Celt and Saxon: Studies in the Early British Border 0521046025, 9780521046022

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C E L T A N D SAXON S T U D IE S IN T H E EA R LY B R IT I S H B O R D E R

CELT AND SAXON STUDIES IN THE EARLY BRITISH BORDER BY K E N N E T H JACKSON P E T E R H U N T E R BLAIR BERTRAM COLGRAVE BRUCE D IC K IN S JOAN & HAROLD TAYLOR C H R IS T O P H E R BROOKE N O R A K. C H A D W I C K

CAMBRIDGE AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

1963

PU BLI SHE D BY T H E S Y N D I C S OF T H E C A M B R I D G E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N .W .i. American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York 22, N.Y. West African Office: P.O. Box 33, Ibadan, Nigeria C AM BRI DGE U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS 1963

Printed in Great Britain at the University Presst Cambridge {Brooke Crutchley, University Printer)

Prefatory Mote This book is the third of a series devoted to studies of various aspects of early Britain between the departure of the Romans and the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The first volume, Studies in Early British History, by six contributors, was published in 1954 and reprinted in 1959. It was chiefly concerned with the history of the foundations of British history and British culture during the brief period when the Celtic-speaking peoples were the rulers of our Island. The second volume of the series, Studies in the Early British Churchy by four contributors, was published in 1958, and was chiefly devoted to the nature of our sources for the intel­ lectual and ecclesiastical life of Britain in the same period. The present volume explores, in ten studies of varying length by eight contributors, some records of the early contacts of the AngloSaxon with the British kingdoms. The object of the present book, as of its predecessors, is to offer the results of some researches by scholars working in various specialised fields, and from very different angles, on an obscure but important period of our early history. I have explained in the Introduction the nature of our widely divergent sources and the variety of disciplines required for their critical use. In the present state of our knowledge it would be misleading to attempt to give a complete picture of the period, and to attempt to write a con­ tinuous narrative would only darken counsel. I have felt that progress in such studies can best be made by avoiding any attempt to force consistency between the results of the various contributors. I am responsible for the conception and plan of this book, and of the series as a whole, but I have preferred to allow each contributor to present unhampered the result of his own researches. We are grateful to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press for their encouragement throughout, and for being willing to publish our books, and also for the splendid help which their readers and staff have given us with the proofs and the printing. In particular we thank Mr G. V. Carey for being willing to make our index and for much help with the proofs. I myself owe a v

33693

PREFATORY NOTE

special debt of gratitude to my fellow contributors for help with my own work. I also owe them some apology for stressing the relevance and importance of such Celtic sources as are sometimes at variance with the more high-grade Saxon records of the period. From this I absolve my colleagues, but remain unrepentant. Indeed it might here be said, as of Grendel's bad deeds, swa he hyra ma wolde. N OR A K. C H A D W I C K C AMBRI DGE

M a y 1962

Contents Introduction by N O R A K. I

II

CHADWICK

page

I

On the Northern British Section in Nennius by K E N N E T H J A C K S O N

20

Some Observations on the Historia Regum attributed to Symeon of Durham by P E T E R H U N T E R B L A I R

63

III

The Earliest Life of St Gregory the Great, written by a Whitby Monk by B E R T R A M C O L G R A V E

119

IV

The Conversion of Northumbria: A comparison of sources by b y n o r a k . c h a d w i c k

138

The Battle of Chester: A study of sources by N O R A K. C H A D W I C K

167

Bede, St Colrnan and the Irish Abbey of Mayo by N O R A K. C H A D W I C K

186

V

VI

VII

V III

*Dewi Sant * (St David) in Early English Kalendars and Place-Names by B R U C E D I C K I N S Pre-Norman Churches of the Border by J O A N and h a r o l d t a y l o r vii

206

210

CONTENTS

IX St Peter of Gloucester and St Cadoc of Llancarfan by C H R IS T O P H E R B R O O K E X The Celtic Background of Early Anglo-Saxon England by N O R A K. C H A D W IC K Index

page 258

323

353 PLATES Facing page 117

i (a) The Historia Regum, C.C.C.C. MS. 139, fo. 51 v; (6) and (c) the Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, U.L.C. MS. Ff. 1.27, pp. 123 and 131

11 in iv

Between page 228 and page 229 Diddlebury Diddlebury Font at Eardisley

Introduction BY N O R A K. C H A D W I C K

The object of the present book is to throw light on the sources for our early history in the period of the foundation of the AngloSaxon kingdoms and later. The problems on which our attention has been chiefly focused are those arising from the relations of the in-coming Teutonic peoples with the Celtic-speaking peoples who must have formed the greater part of the population. We are study­ ing the fusion of two peoples whose background, language, institu­ tions and culture are totally different. We believe that a fuller understanding of the historical sources and the problems to which they give rise may be obtained by examining the records—in what­ ever medium they may have been preserved—of the Celtic and Teutonic peoples along the line of the Border country where for a brief space the Celtic peoples halted the Teutonic advance, and where, in the West at least, they have retained their national and linguistic integrity. Perhaps the best description of the present collection of studies is to call it an interim report on our sources of information on the intercourse between the old-established Celtic peoples and their more recently established Teutonic neighbours along the line which eventually became known as the Marches, or the Border, by which we mean the debated line of demarcation betweëriTïhe~ ^Tritons of southern Scotland and England in the north, and between north-western England and Wales and England east of the (Pennines and of the valleys of the Dee and the Severn on the west. As the Taylors have said in their history of the early churches along this Border, the object is: ‘to point the way for further investiga­ tion*. It is hoped that the studies which concentrate on the earliest historical records for the north may help to indicate the nature of some of our lost materials, and that this will be a step forward to­ wards establishing our early history. It will only be a first step. The interpretation of these records, and the relative value to be attached to the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon evidence, which is often at variance, are very difficult to determine. Further study is badly needed. i

CCS

INTRODUCTIO N

In the present state of our knowledge it would obviously be injudicious to attempt to construct a coherent picture of the impact of the Anglo-Saxon on Celtic society. The period is rich in Latin and Anglo-Saxon sources for Anglo-Saxon political and ecclesiasti­ cal history, but for the relationship of the Anglo-Saxon ruling classes with the Britons whom they conquered and absorbed, and also with the unconquered Britons beyond their Borders, our sources are far less ample, both in quantity and scope. This is per­ haps inevitable and due to the relative scarcity of early written records among the Celtic peoples of Britain. We have, of course, a certain number of early Latin texts, such as the work of Gildas; and the lost Northern sources used by Nennius much later make it clear that Latin historical records were made in the North, prob­ ably in the early seventh century. Before the seventh century, however, the vernacular appears hardly to have been written among the Celtic population except for lapidary funerary inscriptions of the briefest nature commemorat­ ing the names of the wealthier chieftains in the north and west of the country. Except lapidary inscriptions the early British Church among the *Men of the North*, as the Britons of southern Scotland were called by the Welsh of Wales, has left no contemporary written records, Latin or Welsh. Knowledge of historical persons and events was for the most part transmitted by oral tradition, carried on from generation to generation by a class of highly trained bards. But the value of this oral tradition was relatively high, and when Latin writing came to be applied to native historical traditions, the oral traditions of our period, including all those which had been introduced from the Britons of southern Scotland, were written down in the southern Welsh kingdoms, which were still independent. Their general quality justifies a position of honour for them among the sources for the history of Britain in the early Medieval period. It is not to be looked for, however, that a conquered people should have the experience or the resources to furnish numerous or highly organised scriptoria, still less that the Saxon kingdoms would have any inclination to finance their own archivists to place on record the traditions or institutions of the subject population, in so far as this was Celtic, or of the neighbouring Celtic peoples who remained unconquered in the west. Consequently, our modern historians of this period not unnaturally tend to pass by the small 2

INTRODUCTIO N

body of Celtic records and to concentrate on the relatively rich and comprehensive Anglo-Saxon sources. Moreover, our Celtic sources are particularly difficult to handle. Their interpretation requires highly specialised disciplines, with which the historian of later periods is not required to be familiar. In the first place the great majority of our Celtic sources have been transmitted for a considerable period of time by oral tradition before being committed to writing, and oral tradition requires highly specialised experience in those who would use it as the raw material of history. In the second place, while we are fortunate in having a certain number of Latin records, the majority of our British historical traditions are in the Welsh vernacular. It is impossible to make a scholarly assessment of the Celtic dimension in our early history without some knowledge of Welsh. This is a difficult language, and few historians, even those familiar with medieval Latin and Anglo-Saxon, care to undertake this additional burden in order to make themselves conversant with the Celtic records. The result is that the Celtic element in our early history is treated in a stepmotherly spirit. Odio quod non intellego. Yet until our Celtic sources, both in Latin and in the vernacular, have made the contribution to our studies which is their right, our early history lacks a third dimension, and cannot even profit fully from our rapidly increasing knowledge of the Roman and AngloSaxon aspects of the period. Within our own generation the picture of the overlap in our early cultures has been greatly enriched for the centuries following the withdrawal of the Romans. During the last ten years especially the combined resources of archaeology and air photography have completely transformed our picture of the relationship of the Romans and the Saxons during this momentous period. The work of Professor Ian Richmond, of Dr St Joseph, and of Dr J. N. L. Myres has radically altered our conception of the origin of our existence as an independent nation. The Romans had been in the habit of referring to Britain as ‘on the edge of the habitable globe’—a small and relatively unimportant province of a vast empire. The Anglo-Saxons created a nation with an indepen­ dent status, and a position of political and cultural dignity among the countries of western Europe. While archaeology has done much to illuminate the way in which this change was brought about, our generation has been equally happy in the work of a body of scholars who have built up a picture 3

1-2

INTRODUCTION

of the political development and the institutions which transformed the Teutonic newcomers into an adult nation of permanence and stability. The history of this development has been written by Sir Frank Stenton and also by Peter Hunter Blair, and the texts of our most important institutional sources have been re-edited—AngloSaxon charters by A. J. Robertson, writs by F. E. Harmer, wills by D. Whitelock, and above all the superb corpus of Anglo-Saxon laws by the late Professor Liebermann. All these and other scholars have combined to create a body of documentary material which offers a fairly complete entrée into the working of the AngloSaxon state. It will be long before Celtic studies are in a position to offer a body of Celtic historical sources comparable in scope with these Anglo-Saxon collections. Workers in the Celtic field are less numerous and their output is necessarily more restricted; but in quality the best work of Celtic scholars can justly claim comparison with the best Classical and Anglo-Saxon scholarship. It is fair to say that one of the most important lines of advance in the study of the early centuries in our Islands has been the growing re­ cognition of the dignity and importance of Celtic studies and of the part played by the Celtic peoples in the formation of this early history. The extant body of Irish laws is enormous ; but legal and historical studies have already made substantial progress in the works of Éoin McNéill, R. Thurneysen, and D. A. Binchy; Studies of the Celtic church in the works of J. F. Kenney and the Rev. P. Grosjean, S.J., Bollandist. In addition to the specialised legal and historical researches great advance has also been made in the study of the earliest Welsh poetry by Sir Ifor Williams; of the early Welsh language and place-names both by him and by Professor Kenneth Jackson; of Welsh place-names by Dr Melville Richards; and of inscriptions by the late Professor Macalister and the late V. E. Nash-Williams. The importance of these linguistic studies for their bearing on history can hardly be overrated. Above all, the profound and extensive researches of Sir Ifor Williams have demonstrated the value of early British poetical tradition and its importance as the basis for history. In this way we are now in a position to carry back Celtic history two or more centuries before Celtic written records begin. In particular he has shown the way in which we can catch history in the making, as it were, in the panegyric and elegiac 4

INTRODUCTION

poetry composed by the British bards attached to the small courts of the North British and Welsh princes. It is ultimately to these early poetical compositions of the bards, often later paraphrased as oral prose narratives, that I would trace the origin of much of our earliest historical material recorded later in the annals of the Celtic side of our Border. Our Celtic sources offer some special features which, while not peculiar to Celtic history, play a more important part here than in better documented periods. Of these important elements in Celtic historical sources I would specially stress (i) the part played by the oral poetry to which I have just referred; (2) the right use of negative evidence; (3) the function of what, for want of a less harsh term, we may call literary forgery; (4) and perhaps most important of all, the stimulus to production afforded by controversy. This last factor carries with it a special danger when the original milieu of a given document is unknown. Before accepting what it tells us we have to be constantly on the alert for its bias, and to seek to discern the motives which inspired it. This is not the place where one can demonstrate fully the impor­ tance of early occasional poetry for history, which is, in any case, widely recognised among many peoples, and which includes ephemeral poetry of public interest in addition to the panegyric and elegiac poetry of the court bards. In Ireland our earliest knowledge of the Leinster princes and others of Munster and Meath is pre­ served in oral poetical compositions which have been collected and published by Kuno Meyer,1 some of them sustained works, others preserved only in fragments, but often with scraps of contemporary information and comments which constitute our earliest historical narrative material. The earliest Irish annals frankly state their indebtedness to such poems, and the Annals of Tigernach in particular often quote poetical fragments as the source of their statements. In Scotland we can often trace echoes from heroic poetry behind entries in the earliest chronicles, including the socalled Pictish Chronicle,12 and one will know better than to interpret them literally. On the other hand a triumphant British bard has left us in no doubt as to the fate of the Dâlriadic king Domhnall Brecc in what is also known from more reliable sources to be his 1 Über die älteste irische Dichtung (Berlin, vol. 1, 1913; 11, 1914); Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrik Irlands (Berlin, 1919). 2 Cf. H. M. Chadwick, Early Scotland (Cambridge, 1949)* P- xvi, and passim. 5

