The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  In another letter, this time one of sympathy and consternation to the bishop of Lindisfarne, he wrote:

  ...the distress of your suffering fills me daily with deep grief, when heathens desecrated God’s sanctuaries, and poured the blood of saints within the compass of the altar, destroyed the house of our hope, trampled the bodies of saints in God’s temple like animal dung in the street. What can we say except weep with you in our hearts before the altar of Christ and say, ‘Spare thy people O Lord and give not thine heritage to the Gentiles lest heathens should say, “Where is the God of the Christians?”’

  What security is there for the churches of Britain if St Cuthbert with so great a throng of saints will not defend his own? Either this is the beginning of greater grief or the sins of those who live there have brought it upon themselves. This indeed has not happened by chance; it is a sign...268

  Somehow the community at Lindisfarne held out for another eighty years, by which time a Danish army had settled in England and overwintered as far north as the River Tyne. Many treasures belonging to the monastery were destroyed or looted; many monks were killed. The island community once sheltered by the military might of the Bernician kings in their fortress at Bamburgh was vulnerable to further attack from land and sea. Cuthbert’s and Oswald’s relics must be protected. The twelfth-century English chronicler Symeon of Durham wrote:

  Raising, then, the holy and uncorrupt body of the father, they placed beside it in the same shrine (as we find it mentioned in old books) the relics of the saints; that is to say, the head of Oswald the king and martyr, beloved of God, which had formerly been buried in the cemetery of the same church, and a part of the bones of St Aidan... Having collected these relics, they fled before the barbarians, and abandoned that noble pile, the mother church of the nation of the Bernicians...*4

  What ‘old books’ Symeon was referring to we do not know. There is more than one version of the legendary travels of the monks and their precious shrine. An alternative narrative provided by the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto suggests that the relics were removed in the 840s and taken to Norham, on the banks of the River Tweed; Symeon dates the abandonment of Lindisfarne to 875, the year of Halfdan the Dane’s attack on Northumbria.269 At one point it seems as though an attempt was made to remove some of the relics to Ireland (an attempt prevented by divine intervention and a storm).270 Eventually the monks settled at Chester le Street, the site of a Roman fort, Kuncacæster, on the Great North Road between Durham and Gateshead. For almost a hundred years this became the seat of the bishops of Bernicia until their final removal to Durham, where a succession of churches was built to house the relics and provide for the community of Cuthbert until the construction of the cathedral began in 1093. Throughout this period the potency of the relics of Cuthbert, Aidan and Oswald was maintained, enhanced by miracles of healing and prophecy and by donations to the community. The relics contained in the shrine embodied not just the virtue and God-given power of the ancient kings of Bernicia but something of the ancestral luck of the Northumbrian race. It is difficult for a sceptical and cynical twenty-first-century secular society to fully grasp the power and importance of such objects and the places associated with them unless one turns to face Mecca, or Jerusalem. This is powerful magic. Even into the sixteenth century, immediately prior to the Protestant Reformation in England, the Earl of Surrey felt obliged to divert from his march against the Scots at Flodden Field to pick up Cuthbert’s banner from Durham: that is, to ask for the blessing of the saint and carry his totemic standard into battle.

  The opening of the shrine in 1104 was, then, a matter of political and symbolic significance in establishing the bona fides of the new cathedral and reinforcing its tangible links with a glorious but now quite mythical past. This was a test and a rite intended to transcend the overt Norman iconography of Durham’s French bishops and their historically antipathetic behaviour towards the monks of the community of St Cuthbert; to soothe native sensitivities.

  When, in the last days of August 1104, the shrine in which Cuthbert’s relics lay was opened ‘aided by instruments of iron’, the monks found ‘a chest covered on all sides with hides’.271 This, we infer, was the casing fabricated to hold the original relics on their travels from Lindisfarne. Within this chest was the coffin now on display in Durham Cathedral and regarded as the earliest surviving decorated carved wooden object from England. Its simple knife-cut iconography of gospels and saints is perfectly in tune with the aesthetics of Lindisfarne in Cuthbert’s day. There is no serious doubt that this was the ‘light chest’ described by Bede and made to receive the exhumed remains of the saint in 698. Inside, beneath the lid, was a sort of tray resting on horizontal bars with a metal ring at either end by which it could be lifted out. On the tray, near the head, lay the tiny, exquisite book now known as the Stonyhurst Gospel or Cuthbert Gospel—the only complete Early Medieval book from England still in its original binding. It did not belong to Cuthbert but was probably placed in the coffin soon after his translation; it is regarded as contemporary with the more famous Lindisfarne Gospels, produced within a few years of 700. It is one of the most important historic and artistic artefacts of Early Medieval England. In spring 2012 it was purchased jointly for the British Library and Durham Cathedral and University.

