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.
The Eisenhorn novels were the very first Warhammer 40k novels I read about twenty years ago now. Since then, I’ve read many more and, rather improbably, even written some. So I decided to go back to my original door to the 40k galaxy to see how they would read coming at them with the eyes of a writer of these stories as well as a reader.
The answer, of course, is very well. Dan Abnett is a very, very, very good writer, with an unmatched ability to coin words that not just fit into the 40k universe but with a single word engage the reader more fully into that universe.
But now, working from a 40k writer perspective, I’m pretty sure I know how Dan pitched the idea of these novels originally: this was James Bond in 40k. But James Bond with a 40k twist – which means that there’s no sex but even bigger guns. What the Eisenhorn novels and the Bond films share is a breakneck pace with a huge range of exotic locations: unusually for 40k, the stories escape the usual round of polluted hive cities to take in a far wider range of planets, some of which seem like they actually might be quite pleasant to live on (so long as you have money).
In another Bond trope, there’s an unusual emphasis on fine food and drink, with many meals described in loving detail. As an Inquisitor, Eisenhorn unfortunately couldn’t really have an interest in gambling, which is a shame as I’d have loved to have read Abnett’s take on a 40k casino.
As the stories progress, the tie to Bond lessens as the story and characters grow into themselves, but, yes, I still think that’s how they began, when Dan emailed the editors at Black Library and said, “Let’s do Bond in space!”
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
Newly installed on the throne of Northumbria following the Battle of the River Idle, Edwin needed to bolster his position. To do so, Edwin entered into a marriage contract with Eadbald, King of Kent, to marry his sister. Kent, however, was the Anglo-Saxon kingdom with the strongest contacts to Europe and in particular to Francia (as shown archaeologically by goods traded from Francia and the isotopic analysis of a relatively high proportion of bodies having their origin in Francia). Kent was also where Augustine had landed with his mission in 597, and it was where he had established his archbishopric in Canterbury.
The sister of the King of Kent, Æthelburh, was a Christian and a condition of the marriage contract was that the pagan Edwin would allow her to continue to practise her religion through bringing with her a priest who could continue to administer the sacraments to her and her party.
Much of the early advance of Christianity among the pagan kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons was through marriage diplomacy: princesses dispatched by newly-Christian Anglo-Saxon kings to their pagan peers in the expectation of royal alliance and possible conversion.
Edwin was the first. Æthelburh arrived in Northumbria with an entourage that included a priest, Paulinus, an Italian and one of the second wave of religious that had arrived in AD 601 as reinforcements for Augustine and his original party of missionaries.
