Booklisti has just published my list of five books to lighten up the Dark Ages. Go here to see why I chose these books and why you should read them.
Lighting Up the Dark Ages
History
The Birth of a New Religion
As for the Christian church in Britain, shortly after the Synod of Whitby it took an unexpected but extremely important international turn. The Archbishop of Canterbury designate went to Rome to be confirmed – and died, before either confirmation or return.
With the See of Canterbury empty the pope decided to dispatch a truly wild card to Britain to take over as Archbishop of Canterbury. The man he chose was already in his 60s: Theodore of Tarsus was Greek and steeped in classical and patristic learning. Accompanying him was a North African, Hadrian, who was equally learned.
This pair of international scholars established a school in Canterbury that inaugurated a new age of learning among the Anglo-Saxons.
The insular world of the Anglo-Saxons was bursting open. A young boy by the name of Bede, growing up in Northumbria, took that knowledge and made it his own and that of his countrymen.
The End of the Old Religion
With the destruction of the kingdom of the Isle of Wight, the old religion was officially dead.
Of course, belief in the old gods and some of the old practices lingered on in places. But the chroniclers of this new age in Britain, the monks of the new god, had little interest in recording either the beliefs or the practices of the old religion.
What we know for sure of Anglo-Saxon paganism is minimal. Most of our purported knowledge either predates the Anglo-Saxon arrival in Britain, coming from Roman reports on the religion of Germania, or postdates it, derived from the work of Scandinavian and Icelandic scholars from the 12th century onwards recording the myths and legends of their forefathers. How closely either of these related to the lived pagan religion of early medieval Britain we simply don’t know.
Happy Christmas!
The Last Pagan in England
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
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
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
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
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
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.