  Much has been written about these relics. The artefacts accompanying the saint included his ivory comb, his portable wood and silver altar, a Eucharistic paten and chalice; sacramental cloths and vestments of Byzantine silk. Suffice it to say that on removing the shelf the monks found Cuthbert inside, accompanied by an odour of the ‘sweetest fragrancy’ and in ‘a perfect state’ with the bones of the other saints packed around him.272 Almost overwhelmed with fear and emotion, the monks proceeded to investigate. The anonymous monk’s account, and a later version written by Reginald of Durham, have an almost forensic quality about them; the archaeologist could hardly wish for more detail. When the monks had summoned the courage to touch the contents of the coffin, they were able to remove Cuthbert’s wrapped remains intact. Reginald adds an important observation: that the base of the coffin, where the relics of the saints had been compressed against the shrouds in which they were wrapped, ‘was blackened by the closely packed dust of their putrefaction’.273 This suggests that the container had not been substantially disturbed since the original translation; Cuthbert’s body had decayed further after its reburial, but it had done so in situ. This is entirely consistent with a single translation from the original (whether lead or wood or stone) into the light coffin in which the remains were to embark on their remarkable travels.

  Of all the corporeal relics the coffin had contained—Cuthbert, parts of Aidan, bones of several bishops of Lindisfarne and of the Venerable Bede—Oswald’s head alone was replaced when the coffin was reburied; the others were relocated elsewhere in the cathedral. This begs the question of how the monks knew which was the head of the royal martyr. Since 1104 Cuthbert’s shrine has been opened three times. In 1538 Henry VIII’s commissioners destroyed many of the shrines in the cathedral, exhumed the coffin of Saint Cuthbert and examined it for signs of incorruption before replacing it in the tomb. In 1827 the relics were examined in detail and Canon Raine found that the skull was now in ‘an imperfect state’.274 The tomb was reopened for the last time by Canon Greenwell, the indefatigable antiquary, in 1899. This time the fragments of skull were examined in detail and photographed. When reconstructed, the skull Greenwell saw showed clear signs that its owner had been felled by a blow from an edged weapon, which produced a gaping three-finger-wide slash across the front of the skull. This is a wound of battle, or of execution. It cannot belong to any of the saints whom we suppose to have accompanied Cuthbert on his post-mortem journeys. It may be the most intimate possible evidence for Oswald’s fatal encounter with Penda. If we can say that Oswiu picked the right skull off the right stake at Maserfelth, there is reason to believe that this skull is the same one. If further testimony for the credibility of the relics
as a group is required, it comes in the form of the superb pectoral cross, missed by the monks in 1104 and by the commissioners in 1538 and only retrieved during Raine’s even more intimate examination in 1827. Made of gold inset with garnets, it was found deeply buried in the earliest wrappings of the saint’s body and had been suspended around Cuthbert’s neck by a gold-twisted silk cord. Its seventh-century provenance is unchallenged.

  The histories of Oswald’s other body parts—right and left arms, hands, torso and legs—are almost equally compelling; and almost equally telling in illuminating Oswald’s extraordinary potency throughout the medieval period across England and parts of Europe. There was only ever one Cuthbert, but the story of King Oswald’s bones is vastly complicated by their multiplicity: at least five medieval churches, including Durham Cathedral, claimed to possess his head; there are several claims for arms and any number of unspecified ‘relics’. The Bardney tomb, graced not only by a substantial proportion of Oswald’s body but also by continuing royal patronage and the presence of the martyred king’s battle standard, was further adorned with precious gifts and embellishments by no less a king than Offa, the late-eighth-century Mercian contemporary of Charlemagne.275 That Mercian royal interest in propagating Oswald’s cult continued into the tenth century. Under Æthelflæd, so-called Lady of the Mercians, queen of Mercia and daughter of Alfred the Great, several churches dedicated to Oswald seem to have been founded and in 909 she may have been personally responsible for the removal of his tomb from Bardney to a new monastic church at Gloucester: she is one of the earliest, best-attested and most regal of a long line of body-snatchers.276

