In due course, Oswiu’s offspring with his cousin Eanflæd might hope to succeed to both Bernicia and Deira. For the time being he did not feel secure enough south of the Tyne to impose direct rule there. His son Alhfrith was too young to deputise, as was his nephew, Oswald’s son Œthelwald. Oswiu chose to rule Deira through a sub-regulus, the last prince of the Yffings: Oswine, the son of that Osric who had apostatised, taken on the army of Cadwallon in the year of the interregnum and been killed for his trouble. We cannot say what sort of a man Osric was; he had played a weak hand and lost; he is no more than a footnote to the seventh century. Of Oswine we can say much more because he was a favourite of Bede, of Aidan, of his own people and also, to begin with, of Oswiu.
Oswine was tall and handsome, pleasant of speech, courteous in manner, and bountiful to nobles and commons alike; so it came about that he was beloved by all because of the royal dignity which showed itself in his character, his appearance and his actions; and noblemen from almost every kingdom flocked to serve him as retainers.
To a politician like Oswiu this early portrait of the chivalrous Prince Hal might reveal a double edge: it might suggest that Oswine was in the business of recruiting a warband sufficient to challenge the authority of his over-king. Only time would tell. To churchmen like Aidan and Bede it was his virtue which both impressed and concerned them; for he was that rare, almost unique beast, a humble king. His great piety attracted the favour of Aidan; perhaps as a young man he had been educated on Lindisfarne under the bishop’s protection. It is significant that, the Deirans having no bishop of their own, their principal ecclesiastical lord was the royal holy man of the Bernicians. Oswine, in recognition of this relationship, gave Aidan a fine horse, that symbol of kingly favour and rank. Aidan, despising the sort of dignity and comfort which such trappings conferred, gave it away to a beggar. Bede loved that sort of story and gave it special emphasis as an admonition to the kings and bishops of his own day who inevitably suffered by comparison. Oswine was horrified; probably insulted. Meeting Aidan at dinner the Deiran prince upbraided the Irish bishop, saying that he could have given any old nag to the holy man if he was going to be so free with his gifts. Aidan’s well-honed response was to ask the king if he regarded the son of a mare as dearer to him than the son of God? Oswine took this admonition and thought deeply about it. Later, returning from a hunting expedition and warming himself in the hall by a great fire surrounded by his thegns, the priest’s words struck him with such force that he unbuckled his sword and threw himself at the bishop’s feet:
‘Never from henceforth,’ he said, ‘will I speak of this again nor will I form any opinion as to what money of mine or how much of it you should give to the sons of God.’ When the bishop saw this he was greatly alarmed; he got up immmediately and raised the king to his feet... The king, in accordance with the bishop’s entreaties and commands, recovered his spirits, but the bishop, on the other hand, grew sadder and sadder and at last began to shed tears. Thereupon a priest asked him in his native tongue, which the king and his thegns did not understand, why he was weeping, and Aidan answered, ‘I know that the king will not live long; for I never before saw a humble king.’198
Humble he may have been; humility would not prevent Oswine from fulfilling his own tribal destiny and the prophecy of the admiring Aidan by raising an army against Oswiu. His rebellion, seven years in the fomenting, took place against a complex backdrop of church consolidation and external threat.
Throughout the later 640s and into the next decade Penda was able to attack his neighbours with impunity, driving Cenwalh from Wessex, raiding East Anglia and seemingly able at will to carry his warbands deep into Northumbrian territory. At no point before 650, however, did either Penda or Oswiu feel able to mount open war on the other. It was a period of retrenchment and desultory campaigning of the sort familiar in tribal Europe after the death of a great warrior king. Lindisfarne, at least, was preserved from attack: there was no loot to be had there, it being such a modest establishment.
It is easy to think of Aidan’s small community on his tidal island, supported by a number of estates, constituting the entirety of the early Northumbrian church. If there are times in the seventh century when notices of new foundations reach us, mostly we can only say that by a certain date such and such a monastery must have been founded. But it is worth asking how many churches and monasteries there were at the end of Oswald’s reign. His patronage of Aidan and Bernician membership of the Ionan paruchia were secured by Oswiu; but how far had that mission spread in the eight years since Heavenfield?
