The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  Two important campaigns of excavation on the headland have failed to show exactly where the heart of Hild’s complex was. It must have been reasonably large because she was the head of both male and female communities here: Whitby, like Hartlepool, was a so-called double monastery under the rule of a single, female abbess. The complex of stone foundations revealed to the north of the medival abbey in the 1920s was not excavated with modern techniques and many of the records were lost.*1 What might have been the flimsy remains of the earlier monastery, made of wattle and daub, were thought by the original excavators to be no more than internal partitions in later stone buildings, and what survives of the site record does them no justice.224 As in so many other cases, like Lindisfarne and Iona, the focus of Hild’s monastery was probably overlain and largely obliterated by the later medieval complex so that its layout and form will probably never be elucidated. Was it, one wonders, of wood and wattle, or had the idea of stone buildings formed in the minds of its founding royal patron and his abbess?

  Excavation of a substantial cemetery to the south of the medieval abbey in the 1990s has thrown up the intriguing possibility that Christian burials were taking place here long before Hild’s foundation. Roman pottery was recovered from some of the burials and a very late or sub-Roman glass bead was also found in a grave. If, like Old Melrose, Whitby was the site of a former or existing British church, here is both a motive for its foundation, or re-foundation, and a twist to the orthodox account of the Council of Whitby. Bede portrays the dispute as being between the Ionan-inspired church of Lindisfarne and that of Rome and Canterbury but we know that the British church survived and even thrived in many places in the West and North. There may well have been British bishops in attendance at Whitby, unmentioned either by Bede or by Wilfrid’s biographer Eddius Stephanus, because by their day the British church in Northumbria was irrelevant—or they wished it to be irrelevant. It is not hard to see where British sympathies might have lain.

  Bede says that the Council was called jointly by Alhfrith and Oswiu to resolve the debate over the timing of Easter and other matters of orthodoxy; but even if that were substantially true, the political tensions of the preceding few years ensured that there were more expedient matters at stake. King Oswiu, Bede says, believed that nothing could be better than the practices and teachings of the Irish church, which he and his brother Oswald had been taught during their childhood on Iona; his natural sympathies lay with Colm Cille. Oswiu, then, had no personal aesthetic or spiritual dilemma on which he sought counsel, unless he genuinely sought Paschal peace in the royal bedchamber. If that was his only problem, the bedchamber is where that dispute would have remained and been resolved. For him this was probably not a matter of conscience: Northumbrian unity and the recognition of his imperium were at stake. On the other hand Alhfrith, influenced by Wilfrid and other Romanists, threatened by the looming presence of Ecgfrith and wishing to flex his Deiran muscles, looks as though he were seeking a showdown with his father and was prepared to stake all on the outcome of the debate over orthodoxy.

  Both men had much to lose. In handing over the political debate to the church and in siting the Council in Deira, Oswiu looks, as so often beforehand, to have been playing a weak hand. If the Council under Alhfrith’s and perhaps Eanflæd’s influence resolved that the Northumbrian church should convert to orthodoxy it could not be seen as anything other than a defeat for Lindisfarne and for the king: it would fatally compromise his position. The primacy of Canterbury over Iona would be irrevocable. If Oswiu refused to convene the Council or accept its decision he would be isolated at a time when his southern imperium was beginning to be threatened by the emergence of Penda’s son Wulfhere in Mercia. Wulfhere may have been converted under Oswiu’s auspices, but he married a Kentish princess and politically he looked to the South for support.

  Alhfrith, if he lost, would have to submit to his Bernician father and lose the precious independence he had been asserting, ultimately to be replaced by Ecgfrith as successor-in-waiting; or he must resort to open rebellion. The stakes, then, were high. But in jointly hosting the Council at Whitby, on Deiran soil but under the aegis of a Lindisfarne-trained Bernician protégé of Deiran royal stock, Oswiu was playing a subtle hand; not necessarily a weak one. We cannot, at this remove, tell whether the cards were marked, with senior clergy lined up behind their royal patrons and ready to vote according to a whip, or whether their intellectual or spiritual independence was in any way corruptible. Nor can we say what words of counsel Eanflæd might have offered her husband: did she attempt to persuade him of the virtues of the Roman cause or did she, as Anglo-Saxon heroic custom required, act as disinterested peacemaker and cup-bearer among members of the royal family?

