When a certain traveller (we do not know his name) was passing the site of the king’s martyrdom on horseback ‘not long after’ Oswald’s death, he may have been aware of the general vicinity of battle, but otherwise supposedly saw nothing untoward. His horse, Bede says, suddenly tired, bent its head to the earth and began to foam at the mouth. It fell to the ground and the rider, believing it to be in its death throes, dismounted and stood by, unsure what to do. The horse continued to writhe until, as popular legend had it, it rolled over the spot where the Bernician king had breathed his last. The horse’s pain began to ease and after a while it rolled over and got to its feet, apparently so unharmed by its ordeal that it began to graze greedily on the grass...
When the rider, who was an intelligent man, saw this, he realised that there must be some special sanctity associated with the place in which the horse was cured. He put up a sign to mark the site, shortly afterwards mounted his horse, and reached the inn where he intended to lodge. On his arrival, he found a girl there, niece of the patron, who had long suffered from paralysis. When he heard the members of the household lamenting the girl’s grievous infirmity, he told them of the place where his horse had been cured. Why need I say more?184
Why indeed? Having been carried in a cart to the site marked by the horseman, the girl was laid down and fell asleep; and on waking found that she could walk home in perfect health. It is easy for the twenty-first-century cynic to see in this episode a great deal of wishful thinking and the power of suggestion tacked on to a predisposition to see the miraculous in chance—or even contrived—events. In the Early Medieval period the miraculous was a universally accepted fact of everyday life. It would have come as a surprise to no-one that so renowned a warrior, so virtuous a king should bring luck in death as he had to his people in life. What is perhaps more significant for the historian is Bede’s tacit admission that this earliest manifestation of a cult of Oswald was a popular one: its origins had nothing to do with a church or monastery. Not only that, but the early recipients of the saint’s favour were not necessarily all of noble blood. The first, indeed, was no monk or wandering pilgrim but a horse, one of the supreme symbols of heathen kingship; its owner was a secular aristocrat.
Whatever spin Bede might have wished to impart, he was bound to reveal that sick men and beasts were being healed at this spot right up to his own day: so much so that...
people have often taken soil from the place where his body fell to the ground, have put it in water, and by its use have brought great relief to the sick. This custom became very popular and gradually so much earth was removed that a hole was made, as deep as a man’s height.185
If the fully developed English and Continental cult of Oswald was to see its full flourishing in churches and monasteries endowed with great gifts of land, books and the saintly king’s relics, its origins lay deep in the primal superstitions of the countryside and the pagan heart of early kingship. The head and arms were retrieved by his brother and taken as totemic trophies; the homeopathic virtues of the death-site were appropriated by local folk who cared perhaps a little for Oswald’s Christian virtues but, it seems, far more for the pagan virility conferred on him by right and by descent from a great chieftain; power and virtue are not always easy to tell apart.
It is not so easy either to see Oswald’s Ionan and Bernician geist finding much favour with the local population unless, as the historian James Campbell suggested in a highly perceptive volume of essays in the 1980s, there were British Christians in that region—as there almost certainly were in Northumbria.186 The possibility, in fact, that the origins of the popular cult which grew up at Oswestry were British is strengthened by Bede’s account of another miracle at the site of his death. A Briton, he says...
was travelling near that place where the battle had been fought, when he noticed that a certain patch of ground was greener and more beautiful than the rest of the field. He very wisely conjectured that the only cause for the unusual greenness of that part must be that some man holier than the rest of the army had perished there. So he took some of the soil with him wrapped up in a cloth, thinking that it might prove useful, as was indeed to happen, as a cure for sick persons.187
There is plenty to intrigue here. First, Bede is clear that the man was a Briton. Did he have a British source for this story, or was the Britishness of the witness an essential element of the popular tale—an exotic detail? Next, the greenness of the grass suggests to any archaeologist worth his or her salt one of two things: a greater depth of soil than the surrounding area which, during summer, would retain moisture and therefore appear greener and more lush, or ‘beautiful’; or greater soil fertility produced by high levels of potassium (blood and bonemeal) or nitrogen. The archaeologist begins to ask what sorts of impacts might produce such features, and the thought of a burial pit comes to mind. Perhaps this was a mass grave? Strictly speaking, there should have been nothing corporeal of King Oswald to bury.
