—Ecgfrith is taken to Iona to be buried (possibly; Jarrow believes he should have been taken there). All Northumbrian conquests north of Forth and Solway are lost. Rheged is retained.
—It rains blood; milk and butter turned into blood (ASC).
—Cuthbert and Eata swap roles: Cuthbert returns to Lindisfarne and Eata to Hexham as bishop.
686
Wilfrid restored to see at York with lands at Ripon and Hexham, probably after reconciliation with Theodore.
—Adomnán of Iona visits Northumbria, esp. Jarrow. Adomnán gives Aldfrith a copy of the De Locis Sanctis dictated to him by Arculf.
—Plague.
—Cuthbert again retires to the solitude of Inner Farne.
—Raid on Kent by Cædwalla of Wessex; installs brother Mul on Kent throne. Takes control of Wessex, South Saxons, Surrey, Jutes and all Wessex; conquers Isle of Wight; kills opposition royals.
—Death of Eata, bishop of Hexham and former abbot of Melrose, Ripon and Lindisfarne.
687
Death of Cuthbert; dispute between Wilfrid and Lindisfarne monks; they are purged.
—Mul of Kent burned to death.
688
Ine succeeds to throne of Wessex until 726.
—Cædwalla voluntarily abdicates and goes to Rome to be baptised (influenced by Wilfrid while in Sussex?).
689
Cædwalla of Wessex dies in Rome, possibly as result of injuries received in conquest of Wight.
690
Archbishop Theodore dies; buried at Canterbury in monastery of St Augustine.
—Benedict Biscop dies aged sixty-two.
691
Wilfrid expelled by Aldfrith.
692
Mercia reconquers Lichfield.
—Wilfrid is in exile in Mercia, founding monasteries at Oundle, Brixworth etc.
—Acca becomes abbot of Hexham.
693
Death of Bruide mac Beli.
695
Æthelthryth disinterred by sister, Seaxburh, and found to be incorrupt.
c.697
Aldfrith marries Cuthburh (sister of King Ine of Wessex); son Osred is born.
—Osthryth, wife of Æthelred of Mercia, murdered by the Mercians.
698
Beorht of Dunbar, at head of Northumbrian host, is killed by the Picts.
—Cuthbert’s coffin at Lindisfarne is translated and his body found to be incorrupt. It is placed in a decorated wooden casket. Bishop Eadberht is buried beneath Cuthbert in his original sarcophagus. The Lindisfarne Gospels may have been completed by this date.
c.700
Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert written by a monk of Lindisfarne. Possible date for production at Wearmouth–Jarrow of the Codex Amiatinus, oldest known surviving copy of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible.
702
Wilfrid called to account at church council at Austerfield, West Yorks. Archbishop Berhtwald excommunicates him. Wilfrid sets off for Rome again, aged sixty-nine, with Acca.
c.703
Bede completes De temporibus; Wilfrid and Acca visit Willibrord in Frisia on their way to Rome; hear stories of Oswald’s cult there, and his relics.
704
Death of Aldfrith at Driffield. Eadwulf (unknown parentage) usurps kingdom of Northumbria. Tries to expel Wilfrid.
—Death of Adomnán of Iona; succeeded by Conamail.
—Æthelred of Mercia (reigns from 675) abdicates and retires to become abbot of Bardney monastery in Lincs.
705
Siege of Bamburgh. Osred (aged eight, son of Aldfrith) succeeds to kingdom of Northumbria; protected by Wilfrid and Berhtfrith of Dunbar who raises the siege: Eadwulf is exiled.
—Synod of Nidd: Wilfrid restored to his lands at Hexham and Ripon. Wilfrid retires to Oundle in Mercia; intervention of Ælfflæd suggests Aldfrith wishes Osric to succeed.
708
Bede accused of heresy over his calculation of the ages of the world; refutes with finely calculated riposte; is antagonised by Wilfrid.
709
Wilfrid dies at the age of seventy-five. Leaves monasteries and portable wealth to close relatives.
711
Berhtfrith of Dunbar attacks Picts in revenge for the deaths of his father and grandfather, at a Battle in Manau between Stirling and Linlithgow.