  A more mundane fate met the precious right arm, encased in its silver reliquary at Bamburgh and interred in the crypt of St Peter’s church by Oswiu. Around 1055 a monk called Vynegot stole it and took it to Peterborough. According to the chronicler Hugo Candidus, Peterborough also managed to acquire one of Oswald’s ribs and ‘some of the ground on which he was killed’.277 For the propagators of the cult of Oswald the division of his body was manna from heaven. Almost anyone could claim ownership of an Oswald relic—and they did.

  Fragments of the stake on which he was impaled had spread to Ireland and to Frisia by the early part of the eighth century. The royal monastery of Chelles, near Paris, was given an unspecified relic of Oswald, probably by Charlemagne, towards the end of that century. The most spectacular reliquary of all belongs to the church dedicated to him at Hildesheim in Germany. Made in the 1180s of gold and silver and containing a textile bag with most of a skull, minus the lower jaw, the lid of the octagonal reliquary is in the form of a dome with a finely worked gold head on top, wearing a crown set with precious stones and enamel.278 By 1300 another Oswald skull was being claimed by the church at Schaffhausen in Switzerland; and another, perhaps originally residing at Zeddam, now belongs to the Rijksmuseum Catharijneconvent Utrecht in the Netherlands. A relic-list from Willibrord’s early foundation at Echternach in Luxembourg claimed to possess yet another Oswald skull.

  A comprehensive DNA testing programme on all the claimed Oswald corporeal relics would be a fascinating project. It would inevitably in some senses devalue many, if not all of the relics; and to worry about whether they are ‘real’ or not is also in a way to miss the nature of the medieval faith in relics and the vast industry it spawned. But for the twenty-first-century archaeologist the fascination in the results would match that of the monks of Durham, tremulously unwrapping the bindings of their saints in the candlelit majesty of a great cathedral.

  Oswald’s continuing fame outside the original and early centres of his cult can partly be attributed to the multiplication and wide dissemination of his relics at a time when Irish, Northumbrian and Mercian monks were proselytising among the unconverted peoples of northern Europe. Royal women, too, are notable for their enthusiasm in propagating his virtues. The first of these was related to Athelstan (895–939), grandson of Alfred the Great and the first king who might truly lay claim to the title Rex Anglorum: king of all England. His identification with Oswald as the first great Christian English king (conveniently forgetting Edwin), is easily understood by association. His half-sister Edith married Otto the Great of Saxony and, as it were, took Oswald with her.*5 Another part of the appeal lies in his status as the first great martyr of the English and the hybrid Christian/pagan divinity embodied in his ‘luck’.

  Not every cult centre possessed relics of Oswald: Wilfrid’s foundation at Selsey in Sussex was based on no more than Wilfrid’s entrepreneurial zeal and the presence of a calendar that listed Oswald’s feast day, 5 August, as a major festival. Such calendars were spread widely across Europe, and very many of them kept Oswald’s name alive, through Germany and Switzerland, Austria and beyond. One must also credit Bede, whose apparently late conversion to the virtues of Oswald ensured his presence at the heart of the Ecclesiastical History, one of the most widely copied and widely read texts in Early Medieval Europe.*6 Bede’s and Oswald’s fates were tied literally and figuratively together, for Bede’s relics were added to those of Oswald and Cuthbert after his death in 735. It was an irony not lost on Bede that Oswald’s earthly imperium continued to expand within the Christian realms long after his death in battle.

