The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  There are two further reasons, aside from the Dál Riatan boat muster, for believing that Oswald came to meet Cadwallon from the west. One is that when Oswald set up his camp before the assault on Cadwallon, it was located a few miles to the north-west of Corbridge, at a place called Heavenfield. That then makes sense as the direction from which he marched—not from the north along Dere Street. The other is the nature of relations between the Bernician kings and those of Rheged. Æthelfrith, it is supposed, had annexed Rheged, the kingdom of the Solway, during his long reign. Hostages must have been exchanged; perhaps marriage alliances were brokered. One of these was later fulfilled: Oswiu, born in 612, had fathered a child with the Irish princess Fina during his Scottish exile but his first acknowledged marriage was to Rhieinmelth, daughter of Royth, son of Rhun,*5 son of Urien of Rheged.

  Rheged was, therefore, another interested party. It had effectively lost its independence, so far as we can tell, after the death of its great hero Urien in the years before 600. And yet, its court was still sufficiently regarded to provide consorts for Bernician overkings; or at least prospective Bernician overkings. It cannot have been oblivious to Cadwallon’s depredations across the Pennines; and may have felt threatened by them even if Cadwallon was also British.*6 Oswiu’s marriage to Rhieinmelth must date to around 630–5 because their son Alhfrith became sub-king of Deira under his father around the year 655 and cannot realistically have been much less than twenty years old at the time. The union of Rheged and Bernicia, then, might have taken place either side of Oswald’s restoration. But that is not to say that the two houses had not arranged the marriage earlier, perhaps between 612, the year of Oswiu’s birth, and 617 when Æthelfrith was killed by Edwin.

  Oswald, then, if I am right and his route to Bernicia was made via Solway, must have presented himself to the court of Rheged (perhaps at Carlisle, the British Caer Luel, or Stanwix, just the other side of the River Eden)*7 and engaged the court with an ingratiating speech something like this: does the court of Royth son of Rhun son of Urien of great fame recognise the friendship between our two peoples forged in the days of our fathers; will the warriors of Rheged stand by their allies against the perfidious apostate Cadwallon (laying it on a bit thick, here, as one does in such situations) who like a cursed whelp seeks only to destroy and defile the north parts of our island with rapine and slaughter (appealing to the stability lobby); will the King cement our friendship in the name of the True God by honouring the betrothal in Christ of our brother Oswiu with his daughter Rhieinmelth agreed upon in the time of our fathers? etc., etc. Gifts would have been exchanged, backstage deals struck, oaths made. I am guessing, but I do not think the politics of such events has changed much; nor the florid superficiality of the language.*8

  What Oswald wanted was an ally, both to guard his rear—or at least abstain from joining in against him—and probably, since he had come by boat, to supply horses and provisions for his small but zealous army; goodness only knows what the proud but much-reduced court of Rheged must have thought. Probably they considered Oswald, of whose martial reputation they must have heard, a better bet than the rogue Cadwallon: a restored and powerful (and Ionan-Christian) Northumbria offered stability, protection and a measure of access to its lines of patronage.

  For much later narrative histories it is possible to identify elements of charisma in individual leaders. Nelson had it in bucket-loads, as did T. E. Lawrence—both of them born (in their own minds, at least) in the classical flashing-blade mould of warband heroes. Colm Cille’s charismatic leadership of the community of Iona is drawn with awe and affection by Adomnán (albeit a hundred years after the fact) and Bede cannot help admiring the heathens Penda and Æthelfrith, as well as Oswald. Oswald’s Irish nickname Lamnguin allows us to glimpse something of his reputation as a fighting man, a dashing warrior on the field of battle. To achieve that exalted status required not just charisma but luck, the facility to inspire, generosity and magnanimity; above all, perhaps, skill in arms and horsemanship—all those virtues ascribed to his poetic equivalent Beowulf.

