slew an enormous number of the people, filling two rivers with corpses so that, marvellous to relate, the slayers, passing over the rivers dry foot, pursued and slew the crowd of fugitives; the tribes were reduced to slavery and remained subject under the yoke of captivity until the time when the king was slain.236
Shortly after this campaign Wulfhere, king of Mercia, apparently at the head of an allied army of the southern English, attacked Northumbria and was repelled. Both Eddius and the author of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto recorded that Ecgfrith’s army was very small. Wilfrid seems to have accompanied the king. We are not given the site of any battle in this campaign (somewhere along the Great North Road between Lincoln and Catterick seems highly probable); all we know is that shortly afterwards Wulfhere died; one is tempted to think that the campaign was rather half-hearted, but it does seem to have resulted in the temporary annexation of Lindsey by Ecgfrith. Eddius’s motive in describing the two ‘invasions’ is perfectly clear. He wanted to show that while the king and his consort were supporters of Wilfrid they enjoyed success; when they turned against him God saw to it that their luck ran out.
The rift must have begun before the Mercian invasion; either Wilfrid had got wind that Theodore wished to reform the diocesan structure of the English church and divide Northumbria into smaller sees; or, as Eddius would have his readers believe,
Ecgfrith’s queen, named Iurminburh, was at that time tortured with envy owing to the persuasions of the devil... This sorceress shot poisoned arrows of speech from her quiver into the heart of the king... She eloquently described to him all the temporal glories of Saint Wilfrid, his riches, the number of his monasteries, the greatness of his buildings, his countless army of followers arrayed in royal vestments and arms.237
Whatever underlying personal tensions there may have been, and there is little doubt that throughout his life he attracted such critical attention, Wilfrid had somehow lost the king’s favour. Ecgfrith’s victory over Mercia had been accomplished with...
...the aid of Saint Wilfrid, who was with him, but especially through the prayers of Saint Cuthbert, who was absent. After this battle King Ecgfrith gave Carham and whatever pertains to it to Cuthbert and held him in the highest veneration as long as he lived...*10
The message to Wilfrid was unmistakeable: Bernician Lindisfarne was to receive a gift of land in celebration and thanks for the victory against Mercia; Deiran Ripon was not. Cuthbert, now prior of Lindisfarne, increasingly revered by his contemporaries and very much the gentle ascetic, had replaced Wilfrid in the royal favour. But for archaeologists and historical geographers there is more to this brief passage than meets the eye. The key phrase here is et quicquid ad eam pertinet: ‘whatever pertains to it’. Elsewhere in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto we find cum suis appendiciis: ‘with its dependencies’. Here we have a small but highly significant clue to the way in which land was held and donated in the seventh century. Names like Carham (and later Warkworth, Jedburgh and others mentioned in the Historia) are those of vills or townships; that is to say, territorial units whose dependent settlements owed them food renders and services. In other words, these are the component parts of shire estates, being alienated by royal gift into the hands of the great monasteries.
Shires generally seem to have comprised units of either six or twelve vills adjacent to one another and forming contiguous territorial units.*11 In the later Middle Ages Carham formed the core of a parish which extended on both sides of the River Tweed and seems to have encompassed the territory of former British churches on the north side of the basin at Eccles. Whatever pertained to Carham in 675 looks as though it were at least a half-sized estate consisting of about six vills or townships. There may, at some point, have been a shire of Carham, which would have abutted Gefrinshire (Yeavering), Yetholmshire (Kirk Yetholm) and Norhamshire (Norham), the last of which was also certainly a possession of Lindisfarne. Carham, significantly, is less than three miles from Sprouston, the major Anglian township on the Tweed identified by aerial photography in the 1970s and which is also thought to have British origins.*12 If, as archaeologists believe, it was abandoned in the late seventh century, there may be a case for arguing that, as a lordless estate, its donation with Carham was an attempt to revive its economy under monastic management: better it had an economy whose surplus went to God than no economy at all. The extra responsibility seems to have been too much for Cuthbert: within a year of this donation he had retired to his cell on Inner Farne, building walls so high that he might see nothing but sky, and suffer no other earthly distraction to interfere with his contemplation of God.
