In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  Historians, bards and storytellers alike were tempted to improve on the truth, as they are today. But you can forget pale hands emerging from the depths of lakes offering swords of destiny to passers-by. You can forget holy grails and messianic bloodlines. Bloodlines mattered as political reality, it is true, but they were traced from the ancestral tribal gods of Britain and Germany or the last generals of the Roman Empire, not from the crucified prophet of Nazareth.

  One of The Wonders of Britain, from a list written down at the beginning of the ninth century but surely recited to children and kings for hundreds of years before and after, was an ash tree that grew on the banks of the River Wye and which was said to bear apples.1 Such poetic imaginings are easily dismissed by academics as fancy; and yet the distinguished woodland historian Oliver Rackham has recently shown that the famous tree in question must have been a very rare Sorbus domestica, the true service tree, which has leaves like a rowan or ash, and which bears tiny apple- or pear-shaped fruit.2 In 1993 one was found growing on cliffs in the Wye Valley in Wales. Early Medieval Britain was full of such eccentricities—the Severn tidal bore and the hot springs of Bath fascinated just as they do now—but the people who survived the age were, above all, pragmatists and keen observers of their world. Their knowledge of weather and season, wildflower and mammal, shames the modern native. They were consummate carpenters, builders and sailors. The monk Bede, writing in the year 731, knew that the Earth was round, that seasons changed with latitude and that tides swung with the moon’s phases.

  Love and romance must have played their part in life, although few men writing during the three hundred years after the end of Roman Britain thought to mention them. For the most part life was about getting by, about small victories and the stresses of fretting through the long nights of winter, about successful harvests and healthy children.

  The vast majority of people in the Early Medieval British Isles, as across Europe, are invisible to us. We know farmers and craftsmen existed: we have their tools and the remains of their fields. Sometimes their houses can be located and reconstructed; rather more often we find their graves. Very, very rarely we hear their names. Sometimes they encountered seafarers and travellers from strange lands who brought tales of exotic beasts and holy places. The countryside was busy with people, nearly all of them to be found working outside in their fields or woods, or fixing something in their yards; ploughing, milking, weeding, felling, threshing and mending according to the season. We have their languages: the inflexions, word-lore and rhymes of Early English, Old Welsh, Gaelic and Latin tell us much about their mental worlds. We can guess at numbers: somewhere between two and four million people living in a land which now holds fifteen to thirty times that many. Their history is recorded in our surnames and in the names of villages and hamlets. With care, their landscapes can be reconstructed and at least partly understood. The hills, rivers, coasts, some of the woods and many of their roads and boundaries can still be walked, or traced on maps. And through pale dank sea-frets of late autumn King Oswald’s Holy Island of Lindisfarne still looms mysteriously across the tidal sands of Northumberland’s wave-torn coast.

  Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years, from ad 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde, Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the ‘Whiteblade’ or ‘Blessed arm’ of legend, he won and lost his kingdom in battle. He was the first English king to die a Christian martyr. He is the embodiment of a romantic hero: the righteous exiled prince whose destiny is to return triumphant to reclaim his kingdom. More than that, he is almost the first Englishman (the other candidate is his Uncle Edwin) of whom a biography might be written.

  We do not know what Oswald looked like except that, like all warrior kings of the age, he probably wore his hair long and sported an extravagant moustache. Even by the standards of the day his was a short and bloody rule, his end summary and brutal. In death his severed head and arms were displayed on stakes at a place which came to be known as Oswald’s Tree or Oswestry and his skull, a sacred possession of Durham Cathedral, exhibits a sword-cut wide enough to accommodate three fingers. His post-mortem career was as extraordinary as his life and death had been. Many miracles were said to have taken place where he fell and in later times his relics (rather too many of them, in truth) were valued for their virtue and potency right across Europe.