  In Oswald’s case there might have been something more on which he could trade both to attract good men to his warband and convince doubters (at Dunadd; at Carlisle?) of his prospective success. Lamnguin, ‘Whiteblade’ or perhaps ‘Bright arm’ recalls the legendary Irish God Nuada Airgetlám, whose arm was severed in battle and replaced with a silver prosthetic which entitled him to the kingship.111 In Rheged there had once been a cult devoted to a totemic tribal deity, known to us only from inscriptions and one or two crude but evocative representations of the naked and very evidently virile horned war god Belatucadros, spear and shield in hand, whose name, roughly translated, means ‘bright, beautiful one’ or perhaps ‘death-decorated one’. The Roman soldiers of the Wall garrisons unsurprisingly equated him with Mars, their god of war. An atheling as canny as Oswald might well have traded on any associations made between himself, the returning Whiteblade, and these attractive, cunning, lucky gods of war.112 This idea is reinforced by the association of a similar representation of Woden as a god with horned helmet, naked, carrying a spear in either hand.113 If Oswald did present himself at the court of Rheged looking for support and tapping into Irish and Germanic iconography and native Christian/pagan sentiments, it also provides a plausible backdrop for his brother Oswiu’s marriage to a princess of that once-proud kingdom. The success I suppose Oswald to have had in Rheged is, in a sense, attested by the outcome.

  Now to war: from Carlisle, Oswald heads off to do battle with Cadwallon at a speed which is faster than news can travel towards the British host; probably with horses supplied by Rheged; perhaps even with a British contingent of young Rheged nobility among his forces. He must strike before Cadwallon is aware of his landing. East, then, at dawn’s first light into the early summer sun along the Stanegate, the first-century Roman road joining Rheged to Northumbria through the Solway–Tyne gap. It predates Hadrian’s Wall, keeping to lower, easier ground, and at its inception was probably intended as a frontier in its own right. It was retained as a route of supply to the Wall forts and as a means of transferring troops quickly along the Wall’s length. The Roman army reckoned it a three-day march from Carlisle to Corbridge; two days at forced pace. Oswald’s host, numbering perhaps in the low hundreds, is unhampered by baggage trains or booty: it travels light and fast. No shining legion had been seen in these parts for two hundred years but warbands cannot have been a strange sight. The wall of Hadrian still stood in large part, although the gates of its forts had long ago rotted on their hinges and it was no barrier to farmer or trader. At Birdoswald Fort there is archaeological evidence for some sort of establishment surviving into perhaps the sixth century, evidenced by timber halls erected over the abandonment layers of the fort. It is tempting to associate its name with a memory of an overnight camp by the Bernician atheling; but the name is all we have.*9 More likely Oswald camped in the Stanegate fort at Nether Denton or carried on towards Vindolanda where, in its last active days, there seems to have been a British church.114 Despite the effective abandonment of the Solway-Tyne gap as the military frontier of an empire, this was not an empty landscape. Traders working their way from sea to sea, like the latter-day truckers winding slowly along the A69, modern equivalent of the Stanegate, must have used this route. If the old Roman forts did not support anything resembling urban communities, they were still convenient staging posts, places to build up stocks of food, fodder and ale, and probably supporting smithies where farriers could count on passing trade: the desultory remnants of once-thriving economies. Drovers and shepherds must also have been in evidence, herding their cattle and sheep on to the high pastures in early summer but otherwise uninterested in the movements of warriors except for the bartering of a night’s meat ration. When new settlements developed in the Early Medieval period they were to be found along the Stanegate corridor, not on the Wall.

  Rivers in mid-summer still ran with ale-coloured water draining off the high moors.
At Greenhead, the highest point of the route, a narrow pass had to be scouted—a perfect place for an ambush, although it seems Cadwallon was blissfully unaware of approaching doom. If bridges survived at Chesters and elsewhere the army would keep its pace; otherwise, fording points must be warily scouted. Oswald surely had intelligence of Cadwallon’s position: the site chosen for his last camp shows that his army avoided the last stretch of Stanegate; probably it was closely watched. At Chesters the army moved along the precise line of the Wall to within an hour’s march of Corbridge at a turret three or four miles to the north-west across country and sheltered from southerly eyes by a convenient bluff. Cadwallon’s apparent ignorance of Oswald’s imminent arrival suggests strongly that local sympathies lay with the Bernician atheling, not with his British enemy.