  In visualising the Council of Whitby as a game of political poker one might be giving the protagonists too much credit for forethought. Early Medieval kingship was mostly an expedient affair, with policy made on the hoof. My feeling is that Oswiu was sufficiently confident of himself that he could afford to let Alhfrith challenge him; even so, the timing of the events of 664 may have forced his hand and ensured that when the critical moves were made, he must improvise.

  The Anglo-Saxon historian Richard Abels has argued persuasively that the death of Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury, who succumbed to the plague on 14 July, was the trigger that made imperative an immediate resolution of the question.225 As overlord of the English kingdoms Oswiu naturally enough saw the appointment of a new archbishop as an extension of his royal patronage. The new metropolitan at Canterbury should be his nominee. If there were an alternative candidate proposed by the Roman party, then Bernicia’s obdurate refusal to accept orthodoxy on Easter and other matters might weigh heavily against his choice with Pope Vitalian. Vitalian’s predecessor, Eugene I, had recently been introduced to Alhfrith’s enthusiastic young protégé Wilfrid; he must also have read in the correspondence of Pope Gregory that great man’s vision for an English church. Here is Oswiu’s first and most obvious political motive for falling into line with Roman convention, whatever his personal sympathies.

  The cast assembled at Whitby in the late summer or autumn of 664 was both impressive and carefully chosen. There were two kings, representing Irish and Roman sympathies. This says much in itself: Oswiu did not intend to allow a voice to Wulfhere of Mercia, nor to the kings of Wessex, East Anglia or even Kent, in whose capital city the now-deceased archbishop had resided. Oswiu’s message is that this was an internal Northumbrian issue even though, in attempting to nominate the next metropolitan of Canterbury and writing to Pope Vitalian—that is to say, having a literate churchman write to Pope Vitalian—Oswiu would portray himself as Regi Saxonum: king of all the English peoples.*2

  So: two kings. There were also three bishops: Colman, who in today’s language would be described as a hard-liner on the Irish side; Cedd, bishop of the East Saxons and an alumnus of Lindisfarne; and Agilbert, a Gallic bishop who had held the see of Wessex and who was firmly of the Roman persuasion. He was the senior of a party that comprised his own priest Agatho, James the Deacon, Eanflæd’s priest Romanus and Wilfrid, presumably accompanied by a party of his Ripon monks. Agilbert had a poor command of the English tongue and so Alhfrith’s silver-tongued priest Wilfrid was asked to plead the Roman cause. On the Irish side were Hild, Colman, Cedd (who acted the part of disinterested translator) and a great many followers from both Whitby and Lindisfarne. Conspicuous absentees were Abbot Boisil of Melrose and Cuthbert; both had been struck down by the plague, from which Cuthbert (by the power of prayer), but not his mentor, recovered.226 Nor does it seem as if Eata was present, but we do not know why.

  There are immediate echoes here of a previous constitutional set-piece, Edwin’s conversion debate of 626 in his great hall on the Yorkshire Wolds, some thirty miles to the south of Whitby. The timber hall, with its central hearth, its architecture of war and precedence and pagan royal divinity, would have made the perfect setting for Oswiu to pull off a similar tribal coup. Bu
t was there a hall at Whitby? Had Hild caused such a building to be constructed in her new monastery? It seems unlikely, given her ascetic leanings. In that case, one must envision either that there was a nearby villa regia with a suitable venue for debate (by no means impossible) or that the Council took place in much more humble, perhaps very crowded surroundings. I think it possible that, given the urgency lent to the Council by Deusdedit’s death, Whitby might have been chosen precisely because it lay close to a villa regia which was habitually visited in the late summer or early autumn, so that the Council coincided with the gathering of its annual food render. Early Medieval life may have been miraculous but it was also pragmatic: people needed feeding and housing.

  Bede implies that the debating chamber was crowded, with some delegates having to stand: however this first great council of the English church might be dressed, it has the ring of a tribal gathering, with the king at the centre sitting in judgement on those below him in his sacral role as law-giver.