714
Probable date of death of Ælfflæd, sister of Ecgfrith.
716
Iona capitulates and agrees to follow Roman rule. AU note the expulsion of Ionan communities across Druim Alban by Nechtan of the Picts.
—King Osred is killed in a plot by his kinsmen. Kingdom briefly usurped by Eadwulf. Succeeded by Coenred.
—Abbot Ceolfrith of Jarrow retires and sets out on pilgrimage to Rome.
—Bede’s verse Life of St Cuthbert.
—Æthelbald succeeds to the Mercian throne (to 757). He refers to himself in charters as Rex britanniae.
717
Eadwulf’s death in ?Dál Riatan exile reported in Irish Annals.
—Archbishop Nothelm returns to Canterbury from Rome with papal annals relating to the conversion of England; communicates with Bede.
718
Osric succeeds to kingdom of Northumbria.
721
Bede’s prose Life of St Cuthbert.
c.725
Bede writes De temporum ratione (Concerning the organisation of time).
729
Osric dies; Ceolwulf succeeds to kingdom of Northumbria. King Nechtan of the Picts is driven from his kingdom.
731
King Ceolwulf imprisoned in a coup; is forced to enter monastery at Lindisfarne. Gives significant endowments to the monastery. Recovers kingdom.
—Bede completes Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Effective end of contemporary Northumbrian history.
734
Bede’s Letter to Archbishop Egbert of York (brother of King Eadberht) on spurious monasteries etc.
735
Death of Bede. ?Alcuin of York is born.
—Nothelm moves from being archpriest at St Paul’s in London to archbishopric of Canterbury. ?Appointed by Æthelbald of Mercia.
Appendices
Appendix A
The Bernician king-list problem
Appendix B
The genealogies of the kings
The seventh-century Deiran royal house
*
The seventh and early eighth-century Bernician royal house
*
The early Anglo-Saxon kings of Northumbria
Appendix C
A note on the languages of seventh-century Britain
Picture Section
Appendix A
The Bernician king-list problem
The genealogies of the early Bernician kings have never really added up to the satisfaction of historians: there are too many contradictions between and among the scanty sources. The convenient explanation is that the sources are unreliable or unhistorical, messed up either by scribal error, carelessness or wilful deceit for dynastic ends. Here, I propose a simple re-reading of the sources, doing no injustice to any of them, which allows trust to be placed in the succession and broad dating of the Bernician king-lists.
The genealogy of Oswald’s father Æthelfrith, and that of his forbears, is suspect because in copying it from an original Mercian source the British historian known as Nennius seems to have been unsure of himself.300 Nennius’s Bernician king-list has it that Ealdric genuit Ælfret. Ipse est Ædlferd Flesaur: ‘Ealdric begat Ælfred; that is Æthelfrith the Twister.’*1 It is not very helpful. We might read it to mean that Ealdric, that is Æthelric, bore a son named Ælfred, whose nom de guerre was Æthelfrith; but it doesn’t convince. The original source behind the fragments Nennius put together has become garbled, as if a line is missing; more likely there were two sons, Ælfred and Æthelfrith. We know that Æthelfrith had another brother, Theobald, mentioned by Bede; and elsewhere in HB 61 Nennius implies that there was another, Ecgulf. My bes
t guess is that Æthelric had four sons, because Ælfred turns up independently in an Irish Annal.*2 If it didn’t matter, we might chalk the problem up to the ‘don’t know, can’t tell’ column with which Early Medieval genealogies are littered. But it does matter, because the only chance to create a narrative outline for the period between Ida’s legendary arrival at Bamburgh and Æthelfrith’s unification of Deira and Bernicia in about 604 depends on whether, or how far, the Bernician king-list can be trusted.