We may confidently say that at least six other churches existed in Northumbria, although there are likely to have been many more lost to history. The king had his own churches at Bamburgh and at Yeavering; perhaps also at other royal estates. There had been a church at a Deiran villa regia, Campodonum, in Edwin’s day, which was destroyed by Cadwallon but rebuilt by later kings—perhaps by Oswine. Paulinus’s church at York still stood—it was sufficiently established to receive Edwin’s head after his death at Hæthfelth—and Oswald ensured its completion. There has, we know, been a minster church on that site ever since. Bishop Aidan founded at least one, probably several more, satellites of Lindisfarne in the years after Oswald’s death. The only one we can identify, thanks to a Bedan anecdote, lay on the north side of the River Wear where Aidan gave Hild, great niece of Edwin, a single hide of land on which to found a monastery.*1 Another lay perhaps upstream from the mouth of the River Tyne just east of Jarrow at a place called Donemutha. This may be the place where, in his childhood, Saint Cuthbert had prayed for a party of monks who were in danger of being swept out to sea on a raft of timber they had collected.199 Then there is that obscure, enigmatic congregation which survived all the depredations of war and strife, somewhere close to Catterick, ministered to by James the Deacon throughout the reigns of Oswald and Oswiu. I have already suggested that there may have been an abortive monastic foundation at Heavenfield.
Melrose, the community which Cuthbert was to join as a young boy, was certainly in existence by the end of the 640s; most historians accept the possibility that there was an active British Christian community here which survived from the end of the Roman period in northern Northumbria; so it may not have been the only one receiving young nobles like Cuthbert. There were British churches in the Pennines too, later to be purged and taken over by Wilfrid. Of the other possible early foundations we might cite that at Ebchester, the small Roman fort on the south side of Durham’s Derwent Valley, whose monastery was named after Æbbe, the uterine sister of Oswald and Oswiu.*2 She later established a more remote community on the sea-pounded rocky coast north of Berwick at a place now known as St Abb’s Head. I think it possible that her foundation at Ebchester—by no means the only early monastery to be located on a Roman military site—may have served as the retirement home for her sisters-in-law Cyniburh, the widow of Oswald, and Rhieinmelth, the discarded spouse of Oswiu. What conversations might those three royal women have had, protected from the inconstant political fates of the world of men: a daughter of Acha and sister of Oswald, brought up in the shadow of Iona at the centre of the Christian world; a princess of Wessex, cast off from her culture and family; and perhaps the last royal princess of Rheged, that legendary British court of faded grandeur and poetic legend?
We know also from Bede that Aidan’s Irish monks—and scores, if not hundreds more came from Ireland in the decades after Heavenfield—felt a missionary obligation to preach to the poor and to the widely dispersed communities of the North. No doubt solitary monks, fulfilling their desire for peregrinatio, the wandering exile for Christ, built themselves modest cells in the hills and valleys of Northumbria; but none has recognisably survived. There is a ring of what look like Early Medieval cells inside a prehistoric enclosure on Ingram Hill in the Breamish Valley, on land once owned by Lindisfarne; were there pioneering monks here in the seventh century? Others may have formed small communities in equally remote places, in
visible to the archaeological record except by some chance survival of a Christian artefact.*3 There must have been many other foundations, either those whose names we know but which are unlocated or those time has forgotten, which did not survive. Others might be inferred from enigmatic structures on sites identified through excavation or from the air: there is a good candidate at Sprouston on the River Tweed, probably lying within a Lindisfarne estate but belonging to a secular lord. There was, as yet, nothing remotely like the parochial system which was to emerge in the eighth century and which has framed the English territorial and ecclesiastical landscape ever since. When that system did emerge it was rooted firmly in political and economic bedrock: on the shires and vills on which food and military renders were imposed. The parochial system was, in fact, an extension of these; the tithe, which first appears under a law of Æthelwulf, father of Alfred the Great, was a fiscal formalising of the ten per cent render.
