A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (14 page)

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 ordered 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.
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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 died, 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.

With the flight of Bishop Paulinus, Roman Christianity in Northumbria was in disarray. A Christian baptized into the Irish tradition, Oswald sent to Iona for a monk bishop who would refound the Northumbrian church there. They sent Aidan and in 635 the king gave him the tidal island of Lindisfarne as the seat of his bishopric. Thus was inaugurated the monastery on Holy Island, destined to be the numinous heart of Northumbrian golden age culture. For the next thirty years the Irish clergy, with growing ranks of Northumbrian acolytes, were to prove an essential ingredient in the mix of Northumbria’s golden age.

The first Irish mission to Britain had been that of St Columba or Colm Cille (c. 520–97), who was probably of royal kin and descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages of Meath. He was ordained at an early age and was associated for a time with Kells, then a royal residence, before founding monasteries in Ireland at Derry and Durrow. Then, in his mid-forties, he crossed the North Channel on a personal pilgrimage, possibly of penance, and together with twelve companions established a monastery on the island of Iona. The Book of Durrow is one of the inspirational manuscripts associated with what is sometimes called the Hiberno-Saxon tradition of illuminators, of which the two masterpieces are the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Sometime in the 660s the Anglian churchman Ecgberht crossed over to Ireland and established himself at Rath Melsigi (probably Melfont in County Louth). This monastery attracted Englishmen such as Wilfrid and Willibrord, interested in the ways of the Irish missionaries or
peregrini
, as they are commonly termed in a technical sense (see below). Probably the most famous of these was St Columbanus, who had founded such monasteries as Luxeuil in the Vosges mountains and, most famously, Bobbio, near Piacenza in Italy.