The second element is equally interesting: the Briton concluded that someone holier than the rest of the army had been slain there. This indicates strongly, if Bede was doing justice to his sources and not over-cooking them, that the Briton was well aware that this was a famous battle site. If so, it might be very natural for him to conclude that the holy person in question was Oswald, a fellow Christian and renowned warrior for Christ—even if, in other respects, he was an enemy of the British. Did the Christians of the Marches believe, rightly or wrongly, that Oswald had come to their lands to fight for their souls and rights of conscience? If so, how did they square that with Oswald’s defeat of his at least nominally fellow-Christian Cadwallon of Gwynedd? Dare we suggest that the conflict between Eowa and his brother Penda was that between a Christian and a pagan?
There is something more. The fact that it was the soil, presumably soaked in holy and very royal blood, which retained magical properties (like the food and silver dish gifted by the royal right hand; like the head and arms) echoes very ancient associations of supernatural transmission by touch in both pagan British and Germanic traditions and in Continental Roman Christian practice. Victricius, the late fourth-century bishop of Rouen, declared that the power of saints was such that it passed into even fragments of their bodies, each fragment ‘linked by a bond to the whole stretch of eternity’.188 It was not such a great leap in the Early Medieval imagination to allow that cloth, water and soil might take on these properties by touch in a homeopathic hierarchy of value which extended beyond secondary contact to tertiary association and beyond. The very earliest Irish saints’ tombs, slabs erected playing-card fashion as tents over the holy resting place, had holes cut in them so that pilgrims might take a handful of dust from the sanctified soil. There were those in the church who believed in the inviolability of the corporeal relic; but there were also those who accepted practically, if not morally, the imperative of distributing the virtue of the saints among the faithful—and perhaps unfaithful.
There is a story, preserved in the anonymous Life of Gregory the Great, which makes it absolutely clear that the power and credibility of secondary relics had already become a matter of surpassing interest to the church in Rome. Some men came to Rome ‘from Western parts’ seeking relics for their master. Pope Gregory, knowing the potency of such items and eager to disseminate their power, consecrated some relics of the various holy martyrs, placed them in separate boxes and sealed them with the papal seal so that they might be carried back to the master.
On their return journey, while they were resting by the wayside as men do, it occurred to their leader that he had done foolishly in not finding out what he was taking back to his master. So he broke the impressions of the seals and found nothing inside the boxes except some dirty pieces of cloth. Thereupon they returned to the man of God, saying that if such rags came to their master, they were more likely to be condemned to death than to be received with any thanks.
Gregory, so we are told, was patient with the men and asked them to pray to God
for a sign that the relics were authentic. He then took a knife and made an incision into one of the cloths, whereupon it bled.
He said to them, ‘Do you not know that at the consecration of the Body and Blood of Christ, when the relics are placed on His holy altar as an offering to sanctify them, the blood of the saints to whom each relic belongs always enters into the cloth just as if it had been soaked in blood?’189
Not only does the striking eucharistic element in the story show just how the early church developed a logic for the power of corporeal relics; it also reveals how attractive such logic was to those of heathen sympathies who were only too easily impressed, as these doubters were, by the efficacy of sympathetic magic.