King Oswiu had set a precedent for donating land to monasteries in thanks for victory (and their prayers) after the battle on the Winwæd but he had been careful to distribute his patronage widely and equally among his two kingdoms; Ecgfrith, in continuing the tradition, was taking sides. If royal patrons were to become partisan, the inevitable response from ecclesiastical entrepreneurs was to compete more vigorously for their favours. It was not just ambitious abbots like Wilfrid who entered this competition. Queens Eanflæd and Æthelthryth had been prepared to use their powers of patronage to favour their own ecclesiastical causes and now royal women began to see how they might use the same mechanism to promote dynastic interests. The benefits of ties between churches and their patrons were mutual: churches and monasteries attracted wealth, which could be used to promote the careers of collateral members of the family. For royal women there were multiple opportunities. Their sisters, daughters, nieces could enjoy the fruits of their endowments; more significantly, ecclesiastical communities and their abbots or abbesses could and would lobby for the promotion of their patrons as candidates for kingship or other high office. In the paruchia of Colm Cille there had been a synergy between ecclesiastical and political ambitions: several of Colm Cille’s descendants became abbots on Iona. The royal families of the English kingdoms were also quick to exploit these opportunities and many of Wilfrid’s monasteries would be bequeathed by him to his relatives: here he is playing the English equivalent of the Irish érenach, but wise heads foresaw the political risks involved and it worried them.
A year after Ecgfrith’s victory against Mercia, Wulfhere was succeeded as king by his brother Æthelred, whose queen was Osthryth, Ecgfrith’s sister. In 675 the royal couple founded a monastery at Bardney in Lindsey on the edge of the fens east of Lincoln. Very little is known of the circumstances of its foundation—the first abbot was probably a member of the former ruling dynasty of Lindsey. There was a strategic element in its location in a territory formerly regarded as part of Northumbria and the royal couple were keen to invest the new abbey with a significant relic.
There is a famous monastery in the kingdom of Lindsey called Bardney, which was greatly loved, venerated and enriched by the queen and her husband Æthelred and in which she wished to place her uncle’s bones.*13
The bones in question were those of Oswald; that is, what was left of him. I suggested in Chapter XIII that the clue to the whereabouts of these bones during the previous forty years lies in the fact that they had been wrapped in Oswald’s purple and gold battle standard. Now this immensely valuable capital asset was to be spent on endowing their monastery. The receipt of such relics was a matter of immense prestige for the monks of Bardney; at least, it ought to have been...
The carriage on which the bones were borne reached the monastery toward evening. But the inmates did not receive them gladly. They knew that Oswald was a saint but, nevertheless, because he belonged to another kingdom and had once conquered them, they pursued him even when dead with their former hatred. So it came about that the bones remained outside all night with only a large tent erected over the carriage in which the bones rested.238
Here is a tantalising glimpse of the sort of ceremonial which must have been witnessed, probably with less pomp, by the monks at Lindisfarne when Oswald’s head arrived. The cynic might ask why the king and queen had not thought to ask the monks if
their gift would be welcome. The insult caused by rejection of such a noble gift must have stung.*14 The monks of Bardney, then, not to mention whoever had been placed in charge of the precious relics, were in an invidious position. Time for a miracle.
But a sign from heaven revealed to them how reverently the relics should have been received by all the faithful. All through the night a column of light stretched from the carriage right up to heaven and was visible in almost every part of the kingdom of Lindsey. In the morning, the brothers in the monastery who had refused the relics of God’s beloved saint the day before, now began to pray earnestly that the relics might be lodged with them. The bones were washed, laid in a shrine constructed for the purpose, and placed in the church with fitting honours.239
Many miracles were subsequently associated with Oswald’s relics and with the soil on which the water from the washing of his bones fell. A visiting abbess from another Lindsey monastery begged some of this soil from the queen and, taking it home wrapped in a cloth inside a casket, used it to cure a convulsive man possessed by the devil. A boy with a recurrent fever, perhaps malaria, was cured when he sat by Oswald’s tomb.
