The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  Ownership of the Oswald cult did not remain just in lay or low-born hands. With such a saint available to them, Oswald became an early focus for the entrepreneurs of the cult of royal saints. What surprises historians is that it should have taken so long for the church to appropriate this most valuable martyr. It was not until thirty years after Oswald’s death that the popular cult was identified with an ecclesiastical institution. It did not do so where one might expect such a cult to flourish: at Lindisfarne, which he had founded and where his head was buried. Aidan’s community either did not wish to attract the attention and crowds which overt veneration of Oswald’s relics would bring; or they were uncomfortable with the pagan overtones of the head cult, well known in both Ireland and Britain.

  The Bernician home of the Oswald cult was Heavenfield, where he had raised his cross the night before battle. Bede tells us that the brethren of the church at Hexham made a pilgrimage to there every year on the day before the anniversary of his death on 5 August. Recently, Bede says, a church had been built there, and the present unprepossessing building is probably on the same site. But as I have suggested, the actual site of the cross may have been in the ruins of the Roman mile turret known as 25b which seems to lie at the centre of an enclosure of unknown date but suggestive size and shape. We know the date of the foundation at Hexham: 673, very probably the year in which Bede was born. It was built by that most controversial figure Wilfrid, scourge of unorthodox practices and of the Irish church and champion of all things Roman and splendid; but also a man most active in seeking the patronage and approbation of kings. The annual pilgrimage is probably to be dated no earlier than that time, although there is every reason to suppose that some sort of local cult of the cross site was already developing, much as it was at Oswestry and, perhaps, while Oswald was still alive.

  Bede knew of miracles which had occurred there and he cites one which was experienced by a man still living in his own day. Bothelm, a monk of the church at Hexham, had broken his arm in a fall on ice. Suffering terrible pain from the fracture, he asked one of the brothers, whom he knew was to visit the site of the cross, to bring him back a fragment of the wood. Perhaps reluctant to take a chip from the holy monument which was already subject to the depradations of souvenir hunters, the brother retrieved a piece of moss which grew on it. Bothelm placed the moss in his bosom and went to bed, and at midnight awoke feeling something cold close to his side; reaching for it, he realised that his arm and hand were as sound as if he had never been injured.

  Bothelm was not the only holy man interested in possessing fragments of wood associated with Oswald. Willibrord, renowned Continental missionary of the later seventh and early eighth centuries and pupil of Wilfrid, somehow on his travels acquired a fragment of the stake on which Oswald’s head had been impaled. Where and how this valuable treasure came into his possession, we cannot say; but we might infer that it was given him by Wilfrid. Willibrord placed the splinter in water and used the resulting drink to heal a sick scholar in Ireland, where Oswald’s fame had naturally enough been spread by his connections with Iona and by monks who returned to Ireland from Lindisfarne. The scholar had led a less than perfect life and, having fallen victim to a plague, was on the point of death. He begged Willibrord to help him, evidently having heard that the monk possessed relics of the saintly king. When the stake-infused drink cured him, he turned to the Lord and became a missionary. It is a story firmly belonging to the conventions of hagiography. Willibrord was in Frisia when he told this story to Wilfrid and Wilfrid’s companion Acca, later bishop of Hexham and close friend of Bede; this must have been in the 690s, fifty years after Maserfelth. If he did in fact have a piece of the stake, it must have been curated as a relic from that time and perhaps passed through several sets of hands.

  Acca, who related this miracle-story to Bede at third hand, told him of another Oswald miracle from an apparently even more improbable location. A monastery had been founded at Selsey in the kingdom of the South Saxons in the first half of the 680s, among a people previously untouched by the conversion. Some years after its founding it was, like many other parts of the island, struck by a virulent plague. Among the victims was a young Saxon, a recent convert, who in his febrile state was visited by a vision of St Peter. The boy had been left alone while the rest of the monastic community observed a three-day fast in the hope that God would deliver the surviving monks from the ravages of the disease. The apostle brought the boy good news—up to a point. He, the boy, was shortly to be released from earthly pain and taken to Heaven. The rest of the monastic community were to be restored to health. These favours, the boy was to tell his abbot, Eappa, were granted at the intercession of King Oswald because that very day was the anniversary of his death. The abbot went to check in the monastic calendar and found that this was indeed the case. And true to the apostle’s word, the boy died but all the other monks at Selsey were spared.

