History

A Monk Abroad

24 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

St Oswald?

23 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Oswald: Return of the King

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.

The King’s Monks

23 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Oswald: Return of the King
Lindisfarne – the holy island. [By Gaisarix – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124729535]

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.

The Battle of Heavenfield

23 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: High King of Britain, History, Oswald: Return of the King

It’s likely that Oswald took Cadwallon and his men by surprise. The men of Gwynedd had been on campaign for a year or more. It was a long time to be away from home. They had acquired a great deal of booty (the Staffordshire Hoard has vividly illustrated just how much riches could be taken from the body and arms of a dead enemy).

The battle probably started around Corbridge, where the old Roman road crosses the River Tyne. It became a running rout, with Cadwallon and his surviving men making a fighting retreat, down along the course of a river, being forced back and back into the bleak moors until finally the remnants of Cadwallon’s army, and the king himself, were caught beside the Devil’s Water.

There Oswald cut down Cadwallon. The last great hope of a Britonnic reconquest died in the mud.

Oswald Rides to Battle

7 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Photo: David Dixon

Oswald with his small party of men rode to beat the news of their landing. Reaching a camp site in the shadow of the Wall, they took shelter there. According to the later accounts in Bede and Andoman’s account of the life of Columba, this eve-of-battle camp was crucial for the battle’s outcome.

Andoman tells of a dream, coming to Oswald in the night, in which Columba himself promised victory to Oswald on the morrow. Expanding the sense of mission in this war band, Bede tells how Oswald raised a cross in the field where they camped on the eve of battle and had all his men, Christian and pagan alike, swear to fight in its name.

Bede, an avid reader of Eusebius’s History of the Church, would have been aware of the parallels between this and Constantine’s vision and oath taking before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

Bede wrote an ecclesiastical history of the English people. As the title tells, he was not interested in recording all the many victories and defeats that peppered those battle-weary centuries. The ones he wrote about were those which were important for what happened to the Church, and few, in Bede’s estimation, were more important than the one between Oswald and Cadwallon.

Iona and Oswald

7 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

As Oswald and his small band of men rode across the country, probably taking the Stanegate, the old Roman military road that ran south of the Wall, they could not have known that the battle they were riding towards would be so important.

Apart from the retainers who had accompanied his family into exile, Oswald also had under his command his younger brother, Oswiu, and some warriors from Dal Riada, tied to him through the bonds of loyalty forged on battlefields and given leave by their king to throw in their lot with the young pretender.

A key factor in King Domnall Brecc’s decision to allow his men to go with Oswald was the attitude of Iona. But when the abbot, Ségéne, assured Domnall Brecc that Oswald had the blessing of Columba, then the decision was clear. For the warriors of the time, Christian or pagan, the power of saints or gods was a key factor in their calculations.

A battle is never certain. But in the 7th century, when battles were fought between small armies often consisting of less than a hundred men, the valour of a single warrior could turn defeat into victory. In the same way, an unlucky chance – a warrior slipping, a sword breaking, an arrow piercing a broken mail ring – could precipitate defeat, particularly when kings fought as fulcrums of their war bands. Kill the king and the battle was won.

Iona’s Betrayal

7 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Oswald had been sufficiently renowned in the battles he took part in alongside the men of Dal Riada to earn an epithet: Lamnguin, the White Arm. For their part, the monks of Iona, who knew the young man well, gave him the blessing of St Columba in his enterprise. The betrayal of Iona continued to rankle for many centuries; the Moliant Cadwallon, a eulogy to Cadwallon written a century or so later, includes the triad:

From the plots of strangers and iniquitous monks,
As water flows from the fountains,
Long shall be our weeping for Cadwallon.

The Britons of Gwynedd might have hoped that the monks of Iona would take the part of their king rather than that of an Anglo-Saxon ætheling. Cadwallon’s success, in throwing down Edwin at the height of his power and ravaging the kingdom of Northumbria, came, in retrospect, to represent the last chance to throw back the encroaching Anglo-Saxon hegemony over lowland Britain.

While it might seem unlikely that battles between armies that consisted of, at most, a few hundred men, could have long lasting consequences, there are other instances where we can see that this was definitely the case. Fifty years later, with Northumbria at the height of its power, it seemed that the Northumbrians might expand their realm to take in all of lowland Scotland. But the Northumbrians suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Nechtansmere in 685. Their king, Ecgfrith (Oswiu’s son and heir), died there, as did all Northumbrian ambitions towards northern expansion. The battle basically ensured that there would later be a Scotland.

