—Plague (after July comet); Archbishop Deusdedit dies. King Eorconberht of Kent dies, succeeded by Ecgbert I (673). Cuthbert struck down by plague; recovers.
—Cedd dies of plague at Lastingham.
—Boisil dies of plague at Melrose.
—Council of Whitby (Streanæshealh). Hosted by Hild, abbess of Whitby. Delegates include Agilbert, Colman, Wilfrid, Oswiu, Alhfrith, James the Deacon and Romanus. King Oswiu convenes synod to determine which church to follow: Iona or Rome. Decides in favour of Rome.
—Bishop Colman abdicates from Lindisfarne and is replaced by Eata as abbot, not as bishop; Colman founds monasteries at Inishbofin and Mayo.
—Tuda is chosen as new bishop of Northumbria with his see at York; he dies of the plague
—Wilfrid elected as bishop of Northumberland at York.
—Cuthbert becomes prior of Lindisfarne.
—?Alhfrith dies this year or soon after. Possibly succeeded as sub-king of Deira by Ecgfrith.
—Wigheard sent by King Egbert of Kent and Oswiu with a letter to Rome to have a new archbishop appointed. Wigheard dies in Rome.
—King Sighere of Essex apostasises after plague; begins to rebuild temples and idols (EH II.30).
665
Wilfrid consecrated bishop of York; but by ?Agilbert in Gaul, not at York (perhaps because of lack of qualified Roman-style bishops in England after plague); stays in Gaul and influence wanes temporarily. Returns to Ripon and rules there for two to three years. English Christian kingdoms in a state of crisis until arrival of Theodore.
—Benedict Biscop arrives in Lérins and stays for two years at the monastery.
666
Chad (Ceadda) is appointed bishop of York by Oswiu in Wilfrid’s absence.
669
Arrival of Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus in England with his monk Hadrian, and accompanied by Benedict Biscop; Theodore undertakes a tour of the Christian states to bring them into line with apostolic doctrine and discipline.
—Wilfrid restored to see of Northumbria.
—Chad returns to Lastingham as abbot, but is then sent to Mercia as its bishop under Wulfhere. He is granted land at Lichfield to establish see.
—Benedict Biscop becomes abbot of St Peter and St Paul monastery in Canterbury.
—Death of Cumméne, abbot of Iona; succeeded by Failbe.
670/1
King Oswiu dies of natural causes at fifty-eight years of age. Succeeded by Ecgfrith, his first son by Eanflæd
—Wilfrid expels monks from Ripon and builds a stone church, probably financed by the plunder of British churches in the Pennines.
—Wilfrid tries to extort land from Ecgfrith in return for persuading Queen Æthelthryth to consummate her marriage with Ecgfrith. She remains a virgin.
—Eight-year-old Ælfwine, Oswiu’s youngest son, is sub-king of Deira until 679.
—Queen Eanflæd retires to Whitby Abbey.
XVIII
Habeas corpus
Is seo forðgesceaft
digol and dyrne; drihten ana wat
Our future fate is dark and hidden;
only the Lord knows
Aidan’s body had lain in the holy soil of Lindisfarne for thirteen years when Colman decided that he could not in conscience live with the judgement of the Council at Whitby. Bede says that he...