INTRODUCTION

attack on the Britons in the Battle of Carron in 642, and also as to where the bard’s own sympathies lay: The head of Dyvynwal Vrych The ravens gnawed it.1 And in an Irish poem attributed by an Irish annalist to Riagal of Bangor1 2 at a later date we have the Irish point of view on the dis­ astrous expedition of the Northumbrian king Ecgfrith which ended in his death at the hands of the Pictish king Brude III (d. 693) in the battle of Dunnichen near Forfar in 685. This day Brude fights a battle for the land of his grandfather... This day the son of Oswiu has been killed... Christ heard our supplications.3 The importance of oral panegyric and elegiac poetry as the earliest source for the history of Norway is emphasised by the brilliant Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson who died in 1241. In his preface to his Heimskringla, his prose history of the earliest Norwegian kings, he shows himself fully aware of both the value and the dangers of this class of evidence, and he also classifies his sources as follows: In this book I have transcribed traditions of those chiefs who ruled in the northern lands... as I have heard them from men of knowledge, and also certain of their genealogies as they have been taught to me. Some of this is found in the ancestral pedigree in which kings and other men of noble lineage have traced their kindred ; some, however, is derived from old poems or narrative verse composed for entertainment. And although we do not know the truth of these, yet we know this much, that men of knowledge in past times have held them to be true. Snorri then proceeds to enumerate his poetical sources, citing by name all the famous court poets of the earliest Norwegian kings and also the names of their works and the nature of their contents ; and he concludes the list as follows : And when Harold the Fair-haired was king in Norway Iceland was settled. There were skalds (‘court poets’) with King Harold, and people still know their lays4 by heart, and the lays about all the kings who have ruled in Norway since. And we place the chief reliance on what is said in those lays which were sung before the kings themselves or their sons, 1 Cf. Chadwick, Early Scotland (Cambridge, 1949), p. 126. 2 His death is recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters, s.a. 881. 8 See W. F. Skene, Chronicles of the Piets and Scots (Edinburgh, 1867), p. 402. 4 The word is kvæôi, a narrative poem, regularly used of historical court poems, especially narrative poems, and also of ballads. 6

INTRODUCTION

and we accept as true all that which is recorded in these lays about their expeditions and battles. Now it is the habit of poets to praise most those before whom they stand; but no one would dare to relate to the king himself deeds which were known to all who listened, and indeed to the king himself, to be a tissue of lies, for that would be mockery rather than praise. Iceland was especially famous for its many brilliant and accom­ plished poets, who travelled far and wide to the courts of northern and western Europe in the Viking Age. The court of SigurSr, the Norwegian earl who ruled Orkney on behalf of King Harold the Fair-haired of Norway (688-91) was a great centre to which Ice­ landic poets resorted, and it is on their panegyrics extolling their patrons, the Orkney earls whom they visited, that the Jarla Sögur, ‘the stories or sagas of the Earls’, which formed the nucleus of the Orkneyinga Saga, was built up. It will be seen that the foundations of Celtic history differ in kind to some extent from those of later periods, the latter founded almost wholly on written documents, and generally contemporary. But it is not only the nature of the material which differs, but also the motives which have prompted the records. As long as writing was confined to a small educated class, and parchment scarce and costly, the records would seem to have been chiefly prompted by impor­ tant issues only. St Patrick’s Confession would appear to be inspired by a need to justify his divine calling for his mission to Ireland in the face of opposition from unfriendly critics. His Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus is an open and public protest against slave raiding. Controversy is one of the strongest incentives to writing, and it is to be suspected that the greater part of our written litera­ ture of the seventh and early eighth centuries in Celtic countries is inspired by the struggle between the Celtic and the Roman parties in what is generally known as the Easter Controversy. In the face of the Roman efforts to establish the unitas Catholicay backed by emissaries endowed with the highest Continental culture, and supported by documents of educated standard, Celtic scholars felt compelled, for the first time, to express in written form the traditions, usages, and discipline of the earlier Order which it was their concern to defend. The important effect which this controversy had on the intellec­ tual life of the time has hardly yet been fully appreciated, and sometimes gives rise to misunderstanding. Terminology perfectly 7

INTRODUCTIO N

appropriate in the later Middle Ages is often misleading when applied to our period. As an instance we may take the word ‘forgery1. This of course represents a common practice in the Middle Ages, especially in regard to false charters and other legal documents, composed with the definite practical purpose of estab­ lishing a claim to property. In the earlier period also it was a common practice to write a text under an assumed name, most commonly a literary composition. The object in so doing, however, is not to make a false claim, or to legalise a traditional claim, to property. The purpose of the forgeries of our period was generally to impress one’s contemporaries by writing under an assumed name which carried great authority. Indeed the surest way to acquire publicity was to write under a famous name. At the same time it ensured a certain amount of anonymity. The purpose of such ‘forgeries’ might be merely to indulge in a form of literary affectation, and at Charlemagne’s court later the fashion developed into a literary School, a kind of shadowy Academy, of which all the members wrote under assumed names which deceived, and were intended to deceive, no one. It was a kind of literary game. But it was by no means new in 800. Already in the late fifth and early sixth centuries the custom was fully developed in Aquitaine, where a certain writer, calling himself Virgilius Maro, was writing under the name of the great Mantuan. In Ireland in the seventh century a monk who wrote as a member of the monastic literary circle of St Carthach’s monastery (Carthagenensis) at Lismore on the river Blackwater in south Munster, not unnaturally assumed the nom-de-plume of Augustine and is com­ monly referred to by later writers as the ‘Pseudo-Augustine*. His correspondents and immediate circle are similarly referred to under noms-de-plume. ‘Eusebius ’ appears to be the name given to the writer’s teacher Manchianus.1 One of the difficulties in using such Dark Age texts is to avoid the danger of judging them by the standards and criteria appropriate to a later age. The authenticity of the writings attributed to St Patrick and of the De Excidio Britanniae of Gildas are still some­ times called in question. Yet even if it were possible to demonstrate that these documents were not composed by the writers whose names they bear, this would not necessarily convict the writers of 1 See the Rev. P. Grosjean, S.J., Bollandist, ‘Sur quelques exégètes irlandais du V ile siècle’, Sacris Erudiri, vu (1955), 67 ff. 8

INTRODUCTIO N

bad faith ; and although it would perhaps heavily reduce the prestige value of these works, they might still have a value as an honest attempt to reproduce what the author in question would be likely to have said, an approximate reproduction. They would have some value as ‘writings in character’, especially if composed while the tradition which they were claiming to transmit was still alive, even if the motive of the writer was biography or polemics. We may sus­ pect that some of the early pilgrimages were fictitiously composed under well-known names ; but they would still represent approxi­ mately the pilgrimages of the period, as a comparison with other more or less contemporary texts will demonstrate. Perhaps one of the most delicate tasks which confront the Dark Age historian is to know just how much allowance to make in a given case where the written record fails. This is undoubtedly where some of the most serious mistakes may occur, and our only safeguard is to avoid too positive an interpretation of the negative. Plummer called attention to the fact that no contemporary writer of the fifth century mentions St Patrick, and that neither Gildas nor Bede makes any allusion to him. Consequently, Plummer was inclined to doubt his very existence. The lists of the bishops of Whithorn cease soon after 800, and it has commonly been assumed that the see came to an end at that time, whereas the true interpre­ tation of this negative evidence may well be that the records only ceased to be kept at that date, or were lost. We have no written records for the Church of Hoddom in Dumfriesshire, yet we have evidence from the continuous series of Anglian crosses, till recently preserved in the graveyard there, that an Anglian monastery survived there throughout the Viking Age. It has been mentioned above that the Britons of southern Scot­ land have left no written records except a few early Christian stone funerary inscriptions, and a few brief notes incorporated at a later date in Nennius’s History of the Britons. All these, however, and also their oral poetical traditions, cease about the middle of the seventh century, consequently it is generally assumed that all the princes of the North perished or were absorbed by the conquering Angles of Bernicia. It may, however, be submitted that more prob­ ably, with the conversion of Northumbria to the Roman Order at the Council of Whitby in 664, the northern scriptorium which had recorded our brief series of annals of these northern princes either came to an end, or more probably was transformed to the Roman 9

INTRODUCTION

pattern and the Anglian interests, and ceased to record the exploits of the northern local princes. But we hear nothing of warfare against these princes under Oswald or Oswiu. On the other hand we have reason to believe that intermarriage took place between the Anglian and the British princely families, and we may well believe that, without either extinction or literal absorption, these northern princes may have been willing to function on behalf of the Anglian rulers as military outposts against the Piets, as we have good reason to think their predecessors had done on behalf of the Romans. Centuries of experience of the terrain and of local tactics would make them invaluable allies of the Anglian princes. Indeed it may be doubted if, without the knowledge and experience of the Britons of the North, these Bernicians could have kept the powerful Piets in check. On the other hand the North British princes would be as anxious as the Bernicians to contain the Piets behind the Antonine Wall. There is no reason to suppose that the British princes would love their ancient hereditary northern enemies any better than their more recent enemies to the east and south. It is in connection with the Piets that the danger of the historian’s too great dependence on the written records is most obvious. A certain amount of written evidence has come down to us in late manuscripts bearing directly on Pictish history. This takes the form chiefly of lists of the Pictish kings prior to the union of the indepen­ dent Pictish kingdoms with the Irish kingdom of Argyll in the ninth century. These lists, however, are of very unequal value, and only a relatively small proportion can claim to be historical. We have, in fact, no written evidence from the Piets themselves which would lead us to believe that in the Dark Ages they were still a people with an advanced culture and political power. Yet no one can doubt this advanced culture who has studied their art in stone sculpture; but for our knowledge of their political and military strength we are almost entirely dependent on external evidence. Our most detailed evidence bearing on Pictish history comes from their immediate neighbours. Bede is perhaps the most valuable contemporary source, but Adamnân’s Life of S t Columba, the Irish Annals and the Chronicle of Ddlriada all contain contem­ porary information of high value. Yet none of these written sources would have enabled us to gauge the true stature of the Piets. It is rather the allusions in contemporary Continental writers that io

INTRODUCTION

picture this great nation as the giants of the North, especially in the late Roman period. The allusion of Ammianus Marcellinus to the conspiratio barbarica of 367 gives evidence of their power of co­ operation and organisation with neighbouring peoples, Irish and Saxon, in a raid which overran England as far as Kent, killing the Comes litoris Saxonia, immobilising the dux Britanniarum, and temporarily destroying the Wall and the garrisons.1 According to Constantius’s Life of S t Germanus the Piets were among the enemies encountered by the saint in the course of his military activities in Britain in 429. The Anonymous Gaulish Chronicle informs us that ‘ Maximus [i.e. Magnus Maximus (d. 388)] strenuously overcame the Piets and Scots*, implying that his activities against the Piets were among his most important achievements in Britain. It is, however, from the Gaulish panegyrists that we obtain our picture of the Piets as the most formidable enemies whom the Romans had to face in the West.2 Indeed the earliest occurrences of the name Picti are found in the anonymous panegyrists* references to the campaigns of Constantius Chlorus in northern Britain; and pas­ sages in the panegyric pronounced before his son Constantine sug­ gest that some details of Constantius’s campaign against the Piets were still remembered. To the panegyrists of the period this cam­ paign of Constantius against the Piets was looked upon as the peak of his achievements, and the subduing of the Piets by himself and others as the greatest safeguard of Roman Britain. Yet the Britons themselves must have retained considerable vitality. First with the help of Roman resources, and later, in all likelihood, with the help of the growing power of Bernicia, the Britons of the North prevented what must inevitably have developed into a Pictish conquest. On the west also the Britons undoubtedly staved off a full-scale Irish occupation. The evidence of inscrip­ tions and place-names combines with that of tradition and archaeology to show a steady encroachment of Irish settlements all the way up our west coast from Cornwall to Argyll. It was only when these settlements reached an area north of the British king­ dom of Strathclyde that they were able to form a permanent Irish kingdom in Argyll and the Inner Hebrides. All through their 1 Ian Richmond, Roman Britain (Pelican Series, Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 62. 8 I have collected the references in a short article on ‘The Name P ict\ Scottish Gaelic Studies , vm (1958), 146 ff. II

INTRODUCTION

history after the Roman decline the Britons had to face the almost insuperable problem of defending the long thin arc of their terri­ tory which stretched in the north and west from Edinburgh to Cornwall, and of defending their triple frontiers against hostile invasions and encroachments from east, north, and west. Yet this defensive ordeal did not sap their initiative. In the fifth and sixth centuries, when pressure from the Saxons on the east, and from Irish on the west, was at its height, large numbers of Britons crossed over the English Channel to Armorica from east and south-east Wales and the Severn valley, and from Devon and Cornwall, to form our earliest colony. It is commonly stated that the intellectual life of the Britons was stultified by their long adherence to the forms of the Celtic Church and their tardy accep­ tance of the Roman Order. The history of the Breton colony hardly bears this out. From Brittany come our earliest Lives of Welsh saints, several of them at least two centuries earlier than any from Wales; and though this may well be due to stimulus of GalloRoman culture on the colonists, the actual information furnished from Breton sources for St Illtud’s monastery at Llantwit Major, and other South Welsh monastic centres, gives us some of our most important information about the intellectual level of the institutions of the Celtic Church, not only in Brittany itself, but also in Wales. Breton (Latin) records are indeed an invaluable source of information about the Celtic Church. It is this meeting and interaction of widely different cultures which perhaps forms for historians the chief fascination of Britain in the Dark Ages. Viewed against a wider background the history of the period is not of great importance. The relaxing grip of a great Empire on a remote province ; the brief political supremacy of the heroic native rulers, untrained and inexperienced in co­ operation; the hard-fought rearguard action of these native princes against the westward advance and occupation of the Barbarians— these are not the stuff of great history. It is the analysis of the complex situation that constitutes for the historian an interest out of all proportion to its intrinsic importance. The interest is further heightened by the number and variety of our sources—notices in Continental writers; stone inscriptions, both in Latin and the vernacular, and in the Latin and the Celtic ogam script; an everincreasing wealth of archaeological material, forcing on us a con­ stant reconsideration of our data; Latin written records, made in 12