  Oswald’s historical significance is greater even than the sum of his parts. He forged a hybrid culture of Briton, Irish, Scot and Anglo-Saxon which gave rise to a glorious age of arts and language symbolised by his foundation of the monastery on Lindisfarne and the sumptuous manuscripts later crafted there by Northumbria’s monks. His political legacy was in part responsible for the Crusades and for Henry VIII’s break with Rome; and for the idea that Britain is a Christian state. He was the model for Tolkien’s Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. If popular history needs a heroic figure from the age of Beowulf, there is no need to invent, or re-invent one. Oswald was the real thing.

  There are songs and memorial inscriptions and a substantial body of poetry surviving from the so-called Dark Ages, some of which celebrate the lives and deaths of ordinary folk: ceorl*2 and dreng, husband and wife. The written history of the period is very much concerned with kings and queens, with exiled princes, warriors and holy men; but the politics are instantly recognisable as that of any group of competing elite families: sibling rivalry, marital rows, betrayal and plotting for dynastic advantage are all there. Oswald was the product of such rivalries. He was born in about 604 into a family where politics were played for the highest possible stakes. For no-one were those stakes higher than for his mother.

  It was not easy being a seventh-century queen—particularly so in the case of Acha Yffing. She was the mother of six sons, a daughter and a stepson. Her husband was a great, perhaps the greatest, Early Medieval warlord: Æthelfrith Iding, king of Bernicia and Deira, overlord of North Britain; but in the long campaigning summer of 616 he was far away from his Northumbrian homeland, fighting British kings and massacring Christian monks on the marches of what is now Wales. Like his father and grandfather before him, he would die sword-in-hand. The British called him, with bitter irony, Eadfered Flesaur: Æthelfrith the Twister.

  As a woman Acha is virtually invisible. Her grave is unknown. Dr Tony Wilmott, Senior Archaeologist at English Heritage, informs me that a gravestone fragment recovered from excavations at Whitby Abbey in the 1920s bears the name ahhae+; if this is indeed the last resting-place of Oswald’s mother, it suggests that she survived until the mid-650s and was influential in the founding of the royal cult of the Idings at Whitby under Oswald’s brother, King Oswiu. After the death of Æthelfrith her fate is obscure, although there are two small clues. One is the destiny of her sons. The other is a name on a map. Acha, a minuscule hamlet close to the site of an ancient dun, or fort, lies nestled on the sheltered south coast of the Scottish island of Coll in the lee of low hills, which protect it from the pounding swell of the open Atlantic. If the place stands as a record of her residence there it is intriguing, because at least two of her sons, Oswald and Oswiu, were educated on the island of Iona, no more than twenty miles to the south, in the famous monastery of Saint Columba (more properly Colm Cille). One of those quirks that litter our hotchpotch linguistic heritage is that the Germanic name Acha is close to the word achaidh, which means, in Old Scots Gaelic, ‘field’ or ‘pasture’. So the name Dun Acha might have come into being to denote a fort with or near a field. We will never know. There are, though, good reasons for believing that Acha might have journeyed far to the north and west with her children in the aftermath of her husband’s violent death.

  Acha was the daughter of Ælle, king of the region called Deira between the rivers Humber and Tees. We can place her birth, perhaps, at one of the royal estates of the Deiran kings on the
Yorkshire Wolds within three years or so of 585. It is reasonably likely that King Ælle was deposed either by Æthelric, the father of her future husband, or by Æthelfrith himself. He was the first to join the two ancient territories of Bernicia and Deira and unite them as one kingdom of the peoples north of the Humber: the Norðanhymbrenses or Northumbrians.*3 He probably did so by force. We can place their marriage close to the year 603, and the birth of Acha’s first child, Oswald, a year later. Marriages of political convenience or alliance were absolutely normal in the higher reaches of Early Medieval tribal society. Sometimes the marriage cemented an alliance ensuring the future prospects of both families and kingdoms; sometimes it reflected the superiority of one king over another, who must offer a daughter to seal his submission; at other times it might be designed to put an end to a feud. The male offspring of the union might be regarded as legitimate potential rulers of a united kingdom—if they survived.