left Britain and took with him all the Irish whom he had gathered together on the island of Lindisfarne. He also took about thirty men of English race, both companies having been instructed in the duties of monastic life. Leaving some of the brothers in the church at Lindisfarne, he went first to the Island of Iona, from which he had been sent to preach the word to the English. From there he went on to a small island some distance off the west coast of Ireland, called in Irish Inisboufinde, the island of the white heifer.232
One has some sympathy for Colman, who must have believed himself personally betrayed by his patron King Oswiu. That dismay was shared on the island of Colm Cille, whose community would not accept Roman orthodoxy for another two generations. Colman now sought a new Lindisfarne and chose Inishbofin, some three miles off the coast of Connemara, County Galway. This foundation is remarkable for the insight it gives us into the hundreds or thousands of such enterprises dating to the sixth and seventh centuries in the British Isles. The site of Colman’s monastery has never been excavated but is still visible on Inishbofin’s fertile east plain: it lies by a stream fed by a freshwater lough and just a few hundred yards from a sheltered sandy beach. It seems to have survived into the tenth century but the community there left no records. Fortunately, Bede was well informed about its history under Colman:
When he reached this island, he built a monastery and placed in it monks whom he had brought from both nations. But they could not agree together because the Irish, in summer time when the harvest had to be gathered in, left the monastery and wandered about, scattering into various places with which they were familiar; then when winter came, they returned and expected to have a share in the things which the English had provided. Colman sought to put an end to this dispute and at last, having travelled about far and near, he found a place suitable for building a monastery on the Irish mainland called in the Irish tongue Mag éo.*1
Here, then, were cultural tensions between different nationalities based not on the ecclesiastical rule they followed but on deeper, more ancient traditions, which were domestically incompatible. The source for this story was Mayo which, by Bede’s day, was a famous seat of learning and known across Europe as Mayo of the Saxons: twenty-eight acres in extent with generous estates and home to hundreds of monks, many of them exiles or pilgrims from England. Bede’s correspondents gave him the following illuminating details of Colman’s acquisition of the site:
He bought a small part of the land from the chief to whom it belonged, on condition that the monks who settled there were to pray to the Lord for him as he had provided them with the land. A monastery was forthwith built with the help of the chief and all the neighbours and in it he placed the English monks, leaving the Irishmen on the island.233
Here is testimony to the process by which great landowners, the Irish equivalent of gesiths, came to follow their kings in patronising the church; they were probably known by the term érenach, or coarb. Such lay patrons became a prominent feature of Irish foundations just as, by Bede’s day, they were in Northumbria. Nowhere could there be a clearer statement of the mutual incentives for holy men and their patrons in setting up communities; and underlying it is the desire for legitimisation, stability and the dignity and luck which a great bishop of the paruchia of Colm Cille could confer on a warrior elite. At the heart of the matter is control of the agricultural potential of land, the labour and management to exploit it, and the benefits such capital investment could bring for both parties.
Indivisible from the legitimacy and sanctity of such pioneering missions was a need for a God-given, some might say magical or superstitious, talisman. And when Bede tells us that, on his departure from Lindisfarne, Colman ‘took with him some of the bones of the reverend father Aidan’, leaving ‘some in the church over which he had presided, directing that they should be interred in the sanctuary’, we are offered a clue to the process by which such magical virtue was transferred from one site to another.234 The Annals of Ulster record, in noting Colman’s arrival on Inishbofin in 668, that he brought with him the relics of saints; no doubt some of these were, in turn, taken on to seed the fortunes of Mag éo.
From the earliest days of the Christian church shrines had been erected over the relics of martyrs and special holy men and women; many of these shrines developed into monastic or episcopal establishments and some of them, in turn, became centres of urban revival. Xanten*2 in Germany (Saint Viktor) and Tours in France (Saint Martin) are the classic type-sites: both developed around the extramural cemeteries of important Roman towns. England’s primary martyr was Saint Alban, whose shrine on the hill above the Roman town of Verulamium has been a place of pilgrimage since the third ce
ntury; many other foundations attest the potency of corporeal remains and the sites of miraculous events or martyrdom. In Ireland an impressive array of structures evolved to house the relics of the saints. Slab shrines, which look like stone playing cards propping each other up tent-like, were provided with holes through which pilgrims and cure-seekers could reach in to touch saintly dust; house-shrines were constructed to mimic the cells where holy men had prayed; altars and leachta*3 were built to contain the bones of founding saints; and the tombs of lay patrons, too, became foci for veneration. The portability of human remains after ritual exhumation, washing and encasing in a suitable vessel was to become a stock-in-trade of monastic and church expansion across Europe during the Early Medieval period. Of the posthumous heroes of this missionary import–export business, none is more luminous than Oswald.