What we can say with certainty is that under Oswiu, and in particular under the influence of Queen Eanflæd, there was an explosion of monastic endowments across Northumbria from the mid-650s onwards. This second wave of foundations, all in imitation of the Irish model established so brilliantly at Lindisfarne, would hard-wire political reality to the spiritual revolution brought about by the Ionan mission and, inadvertently or otherwise, forge a new political culture in Anglo-Saxon England: the beginnings of the modern idea of statehood. While the inward-looking, conservative, diocesan rump of the Augustinian mission survived but achieved little more than survival in Kent, Oswiu, on the back of his brother’s divine inspiration, conceived a church at the social and economic heart of his kingdom: a spiritual imperium to go with that wrought by the sword. The backdrop to this extraordinary new relationship between church and state, king and cleric, is all too familiar: dynastic rivalry and foreign invasion.
Northumbria’s neighbours to the north and south saw the death of Oswald as a chance to test the resilience of the new king’s forces. The Annals of Tigernach note a battle between Oswiu and ‘the Britons’ (Picts? Welsh?) under the year 643; perhaps this records his raid to retrieve his brother’s head and arms; it may also preserve the notice of a raid on his northern borders. We cannot date the first of Penda’s incursions against Oswiu; there were probably several campaigning seasons during which Penda exercised his army’s appetite for fighting, looting and spoliation. His own insatiable desire for battle does not appear to have extended to the idea of conquest or territorial acquisition. He may have contented himself with the idea of affirming his control against internal opposition over the lands that he considered ‘Mercian’.
The earliest sure reference to external depredations comes not from Nennius or Bede but in the Anonymous Life of Saint Cuthbert, written around the year 700. As a young man of about seventeen the future holy man joined the community at Melrose in Roxburghshire (now Scottish Borders); but before that he had fulfilled his obligation to serve his earthly king in Oswiu’s army: ‘when dwelling in camp with the army, in the face of the enemy, and having only meagre rations, he yet lived abundantly all the time and was strengthened by divine aid...’200 His hagiographer does not say against whom he was fighting, but it must have been about 649 or 650, for he gave himself up to monastic life in 651.
About this time, tensions between Oswiu and his Deiran sub-king Oswine erupted into civil war and Penda embarked on a series of devastating raids deep into Northumbrian territory, perhaps knowingly exploiting internal tensions. We know too little of the broader picture in the North to be able to say which came first, or who exploited the timing of the other. Oswiu may have been threatened from both north and south and in such circumstances the opportunity to strike against him may have appealed to enemy and ally alike. There is no record before the mid-650s of Oswiu and Penda meeting face to face in battle. Penda’s attack was part, it seems, of a concerted campaign of devastation which included a siege of the tribal fortress at Bamburgh. Even then Bamburgh must have presented a formidable face to anyone rash enough to try to take it. To the west, to landward, it appears like a giant natural rampart: an indomitable fist rising from and against the sea. Its access to a harbour and the well that provides it with fresh water meant that any Mercian attempt at a siege was futile. Penda decided to try to burn it, and so he had his army dismantle all the surrounding dwellings (peasant houses and workshops serving the royal court, I wonder?) and make with their timber an immense bonfire. Bede’s description of the heaps of beams, rafters, wattle walls and thatching which the army raised against the cliff is one of the most telling in our early sources; but the assault was patently doomed. Penda can only have hoped for a lucky spark to strike the buildings of the fortress beyond its palisade; perhaps in impotent fury he lost his cool. Was he specifically intent on getting at Oswald’s incorrupt right arm, his trophy from Maserfelth?
We do not know who was inside; one suspects that the king was away campaigning elsewhere. In any case, Bede tells us that it was Aidan, now in his last years and living a secluded life on Inner Farne, who saw the flames high above the fortress and feared that the city might be lost—and all his work with it. He raised his eyes and hands to Heaven and prayed for salvation from this pagan evil. As if in answer, ‘the winds veered away from the city and carried the flames in the direction of those who kindled them.’201 Hoist, as it were, by their own petard, the enemy retreated, realising that Bamburgh was divinely protected. Geographers might reasonably see in this narrative the quite natural evening shift from an offshore to an onshore breeze. No contemporary churchman would have seen it in any other light than the intercession of the one true God, of Christian virtue overcoming pagan impiety, with unbaptised natives thinking perhaps of intervention by the god of storms þunor (the Old English version of ‘Thor’). It would also not have been lost on the bishop, his king and their people that both Lindisfarne and Bamburgh were protected by the magic of Oswald’s head and incorrupt right arm.
