The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  A Northumbrian reverse on the edge of Pictland, at the hands of Penda’s British allies and perhaps involving Oswiu’s kinsman King Talorcan, would have been seen by the British (and their historians) as a great triumph and by Oswiu as one of those fortunes of war. Since the summer of 2009 archaeologists have naturally contemplated the possibility that the Staffordshire hoard is a share of this great treasure carried back to Mercia by Penda’s men or his British allies; if so, they were rather careless with it. The jury is, as yet, out on that: the 650s would be at the earliest end of the possible date-range of its dumping. What we can say is that Oswiu, humiliated as he was, did not suffer catastrophic defeat; for at the end of 655, perhaps the same year as the ‘Distribution of Iudeu’, perhaps a year after, he was able to bring Penda to a final, decisive battle on his own terms in territory much closer to home.

  Bede’s account of the campaign of 655, which ended deep into the winter months in the south of the region of Loidis (modern Leeds) raises a number of awkward questions. He says that Penda refused to accept Oswiu’s great treasure ‘for he was determined to destroy and exterminate the whole people from the greatest to the least’.209 The British sources surviving in the Nennian account suggest strongly that the treasure was handed over; how to reconcile these opposites? I think the acquisition of Ecgfrith as a hostage is decisive in showing that the deal was in fact done: vast quantities of treasure were handed over along with the even more precious legitimate son of the Northumbrian king. Subsequent to the summer campaign, which historians agree must have ranged all the way from the southern borders of Northumbria to the Forth and which led to a punitive treaty, someone broke faith. Either Penda continued to raid—on his way home?—or, having paid him off, Oswiu decided that he did not, in retrospect, like the terms. I think the former is more likely, because Oswiu, by breaching his tributary terms, would have risked his son being executed. He might conceivably have taken that risk but it is hard to see him being forgiven by his all-too-active queen.

  Where the great ancient road known as the Roman Ridge between Castleford and Doncaster (now the A639) crosses the River Went (or Winwæd) at Thorpe Audlin, it is prone to periodic flooding. Time out of mind north–south traffic has been squeezed between the Humber-head wetlands and the lower slopes of the Pennines; any further to the east and the road would have been too frequently impassable: it must have been an engineer’s nightmare. Wherever the road between Corbridge in Northumberland and Lincoln, a hundred and sixty miles to the south-east, crosses a river there is a risk of flooding; and armies moving along it from the Roman period onwards were vulnerable to the strategic flaws of fords and bridges: they are choke points where a pursuing host can catch its prey. Likewise, they can act as points of defence along a line of retreat. Between Corbridge and Lincoln at least seven battles were fought in the seventh century along the line of this road; probably there were many more unrecorded. The battle on the River Winwæd was as important as any.

  We cannot say for sure how Oswiu and a small Northumbrian force came to meet Penda’s great army here in the middle of December. Bede’s providential version has it that Oswiu, hearing that Penda refused to accept peace, bound himself with an oath: ‘If the heathen foe will not accept our gifts, let us offer them to him who will, even the Lord our God.’ He promised that if God granted him victory he would give his baby daughter Ælfflæd and twelve small estates to the church. It turns out to have been one of the more significant oaths in British history. In this spirit, says Bede, Oswiu entered the fight with his tiny army.

  Penda’s forces were considerable. He boasted the banners of no fewer than thirty legions, according to Bede. This must mean that he had thirty warbands under their own commanders at his disposal: many of these were duces regii, ealdormen and sub-kings from the provinces under Mercian control; but there were also kings of tributary nations. They included British chiefs such as Cadafael, son of Cadwallon of Gwynedd, and perhaps contingents from further north. They included Æthelhere, king of the East Angles. They also included Oswald’s son Œthelwald, king of Deira, who seems in extremis to have nailed his colours not to the mast of his uncle’s standard but—treacherously—to that of his seemingly more powerful Mercian neighbour. The Winwæd was, indeed, right on the border between his territory and Mercia. One might legitimately also ask who was not present? Peada, son of Penda, king of Middle Anglia and son-in-law of Oswiu, was not; or if he was, he did not fight on his father’s side: few who did lived to tell the tale.