INTRODUCTION

the first instance by ecclesiastics; oral vernacular traditions of relatively high quality, written down some centuries later than the events recorded; a rich store of carefully preserved genealogies, both royal and ecclesiastical. The student who would seek to unravel the clues and trace the history of the period may well feel himself bewildered by this dazz­ ling variety of evidence, not amounting to a great quantity in all. His task resembles not so much that of the historian recreating the period in his study as that of a chemist analysing the sources of the period in the laboratory. For the present writer—and here perhaps some of the contributors to this book would not agree—the value of our study lies not so much in what it contributes to our exact knowledge of the actual events under discussion, as in the oppor­ tunity which it presents of studying the groundwork of history, the kind of materials on which early history is based, the variety and relative value of our data. The Battle of Chester, for example, was certainly not an event of great significance ; and it cannot be claimed that a study of our sources adds greatly to our knowledge of the battle itself; but they do what is perhaps more interesting—they serve to place it in its literary setting, to bring out the artificial framework of our most sustained narrative of the event, and the motive which has inspired the melodramatic element in this narra­ tive. They serve to show how it was viewed by the people directly concerned in the event, and also by those who have recorded it. Taken together they help to adjust the balance of our sources. The present writer would make a similar claim for the accounts of the Conversion of Northumbria and the baptism of King Edwin. Our sources are admittedly of very unequal value, and have come to us through widely discrepant classes of narrative. The historian will doubtless sweep many of these aside as of no sound historical value at all. But they surely have a positive value in their own right, for they show us how the event was disputed by people holding widely different views, how it was made to serve as a sub­ ject in the controversy between not only the Celtic and the Roman Churches, but probably also between the Celtic and the Saxon opposing political forces in the following century, and perhaps even in Edwin’s own day. Already the writers of our records were evidently trying to create history out of discrepant materials. And with a highly dramatic result they have brought the traditions of the ‘Men of the N orth’, the heroic princely society of Cumbria, 13

INTRODUCTION

into conflict with those of Canterbury. It may, I submit, be as­ sumed that it is the heat of these conflicts rather than the intrinsic importance of the event which has been the occasion of our records, and which enhances the interest of the event. The conflict of ideas and ideals, not the event itself, has stimulated the literature. In general the earliest records of a battle are the contemporary panegyrics and elegies of the court bards; but these quickly form the basis of prose narratives which take their bias according to the milieu in which they are formed. It is commonly such prose nar­ ratives or sagas which form the basis of our earliest written histories, these sagas being sometimes selected for the sake of this bias, and sometimes having yet a new bias added by the writer who incor­ porates them into his own narrative. In the following studies no attempt has been made to trace the actual history of the overlap of the British and the Anglo-Saxon peoples on our Borders. Our aim has rather been to examine the sources of such history and to seek to establish their relative value by inquiry into their origin, the conditions in which they came into being, the purpose for which they were recorded, and the bias of their sympathies. Our studies are primarily concerned with some of the written sources of Border history, chiefly Bede, the anony­ mous monk of Whitby, Symeon of Durham, Nennius. These and other sources, such as the Irish and Welsh annals, are often con­ tradictory, and among our most interesting and difficult problems is that of assessing the relative values of these varied written sources, and the weight to be attached to each. This problem becomes increasingly difficult when the contradiction lies between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, as, for example, in regard to the baptism of Edwin; or again when, without actual contradiction, they present a widely different account of the same event. The narrative of Bede on the one hand, and the Irish and Welsh annals on the other, have preserved accounts of the Battle of Chester which have very little in common but are supplementary. The problem becomes still more complicated when two more or less contemporary Latin records from a neighbouring area offer variant versions of a single event, as in the vision ascribed by both Bede and the anonymous monk of Whitby to Edwin before he acquired the Northumbrian throne and while he was a fugitive at the court of the East Anglian king Raedwald. To what extent are the two traditions independent of one another? Which is the

INTRODUCTIO N

older? From what source did Bede and the monk acquire their versions? Dr Colgrave has scrutinised the two stories and traced the channels by which the tradition has probably reached Whitby from Canterbury. I have suggested a possible additional channel from Lindsey. The difficulty involved in assessing the relative value of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sources becomes even greater when wide inter­ vals of time have elapsed between the dates of the recording of these sources. The Latin History of the Britons by Nennius, which claims that Edwin was baptised by a British priest, was probably written nearly a century later than Bede’s account which claims that he was baptised by Paulinus, who had been sent to Canterbury by Pope Gregory the Great. Yet there seems little doubt that the Celtic claim of Nennius, which is made also in the Annales Cambriae, and doubtless ultimately from the same source, is derived from a written record made nearly a century earlier than Bede’s narrative. On the other hand twelfth-century traditions claiming that Edwin’s early youthful exile was spent at the Christian court of Gwynedd in north-west Wales are recorded from a source the tradition of which has some claims to our consideration. The lost northern sources for the History of the Britons of Nennius are brought to light by Professor Jackson, partly by linguistic technique. By an examination of the British (Welsh) forms and the proper names in this narrative and in the Annales Cambriae which come from the same ultimate source, he has sug­ gested that the original nucleus may have consisted of some lost northern notes recorded in a scriptorium in a North British milieu in the early seventh century, and that they were incorporated, to­ gether with much information concerning the relations between Britons and Angles, in a lost Northern History, compiled in the second half of the eighth century in a scriptorium where the affairs of Bemicia were of considerable interest. He has further shown that this lost northern history may have been incorporated, directly or indirectly—he is inclined to think directly—into Nennius’s History of the Britons. M r Hunter Blair’s study again demonstrates the relevance of well-authenticated records, made as late as the twelfth century, for early Border history. In a close analysis of the History of the Kings, attributed to Symeon of Durham, he demonstrates the unique value of the part which is composed in the form of annals for the *5

INTRODUCTION

period when the lost northern annals appear to cease as an indepen­ dent document, to the time when the lost northern history continues the record from quite different sources, Anglian in interest. Our evidence does not point to a scriptorium on the Welsh Border of so early a date as that in which the lost northern annals were recorded. We have seen, however, that Nennius's History of the Britons probably dates from the early ninth century (cf. p. 51 below), and in fact all our traditions of the Britons of southern Scotland are contained in manuscripts which were transcribed in Wales, probably while still oral in form. These manuscripts were perhaps written first early in the ninth century. The earliest part of the Annales Cambriae, on the other hand, does not represent con­ temporary annals recorded in Wales, but is believed to have been compiled from a lost chronicle, on which the principal sets of Irish annals are also based—the Annals of Ulster, of Tigemach (from Clonmacnoise) and of Inisfalien (from Munster). Dr Colgrave has made a much-needed study of the early North­ umbrian document by an anonymous monk of Whitby who appears either to have been a contemporary of Bede, or to have lived at no great interval of time from him, and who, in his Life of Pope St Gregory the Great, gives us an account of the conversion of King Edwin by St Paulinus of Canterbury which is strangely like that left us by Bede himself. The relevance of this important early bio­ graphy for our Border studies lies chiefly in the fact that St Paulinus had been sent to Canterbury by Pope Gregory himself, and the part claimed for him in the conversion of the Northumbrian king is, in the eyes of the Whitby monk, one of his hero's greatest achieve­ ments. Its record is, moreover, an act of pietas, since it was written in the monastery of which King Edwin's grand-daughter was abbess at the time. The relationship of this narrative to that of Bede is particularly interesting since the general historical level of the Life is relatively high. In a note on Dewi Sant, the Welsh form for the name of St David, Professor Dickins traces the form of the name, both as it occurs in early kalendars compiled on the Western Border, or under western influence, and also as it occurs in combination with English placename elements in place-names on the Welsh Border. The Leofric Missal from Glastonbury, charters, bishops’ registers, and other early legal documents containing place-names in which the saint's name is compounded with Anglo-Saxon forms (church, walle, 16

INTRODUCTION

*spring stow) provide interesting evidence for the cult of the saint in the Border country at a period earlier than that of his earliest Life. This Life was composed by Rhigyfarch, son of Bishop Sulien of St Davids in Pembrokeshire in the late eleventh century, at a time when Saxon architecture and art styles must have been known on the Western Border. The study of early church architecture and its regional features by Dr and Mrs Taylor links the Northern and Western Border by a concrete subject. Their account of the Border churches shows that on the English side of the Border very little has remained that can be regarded as of distinctly British type, although until the dis­ astrous fire of 1181 Glastonbury must have provided a notable exception. The excavations at Whitby have shown evidence of domestic arrangements of Celtic type, with small cells instead of a dormitory; and traces of the early vallum monasterii can be seen at Coldingham and Old Melrose. The scarcity of remains of Celtic or British type need not be regarded as evidence that the earlier churches suffered immediate destruction, since this was certainly not the case at Glastonbury, and since very few even of the early Anglo-Saxon churches have escaped replacement in Norman or later times, either in the Border districts or elsewhere. Combined with their study of buildings, the Taylors have demonstrated the immediate relevance of the study of stone sculpture and of other forms of ornament. Sometimes the sculptured monuments have survived when buildings have not, and in other instances the ornament gives an important clue to the existence of local schools or foreign influence. Professor Brooke has sought to discover the state of affairs on the South Welsh Border in the late eleventh century by analysing the documents of Gloucester Abbey, which have been long used, but of which the true value as evidence has never been determined ; and also the documents of Llancarfan. From the latter also he has obtained some more clues about the legendary material available at this period. Incidentally he has something to say on the early Welsh bishops, and in addition on the appropriation by Llandaff of Llancarfan charters. I myself, less successful than my colleagues, have stated rather than solved my problems. I might well, indeed, have hesitated for this reason to include my contributions were it not that I am con­ vinced of the importance of demonstrating the wealth of Celtic 17

CCS

INTRODUCTIO N

traditional material, some of it of apparently high quality; and also of stressing its interest and importance, not only in its own right, but sometimes as producing material that conflicts with the accepted Anglo-Saxon sources, sometimes supplementary to it. Bede himself frequently stresses his dependence on oral tradition, and in these cases his sources must often have been similar to the Celtic sources which have come down to us through other channels. Not infrequently these Celtic sources and Bede’s oral traditions serve to throw light on one another. This is especially noteworthy in regard to the Battle of Chester, where Bede appears to have been drawing upon some story culti­ vated in monastic circles, most probably in western Mercia. Bede himself tells us of other oral traditions, Mercian in origin, furnished to him by Pecthelm, which he has incorporated into his History. In the province of Lindsey, itself a Mercian possession at this time, oral ecclesiastical traditions were evidently cultivated at the monasteries of both Bardney and Partney. Penda’s son Æthelred retired to Bardney to end his life as a monk after ruling for some thirty years1 as king of Mercia, and this royal presence, and the special favour which Bede tells us had always been bestowed on this monastery by Æthelred and his queen, must have done much to quicken its intellectual life. Eddius tells us that St Wilfrid resorted to Æthelred at Bardney immediately on his return from his visit to Rome. It may be felt that in the title of our book we have given an unduly wide interpretation to the term Border, and that some of our studies lead us rather farther afield than our title would suggest. The most significant achievement of St Colmân was in Ireland. Symeon of Durham’s History of the Kings comprises material covering the whole of early Anglo-Saxon history. Yet Symeon’s work belongs essentially to Northumbria, and his importance lies chiefly in the material which he has preserved for us from lost early northern sources, some of which is not recorded elsewhere, and must have been originally written in a scriptorium on or near the Border. St Colmân, after the Council of Whitby in 634, passed northwards into Scotland, and then established in western Ireland a community which was virtually an extension of the abbey of Lindisfarne. Without interpreting the term too narrowly I suggest that it 1 On the number, see W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), p. 266, no. 4, and the reference to Plummer there cited. 18

INTRODUCTION

is in general along this dividing line between the British and the early Saxon kingdoms that the sources for their early relations could best be studied, and that we should do well to focus our researches on them. In accordance with this belief I have avoided any attempt to restrict the contributors to a narrow uniformity of plan, and within the wider framework outlined above I have made no attempt to enforce consistency, judging it best to impose no hampering con­ ditions, whether of approach or conclusions, but to leave each writer free to express his own views, and I have felt honoured in the co-operation of these scholars who have been willing to pool their researches. Where we are still only on the threshold of our subject the chief value of investigations such as these must lie in the recognition and isolation of the problems rather than in offering premature solutions to the questions raised, or in attempting as yet to synthesise results.

19

2-2

I On the Northern B ritish Section in Nennius BY K E N N E T H J A C K S O N ABBREVIATIONS

ASE. F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1947). BBCS. The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies. CA. I. Williams, Canu Aneirin (Cardiff, 1938). CEWT. R. Bromwich,1The Character of the Early Welsh Tradition *, in Studies in Early British History, ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 83 ff. CLH. I. Williams, Canu Llywarch Hen (Cardiff, 1953). GL. H. M. and N. K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1932). HB. Nennius, Historia Brittonum, edited by T. Mommsen, Chronica Minora Saeculi IV-VII, vol. h i , h i ff. (vol. xm of Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auct. Antiquiss.\ Berlin, 1898). HE. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (see P. below). HW. J. H. Lloyd, A History of Wales, 3rd ed. (London, 1939). LEWP. I. Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin, 1944). LHEB. K. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953)M. The original source of the Saxon Genealogies, see p. 23. NHB. F. Lot, Nennius et VHistoria Brittonum (Paris, 1934). NV. H. Zimmer, Nennius Vindicatus (Berlin, 1893). OEN. H. M. Chadwick, The Origin of the English Nation (Cam­ bridge, 1907). P. C. Plummer, Verierabilis Baedae Opera Historica (Oxford, 1896; reprint of 1946). PBA. The Proceedings of the British Academy. SEBC. Studies in the Early British Church, ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1958). SEBH. Studies in Early British History, ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cam­ bridge, 1954). VSB. A .W .W ade-Evans, Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae (Cardiff, 1944). ZCP. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie. ZN. R. Thurneysen, review of Zimmer’s Nennius Vindicatus, in Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, xxvili (1896), 80 ff. 20