  Many who heard of the vision were wonderfully encouraged to pray to the divine mercy in times of adversity and to submit to the wholesome remedy of fasting. From that time, not only in this monastery but in many other places, the heavenly birthday of this king and soldier of Christ began to be observed yearly by the celebration of masses.194

  Historians have long recognised in this anecdote, often repeated by Acca, the deliberate establishment in a monastic community of a saint’s cult. The monastic calendar was developing as a means of observing saints’ days and it is highly likely that this particular calendar was brought to Selsey by its founder. And what these three anecdotes, of Heavenfield, of Willibrord and Selsey, have in common is Wilfrid. He it was who, exiled from Northumbria by King Ecgfrith in 681, initiated the mission to the South Saxons which resulted in his founding of Selsey. He was the teacher and mentor of Willibrord. He was probably the entrepreneur behind the establishment of an annual pilgrimage to the site of the cross at Heavenfield and he was almost certainly behind the otherwise unlikely veneration of Oswald at Selsey some time in the 680s. His motives remain to be considered; but there seems little doubt that he was an active promoter of Oswald, perhaps initially as a protector for the foundation at Hexham.

  Wilfrid was not Oswald’s only influential post-mortem patron. In the decade in which Selsey was established as a cult centre for Oswald, a Lincolnshire monastery, Bardney, was founded by King Æthelred and Queen Osthryth of Mercia with some very significant relics of the royal saint. The monks of Bardney, apparently harbouring ill-will towards the memory of a king who had conquered their kingdom in the days of their fathers, refused to allow the royal couple to bring Oswald’s remains there. How they were persuaded otherwise is a matter for later consideration.*2 What is significant is the fact that this king and queen were in possession of Oswald’s body parts. Assuming these to be the actual torso and legs of the martyred hero (and naturally one harbours doubts about this), one is curious to know where they had been during the previous forty years; how they were identified; and how they came into the hands of the Mercian ruling house. The crucial detail in Bede’s account of the miracles which occurred at Bardney, overcoming the monks’ initial resistance to the deposition of Oswald’s relics there, is the presence of his banner of purple and gold (the two royal colours). Bede’s description of this banner, which he tells us was hung over Oswald’s tomb at Bardney, lies behind the otherwise obscure origins of the present-day flag of Northumbria, much cherished by its inhabitants. Its importance, if we accept that this was Oswald’s battle standard at Maserfelth, is that it provides a clue to the parallel history of his remains: a provenance, if you will. We suppose that the head and arms were removed from the field of battle as macabre trophies and taken, probably, to the place now called Oswestry (or perhaps the nearby stronghold and hillfort at Old Oswestry), where they were displayed before being retrieved by Oswiu a year later. Oswiu could be certain that they were his brother’s remains because of the ominous act of the large bird in plucking the arm from its stake and carrying it to the ash tree; the he
ad, one infers, could still be identified facially. But how could the rest of the body be identified on the battlefield? It must surely be the case that the headless and armless corpse was wrapped in the king’s own battle standard at the time and removed to a place where it was stored. Why? And by whom?

  If Penda’s son Æthelred was in possession of these remains after about 679 when Bardney was founded, it is possible that Penda himself ordered that the body be kept; he would surely have been interested in keeping Oswald’s battle standard as a trophy. Equally, some enterprising local might have scavenged them as trophies and later gifted them (for a price?) to Penda or his son. There is a third possibility, that the relics might have come into the personal possession of the queen; for Queen Osthryth was the daughter of King Oswiu of Bernicia, whose raid in 643 might also have resulted in his obtaining the standard, torso and legs. Oswald was her uncle.