  King Oswiu began by declaring that it was fitting that those who served one God should observe one rule of life and not differ in the celebration of the holy sacraments, seeing that they all hoped for one kingdom in heaven; they ought therefore to inquire as to which was the truer tradition and then all follow it together. He then ordered his bishop Colman to say first what were the customs which he followed and whence they originated.227

  The meaning here is unequivocal: Oswiu would not allow the two traditions to continue side by side; there would be one church for the Northumbrian people (and, by implication, for the English over whom Oswiu enjoyed imperium). Bede’s apparent verbatim quotations from Colman and Wilfrid during the debate that followed must be taken with a dose of seasoning. It was a rhetorical commonplace to reconstruct dialogue on the basis of what one thought ought to have been the case. But Bede was relying on eyewitness testimony, probably from several of those who had either been there as young men and women or who had heard many stories from their elders. No doubt there were contradictory recollections from Lindisfarne and Whitby, both of them monasteries where Bede had correspondents. As so often before, the historian felt the need to conflate varying accounts in order to provide a coherent narrative. In the case of Whitby, given Bede’s own fundamentalist adherence to the Roman cause, it was necessary to show how the arguments of the Catholic party had convinced the king.

  The debate became increasingly semantic, convoluted and bitterly personal; it must have continued among the churchmen and women perhaps over several days, if not weeks; how much of it took place in public before the two kings and their courts is hard to say. Against Colman’s appeal to the traditions of his forefathers and the authority of saints John and Colm Cille, Wilfrid pursued a line similar to that of Cummian in the 630s, incredulous that the Irish believed themselves, and only themselves, to be right in the face of all the evidence. Bede gives him the following speech:

  The Easter we keep is the same as we have seen universally celebrated in Rome, where the apostles St Peter and St Paul lived, taught, suffered, and were buried. We also found it in use everywhere in Italy and Gaul when we travelled through these countries for the purposes of study and prayer. We learned that it was observed at one and the same time in Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and throughout the entire world, wherever the Church of Christ is scattered, amid various nations and languages. The only exceptions are these men and their accomplices in obstinacy, I mean the Picts and the Britons, who in these, the two remotest islands of the Ocean, and only in some parts of them, foolishly attempt to fight against the whole world.228

  The judgement attributed to Oswiu by Bede was a masterstroke of enlightened self-interest, delivered with a Da Vinci-esque smile of enigma, according to Eddius, which might be interpreted as one of either submission or triumph.229 The coup de grâce was delivered after an admission by Colman that St Peter, on whose authority the Roman case had been made, had been granted the keys to the kingdom of Heaven.

  Thereupon the king concluded, ‘Then, I tell you, since he is the doorkeeper I will not contradict him; but I intend to obey his commands in everything to the best of my knowledge and ability, otherwise when I come to the gates of the kingdom of heaven, there may be no-one to open them because the one who on your own showing holds the keys has turned his back on me.’ When the king had spoken, all who were seated there or standing by, both high and low, signified their assent, gave up their imperfect rules, and readily accepted in their place those which they recognised to be better.230

  Whatever spin Bede and Wilfrid’s biographer might put on Oswiu’s judgement and its benevolent reception, the result was a decisive unification of the English church. Oswiu, by apparently giving in to his son’s pressure, had completely outflanked him, retaining his political supremacy, ingratiating himself with the Pope and deflecting Alhfrith’s bid to isolate his father from the southern kingdoms. From a personal point of view the victory was bittersweet. Oswiu’s patronage of the church founded by his brother was seemingly fatally compromised. Colman and a large contingent of the community at Lindisfarne refused to accept the verdict. Following the Synod, he would resign the bishopric of Lindisfarne and lead his followers on a new pilgrimage of isolation, first to Iona and then to the west coast of Ireland.