  The status of potential kings, nobles of sufficiently high birth, came with the Anglo-Saxon epithet ‘atheling’. It was not an equivalent to the modern concept of the heir to the throne, because on the death of an Early Medieval king all bets were off; it rather encoded the right to be considered a possible legitimate king of the future—a future which must be secured by arms or the overwhelming political will of an aristocratic elite.

  That a daughter might be offered, willing or unwilling, to a future husband, especially one who was complicit in the deposition or murder of her father, is unpalatable; but it does not mean that royal women lived passive lives as mere atheling breeders and cup-bearers to their lords and masters. Far from it. The seventh century is outstanding for the number of women who played active, sometimes decisive roles in the fortunes of kingdoms, both earthly and spiritual. They are not to be underestimated. They had their own queenly agendas, engineering lines of patronage for their families, acting as brakes on hot-headed husbands, as brokers of deals, as pacifiers and landowners in their own right. Moreover, they might possess great tracts of land and wield the powers of patronage that came with such wealth. For the Beowulf poet the ideal was ‘a noble Princess, fit to be the pledge of peace between nations’. She ‘would move among the younger men in the hall, stirring their spirits; she would bestow a torc often upon a warrior before she went to her seat’. But her over-riding political role was not lost to the poet: ‘She is betrothed to Ingeld, this girl attired in gold… The Protector of the Danes has determined this and accounts it wisdom, the keeper of the land, thus to end all the feud and their fatal wars by means of the lady.’3

  Politics and status notwithstanding, in the year 617, after perhaps thirteen years of marriage, Acha Yffing found herself in a peculiarly unattractive and invidious position. We cannot know if her husband was the murderer or sponsor of the murderer of her father, even if we suspect it. But we do know who killed her husband, ambushing him on the southern borders of his lands where the old Roman Ermine Street crossed the River Idle near Bawtry in South Yorkshire.

  Acha had a brother: two, in fact. Little is known about one, except that he sired two famous granddaughters and caused a small war of conquest. The other was called Edwin. As adults he and Acha can hardly have remembered each other. Edwin, born a year or so after his sister, had been in exile these many years. Deiran atheling without a homeland, freelance warrior, he sought protection and patronage where he might in the kingdoms of the Britons and the Southern English. Through all this time Acha’s husband took a close, almost obsessive interest in Edwin’s career: he spent some years trying to have him killed. Æthelfrith’s failure to bribe Edwin’s protector (the king in question, Raedwald of East Anglia, was put off by some harsh words from his queen) was fatal. Edwin lived to kill his persecutor on the field of battle and claim Northumbria for himself.

  Acha may have considered waiting for her brother Edwin that late summer of 617, to ascertain his intentions towards her and her sons. That she did not speaks volumes for her state of mind and the advice of her counsellors. Shakespeare’s nephew-killing Richard III was a dynastic pragmatist. So was Edwin; and so was his sister. As far as one can tell, on hearing of the death of her husband she gathered her children, her personal treasures and a group of loyal warriors and fled north. Edwin, reclaiming his kingdom, would have summarily dispatched his nephews without a thought for sisterly sentiment.

  The Venerable Bede, first historian of the English and an accomplished investigator, could write only sketchily in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People of events which took place fifty years or so before his own birth:

  During the whole of Edwin’s reign the sons of King Æthelfrith his predecessor, together with many young nobles, were living in exile among the Irish or the Picts…4

  Bede had good reason to know of such things, for he had distinguished correspondents on Iona, the principal monastery and school of Dál Riata (which is what he means when he talks of the Irish); for their part, the Iona chroniclers had special reasons for recording the presence of Oswald at their monastery. He was their Northumbrian king. Bede does not say that their mother Acha went with them. But to risk her brother’s vengeance would have been suicidal. Besides, when the boot was on the other foot—that is to say, when King Edwin was himself killed—Bede records that his queen, Æthelburh, did not hesitate to take her children with her into exile among her relatives at a very safe distance: Paris, to be exact.

