In the porch of St Paul’s, Jarrow there is this stone carved object. If you are thinking, that’s a coffin, you’re right. It’s a shouldered coffin. And if you’re also wondering what that hole is for, perhaps, if you’re eating, look away before you read the answer.
All set? Food put away? Right, here goes. The hole is known as a fissure hole and it’s there to allow the liquid from the decaying body to drain away. I bet you’re glad now you weren’t eating when you you read this.
It’s not very big. Maybe twelve inches in diameter. But the little round window set high in the wall of St Peter’s Church, Jarrow, is the oldest stained-glass window in the world.
It’s on the right-hand side of the chancel. Looking up, you can see three deeply recessed windows. These window openings are all original; they were made when the church was completed in 685 (there’s a larger window but that’s a later addition).
To build and furnish his new churches the man who commissioned them, Benedict Biscop, imported stone masons and glaziers from Europe as both skills were unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. Benedict was an indefatigable traveller: he made five trips to Rome, plus various other excursions during his life. The churches he built – St Peter’s in Wearmouth and St Paul’s in Jarrow – were the first stone buildings since the departure of the Romans and the first with glass windows.
The original glass was long gone when Rosemary Cramp began excavating at Jarrow in 1963 (the excavations went on until 1978). But during these excavations, Cramp and her team found many small pieces of glass that date from the time the monastery was built. So when the dig was finished, these fragments of glass were put back in place, in the window for which they had first been made, 1300 years ago.
I should think those anonymous glassmakers would be astonished, but not a little pleased, to learn that their glass still lets the light into the church they crossed the sea to work on.
Set into the arch above the entrance to the chancel of St Paul’s Church, Jarrow, there is an engraved stone. Set so high, it’s difficult to read but there’s a replica in the arch. It reads, in Latin:
DEDICATIO BASILICAE
SCI PAUL VIIII KL MAI
ANNO XV EFRIDI REG
CEOLFRIDI ABB EIUSDEM
Q ECCLES DO AVCTORE
CONDITORIS ANNO IIII
In English, this reads as:
The dedication of the basilica of St. Paul on the 9th day before the Kalends of May in the 15th year of King Ecgfrith and in the fourth year of Abbot Ceolfrith founder, by God’s guidance, of the same church.
The kalends is the first day of May so 9 days before was 24th April. The 15th year of King Ecgfrith was 685. This stone was laid to commemorate the completion of the second stone church made in Britain and the young Bede, 12 at the time, was one of the people there when the stone was put in place. He saw it every day when he went to the church to sing the Office. And it is still there, in the church that he helped build, 1,336 years later.
If you’re near Jarrow, Newcastle or Sunderland next Saturday, 21st September, Paul and I will be giving a talk about swords, in particular ‘The Perfect Sword’, at Jarrow Hall, the wonderful Bede Museum and Anglo-Saxon village and farm in Jarrow. The talks run from 11am to 1.15 and the other speakers, Philip Shaw and Eric Cambridge, will be worth hearing too. What’s more, it’s free with entry to Jarrow Hall! So come along and say hello. After the speakers, there will also be demonstrations of smithing and warrior skills.
So far as we can tell – and we can tell little with certainty – Anglo-Saxon paganism had little idea of an afterlife. Working from later Norse mythology, we can guess that warriors killed in battle might expect a posthumous existence of feasting and fighting (no mention in existing sources of the other ‘f’ but it was the sort of reward unlikely to be recorded by monkish annalists writing down pagan stories). But there seems to have been little expected for anyone else beyond a shadow existence analogous to the insubstantial shades of classical mythology. The followers of the old polytheistic religions did not hold that we are simply flesh puppets, dissolving upon death, but it was among the living that there was life; what came afterwards was merely shadows and whispers, the long outbreath of final expiration.
In comparison, the new religion offered hope. And it was a hope not confined to a small subsection of the population but one available to everyone: child and adult, poor and rich, slave, peasant and warrior. The first pairing must have been particularly appealing at a time when infant mortality was probably over fifty per cent. The knowledge that the children you had lost and still mourned were not reduced to shades but lived transformed must have been a huge solace to many bereft parents.