  Oswiu, his political capital restored decisively, took the opportunity to undertake the reforms which he must have been contemplating for the best part of a decade. Colman having vacated Lindisfarne, the king determined to separate the monastic and episcopal functions of the Northumbrian church by appointing Tuda, an Irish-trained Romanist, as bishop for his people. His new see would be at York in the heart of Deira, maintaining both geographical and tribal distance between him and Lindisfarne and reviving, after sixty years, the original intention of Pope Gregory to give the North a see in the old Roman provincial capital. There is evidence from excavations at Fishergate in the 1980s that by the late seventh century York was minting coins and hosted a settlement of Frisian traders: did they follow and exploit the arrival of episcopal dignity, or was it, one wonders, the other way around?*3 The rump of Colman’s community, whose loyalty to the king overcame their distaste for his reforms, was placed under Abbot Eata, Oswiu’s long-time safe pair of hands and a candidate calculated to placate the Irish/British party in the Northumbrian church. Cuthbert, Wilfrid’s humble contemporary, became his prior at Lindisfarne.

  Oswiu’s reform had important administrative implications, not often discussed by historians. By separating the offices of abbot and bishop, Oswiu ensured that in future the abbots of all the Northumbrian houses came under the authority of the bishop. There was, from now on, a hierarchy of precedence and discipline by which king appointed archbishop under whom bishops and then abbots owed their duty. No longer would Oswiu have to juggle an ever more complex web of abbatial patronage. Before Whitby it must have seemed as if his abbots, perhaps a score of them representing monasteries great and small, had begun to constitute a parallel order of gesiths, retaining whose personal loyalty could only become an increasing burden on royal patronage. Now their counsel, their management of lands and communities were organised under the quasi-judicial person of the bishop. The king, like all good leaders, had learned the art of delegation. If there is a moment in early English history when one can identify the emergence of the concept of a civil service, an idea of administrative statehood, surely this is it.

  Oswiu was swift in deploying his enhanced political capital. A replacement must be found for the deceased archbishop, Deusdedit. Oswiu took counsel to ensure the right candidate was put forward. One is reminded forcibly here of a conversation that took place between Lord Palmerston and Talleyrand, respective foreign secretaries of Britain and France, in about 1830 when a suitably consensual candidate was being sought to become first king of the new Belgian state.

  PALMERSTON TO TALLEYRAND: Let us try and find someone… who... might satisfy everyone.

  TALLEYRAND TO PALMERSTON: I consider that everyone means you and us.231<
br />
  In this case, you and us were Oswiu and the new king of Kent, Egbert, whose consultation, as tributary ruler under Oswiu’s imperium, was perhaps more by historical courtesy than political necessity. Egbert proposed Wigheard, a member of the community at Canterbury. The details of his career and the exact circumstances of his appointment are not clear; Bede himself gave more than one contradictory account. It is certain that he died shortly after his arrival in Rome for ordination by the Pope. What also seems likely, given that he was a member of Deusdedit’s church, is that he was Egbert’s personal choice. Oswiu might have been tempted to impose his own candidate but was probably content to go along with Egbert’s nomination. What mattered was that he, Oswiu, was seen to have the appointment at least equally in his gift. If Pope Vitalian ordained his candidate, Oswiu might metaphorically wave a piece of paper at his people and claim the legitimacy of an unparalleled imperium papally sealed and stamped. Who could argue with that?

  It seems that Alhfrith did, for after Whitby he is barely heard of again. Bede alludes to a rebellion without giving us any detail or explanation.*4 Oddly, Wilfrid’s biographer, who took a closer interest than any in the young star’s patron, also fails to tell us what his fate was. Bede’s last mention of the Deiran sub-king is a record of him sending Wilfrid to Gaul to be consecrated bishop. Neither Bede nor Eddius seems to have been reliably informed about the precise sequence of events, but it seems that Oswiu’s new bishop, Tuda, became a victim of the plague shortly after his appointment. Eddius tells us that an election took place after Whitby among the kings and the counsellors of the realm, which resulted in Wilfrid being elevated to the new see at York. This seems odd, given that Oswiu had apparently appointed Tuda to the bishopric. Do we have here the most compelling evidence for Alhfrith’s fate? Did he set Wilfrid up as a rival to Tuda even while Oswiu’s new bishop was still alive? If he did, he was following in the steps of his unfortunate predecessors as Deiran sub-kings and over-reaching himself. We do not hear of him again.