*1I am most grateful to students of the North East Centre for Lifelong Learning for many discussions on this subject, which clarified some of these arguments—in particular to Alan Hinton.
*2EH III.24; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 291. There is a slight hint in Bede’s language (innumera et maiora quam credi) that he is quoting directly from a poetic, perhaps British, source.
*3In the nineteenth century an engraved tomb-slab at St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, is supposed to have read Cyninge Æthelwald; modern archaeologists are generally sceptical. Wood 2008.
*4See p.95.
*5Higham 1995: the putative boundary of the kingdom of the Hwicce and the Diocese of Worcester is a striking example; see p.191.
XVI
Wood and stone
Ceastra beoð feorran gesyne,
orðanc enta geweorc
Cities are seen from afar,
skilful work of giants
Between the later fourth century and the time of Oswald no major stone structure was built in Britain, so far as we know. There were no masons; no specialist craftsmen who knew the secrets of lime mortar or Roman concrete; there was no need for what one might call corporate architecture, unless one includes defensive dykes intended to keep armies at bay. Roman forts, town walls, aqueducts, roads, baths and signal stations and maybe, just maybe, a Christian stone church or two, still stood here and there, and there is evidence that occasionally some of them were patched up. But no new stone structures stood before Oswald’s completion of Paulinus’s church at York in the late 630s; and forty years later it was derelict. After that, nothing until Wilfrid had it repaired and began construction of the abbeys at Ripon and Hexham after 670. Bridges, houses, churches—grandstands, even—from the fifth to the mid-seventh centuries (and far beyond in royal and domestic architecture) were conceived, designed and fashioned in wood. A robust hall of hewn oak might stand for a hundred years; most were abandoned, burned or remodelled long before the material lifespan of the structure expired. It was an organic world, adapted to changing fortunes and impermanence, to the rhythms of the seasons, to men’s destinies and especially those of kings. The best wooden architecture, revealed by the excavations at Yeavering and later reflected in the design of illuminated manuscripts and high crosses, had pretensions to greatness as works of art and artifice. The poetic exuberance and joie de vivre of carved decoration celebrated the skills of a woodsman/metalsmith culture whose ideas of embellishment were inspired by the zoomorphia of brooches, shields and swords and more readily transmitted into the liquid potential of wood than stone. Only later in the seventh century did those skills return to Britain from the Continent. Until then common knowledge of Roman structural techniques was confined to wondrous contemplation of the works of giants.
When Finan came from Iona to succeed Aidan as bishop and abbot in 651, he...
constructed a church on the island of Lindisfarne suitable for an episcopal see, building it after the Irish method, not of stone but of hewn oak, thatching it with reeds...213
Construction in stone was certainly known in Ireland—large numbers of early cells and shrines survive from this period—but the conceit that stone buildings reflected high status, dignity or grandeur did not belong in the Ionan tradition. It came from Rome. When Wilfrid commissioned the building of Hexham Abbey in the 670s his biographer overflowed with awe:
My feeble tongue will not permit me to enlarge here upon the depth of the foundations in the earth, and its crypts of wonderfully dressed stone, and the manifold buildings above ground, supported by various columns and many side aisles, and adorned with walls of notable length and height, surrounded by various winding passages with spiral stairs leading up and down; for our holy bishop being taught by the Spirit of God, thought out how to construct these buildings; nor have we heard of any other house on this side of the Alps built on such a scale.214
Contrast Eddius’s description of Hexham with Bede’s of Lindisfarne a few years earlier:
There were very few buildings there except for the church, in fact only those without which the life of the community was impossible. They had no money but only cattle; if they received money from the rich they promptly gave it to the poor; for they had no need to collect money or to provide dwellings for the reception of worldly and powerful men, since these only came to the church to pray and to hear the word of God. The king himself used to come, whenever opportunity allowed, with only five or six thegns, and when he had finished his prayers in the church he went away. If they happened to take a meal there, they were content with the simple daily fare of the brothers and asked for nothing more.215
In the physical transition from wood to stone, with its evident resonance for contemporaries, might be seen a metaphor for the conflicts and opportunities which Oswiu, Eanflæd and the Northumbrian church sought to manage in the ten years or so after the battle on the Winwæd. This decade has often been portrayed as one of crisis in the relations between kings and their priests, between an eccentric rural Irish church of pure asceticism and a worldly, orthodox Rome—not least because Bede painted it that way. It is also a little too easy to trace in the careers of two contemporary holy men, Cuthbert and Wilfrid, a personification of the crisis. Cuthbert, the Irish-trained English would-be hermit—simple in habits and needs, his relationship with his god deeply personal—stood squarely in the conservative tradition of Aidan and his successors. Wilfrid—charismatic, ambitious, Roman in taste and inclinations, diocesan in sympathies—was the orthodox reformer, scornful of what he saw as an uncanonical, reactionary tradition laughably out of date with the rest of the Catholic world. Hiding behind the rhetoric, as is so often the case with political change, lay the resolution of administrative incongruities that had become too awkward to ignore. Those involved at the blunt end saw conflict and crisis; those with a broader outlook saw an opportunity for progressive reform and harmony.