It’s still an open question what proportion of the population in Northumbria was Anglian and what Britonnic. There were probably pockets of each spread through a sparsely peopled landscape, although it seems likely that the Britonnic population was more inland and Anglian villages lined the coast and the riverways.
In Hope-Taylor’s excavation of Edwin’s royal palace at Ad Gefrin, in the lea of the Cheviot Hills and under the shadow of the Iron Age hillfort atop Yeavering Bell, he found traces of a huge enclosure for cattle and sheep. He interpreted this as the corral where the hill folk brought their render of livestock for the king when he and his household, on their itinerant progress through the kingdom, stopped at Ad Gefrin.
It’s likely that these pastoralists of the high country were of the same lineage as the first people to practice transhumance during the Neolithic. When Edwin’s golden hall stood at Ad Gefrin under the Hill of the Goats, the great circling ring of the hill fort would still have glowed pink, the colour of the quarried andesite from which it was made. Centuries of weathering have dimmed the shock of pink that once wreathed the hill. But Edwin saw it shining bright above his golden hall, a stronghold made by the ancestors of the people who now came down from the hills with their render of sheep and goats and cattle.
If you want to read about the most important battle you’ve (maybe) never heard of, buy this month’s issue of History of War magazine, which has my feature on the Battle of Nechtansmere. (If you want to know why it’s important, it basically set the border between England and Scotland 1300 years ago).
In the monk, named Aidan, that Abbot Ségéne sent to Oswald, the king found the ideal partner for his mission: to render thanks to St Columba by the conversion of his people. In Aidan, Oswald found his monastic foil. Bede’s appreciation of him is unstinting and, so far as one can tell, deserved. This regard is all the more remarkable in that Aidan was a proponent for aspects of Ionan Christianity that Bede would spend much of his career writing against. But for Bede, holiness as the best foundation for a new church trumped even doctrinal purity.
Bede wrote his history not just to record the facts but to provide a template for the church of his time and the future as to what they should be. Aidan provided him with an excellent example of the sort of behaviour Bede considered exemplary in a bishop: personally simple and ascetic, ever ready to meet the people at their own level and in their own spaces, uncorrupted by wealth or status. For Bede, Aidan represented a sort of Franciscan ideal five centuries before Francis’s birth.
Oswald had grown to manhood in Dal Riada. His faith had been formed by the monks of Iona and it was deep and profound. In his Ecclesiastical History, Bede portrays Oswald as his ideal of kingship, a warrior saint equivalent to Plato’s philosopher king. Modern historians tend to discount this as hagiography but in part this is the result of the restricted modern idea of what it means to be holy: a plaster idol of piety, partaking of equal measures of Victorian sanctimoniousness and modern self-help psychobabble. This is about as far from real holiness as it is possible to get. Holiness is both far more terrible and far more practical than either: it will reduce a man to the state of a shivering child and enable him to endure pains and trials beyond enduring.
I suspect that Oswald really was as Bede portrayed him: a warrior and a saint. A man who could leave his enemies coughing their lifeblood into the mud but who would also break up the silver plates upon which he was eating to give to the poor clustered around his gate, a man who prayed so habitually that his hands, in rest, assumed the gesture of prayer that he had learned on Iona.
For Oswald the Battle of Heavenfield was a triumph. For Iona it was vindication of their support for this Anglo-Saxon ætheling. At a sword stroke, he went from prince in exile to king of the most powerful realm in Britain.
Oswald set out immediately to render thanks to those to whom he credited his victory: St Columba and the monks of Iona. He sent to the abbot, Ségéne, asking him to send monks from Iona to work for the conversion of his people. Oswald’s family was of the northern, Bernician, line, centred around the stronghold of Bamburgh, whereas Edwin’s line sprang from the southern, Deiran, line, which had its origin in the region of York. So when Ségéne sent a party of monks, led by a young man named Aidan, Oswald gave them for a site for their monastery an island that, standing upon the ramparts of the family stronghold at Bamburgh, he could see jutting from the coast to the north: Lindisfarne.
Lindisfarne was a special island, linked and then separated from the mainland twice daily by the falling and rising of the tides. To this day it retains a unique atmosphere, particularly during those periods of estrangement when the sea rises to cover the causeway and all the coach tour parties have left. Then, Lindisfarne becomes a place apart, home to terns and seals and the lingering sense of a long-ago sanctity.