The Briton who took the bag of soil from what he supposed to be the spot where Oswald died found lodgings that night in a village where the locals were enjoying a feast. If he was a Briton we might infer that he was not freeborn and perhaps not noble but that he was known to the villagers. Was this a British village and therefore welcoming to Britons as of right? Was the man a well-known traveller on an errand for a great lord (someone like the men in King Ine’s British cadre of couriers), in which case one imagines him bearing some mark of his rank: a horse, perhaps; a penannular brooch of recognised ‘Celtic’ style and value; a patterned cloak or a dispatch satchel? The hall in question does not seem to have been a hostel like that visited by the horseman of the first miracle; it was a private house or hall full of guests or dependents. The occasion could be one of the quarter-day feasts. It is on such occasions that the historian heartily wishes for more detail from Bede. At any rate, the man was received by the owners of the house and began to eat and drink with the rest of the company. That he conspicuously hung his precious bag of soil upon a wall-post is hard to credit: did the other guests not think it odd? Did they not question him about it? Perhaps they were preoccupied...
They lingered long over their feasting and tippling, while a great fire burned in the midst of the dwelling. It happened that the sparks flew up into the roof which was made of wattles and thatched with hay, so that it suddenly burst into flames.190
Bede’s readers would have been only too familiar with the horror of a hall catching fire. At Yeavering and elsewhere there is plenty of archaeological evidence, if one needs it, to testify to the potential impermanence of even a well-built structure. There is just enough detail here for us to infer that the hall was in an area of agricultural abundance; not a hill village where the thatch would have been of turf or heather, but belonging to an arable landscape. This, in fact, must have been the sort of hall excavated at Thirlings and elsewhere; not so very different from the great hall where Edwin’s thegn described the short and brutal life of man, only on a more modest scale: the vill of an estate. The Briton, along with all the guests...
fled outside in terror and confusion, quite unable to save the burning house which was on the point of destruction. So the whole house was burned down with the single exception that the post on which the soil hung, enclosed in its bag, remained whole and untouched by the fire. Those who saw it were greatly amazed by this miracle. After careful inquiries they discovered that the soil had been taken from the very place where Oswald’s blood had been spilt.191
So far in Bede’s list of miracles—a small sample, he assures us, of those he has heard—there is nothing that requires the receivers of Oswald’s favour to have been Christian. It is too easy to make the assumption that the Briton must have been a Christian and that the locals of Wrocansæte must have been pagan. In fact it is probably better to allow that Oswald’s ‘luck’ was equally impressive in the minds of all those who were touched by it—Christian or pagan. But whatever spin Bede might put on these events—and he swiftly restores Oswald to a Christian context after these two tales—there is no evidence that the church took institutional possession of the growing Oswald cult until much later in the century when formalised cult centres began to emerge in Bernicia and, more improbably, Lindsey and Sussex. At Oswestry various sites of interest were preserved in memory until a church was built there, but we cannot date its foundation at all closely and there is even some doubt that it was founded before the Norman Conquest. As the historian Catherine Cubitt has pointed out, there is a distinct division between the monastic, institutional cults of Anglo-Saxon England and the popular, local and, for want of a better word, peasant cults which thrived under their own impetus.192 Such cults involve animals being cured, increases in crop yields, thriving trees and upwelling springs. These are rural, low-born interests; and what is more, they bear strong associations with animist beliefs that spirits were to be found in the mineral, organic, life-giving elements of the natural world. Oswald, almost uniquely, attracted a cult following from the rural poor and secular nobility, from royal dynasts and from monastic enthusiasts of his pious example.
Either Bede did not have more information on the development of the cult at Maserfelth or, more likely, he chose to avoid mention of it in his Ecclesiastical History because of the very evident and disturbing pagan associations popular legend suggested. Many stories were told which portray Oswald in a much less Christian light than Bede would have been comfortable with. Of these, the only one given much credence by most historians is that cited by Reginald of Durham in his Vita Sancti Oswaldi of the twelfth century.*1 Reginald was, to say the least, less dispassionate than Bede. Much of his Life of Oswald is derivative of the monk of Jarrow; his detailed descriptions of Oswald and of incidents in the king’s life are either ludicrous or too similar to hagiographic convention to be taken very seriously. If there are stories in his account which came from credible sources they are hard to identify. But Reginald’s story of Oswiu’s raid to retrieve the remains of his brother carries immediate conviction, partly because it is hard to see it as part of hagiographic orthodoxy. It is utterly pagan in feel and appears to be derived from an independent source to which Reginald had access.