  Penda’s army, then, was large and powerful by Early Medieval standards: in the several thousands and full of senior, experienced commanders. Long after the end of a campaigning season in which he had been bested and humiliated—perhaps in fury that Penda had broken the terms of their agreement; perhaps at the behest of his queen (had she laid the proverbial sword in his lap?) whose young son lay in Mercian hands; perhaps on the tail of Penda’s victorious and crapulous return home after a year of rampage—Oswiu struck south along Ermine Street hoping to catch his enemy by surprise. He does not seem to have been able to call on many allies, which suggests that his plan had not been long in gestation. Did Œthelwald play a role in the time and place of battle? Did he give Penda intelligence of the attack; or was he playing both sides? We cannot say; but when it came to battle Oswald’s son did rather less than justice to his father’s reputation and, having apparently been in the vanguard of Penda’s army, drew his forces aside to await the outcome ‘in a place of safety’.210

  Penda’s army must, I think, have been positioned on the north side of a river which, according to Bede, was swollen by heavy rains. Their line of retreat, if indeed they were retreating or merely unsuspecting of attack, was cut off. The Nennian source, in describing Cadafael’s night-time defection in the hours before the battle, has been taken as a hint by some that Oswiu, like his brother before him, launched the decisive attack at dawn in the Irish tradition. It would explain the ensuing chaos. The Mercians and their allies were driven back into the waters of the swollen river; there was no escape. Hundreds, both warriors and their chiefs, were cut down or drowned in the flooded river, encumbered by booty, weaponry and soaking clothes. So disastrous was the battle for the Mercian alliance that few if any of the thirty commanders survived. In the case of the East Anglian king, his entire host was slaughtered. Many more drowned in flight than were destroyed by the sword in battle, according to Bede’s bald but telling account. The last great heathen king of the Anglo-Saxons was cut down with all his followers and Oswiu, as improbably as his brother, had pulled off a brilliant victory, one with profound consequences. Once again, the luck of the Idings had held.

  The immediate consequence was to elevate King Oswiu from the status of a lone wolf in the forest to the sword-wielding Christian imperium which Oswald had enjoyed and which, it must have seemed for so long, would be denied his brother. Oswald’s legacy as a hybrid Christian-warrior king, patron of the Irish church and of other Christian kings, was finally assured. In his hour of need Oswiu had, like Edwin before him, made a Faustian pact. Under the eye of his queen he would now repay those promises and more. Once again the efficacy of prayer before battle in the name of the Columban vision of political Christian kingship had been proven. The last great champion of heathenism was dead. And, what is more, Oswiu’s prodigal son Ecgfrith was restored to him.

  Early Medieval kings were not much more prone to sentiment than tyrants of any other period. They ruled by expedient in an expedient world. Their political decisions were made, by and large, on the sort of criteria familiar to observers of modern politics. Political histories tend to consist of the repayment, when in power, of pledges made on the way up. Presidents, prime ministers, dare one say archbishops and popes, media barons and bankers all face the dilemmas posed by a system of patronage whose rules are as unchanging as human nature. What one pays to whom over how long is a nicety of the game. Selling one’s soul to the Devil is a trope with a long pedigree.

  Those aspiring m
en and women who find themselves without what eighteenth-century naval officers called ‘interest’—that is, influence or access to sympathetic patrons with influence—tend to have to make bolder pledges than those who can count on surer support. The exiled tribal prince is a perfect type for the hero lacking ‘interest’, in a weak position, possessing little to bargain with except hope. Edwin, Oswald, Oswiu and many another before and since (one thinks offhand of Elizabeth Tudor in the 1550s; of Churchill in 1939; of Lenin in Zurich; or Bonaparte in 1799 and again in 1815) must, like Caesar, cast their die, cross their Rubicon and see what befalls.