  There is a church at Heavenfield today: squat and domestic, no more than three hundred years old, the belfry mounted at its west end seemingly a decorative afterthought. The gnomon of its sundial dispassionately tracks the passing of daylight hours year after year. There are few dwellings nearby whose families might be summoned to prayer by its tolling bell. Beyond it to the north are bleak carrs and scattered farmsteads which have stood time out of mind, locked tight into the fabric of the land by drystone walls that tell tales of labour and self-enslavement. Almost crouching within its low encircling wall with its leaning headstones, a grove of oaks protects the modest hilltop to the north of the Wall and General Wade’s eighteenth-century anti-Jacobite military road. To the south seamless hills run on for ever into the blue.

  The story of the night before Oswald’s defining battle of 634 was still circulating as late as a hundred years afterwards when Bede recorded it, probably from stories related by his friend Bishop Acca of Hexham. It suited Bede’s providential view of Oswald’s whole life to portray the mood in Oswald’s camp as spiritual theatre; and it suited Adomnán, in Iona, to record the supposed influence of Colm Cille on so crucial a battle for the fortunes of the Columban church. Their accounts carry additional weight in that both authors could directly cite witnesses; and not just any old witnesses, but the testimony of Oswald himself as he told the story to Abbot Ségéne, and that of the monks who venerated the site. But Bede and Adomnán offer very different, if broadly compatible details of what happened. Here is Adomnán’s version of events, given extraordinary prominence in the Life of Saint Columba by being recited in the first chapter of Book One as direct evidence of Colm Cille’s earthly (or unearthly) powers:

  While this King Oswald was camped ready for battle, he was asleep on a pillow in his tent one day when he had a vision of Saint Columba. His appearance shone with angelic beauty, and he seemed so tall that his head touched the clouds and, as he stood in the middle of the camp, he covered it all except one far corner with his shining robe. The blessed man revealed his name to the king and gave him these words of encouragement, the same the Lord spoke to Joshua, saying, ‘Be strong and act manfully. Behold, I will be with thee.’ In the king’s vision Columba said this, adding:

  ‘This coming night go out from your camp into battle, for the Lord has granted me that at this time your foes shall be put to flight and Cadwallon your enemy shall be delivered into your hands and you shall return victorious after battle and reign happily.’

  Hearing these words the king awoke and described his vision to the assembled council. All were strengthened by this and the whole people promised that after their return from battle they would accept the faith and receive baptism.115

  How clever of Adomnán to invoke the identification of Oswald with Joshua, the assistant of Moses who led the Israelites back into the land of Canaan, to victory and the recovery of the lands which God had promised them.

  Bede’s narrative continues in a passage that may have been intended to convey parallels with the story of the Emperor Constantine before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 and those famed Christian victories of Theodosius and Clovis.116 In Constantine’s vision, the night before his battle, he was commanded to make the sign of a cross on the shields of his soldiers. Perhaps with this precedent in mind (and he must have heard the story of Constantine while on Iona) Oswald...

  When he was about to engage in battle, set up the sign of the holy cross and, on bended knees, prayed to God to send heavenly aid to His worshippers in their dire need. In fact it is related that when a cross had been hastily made and the hole dug in which it was to stand, he seized the cross himself in the ardour of his faith, placed it in the hole, and held it upright with both hands until the soldiers had heaped up the earth and fixed it in position. Thereupon he raised his voice and called out to the whole army, ‘Let us all kneel together and pray the almighty, ever living and true God to defend us in His mercy from the proud and fierce enemy; for He knows that we are fighting in a just cause for the preservation of our whole race.’117

  Bede was in no doubt of its significance. The historical purpose of the two accounts is to place both God and Colm Cille at Oswald’s side in battle; to give the event a historical (and biblical and Roman) context and to set it within a hagiographic tradition in which signs and events portended or reflected God’s special favour. The scene we are presented with also leaves us in no doubt that Oswald was fully aware of the potency of such religious and historical imagery. If, as the medieval Scottish historian John of Fordun*10 later believed, the Dál Riatan contingent were given instructions not to fight Cadwallon (in which case, why were they there?), Colm Cille’s apparent direct intercession, effectively pre-ordaining Oswald as righteous king, was a masterstroke: the spiritual clout of Iona superseded the political interest of the court of Domnall Brecc. Oswald, it seems, had the right stuff.

