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.
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.
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!
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.