ON THE N O R THE RN B R IT ISH SECTION IN NEN N IU S

I

The chief source of information on northern Britain in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum1 is the section known as the ‘Northern History and Saxon Genealogies’, extending from the last sentence of chap. 5Ô2 to the end of chap. 65. The Saxon Genealogies, as they are called, occupy from chap. 57 to the last sentence but one in chap. 61, and they seem to constitute an interpolation into the Northern History. Without them the Northern History runs smoothly from the mention of Ida son of Eobba, first king of Bernicia, at the end of chap. 56 to the passage at the end of chap. 61 telling how he reigned in Northumbria for twelve years, and apparently intending to say that he united Deira and Bernicia under his rule. The interpolated Genealogies begin with the pedigree of Ida himself, followed by the names of his sons and some of their descendants as far as Ecgfrith (who was killed in 685), and it is obvious that the purpose of inserting them at this precise point was to illustrate the history of Ida’s family. But they contain information on much more than the family of Ida. A summary of this section of the Historia Brittonum would be as follows : Chap. 56 : Genealogy of Ida, from Woden. Names of Ida’s twelve [read seven] sons. Ethelfrith son of Ethelric son of Ida, and the names of his seven sons ; one of them, Oswy, father of three sons including Ecgfrith. Ecgfrith fought his cousin Birdei king of the Piets and was defeated and killed, and the ‘Saxones Ambronum’ never raised tribute from the Piets since that event, called the Battle of Linn Garan. Oswy’s two wives were Riemmelth [read Rieinmelth] daughter of Royth son of Rum [read Run] and Eanfled daughter of Edwin [king of Deira]. Chap. 58 : Genealogy of the kings of Kent, from Hengist to Ecgbert son of Erconbert. Chap. 59 : Genealogy of the kings of East Anglia, from Woden to ‘Elric* [mistake for Ælfwald, see below]. 1 I use this term throughout in the normal sense, meaning the work compiled at some time in the early part of the ninth century. Some authorities, notably Lot, mean by it a hypothetical older kernel of this work. This unnecessary confusion is avoided here. Note that all quotations from HB. are cited from Mommsen’s edition (see abbreviations), which is much better than Lot’s. 2 The section immediately preceding, that is, the whole of chapter 56 down to this point, the exploits of King Arthur, was probably not part of the Northern History; see my article in R. S. Loomis, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1959), P- 6 . 21

ON T H E N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

Chap. 6o : Genealogy of the kings of Mercia, from Woden to Pybba, who had twelve sons of whom the writer knew the names of Penda and Eowa. Genealogy of Ethelred, from Pybba. Genealogy of Ethelbald, from Pybba. Genealogy of Ecgfrith, from Pybba. Chap. 61 : Genealogy of the kings of Deira, from Woden to Edwin. Edwin’s two sons Osfrith and Eadfrith killed with him at the Battle of Meicen, since when none of his descendants have reigned, all being killed by Cadwallon king of Gwynedd. Genealogy of Oslaf, from Oswy. Genealogy of Eadbert and his brother bishop Ecgbert, from Ida. Thurneysen first pointed out,1 and Sisam has since discussed in detail,2 the English source for this collection of genealogies. It is a compilation found in the British Museum manuscript Cotton Vespasian B vi, f. 108 ff.3 Sisam shows that this is of Mercian origin, probably written at Lichfield and belonging to about the year 812, in the reign of Coenwulf, the last king of Mercia whom it mentions. It gives the following pedigrees in the following order: Northumbria (1) Edwin [d. 633] son of Ælle, of the line of Deira, back to Woden son of Frealaf. (2) Ecgfrith [d. 685] son of Oswy, of the line of Bernicia, back through Ida to Woden son of Frealaf. (3) Ceolwulf [abdicated 737] son of Cuthwine, back to Ida, and (3 a) his first cousin Eadberht [abdicated 758] son of Eata the younger brother of Cuthwine. (4) Alhred [reigned 765-74] son of Eanwine, back to Ida. Mercia (5) Ethelred [d. 704] son of Penda son of Pybba, back to Woden son of Frealaf. (6) Ethelbald [d. 757] son of Alwih son of Eowa (brother of Penda) son of Pybba. (7) Ecgfrith [reigned July-December 796] son of Offa, back to Eowa son of Pybba. (8) Coenwulf [796-821] son of Cuthbert, back to Pybba. Lindsey (9) Aldfrith [known to have been living between 786 and 796]* son of Eata, back to Geat, great-great-great-grandfather of Woden. Kent (10) Ethelbert [reigned 725-62] son of Wihtred, back to Woden son of Frealaf. East Anglia (11) Ælfwald [d. 749] son of Aldwulf, back to Woden son of Frealaf. As already noted, the document as it stands in the Vespasian MS. was probably written and brought up to date about the year 1 Z N . p. 100. 2 P BA . xxxix (1953), 288 ff. 8 Edited by Sweet, ‘T he Oldest English T exts’ (Early English Texts Society, Lxxxiii (London, 1885)), 169 ff. Also in certain later MSS. (see Sisam, loc. cit.)t which probably derive from the Vespasian collection and are of no importance for present purposes. 4 See Stenton, ‘ Lindsey and its Kings *(in Essays in History Presented to R. L. Poole, ed. H. W. C. Davis, Oxford, 1927), pp. 140 f. 22

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H SEC TIO N IN N E N N IU S

812. There is, however, good reason to think that it derived from a slightly earlier lost copy of the end of the eighth century, itself a Mercian compilation1 (called here M.). Zimmer12 (who knew only the version of M. in Nennius) thought it was as old as 685-6, and that anything it contains subsequent to that time is an interpola­ tion, but this has been effectively refuted by Sisam.3 Thurneysen4 believed it belonged to the middle of the eighth century, with later additions, including that of the pedigree of Ecgbert of Mercia in 796, but his reasons are unclear (perhaps because Ælfwald of East Anglia died in 749 and Ethelbert of Kent in 762). Sisam very pro­ perly points out5—what should be sufficiently obvious—that in a collection of this type the argument that any given pedigree must have been drawn up in the reign of the latest king it mentions has validity only if a descendant of his also reigned. In fact, as Sisam remarks, none of the last kings of Northumbria or Mercia men­ tioned in the Vespasian MS. was succeeded by a son; and one may add (though Sisam does not mention Thurneysen) that this was also true of Ælfwald of East Anglia and Ethelbert of Kent.6 Actually, it will be pointed out below that M. must really have been put together in 796, or at any rate not before 787. There is not the slightest doubt that the Nennian ‘ Saxon Genea­ logies* come from the same source as does the Vespasian collec­ tion; in fact, from M. Apart from the presence in Nennius’s Saxon Genealogies of a good deal of additional material, which will be examined presently, the agreement is remarkably close. The chief differences are as follows : (a) Nennius has the pedigrees in a dif­ ferent order, that is (to give them the numbers allotted to the Vespasian sections above), 2, 10, 11, 5, 6, 7, 1, 3 a. (6) Nennius omits the pedigrees of Ceolwulf (3), Alfred (4), Coenwulf (8), and Aldfrith (9). Ceolwulf may easily have been skipped accidentally because his pedigree from his grandfather upwards is the same as the next one, that of his cousin Eadbert (3 a). One may suggest the absence of Alhred is due to the fact that Vespasian makes him 1 See Sisam, op. cit. pp. 293 ff. Lot (N H B . p. 93), but not Sisam, gives a further piece of evidence for its Mercian origin—the interest in Offa shown by the reference to his killing the tyrant Beornred and becoming king of Mercia. 2 N V . p. 78. 8 Op. cit. p. 294; cf. 309. 4 Z N . p. 101 ; cf. ZCP. i, 164, where he says the contents suggest 748 or 749. 6 Op. cit. p. 292 n. 4. 4 On Ælfwald see Stenton in P. Clemoes (editor), The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1959), pp. 43 ff. ; and on Ethelbert, the same author, A SE . p. 205.

23

ON THE N O R TH E RN B R IT I S H SEC TI ON IN N E N N I U S

descend from Edric son of Ida, whereas the Saxon Genealogies make Eadbert descend from this Edric instead of from Ocg son of Ida; after the name ‘Edric* the Saxon Genealogies in Nennius wrongly continued with the pedigree of Eadbert instead of that of Alhred, thus jumping over the latter. On Coenwulf, see below. Sisam has made it probable that Aldfrith (9) was not in M. but was an addition by the Vespasian MS.1 (c) Except in the case of the Mercian genealogies 5, 6, and 7, the names in the pedigrees are given in descending order (in the biblical manner, A genuit B ), whereas the Vespasian collection gives them in ascending order (A son of B). (d) English names are spelt to some extent in a more or less Welsh fashion, and are sometimes confused and corrupted. The most notable instance of the latter is the fact that the last king of East Anglia, Ælfwald son of Aldwulf, appears in Nennius as Elric ; Thurneysen suggests2 that this arose from a miscopying, the scribe’s eye having caught the name of Aldwulf’s father EÖilric (which he had already just copied as Edric) instead of that of his son. Again, the Saxon Genealogies in Nennius bring the pedigree of Kent down only as far as Ecgbert (d. 673) son of Erconbert, whereas the Vespasian collection has two further generations, Ethelbert son of Wihtred; but Thurneysen proposes3 that the scribe of the Historia Brittonum was confused by the similarity of the names Ecgbert and Ethelbert. (e) The Saxon Genealogies in Nennius have minor confusions between some names in the very early parts of the pedigrees of Deira and Bernicia, probably due to their having stood side by side in M.4 (/) The order of certain names in the Kentish pedigree in Vespasian differs from that in Nennius, but this is no doubt the result of a miscopying by the Vespasian scribe.6 (g) Nennius’s Saxon Genealogies are tràced back only to Woden, but in the Vespasian collection they go back further to his father Frealaf (except in the case of Lindsey, which goes still further). Sisam shows that this is due to the compiler of Vespasian.6 (h) The Saxon Genealogies give a pedigree of one Oslaph, descendant of Osguid (Oswy, great-grandson of Ida) ; and to that of Eadberht (3 a) they add the name of his brother bishop Ecgbert. These items will be dealt with below, where it will be proposed that they were not in M. 1 Op. cit. p. 309. a Z N . p. 101. 8 Ibid. 4 So Sisam, op. cit. p. 293. 6 See Sisam, op. cit. p. 234; his suggestion that the Welsh source corrected the pedigree by reference to Bede is less likely. 6 Op. cit. p. 324.

24

ON TH E N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H SECTI ON IN N E N N IU S

In sum, the general opinion that Nennius’s Saxon Genealogies and the Vespasian MS. derive from a common source must be correct. Now, in Nennius the last pedigree is that of Ecgfrith of Mercia, who reigned as under-king of Mercia, under his father Offa, from 787 till the latter’s death in July 796, and as sole king from then to December 796, whereas Vespasian continues the kings of Mercia with his successor Coenwulf, who was king when Vespasian B vi was written about 812. It has been remarked already that in a collection of pedigrees of kings, the date of the last king in any one pedigree is of no significance if none of his direct descendants became kings. But this does not apply, of course, to the last name of all in any given collection; in this case the inference that the whole body was compiled in his time is reasonable and in­ deed imperative, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Ecgfrith left no descendants, but it is quite clear that the English source of Nennius’s Saxon Genealogies, that is to say M .y must have been put together in his time, and that the Vespasian MS. brought this up to date.1 M. is therefore to be dated in the second half of the year 796, or perhaps between 787 and the end of 796 ; it has already been noted that it must have been of Mercian origin. The section of the Historia Brittonum called the Northern His­ tory, into which the Saxon Genealogies were interpolated, consists of a résumé of events in the history of Northumbria and of the Britons of the North from the time of Ida to the killing of Ecgfrith by the Piets at Nechtansmere in 685 and the death of St Cuthbert in 687. The important passage here is in chap. 65 : Ecgfrid, filius Osbiu, regnavit novem annis (in tempore illius sanctus Cudbert obiit in insula Medcaut). Ipse est qui fecit bellum contra Pictos et corruit ibi. According to Zimmer2 this passage dates the compiling of the document to the year 679, because 679 was the ninth year of Ecgfrith’s reign. He was therefore forced to treat the mention of St Cuthbert’s death and of the killing of Ecgfrith as interpolations, and was unable to give any satisfactory explanation of why Cuth­ bert is said to have died ‘in his time’. This date 679 was widely accepted,3 and was regarded as of fundamental significance as the date of an important and very early source of the Historia Brit1 Cf. Lot, op. cit. pp. 92 f. 2 N V . pp. 95 f. 3 So Thumeysen, Z N . pp. 84, 86, etc.; ZCP. xx, 122.

25

ON T H E N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

tonum; but it has since been demolished by Lot. As he notes,1 regnavit novem annis is erroneous, since Ecgfrith reigned fifteen years, and he agrees with Chadwick12 that the mistake lies in a mis­ reading of an original xm i as vim. Allowing for a miscalculation of one year, ‘reigned fourteen years’ would exactly suit the mention of Ecgfrith’s death at Nechtansmere, which would therefore not be an interpolation at all. Further, the mistaken statement that Cuthbert died ‘in his time ’ is satisfactorily accounted for by Lot,3 who traces it to a careless reading of Bede, H E. iv, 27, where he says that Ecgfrith made Cuthbert bishop of Lindisfarne in the year that he himself died. Consequently, the reasons for dating the compilation of the Northern History in the year 679 disappear. In point of fact the date must be a great deal later. A large part of the Northern History, namely from the last sentence in chap. 61 to half-way through chap. 65, consists of notes on the history of the kings of Northumbria from Ida to Ecgfrith, greatly expanded with additional matter of northern interest. Now these notes (but not the additions) appear to derive in part from or to be based on a short English document known as the Moore Memoranda which is found in the Moore MS. of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica; and if so they presuppose the existence of that document.4 It has been shown by Hunter Blair5*that this was composed in the year 737,® and it follows that the original of the Northern History cannot be earlier than this date if it is indeed derived from the Moore Memoranda. Besides that, Lot has made out a case7 for the view that certain 1 N H B . p. 79 n. 2. * OEN. p. 345. 3 N H B . p. 205 n. 5. 4 See L ot’s argument, N H B . p. 73 ; and for a discussion of the Memoranda, see P. H unter Blair, ‘The Moore Memoranda on Northumbrian History’, in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (ed. C. Fox and B. Dickins; Cambridge, 1950), PP- 245 ff. T he derivation, claimed by Lot as certain, cannot be regarded as an established fact—it could be argued that both might come independently from an older king-list—but the two agree so closely in detail that I believe it to be probable. It is true that the Moore MS. itself reads xv, not xiv, as the years of Ecgfrith’s reign in the passage mentioned above ; but there is no real reason why a subsequent intermediate copyist should not have written xiv for xv by inadver­ tence, later misread as above. 6 Op. cit. 4 Lot, op. cit. p. 79, oddly dates it 774, but this is due to a wrong identifica­ tion of the pater Ecgbert whom it mentions. 7 Op. cit. pp. 72 f. But Lot’s list is exaggerated and inaccurate ; for instance, the compiler evidently knew of the struggle of Oswald and Cadwallon, and of the death of Ecgfrith, from native sources apart from Bede ; Oswy made no expedi­ tion against Iudeu in Bede (or in Nennius, for that m atter; Lot seems muddled here). 26