  Cynics might say that Oswald, and the historians and hagiographers who traded on him over the next five hundred years, were consciously manipulative; that the vision was a fabrication and the cross mere psychological hokum. That is to mistake the nature of the Early Medieval mindset. Oswald’s and Bede’s worlds were miraculous: without the probabilistic explanations of science, truth was constructed from a combination of practical reality and a strong belief in sympathetic magic, omen and augury. Signs were there to be read and they were taken very seriously indeed. Oswald, in a state of high excitement and, perhaps, having been warned by his friend Ségéne to look out for signs of Colm Cille’s favour (so that the monks might be certain which Christian king was the more righteous), very naturally interpreted whatever dream or vision he had as just that. Moreover, there is little doubt that for all his political acumen—and he had been well taught—Oswald was a genuine spiritual convert, unlike his uncle Edwin who was baptised for political convenience. Oswald was a believer. Like Rædwald, however, he may have kept a strategic foot in each camp.*11

  Until the nineteenth century, Oswald’s clash with Cadwallon was known as the Battle of Heavenfield; the Ordnance Survey still locates the battle site next to the church and the modern wooden cross that stands beside the road here. Bede says that in his day the site was held in great veneration; monks would process there on the eve of Oswald’s feast day every year to keep vigil. People would take splinters from the cross which Oswald raised and soak them in water, before giving the drink to sick men or beasts or sprinkling them with it; such people were quickly restored to health.118 There is some satisfaction for archaeologists in this forensic detail. It is often difficult to explain how the past operated physically in creating the archaeological record. Here is direct, compelling evidence to explain why the original cross is no longer there: it was nicked, splinter by splinter. What form the original cross took is obscure. Was it hastily fashioned from local boughs and lashed together? Was it, perhaps, made from Roman floor joists pulled from the mile turret on the site? Or was it crafted in anticipation—did it in some way artistically anticipate the Irish-influenced stone high crosses of Northumbria which are the great glories of the northern Christian landscape? Turret 25b, the not very evocative name of the site where this is supposed to have happened, was excavated
in the 1950s.119 On the excavator’s plan there is a rectangular hole in the centre of the floor of the turret, interpreted at the time as disturbance from a later period; but it would perfectly suit as a hole in which a cross might be raised.

  So confident was Bede of the providential nature of Oswald’s campsite that he regarded the name Heavenfield as having been given to the place in antiquity as an omen. By the time Bede was writing, the first church had been erected there and one has stood on the site ever since.

  At dawn, the morning after Oswald’s vision and his raising of the cross, the army launched its attack on Cadwallon’s ‘irresistible’ army.*12 But the encounter was not fought at Heavenfield. The tradition of the Welsh Annals has it that the battle, recorded under the year 631, equating to 634, was called Cantscaul. Early writers suggested that this was derived from Brythonic Cat, for ‘battle’, and gwal, or ‘Wall’; that the battle therefore must have taken place close to Oswald’s camp. This has now been dismissed on philological grounds, and it is accepted that Cantscaul is a corrupt form of Cant scaul, which itself can be shown to precisely transliterate Old English Hagustaldesham: that is, Hexham.120 That name, which intriguingly means ‘enclosure of the young warrior’, does not seem to have come into existence until later, perhaps when the church was established there in Oswiu’s reign and when its first bishop, the ambitious Wilfrid, wanted for his own reasons to trade on Hexham’s associations with nearby Heavenfield. It is not really credible as the site of the battle because there is a better and more specific location on offer. Bede says that Cadwallon’s destruction happened ‘at a place which is called in the English tongue Denisesburn, that is the brook of the Denise’. Not until the nineteenth century did a historical document emerge to pin down Denisesburn. It was found in a charter, apparently by members of the Tyneside Naturalists’ Field Club whose president, the indefatigable barrow-digging antiquary Canon William Greenwell, reported its significance for the location of the battle site in 1864. The charter, dating to 1233, granted one Thomas of Whittington: