There followed twelve months of conspiracy and murder among the ruling establishment, in which the new King Sigeberht was driven from his throne by his successor Cynewulf. Forced to flee, an outlaw, into the forest of the Weald, he was assassinated by a herdsman – on Cynewulf’s orders, it was supposed. The next thirty years belong to Cynewulf who, we are told by the Chronicle, could trace his paternal ancestry in direct line back to Cerdic, and who fought many ‘great battles’ against the Britons. For all that, one of the longer, and it would seem more successful, reigns in English history receives little attention from the Chronicle bar the mention that it ended with the king’s murder by Cyneheard, the brother of Sigeberht, whose own death Cynewulf too had contrived some thirty years previously. Cyneheard too was killed and the succession was secured by Beohrtric, another direct descendant of Cerdic. He may well have owed his throne to Offa of Mercia (see chapter 4); he married his daughter. Beohrtric was opposed by Ecgberht, connected with the West Saxon and Kentish royal lines, and grandfather ‘to be’ of Alfred the Great. Although Wessex won a momentary independence, Ecgberht was driven from ‘the land of the English’ i.e. England by Beohrtric who was assisted by Offa, and Ecghberht was forced to live at the court of Charles the Great, king of the Franks, for several years.
No doubt the overbearing Mercian looked upon Wessex as at best a client kingdom, at worst a subject province. According to King Alfred, who recounted the tradition to his biographer, Asser, many years later, Eadburh’s malevolent period as royal consort explained why the wife of a West Saxon king was never consecrated queen. A true daughter of her father, she ruled the court circle by tyranny and intrigue, but had to flee the country when a plot misfired and she almost poisoned her husband. Whether any of this was true (was she following instructions?) or whether we are dealing here with a simple case of misogynistic gossip, the kings of Wessex did not, after her time, honour their wives with the title of queen and held their ceremonial ‘crown wearings’ in solitary state. It was a change from earlier times. In the seventh century the West Saxons had been briefly ruled by a queen regnant and as late as the 740s a king’s wife was witnessing charters as ‘regina’ (‘queen’).
Beohrtric’s reign (786–802) witnessed an event of terrible omen for the English. ‘In these days’, records the Chronicle, ‘came the first three ships of Northmen’ – it seems they may have been from the region around Hardanger Fjord in western Norway. One report has them landing at Portland. The king’s gerefa rode out to meet them because he did not know what they were, although, presumably they were not traders, since otherwise they would have been heading for Hamwic. Maybe they had steered a wrong course. It was the reeve’s duty to have newcomers report themselves to the king’s town. They killed him.18
It was a portent of things to come. Ecgberht, the next king of Wessex (802–39), who was king of Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Essex from 825, and was awarded the title of ‘bretwalda’ by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as eighth in line of the wielders of the imperium named by Bede, would spend the last years of his reign combating recurring incursions of such ‘northmen’ or ‘Vikings’
3
NORTHUMBRIA: THE STAR IN THE NORTH
I have argued in chapter 1, with David Rollason, that by the time of Bede it was ‘right to regard Northumbria . . . as essentially English’.1 This chapter argues that the Northumbrians of the seventh and eighth centuries were, considering their numbers and the size of their territories, among the most important, in terms of their cultural contribution to contemporary Europe and influence on the future, of any of the tribal successors to imperial Rome at that time. Their kings founded the possibility of success; their scholars and artists gave birth to it; and a succession of missionaries of determination, faith and courage, and often of administrative genius, established a presence in Europe that would prove formative in the history of the Continental church.
The European setting and Northumbrian actors
In the late seventh century and the early eighth, Northumbria, that is the united kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia, was England’s dominant power. Warfare was a condition of the age throughout Europe. In Spain a century of conflicts between various Visigothic rulers prepared the ground for the catastrophic reign of King Rodrigo (d. 711), when Moorish mercenaries from North Africa were called in. Within months others followed and by mid-decade virtually the entire Iberian Peninsula was in the hands of Islam. Not until the reign of Abd ar Rahmann II, Emir of Cordova (822–52), did the full glories of Moorish Spanish culture begin to unfold. In Italy the Lombards, a Germanic people given to internecine war, produced a great ruler and lawgiver in King Liudprand (712–44), with his court at Pavia. But the pope at Rome, fearful that he might become the Lombards’ puppet, called on the protection of Charles the Great, King of the Franks, and in 774 Charles added the iron crown of Lombardy to his other trophies.
The Frankish kingdom, which comprised most of western Europe north of the Alps, had been founded by Clovis, barbarian turned Catholic (not Arian) Christian in the early 500s. From 600 up to the early 700s it fractured in the wars of his successors, the Merovingian kings, and their chief ministers, ‘mayors of the palace’. Then in 714 the Northumbrian-born St Willibrord, bishop of Utrecht, baptized Pippin, son of the ‘mayor’ Charles Martel. When he grew to manhood, this Pippin the Short, with the full approval of the pope, displaced the last Merovingian ruler. In the year 751 he became king of the Franks, in a ceremony of consecration conducted, we are told by the Frankish Royal Annals, by another English cleric, St Boniface, archbishop of Mainz and today patron saint of Germany. Towards the end of the century, his son, Charles the Great (in German Karl der Grosse, in French Charlemagne), presided over the ‘Carolingian renaissance’, the first great cultural flowering in Europe since the fall of Rome in the West, with the Northumbrian Alcuin of York his principal director of studies.
Leading roles in Northumbria’s golden age (an overworked term in the view of some modern historians of Mercia!) go first to the five kings: Æthelfrith the pagan and his Christian successors Edwin, Oswald, Oswiu and his son Ecgfrith. Next, to the churchmen and women, mostly of noble stock: Abbess Hild (Hilda) of Whitby, who presided over the Synod held there in 664 with momentous consequences for Europe; Cuthbert, charismatic monk-bishop and hermit; Benedict Biscop, monastic founder, patron of learning and library builder and frequent visitor to Rome; Wilfrid of Ripon and York, a prince bishop on the European stage and Archbishop Ecgberht, a king’s brother who, along with his successor Archbishop Ælbert, created northern Europe’s principal seat of learning, where Alcuin would dazzle the continent. Greatest of all was Bede.
Soon after their deaths Cuthbert and Wilfrid were subjects of notable biographies. Cuthbert’s, completed some time between 698 and 705, almost certainly prompted the Vita Wilfridi written by Stephen, a monk at Ripon, shortly after Wilfrid’s death at Oundle in 709 or 710. There ensued what has been called ‘a virtual “pamphlet” war’. Bede himself was very much on the side of the modest Cuthbert as opposed to the fiery Wilfrid, who it has been said ‘came into conflict with almost every prominent secular and ecclesiastical figure of the age’. He founded many monastic communities and every year, at the liturgical commemoration of his death, readings from the biography, delivered no doubt in a dramatic manner, would have revived memories of that towering physical presence and sonorous voice.
Formation of a kingdom
The name ‘Northumbria’ may actually be Bede’s coinage, but the state originated in the two constituent kingdoms of Bernicia to the north and Deira to the south. In 600 Deira was ruled by King Ælle and Bernicia by King Æthelfrith, who was married to Ælle’s daughter Acha. Her brother Edwin, their father’s heir in Deira, was robbed of the succession when Ælle died in 604 and the Bernician king drove the young man into exile – a century later the Deirans would still regard this as the act of a tyrant. Edwin found asylum at the court of Rædwald of the East Angles and survived at least one assassination attempt or
dered by his brother-in-law.
Æthelfrith won decisive victories over his Christian neighbours, the Scots Irish of Dál Riata to the northwest and the British of the kingdom of Rheged, to the west.2 Such border kingdoms were almost a symbiotic necessity for an expansionist English king. Either they paid tribute or he could distribute their land and wealth among his warrior thegns as befitted a ring-giving lord in the Beowulf tradition. Bede, perhaps here a better Northumbrian than Christian, admired Æthelfrith the pagan warrior lord. Reporting his victory at Degsastan (Degsa’s Stone) over the Scots in 603, the monk compares the heathen war leader to King Saul of ancient Israel. Like Saul, Æthelfrith exterminated or enslaved the defeated population to open the conquered territory to settlement. Bede duly notes that, unlike Saul, Æthelfrith ‘was ignorant of the true religion’.
Describing the destruction of the Britons of Strathclyde at the Battle of Chester in 614, Bede’s triumphalism is open. The British had a detachment of monks praying for victory in the sight of the enemy. Æthelfrith attacked these first, ‘fighting against us even if unarmed’, slaughtering some twelve hundred before dealing with the rest of the ‘accursed army’, as Bede puts it. And why does he say ‘accursed’? First, because their British ancestors had made no attempt to teach the faith to the invading pagan English; secondly, the British church refused to submit to Rome. With kinsfolk among the aristocratic tradition Bede himself was not so far ‘divorced from the warrior mentality of Beowulf’.3 His description of Æthelfrith as a man ‘most desirous of glory’ (gloriae cupidissimus) recalls the word domgeorn (literally, ‘glory-eager’) used in Anglo-Saxon literature of heroic warriors and Bede may have known a now lost epic praising the hero-king.
Æthelfrith’s reign ended at the Battle of the River Idle in 616, when he was defeated and killed by Rædwald of East Anglia, who had taken up the cause of Edwin the exile. Now it was the turn of the dead king’s sons (Edwin’s nephews) Oswald and Oswiu, aged twelve and four, to seek asylum, apparently in Dál Riata. In exile for seventeen years, they acquired fluent Irish and were baptized Christians, probably at the island monastery of Iona. Edwin, holding at first to the old pagan religion, extended Northumbrian power over the shadowy British kingdom of Elmet (in modern west Yorkshire). He imposed tribute over the islands of Anglesey and Man and, for a time, over Mercia. The campaigns of Æthelfrith and now Edwin were prising apart the British rulers of Wales to the south from those of Strathclyde in Cumbria to the north.
Edwin, the most powerful figure of his day and rated the fifth wielder of the imperium by Bede, moved among his manors and estates in quasi-imperial pomp. Banners were borne before him when he rode to war with his thegns (ministris) and also in time of peace as he travelled his territories, consuming the food rents owed by his subject lords. Behind this lay an administrative structure of cities (civitates), estates (villas) and provinces (provincias, possibly sub-kingdoms), Whenever the entourage made a progress from a great royal hall, it was preceded by a standard bearer or ‘a type of standard Romans call a tufa, English call a thuf’. To such accounts we can add remarkable archaeological finds made in the later twentieth century near the village of Yeavering in Northumberland.
It is an extensive site, originally of pagan cult significance, stretching over about a quarter of a mile (c. 400m) with prehistoric remains at either end, a stone circle and a Bronze Age barrow, both modified in the later sixth century. Post holes and other traces indicate that in the early seventh century a number of monumental timber halls were built and also a unique structure best described as a segment of an amphitheatre. In the opinion of Professor Blair the complex was the royal vill of King Edwin and the site of the massive baptismal campaign following his conversion to Christianity (see below). Whether one of the timber halls ever served as the royal mead hall is unclear. That it was an Anglian royal vill raised in a place of traditional religious veneration seems certain.4
In 625 King Edwin married the Christian Princess Æthelburh (Ethelburga), sister of the king of Kent. She was to be allowed to practise her Roman Catholic faith at his court, under her priest Bishop Paulinus – consecrated before leaving Kent by Archbishop Justus of Canterbury (like him a founder member of St Augustine’s mission) – and his assistant James the Deacon. Edwin was to convert at some future date. The following Easter he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. The attacker, sent by the king of Wessex and posing as a courier, suddenly drew a concealed sword on being admitted to the royal presence and thrust at the king, who was only saved by a loyal thegn hurling himself forward to take the blow. The same evening, we are told, the queen gave birth to a baby girl. Edwin vowed to be baptized if the Christian God gave him victory over Wessex and meanwhile allowed his daughter Eanflæd to be baptized ‘the first of the Northumbrian race’. The king, we are told, went into Wessex ‘with levies’, where he slew ‘five kings’. He prepared to follow his daughter to the font.