ON THE NORTHERN BRITISH SECTION IN NENNIUS

other notes on Northumbrian events were taken by the compiler of the original Northern History from Bede, who finished his Historia Ecclesiastica in 731. There is good reason, therefore, to think that the original Northern History used by Nennius was put together not earlier than the 730,s ; and it may be significant that two of its main sources are found together in the Moore MS. 2 Both the Northern History and the Saxon Genealogies contain a good deal of information which is obviously of Northern British origin. Before discussing the history of these items of British provenance, it will be convenient to deal with the forms of the names and some points connected with the events they describe. Chap. 61, ‘I d a .. .joined Din Guayrdiguurth Berneich*. It is clear that Din Guayrdi here, ‘the fort of Guayrdi*, is the same place as Din Guoaroyy ‘the fort of Guoaroy*, in chap. 63, where it is identified as Bamburgh. The reading of the two best MSS. (the Harleian recen­ sion) is Din Guayrdi guurth Berneichy which is duly accepted in Mommsen’s edition of Nennius, but Lot gives instead the corrupt passage from an inferior group of MSS. (the so-called ‘Nennian recension*, = MSS. D, C, G, and L) which read Din Gueirm (or Gueirni or Gueirin) et gurd Birnech. As this British name is not otherwise known it is not easy to be certain which reading is cor­ rect. The d in the first may well be a misreading of an improperly closed o1 or an ill-written w,2 but the reverse is also possible, that Din Guoaroy is for Din Guoardy.3 In favour of Din Guoaroy is the fact that the twelfth-century Irish MS. the Book of Leinster men­ tions4 an expedition by Fiachna son of Baetân (king of Ulster, d. 626) to Dun nGuaire i Saxanaib, ‘Dun Guaire in England*; which looks at first sight very much like the same place. If so, Guoaroy has been Hibernicised by assimilation to the Irish personal name Guaire. But according to the Annals of Ulster this Fiachna destroyed a place called Raith Guaili, ‘the fort of Guaile*, belong­ ing to Aed Bole, in 623, and this is so similar (with / by error for r) 1 So Phillimore, Y Cymmrodor, ix, 146 n. 1. 2 Cf. Osguid several times in H B . for *Osguiu or *Osguiot i.e. Oswy (A S. Osuiu). T he form Osbiu also occurring in H B . for Oswy represents Osuiu with the first u miscopied as b. 9 Cf. Eoguin for Edguin in chap. 63 in the next sentence. 4 Fo. 1900. 27

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H S EC TI ON IN N E N N I U S

that the same place must surely be meant. But Aed Bole was a king of Munster and had no connections with Bernicia, and it is there­ fore possible that i Saxanaib is a mistake. On the other hand Fiachna is said to have helped Aedân mac Gabrâin, king of Ddl Riada and opponent of Ethelfrith, against the English1 (i.e. Bernicia), so that a joint siege of Bamburgh by these two kings, though otherwise unknown, is not impossible. The readings suggest that if the o is right, not d, the name represents the Old Welsh element -guarui, Old Breton ~uuaroey -uuaroiy of unknown meaning, found in per­ sonal names,12 so that it would be Din Gwarwy in Middle Welsh. If Gwarwy is the correct form, Sir Ifor Williams proposes,3 however, that it is the Welsh word meaning ‘play’, and that there was an amphitheatre there; but this is very conjectural. If the readings Gueirm or Gueirni and Gueirin conceal the true form of the name, it is most likely to be Gueiriny which, as Williams notes, might be a derivative of the gwaer- apparently seen in Guayrdi\ the meaning of which is unknown. The whole problem is full of obscurities. The words guurth Berneichy variant gurd Birnechy are simply the Old Welsh for ‘to Bernicia’; Old Welsh guurthy gurthy gurdy Middle Welsh wrthy ‘to* and the native form of the name Bernicia, on which see LHEB. pp. 701 ff. Nennius thus appears to say that Ida joined Bamburgh to Bernicia, which is senseless, since it was there already and is in any case not a province. The later recension of HB. mentioned above reads iunxit arcem id est din Gueirm et gurd Birnech, quae duae regiones fuerunt, in una regione, id est Deur a Bernech, Anglice Deira et Bernicia ;4 ‘joined the fort, that is diny of Gueirm even unto Bernicia, which were two provinces, in one province, that is, Deur and Bernech, in English Deira and Bernicia’. This looks as if the original author was really trying to say that Ida joined Deira and Bernicia into one kingdom, that is, Northumbria (which is an anachronism, since it was his grandson Ethelfrith who first did this), and that Bamburgh 1 Cf. K. Meyer and A. Nutt, The Voyage of Bran (London, 1895), 1, 44. 2 Cf. J. BaudiS, Grammar of Early Welsh, part i; Philologica, II, supplement (Oxford, T he Philological Society, 1924), p. 37. 3 CA. p. xlv. 4 Din is Old Welsh for ‘fort*; a is Old Welsh a or ha, ‘an d ’; Deur is the Old Welsh for ‘D eira’, cf. Williams, op. cit. p. 340; and LH EB . pp. 419 f. 28

ON THE N O R TH E RN BR IT ISH SECTION IN NE NNIU S

is in this kingdom, but that the text became corrupted very early. Possibly the original reading was iunxit Deur guurth Berneich, quae duae regiones fuerunt, in una regione, id est Deur a Berneich, Anglice Deira et Bernicia, with an interlinear note something like ubi arxy id est diny Guairoi (or whatever the original reading of this name was), referring to Berneich ; then at a stage before this material reached Nennius, some copyist who had become very muddled substituted the name of the fort for that of the province; the Harleian recension of Nennius ‘unravelled’ the tangle by simply cutting all the rest away; and the generally inferior ‘Nennian recension ’, in which the words are a marginal insertion, copied them in from some manuscript in which they were preserved. The unnecessary et before gurd may be due to a , ‘and*, in Deur a Bernech. Outigirny the Northern History continues, ‘fought bravely against the race of the English at that time’ (that is, during the reign of Ida, 547-59). He is quite unknown to us, but it is obvious that he was familiar in native British tradition at the period of Nennius’s source. The reading of both MSS. is Dutigirnybut there is no such name in Welsh,1 and there is no doubt whatever that Sir Ifor Williams’s emendation,2 Outigirny is correct; this occurs elsewhere in Old Welsh,3 and appears in its later Welsh spelling as Eudeyrn. This is another instance of the confusion of o and d mentioned above. Talhaern TataguenyNeirinf Taliessiny Bluchbardyand d a n called Gueinth Guaut ‘were all famous in British poetry at the same time*, says the Northern History. Talhaern is an Old Welsh spelling for the name Talhaearny ‘ Iron Brow’, and his epithet, later Tad Awenf means ‘Father of Inspiration’; Neirin is the early form4 of the name Aneiriny the meaning of which is uncertain (it may be from the Latin Nigrinus) ; Taliessin is ‘Beautiful Brow ’ ; Bluchbard seems to mean ‘Beardless Poet’;5 Cian means ‘Puppy*. As to Gueinth 1 If there were a name meaning ‘Black L ord' it would be Dubtigim in Old Welsh, and a spelling without b would not be probable in the Harleian recension. L ot’s Clutigen or Clutigent (N H B . p. 71) is an impossibility, like many of Lot’s essays in Celtic philology. There neither is nor could be such a name. 2 B B C S. vu, 387. 3 Genealogy x, and in the later form Eutigim, in the Book of Llandaf, p. 140, etc. 4 Cf. Williams, CA. pp. xv and lxxxvii. 6 Cf. Breton bloucyht ‘beardless’, ‘sm ooth’.

29

ON T HE N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

Guauty a very easy emendation is Guenith, which would make his epithet ‘Wheat of Song*, presumably a way of saying that he was a master of poetry, and this is no doubt right.1 Of these, Aneirin and Taliesin were of course famous North British poets who flourished in the latter part of the sixth century; Talhaeam and Cian are both referred to in early Welsh tradition as poets,2 though nothing is known of their work ; and ‘Bluchbard *is quite unknown (the sug­ gestion that the name represents Llywarch Hen cannot be taken seriously). This passage on the sixth-century northern poets might well have been put together quite late, by someone who knew such of their works as still survived, but there is no reason why it should not be early, and indeed the form Neirin suggests it may well be. Mailcunus was king among the Britons in regime Guenedotaey and his ancestor Cunedag had come to Wales with his eight sons from Manau Guotodin in the North and expelled the Irish. On the name Old Welsh Mailcunf Middle Welsh Maelgzvn, ‘Princely Hound \ see LHEB. p. 624. Mailcun, king of Gwynedd (N. Wales) died in 547 according to the Annales Cambriae. The modern Gwynedd would be *Gained (which could be spelt also *Guened) in Old Welsh, from British *Vëneday but it seems not to occur; documents from the Old Welsh period call it in Latin Guenedota3 or Guenedota regio4 and the inhabitants Guinedoti5 or Guinedotae genSy* with an adjective Guinedoticus? These are all derivatives of an adjectival stem, British Vënedot-.8 This is found in Welsh, with syncope, as Gwyndody but the name seems to have become stereo­ typed in early Welsh Latin in the unsyncopated form *Guinedot-.9 Cunedagy Modern Welsh Cunedday occurs in this form here only; otherwise it is Old and Middle Welsh Cuneda10 (perhaps British *Counodagosy ‘Good Lord*, see Y Cymmrodory xxvm, 92 n.); the name lacks syncope of the composition-vowel.11 The preservation of the old final -g is a very archaic feature, and not likely to be later than the middle of the eighth century at latest, very probably earlier.12 Manau Guotodiny Modern Welsh Manaw Gododdiny that 1 For other possibilities see Williams, LEW P. p. 75. * Cf. Williams, CA. p. lxxxvii. 3 Armâtes Cambriae, s.a. 547 and 798. 4 HB. chs. 61, 62, 64, 65; Annates Cambriae, s.a. 809. 6 V SB . p. 72 twice. 8 V SB . p. 74. 7 V SB. p. 186. 8 Which actually occurs, see LH EB. p. 655. 9 See LH EB. pp. 647 ff. and 652 ff. 10 See LH EB . p. 445. 11 See LH EB. pp. 647-9. 18 See LH EB . p. 458. 30

ON THE NO R T H E R N B R IT I S H SEC TIO N IN NE N N IU S

is, ‘Manaw in Gododdin’, seems to have been a district round the head of the Firth of Forth, an outpost of the great province of Gododdin, the area between the Forth and Hadrian’s Wall. Manaw is from British *Manava or *Manaviayand Guotodin comes regularly from the British tribal-name * Votâdïni which occurs in Ptolemy’s map as Otadini in this part of Scotland. On the story of Cunedda and his sons see J. E. Lloyd, HW. I, 116 ff. ; H. M. Chadwick, Early Scotland (Cambridge, 1949), pp. 147 ff. Chapter 63, four kings, Urbgen, Riderch Hen, Guallauc, and Morcant fought Hussa, king of Bernicia; and Theodric, king of Bernicia, fought Urbgen and his sons, who besieged the enemy in the island of Metcaud; but Urbgen was betrayed through the envy of Morcant, and killed. Urbgen is the famous hero of early Welsh poetry, king of Rheged,1 celebrated by the poet Taliesin mentioned above. The name occurs again in chap. 63, spelt in the Nennian recension of Nennius as Urbeghen, and in the Chartres MS. of Nennius, preface, as Urbagen ; in Middle Welsh it is Urien.12 Riderch Hen, ‘ Riderch the Old’, also called Riderch Hen in the Old Welsh Genealogies, is familiar in early Welsh poetry and tradition as Ryderch Hael, ‘Rhydderch the Generous’, king of Strathclyde at the end of the sixth century, whose historicity is guaranteed by the mention of him in the Life of S t Columba. Guallauc, wrongly written Guallanc in Nennius, is the Gwallawc son of Lleennawc of early Welsh poetry, a prince of the North but not satisfactorily located.3 Morcant, Middle Welsh Morgant, was another of the lords celebrated in the Welsh poetry relating to the Men of the North, likewise of unknown provenance.4 The island of Metcaud occurs again in chap. 65 as insula Medcaut where St Cuthbert died; Holy Island (Lindisfarne) appears to be meant, where Cuthbert was buried, though he actually died on the Farne Islands. In chap. 63 one of the two MSS. of the Harleian recension reads Medcaut, the other Metcaud; in chap. 65 both read Medcaut ; and the name for Lindisfarne occurs in early Irish as Inis Medcoit, Insula Medgoet, 1 T he country round the Solway Firth, probably. 2 On this name and its forms see LH EB. pp. 439, 648. 8 Williams’s attempt to place him in Elmet (Canu Taliesin ; Cardiff, i960; p. 101) seems to me to rest too heavily on a doubtful interpretation of a doubtful line in a difficult poem. 4 On the early poems dealing with these people see Williams, LEW P. pp. 63 ff. ; idem, ‘T he Poems of Llywarch Hen* {Proceedings of the British Academy, xviii (1932), 269 ff.); R. Bromwich, C EW T.

