History

The Last Pagan in England

17 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

By the end of the Synod of Whitby, Britain had become for the most part a Christian country.

The last pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdom was on the Isle of Wight. Its inhabitants clung to their beliefs. Shortly before the Whitby Synod, in one of the ironies of the pagan conversion, King Wulfhere of Mercia, who was Penda’s son, invaded the island and baptised the islanders by force.

To this point, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons had been peaceable, at least within the context of the power plays of rival kings. But with all the country now Christian, the last pagan holdouts began to appear unconscionable, and even more so when the islanders on Wight reverted to paganism.

The islanders held to the old gods until 686, when the king of Wessex, Cædwalla, brought his army across the Solent. Cædwalla did not give the islanders the benefit of the doubt: he killed King Arwald, the last pagan, in battle, executed his heirs and either killed or deported the islanders, settling the Isle of Wight with people from his own kingdom.

Roman Triumph

16 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Musée de Bretagne, Collection Arts graphiques

The Romans carried the day at the Synod of Whitby. Oswiu ordered that Roman practices should be adopted throughout his realm. Not all the monks of Lindisfarne were willing to abandon the customs of their father. Those that would not, withdrew from Lindisfarne, returning to Iona.

The church in Northumbria spent the next decades delicately balancing integrating the old Irish elements into the new church while trying to prevent the more zealous advocates of Rome denigrating the achievements of its founders. Much of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is dedicated to achieving this balance.

The Key to Heaven

16 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

The Irish claim that their method of calculating Easter came to them via St Columba from the Apostle John himself carried great weight.

But the proponents of the Roman practice of dating Easter hit back. They first pointed out that the Irish method of calculation was confined to Ireland (and even there some of the southern churches had switched to the Roman method) and the Church of the Britons whereas the Roman method had become universal.

But the card that carried the argument for Rome was their assertion, that the Irish could not deny, that Peter had been given the keys to the kingdom of heaven and, as Rome’s chief apostle, his word carried the greatest weight.

 Given the sins that lay heavily upon Oswiu’s soul, this was a key consideration for him.

The Problem of Easter

16 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History
The dates of Easter 532-626 [photo by Apatak]

The calculation of Easter is not easy and the arguments are highly technical, involving astronomy, mathematics and the application of Scripture. No doubt these differences were rehearsed at some length during the Synod but, in the end, the argument for Oswiu came down to one of authority.

Both the Irish and Roman practices were hallowed, in the eyes of their proponents, by their apostolic progenitors. The Irish said that they had their method of calculation from the Apostle John himself, this method having been passed on to the great saints of their own tradition and finally down to Columba, Iona’s founder.

The Synod of Whitby

16 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Oswiu: King of Kings

The Synod of Whitby resolved the differences between Irish and Roman practices. The decision, as presented by Bede, was as much that of King Oswiu as the church men present at the council.

The key difference lay in Irish and Roman traditions having different methods of calculating the date of Easter which could lead to Easter being celebrated on different Sundays. This was a particularly difficult matter for the royal household as Oswiu followed the Ionan practice of his youth whereas his queen, Eanflæd, Edwin’s daughter, kept to the Roman custom, leading to a situation where half the royal household was still keeping the Lenten fast while the other half was enjoying the Easter feast.

Such a visible sign of disunity was not tenable in a royal family and, indeed, it appears to have been one of the reasons for the strife between Oswiu and his son, Ahlfrith.

Oswiu and the Church

1 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History
By Colm O’Laoi – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Perhaps the best example of Oswiu’s practical approach to kingship comes from how he dealt with a dispute in the Church. Oswiu himself followed the practice of Iona, where he had been brought up. But his queen, Eanflæd, the daughter of King Edwin, followed the Roman practice of her father. In most matters this did not cause any problems. But there was one area where there was difficulty: when to celebrate Easter. The Irish used a different method to calculate the date of Easter than the Romans. This produced a situation where the king and his retinue might be celebrating Easter while the queen and her women still had a further week of the Lenten fast to go.

To solve these differences, Oswiu summoned a church council to Whitby, which met in 664, to thrash out these disputes.

Bede on Oswiu

1 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

As for Oswiu, Bede is equivocal. Oswiu ruled for 28 years, which was an exceptionally long reign for the time. However, unlike his elder brother, Oswiu had to scrabble for legitimacy and to secure his throne, and he was not above employing murder to do that.

His reign was also troubled by strife with his nephew, Œthelwold, and his son, Ahlfrith. It was, in sum, a reign disturbed by the usual problems of dynastic politics and the short-term solutions that men employ to deal with these. But it was a reign that ended with Oswiu dying of natural causes in his bed, in his late 50s, rather than on the battle field as had been the case with all his predecessors.

As such, it was the reign of a flawed but shrewd king in difficult times, a reign threaded with all the political compromises and betrayals that were necessary to ensure such a long reign. Hard to present such a man as the ideal of Christian kingship, although there might be a case for saying Oswiu came close to an ideal of practical kingship.

Penda’s Role

1 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

In Bede’s history, Penda plays an unusual role: he is the killer of Christian kings, most notably Oswald, Bede’s exemplar of Christian kingship, but Bede never evinces the same dislike for Penda as he does for Cadwallon or even Rædwald.

For Bede, Penda was an honest pagan who allowed the preaching of the new religion in his kingdom even if he did not follow it himself. Penda’s own son converted to Christianity when he married Oswiu’s daughter. (Politics was a complicated and bloody family affair, made more complex and bloody in this case when Oswiu’s daughter murdered her husband.)

Bede’s true scorn was reserved for Cadwallon, whom he saw as a traitor to Christianity by his warring on Edwin and the newly converted Northumbrians. Similar scorn he poured upon Rædwald, who hedged his religious bets, keeping altars to the old gods as well as the new god. For Bede, this hedging of religious bets was worthy of despite.

Penda’s Fame

1 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Gernot Keller (Own work)- 2008-05-17-SuttonHoo.jpg – cropped & slightly brightened. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Penda was the last of the great pagan Anglo-Saxon warlords, the culmination of a succession of men who had completely changed the face of the country in the two centuries following the end of Roman rule. The deathless fame that their court scops (Anglo-Saxon bards) promised them in their halls as they gave out gold proved illusory: most of these kings are completely forgotten, the songs sung in their praise falling to silence as they fell into their graves.

Genealogical king lists provide lists of short-lived kings for the better-known kingdoms, although these men have left little more than their names to posterity (and it’s by no means certain that the names that have come down to us were all actually kings, particularly since at the head of most of these king lists is one of the old gods, most often the god of the slain). The battle fame they earned proved as short lived as their kingdoms.            

But Penda’s name does live on. It lives on through his place in the history of Bede proving that attracting the notice of the greatest historian of your day is the best way to ensure post-mortem fame.

Penda’s End

1 December 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Seeing his enemy unprepared, Oswiu attacked, catching Penda and his army in disarray, the army split and caught with its back against the flooding river.

Bede was a monk. He was not interested in giving details of how a battle was won or lost on the battlefield but in this case he does record that more men were drowned than killed in the battle. This suggests an army caught by surprise and routing, with panic-stricken men chancing the water rather than the mercy of their enemies, only to find the river was less merciful.

We don’t know what precipitated the rout but given that Penda died in the battle, it could have been that when his men saw their war leader, the king killer, himself struck down that the running dogs of panic were loosed and the army broke.

The battle is recorded as taking place on the banks of the River Winwæd. The river name did not survive so its exact location is not certain although candidates include the River Went near Doncaster and Cock Beck outside Leeds.