  Pagan queens who lost their kings in war did not necessarily find themselves disposable or politically irrelevant. Their potential role as negotiators, as counsellors or as senior representatives of their dynasties might save them. A widowed queen of Kent married her stepson on his accession, although it ended ill: Bede reported with satisfaction that the offender was afflicted by madness and possessed of unclean spirits.5 Heathen dowagers may on occasion have been executed or left to live on the equivalent of a pension—a small estate perhaps. But the arrival of Christianity in the days of Edwin and Oswald subtly changed the status of noble women. The sanctuary of the monastery came to offer a relatively comfortable, peaceful retirement, as it also became an attractive career option for royal women who were not destined to be queens.

  Acha, then, probably carried her children into exile. It is not immediately clear exactly why she chose the Scottic court of Dál Riata as a place to seek sanctuary but she was not the first Northumbrian to do so and perhaps her sons could claim paternal relations at their court.*4 If, as historians infer, her six natural sons were baptised and educated on Iona, she would not have been able to live with them: Iona was forbidden to women. There was an island sanctuary close by in the Sound of Iona, however—Eilean nam Ban—where she and her daughter Æbbe might live in the company of other women. But there is always the chance that she was given the little dun on the island of Coll, facing south towards Iona and only a day’s hard rowing away.

  Oswald went into exile with his brothers and a group of young nobles when he was twelve years old. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Bernician king-list in the Historia Brittonum, both compiled a couple of hundred years later, give him five brothers and a sister, Æbbe.6 Oswald also had a half-brother, Eanfrith. He was the son referred to by Bede as living in exile among the Picts; he married a Pictish wife and his son, Talorgen, became king of that enigmatic northern nation. Of the ‘uterine’ brothers—those borne by Acha—one, Oswiu, is equally certain: he succeeded Oswald as king of all Northumbria and reigned for twenty-eight hugely significant years. The four others can be permed from two lists which do not quite agree but which include: Osguid, Oswudu, Oslac, Oslaph and Offa.*5 In a sense, it matters little whether they were all real or not; none of them appears again in the historical record. If they survived childhood fevers and early adventures on the field of battle to return to their fatherland with Oswald, no historian recorded it. But the sums add up. Oswald was born in 604, a year or so after his parents’ marriage. King Æthelfrith died in about 617, which leaves a period of twelve or thirteen years in which Acha might plausibly hav
e borne all six alliterative sons and one daughter. Oswiu, born in about 612, would fit into that sequence as the fifth child. Oswald, Oswiu and Æbbe, the survivors, lived to play their parts on the grand stage.

  There is a point at which academics run out of firm ground and either retreat or risk ridicule. Leaving them behind, the sword-and-sandal historical novelist leaps into the quicksand of imagination and uncertainty, which leads sometimes to insight, often to fantasy. The biographer is left beached with a risk-assessment form to fill in. The academic archaeologist or historian cannot do other than project conventional wisdom on to the unknown. They must ask what so-and-so would have done following the cultural rules of the time. They must balance probabilities and err on the side of caution. They must rationalise. They will allow an average man three score years and ten; they weigh the accidents and balls-ups and offer a balanced probability.

  The real world, it is all too clear, is full of irrationality, whim, chance event and unintended consequence. Who would dare to suggest without a trustworthy record that England’s seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore—a contemporary of Oswald—would be a Greek from Asia Minor, plucked from his studies in Rome at the age of sixty-seven and sent to England without knowing anything of the language or culture of the English; that he would set the essential foundations for ecclesiastical organisation which survives in the modern Anglican church; and that he would die as Archbishop twenty-one years later at the age of eighty-eight? Nobody would bet on such a thing. The academic cannot project more than ordinary likelihood on to the invisible lives of historic figures; novelists must make them up.

  There is no point pretending that Oswald’s childhood can be reconstructed. We do not know his birthplace; we cannot say if he was healthy or happy; there is no point picturing him gazing wistfully at the island of Lindisfarne from the ramparts of his home and wondering about his destiny as an atheling. Still, his childhood has a context and a geography that are real and tangible. The seventh-century landscape of his homeland survives in its essence: you can go there and look at it for yourself.