The churches Aidan founded outside Lindisfarne, with two possible exceptions, are unknown in both extent and location. The two exceptions are Bamburgh, where Aidan is known to have died and been buried, and probably Yeavering where Building B, constructed as part of a great expansion of the royal township in both scale and architectural magnificence and dated by Hope-Taylor to Oswald’s reign, lay to the east of the great halls. It occupied the site of a former string-grave cemetery, perhaps to be associated with Eanfrith’s brief tenure of the kingdom. The church was simple, a structure forty feet long by about twenty wide, set in a fenced enclosure absolutely crammed with east–west aligned graves; so crammed, in fact, that the excavator had difficulty determining where one grave ended and the next began; one interment was squeezed in so tightly between others as to be forced to fit around a buttress post. After an initial phase the church was destroyed by fire and rebuilt with a western annexe in a style closely resembling the superior domestic complex of Area C to the north-west. This was a royal church, not the ancillary structure of an outsider permitted to cling to the fringes of power. Royal, suitably imposing, but well within the aesthetic compass of Irish sensibilities. That Oswald, assuming he was the king responsible for this phase of building at Yeavering, intended Iona’s influence to lie at the heart of his rule, seems a reasonable conclusion to draw.
The success of Aidan’s and Oswald’s mission is evident in the simple fact of its survival after the king’s untimely death in battle. Oswald’s reign lasted less than a decade. But his political success in that short time shows that his energies were by no means confined to the establishment of the Irish church in England.
*1EH III.3; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 219. Cadwallon is here a mere heathen.
*2Thacker 1995, 112. My colleague Colm O’Brien suggests that Oswald’s later elevation to the apogee of his narrative may have something to do with Bede’s wish to enhance Aidan’s reputation.
*3See p.351.
*4See p.265.
*5See my essay on the Bernician king-list, Appendix A, p.395.
*6O’Brien 2002.
*7See Glossary, Appendix C, p.414.
*8Old English boc for book derives from the same root as beech, a wood that must have been used either as a binding or for writing on.
*9As I will demonstrate in Chapter XX.
X
The neighbours
Duru sceal on healle…
rum recedes muð
A hall needs a door…
the building’s wide mouth
As a hall needs a door, a king must have a wife. The name of Oswald’s queen was not even recorded by Bede. She is the most invisible of royal consorts in the seventh century. We have to trust the much later assertion of Reginald of Durham that she was called Cyniburh. We can be reasonably sure that she was the daughter of Cynegisl, king of the Gewisse or West Saxons. She bore Oswald a son, Œthelwald, who played his own small and ignominious part in the fortunes of Northumbria. Oswald conspicuously waited until he was king to marry. Merovingian custom in this period was that only offspring born to a king during his rule might succeed him, and Oswald may have felt subject to a similar constraint either by Irish or by Bernician precedent.*1 He was leaving nothing to chance. Since marriage was a political event in the seventh century, Oswald’s nuptials must be seen as part of a political and military alliance with the king of the Gewisse.
At no point can the lands of the Bernician kings have bordered on those of Wessex. Their kings were not then remotely the dominant force they came to be in the ninth century; not until Cædwalla (with his oddly British name) in the late seventh century were they able to impose tributary status on their southern neighbours. But Wessex was rich in resources, as the founding of the trading town of Hamwih under Cædwalla’s successor King Ine implies. In the Tribal Hidage it was assessed at one hundred thousand hides, three times the tribute exacted from Mercia or East Anglia. This is not necessarily a direct reflection of wealth, because if the Hidage belongs to Edwin’s reign there were obvious grounds for an extreme punitive levy on the kingdom that had sponsored his attempted assassination. Even so, Wessex might have been seen as a rising star. More importantly, it bordered Oswald’s southern neighbour Mercia, whose would-be king Penda had helped dispatch Edwin and whose own rise must have been one of Oswald’s principal territorial concerns.