Oswiu was supposedly searching the battlefield for the remains of his brother. One imagines that there was more than one stake on which a head or arm was impaled as a gift to the battle-god Woden. A year after the slaughter, recognition of the fraternal arms, no doubt stripped of their armour and adornments, might well have posed a problem, even to his brother and even if they were, as Bede says, improbably incorrupt. But a great bird came to Oswiu’s aid, picking the dead king’s right arm from its stake and carrying it to a nearby ash tree. The tree was thereafter resistant to decay and later became the site of a church. The bird dropped the arm and where it fell a spring rose from the ground; this too became a holy site, perhaps the very well preserved by Oswestry Council in a sunken garden off the appropriately named Maserfield Road. From here Oswiu recovered the arm and, finding one to match, made off with them and the head. It is a gruesome scene to imagine. The importance of the story lies in the identification of the ‘great bird of the crow family’ as described by Reginald, with the Raven, the traditional companion in war of the god Woden; and of the tree as an ash—Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life and death, where Odin hanged himself in sacrifice. Yggdrasil was supposed to connect the heavens and the earthly world of man with a subterranean well whence many rivers sprang. This is potent stuff, and the story is unlikely to have been made up by any Christian monk. The tale, together with the circumstantial evidence of Bede’s two battlefield miracles, make me suspicious that the site of the church and well, that is to say the place where Oswald’s remains were impaled and which became Oswestry, cannot quite be the same place as the battlefield. I think Penda took his trophies and displayed them at some site of significance at a distance from the site of the battle; just how far away it is useless to speculate. But I think the association between battlefield and impalement must be reasonably close, since by Reginald’s day they had merged into one site with a new name: Oswald’s Tree. It might just as well have been named Yggdrasil.
The site of Oswald’s death and the fate of his corporeal remains seem, then, to have appealed to both Christia
n and pagan, Briton and Anglian, at a fundamental level of superstition and belief. It is perhaps overly obvious to say that in Oswald, pagan and Christian, British and Germanic, sacral and temporal were fused as in no other king of the Early Medieval period. But here is the essence of his fascination for historians, just as the potent combination of elements proved so enduring in Britain and the Continent for more than five hundred years after his death. Oswald was Woden-sprung, like his famous heathen father. He was a great warrior with a famed right arm which delivered death to his enemies and luck and wealth (the Old English words eadig and sædig are interchangeable) to his people.193 He was a conqueror of conquerors; he was graced with the favour of both Woden, the battle-god of the Anglo-Saxons, and that of the king of Heaven—perhaps also with the horned and spear-wielding chutzpah of the northern British war god Belatucadros, the ‘bright, shining one’. He sponsored the baptism of kings and the establishment of dioceses. He brought victory, glory and honour as well as booty and gifts to his warrior-companions. He shared his luck and riches with the poor of his fatherland and with the church whose lands were his endowments. Faced with his own end he prayed for the souls of those who fought with him. In death his corporeal luck was transmitted to whomever possessed or had come into contact with his remains; his Christian virtue and healing power could be transferred by touch and employed by the virtuous. He appealed to the tribal, totemic king-worshippers of his Bernician homeland and to the rural lay people of distant lands. He had been blessed with the favour and endorsement of a great house of Irish monasticism and in turn had been rewarded with earthly success in battle and conquest.
For Bede he was most holy and victorious, the paradigm of Christian kingship and a striking example to those contemporaries of Bede who did not share all, or any, of his virtues; for everyone else he was a cult figure whose magic could be vicariously enjoyed and celebrated. His death could be seen as both a sacrifice for the continued luck of his people and as martyrdom in the cause of the nascent church.
The King in the North Page 26