  Edwin had promised Paulinus that if he regained his kingdom he would convert to Christianity. He delayed the fulfilment of that promise for many years until he had wrung more out of it. Edwin, once king, was in a strong negotiating position: he was able to make an informed political decision which weighed very carefully the pros and cons of taking his people from the familiar, if whimsical, homeland of the Germanic pantheon of capricious gods into the promised land of a single, omnipotent being. This God promised life after death to a people addicted to augury and sympathetic magic and deeply sceptical of phenomena they could not witness themselves. In return, He required adherence to a code of conduct not entirely at odds with the heathen mind but much more demanding: more demanding because the code had a purely rational logic behind it. It was this rationality, more than the promise of everlasting life, which attracted a new generation of canny tyrants, who saw its potential as a civilising political tool.

  Oswald and his younger brother are special cases not only because, having been converted during impressionable youth in an atmosphere of extreme spiritual and political potency, they were proper ‘believers’; but also because their hybrid upbringing imbued them with a strong sense of the potential for rational kingship. Their teachers—Ségéne, Aidan, the monks of Colm Cille’s spiritual kingdom-on-earth—were clever, learned men, intellectuals who could and did argue a case with passion and reason. If heathen kingship was about the embodiment of tribal luck in the person of the king, heathen practice was about raising the odds and predicting the success of a venture, whether it was the harvest, childbirth or the outcome of a battle. The death of the king voided all bets. Christian missionaries attempted to show kings that by implementing the teachings of Christ they ensured themselves and their earthly kingdoms a life beyond the mortal. The lessons taught by Aidan to his Bernician protégés were intended to instruct them in how to be good kings; to show that even if they fell from perfection they could expiate their sins; that effect followed cause; that intention affected outcome; that the luck of a Christian people would survive the earthly passing of a king; that their prayers after death could ensure his everlasting rule with God in Heaven and the continuation of their tribal fortunes.

  Their Germanic heritage and the patronage of the kings of Dál Riata taught the Bernician princes much about tribal models of kingship, its potency and vulnerabilities. Here were two young men of shining parts, in whose upbringing huge energies were invested, with the chance to see kingship, and by extension statehood, as a project with potential in the longer term. Their sort of kingship must survive the death of the person of the king. Oswald’s sacrifice in battle was in real terms made for the benefit of the grander project: the foundation of a Christian, rational state. We cannot say that Oswald was explicitly aware of his place in this grand scheme; he more than any other was forced into expediency; but his mentors were and so, it seems, was his brother.

  In the aftermath of the triumph at the Winwæd Oswiu must, before he could fulfil the promises made before battle, deal with practicalities. Œthelwald was removed from the throne of Deira and replaced by Oswiu’s battle-lieutenant Alhfrith, whose marriage to Penda’s daughter qualified him for guardianship of the southern flank of Northumbria. We do not know what happened to Oswald’s perfidious son; there is a suggestion that he retired to a monastic foundation at Kirkdale on the southern edge of the North York Moors;*3 more likely he paid for his treachery with summary execution. Here was one atheling who, seeing his place in the pecking order diminish year by year, scion by scion, had made a pact with the wrong devil. Peada, Oswiu’s son-in-law, who had not followed Penda into battle, was rewarded by his confirmation as king of the Southern Mercians, those peoples living to the south-east of the River Trent. Bede reports that he did not enjoy the fruits of his kingdom for long; it was said that his wife, Oswiu’s daughter Alhflæd, treacherously had him murdered a year later. Here is the tip of a political iceberg whose below-the-surface machinations are beyond our ken, if not our imaginations.