At the end of Oswald’s reign in 642 there were half a dozen or so churches in Northumbria. The English part of Britain had about the same number of bishops. Rome’s direct connection with the Anglo-Saxons was through Canterbury. Papal knowledge of the early Anglo-Saxon church was patchy: messengers travelled between Rome and its Atlantic outposts infrequently; information about the lands at the far end of the pilgrim route was almost always out of date. The Metropolitan Archbishop of Britain, Honorius, was the last of the original Augustinian mission. His successor, Deusdedit, would be the first native to hold the office.
Patronage and authority in the church were as diverse as its British, Irish and Roman cultural traditions. In Canterbury and its daughter sees authority was vested in the bishop according to a well-established Roman hierarchy. Monastic rule in the south was likely to vary with the person of the abbot and the traditions of the foundation, but abbots were subject to their bishops. The Irish church established by Oswald and Aidan at Lindisfarne had a very different notion of authority. In the monastery the abbot was supreme: he owed duty and allegiance to his patron and to his spiritual Lord, but to no other mortal; at Lindisfarne, as at Iona and many other Irish foundations, he was also the bishop so that diocesan functions, such as they were, were exercised by the paruchia of the mother church downwards to its dependencies. The British church looks as though it must have been something like that of Ireland: its Easter practices were certainly considered anachronistic by Augustine, although it seems that British bishops enjoyed primacy over the abbots of their monasteries. So long as there were few establishments these anomalies were either cherished as a form of diversity or overlooked. As the number of monastic houses and, we presume, lay churches began to multiply, so did the potential for inconsistency. Conflict, when it became a matter for state intervention, was almost bound to happen in Northumbria where, from the date of the foundation of Lindisfarne in 635, all three traditions existed side by side.
In the north of the kingdom British churches and British traditions seem to have predominated, judging by the surviving numbers of inscriptio
ns, long-cist cemeteries, Eccles-type place-names and direct references to establishments such as Mailros/Melrose. Lindisfarne was founded south of the River Tweed bordering on this ecclesiastical province—deliberately so, perhaps. Such was Aidan’s personal authority and such was the esteem and awe in which Colm Cille’s Ionan paruchia was held that it seems British priests were content to belong in this sympathetic new order. But in any case Aidan was not a doctrinaire abbot and bishop; he came from a tradition in which the head of every foundation stood under God’s judgement and no other; diversity was a matter of celebration in Irish tradition. He would probably have felt the same about James the Deacon, Paulinus’s long-lived companion practising in his solitary church (of stone or wood, one wonders) near Catterick all those years. Did Aidan know of James? Did the latter visit his nominal bishop on Lindisfarne or did he unswervingly look south towards Canterbury and his Roman conscience?