  Oswald’s death precipitated a new crisis in Northumbria. His brother Oswiu was recognised as his successor in both Bernicia and Deira by right of having the same inheritance: Æthelfrith andAcha. There is, however, some evidence*3 that in Deira he was not accepted as readily as Oswald had been. Like his predecessors he must establish his fitness to rule by his deeds as a warrior and politician. Oswald’s legacy, which placed Bernicia at the head of all the English kingdoms and others besides; which had established an institutional Christian church with missionary and economic functions; which might conceivably lead to the unification of many of the kingdoms under a northern imperium, must now be tested by the rules of its day. Was Northumbria to be forged into a truly united kingdom? Were the Christian political treaties which the subject kingdoms of the English had embraced (willingly or unwillingly) to have a meaningful future in creating a culture of responsible and civilised kingship? Would Oswiu repudiate the church, or would he realise its potential for creating a political entity which we might recognise as a state? Would the new power in the land, his brother’s slayer Penda, strike him down before he could establish himself?

  *1Regrettably there is as yet no proper English translation of the Vita Sancti Oswaldi, the Latin text of which is to be found in Arnold 1885.

  *2See Chapter XVIII.

  *3See p.262; he placed a Deiran prince, Oswine, there as sub-king and was most particular to ensure that his powers of patronage were spread evenly throughout the two kingdoms.

  XIV

  Family affairs

  Cyning sceal rice healdan

  A king shall guard

  his kingdom

  Oswiu began his reign in a position of weakness: the bulk of the Northumbrian army had been destroyed at Maserfelth and the living potency of Oswald’s Bernician imperium died with its king. Besides, Oswald’s gesiths had owed him the personal loyalty of a warrior to his lord; Oswiu, in defending his brother’s legacy, must start afresh. Many of the estates whence Oswald had drawn his fighting elite were now lordless, unable to render the new king the services of warriors who were dead, and whose sons were infant. The Bernician host was insufficient to defend the fatherland. There was a literal vacuum of operational power, of regional political function. Executive control at shire level must have devolved to the reeves, those intermediaries between king and estate; noble families whose lord was dead and who could not provide a son of fighting age to take his place in the king’s host might have been displaced from their homes by those who could. Competition for the new king’s patronage in the shocking aftermath of Oswald’s death must have been fierce: old rivalries revived among the northern nobility; opportunities for fortune and favour seized. Beyond the borders of Bernicia and Deira, Picts and Strathclyde Britons, lords of Rheged, Powys and Gwynedd would meet in their great halls and contemplate one last chance for the Gwyr y Gogledd, the Men of the old North, to rise against the Saxon.

  Penda was the immediate external danger. During the first thirteen years of Oswiu’s reign he was able to mount periodic raids into Northumbrian territory from Mercia and these were so successful that at one stage even Bamburgh was under threat of capture and destruction. Oswiu must have attracted his own warband during his years in Irish exile and, probably, during campaigns in the North on behalf of his brother; but in the autumn of 642 he was in no position to take on the new power in the land in open battle. He must bide his time, defend his shrunken kingdom and use his political skills to forge effective alliances. He may have lacked the extraordinary charisma of his martyred brother but the Oswiu who emerges from the pages of Bede is an astute, canny, ruthless politician of great sophistication. He was the first, the only, Northumbrian king of the seventh century to die in his bed. He deployed his talents to great effect, securing not only the legacy of Oswald, but his own considerable achievement in constructing the first great English state.

  Even at the beginning Oswiu was not without friends. He could rely on a core constituency in Bernicia by virtue of his reputation as a warrior and his birthright. His loyalty to the Irish mission on Lindisfarne is striking, and was fulsomely reciprocated. In the first year of his reign, having retrieved Oswald’s remains from British territory far to the west and south, he gave the dead king’s head to be buried in the cemetery on Lindisfarne. It was perhaps an uncomfortable gesture for the community to receive, but they cannot have been insensible to what seems to modern sensibilities an odd sort of compliment. The luck in the head, as it has been termed, was a manifest symbol of royal and divine favour: it bestowed protection, literal and psychological.195 In return, Oswiu won support for the series of dynastic policies which he implemented almost immediately.