There was, surely, a punitive element in Colman taking possession of Lindisfarne’s precious relics. His sense of rejection by Oswiu and, perhaps, his own failure to argue more effectively at Whitby were unendurably bitter blows. Likewise, the holy island’s primacy in the English mission was doubly damaged by the setting up of a new metropolitan see at York and by the physical loss of its founder’s bones; Lindisfarne would have to find a new and potent patron saint, while the paruchia of Colm Cille invested its energies in a new project. At York, where Paulinus’s church had been completed by Oswald and then rebuilt after decades of neglect by Wilfrid, King Edwin’s head was the principal relic. It had been retrieved from the battlefield at Hæthfelth in 632 and it is reasonable to see, in the re-establishment of the episcopal seat at York, the arrival of a Frisian trading colony and the possible repair of some of the city walls, an attempt to replicate the development of a Tours or Xanten by late-seventh-century Northumbrian kings.
Corporeal remains were a very real commodity to be invested on behalf of a community or a tribal elite. There is more than a hint of animism here. In the late Bronze Age landscape of Northumbria, as elsewhere, the remains of ancestors were interred beneath barrows and cairns to propitiate the spirits, to bless and fertilise the land and, in a sense, to claim it for the kin. The bones of the saints were deployed in similar fashion, as symbols of the luck and virtue of a founder or community; as elements of a ritual of fertility. The presence of the relics of a saint was of great value: as a magical protection; as luck; as title deed and seal of legitimacy; above all, perhaps, to attract pilgrims and future patronage, which were the means of economic and social success among increasingly competitive monastic and church communities.
Edwin’s head at York in Deira and Oswald’s at Lindisfarne in Bernicia: a dilemma of totemic loyalty for the Northumbrian people? Perhaps; but more likely a reflection of the political reality that the Anglian peoples of the North were not to be united by mere administrative reform or royal persuasion. Under Oswiu’s successor Ecgfrith the inherent tensions in northern dynastic affairs did not resolve themselves. Competition between Deiran and Bernician saints erupted into what amounted to ecclesiastical civil war. In death, as in life, Oswald and Edwin played the parts of heroes on opposite sides.
The arrival of Archbishop Theodore at Canterbury in May 669 filled the void in ecclesiastical authority which had threatened the fragile stability of the English church since Whitby; more than filled the void. Theodore, immediately wielding the authority vested in him by the Pope and effectively authorised by Oswiu’s acceptance of papal jurisdiction, ordered Chad to surrender the see of York to Wilfrid.*4 The sixty-seven-year-old Greek-speaking monk had been chosen well. In a twenty-one-year incumbency he set about re-organising the dioceses of Britain and implementing a set of canonical rules which survive substantially as the foundations of the Church in England. He took a hard line with kings and bishops who challenged his authority in ecclesiastical politics; and with his monk Hadrian he also established a brilliant school at Canterbury, ushering in an era of outstanding scholarship.
After Oswiu’s death in 670 or 671 Ecgfrith, now about twenty-five years old, acceded the throne and installed his young brother Ælfwine, aged just ten, in Deira. If Oswiu had allowed Deiran sub-kings to become too powerful, his son would not, apparently, make the same mistake: Ælfwine was no more than a figurative royal presence: Northumbria was to be ruled as a single kingdom (although I have a suspicion that Ecgfrith’s mother Eanflæd might have acted as regent in the southern kingdom). We know nothing of the inauguration rituals involved; we can only assume Ecgfrith’s universal acclamation by the nobility of Northumbria—there were, after all, no other legitimate candidates if we accept that Alhfrith had been disposed of after Whitby.
If, as I believe, Ecgfrith had been sub-king of Deira between Whitby and his father’s death, the new king may already have enjoyed a close friendship with his bishop, Wilfrid. Wilfrid now set about exploiting this relationship to reflect the dignity proper to a Roman bishop of all the Northumbrians. If Wilfrid had done little more than see to the repairs of Paulinus’s and Oswald’s church at York, at Ripon he masterminded an altogether grander project, constructing a basilica with crypt (the latter of which survives more or less intact), dressed stone, aisles and columns. This was a building fit for a Roman bishop.
