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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.

Edwin, New High King of Britain

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

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.

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.

Book review: Tips for Writing, Publishing and Marketing your Novel by Matthew Harffy and Steven McKay

17 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
Tips for Writing, Publishing & Marketing Your Novel by Matthew Harffy and Steven McKay

Ten years ago, I was at the London Book Fair for the launch of the first of my novels about 7th-century Northumbria, Edwin: High King of Britain. I was particularly pleased with the book because it was a fascinating period of British history and no one else had written about it. I had the market all to myself.

Only, I didn’t. At pretty well exactly the same time, Matthew Harffy published The Serpent Sword, the first in his Bernicia Chronicles, telling the story of kings Edwin, Oswald and Oswiu through the eyes and actions of a sometime member of their warbands, Beobrand.

I was, I must admit, pretty gutted. But then I realised that Matthew was going the independent route with The Serpent Sword while I had a proper publisher. I settled back to count my royalties while I let Matthew eat the dust of my sales. With that backing, surely my books would win the battle for Northumbria.

Only, they didn’t. Matthew’s Bernicia novels have sold by the bookshelf, shifting over half a million (!) copies in total. Mine have sold respectable amounts but nothing like as many as his.

So when Matthew put out this book (with Steven McKay, who’s also sold many more books than me) I bought it because, frankly, I wanted to know how he did it.

And that’s exactly what they tell you. With no froth, no spin, no filler: it’s a book to read in an afternoon but with the distilled experience of a combined twenty years in the trenches of writing, publishing, marketing and selling books. As such, it’s invaluable, and I will be putting their ideas into practice. Maybe, just maybe, I might begin to then start catching up!

Book review: The Smell of War by Roland Bartetzko

17 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Smell of War by Roland Bartetzko

There aren’t many boys today who grow up with the ambition to fight in a war – but that’s what Roland Bartetzko always wanted to do. Growing up in the old West Germany, there was the chance that he would have to do exactly that, should the Soviet tanks roll West. So Bartetzko enrolled in the German army, training as a paratrooper. But then, in a miracle that was so unexpected we have pretty well ignored it ever since, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended without a shot being fired.

Great for the rest of us, bad for a young German who desperately wanted to test his mettle in a proper war. But in the aftermath of the dissolution of the old Eastern bloc, the old tensions that had been suppressed under communism rose to the surface again, first in what had previously been Yugoslavia. War broke out there, the first war in Europe since the end of World War II. Now Bartetzko had his chance.

Signing up as a volunteer for the Croatian Defence Council, Bartetzko got to taste war at first hand. And not just taste it: he dived in head first. Because this is the strange truth that it’s important we recognise: for most people, war is hell. But there is a small sub group of men for whom war is not life: never do they feel more alive, more energised, more vital than when their lives are on the line. Bob Crisp, South African cricketer, WWII tanker and, according to Wisden, ‘one of the most extraordinary men to ever play cricket’ was one. Crisp later told his son that he “loved the war. He enjoyed it. He thought it was fantastic“.

Another was Adrian Carton de Wiart whose Wikipedia biography famously begins: He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; was blinded in his left eye; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp; and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.”

Now we can add Roland Bartetzko to that list. For with the Croatian war over, Bartetzko did not go home to Germany but instead volunteered for the even more shoestring Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting a guerilla war against the Serbs, seemingly against impossible odds, until NATO came to the rescue of the Kosovans.

But this is not a book about why Bartetzko wanted to test himself in battle – he barely touches on that. Instead, it’s actually a manual of what to do and what not to do if you should find yourself fighting as a guerilla against a vastly more powerful enemy. It includes how to set up an ambush, what to do when pinned down by a machine gun, the importance of foot care and many other aspects of practical war craft from a man who knows it better than most people. It’s laconic, clear and honest.

Bartetzko is still the war dog. Too old, he says, to fight against the Russians in Ukraine, he is still near the front lines, bringing supplies and equipment to the soldiers there. It’s a remarkable book from a fascinating man – but a man who appears oblivious or unwilling to ask questions as to his own fascination with war.

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.

The Even Newer Paradigm of the Arrival of the Anglo-Saxons

17 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

aDNA analysis has confirmed traditional view that there was really a period of mass movements. Large numbers of Anglo-Saxons did sail across the North Sea to Britain. But within that overall scheme, it’s clear that there is room for a great deal of nuance. There is also clear evidence for intermarriage between continental incomers and native Britons, as well as there being a significant number of arrivals from France too.

What we seem to have is a patchwork picture. Yes, there were large groups of settlers who arrived and who appear to have largely displaced the native population, particularly in eastern regions such as Kent and East Anglia. As we move west, the degree of admixture increases, with some families showing clear signs of marrying among both groups over a number of generations. And in the west there is relatively little presence of these continental ancestors. This does tally quite well with the accounts of Gildas and Bede. Factor in that this all took place over a couple of centuries and we have a sort of slow moving Anglo-Saxon creep north and west from their original strongholds in the south and east. It’s a mixture of conquest, intermarriage, alliances, slave taking and the slow consolidation of tiny kingdoms into larger polities.

aDNA and the Anglo-Saxons

16 June 2024
Edoardo
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Categories: History

DNA analysis techniques have advanced rapidly and, in particular, the techniques for finding and analysing aDNA have improved dramatically. Researchers discovered that DNA survived better, and with much less contamination, in the petrous bone in the ear. The petrous bone is one of the hardest and densest bones in the body, leading to it surviving better than other parts of the body and providing excellent aDNA samples.

That meant it would be possible to analyse the DNA of burials dating from the early Anglo-Saxon period to see where these people really came from. If the analysis worked, we would finally know which idea was correct, the old one of mass migration or the new one of elite takeover.

The most recent large-scale study, which involved the analysis of the aDNA from 350 burials across eastern and southern Britain carbon dated to between the 5th and 7th centuries found that 74 per cent of the genetic history of these people comes from continental north-western Europe. There was a marked east-west difference, with the main concentration of people having continental ancestry in the south and along the east coast, and the proportion having a native British ancestry increasing further west and north. There was also no sex difference, indicating that this ancestry derived from whole family groups arriving in Britain rather than Germanic warriors taking native Britonnic women as wives.

So the traditional view that there was really a period of mass movements of populations has been vindicated. It wasn’t a elite takeover. The Anglo-Saxons really did migrate in large numbers to Britain, displacing the native population.