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The King is Dead

28 October 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History, Oswald: Return of the 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.

Warrior Nuns

10 October 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

Warrior Monks

10 October 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

Coffin in the Porch

26 September 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

The Oldest Stained-Glass Window in the World

24 September 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

Old Stone

23 September 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

Book review: Red Rising by Pierce Brown

18 September 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
Red Rising by Pierce Brown

One of the great joys for a bookish father is to have a son who’s willing to read your book recommendations – and most of the time he’s even liked the books I’ve suggested he read.

So when Matthew asked me to read a book that he had read, I obviously had to read in kind. The book was Red Rising and he had loved it.

Reading it myself, I could see why he loved Red Rising so much. It is the perfect book for a young man setting out in life and ready to take on the world. But for an old man beaten down by the world, it resonates somewhat differently. For me, it’s a book suffused with regret for the passing of the vigour and energy of youth which, at the time, I thought was mine forever rather than loaned to me at my start. Now, the energy I have left is leavened with thought; something to be held onto and spent wisely.

The struggle of Darrow is the struggle of a young man against a foe that he does not even realise yet can never be beaten; it gave me great satisfaction to read and be, for a while, young again.

Live in Jarrow!

16 September 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.

Old Religion and New Faith

6 August 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

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.