The Irish claim that their method of calculating Easter came to them via St Columba from the Apostle John himself carried great weight.
But the proponents of the Roman practice of dating Easter hit back. They first pointed out that the Irish method of calculation was confined to Ireland (and even there some of the southern churches had switched to the Roman method) and the Church of the Britons whereas the Roman method had become universal.
But the card that carried the argument for Rome was their assertion, that the Irish could not deny, that Peter had been given the keys to the kingdom of heaven and, as Rome’s chief apostle, his word carried the greatest weight.
Given the sins that lay heavily upon Oswiu’s soul, this was a key consideration for him.
The calculation of Easter is not easy and the arguments are highly technical, involving astronomy, mathematics and the application of Scripture. No doubt these differences were rehearsed at some length during the Synod but, in the end, the argument for Oswiu came down to one of authority.
Both the Irish and Roman practices were hallowed, in the eyes of their proponents, by their apostolic progenitors. The Irish said that they had their method of calculation from the Apostle John himself, this method having been passed on to the great saints of their own tradition and finally down to Columba, Iona’s founder.
The Synod of Whitby resolved the differences between Irish and Roman practices. The decision, as presented by Bede, was as much that of King Oswiu as the church men present at the council.
The key difference lay in Irish and Roman traditions having different methods of calculating the date of Easter which could lead to Easter being celebrated on different Sundays. This was a particularly difficult matter for the royal household as Oswiu followed the Ionan practice of his youth whereas his queen, Eanflæd, Edwin’s daughter, kept to the Roman custom, leading to a situation where half the royal household was still keeping the Lenten fast while the other half was enjoying the Easter feast.
Such a visible sign of disunity was not tenable in a royal family and, indeed, it appears to have been one of the reasons for the strife between Oswiu and his son, Ahlfrith.
Well, what can I say? Dan Abnett is the reason I ended up writing 40k and his Ravenor novels was the second series I read after Eisenhorn. It’s no wonder I was hooked. The man is an absolute master, both at plotting (how does he keep all those separate strands in his head until he ties them all together?) and building worlds with single, perfectly chosen, words.
As to the perennial Eisenhorn vs. Ravenor question… er, can I sit on the fence? Say they’re both equally brilliant but in different ways? I know that’s a cowardly ducking of the question and… alright, yes, I am avoiding an answer. Oh, I don’t want to. It’s like being asked to choose between children. All right, all right, if I must…
Ravenor. Right, I said it. By a tiny tad, and largely because more of his crew survive, but I give it to Gideon Ravenor. But I’d prefer to have dinner with Eisenhorn. At least I could see his face.
Thanet isn’t even an island now, just a spur of Kent sticking out into the Channel.
But for a thousand years it was the hinge upon which England’s history turned. Then it really was an island, separated from the mainland by the Wantsum Channel, a tidal channel that separated the high chalk of Thanet from the rest of the country.
The Isle of Thanet was also one of the closer points to the continent. The Wantsum Channel, by cutting it off from the rest of Britain, acted in effect as a moat, providing defences for anyone holed up on the island. This was something eyes watching from across the Channel noted so that, when Julius Caesar arrived in 55 and 54 BC, he set up a fort on the island. Indeed, he might have landed on it too when first arriving. When the Romans returned, they set up their initial fort at one end of the Wantsum Channel and, once Britain was secure, turned that fort into the most important fort/port in the country, Richborough.
They also established another fort, Reculver, at the other end of the Wantsum, showing clearly how strategically important this channel was.
Then, after the Romans left Britain, the Anglo-Saxons arrived and, according to legend, Hengist and Horsa were given the Isle of Thanet by a foolish King Vortigern in return for their mercenary help. He should have remembered his history: no good could come of giving men with swords such an impregnable base. Sure enough, Hengist and Horsa overthrew Vortigern and set themselves up as kings of Kent. Once again, Thanet had been the hinge upon which England’s history had turned.
And this was not the end. During the Viking era, Viking armies realised that the Wantsum Channel was the ideal place to moor their longships while the isle provided them with a secure base to overwinter before better weather allowed them to resume their customary raiding and pillaging.
In 865, the Great Heathen Army, that came within a single battle of conquering all England, overwintered on Thanet. The isle’s inhabitants must have been becoming a little tired of being the providers for so many passing raiders. Nevertheless, the soil was so rich that the Isle had the highest population density in Kent a while later.
It was only the silting up and closure of the Wantsum Channel, turning the Isle into the tip of Kent, that ended its hinge role in history.
