eanfrith’s death ought to satisfy him. Unless, that is, he believes Æthelfrith’s surviving son Oswald might yet pose a threat. Cadwallon, then, having dispatched Osric and fulfilled his and his warriors’ lust for plunder and wasting, summons Eanfrith to Corbridge on the edge of Bernician territory where he, Cadwallon, can defend himself and maintain a line of retreat. Whether it is Oswald or Eanfrith who arrives first, Cadwallon is strategically placed to intercept either—or both. There is no suggestion, incidentally, that Deira recognises Eanfrith.

  Eanfrith hopes that Cadwallon is after his submission or an equitable peace deal. Probably, in accordance with the customary nature of such proceedings, a great quantity of treasure will be negotiated and delivered, oaths sworn, hostages swapped. But Eanfrith has read the British king wrong: he does not care for mere submission; he does not care to impose his absentee rule on tributary Anglian kings of the North as an act of imperium or self-aggrandisement. In his tent, surrounded by battle-hardened campaigning veterans, Cadwallon has Eanfrith and his retinue put to the sword, probably decapitated so that their heads can be posted on stakes on the decayed ramparts of Corstopitum as trophies. He takes their treasure too. Now there is almost no-one left who might challenge the arbitrary military despotism of the British king. Northumbria is finished as an Early Medieval kingdom. Almost. This is the cue for Oswald Lamnguin to make his entry.

  If Oswald and his half-brother Eanfrith were in communication between the fall of Edwin and Cadwallon’s arrival in Bernicia, it has not been recorded. Of the fact that both knew of the battle at Hæthfelth soon after the event there can be only small doubt. Very little has been written about intelligence-gathering in the Early Medieval period, it is true. Kings picked up regional news items as they travelled; traders brought stories from far afield. There were spies, as the assassination attempt on Edwin by Cwichelm’s man shows. Military scouts recruited either from natives with excellent local knowledge (King Ine of Wessex had British ‘riders’ among his retinues) or from the ranks of unmarried young warriors must have been kept busy. A number of unspecified journeys are to be found in the pages of Bede and Eddius Stephanus that may reflect missions of one sort or another. Pilgrims journeyed as far as Rome and beyond. The poor and unfree may have been tied to the land of their lords, but people moved around the landscape, as the early law codes testify.

  The ability of armies to locate each other in the seventh century is impressive, even allowing for the obvious concentration of battles on the lines of Roman roads. In 1745 the Young Pretender’s three armies failed to find each other in the Borders, never mind the enemy. Edwin’s instruction to have bowls hung above water sources on roads implies that in the seventh century there was royal interest in maintaining arterial routes. The question is, was there a cadre of royal messengers whose job it was to pass diplomatic and intelligence material: offers of alliance, warnings, arrangements for meetings and so on? The answer must be a cautious yes. That there were lodgings for travellers is attested by Bede in a post-mortem story about Oswald.107 That messages might pass very rapidly is a little harder to show, but nonetheless likely. On the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 Sir Robert Carey, who had a personal interest in the matter, rode from London to Edinburgh carrying the late queen’s ring (finger still attached). The journey nearly killed him and won him few friends, but he accomplished it in three days at the end of March on roads that cannot have been very different from those used by the Anglians or British of Oswald’s day. And there is a striking near-contemporary example of the speed at which news of great events could move. In 685 St Cuthbert was staying with King Oswiu’s daughter Ælfflæd in the city of Lugubalia (Carlisle, where Roman public fountains still ran in Cuthbert’s day) when he received an awful premonition of the death of King Ecgfrith in battle against the Picts in the region beyond the River Tay. Within two days a fugitive from the battle appeared and confirmed his fears.108 In Bede’s view this story was miraculous proof of Cuthbert’s sanctity; but he could not have told it if the events he described were not at least credible, since they occurred well within the memory of many of his contemporaries.

  Oswald, living at the court of Domnall Brecc in Argyll, will have heard soon enough that Edwin was dead, that Osric and Eanfrith had claimed the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia respectively. He will have heard of Eanfrith’s murder by Cadwallon and must at that point, if not before, have taken counsel. To suggest that more political capital had been invested in Oswald by Dál Riata than by the Picts in Eanfrith may be to read too much into Eanfrith’s dismal fate; nevertheless, to say that in the four hundred days or so between Hatfield and the death of Eanfrith interested parties in Dál Riata were watching events closely and carefully considering their options is an understatement. The future of Bernicia was a matter of the greatest importance in Argyll and on the island of Iona. It is possible, with care, to reconstruct plausibly the circumstances in which Oswald was released from his obligations as a member of Brecc’s household to make his own, fateful bid for Northumbria. If he were to succeed in fulfilling his ambitions and those of his sponsors and companions, the timing of his bid would be crucial: there was not a moment to lose.

  *1Bede, De Temporum Rationem, edited by C. W. Jones, 1943. The ð character is eth, as in brethren.