31

ON T HE N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

etc.1 These forms suggest that Old Welsh Medcaut is correct, which would be Middle Welsh MedgawtyModern Welsh Meddgod. Eadlfered Flesaur2 reigned twelve years in Berneich and another twelve in Deur; and gave Dinguoaroy to his wife Bebhab (sic), whence it is called Bebbanburh. Eadlfered is Ethelfrith, grandson of Ida, king of Northumbria 593-616, and Flesaur means ‘The Twister’, ‘The Artful Dodger’.3 He is Ædlfred Flesaur in the Saxon Genealogies, chap. 57; and in later Welsh tradition he appears as Edelflet Fleissawc.4 Berneich, Deur, and Dinguoaroy have already been discussed. The text then continues that Eoguin (sic, read Edguin) son of Alii reigned seventeen years and occupied Elmet and expelled its king Certic. This is Edwin son of Ælle of Deira, king of Northumbria 616-32. Elmet is a district still known by this name, on the fringes of the Pennines south-west of York, and was an independent British kingdom until it was conquered by Edwin. There was another Elmet, in Wales, Modern Welsh Elfed in Carmarthenshire. Certic is the name better known in Old Welsh sources5 as Ceretic, from an older British Coroticos (the name of the king of Dumbarton written to by St Patrick) or *Caraticos. Certic for Ceretic may well be a genuine form, with syncope, as seen in the Anglo-Saxon Cerdic borrowed from it,6 and used by Bede in his mention of this very king,7 where he tells how St Hilda’s father Hereric was living as an exile sub rege Brettonum Cerdice during his daughter’s infancy (and therefore soon after 614, when she was born). He is generally identified, with reason, with the Ceretic who is given by the Annales Cambriae as dying in 616. Chapter 63 continues with a note, in the Harleian recension, on the baptism of Eanfled daughter of Edwin and all her people, and of Edwin with 12,000 of his, saying that ‘if anyone wants to know who baptised them, it was Rum map Urbgen who baptised them ’. The ‘Nennian recension’ gives the name as Run mep Urbeghen, and says that sic mihi Renchidus episcopus et Elbobdus episcoporum sanctissimus tradiderunt. The word map, wrongly written mep in the ‘Nennian recension’, is the Old Welsh for ‘son’, Modern Welsh 1 See E. Hogan, Onomasticon Goedelicum (Dublin, 1910), p. 467. 8 So MS. K of the Harleian recension; Mommsen accepts the inferior Eadfered Flesaurs of MS. H. * See Williams, Canu Aneirin, p. xv. 4 Y Cymmrodor, vii, 127. 6 H B . c. 37; Annales Cambriae, s.a. 616; Old Welsh Genealogy xxvi, xxxii; etc. • See LH EB. pp. 613 f. 7 HE. iv, 23.

32

ON THE NORTHERN BRITISH SECTION IN NENNIUS

mab; Urbgen and XJrbeghen have already been discussed. The person in question is Run, Modern Welsh Rhuny mentioned in the early Welsh poetry dealing with Urien of Rheged in a context wholly consistent with his having been one of the latter’s sons who fought the English with him.1The form Rum in the Harleian recen­ sion here and in chap. 57 (see below) is corrupt, and is doubtless due to a misreading of the contraction-mark for n as that for m. Eanfled was of course baptised by Paulinus, in 626, and her father Edwin by the same bishop in 627 ;2 but there was evidently a tradi­ tion current among the Britons that it was Rhun son of Urien who was responsible. The same tradition is expressed in the Annales Cambriaet s.a. 626 ( = 627), Etguin baptizatus est et Run filius Urbgen baptizavit eum. The two stories may be reconciled by sup­ posing that the baptism was a joint affair, on the part of Paulinus the emissary of Rome and a prominent northern British ecclesiastic of the royal family of the border kingdom of Rheged.3 There is no­ thing odd about Bede’s failure to mention Rhun, since he was notoriously hostile to the British Church and regularly suppressed any favourable reference to it; and on their part the Britons would not hasten to give the credit to Paulinus. In fact somebody who knew the tale in Bede made a clumsy attempt to reconcile the two, in the ‘Nennian recension*, by adding to the mention of Rhun a gloss which says id est Paulinus Eboracensis archiepiscopus. Pre­ sumably Rhun, a famous warrior and opponent of Bernicia along with his father in his youth, had entered the Church in his old age (there is nothing improbable about this), and it appears that he had forgiven his enemies. In the remaining two chapters of the Northern History, Nennius goes on to give details of the next three kings of Northumbria: Os­ wald (633-41), Oswy (of Bernicia, 641-55, of Northumbria 655— 70), and Ecgfrith (670-85). Of Oswald, he says ipse est Oswald Lamnguin, and tells that he killed Catguolaun, king Guenedotae regionisy in the battle of CatscauL Lamnguin means ‘Of the Bright Blade ’, Modern Welsh Llafnwyn. The form is perfectly regular, and the title is of a quite normal type (compare, for example, Osla Gyllellvawfy ‘Osla of the Big Knife’). However, Max Förster has 1 See I. Williams, CLH. pp. 15-16, 132, 137. 2 Bede, HE. 11, 9 and 14. 8 Cf. Thumeysen, Z N . p. 85 n. 1; Chadwick, GL. pp. 157 f. Lot treats the tale as entirely bogus (op. cit. pp. 15,116, etc.), but his scepticism is excessive and his attack on Thumeysen unwarranted.

3

33

CCS

ON T HE N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

suggested1 that the word should be emended to LaumgUin, *Of the White Hand *or ‘Of the Blessed Hand *, which would be a reference to his arm and hand which were cut off in the battle of ‘Maserfelth* and were preserved uncorrupted as a holy relic in Bede’s day at Bamburgh.2 The emendation is tempting, but perhaps scarcely justified in view of what has just been said ; if it is correct, it is to be noted that laumf ‘hand’, may be an archaic form.3 Catguolaun is spelt Catgublaun in the MSS., but the b here must be a miscopying of a rather open-topped o, just as Osbiu for Osuiu in chapters 57 and 65 has a miscopying of u as b; see p. 27 n. 2 above. Catguolaun or Catguollaun is familiar in Old Welsh4 and actually recurs in the Saxon Genealogies, HB. chap. 61, see below; it is Middle Welsh Cadwallawn, Modern Welsh Cadwallon. He was the famous king of Gwynedd (Guenedotae regionis) who allied himself with Penda of Mercia against Northumbria and defeated and killed Edwin at the battle of Hatfield Chase in 632, as Bede tells;5 and was himself killed by Oswald, as described by Nennius, at the battle of ‘Denisesburna',6the Rowley Water by Hexham, the next year. This is the battle called by Nennius Catscaul, and by the Annales Cambriae> s.a. 631, bellum Cantscaul in quo Catguollaan [sic] corruit. Sir Ifor Williams has explained this name ingeniously and satisfyingly.7 He accepts the reading Cantscaul, and takes this to be a compound of cant, ‘surrounding wall, enclosure *, and scaul (Middle Welsh yscawl) which he suggests may mean ‘young warrior*, cognate with the Irish seal ‘champion, hero*. Now Hexham is Anglo-Saxon Hagustaldeshamy ‘the village of the young warrior*, and it is Williams’s view that Cantscaul is a Welsh rendering of this English name; an explanation which is seen to be even more probable if we may believe that the Welsh mistook häm in this word for Anglo-Saxon hamm in the sense of ‘enclosure*.8 Williams very rightly rejects the absurd ‘cath~is~gwauV, of Skene and Plummer, supposed by them to mean ‘the battle within the wall*.9 1 Anglia, lx ii, 58. 8 HE. hi, 6. 3 But this cannot be asserted with confidence; cf. LH EB . pp. 416 f. 4 So Annales Cambriae, s.aa. 629, 630, 631, 682; Old Welsh Genealogy 1 (twice), xix. 4 HE. 11, 20. • HE. hi, i. 7 B B C S. vi, 351 ff. 8 T he word hagustald itself meant originally ‘the occupant of an enclosure’. • Nevertheless, Lot (N H B . pp. 77 and 204) still gives this interpretation, though he has apparently read Williams. 34

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H SEC TIO N IN N E N N IU S

The Northern History then goes on to say that during the reign of Oswy there came an epidemic in which died Catgualatry king among the Britons after his father. This was Cadwallon’s son Cadwaladr, who succeeded him as king of Gwynedd after an interval and died in an epidemic in 682, according to the Annales Canibriae, and therefore not in Oswy’s reign but in that of his son Ecgfrith. There was, however, a famous outbreak of plague in 664 in Oswy’s reign, and the two occasions seem confused here. Catgualatr is the exactly correct Old Welsh spelling for the later Cad­ waladr, but it is remarkable that of the two MSS. of the Harleian recension of Nennius the better reads Catgualart. This looks at first sight like a mere scribal error; but the curious fact is that Catgualart is commoner in Old Welsh than Catgualatr is,1 and in Old Breton sources names in -uualart are far more numerous than names in -uualatr. This makes it look as if the metathesis was a genuine one in both languages (at any rate certainly in Breton),12 in spite of the fact that a later form *Cadwalard which would therefore be expected seems not to occur. The metathesis, if metathesis it was, cannot have been really old, since if it had been, *-gualarth and *-uualarth would be the forms. Perhaps Mommsen was right to read Catgualart instead of Catgualatr in his text. Chapter 64 ends by saying that Oswy killed Penda in a battle in campo Gai in which the kings of the Britons were killed who had gone out (1exierant) on an expedition with him as far as urbem quae vocatur Iudeuy and the next sentence continues (in chap. 65) that Oswy then (tunc) restored (reddidit) into the hand of Penda3 all the riches which he, Oswy, had in the town, and Penda distributed them to the kings of the Britons, id est atbret Iudeu. The only one of these who escaped, it adds, was Catgabail, rex Guenedotae regionisy who slipped away by night with his army; hence he is called Catgabail Catguommed, There is obviously a gross confusion of order here. Clearly, Penda first led an expedition with a number of British allies against Oswy to the ‘town which is called Iudeu \ and these forced him to give back certain booty which he (Oswy) appears to have taken previously from the allies, which Penda then handed 1 Catgualart in Annales Cambriae, 682; Old Welsh Genealogy 1, xvm. 2 Compare BaudiS, op. cit. p. 163. 3 Emending in manu Pendae, which makes no sense in the context, to in manum Pendae. 35

3 -2

ON THE NO R T H E R N B R IT I S H S EC TIO N IN N E N N I U S

out to them. After that, Oswy fought them in campo Gai and killed Penda and all the British kings except CatgabaiL1 The battle in which Oswy killed Penda, which was fought in 654, is said by Bede to have been propefluvium Uinuaed and in regione Loidis.12 The ‘river Winwæd *is not known, but Loidis is the country round Leeds.3 Gai is unidentified and unknown; the Annales Cambriae refer to the battle, s.a. 656, as strages Gaii campi. The name would presumably be Gae in Modern Welsh; it looks as if it might be the same as the personal name Gai which occurs in an inscription of the tenth or eleventh century in Glamorgan,4 but of course this is highly uncertain. The story of the treasure of ludeu is most circumstantial, and may well be very early, as will appear below, but it is not perfectly consistent with the account given by Bede,5 who says that Oswy, having *at this time* suffered cruel and unbearable invasions on the part of Penda, was driven to promise him a vast tribute of kingly riches (ornamenta regia, presumably jewels, etc.) as the price of peace, and that Penda refused this; whereupon the battle of the river Winwæd followed. The ‘inva­ sions’ in question appear to include a ravaging of Northumbria and attack on Bamburgh before the death of Aidan in 651,6 and a similar raid near Bamburgh after his death.7 The solution depends in part on the identification of urbs ludeu. There can be little doubt that the general view which makes it the same as Bede’s urbs Giudi is cor­ rect; Bede mentions,8 in a quite different context, the Firths of Forth and Clyde, of which the former has in medio sui urbem Giudit by contrast with the latter which has on its right hand urbem Alcluith. Urbs Alcluith is of course the Dark Age capital on Dumbarton Rock, and this shows that urbs is used here in its com­ mon Dark Age meaning of a fortified settlement of some impor­ tance, pretty well synonymous with arx. The most common opinion has been that the only place ‘in the midst’ of the Forth that can be 1 Compare the account of this passage given by Lloyd, H W . 1, 189 f., which is obviously right; Lot makes a senseless muddle of it, which he rather naturally complains is ‘complicated and obscure’. He does not seem to understand the meaning of reddidit, and must have allowed his interpretation of the entire pas­ sage to be coloured by the error in manu Pendae. 2 HE. in, 24. 3 Certainly not Lothian, as Skene and others thought. 4 V. Nash-Williams, The Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff, 1950), p. 165. 6 Loc. cit. • HE. in, 16. 7 HE. hi, 17. « HE. i, 12.

36

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urbs Giudi is the little rocky island of Inchkeith; but this has always been felt to be rather unsatisfactory, because there is no trace of any Dark Age stronghold there, nor of any settlement of the slightest importance. Nor, in fact, is it the kind of place where fortified towns were made at this period, but rather, the sort of site com­ monly chosen for monasteries by Celtic monks. Mr Peter Hunter Blair has suggested that in medio should be taken to mean ‘half-way along*, and suggests Cramond or Inveresk on the south shore of the Forth, both of them having been Roman forts.1 But in medio would be a rather odd and scarcely natural way of saying this. Mr Angus Graham has recently proposed2 that urbs Giudi must have been Stirling, where there must surely have been a stronghold in the Dark Ages now hidden under the present castle, as in the case of Edinburgh. In the Middle Ages Stirling was a fortified hilltop town of the greatest strategic importance, and if there was a fort there in the Dark Ages it would be exactly the kind of place that Bede would mention, in relation to the Firth of Forth, by contrast with Dumbarton in relation to the Firth of Clyde. Mr Graham ingeniously—and to my mind wholly satisfactorily—explains what Bede meant by saying it was ‘in the midst of* the Firth. As regards the forms of the two names, Iudeu is corroborated by the mention in the Gododdin of Aneirin3 of a hero ‘(from) beyond the sea of Iodeo\ which is a possible Middle Welsh spelling for Old Welsh Iudeu ; if the name existed in Modern Welsh it would be Iddew. In the context, ‘the sea of Iodeo *would very well suit the Firth of Forth. Bede’s Giudi looks like an attempt to spell Iudeu ; the G- means of course the sound of y in English yesy as also does the /- of Iudeu, and the only real difference is the -i in Bede’s form, which may easily be due to scribal corruption, or to misinformation.4 If urbs Iudeu is Stirling, or a place on the southern shore of the Forth, the story in Nennius, rearranged so as to remove the chrono­ logical contradiction, makes it appear that on the occasion of one of the ‘invasions’ of Northumbria by Penda, Oswy was chased up north to the remote borders of his domains—if Stirling, to a strategic border outpost in the district where the lands of the Piets, Scots, 1 ‘T he Origins of N orthum bria’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th series, xxv (1947), 27 f. 2 Antiquity, xxxm (1959)» 63 ff. 3 See Williams, CA. p. 338. 4 T he attempt to identify Iudeu and Giudi with the Evidensca of the Ravenna Geographer (Richmond and Crawford, Archaeologia, xcm (1949), 34) is far­ fetched on philological grounds. 37