  There is another archaeology of Oswald, more shadowy, which allows us to detect on the fringes of credibility something of the effect his mythology continued to have on later generations. To begin with, a number of medieval holy wells appear to be associated with the more pagan elements of the early Oswald cult. The first suggestion of an association with a well is Reginald’s admittedly late story of the right arm that fell from the ash tree whither it had been brought by the raven-like bird.*7 Other Oswald wells are to be found at Elvet, a short walk across the River Wear from the cathedral at Durham and a possibly early cult site for Oswald; Winwick and Warton in the pre-1974 county of Lancashire (and possibly on the southern border of Northumberland in the late seventh century); Astbury in Cheshire, Kirkoswald in what used to be Cumberland, Grasmere and Burneside in old Westmoreland.*8 Close to the site of Turret 25b at Heavenfield is a spring, used by the excavators of the turret in the 1950s, called the White Well. The locations of most of these wells in areas of very late Germanic settlement or control tends to reinforce the idea that the earliest cult of Oswald was a popular British idea: as Alan Thacker has pointed out, pre-Christian native cults often associated springs with the veneration of head-relics.279 The prefix ‘white’ at Heavenfield suggests, naturally enough, an association with Oswald’s Irish nom de guerre, Lamnguin: Whiteblade. A possible early church dedication to Oswald at Whittingehame in East Lothian suggests another possible Lamnguin association.280 There is much more research to be done on the association of ‘white’ names with elements of the Oswald cult.

  There is an intriguing series of coins, belonging perhaps to the early part of the eighth century, which have been discussed by, among others, Michelle Ziegler.281 This is the so-called K-series of early Anglo-Saxon silver pennies, or sceattas, which have been found in the south and east of England and which for the most part are housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The obverse has an image of a king drinking from a cup or chalice, sometimes with a cross above it. The reverse shows a warrior with long hair and apparently clad in mail. In his right hand is a long cross whose stem reaches the ground; on his left hand perches a bird. The king is standing in what could be interpreted as a ship or dish. Below the left hand with the bird is a T-shape. The temptation to associate the bird with Oswald’s raven and the possible dish with the silver platter that he gave to the poor is very strong. At such an early date the only mints in the south-east of England were London and Canterbury; if these coins were minted at the latter, it might be argued that the figure on the reverse with the bird is Augustine, although he had no particular association with birds. If it is Oswald we have to ask, why Kent? Oswald had no clear connection with that kingdom, whose Northumbrian connections are confined to Edwin and the Deiran royal line of
the Yffings; for a while his young cousins were sheltered there. Sussex, which might be expected to trade on its Oswald associations, did not have a mint so early.

  The only coinage with indisputable Oswald iconography comes not from England but from Switzerland. At Zug, in the early seventeenth century, a series was minted which has Oswald with sceptre and raven on the obverse and the imperial German twin-headed eagle on the other. This can be explained by the presence in Zug/Schaffhausen of an Oswald head cult, probably originally founded in the late eleventh century by Judith, wife of Tostig, the deposed Earl of Northumbria who invaded northern England with the help of a Norwegian army but was slain by his brother Harold II at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 (three weeks before the latter was himself defeated and killed at Hastings).

  Church dedications to Oswald offer equally problematic associations, mainly because the earliest recordings of such dedications often occur in a post-Conquest setting; there are very few which can be absolutely asserted to belong to the eighth century. The only example that can be confidently placed so early is that of the church at Scythlescæster.282 Symeon, probably drawing on a lost Northumbrian chronicle, records the death in 788 of King Ælfwald of Northumbria at an unidentified site on Hadrian’s Wall. The king was taken for burial at Hexham, where the Northumbrian cult of Oswald was at its strongest, and a church, dedicated to him, was built at the site of the battle. Scythlescæster has not been identified: Chesters, not far to the west of Heavenfield, is one possibility; the Roman fort at Birdoswald, which shows signs of occupation after the end of the fourth century, is another obvious candidate.

  The many other Oswald church dedications, more than fifty of them in the North of England, have been the subject of detailed study.283 They are problematic in the sense that identifying early dedications, when records often do not antedate the Domesday Survey of 1086, is virtually impossible without the sort of historical note provided by the Ælfwald story; the large numbers of Oswald dedications which may date to the high medieval period does, of course, reflect his continuing popularity in the English consciousness. Even so, it is striking that they are concentrated not in Bernicia, as one might expect, but across a broad belt in the north Midlands (that is to say, in Mercia) and Yorkshire/Lancashire. This must reflect the interest taken by Mercian kings and queens in Oswald’s cult status—an attempt, perhaps, to appropriate it from its populist origins and to associate themselves with Oswald’s post-mortem and overtly royal powers of patronage. The paucity of Oswald dedications in his Bernician heartland probably reflects the desire of the Lindisfarne community in the eighth century to promote Cuthbert, a less ambivalent figure and one whose complete corporeal relics they hung on to tenaciously throughout the following centuries.