  *2Bede knew the name of the place but omitted to pass it on. As late as the fifteenth century it was known as Seynt Iamestret; its location has been much sought, but never confirmed; the stret element suggests it lay on or close to a Roman road. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 207. James is also a possible primary source for much information about the Northumbrian conversion cited by Bede, who may have been his marginal contemporary.

  *3But see p.137.

  *4Chaney 1970, 80; that the apostate Osric was given a feast day is interesting in itself.

  *5Regrettably, most of the critical parts of the Roman town there were excavated before archaeologists thought to, or were able to, identify anything as subtle as the ephemeral traces of a Dark Age campsite. Bishop and Dore 1988.

  VIII

  The return of the King

  Fyrd sceal ætsomne...

  tirfæstra getrum

  The army stays together...

  a band set on glory

  Thomas, Lord Cochrane, the frigate captain famed for his dashing exploits in the wars against Napoleon, distributed a handbill calling for volunteer crewmen for his 1805 commission in the thirty-two-gun frigate Pallas. For stout hands who could handle field pieces and ‘carry an hundred weight of PEWTER, without stopping, at least three miles’ he offered the chance to fill their sea chests with Spanish dollars and doubloons.109 The Pallas later returned to Portsmouth with gold Spanish candlesticks tied to her mastheads after a cruise that netted Cochrane something like seventy-five thousand pounds and would have made even her ordinary seamen enough to set up as tavern-keepers. After one famously successful voyage sailors were seen squatting over skillets on Portsmouth Hard, frying gold pocket-watches in a state almost of delirium.

  The
reciprocal ties that bonded an Early Medieval warlord and his warriors were not unlike those which held together the officers and crew of an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century frigate. Patronage flowed downwards; wealth flowed upwards; loyalty and duty worked both ways. A successful fighting captain—and there were few more successful in prize-money than Cochrane—was able to attract the best men. These in turn were rewarded by his success in action: his fighting prowess and tactical skill, and above all his reputation for being lucky—his talismanic virtue. The one-eighth share of prize money which belonged to a post-captain is not so very far from the roughly one-tenth render which a warlord would take from his estates or, perhaps, from the great booty of a battlefield. The best crews worked, lived and fought together over many commissions; were battle-hardened, unflappable, tough and unshakeable in their desire for more treasure, more glory: it was addictive. Many a sailor sang of the deeds of his youth in doggerel less polished but no less evocative than Y Gododdin. Like Early Medieval warriors, the navy’s elite officer cadre, recruited from the sons of those bred to fight and lead, established a literally fabulous reputation for derring-do. Similarly their weaponry, clothes, badges of honour and privileged lifestyle were supported by a much larger number of less-celebrated supporters: carpenters, bosuns, pursers, cooks and seamen who hoped, by being attached to a leader with a reputation like Cochrane’s (or Oswald’s), to receive their relatively pathetic share of wealth and glory and its concomitant bragging rights over their fellows. And like the fighting sailors of a frigate—two hundred and fifty-odd men largely confined to their own company within the wooden walls of their ships—the Early Medieval warrior was effectively peripatetic: the warband and the tent were their home for long periods.

  Oswald Lamnguin had proved himself as a young man fighting in the warbands of the kings of Dál Riata. The many young nobles with whom Bede tells us the sons of Æthelfrith went into exile must have matured or died alongside him during seventeen years of exile. The twelve companions who Adomnán tells us were baptised with him on Iona must be regarded with the same scepticism as those who accompanied Eanfrith to his fatal encounter with Cadwallon; it is a symbolic number. Oswald’s exploits in the field of battle may have attracted more Bernician exiles into his warband and that of his younger brother Oswiu, now twenty-two. The prospect of adventure and glory perhaps also drew young nobles of Dál Riata to Oswald’s purple and gold banner. That this motley band were eager to take on Cadwallon’s veteran army can be inferred; that they were equipped to do so on their own is doubtful. Eanfrith had failed in his attempt to launch an assault from Pictland: he had not been able to attract sufficient men of skill and experience to his band to take on the British army. Oswald’s bid could not be allowed to fail so abjectly. In reconstructing the events of his return to Bernicia the part played by his sponsors cannot be underestimated.

  In the aftermath of Hæthfelth and Eanfrith’s disastrous meeting with Cadwallon, Oswald, bound by oath of loyalty to his lord Domnall Brecc, must have taken counsel. Who were his advisors? Brecc was the son of Eochaid Buide, Colm Cille’s chosen successor to Áedán at whose court Oswald and his brothers and sister had taken refuge in 617. Brecc and Oswald may have fought alongside each other in Ireland, and were perhaps of similar age. Brecc would preside over the precipitous decline of fortune of the kings of Dál Riata and in the early 630s his position was complicated by tensions with his ancestral Ulster homeland, with the British kings of Strathclyde*1 and with Pictish kings to the east (both at least nominally Christian, as was Cadwallon). At the same time, his sponsorship of Oswald, if successful, would give him rights of tribute and patronage over Northumbria and the promise of reciprocal help in his dynastic wars, so he had a delicate diplomatic plate-spinning act to pull off and there may have been parties at his court lobbying for different strategies.