Of the churches whose existence we can be sure of, we can also say that their patrons, that is to say those who had donated their land and owned the right to appoint their priests, were kings: Edwin, Oswald and Oswiu in Northumbria, Cynegisl in Wessex, Æthelberht in Kent and so on. Lindisfarne was as much Oswald’s church as it was Colm Cille’s. The land on which such establishments were founded came customarily with the obligation to render food and services to its owner, the king. Those services were not cancelled by the foundation of a church or monastery; they were commuted to prayer in perpetuity. After the death of the founding patron, his monks must continue to pray for his soul in payment for their freehold rights. If, as at Lindisfarne, the new king continued his patronage of the foundation, an interesting situation arose, as the Durham Liber Vitae, which lists the donors to Aidan’s successors, implies. No new gifts of land and treasure to the community could, as it were, erase the founder’s mark. Lindisfarne was the foundation of Oswald and always would be (despite a spurious later attempt to insert Edwin at the head of the list of patrons). It stood to reason that when later kings, their wives and collateral relations endowed the monastery anew, the efficacy of the monks’ prayers for their patrons, old and new, must be diluted, so to speak. It equally stood to reason that kings and other wealthy members of the warrior elite should wish to demonstrate their Christian credentials by endowing new foundations in which their name headed the list of patrons. One cannot help thinking of the histories of great football clubs, with their chairmen’s names emblazoned on shiny new stands which they have paid for, with the occasional successful manager or heroic striker sanctified by having his name replace that of a long-dead and partially forgotten donor on some part of the holy ground. Only the boldest (and richest) dare to provoke the wrath of the faithful by playing the ultimate trump card: razing the old stadium and raising a new one, with a single sponsoring name on it. The rules, rewards and risks of patronage and sanctity do not change much.
For Oswiu, it was not enough to continue his brother’s patronage of Aidan at Lindisfarne. Oswine’s murder was an opportunity to expiate his earthly sins and establish himself as the founding patron of a new monastery at Gilling. In anticipation of his victory over Penda and in thanks for the birth of his daughter, his munificence was cast twelvefold. None of these foundations would be as great as Lindisfarne, but in their profusion Oswiu and his queen ensured that their patronage was spread more equably among Northumbrians: so that the faith should be spread more widely, no doubt, but also so that the tangible and political value of their patronage should be distributed and demonstrated likewise. One great foundation had been enough for Oswald: one king, one great house, one relationship with a great holy man. With Oswiu’s foundations, his relationships with abbots multiplied accordingly. But to whom were they to owe their ecclesiastical duty? And how were they to be controlled?
There was only one bishop of the Northumbrians, the ambition of Gregory and Paulinus to found a second metropolitan see at York having come unstuck in 632. After Aidan it was Finan and after Finan, who died in 661, it was another Ionan appointee, Colman. The bishops of Northumbria were by virtue of their Irish heritage and the founding patron, Oswald, also abbots of Lindisfarne. Even before the theatrical denouement of 664 at the Synod of Whitby there were tensions among Northumbria’s senior churchmen, which show the potential flaws in this historic arrangement. This is demonstrated by the fortunes of a new community founded on the eastern edge of the Yorkshire Pennines at Ripon. Eata, its first abbot, had been a protégé of Aidan, trained in the Irish manner on Lindisfarne. By about 651 we find him in charge of the monastery at Mailros, or Melrose. It is possible that he was the founding abbot there but, as I have said, most historians now believe it was a pre-existing, British institution. In that case Aidan may have consciously deployed Eata there as a diplomatically safe, conciliatory deputy in an area of delicate British sensitivities. Several years later he moved to Ripon to found a new community there, taking the young Cuthbert with him as guest-master.216 Perhaps the same motive applied: there were British Christian communities in the Pennines too. But this time there was a royal patron, the half-British Alhfrith, recently installed by his father Oswiu as sub-king over the Deirans. Oswiu had splashed his wealth in the foundation of those twelve ten-hide monasteries after the defeat of Penda; Alhfrith’s friend, brother-in-law and fellow sub-king Peada had recently founded a monastery at Medehamstede (Peterborough) with Oswiu’s blessing. Alhfrith was keen to make his own mark on the ecclesiastical map.