A date for Æthelfrith’s birth can only be estimated by guessing his age at accession to the kingship. The Historia Brittonum allows him twenty-four years as king, the last twelve of which he was king of both Bernicia and Deira. Early Medievalists concur that Æthelfrith became king around 592–3. At what age? There is almost no point speculating: anywhere from twenty to forty, maybe younger, maybe a bit older. Historians like to put brackets around such things: ‘he must have been at least such and such when he took the throne’ or, ‘he couldn’t have lived that long’. Learned articles are full of such statements. The fact is, we don’t know. If he was sixty when he died that would give a birth date of 557, which is not unreasonable; but he could just as easily have been seventy, or fifty. Think of Archbishop Theodore reaching England at the age of sixty-seven and holding office for more than twenty years after that.
Æthelfrith had a British wife before Acha. Nennius has it that he gave his first wife (he specifically uses the word wife, not queen, so I suspect that at the time Æthelfrith was not yet king), whose name was Bebba, the fort of Dinguoaroy and that it was re-named after her: Bebbanburgh or Bamburgh. This sounds a little like the chronicler guessed her name from the name of the royal fortress; but otherwise this marriage is credible. Dinguoaroy, like Flesaur, is Brythonic: the native language of the Britons from which Welsh, Cornish and Breton were starting to develop in this period. It contains elements which might mean something like the ‘fort of the theatre or assembly-place’: intriguing in itself.301 Bamburgh, then, had been a British fortress before the English had it; and this is more or less confirmed by excavations in the castle. If Æthelfrith ‘gave’ it to his wife, it implies that as part of a marriage settlement he gave her the estate, or Early Medieval shire, of Bamburgh for her dower. That would explain why it came to be re-named after her. It would have been a generous gift indeed, for Bamburghshire as we understand it was a large, fertile and productive landholding.*3
Whatever the truth about Æthelfrith’s first wife, she only bore him one son we know of: Eanfrith. That Eanfrith ended up an exile among the Picts suggests that Bebba, or whatever her real name was, had Pictish blood. If so, it is evidence that the kings of Bernicia who preceded Æthelfrith sought an alliance between themselves and the Picts and so married him to one of their princesses. That the dower seems to have been so generous might imply that Æthelfrith had early expectations of becoming king of Bernicia and that the alliance was regarded as of the highest importance. I suggest that an alliance with the Picts was designed to isolate the kingdom that lay between them: Gododdin.
This is tricky stuff. What seems clear is that when Ida, the dynastic founder, came to Bernicia in the middle of the sixth century he was able to do little more than cling to a beach-head; that the beach-head was Bamburgh/Dinguoaroy; that he must have seized the fort and held it against a concerted British campaign to oust him. In his sons’ day the English warbands gradually extended their reach and power to control the whole of the kingdom of Bernicia, formerly the British Bryneich: probably the lands between Tyne and Tweed. Æthelfrith ultimately emerged as the beneficiary of this dynastic sacrifice, no doubt bloody and arduous. He was the only grandson of Ida to rule the Northumbrians.
The detail of this campaign is infuriatingly précised by Nennius’s account:
Four kings fought against them [the sons of Ida], Urien, and Rydderch Hen, and Gwallawg and Morcant. Theodoric fought vigorously against Urien and his sons. During that time, sometimes the enemy, sometimes the Cymry [Britons] were victorious, and Urien blockaded them for three days and three nights in the island of Metcaud [Lindisfarne]. But during this campaign Urien was assassinated on the instigation of Morcant, from jealousy, because his military skill and generalship surpassed that of all the other kings.302
This narrative, perhaps derived ultimately from a poem, tells of a grand coalition of British warlords who, fearing the rising threat of the English of Dinguoaroy, set out to destroy them, to drive them back into the sea whence they came. The location of the siege is significant. Metcaud, the British name for the tidal island of Lindisfarne, lies a few miles to the north and in plain view of Bamburgh Rock. The Idings, then, were involved in a last-ditch defence of their core territory, in imminent danger of being wiped from the pages of history.