  If Oswald had made a bid for his father’s kingdom during Edwin’s reign, there is only the faintest allusion to it in the notice of the attack on Bamburgh hinted at by the Irish Annals.*2 Any attempt to reclaim his kingdom by battle against Cadwallon might have further complicated the politics. Much later Scottish tradition has it that Brecc forbade Oswald to deploy Dál Riatan warriors against Cadwallon, with whom he was historically allied.*3 Nevertheless, the complex realities of Northern politics imply that while Cadwallon was a British Christian king of the line of Cunedda of the Gododdin and might, therefore, expect sympathetic support or abstention from other historic enemies of the heathen Lloegr, his campaign in Northumbria might also be seen as destabilising established relations; in not seeking to rule but merely to plunder and kill, he had upset the natural order of things. He was a liability; he had gone rogue.

  Brecc must have had a major say in Oswald’s intentions, if only because Oswald required his permission to leave the court. Whom else did Oswald consult? There are several obvious candidates. If Acha, his mother, was still alive he may have sought her counsel. Her keenness to return to Bernicia can only be imagined, as can the interest with which she encouraged the careers of her sons after the death of her estranged brother Edwin. Oswald’s younger brother Oswiu and his sister Æbbe may also have been privy to family debates about timing and tactics. If they had any residual loyalty to their half-brother Eanfrith, that was now irrelevant. Oswald could probably count on Oswiu’s own warband—perhaps small and less experienced than Oswald’s—to support him.

  Maybe the most interested party in these deliberations was the abbot of Iona. Since 623 the incumbent of the mother church of the Columban federation had been Ségéne. Iona had invested heavily in its protégé princes: not just in the education of young Idings, but in the careers of sons of the Cenél nGabráin. Ségéne’s friendship with Oswald was allied to a keen interest in his career. When the opportunity arose in 634 he was prepared to back his atheling with all the resources under his control. He may have been directly involved with counselling alongside Domnall Brecc, whom he had known since birth and probably ordained in 629. Iona was by no means an insignificant party in any deliberations over the extent to which the Scotic kings and the Irish church should back the aspiring Bernician kings. Ségéne’s support went beyond interceding with the king of Dál Riata. He could supply his own warriors, monks who were prepared to fight the fight for Christianity among the heathen (or the rogue Christian); who would obey their abbot. He might also invoke the potent virtues of the founder Colm Cille in support of Oswald’s campaign. That there was an Ionan contingent in Oswald’s forces has been the subject of a certain amount of debate, but it is now generally accepted as a serious possibility. The historical evidence relies on a very few lines in the Red Book of Hergest,*4 which survives only in a very late copy but which laments, in elegising Cadwallon, his final betrayal:

  From the plotting of strangers and iniquitous

  Monks, as the water flows from the fountain,

  Sad and heavy will be the day of Cadwallon110

  It is impossible to be sure about the timing of Oswald’s arrival in Bernicia. I doubt if he came with Eanfrith. More likely, he had to organise the patchwork elements of his warband and calculate their surest approach. Early in the summer of 634, I suggest, Brecc gave him permission to leave the Dál Riatan court and make his bid. The timing depends largely on Oswald’s means of travel. His original exile from Northumbria was probably made by boat from the Solway Firth, and I suggest that his return was effected by the same route. Brecc’s Dál Riatan armies were recruited by customary render of military service as an amphibious assault force: they mustered by boat, they moved by water; like Cochrane’s crews, the progenitors of the Royal Marines, they assaulted from the sea. If Brecc were to back Oswald with warriors, they were surely marines and the boats were supplied from the traditional musters of the Cenél nGabráin. Travel by sea avoided slow, awkward, potentially disastrous marching across the lands of the Strathclyde Britons and Picts; it avoided alerting Cadwallon to their movements; it was also quicker. I believe, then, that Oswald’s disparate
crew of exiled Bernician hopefuls, sword-wielding monks and Dál Riatan young-bloods (who had been told not to actually fight Cadwallon) sailed south from Dál Riata and landed somewhere on the upper reaches of the Solway Firth; they may even have sailed right up the River Eden to Carlisle. Perhaps, at this point, the official obligations of the Dál Riatan marines were over, since they were not supposed to fight. But fight they did.

  The trigger for this enterprise was Eanfrith’s death, followed by negotiations, provisioning and the muster. The window of opportunity was provided by the season. The two middle months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar were Ærra Líða and Æftera Líða. Líða is translated by Bede in his treatise on time, De tempore ratione, as ‘gentle’, or ‘navigable’: in other words, these were the prime sailing months. Oswald’s window was between June and July, which is why I think it worth setting Eanfrith’s death no later than the early months of 634. Cadwallon had been prepared for Osric and Eanfrith; Oswald’s intention must have been to launch an assault without warning in order to compensate for the relative weakness of his army. He might have had intelligence of Cadwallon’s whereabouts if I am right that the British warlord had overwintered at Corbridge and met Eanfrith there; alternatively, Cadwallon might have received word that Oswald was on his way and positioned himself strategically to intercept his army, whether it came from north or west.