  Like Oswald before him Oswiu was aware that a son born before accession was not regarded as entirely legitimate.196 That was probably why Oswald had waited to marry until after his return to Northumbria. Oswiu already had three children. One, born out of wedlock to the Irish princess Fina would later play his own part in the Bernician succession, although not without opposition. With Rhieinmelth, his British consort, Oswiu had a son, Alhfrith, and a daughter, Alhflæd, neither more than seven or eight years old at his accession when Oswiu himself was still a young man of thirty. By judicious marriage he might advance both the legitimacy of his offspring and his political ambitions. He seems to have felt most vulnerable in his relations with Deira, whose gesiths were loath to accept him as king by right. A Deiran cousin would fit the bill perfectly.

  In choosing a bride who was not just a princess of Kent but also the daughter of his dead uncle Edwin, Oswiu hoped to kill two birds with one stone. Little can he have realised what he was letting himself in for; but this was no impetuous fling on his part. Oswiu was enough of an Ionan protégé to seek the legitimacy which might be conferred by his bishop. These were delicate issues for the church. Oswiu was married; his queen and children were known to the Lindisfarne community, their near neighbours on the Northumbrian coast. Bede tells us nothing explicit about such awkward arrangements; it did not suit his narrative. But from small fragments of historical evidence we might piece together the train of events which led to the installation of a new queen.

  The ninth-century Durham Liber Vitae is a sort of medieval visitor’s book, recording gifts to the community of St Cuthbert. Its core belongs to a set of records probably kept on Lindisfarne from the earliest days of the community and maintained, with many additions and modifications, not to say fictions, until it attained its final form in the Middle Ages. In many respects it is not trustworthy: the first king cited in its list of donors was Edwin, dead before the community’s foundation; but the first queen cited as a donor is unlikely to be such a retrospective insertion. She is Rægumeld, an anglicised spelling of Rhieinmelth. My reading of this entry is that, with the connivance of Bishop Aidan, Oswiu’s queen was ‘retired’ into the hands of the Lindisfarne community with a suitably generous donation on her behalf. The donation possibly consisted of part of her dower lands, perhaps one of the Northumbrian estates listed in the earliest possessions of Lindisfarne in Islandshire or along the River Tweed; but more probably some f
orm of moveable wealth, such as treasure, or perhaps books. Where she actually lived out her days can only be a matter of speculation; she would not have been allowed to live on the holy island itself. But her children both survived and were maintained by Oswiu’s court until the complex rivalries of the 660s led to a family feud.

  That Aidan was complicit in Oswiu’s plans can be inferred not just from the possible fate of the queen but in the events surrounding the installation of Oswiu’s new consort. Oswiu’s ambassador to his prospective wife at Canterbury, where the fortunes of the Augustinian mission had revived with the accession of a Christian king, Eorconberht, was a priest named Utta. Eorconberht was, according to Bede, the first king to order that all the pagan shrines in his kingdom be destroyed. At the Kentish court his cousin Eanflæd, daughter of Edwin and grand-daughter of Æthelberht, was living after returning from the exile imposed by her cousin Oswald after Heavenfield. She must be fetched:

  Utta intended to travel to Kent by land but to return with the maiden by sea; so he went to Bishop Aidan and begged him to pray to the Lord for himself and those who were to make the long journey with him. Aidan blessed them, commended them to the Lord, and gave them some holy oil...197

  The point of telling this story, set up as a retrospective on the great bishop’s virtuous life, was to show the power of Aidan’s blessing, for in due course on the return journey a storm blew up fit to sink the vessel in which the precious party was returning; but Utta poured the holy oil on the turbulent waters of the North Sea and all was miraculously well. The back-story here is slightly more subtle: through Utta, Oswiu sought and won the approbation of his principal holy man for the mission to Kent. It mattered to Oswiu and his constituents, and it will have mattered to the king and princess of Kent. Aidan’s blessing was not just provident: it was essential. Eanflæd’s willing or unwilling career as queen of the Bernicians began, then, in auspicious circumstances just as her life had: she was baptised by Paulinus at Easter shortly after her father, Edwin, was delivered from the assassin’s blade and she from her mother’s womb. At a stroke Oswiu secured a suitable Christian wife of impeccable breeding and political value; soothed any worries which the church might have had concerning the dispatch of his previous queen; and, moreover, succeeded in reforging the old alliance between the Idings and the Yffings so that he might be recognised as king of all the peoples north of the Humber.