Afterwards, when the building had been finished, he invited to the day of its dedication the two most Christian kings and brothers, Ecgfrith and Ælfwine, together with the abbots, the reeves and the sub-kings; dignitaries of every kind gathered together... Then, when the sermon was over, the kings started upon a great feast lasting for three days and three nights, rejoicing amid all their people...*5
Northumbria had seen nothing like this before; not only was the architecture more imposing than any existing building in the kingdom; its altar was adorned with cloth of purple and gold. Wilfrid also commissioned the production of a set of gospels written in gold on parchment of purple. The gospels were encased in gold studded with jewels. This splendid occasion was more than just a dedication ceremony. Wilfrid took the opportunity to record before these witnesses the possessions Ecgfrith and his father had given over to the community at Ripon—including, intriguingly, many churches in the Pennines that had been ‘deserted’ by British clergy.*6 It was an oral equivalent of the document known as the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, which recorded gifts made to Lindisfarne, establishing legal title over those possessions. It was also a challenge to the dignity of the kings. Wilfrid’s economic pulling-power was such that he could bring masons and glaziers, scribes and jewellers from Frankia to embellish his temple. Two generations earlier Edwin had fulfilled the dual role of divine ruler and chief priest of his people; Paulinus had been, in the first place, no more than his wife’s priest. Now, bishops might compete with kings in magnificence, if not yet wealth or power. How would Ecgfrith and his successors respond?
This new relationship between king and bishop, which Oswiu had anticipated in theoretical terms but not in the overwhelming physical person of Wilfrid, began to play out almost immediately: there was a crisis in the royal court. Ecgfrith had been married at the age of about sixteen to a princess of East Anglia, Æthelthryth,*7 the daughter of King Anna. She was at least ten years Ecgfrith’s senior and had already been married to a prince of the fenlands of South Gyrwe (one of the small fenland kingdoms in the area around Ely, south of the Wash) called Tondberht; the marriage was childless. After his death she was given to Ecgfrith at a time when an alliance between Oswiu and her uncle King Æthelwold was a political necessity in the face of Mercian pressure on the East Midlands. She was a most reluctant bride. Not only had she taken a vow of chastity during her first marriage; she continued virgin during her marriage to Ecgfrith. Not unnaturally, one might ask why Ecgfrith married her if the union was unlikely to produce an heir?
Now that Ecgfrith was king, producing a legitimate male heir became a matter of urgency. The queen was intransigent. Wilfrid, in whom she found a friend and confidante, was asked by the king to intervene—this is according to Bede who asked Wilfrid in person for his account of the situation.235
It seems that the king was so desperate, as it were, to achieve nuptial and procreative consummation that he offered Wilfrid estates and money if he could persuade the queen to fulfil her wifely duties. The mind boggles; it doesn’t say much for the royal couple’s relationship. But in this matter, for once, Wilfrid’s arguments and charm were deployed in vain. In about 672 the marriage was dissolved; Æthelthryth retired first to the abbey of Oswald’s sister Æbbe at Coldingham on the Berwickshire coast and then to the Isle of Ely, where she founded a monastery on her own original dower lands. In death, as in life, she was unsullied: upon her exhumation by the nuns at Ely her body was found to be incorrupt.*8
Ecgfrith was free to marry again. His new consort was Iurminburh, of whom we know almost nothing; her background is completely obscure, although the name is suspiciously Kentish, even Frankish; her unnamed sister married a king of Wessex. Wilfrid initially did rather better out of his failed diplomacy than he could have expected. Æthelthryth left him substantial estates along the Tyne Valley and at Hexham, in 673, he created an abbey complex even more stupendous than that at Ripon. But in the new queen he found, or made, a determined enemy.
Eddius Stephanus, Wilfrid’s biographer and the English church’s first singing master, made great play of tying the fortunes of his precious bishop to those of the kingdom and, in particular, the king and queen. In his first few years on the throne, Ecgfrith, like all Northumbrian kings before him, was required to prove his military might and the superiority of the Northumbrians in battle. There was, first, an invasion from the North, from Pictland. Ecgfrith raised a body of horsemen and counter-attacked with the support of a sub-king, Beornæth.*9 The Northumbrian host...
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