Ripon, regardless of Eata’s personal loyalties to Lindisfarne and Finan, was a long way from the mother-house and owing its patronage to a collateral member of the ruling dynasty. How might that play out? Aidan had received the unswerving loyalty of a former sub-king of Deira, the murdered Oswine, and Alhfrith’s relationship with Lindisfarne must initially have been cordial, for Finan either gave Eata permission to leave Melrose or was responsible for sending him there. But within three or four years of his arrival at Ripon, Eata had been replaced:
Meanwhile because the whole state of the world is frail and unstable as the sea when a sudden tempest arises, the aforesaid Abbot Eata with Cuthbert and other brethren whom he had brought with him was driven home, and the site of the monastery, which he had founded, was given to other monks to dwell in.217
More than replaced, then: he was expelled with all his companions. Here was an apparently open rift between the Deiran church and the Bernician mother-house, precisely what Oswiu had been trying to avoid. Not for the first time it brought into serious question Oswiu’s policy of setting up cadets of the royal household as sub-kings. Oswine’s murder had set an unfortunate precedent: Œthelwald had probably seen the shadow of Alhfrith looming and made his ill-fated bid, jumping before he was pushed; Alhfrith cannot but have seen himself in a similar position, with Ecgfrith, Oswiu’s young son by Eanflæd, coming up on the rails. Was this a premeditated shot across the bows heralding a breach between father and son? Was Alhfrith testing the murky waters preparatory to insurrection, or merely acting the independent son to an overweening father? We are not privy; and if Bede was, he does not say. What did that rift mean for ecclesiastical authority? How was Lindisfarne to react to the expulsion of one of its favourite sons? What was Alhfrith’s motive for this volte-face?
The beneficiary of the management coup at Ripon was Cuthbert’s almost exact contemporary, Wilfrid. It is hard to like him: even his most ardent admirer and biographer Stephen*1 could not conceal Wilfrid’s self-serving ruthlessness; but in his charismatic charm, self-belief, bloody-minded ambition and love of wealth, his relentless energetic pursuit of material and spiritual conquest, we are made acquainted with the most tangible and flawed human character of the age. Like Cuthbert he was born into a noble family, perhaps in Deira, in the year either side of Oswald’s victory at Heavenfield. His father was a gesith with estates and connections at court. An argument with his stepmother (not the first or last in recorded history) prompted Wilfrid to leave home at fourteen and, on the recommendation of his father’s friends, he was intr
oduced to Queen Eanflæd. He was immediately noticed: clever, handsome and socially gifted, he found favour with the queen and when he declared his intention to devote his life to the church she gave him into the care of an elderly gesith called Cudda who, paralysed and tired of life at court, declared his intention to retire to Lindisfarne.
Under Aidan, then, in the last years of the bishop’s life, Wilfrid was taught the rule of the Ionan monks. It was not enough: he dreamed of travelling to Rome. In about 652, after Aidan’s death, he was given permission to leave Lindisfarne and the queen recommended him to her cousin Eorcenberht, king of Kent. We do not know how he travelled: in later decades, when the pilgrimage to Rome was almost a commonplace, there were a number of routes combining both land and sea. The coastal route was quicker; probably safer too. The land route offered the chance to visit shrines and churches of repute and make useful connections, but also to attract the attention of thieves and unfriendly lords. Wilfrid stayed at Canterbury for a year before a suitable travelling companion could be found for him; here he first read the current orthodox version of St Jerome’s translation of the Psalms; he saw the workings and trappings of a more Continental court and of the Augustinian church; he met Benedict Biscop, a fellow Northumbrian who shared his ardent desire to see Rome (Biscop made the journey no fewer than six times in his life) and together they embarked on the pilgrims’ trail through Frankia. They will have taken passage from one of the Kentish ports such as Sandwich or Sarre and probably sailed to Quentovic, the international port and trading settlement near the modern town of Étaples on the River Canche in the Pas-de-Calais.
The King in the North Page 31