Bede had more trouble dealing with Oswine’s rebellion: here were two worthy Christian kings in conflict over earthly territories. Oswine, humble though he may have been, harboured ambitions to cast off the yoke of Bernician domination over his people. No reminder that Oswiu was as well qualified to rule over Deira as his brother had been by right of their maternal descent, no marriage to a princess of Deira, had reconciled Oswine—and perhaps his constituents—to Oswiu’s rule. It is not worth speculating further on the dynamics of such personal politics. The fact is that Oswine raised an army against Oswiu in the summer of 651. The size of his warband was no match for that of the Bernician king, we are told; in this Bedan detail is a hint that perhaps Oswine timed his rebellion to coincide with Penda’s attack, hoping that Oswiu had his hands full elsewhere. We might even speculate on a Mercian–Deiran alliance. If that is the case, it was hopelessly mismanaged: Oswiu was ready for him, and in such overwhelming numbers that Oswine decided to disband his army rather than risk annihilation, seeking temporary refuge while he considered his limited options.
The geography of these events is fascinating. Oswine assembled his army at Wilfaresdun. There is no consensus on the exact location of this otherwise unknown settlement, but Bede offers us unusual precision when he tells us that it was about ten miles north-west of Catræth, the ancient Roman town which guards the Great North Road and a critical eastern entry point to the Pennine kingdoms. This places the action close to that modern traveller’s signpost to the North, Scotch Corner, where the A1 meets the westbound A66. Scotch Corner may be named after the Scot’s Dyke, a still partly visible massive ditch and bank built either side of Gilling Beck to prevent, it would seem, an advance by the old Roman route across the Pennines. It is a truism that a dyke looks both ways; so one must be careful not to assume which side was intended to be defended. Nevertheless, the modern village of Whashton, a good candidate for Bede’s Wilfaresdun, lies two miles to the west of Scot’s Dyke on a promontory overlooking Gilling Beck; the dyke separates it from the royal vill of Catræth and
the Great North Road. Whatever period the dyke belongs to—and consensus is that it is Early Medieval in date, perhaps part of the Swaledale earthwork system—Oswine might have exploited it as a defensive redoubt against Oswiu. Whether or not this is the right interpretation, the denouement of the rebellion took place in Deira. Oswiu had not been waiting at home for a knock on the door.
The end was ignominious in the extreme. Oswine, with a single companion named Tondhere, took refuge in the nearby house of a supposedly faithful gesith called Hunwold, in sight of the dyke at the vill then called Gilling (now Gilling West). Hunwold betrayed Oswine to the king, who sent a thegn called Æthelwine to kill him. The date was 20 August 651. It is now, at a moment regarded by Bede as a foul stain on the Christian kingship of Oswiu, that we first detect the decisive intervention of his queen, Eanflæd. Possibly she had already attempted to broker a deal between her second cousin Oswine and her husband. If so, she had been unsuccessful. Her allegiance to the Deiran cause must both have given her personal pain and raised marital tensions. But she was no wallflower: Eanflæd had been brought up in the courts of Kent and Frankia, where politics were a messy and pragmatic business. Eanflæd asked the king to give land at Gilling for the construction of a monastery where the souls of both kings, victim and murderer, would be prayed for, in expiation of his crime.202 Significantly, the first abbot of the foundation was the priest Trumhere, a kinsman of both Eanflæd and Oswine. In one sense this is a transmission of the pagan law of blood-price, or wergild, into a Christian context: a payment to compensate the victim’s family, to atone, and more specifically to prevent a blood feud, that bane of medieval society.
The King in the North Page 28