Gerald Moody’s excellent book gives all the archaeological detail of these few extraordinarily important square miles and sets them into their historical context.
Frankly, I had not the slightest idea of who John Brown (the Angel of the Lord) was when I began reading the book, although I had some vague idea that his body lay mouldering in the grave, so Harry Flashman’s latest adventure served to plug a huge gap in my historical knowledge while also, as usual, being a marvellous romp through the trouble spots and boudoirs of the 19th century.
It turns out that John Brown was an abolitionist who decided to launch a raid on a US army armoury at Harper’s Ferry, steal the weapons there and give them to slaves, sparking off a slave rebellion. It was a mad idea and, sure enough, it failed; few slaves joined the rebellion and Harper was captured, tried and executed. But in his death, Harper became a martyr for the abolitionist cause, pushing both sides towards the fateful Civil War that started a year and a half later.
Flashman is the bemused witness to this all: a man less inclined to lay down his life for a principle than Harry Flashman is difficult to imagine but Fraser’s great skill is to show Flashman’s reluctant admiration for Brown’s mad courage, while maintaining Flashman’s own personal cowardice.
There’s also a welcome (although not for Flashman) reappearance by Harry’s old adversary, John Charity Spring, erstwhile professor at Oxford, now slave dealer and ship’s captain.
By this novel, the tenth in the series, we know what to expect. While Flashman and the Angel of the Lord doesn’t do anything new, what it does do, it does with Fraser’s usual skill.
Perhaps the best example of Oswiu’s practical approach to kingship comes from how he dealt with a dispute in the Church. Oswiu himself followed the practice of Iona, where he had been brought up. But his queen, Eanflæd, the daughter of King Edwin, followed the Roman practice of her father. In most matters this did not cause any problems. But there was one area where there was difficulty: when to celebrate Easter. The Irish used a different method to calculate the date of Easter than the Romans. This produced a situation where the king and his retinue might be celebrating Easter while the queen and her women still had a further week of the Lenten fast to go.
To solve these differences, Oswiu summoned a church council to Whitby, which met in 664, to thrash out these disputes.
As for Oswiu, Bede is equivocal. Oswiu ruled for 28 years, which was an exceptionally long reign for the time. However, unlike his elder brother, Oswiu had to scrabble for legitimacy and to secure his throne, and he was not above employing murder to do that.
His reign was also troubled by strife with his nephew, Œthelwold, and his son, Ahlfrith. It was, in sum, a reign disturbed by the usual problems of dynastic politics and the short-term solutions that men employ to deal with these. But it was a reign that ended with Oswiu dying of natural causes in his bed, in his late 50s, rather than on the battle field as had been the case with all his predecessors.
As such, it was the reign of a flawed but shrewd king in difficult times, a reign threaded with all the political compromises and betrayals that were necessary to ensure such a long reign. Hard to present such a man as the ideal of Christian kingship, although there might be a case for saying Oswiu came close to an ideal of practical kingship.
In Bede’s history, Penda plays an unusual role: he is the killer of Christian kings, most notably Oswald, Bede’s exemplar of Christian kingship, but Bede never evinces the same dislike for Penda as he does for Cadwallon or even Rædwald.
For Bede, Penda was an honest pagan who allowed the preaching of the new religion in his kingdom even if he did not follow it himself. Penda’s own son converted to Christianity when he married Oswiu’s daughter. (Politics was a complicated and bloody family affair, made more complex and bloody in this case when Oswiu’s daughter murdered her husband.)
Bede’s true scorn was reserved for Cadwallon, whom he saw as a traitor to Christianity by his warring on Edwin and the newly converted Northumbrians. Similar scorn he poured upon Rædwald, who hedged his religious bets, keeping altars to the old gods as well as the new god. For Bede, this hedging of religious bets was worthy of despite.
Penda was the last of the great pagan Anglo-Saxon warlords, the culmination of a succession of men who had completely changed the face of the country in the two centuries following the end of Roman rule. The deathless fame that their court scops (Anglo-Saxon bards) promised them in their halls as they gave out gold proved illusory: most of these kings are completely forgotten, the songs sung in their praise falling to silence as they fell into their graves.
Genealogical king lists provide lists of short-lived kings for the better-known kingdoms, although these men have left little more than their names to posterity (and it’s by no means certain that the names that have come down to us were all actually kings, particularly since at the head of most of these king lists is one of the old gods, most often the god of the slain). The battle fame they earned proved as short lived as their kingdoms.
But Penda’s name does live on. It lives on through his place in the history of Bede proving that attracting the notice of the greatest historian of your day is the best way to ensure post-mortem fame.