Oswald’s fame was spread far and wide not just by physical association with his relics but also because of the enthusiasm with which stories about him were told throughout the Christian kingdoms, especially where new missionaries were preaching to prospective or recent converts. His heroism in battle, his links with the famous island of Iona and with Aidan, his personal qualities and the undeniable effect of his relics made for a persuasive package. His was a ‘good’ story. His luck, transferred miraculously in death from his spirit to his corporeal remains and anything with which they came into contact, seemed to rub off, literally and figuratively.
Oddly enough, the development of the cult of Oswald in Bernicia and Deira was slow, and late. Perhaps for obvious reasons Oswiu and Eanflæd did not promote the dead martyr; after all, who would not be discomfited by comparison with such an exemplary dead brother? In Ecgfrith’s day a cult centre did develop at Whitby, and was heavily invested in by the women of the royal household; but it did not embrace Oswald. Oswiu was buried there and his widow retired to the abbey under the care of the great Hild. When Hild died in 680 she was succeeded as abbess jointly by Eanflæd and her daughter Ælfflæd, sister of Osthryth of Mercia and of Ecgfrith.240 Ecgfrith’s queens were excluded from this coterie. We cannot be sure where Iurminburh ended her days; she certainly took the veil after Ecgfrith’s death, as Eddius records241 and was listed among the patrons of Lindisfarne in the Durham Liber Vitae. Like Ecgfrith’s first queen, she failed to produce an heir. Ecgfrith, it seemed, did not possess the family’s lucky genes.
That Whitby was Deiran in its loyalties is confirmed by the arrival there in the early 680s of King Edwin’s bones in circumstances which suggest an attempt to replicate Oswald’s installation at Bardney and found a cult. In the anonymous Whitby Life of Gregory, which is a flagrant propagandist hagiography of the pope behind the Augustinian mission, Edwin is understandably promoted as rightful heir to that mission—after all, Eanflæd was his daughter, Ecgfrith and Ælfflæd his grandchildren; one of them almost certainly commissioned, perhaps even wrote, the Life. After his death on the field of battle in 632 Edwin’s head had been taken to York and placed in the church built by Paulinus and recently restored by Wilfrid.
Now there was a certain brother of our race named Trimma who exercised the office of priest in a monastery of the South English, in the days of their king Æthelred, while Eanflæd was still living and in the monastic life... A certain man appeared in a dream to the priest and said to him, ‘Go to a place that I will tell you of, in the district known as Hæthfelth, where King Edwin was killed. You must remove his bones from there and take them to Streanæshealh.’242
The priest, understandably, was confused and sceptical. Where was he to look? He was to go to a certain village in Lindsey and ask a certain ceorl (the anonymous hagiographer had forgotten the names) who would show Trimma where to look. Trimma decided that there was some trickery here and tried to ignore the man in his dream; but the man persisted, whipping and rebuking him. Quite what lies behind this story is not clear: a monk’s vision in a state of trance? The scourging is not an uncommon part of such tales; Colm Cille was forced to ordain Áedán mac Gabráin after refusing a visionary urging and then being scourged. In the end Trimma set off on what must have seemed a futile quest:
he quickly went off to find this ceorl and, on making enquiries, soon found him according to the directions given him. He questioned the ceorl closely and learned by certain marks, which the man explained clearly, where he ought to look for the king’s relics. As soon as he got the information, he went at once to the place which had been pointed out to him, but on his first dig he did not find what he was looking for; however, after digging more carefully a second time, as often happens, he found the treasure he desired and brought it with him to our monastery. And now the holy bones are honourably buried in the church...243
As the first authenticated archaeological excavation in the British Isles, this story has its own fascination. It raises any number of questions about who sanctioned Trimma’s quest—Eanflæd must be the prime suspect—and how the intelligence was gathered. And then, how did this certain ceorl know where Edwin’s bones were buried? Were they on his farm? It all seems a bit like Treasure Island; and yet, there is a real event underpinning the story. Its political significance as a component in the deliberate and planned elevation of Whitby to the principal cult site of the Deiran (and by implication Northumbrian) royal family is unmistakeable, as is the parallel down-grading of Lindisfarne/Bamburgh and Bardney.