ON T H E N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

Strathclyde Britons, and Angles met, which is likely to have been in the control of whichever of these northern kingdoms was most powerful at the time, as Northumbria under Oswy is known to have been. There, he bought off Penda and the British kings by giving back great treasures that he had won from them ; and only later did he fight with Penda near Leeds and destroy him and his army. Bede’s account is easily reconciled with this if we suppose that the two events have been telescoped in such a way that the offer appears to have been made just before the battle of the Winwæd and was therefore necessarily taken by Bede or his source to have been refused. Atbret Iudeu means ‘the Restitution of Iu­ deu’, and the phrase id est Atbret Iudeu means that the event was well-known to the Britons under this name. As already remarked, the whole tale in Nennius, once the obvious reshuffling has been done, is highly circumstantial. But besides this, atbret looks like a very archaic form; the Modern Welsh is edfrydy which in normal Old Welsh would be spelt *etbrit or (with the not very uncommon use of e for i) *etbret. In atbret we may have a form older than the development of vowel-affection in Primitive Welsh, and therefore not later than the seventh century.1 The fact that Bede is in general very accurate and Nennius in general very much less reliable ought not to make us forget that even Homer sometimes nods ; here, the passage in Nennius provides very strong reason to believe that Oswy really did ‘restore’ treasure at urbs Iudeu, apparently at least somewhere on the Forth, that this event became famous in British tradition, and that it was already famous in the seventh century soon after it took place. The episode ends with the story of ‘Catgabail Catguommed\ This is Cadafael, king of Gwynedd, who reigned between Cadwallon and Cadwaladr ;2 but the name Cadafael would be *Catamail in Old Welsh, from British Catumaglos,3 ‘ Battle Prince ’, and Catgabail is a compound of a type very improbable in a personal name (noun plus verbal noun). As it stands, it means ‘Battle-Taking*; and Catguommed is a factitious title meaning ‘Battle-Refusing*—it would be *Cadorned in Middle Welsh. The present writer has sug­ gested elsewhere4 that since Old Welsh Catamail and Catgabail 1 See LH EB. § 176 ; but the absence of affection might be purely orthographic, see ibid. § 172. 2 See J. E. Lloyd, H W . 1, 190. 3 Actually occurs, as Catomagili) (genitive) in a sixth-century inscription in Pembrokeshire; Nash Williams, op. cit. p. 180. 4 Journal of Celtic Studies, 1, 69.

38

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H SEC TIO N IN NE N N IU S

would be pronounced rather alike, the king Catamail was mocked by having his name converted, by an ironical and not very good pun, into an epithet, Catgabail, with the opprobrious qualification Catguommed—‘Battle-Seizer Shun-Battle’. Chapter 65 now goes on to mention the story of Nechtansmere, which may be left for the moment since it is more fully touched on in the Saxon Genealogies; the passage contains the reference to St Cuthbert’s death in insula Medcaut already discussed. It ends with a brief account of Penda, saying among other things ipse fecit bellum Cocboy in quo cecidit Eoua. This is the battle called Maserfelth by Bede1 (generally identified with Oswestry), at which Oswald was killed. Cocboy would become Cogfwy or Cogwy in Middle Welsh, and in fact Ifor Williams points out2 that the place is mentioned in a poem by the twelfth-century poet Cynddelw: ‘When the man went to the battle of Cogwy in the conflict between the men of Powys and Oswald son3 of Oswy.’ Besides, a poem of much earlier origin (perhaps as old as the ninth century), telling of the fate of Cynddylan, a prince of the Welsh Border in the seventh century, declares ‘ I saw armies on the ground of the field of Togwy, and the battle full of affliction; Cynddylan was an ally*.4 Here Williams’s emendation Cogwy is obviously right. It is interesting to note that the guess of historians that the Welsh were allied with Penda on this occasion is here doubly confirmed; Cynddylan was ruler of the part of Powys now in Shropshire, including the Oswestry district itself. The exact site of Cogwy cannot be identi­ fied ; Lot’s equation with the Romano-British Coccium in Lancashire is impossible philologically and doubtless historically too.5 The British element in the Saxon Genealogies is of exactly the same kind as that in the Northern History. In chap. 57 the men­ tion of Ethelfrith calls forth the note ipse est Aedlfred Flesaur, with the nickname which has already been discussed. Three sentences later comes the reference to the killing of Ecgfrith by the Piets in 685 ; it says of him that it was he ‘who fought the battle against his cousin, who was king of the Piets, called Birdeiy and there he fell with all the might of his army, and the Piets with their king came 1 HE. hi, 9. 2 B B C S. iii, 59. 3 Sic; mistake for ‘brother’. 4 I. Williams, CLH. pp. 48 and 242. 6 Coccium would be *Cich in Old Welsh. 39

ON THE NO R TH E R N B R IT I S H SEC TI ON IN N E N N IU S

off the victors; and the Northumbrians1 never again proceeded to exact tribute from the Piets from the time of that battle. It is called Gueith Linn Goran \ 12 The source for this must be some good more or less contemporary authority. Gueith Linn Garan means *the battle of Linn Garan, the Pool of the Crane *(in Modern Welsh it would be Llyn Garan). Now in English tradition, as exemplified in Symeon of Durham, the place is called Nechtansmere, ‘the Pool of Nechtan* (a Pictish king); and in the Irish annals Dun Nechtain, ‘the Fortress of Nechtan* (now the hill of Dunnichen above the present marsh, near Forfar in the country of the Piets). ‘The Pool of the Crane1 is evidently the genuine Celtic name of northern origin. As it stands it may perfectly well be Strathclyde British ; but the pool at Dunnichen must always have been little more than a large pond, and it is not at all probable that this remote and trifling sheet of water would have been known to the men of Strathclyde by any name given to it by themselves in their own language, or heard of by them at all until the battle made it famous. The conclusion may well be, therefore, that Linn Garan is the true Pictish name of the pool—it could be Pictish just as much as British, in its form—and that when the fame of the battle spread the name spread with it.3 In other words, Nennius’s vocatur Gueith Linn Garan means ‘it is called [in the language of the Piets] the Battle of Linn Garan*. If so, the source for this is likely to have been within living memory of the battle, as it would probably have become forgotten again in Strathclyde if it was much later. In much the same way Birdei is very close to the proper Pictish name of the king. Irish documents call him and other kings of the same name Bruidey and they are generally known to historians in this shape; but in the Colbertine MS. of the Pictish Chronicle, which goes back without doubt to genuine Pictish sources, these kings are given as Bridei or Bredei ;4 and in Bede,5 who likewise got his information from Pictland and not through Irish intermediaries, the name appears as Bridius. In Nennius there is the common meta1 Saxones Atnbronum; on the meaning of this term see Thumeysen, Z N . p. 83 n. 2; and (a different explanation), Lot, N H B . p. 95. 2 MS. H reads Lin Garan, which is accepted by Mommsen, but the reading of K, Linn Garan, is preferable though the other is quite possible. 3 Cf. the present writer in Antiquity, xxix (1955), 78. 4 Cf. K. Jackson in The Problem of the Piets (ed. F. T . Wainwright, Edinburgh, 1955), P- 161. 3 HE. in, 4. 40

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H SEC TIO N IN N E N N IU S

thesis of n, but he preserves better than Bede the apparently correct ending in -«. Here again, then, there lies behind Nennius’s account of the Battle of Nechtansmere some northern source of true Pictish origin. After the note on Gueith Linn Goran the Saxon Genealogies con­ tinue with a very interesting note, that Oswy had two wives, one called Riemmelth daughter of Royth son of Rum and the other Eanfled daughter of Edwin son of Ælle. Rum is another instance of the name Run being wrongly spelt with an -m\ there seems little doubt that this is the Rhun son of Urien of Rheged already dis­ cussed. The name Royth is unknown elsewhere, so far as I am aware; it would be *Rhwyth or *Rhoeth in Modern Welsh if it existed.1 The Riem- of the woman’s name must be a simple scribal error for rieiny ‘girl’ or (in early usage) ‘queen’, so that we should probably read Rieinmelth. The second element may be the Modern Welsh mellty ‘lightning*, and if so the whole would be ‘Queen of the Lightning* or the like, and better spelt Rieinmelt in Old Welsh. It would be Rhiainfellt in Modern Welsh. The fact that Oswy married Edwin’s daughter Eanfled, soon after 642, is familiar from Bede,12 and if the note in Nennius is correct, Eanfled must have been his second wife, since she was living as joint abbess of Whitby in 685 long after his death.3 There appears to be no other source apart from Nennius which states in so many words that Oswy married twice and that his first wife was called Rieinmelty but the Durham Liber Vitae provides unexpected confirmation that this was the case. It starts with a list of the Christian kings and princes of Northumbria, beginning with Eduiniy followed by Osualdy OsuiOy Ecgfrithy Alchfrithy etc., and then a list of ‘the names of queens and abbesses* of Northumbria. This runs Rægnmældy Eanfledy Iurminburgy Ælfledy Œôilburgy etc.4 Œdilburg is presum­ ably Edwin’s wife, and is therefore out of order, and Oswald’s wife Cyneburh is not given; Eanfled is Oswy’s second wife, and there can scarcely be any doubt that in Rægnmæld we have an attempt to spell the name Rieinmelt. It would be a very fair effort to render in Anglo-Saxon spelling what the British name must have sounded like to English ears, though Riægnmæld would have been still better. 1 Or less likely *Rhwyd or *Rhoed. 2 HE. h i , 15, 24, etc.; cf. P. 11, 165. 3 HE. iv, 26. 4 See Sweet, ‘The Oldest English T exts’ (full reference, see p. 22 n. 3 above), p. 15441

ON T HE N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

There seems no good reason to doubt the tale. A marriage between a young Northumbrian prince and a princess of the neighbouring British kingdom of Rheged is in itself perfectly plausible, and the friendly relations between her family and the English implicit in the story of Rhun baptising Edwin in 627 would favour this. The marriage must have taken place before 642, though scarcely before 633, when Oswy was 20; perhaps we may date it about 635. If Rieinmelth was granddaughter of Rhun son of Urien she would have been born at about the same time as Oswy. It may well be the case, as Wade-Evans has suggested,1 that the acquisition by Northumbria of the wide lands of north-west England and south-west Scotland of which Rheged was the core, which seem to have been gradually occupied by the English soon after the middle of the seventh century, in the time of Oswy,2 was the result of this marriage alliance and not of conquest. If we can trust Nennius—and the story is plausible, and seems to be corro­ borated by the Liber Vitae—this throws some valuable light on the history of the British kingdom of Rheged. Its king Urien was killed either about 575 or about 585,3 and virtually nothing further is known about its fate between then and its occupation by the English, except that his famous son Owein, the most celebrated of his martial sons in early Welsh poetry, who seems to have survived him, may well have succeeded him. The story in Nennius would appear to imply, however, that Rheged was still an unconquered and important kingdom about 635, since the young Northumbrian prince is not very likely to have married a representative of a ruined and landless dynasty, even though he and his brothers had them­ selves been temporarily in exile until 633. If the theory that Oswy acquired the North-West by marriage is correct, Rieinmelth pre­ sumably had no surviving brothers; her father Royth, however, would no doubt have been king of Rheged or at least heir to it. Run the grandfather must have entered the church late in life if the story of the baptism is true; other examples can be found in Dark Age history of the abdication of kings and princes to devote them­ selves to religion. The next reference to northern British affairs in the Saxon Genealogies is the note in chap. 61, on the pedigree of Edwin, that 1 A. W. Wade-Evans, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History Society, xxvii (1950), 82. * Cf. LH EB. pp. 215 ff. 3 See LH EB. p. 707. 42

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Soemil, his (legendary) great-great-great-grandfather, primus separavit Deur o Birneich. Deur and Birneich have already been discussed; o is the Old Welsh preposition meaning ‘from*. The statement is of course an absurdity; Deira and Bernicia were not united at all until the time of Ethelfrith, Edwin’s predecessor, and the first separation of the two provinces came in 632 after the killing of Edwin, when his cousin Osric reigned in Deira and Ethelfrith’s son Eanfrith in Bernicia, but the two provinces were reunited under Oswald in the next year. The next sentence in Nen­ nius refers to the killing of Edwin and his sons Osfrith and Eadfrith at the battle of Meicen, This took place at the battle of Hatfield Chase near Doncaster, Bede’s Hæthfelth, fought in 632; and, as Nennius continues, no descendant of his ever reigned afterwards, all having been killed by the army of Catguollaun, king Guenedotae regionis (names which have already been discussed). Meicen would be Meigen in Middle and Modern Welsh, and Cadwallon is in fact associated in medieval Welsh tradition with a battle at or expedi­ tion to a place called Meigen; but the contexts show clearly that this Meigen was regarded as being in Wales, on the borders of Powys.1 It seems probable that there is some confusion here,2 and that a battle of Cadwallon’s at a place called Meigen on the Welsh border has been mistaken for the battle of Hatfield Chase. The co­ incidence involved in supposing that the Old Welsh name for Hatfield Chase was really Meicen and that Cadwallon fought also at another Meigen on the Powys border would surely be too great to be credible; though it is perhaps possible that Nennius’s Meicen is Hatfield Chase and that owing to some confusion the name was transferred in tradition to another event on the borders of Wales. The last two pedigrees in the Saxon Genealogies offer us Ecgfrith son of Oswy with the epithet Ailguin and Eata (d. 738) son of Leodwald, of a minor branch of the descendants of Ida (Vespasian 3 a)y with the epithet Glinmawr.3 Ailguin would be Aelwynn in Middle Welsh, ‘Of the White Brow’, but nothing is known of how he acquired this title. Glinmawr, Middle Welsh Glinvawr, means ‘Of the Big Knees’, and again the origin of this is unknown. An 1 See Phillimore, Y Cymmrodor, xi, 147 f. ; Lloyd, H W . 1, 186. T he identifica­ tion with a Meigen in Glamorgan, given by J. Loth, Les Mabinogion (Paris, 1913), 11, 249 n. 2, derives from the spurious Iolo M SS., and is incorrect. On Meigen see R. Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, p. 151. 2 So Loth, loc. cit. 3 Liodguald genuit Eatan [MS. K]; ipse est Eata Glinmaur. 43