The mechanics of this alliance, which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records under the year 636, are hung on Cynegisl’s baptism by Birinus, a sort of freelance bishop who had been allowed to preach among the heathen Gewisse. The king’s conversion was very likely Birinus’s initiative, but its political motivation must have been the overt Christianity of the new great power in the land. Cynegisl’s choice of Oswald Iding as godfather makes that clear enough. An alliance with Bernicia, on a tributary basis, was also desirable for a West Saxon king whose son, Cwichelm, had been behind the murder attempt on Edwin. So Oswald’s Christian credentials already carried sufficient weight that heathen kings would undergo conversion as a corollary of alliance. It is hard to imagine that Oswald and the king’s daughter were previously acquainted, so this looks like the most calculated of marriages. Given that the queen left almost no other mark on history I suggest that she was not the political or moral force her sisters-in-law became. In Bernicia it must have seemed that a long period in the shadows of Deiran domination had now given way to an age reminiscent of the glorious days of Æthelfrith. In Mercia the alliance cannot have been looked on with anything other than deep misgiving.
Bede’s claim that Oswald held sway over more lands than any of his predecessors—as a result, clearly, of his Christian virtues—is worth a close look to see if it stands up. Within living memory Kent and East Anglia had claimed or been acknowledged to exert imperium over the other kingdoms. The death of Æthelberht of Kent in about 616 and the apostasy of his successor led to a decline in Kentish influence, confirmed by Bede when he records that after her flight to the Kentish court in 633, Edwin’s widow ‘Æthelburh, fearing kings Eadbald and Oswald... sent these children to Gaul to be brought up by King Dagobert.’151 Eadbald of Kent had apostasised on the death of his father, married his stepmother and then undergone baptism in the early 620s. He had given his daughter in marriage to Edwin and his niece Eanflæd would become Oswiu’s second (or third) wife. Kent may not have been tributary to Edwin, but Æthelburh’s concerns for her children indicate that Oswald’s writ ran all the way to the Channel. Oswald also held imperium over the South Saxons,152 so that the whole south coast of England from Thanet to Poole and as far north as the Thames was tribute to him.
Lindsey, squeezed between Mercia in the west, the River Humber, the east coast and the fenlands of Anglia to the south, had a chequered history under the Northumbrian kings. It was a second-division kingdom, if its Hidage assessment of seven thousand hides is anything to go by. Its royal genealogies are thinly attested in the historical record. Its origins probably belong in the Roman province whose capital was the colonia at Lincoln.153 Here, in the church of St Paul in the Bail, is some of the best archaeological evidence for the survival of Romano-British Christianity into the Early Medieval period. Paulinus preached at Lincoln and constructed a stone church there in about 627. If the Tribal Hidage was compiled by Paulinus under Edwin, Lindsey was already tribute to Deira in his reign, when it was bundled with Hatfield. Oswald decisively conquered Lindsey, probably as part of his campaigns to shackle Mercian pretensions. Bede, in recounting the story of the translation of Oswald’s bones to the Lindsey monastery at Bardney, tells us that the monks initially rejected the relics because of Oswald’s aggressive treatment of their kingdom.*2 There might be something more. Historians have noted and rather failed to explore the obvious similarity of Lindsey’s Tribal Hidage record, under which it appears as Lindisfaran, with the island of Lindisfarne. There is no certain historical link but there is a good chance that Lindisfarne was a primary foothold of an Anglian warband sailing up the east coast from Lindsey, lost
in the mists of the early sixth or late fifth century—perhaps led by Ida, founder of the Bernician ruling dynasty. The inhabitants of Lindsey may have believed that they had, as a police officer might say of a recidivist criminal, ‘previous’; Bernician kings may have believed themselves to possess residual rights over their ancestral homeland.