Who were these four British kings? Urien can be identified as the Lord of Rheged, the Solwegian kingdom which seems to have included Galloway, Cumbria and parts of the northern Pennines. Rydderch Hen was king of the Britons of Strathclyde; Gwallawg is identified in other genealogies as the father of Ceretic, king of Elmet. Elmet, which survives even today in place-names like Barwick-in-Elmet, was a Pennine kingdom roughly equating to the bulk of West Yorkshire. Its boundaries may have extended as far east as the wetlands at the head of the River Humber, in which case it separated the northern English of Bernicia and Deira from their southern counterparts in Mercia and Lindsey. Morcant, of whom we know virtually nothing apart from his presence in this assault, can be inferred to have represented the northern British: the kings of Gododdin who ruled the area around the Forth from their fortresses on Castle Rock, Edinburgh, and Traprain Law in East Lothian. All the British kingdoms of the period were Christian, at least nominally. They could, therefore, portray themselves as fighting a holy war against the heathen English.
Nennius’s all too brief account of what seems to have been a lengthy campaign ranging across much of the North-east implies that the final showdown, the siege of Lindisfarne, was raised by an act of betrayal that passed into British infamy. Since Theodoric is named as the defender and raiser of the Siege of Lindisfarne, he ought to have been king of Bernicia at the time. But the numbers do not add up. Nennius offers us a detailed sequence of early Bernician kings:
Ida reigned 12 years
Adda reigned 8 years,
Æthelric reigned 4 years,
Theodoric reigned 7 years,
Freodwald reigned 6 years,
Hussa reigned 7 years.*4
This takes us to the supposed start of Æthelfrith’s twenty-four-year reign which, given his death in 616/17, gives us an end-date for the list of 592–3. Taking this chronology at face value gives dates for Theodoric, and therefore of the Lindisfarne campaign, of 571–8. But Nennius adds a confusing yet superficially convincing detail: that in Freodwald’s reign, which in this sequence ought to be between 578 and 585, the Kentishmen received baptism from the mission of Augustine.303 Now the date of this mission is one of the half-dozen or so dates in English history that every school child used to know: 597. We cannot have our cake and eat it.
The problem arises from Bede back-calculating Ida’s reign from his first sure regnal date: Æthelfrith’s death in 617.*5 The Northern History has it that he reigned twelve years in Bernicia and twelve in Deira and twenty-four in both. This has nearly always been read to mean that he reigned twenty-four years in Bernicia (i.e. from 592/3) and annexed Deira in 603/4, thereafter uniting the two kingdoms. This interpretation requires that the detail about Augustine’s mission is an error, a pretty big one as these things go: at least twelve and perhaps eighteen years. Not impossible, but it needs some explaining. It means that Ida’s seizure of Bamburgh is dated to 547, which most historians agree is too early; it also means that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 588, which records Æthelric (Æthelfrith’s father) gaining possession of Deira on Ælle’s death and ruling there for five years, creates an anomaly, especially since his rule over the Bernicians is placed before 571. That is some comeback. And then, it
leaves Deira without a king between Æthelric dying in 592/3, and Æthelfrith who is supposed to annexe it twelve years later. It will not do.
There are two general approaches to such dating problems. One, very reasonably, is to accept that they cannot be resolved.*6 The second obliges the historian to suppose an error, or series of errors, which can take many forms. Scribal mistakes, such as mis-copying xvii for xxvii when using Latin numerals for dates, are common in annal entries. Errors of omission are easy to envisage too, such as missing a name off a list; and so on, right up to the deliberate falsifying of ancestors and dates to suit topical political motives. The rule of thumb must always be to prefer the scenario that posits the fewest errors; otherwise, historians can more or less make up any solution which suits them. Simplest is best: time to sharpen Occam’s razor.
The straightest and, it seems to me, most elegant solution to the problem of dating the early Bernician kings is to invert the standard interpretation and postulate that Æthelfrith ruled for twenty-four years in Deira, the last twelve of them in Bernicia. This is perfectly reasonable as far as Nennius goes: the line ‘Æthelfrith reigned twelve years in Bernicia and another twelve in Deira’304 can comfortably be read this way. That the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ‘E’ entry for 593 records him becoming king of ‘Northumbria’ simply reflects the traditional interpretation of the Nennian king-list, possibly influenced by Bede. He was almost certainly not king of a united Northumbria so early. The assumption that he was first king in Bernicia has remained unchallenged, so far as I know, but that is all it is: an assumption. There is no reason I can think of to maintain it as a rock of Bernician studies.
The King in the North Page 41
