Photo by By David Rowan, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
The payments and hostages bought Oswiu time but it’s clear that he knew they were all only stopgaps: this was Danegeld before the Danes had turned up but already it was clear that the payment was never enough: Penda would always come back for more. He was farming the neighbouring kingdoms, harvesting their riches at regular intervals.
With such store of treasure, and with the deserved reputation as the greatest warrior of his time, Penda had no difficult attracting warriors, and petty kings, to his cause. In 655, Penda decided that Oswiu was ripe for another shearing. This time, he gathered not only his own warband but the warband of the allied kingdoms: they would all feast on the Northumbrians. For the time, it must have been a vast army; Bede records that it was composed of 30 warbands, including those of the kings of Gwynedd, East Anglia and Deira (an unkind cut, that last, for Oswiu, as the man leading the Deirans was Œthelwold, his nephew, Oswald’s son).
In the face of such an army, Oswiu did as he’d done before: he dissembled and withdrew. Rather than offering battle, he offered money, aiming to buy off Penda and his allies.
Sigeberht ruled East Anglia from 629 to 634. But in 634, Sigeberht abdicated in favour of his co-ruler Ecgric and entered a monastery. This was remarkable in itself: Sigeberht was the first Anglo-Saxon king to abandon power for the religious life. It’s an indication of how deeply the new religion had penetrated the warrior class even during the first generation of converts. Sigeberht was completely sincere in his renunciation of the life of the warrior, although it seems that not all his people were convinced. For at some point after he entered the monastery, King Penda came calling with his Mercian army. King Ecgric fell back before the advancing Mercians but Penda pursued them. Remembering Sigeberht’s pre-abdication abilities as a warrior and battle leader, Ecgric sent messengers to the once king, asking him to leave the monastery and join him in defending the realm. But Sigeberht refused, reiterating the final nature of his renunciation of the world; he would bear arms no longer.
With the situation desperate, Ecgric refused to accept Sigeberht’s answer and had him dragged from his monastery. But even when forced from the monastic life, Sigeberht refused to resume the life of war. He was a monk now and would no longer bear arms nor trade in lives. Ecgric tried to delay, withdrawing into the marshes, but his army was tracked down by Penda’s scouts. The East Anglians had no choice but to give battle.
Even at the end, Sigeberht clove to his vows and refused to take up weapons, wielding only a staff in his own defence.
To no avail. The Mercians cut down the East Anglians, killing Ecgric and Sigeberht, and significantly reducing East Anglian power.
However, it turned out that reduction was not sufficient for Penda for when their successor, King Anna, looked on course to restore East Anglian power Penda invaded again, killing another king.
Sigeberht, who ruled East Anglia from 629 to 634. But in 634, Sigeberht abdicated in favour of his co-ruler Ecgric and entered a monastery. This was remarkable in itself: Sigeberht was the first Anglo-Saxon king to abandon power for the religious life. It’s an indication of how deeply the new religion had penetrated the warrior class even during the first generation of converts. Sigeberht was completely sincere in his renunciation of the life of the warrior, although it seems that not all his people were convinced. For at some point after he entered the monastery, King Penda came calling with his Mercian army. King Ecgric fell back before the advancing Mercians but Penda pursued them. Remembering Sigeberht’s pre-abdication abilities as a warrior and battle leader, Ecgric sent messengers to the once king, asking him to leave the monastery and join him in defending the realm. But Sigeberht refused, reiterating the final nature of his renunciation of the world; he would bear arms no longer. With the situation desperate, Ecgric refused to accept Sigeberht’s answer and had him dragged from his monastery. But even when forced from the monastic life, Sigeberht refused to resume the life of war. He was a monk now and would no longer bear arms nor trade in lives. Ecgric tried to delay, withdrawing into the marshes, but his army was tracked down by Penda’s scouts. The East Anglians had no choice but to give battle.Even at the end, Sigeberht clove to his vows and refused to take up weapons, wielding only a staff in his own defence. To no avail. The Mercians cut down the East Anglians, killing Ecgric and Sigeberht, and significantly reducing East Anglian power.However, it turned out that reduction was not sufficient for Penda for when their successor, King Anna, looked on course to restore East Anglian power Penda invaded again, killing another king.
The brooding figure of Penda of Mercia loomed over Oswiu’s rule. Following his defeat of Oswald, Penda became the pre-eminent king in the land. Although he does not seem to have made any serious efforts to enlarge Mercia by incorporating surrounding kingdoms into his own, he was able to remove bordering kings who displeased him, apparently at will. He disposed of three kings of East Anglia, two during their reign and the third in his retirement.
Alongside his exploits as a killer of kings, Penda also forced Cenwalh, the king of Wessex, into exile, as well as repeatedly raiding into Northumbria, at one point laying siege to Oswiu in his Bamburgh stronghold. On that occasion, the prayers of Aidan turned back the flames by which Penda was attempting to burn Oswiu out of his stronghold. But there were other occasions when Penda ravaged the north: Oswiu quite literally bought his kingdom and his life, handing over a vast haul of treasure to Penda. (The Staffordshire Hoard might represent some of this treasure as much of the items appear to have been of Northumbrian origin, although if that is the case quite why the hoard should have been buried and forgotten is a mystery. It wasn’t just treasure Oswiu handed over: Penda took his son, Ecgfrith, as hostage for his father.
The assassination of Oswine was not just business though: Oswine was related to Oswiu’s wife, Eanflæd. This produced something of a dilemma for the queen: as a blood relative to Oswine, it was her duty to seek vengeance on his killer: her husband.
Rather than do so, Eanflæd prevailed upon her husband to provide lands for a monastery to be established where the monks would pray for the repose of the soul of her cousin and for the forgiveness of the sins of her husband. Gilling Abbey appears not to have long outlived the king the monks prayed for, being abandoned in 669 following an outbreak of plague.
It was the best solution to a difficult problem – and one that showed how the new religion was able to unpick some of the chains of blood vengeance that bedevilled Anglo-Saxon society.
Oswiu’s reign started, and continued, under great pressure.
Such was the power ascribed to Oswald’s mortal remains that his younger brother essayed a dangerous raid deep into the heart of Mercian territory to reclaim them. Oswiu must have ridden fast and hard, faster than the news of his passage, to Oswestry in Shropshire, passing through much Mercian territory, where he found Oswald’s arms and head impaled upon stakes before the tree that became known as Oswald’s tree (hence Oswestry).
Riding even faster north, Oswiu and his band of riders made their escape back to Northumbria, carrying his brother’s remains with them.
The kingdom had split back into its two constituent parts, with a son of the Deiran royal house, Oswine, ruling from York. To bolster his claims to Northumbria, Oswiu took as wife Eanflæd, the daughter of King Edwin, no doubt hoping that that would give him greater claim over the southern half of the kingdom. It didn’t.
In the end, Oswiu reunited his kingdom by treachery and assassination. He raised an army to confront Oswine who, seeing that his own forces were seriously outnumbered, withdrew and dispersed his army, deciding not to seek confrontation. But Oswine made the mistake of taking shelter in the hall of a man he had hitherto seen as his most trusted lieutenant, only to be betrayed and killed. Although Bede was appalled by the treachery, it is perhaps not so surprising from the viewpoint of the man who betrayed Oswine. The lord he had sworn service to had backed down in the face of aggression; it was not hard to see which way the winds of power were blowing. In such a case, it would be easy for the friend to think himself betrayed by his own lord, thus giving his conscience clearance to present his new king with the head of his enemy and curry his favour.
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.