Why Edwin should have opened himself to the newreligion from the south is not clear. He was the most powerful king in the north, poised to achieve the Imperium throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. But it was an age when Europe’s kings were aping the style of ‘Roman’rulers, of which the religion based in Rome was an important part; perhaps Edwin decided to adopt it for reasons of modernity and prestige. His ‘southern’marriage was an important political alliance. And it is always worth bearing in mind that there may have been an element of genuine religious sentiment involved. He anticipated objections from his pagan courtiers, but, if we accept Bede’s account, the decisive council meeting went smoothly. First, the pagan high priest, Coifi, readily agreed the proposed overthrow of the kingdom’s traditional religion – and might he be permitted to lead the desecration of the temples with the cast of a spear into the sanctuary? After all, he observed, he had been the most assiduous servant of the pagan pantheon, yet many other men had received more of the king’s bounty than he. Surely if the gods had any real powers he would have been more favoured.
A more thoughtful courtier compared a man’s life on earth to the flight of a sparrow that blunders into the king’s banqueting hall with the fire blazing on a blustery winter’s evening. After a few moments in the warmth and light, it flies out again into the storm. In the same way we pass a few moments in the glow of life from birth to death. But we know nothing of what went before or of what will come after. A religion that can give us information on such matters is surely worth a try. The council agreed and Coifi, riding the king’s stallion, headed for the old temples, spear in hand. The stallion is important, not only because as high priest Coifi was officially permitted to ride only a mare, but also because the horse as such played an important part in the Anglo-Saxons’ pagan religious beliefs.
Edwin was baptized, at York on 12 April 627, in a wooden chapel dedicated to St Peter built specially for the purpose. Apparently Roman ‘Eboracum’ had no Christian church building from the Roman period to match the ruined chapel of St Martin’s at Canterbury. Urged by Paulinus, Edwin ordered the building of a basilica of stone, which enclosed the king’s baptismal chapel.
Mass baptisms followed in what sounds more like a military campaign than the dove-like ministrations of the Holy Spirit. Bede tells us that Paulinus, a tall stooping figure with an aquiline nose set in his gaunt face, and his assistant James the Deacon spent thirty-six days instructing, presumably through an interpreter, and baptizing in the River Glen near the royal palace of Ad-gefrin (no doubt from Brittonic, ‘hill of the goats’), that is Yeavering. Bede accounts for the success by the ‘great desire . . . for baptism among the . . . Northumbrian people’,5 but presumably the known wishes of the king had something to do with it. Perhaps, also, a number of these many converts were ‘closet’British Christians relieved to ‘come out’, even if the official Roman version of the Faith was not exactly theirs. Paulinus was established as bishop at York with James the Deacon at his side, and they began to preach in the subject kingdom of Lindsey. When, in November 627, Justus of Canterbury di
ed, Paulinus consecrated his successor as archbishop, with papal approval.
On 10 October 633 catastrophe struck. King Edwin was killed at the Battle of Hatfield Chase by the combined forces of Penda, the pagan ruler of Mercia, and Cadwallon, the British/Welsh Christian, king of Gwynedd. For twelve months the British king revenged the rapine, slaughter and rape his people had suffered at the hands of Æthelfrith, the pagan, years before. No doubt the aim was ‘to wipe the entire English nation from the land of Britain’.6 Retribution would follow. Later in the century the monastery of Ripon received endowments of holy places abandoned by British clergy ‘fleeing the hostile swords’ of the English.
Bishop Paulinus fled Deira, by ship, with Queen Æthelburh and her children for her brother’s court in Kent. Deacon James held out at York, and in fact was to live to a ripe old age. Expert in church music, he taught ‘after the manner of Rome’. Liturgical music was an important vehicle for spreading the Roman way. But in that dreadful year of 633, as Deira and Bernicia fell apart and their shortlived kings, Osric and Eanfrith, reverted to paganism before being killed by Cadwallon, it must have seemed that the Christian flame in Northumbria was extinguished. Events at the other end of the world would threaten Christendom itself. The death of Muhammad in Medina just four months before Hatfield had opened the way to the tsunami of Islamic conquest that was to wash away the East Roman Christian empire in North Africa, Egypt and Syria.
Heavenfield and renewal under the Irish influence
Oswald, Edwin’s nephew, returned from exile in 634 and demolished Cadwallon and his army at the battle of Heavenfield near Hexham the following year. He claimed to have won with divine aid, in the sign of the wooden cross that he had raised before the battle with the aid of his soldiers. Oswald was now lord of the two northern kingdoms.
A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Page 10