Lindsey never wielded great power: its princesses were not objects of diplomatic desire among the great kingdoms; it had little opportunity for expansion against more powerful neighbours; its subjugation was a military hobby for kings pursuing greater imperium and strategic domination of the Humber basin waterways; Mercia regarded it as a natural extension of its own territory to the east. That Oswald was able to conquer and control it suggests that during his reign Mercia did not yet have sufficient military strength to match him there; not, that is, until the last year of his life. But there is evidence of an attempt by the southern English kingdoms to assert their independence from Northumbria.154 There are entries in two of the Irish annals, in the late 630s, which deserve more notice than many historians have given them. Both are derived from a lost chronicle of Iona and reflect increased interest in northern English affairs after Oswald’s succession. The Annals of Tigernach record under the year 637 a ‘congregation of the Saxons against Osualt’. The Ulster Annals note under the year 639 the ‘battle of Oswald, king of the Saxons’. They might record two military campaigns or, more likely, both derive from mention of a single conflict. If it is the latter, then it seems that Oswald faced a combined attack from the south; and if it was a ‘congregation’, of which kingdoms did it consist? The specific mention of Saxons suggests that there was no British involvement. The obvious candidates are Lindsey and Mercia, perhaps supported by East Anglia. Wessex, already allied with Bernicia, can be ruled out as, I think, can Deira, Kent and the other southernmost kingdoms. Was the campaign led by the rising star of the southern English?
Mercia’s great warlord Penda is an enigma, as little understood as the origins of his kingdom. Bede had no Mercian correspondents and no Mercian chronicle survives to record its genealogies or its foundation stories. It emerges as an entity in the early seventh century when its kings or war leaders are noticed in chronicles and when its princesses begin to marry well. But it does not possess the legendary narratives beloved of Bernician or Kentish genealogists; there is no Mercian historian whose work survives to do it justice, as Bede did for the Northumbrians. There is a resultant danger of underestimating the power and influence of its rulers, especially before the reign of the celebrated Offa in the eighth century. For all the power of the Northumbrian kings, none of them was ever able to strike at the Mercian heartlands in the seventh century. Mercia was not a small kingdom grown great like Wessex or East Anglia. It was not named after a people or a civitas capital. Mercia is a Latinised form of the Old English word Merce, meaning ‘people of the March or border’, as in the Marcher lords of the Middle Ages; and the lands on which it must have marched are those of the British of Powys and the other Welsh kingdoms. The broad consensus is that by tracing the boundaries of the surrounding territories named in the Tribal Hidage, in which the unspecified Mercian lands are rated for tribute at thirty thousand hides, the hole left in the middle must constitute the core lands of Mercia in the early seventh century. This exercise gives us roughly the modern counties of Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, the southern half of Derbyshire and Warwickshire.155 Even then, parts of these lands must originally have been separate, if minor, kingdoms in earlier centuries. Mercia was—must have been—a confederate state, if that is not too loaded a word. If one takes its core territory to be defined by the later dioceses at Lichfield and Leicester one would probably not be too wide of the mark, with the watershed of the upper Trent as its cultural coreland, perhaps; its royal cemetery lay at Repton, its ‘seat of paternal antiquity’ probably at Tamworth; its diocesan seat at Lichfield.
The first hint we have of Mercia asserting independence from Northumbrian kings is in about 614–15, when King Cearl—and it is by no means certain what ‘king’ means in Mercia at this time—gave his daughter to the exiled atheling Edwin, a move which could not be more calculated to inflame the wrath of Æthelfrith. An entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the late 620s has Penda fighting against Cynegisl and Cwichelm of the Gewisse at Cirencester, with no apparent outright winner, although Mercia seems afterwards to have been able to exact tribute from the kingdom of the Hwicce, of which Cirencester was the capital.*3 Before 632, certainly, Penda was in alliance with Cadwallon of Gwynedd, attempting to take on the might of Edwin and succeeding at Hæthfelth on the eastern border of Mercia. These campaigns can only have enhanced Penda’s credentials as a warlord and, although ten years later his brother Eowa’s death is recorded as that of a king, it is hard to say that Penda, by then, was not either his co-ruler or superior. Bede records that his career was one of mixed fortunes, which is not that helpful but indicates that his rise to greatness did not follow a straight path.156 It has been suggested that during Oswald’s reign Eowa was in effect a Bernician puppet, or client king, in Mercia, just as Penda seems to have acted as a protégé of Gwynedd during Cadwallon’s reign.157 Above all, Penda emerges from the pages of Bede as a strenuous defender of heathenism and an indomitable leader of warbands: bold, resolute and dauntless. Bede had previously admitted his admiration for another great pagan warlord, Æthelfrith. He seems to have acknowledged the virtue of consistency, reserving his greatest disapprobation for either apostate English kings or, worse, those who were British Christians.
