Modern historians tend to skip over the bits in Bede where he records miracles. But for Bede, the miracles are a major part of why he wrote his history in the first place. Miracles are signs of divine favour: they’re signposts towards the truth.
Therefore, when Oswald’s mortal remains became the locus of miracles, it was a further sign that the apparent disaster of his defeat by Penda was no defeat at all but partook of the paradoxical victory of the cross.
Death was no longer defeat. Oswald’s kingdom survived him.
The cult of Oswald became a rallying centre for Northumbria and the church that Oswald had sponsored in his kingdom. Stories of the miraculous associated with Oswald’s relics lent them even greater power.
There is no reason not to think that Oswald’s cult was genuine and sincere – but it was also immensely useful for his younger brother. Oswiu’s reign started, and continued, under great pressure.
Although Northumbria fell victim to its fissiparous tendencies, splitting back into the separate kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, Oswald’s younger brother, Oswiu, assumed the throne in Bernicia, helped in large part by his alliance with the monks of Lindisfarne.
For their part, the monks at Lindisfarne had already established a church network in Northumbria and that carried on, largely unhindered by Oswald’s defeat. Penda, pagan though he was, was no holy warrior: he appeared to care little who his subjects worshipped so long as they deferred to him as their king.
But not only did the monks provide continuity in the wake of Oswald’s death, they also provided a reason for it: by their telling, Oswald died a martyr. Thus they turned his death from a defeat for the new religion into a victory, for martyrdom was the apotheosis of Christianity. Its founder had died a martyr and so had its greatest saints, including all but one of the Apostles. At a stroke, they had confounded the old religious metric that measured a god’s potency by his aid in securing victory. The new god was paradoxical and so was his religion. He himself was simultaneously God and man – and that was God in the upper case, unique and unequal. The God/man had achieved victory through his apparent, worldly, defeat. The entire logic of the Roman Empire rested upon the crucifix: enemies raised up to a public death on a cross were beaten, defeated utterly, their public humiliation and long-drawn out dying a statement of the power of the Empire and the folly of crossing it.
But the new religion took that death and, in a stroke of the paradoxical genius that made the religion something truly new, made it central to its proclamation.
So when Oswald died, losing in battle against Penda, it wasn’t a demonstration that the new god was weaker than the old gods because Oswald’s death recapitulated the death of his god. Rather, it became the basis of his ultimate triumph.
Kingdom building in 7th-century Britain depended upon the skill at arms and reputation of each king. Success in battle raised his profile, attracting young warriors to his side as well as providing the booty that he needed to give as gifts in the open-handed manner demanded of a king. The giving of gold was one way to tie a warrior to you through the obligations accepted when a gift was received. The glories revealed by the Staffordshire Hoard show just how rich those gifts could be.
A successful king with a growing warband could demand, or take, greater riches from neighbouring kingdoms, drawing further warriors to his side for the promise of wealth and the less tangible but no less important consideration of battle luck. He would then strengthen the kingdom through marriage alliances both for himself and for his children.
But all of these carefully assembled blocks took their strength and direction from the man at the centre, the king. Remove him, and everything else collapsed.
That was what happened when Edwin died. It was what happened in many other kingdoms when a powerful king faced nemesis on the battlefield. All the scattered pieces then had to be slowly reassembled by whoever fought his way to the throne after the dead king.
On 5 August 642, after nine years ruling Northumbria when it was the most powerful kingdom in Britain, King Oswald fell to the same combination of chance and inattention that had claimed Cadwallon. Penda, King of Mercia, whose lands Oswald had been encircling with a careful ring of alliances, brought his enemy to battle, apparently at a place and time of his choosing. In one of those characteristic catastrophic reverses that brought down kings from their high places, Oswald was killed and his army dispersed.
What was worse, Penda, a thoroughgoing pagan, dismembered Oswald’s body and stuck his head and hands up on stakes as an offering before an oak tree set aside to Woden, Lord of the Slain.
It seemed that the old gods had struck back. Oswald, champion of the new religion, was not only dead but on display before them. By the metric that had told religious ascendancy up to then, the old ways should rise again.
But it didn’t happen that way.
For Oswald and Aidan had done something extraordinary in the nine years of his reign. They had lain the building blocks of a kingdom that could survive the death of its king.
For the daughters of the nobility Christianity was in many ways an even more attractive prospect. It gave women autonomy in establishments under their own authority. What was more, in mixed monasteries of men and women, it was a woman who ruled as abbess.
The Church provided an alternative to unwanted marriage deals for young princesses and, because convents would come to play a large role in fostering royal cults, it was a posting that could well find favour with a kingly father. For widows, the move into a convent provided an alternative to the uncertain politics of being the wife of a dead king in the court of a new king whose own wife would be looking to establish her authority.
The lands that accompanied a convent gave its abbess considerable economic clout in her area, which the shrewd among them – and they seem to have been nearly all shrewd women – employed to maximum advantage.
A benefit of the new religion that became increasingly apparent to the second generation of Anglo-Saxon Christians was its provision of an alternative path for young men and women of the warrior class. While Anglo-Saxon paganism had a priesthood, it does not seem to have required many officiants and those came from within priestly families. So far as we know, its priesthood was male too. As a religion, Christianity was open to all, which was true of Anglo-Saxon paganism, but its religious class was much wider. Anyone could become a monk or a nun, whatever their social class.
While it’s clear that the social classes of wider society carried over to some extent into the Church’s abbeys, monasteries and convents, there was still space for all within the new institutions. What is more, for men born into the warrior class, the Church opened up the possibility of a life where they would not die from a sword thrust to their guts. But, as framed by the asceticism of Aidan and Irish monasticism, it was still a life of heroic strife, fighting spiritual battles against the devil and his legions of demons. These were real battles against tangible foes, and ones that the warrior ethos of the aristocratic class inclined them towards.
Biscop and Wilfrid were both members of the aristocratic, warrior class. Wilfrid carried its love of ostentatious display through into his clerical life; Biscop reacted against it. But the fact that both accepted the new religion showed its attraction for the sons of the nobility.
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.