  Oswiu’s youngest daughter (Ælfflæd was just over a year old) was given to the church as a sort of virgin sacrifice (as her mother had been) and twelve small estates, of ten hides each, were offered for the foundation of monasteries. Oswiu’s increasing political sophistication is shown very clearly in his dispositions. Six of the estates were located in Bernicia, six in Deira, in a conscious attempt to join two kingdoms and two separate peoples into one. Unification was a project which had been attempted by several predecessors and which had not survived any of them. Oswiu’s deliberately even-handed gift was intended to aid permanent unity and, once again, one detects the hand of his queen, Eanflæd. But there is more to be wrung from the bare facts of these monastic foundations. We know what sort of gift ten hides amounted to because the Laws of King Ine prescribed the food render expected from an estate of that size (see Chapter XI). Bede says that the ten-hide estate was ‘small’. Oswiu was not giving away a substantial portion of the lands from which he could exact services and renders: his ‘tenth’ was enough to supply a modest family establishment and no more. The modest family now being installed on each of these twelve modest estates was to be one serving the king by its prayers instead of its arms. Its abbots (or abbesses) would be gesiths for Christ. The means Bede describes as being provided for monks ‘to wage heavenly warfare and to pray with unceasing devotion that the race might win eternal peace’211 included a site on which to build a permanent establishment and the loaves, honey, geese, ale, butter, hens and fodder which came from its dependent hamlets and small farms.

  Where were these monasteries? Might their locations offer more tangible clues to Oswiu’s thinking in alienating this land? Was the land his personally to give away or did these foundations take place on lands lacking a lord because of warfare or other strife—of which there had been much? We know the sites of just two of them, both in Deira. Reading between Bede’s lines we infer that one was located at Heruteu (Hartlepool), the other at Streanæshealh (traditionally identified as Whitby, although there have always been doubts). Both lie on the coast at good harbours of strategic importance; the latter was probably the site of a Roman signal station. On the model of Lindisfarne we might suggest that this second tranche of donations was a direct instrument of royal power, with each lying close to a villa regia, as Lindisfarne did to Bamburgh. In this way the king and queen, on their peripatetic progress, might always be close to a monastery in whose prayers they were obliged to be prominent. Sponsors, after all, want a little something for their money. Other very early monasteries sited close to or within royal estates include those at Campodonum, Donemutha and Hexham. Furthermore, there are frequent associations between former Roman military establishments and early foundations which might be more than mere coincidence. I have a suspicion, and it is no more than that at present, that in inheriting at a remove some of the state functions of a defunct empire, Early Medieval kings might have identified, or been allowed to identify, prominent Roman military structures as being particularly in their gift, if not especially valuable except in terms of prestige. The rash of royal and early ecclesiastical sites along Hadrian’s Wall would be compatible with such an idea. The historian Ian Wood believes that many of these early foundations must cluster along the Vale of Pickering and the Lower Tyne Valley: an example of those ‘cultural corelands’ from which the Early Medieval kingdoms emerged in the sixth century
.*4 This pattern is also echoed in Ireland, for example in the Magh Tochair of Donegal, and one sees hints of such a distribution in the British ecclesiastical centres of the Tweed Valley; so there were precedents from which the Idings might have derived inspiration. It has long been recognised that there is a more than coincidental similarity between the borders of some early kingdoms and the Anglo-Saxon dioceses which succeeded them; the shires of North Northumberland show plainly how secular ideas of territory were transferred to ecclesiastical usage.*5

  With this model in mind, Ian Wood suggests that of the twelve monasteries in this donation, we might add tentatively to Hartlepool and Whitby the early foundations at Gateshead, Bywell and Tynemouth (all on the Lower Tyne) and Stonegrave and Hovingham close to the Vale of Pickering.212 All of these are plausibly situated on or near royal estates, and at the hearts of their respective kingdoms. The subliminal message concealed within Oswiu’s repayment of his pledge is therefore one in which land was alienated from the royal portfolio and invested in a more subtle display of power: the patronage of initially small communities, whose abbots and abbesses were very likely of royal stock. This laid down a pattern for weaving extended networks of dynastic obligations among the Angles of the Northumbrian kingdoms. Here was a means of employing those client kin who were not eligible for the kingship but who might be in a position to lobby for rivals; of employing them in what must have appeared a harmless way as guardians of the collective spiritual memory and aspirations of the dynasty. Their permanence encouraged them to put down roots, to literally and figuratively stabilise the fateful, unpredictable tenure of land and power; above all, to create a rational landscape of patronage locked hard into the acceptance of a sensible, predictable God whose earthly representatives valued continuity above all things. Whether or not such a policy was sustainable or effective, only time would tell.