It is ironic that Wilfrid, the principal opponent of Ionan Christianity and instigator of the triumph of the Roman orthodox church, should also ultimately be a prime instrument in the development of the cult of Oswald. His episcopal elevation had not compensated for the loss of his royal patron Æthelthryth and the hostility of Iurminburh. The queen’s implacable opposition prompted Ecgfrith, in 678, to call Archbishop Theodore to Northumberland on the pretext, real or constructed, that Wilfrid’s see was too big to minister effectively to its people. Theodore had probably seen this coming and was amenable. Wilfrid’s power was effectively unchallenged in the North and his huge see was ripe for reform. King and Archbishop agreed that Northumbria would in future be divided into four dioceses, with sees at York, Hexham, Lindisfarne and, eventually, Abercorn on the Firth of Forth. Wilfrid would lose three-quarters of the ecclesiastical domain over which he had ruled—but not without a fight.
Wilfrid determined to travel to Rome to seek redress from the Pope and left Ecgfrith with a threat of divine retribution, just as Augustine had threatened the British bishops in 604: ‘On this day twelvemonth you who now laugh at my condemnation through malice, shall then weep bitterly over your own confusion.’244 He may have intended this to convey his confidence that in a year he would return with a papal bull supporting his case to wave in their faces. His hagiographer Eddius naturally enough in retrospect saw in it a prophecy which, in the fullness of time, came true: within a year Ecgfrith’s young brother Ælfwine lay dead, killed by the Mercian king Æthelred in battle on the River Trent. There seems to have been no decisive victory here, for in the aftermath of battle Archbishop Theodore managed to broker a treaty in which Ecgfrith relinquished the right to avenge his brother in return for compensation; Lindsey remained in Mercian hands and, for the immediate future, the boundary of the two kingdoms was stabilised on the River Humber.
Wilfrid returned from Rome a year later, having pleaded his case in terms immodest enough to make the most sympathetic modern reader cringe with embarrassment; but successfully, and brandishing his bull. The king (and queen) were unmoved. Papal interference in matters reserved for royal prerogative and sanctioned by the metropolitan in Canterbury was not negotiable especially if, as Eddius records, the king believed Wilfrid to have purchased his bull.245 Wilfrid was imprisoned
, then given into the hands of a reeve called Osfrith in the royal borough of Broninis to cool his heels while he decided whether to accept the king’s offer of a reduced bishopric and a renunciation of the papal bull.246 As added insult, Queen Iurminburh took possession of a box of his most precious relics and carried them with her at all times, even into her chariot when she was abroad.
We do not know the location of Broninis but an island fortress in Bernicia is likely (the inis suffix means island, as it does in Irish and Welsh) and a case has been made to identify it with the hill on which the castle stands on Lindisfarne;247 Osfrith, judging by his name, might be a collateral member of the Iding dynasty. Ecgfrith’s policy towards Wilfrid was not entirely successful. The dispossessed holy man cured the reeve’s wife of a palsy after which the reeve asked the king to release him; so Ecgfrith sent Wilfrid to Dunbar, where a reeve called Tydlin, evidently made of sterner stuff, had fewer scruples. But here, the fetters made to shackle the former bishop would not fit: they were found variously to be too big or too small. To a contemporary this is not as daft as it sounds: Bede makes reference to a man who was suspected of possessing ‘loosing spells’ in a story about the warrior called Imma who survived the Battle of the River Trent in 679 and whose fetters similarly kept falling off him. That Wilfrid was capable of pulling off such a feat, or inducing the idea that such loosing spells were in his power, should not surprise.248 But Wilfrid had more tricks up his sleeve, it seems...
Meanwhile the king and queen, who had been making their progress with worldly pomp and daily rejoicings and feasts, through cities, fortresses, and villages, came upon a certain occasion to a nunnery called Coldingham, over which presided a very holy and discreet abbess called Æbbe, the sister of King Oswiu. At this place the queen became possessed with a devil that same night, and like Pilate’s wife was so plagued and scourged that she scarcely expected to live till day.249
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