History

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.

The Conversion of King Edwin

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

A substantial part of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is taken up with the long process of Edwin’s conversion to Christianity and, as a result, we have the first character portrait of English literature. Bede portrays Edwin as cautious and capable, a king weighing up the relative advantages of remaining true to the gods of his fathers or accepting the new god. The single most famous scene in Bede tells of the council that Edwin summoned, gathering his warriors and also his existing priesthood, to debate the merits or otherwise of conversion.

Rather unexpectedly, according to Bede the most enthusiastic advocate for conversion was Coifi, Edwin’s pagan priest. As Bede had close contacts with the Northumbrian royal court, there’s no reason to think that he made this up. According to Coifi, he had done everything the gods required of him, making sacrifice, offering up prayers, doing all that was required and, in return, he was no better off than men who had ignored the gods.

While it might seem strange to us that a priest should advocate giving up his religion on such pragmatic grounds, it does fit with the basic point of polytheistic religion. The world these religions dealt with was uncertain: disease, storms, famine and death stalked the world, personified by the powers of sky and earth. The gods, as those personifications, were as fickle as their earthly powers. The key purpose of religion was to change the odds in your favour by appeasing and placating inscrutable gods.

But Coifi says up front that he’d done all that to no end. He’d performed the rituals, made the sacrifices, done all that the gods asked of him, and it had not produced results. So rather like a man washing his hands of an unfaithful lover, he throws the old gods over and suggests they try their luck with a new god.

King On the Run

1 July 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Edwin, High King of Britain, History
Replica of the Sutton Hoo helment [By Ziko-C (Own work), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3533575]

The 7th century was an era when the petty kingdoms of the previous two centuries began to be consolidated into larger units. The larger realms swallowed the smaller ones, although which kingdom absorbed which much depended upon the battle nous of particular kings. Northumbria had risen to prominence in the early 7th century by having as its ruler the most fearsome warrior of the time, Æthelfrith. Æthelfrith had begun the consolidation of Northumbria by killing the king of Deira and marrying his widow. The son of the late king, Edwin, fled into exile. As Æthelfrith cut a bloody swathe through the kingdoms of early medieval Britain, he always kept a weather eye on Edwin’s whereabouts. Having an exiled prince (ætheling in Old English, a man throne worthy) was a useful bargaining chip in the lethal game of thrones that united the disparate tribes of the time.

Edwin appears to have made a round of southern kingdoms, going from Mercia, the marcher kingdom in the Midlands, to the Britonnic kingdom of Gwynedd (that an Anglian prince might find refuge among the Britons might seem strange but it held with the oldest piece of realpolitik, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend), before fetching up in East Anglia in the kingdom of King Rædwald (who is likely to have been the man buried in the ship burial at Sutton Hoo).

In East Anglia, Æthelfrith had his quarry cornered and, as the most powerful king in the country, sent messengers to Rædwald requiring him to deliver up Edwin, in pieces or in person. But the obligations of hospitality laid upon the warrior caste were great. Faced with going against these principles, Rædwald chose to fight. Bede records that it was the scornful rejoinder of his wife that decided the vacillating king to chance his arms against Æthelfrith. It may also have been the realisation that giving up Edwin would explicitly announce his status as inferior to that of Æthelfrith and East Anglia was a rich and proud kingdom, relatively safe from Æthelfrith due to its distance from Northumbria.

So Rædwald and his warband, bolstered by Edwin and the men who had accompanied him into exile, decided to chance battle. They caught what seems to have been a relatively unprepared Æthelfrith on the River Idle in Nottinghamshire and there, the most feared king of his time died. It was no easy victory: Rædwald’s own son was among the dead. But in consequence, Rædwald became the most powerful, and richest, king in the land while Edwin took up the rulership of the kingdom of Northumbria.

Why Did They Come?

17 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

The North Sea is a dangerous body of water. What made many thousands of people embark on small boats and set out on the whale road so that they might arrive at a cold wet island in the sea?

There’s no single answer. Some may indeed have come as conquerors. In the fifth and sixth centuries Britain had split into a myriad petty kingdoms, many of which were so small and fleeting as to leave no trace of their existence. In such a context, a determined warlord with a retinue of fifty warriors could ta control of a kingdom and proclaimed himself its king. But amid the political chaos and worsening climate of the time, other people may well have arrived as refugees, pitching up together in a boat hoping to find better land to farm and a new beginning. Some may have been a combination of both: people going into exile after a defeat and finding the opportunities in the new country better than their prospects should they return.

No one story tells the tale and future work should reveal more of the nuances of what happened during those obscure centuries when Britain went from Britannia, where people spoke British Celtic and British Latin, to a land split into many kingdoms where people in the south, east and midlands spoke Old English and the people in the west spoke what was becoming Welsh and Cumbric, and Cornish.

Anglo-Saxon identities

17 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

While from the outside the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons seems like a slow-motion invasion, it would have often seemed different to the people living then.

In particular, local identities and loyalties were more important than ethnic identities, if such even existed then. Identity was familial and local, attached to a tribal grouping and lord, and to religion. The boundaries of these identities were not fixed although they would probably have been clear to the people of the time.

A good example is provided by the genealogy of the House of Wessex, Alfred the Great’s own house and the one that would go on to rule over the first unified English state. The founder of the dynasty was one Cerdic, which is undoubtedly a Britonnic name, as was true of his seven successors. This suggests that a Romano-British dynasty developed strong links, most probably through marriage, with some of the incoming Germanic tribes and set themselves up as rulers in the same way that the newcomers were doing. Having adopted the ruling style of the newcomers, the Cerdicings assimilated to their culture too but from the top down, becoming rulers to the Anglo-Saxons rather than their subjects.