Penda’s first interaction with Oswald may have been the murder of Edwin’s son Osfrith, who had sought his protection after his father’s death at Hæthfelth. Penda was acting as a subordinate, not an equal, as Rædwald’s musings over whether to allow Æthelfrith to murder Edwin while the young prince was under his protection makes obvious. If this parallel murder was an attempt by Penda to politically outflank his brother Eowa, it seems not to have succeeded; but his ambition is as clear as Oswald’s. He, like Oswald, arranged a marriage alliance with Wessex, although in his case it was the union of his sister with King Cenwalh, Cynegisl’s son and successor. Cenwalh later repudiated her and was expelled by Penda. At some unspecified date Penda took on the kings of East Anglia and defeated them; but from the start it was to Northumbria, and to Oswald, that Penda looked as targets to beat back the tide of Christianity; to assert first his independence and then his superiority over the lines of the Idings and Yffings.
Oswald was not a passive observer of Penda’s career. His alliance with the Gewisse demonstrates the lengths, literally, to which he would go to side-step Mercian ambitions. There have been various suggestions over the years that a cluster of Os-names in the Hwiccian genealogies of the seventh century might reflect an attempt by Oswald to plant a dynasty there, with a similar purpose to his alliance with the Gewisse. Perhaps this is where Oswald’s otherwise unmentioned younger brothers went. The jury is out on that... so far.
Oswald must have had one eye on Mercia throughout his reign; he seems to have planned a pre-emptive strike on it in 642; but it was not his only or even his main territorial or martial preoccupation. His cultural and political background was wholly northern, and although the historical evidence for his activities beyond Northumbria is precious thin, there is little doubt that he was active in pursuing political ambitions there.
The northern, specifically Ionan interest in Oswald, his brother Oswiu and the fortunes of the kingdom of Northumbria is shown by a number of entries in the Irish Annals from 635 onwards. These are our principal source for Oswald’s northern activities but they are both sparse and infuriatingly vague. His Dál Riatan patron, Domnall Brecc, suffered a series of reverses in the 630s and 640s which mirror a long-term decline in the fortunes of the Scots. The Battle of Magh Rath, dated to 637, saw an alliance between Brecc and Congal Cáech of the Dál n’Araide attempt to defeat Domnall mac Áedo of the Cenél Conaill. Magh Rath is located at Moira in County
Down and the campaign can be seen as part of a long-running turf war over influence and tribute on the Irish mainland, which had been maintained by the kings of Dál Riata since the Treaty of Druim Cett in about 575. Congal Cáech, who probably called in a marker from his kindred across the water in Argyll, was killed. Most historians believe that the result of the campaign was a disastrous loss of control for Brecc over former Dál Riatan territories in Ulster. Given the reciprocal obligations between northern kings it is possible, likely even, that Oswald fought on Brecc’s behalf, or that he sent a warband in support. If so, his involvement did not make it into the annals.
At some time during the three years after Magh Rath in 637, a confusing variety of Irish annals record the defeat of Brecc’s kindred at a place called Glen Mairson, probably on the Scottish mainland, followed by a siege of Etin, which must be Edinburgh. Bernician involvement in these campaigns again seems likely, especially given the historic northern interests of the Bernician kings in defending and expanding their territories as far as the River Forth. If Oswald was busy fighting a congregatio of southern English in those years (and again, the Annals do not agree on a precise date), then it was probably his younger brother Oswiu who led the Northumbrian warbands in the lands of Gododdin. Who the enemy were is another matter; but there is a clue in the events of 642, when Domnall Brecc died, slain at a place called Srath Caruin or Strathcarron, which must lie on the Carron River in the upper Forth Valley near Falkirk. The Annals of Ulster record that his conqueror was Hoan, king of the Britons.
What are we to make of this flurry of military activity? It seems to have been precipitated by Domnall Brecc’s defeat at Magh Rath in 637, which tilted the balance of power on both sides of the Irish Sea. Hoan, more properly Eugein, appears as a king of the Strathclyde Britons in a stanza about his defeat in 642 of Dyfnwal Frych—that is, Domnall Brecc, in Y Gododdin...
The King in the North Page 20