The Return of the King

7 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

The irony of Christian restoration in Northumbria lay in its vehicle. A young man named Oswald. As a boy of 12, Oswald had had to flee into exile when his Uncle Edwin killed his father, King Æthelfrith, at the Battle of the River Idle. Despite his mother, Acha, being Edwin’s sister, maternal prudence dictated that she should take her children far from her brother’s reach. They went to the sea-spanning kingdom of Dal Riada, which ran from the north-western province of Ireland to the islands and long peninsulas of south-western Scotland, what is today Argyll.

The kingdom of Dal Riada was also the centre of a rising influence in the world of Irish monasticism: the monastery at Iona, which had been founded in AD 563 by a young Irish exile named Columba. It was there, at some point during their exile, that Acha and her children, including Oswald, converted to Christianity.

Unlike for Edwin, these were not conversions bred as much from political reckoning as from faith: this family had come to truly believe in the new god and his religion.

 So when Oswald, by this time a man in his late 20s, heard of Edwin’s fall and the way that Cadwallon was ravaging his father’s kingdom, he decided to return (and yes, there are many similarities between Oswald and Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings; JRR Tolkien was the pre-eminent scholar of Old English in his time).

The King Killers

7 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History
The gravestone of the father of King Cadwallon.

Edwin met his end at the hands of what would seem like an unlikely alliance between Cadwallon, king of the Britonnic kingdom of Gwynedd and Penda, King of the Ango-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. A simplistic understanding of the time would think that Cadwallon and Penda should be enemies. But both wanted to bring down the over powerful Edwin. Although Penda was a pagan, his name could have derived from British Celtic (although the derivation is uncertain and the name unique).

The kingdom of Gwynedd was a stronghold of Romano-Britonnic civilisation. The gravestone of Cadwallon’s father, now set into the wall of the church of Llangadwaladr on the Isle of Anglesy, near the site of the court of the kings of Gwynedd, was written in good, if rather shaky, Latin: Catamanus rex sapientisimus opinatisimus omnium regum (King Cadfan, the wisest and most renowned of all kings).

 But in the brutal power politics of the 7th century, a mutual enemy outweighed any other considerations.

 When Bede, the proud Northumbrian, later recorded these events in his history he excoriated Cadwallon as a faithless Christian and destroyer of his fellow Christians, but evinced a muted admiration for Penda’s unrepentant paganism and sheer ability to kill other kings. Penda was the last of the great warlords, riding through the country leaving trails of vanquished kingdoms in his wake, like an insular version of Genghis Khan.

The Rise and Fall of King Edwin

2 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Edwin, High King of Britain, History, Uncategorized

Although Bede presents the council as approving the change to the new religion, Edwin himself did not convert . After all, the old gods had been kind to him. He had overcome his persecutor, Æthelfrith. His mentor, Rædwald, had died, probably of natural causes, leaving him the most powerful king in Britain. He had cemented an alliance with the Christian kingdom of Kent through his new wife. Why rock the altar?

It was a close encounter with death that decided Edwin to change religion. A rival king sent a suicide assassin but one of Edwin’s men took the blow intended for the king. In the struggle, Edwin was still wounded by the poisoned dagger. At the time of the attack, Queen Æthelburh was in labour and gave birth to a daughter that night. Edwin swore that if the new god gave him victory over the rival king, then he would pay him back, by his own conversion and by allowing the baptism of his new daughter.

Edwin duly recovered and waged punitive war against his rival, returning with enough heads to conclude that the deal had been sealed. He would tie his future fortunes to the new god.

The question was what would happen should the new god’s favour not always lead to victory and glory. After all, if it was simply a matter of signing up to a new religion and all your wishes coming true there would only be one religion in the world.

The fragility of the new faith was exposed when, in one of the catastrophic reverses that was a fatal feature of kingship during this era, Edwin, at the height of his power, lost the Battle of Hatfield Chase and his life too.

His queen fled to Kent with their children. Her priest, Paulinus, who had baptised hundreds of converts, fled too, later becoming Bishop of Rochester.

The church that Edwin had converted to and fostered essentially collapsed.

After all, in the currency of power, death in battle was the great bankruptcy.