ON THE NO R TH E R N B R IT I S H S EC TIO N IN N E N N I U S

Eda Glinvawr is told of in the medieval Welsh triads1 as having fought with and killed the Northern British heroes Gwrgi and Peredur, who died in 580 according to the Annales Cambriae. Once again, there seems to be confusion here ; it looks as if who­ ever wrote ipse est Eata Glinmaur after genuit Eatan in the Saxon Genealogies was thinking of the Eda of the tale of Gwrgi and Peredur and wrongly identified the two. 3

It is obvious, as historians are agreed, that part at any rate of the considerable material in chaps. 57-65 of Nennius dealing with the affairs of the Britons (some of them of no concern whatever to the English) is of British origin,2 not English, and put together in the British interest. The names of the battles and other places are significantly all Welsh, not Anglo-Saxon, and therefore come from the British side, not the English ; the sympathy in the account of Nechtansmere, of Outigirn, and of Urien and his associates is entirely with the Celts against the Northumbrians; and the details about the poets would be of no concern to an English audience. One may say further that all this must be of Northern British origin, for even the notes touching on the kings of Gwynedd (Maelgwn, Cadwallon, Cadafael, and Cadwaladr) do so because of their Northern connections—Maelgwn as descendant of Cunedda of Manaw Gododdin reigning in the time of Ida, Cadwallon and Cadafael as leaders of the Britons against the kings of Northumbria, and Cadwaladr as the chief British king at the time of the plague which occurred during the reign of Oswy.3 Moreover, it is per­ fectly clear that though the Northern History and the Saxon Genealogies in Nennius are based respectively on quite different 1 In the Peniarth 16 Triads (MS. of early thirteenth century; see B B C S. xii, 13, no. 30, and Rachel Bromwich, op. cit. p. 61). In the later White Book of Rhydderch triads (MS. c. 1300; see Y Cymmrodor, vu, 129, no. 42) and in the copy of them in the Red Book of Hergest he is called Eda Glingawr, *Of the Giant’s Knees’. * T he Welsh nicknames of English kings, and the Welsh names (otherwise un­ known) of places and battles in England, are particularly significant—as well, of course, as the details on British poets, etc. * The exact words are dum ipse regnabat, venit mortalitas hominumt Catgualart [MS. H ; Catgualatr MS. K] régnante âpud Brittones post patrem suum, et in ea periit. T hat is to say, the emphasis is *There was a great plague during the reign of Oswy of Northumbria (at which time Cadwaladr was [chief] king among the Britons, and died of it)’. 44

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H SEC TION IN N E N N IU S

English sources, the British material in both is of exactly the same kind (extending even to the repetition of Ethelfrith’s nickname and of the killing of Ecgfrith by the Piets) and may reasonably be taken to have been of the same origin. What is the date and source for all this, and how did it come to appear in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum ? It is obvious, and is in fact generally agreed, that at least a con­ siderable part of it must be of pretty early origin. In Din Guoaroy (or whatever the correct reading is), Medcaut, and Gai we have clearly the old British names of places in Northumbria, before they were christened with new ones by the English ; and these must have come from an early source, and a Northern one, since they would scarcely have been current in Wales in the time of Nennius himself, long after Northumbria had become English in speech. Iudeu is a British name probably quite unknown in later Wales except in very old material such as the Gododdin poem; and Atbret Iudeu is likely to be a popular phrase in common parlance soon after the event, and derived in Nennius from a seventh-century written source. Ca(n)tscaul looks like an early Welsh rendering of an English settlement-name, parallel to Rhydychenf ‘the Ford of the Oxen’, from Oxford; it suggests that when Hexham was first founded the local Britons ‘translated* the English name, which was then very naturally applied to the battle nearby, and the case is therefore not unlike Din Guoaroy and the others—the source goes back to a time when British was still spoken in the area or not far away. As for Linn Garan, reason has already been given to suggest that this was derived from oral information coming from Pictland at the time of the battle. For personal names, Flesaur, Lamnguiny and Ailguin seem to be contemporary nicknames or titles ; they could scarcely have been invented long after the time of their originals. Birdei is apparently the genuine Pictish form of the name, scarcely likely to have been known as such very much later. Cunedag with the -g would seem to come from a written source not later than the middle of the eighth century and probably earlier. All these things are strongly indicative of an early source—and clearly a Northern one —lying somewhere behind the material in chaps. 57-65. Quite apart from its probably early date, the value of this source is really considerable, because it tells so much, of a very authenticseeming nature, that we know from nowhere else. The tale of Oswy’s first marriage, and its implications for the history of Rheged and Northumbria, would be quite unknown but for Nennius, and 45

ON T HE N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H S E C T I O N I N N E N N I U S

so would the history of the conquest of Elmet by Edwin and the expulsion of its king Certic. The ‘restitution of Iudeu’ is barely touched on by Bede, and then misleadingly and probably in­ accurately, and he has nothing at all to say of the part played by Rhun in the conversion of Northumbria. The fact that Ecgfrith was a cousin of Bridei is nowhere else clearly stated; the little episode of Cadafael and his disgrace would never have been heard of but for Nennius, nor would Outigirn the opponent of the English in Ida’s time, nor some of the Northern poets. The story of Cunedda is not really made clear elsewhere, and our knowledge of Urien and his fellow Britons would have been far vaguer. The fact that the Queen Bebba after whom Bamburgh was named was the wife of Ethelfrith is not told by Bede or any author other than Nennius. The statement that Edwin’s two sons were killed along with their father at the battle of Hatfield Chase is not derived from Bede, who says on the contrary1 that Eadfrith fled to Penda and was afterwards treacherously murdered by him. In this case, how­ ever, Bede is more likely to be right. In general, then, the British material in the Northern History and Saxon Genealogies appears to come from some lost northern British source of early date, con­ siderable reliability, and very valuable content because some of it is not recorded elsewhere. What was the character of this source? According to Lot,2 it was ‘British poems, lyric or epic’ of the sixth and seventh centuries, in which were to be found not only the names of the poets mentioned in chapter 62 but also the names and nicknames of the princes of the period, both British and English, and the names of the battles they fought; as well as the details on the Northern poets, the story of Urien, etc. He sees an epic tinge in the expedition of Penda and the British kings to ludeu (with the title Atbret Iudeu given to its sequel), their destruction for having allied themselves with a pagan, the moonlight flit by Cadafael, and the epithet he thus earned. He does allow that the story of the occupation of Elmet and expulsion of its king Certic doubtless comes from native written sources, but it is not quite clear whether he thinks these were also lyric or epic poems or whether they were of a different character. Now, it is not likely that Lot knew anything about the character of the early Welsh poetic tradition. There are indeed poems which mention some of the heroes of the North, and Cadwallon also, and some are 1 HE. n, 20.

a N H B . pp. 74 ff., cf. p. 96. 46

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H S EC TIO N IN N E N N IU S

believed with very good reason to be contemporary with these heroes, while others, though probably composed some centuries after their time, evidently use traditions which were ancient and genuine.1 But these poems are not epics. The early Welsh poetry dealing with these princes was never genuinely narrative, never told any connected story, so far as our evidence goes ; it was panegyric and elegiac, devoted to the praises of the living and of the dead, and unfortunately very vague, very general and very allusive, rarely giving any clear statement of events at any length. Battles are certainly mentioned, sometimes by name, and of course the names of the British chiefs; but no English king or prince is ever once given either by name or by nickname2—one feels that the audience was not interested in the barbaric names of their enemies and per­ haps that quite often the Britons who fought them did not even know what they were or at any rate trouble to remember them. Very early Welsh bardic poetry is the despair of the historian, for it tells so few facts when it could have told so many. There are, however, certain things in our northern material in Nennius which do seem to belong to the poetic tradition, at any rate at first sight, and others which may; it may be difficult to dis­ tinguish. The names of the poets in chap. 62 might well have been known, and known in Wales, from their poetry alone, or from the tradition that went with it; and indeed this particular passage might possibly be an addition by Nennius himself for all one can tell, though I do not think it is.3 Maelgwn is of course familiar in medieval Welsh tradition, and his ancestor Cunedda is occasionally mentioned (though his origin in Manaw Gododdin, the whole point of the inclusion of these two in the Northern History, is not found in any source certainly independent of the material repre­ sented in Nennius). The passage in Nennius best paralleled in Welsh poetry is the story of Urien and the other princes, and his betrayal; this is inferred from (rather than described in, for stories are scarcely described in very early Welsh verse) an elegiac poem See Mrs Bromwich, C E W T. pp. 86 ff. ; Williams, LE W P , pp. 49 ff. ; T . Parry, A History of Welsh Literature (Oxford, 1955), ch. 1. 2 Unless Fflamdwyn, ‘Flame-Bearer* in one of the poems on Urien in the Book of Taliesin is to be regarded as such, but no English name goes with it, and it strikes one rather as a descriptive term invented by the poet for the occasion. There is in fact no evidence whatever for any sort of body of early native Welsh oral tradition which handed on the English names of kings, battles, and places. 8 For one thing, the form Neirin for Aneirin is very archaic, and is not prob­ able in Nennius’s day. 47

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT IS H SE C T IO N IN N E N N IU S

belonging quite probably to the ninth century,1 which as already noted speaks of Urien, Gwallawc, Morgant, and others too, includ­ ing Rhun ; of the hostility of Morgant ; and of the killing of Urien at Aber Lieu, which appears to be the mouth of the Low opposite Lindisfarne. But the poem in fact tells us very little, and the reference in Nennius to the English kings against whom Urien fought, not to mention the general tenor of the passage, suggests that it is not derived from poetry or not primarily so; a different source for it will be proposed below.2 The note in Nennius that ‘Outigirn ’ fought the English might certainly come from poetry. Whether Cadafael and his nickname, and Atbret Iudeu, were derived from poems seems very doubtful ; the latter was obviously a traditional phrase but might well have been known in common parlance in the North, and reason has already been given to suggest it was taken from a nearly contemporary document. The fact seems to be that while some of the statements made in the Northern History and Saxon Genealogies may have been derived from later oral versions of early poetry or poetic tradition, it is impossible to say that any must ; and on the other hand others, such as the notes on Ecgfrith and Nechtansmere, give a quite dif­ ferent impression to anyone familiar with early Welsh ‘heroic* poetry,3 and read like notes taken from old and sometimes more or less contemporary written documents of a historical nature. Such a source or sources would doubtless be written, since otherwise, not being enshrined in poetry or other oral traditional form, the facts would have been forgotten by the time of Nennius. If such histori­ cal documents did exist they would presumably have been the work of the clergy and written in Latin, because the keeping of historical records was not a function of the Welsh poets and story­ tellers (whose material was oral, and in Welsh) ; the occasional use of Welsh phrases need not be excluded, however, and we seem to have traces of these in the statement that Ida joined Din Guoaroy guurth Berneich and that Soemil first separated Deur o Birneich. The sort of document in question which would probably best fit the facts, produced by the Church among the Celts and the English in the Dark Ages, is the marginal entries of contemporary events 1 Edited by Sir Ifor Williams, CLH. pp. 11 ff. 3 It should be added that Rhydderch is invariably called Ryderch Hael (‘ the Generous ’) in medieval Welsh poetic tradition, whereas in Nennius and in the Old Welsh Genealogies he is Riderch Hen (‘the Old ’). 3 Cf. H. M. and N. K. Chadwick, GL. p. 156.

48

ON THE NOR THE RN BR IT ISH SECTION IN NE NNIU S

made in the pages of a Paschal Table, or some kind of brief chronicle scarcely to be dignified as ‘Annals’. In fact, it is believed that a document of this nature, consisting of notes on the history of the Britons of the North and covering the period from the latter part of the sixth century to the middle of the eighth, compiled somewhere in northern Britain, really did exist; and that the Northern section in Nennius and the Northern entries in the Annales Cambriae derive independently from it.1There is no doubt that these two sources stand in a close relation to each other in these details,12 and that neither is derived directly from the other, since certain differences preclude this.3 Such a document—it will be called here ‘the Northern Chronicle ’—would consist, in part or wholly, of more or less contemporary entries having therefore great authority; or the earlier part might have been compiled from living memory and from tradition, leaving the later part as a contemporaneous continuation. That this last was the case was the opinion of Thurneysen4 (who, as we have seen, believed wrongly that the original Northern History was compiled in 679), though he did not enter into the question of whether the continuatidp was a contemporary one. Thurneysen notes the prominence of Rhun and his family in the Northern material, and stresses also the fact that an important source for other parts of the Historid Brittonum was a document entitled ‘The Extracts of the son of/Urbagen5 from the Book of St Germanus’. Ùrbagen is an old Welsh form of the name Urien (compare Urbegh^n in H B . chap. 63, ‘Nennian recension’),6 and the ‘son of Urien’ is generally taken to mean Rhun.7 Thurneysen’s suggestion is that Üiun son of Urien, having entered the Church and consequently >eing able to write Latin,8 left behind him not only his ‘Extracts’ but also some notes on the history of the Northern Britons i n his time and that of his father.9 Thurneysen lists specifically th< story of Ida and Din Guoaroy in chap. 61 and 1 See Chadwick, GL , ]pp. 146 ff.; N. K. Chadwick, SEBC. pp. 46 ff. 2 Examples will hav< 1been noticed in the preceding pages, 8 Lot believed that hé Annales Cambriae knew and used Nennius (N H B . pp. 47, 96, 127, 206), 1t îpugh he gives no adequate justification for this view. « See Z N . p. 85. 6 T he MS. reads Urbacen> but as Thurneysen notes this is an error for Urbagen ; cf. Williams in B B C S. vii, 388. • See LH EB . pp. 436 n. 2 and 648. 7 So Thurneysen, Z N . p. 83; Lot, N H B . p. 6; Chadwick, SE BH . p. 25.

8 And, one may add, sharing the interest in history which characterised the Celtic Church. 9 See Z N . p. 85. 4

49

CCS

ON THE N O R TH E RN B R IT I S H SEC TI ON IN N E N N I U S

the change of name to Bebbanburh in chap. 63; the mention of Outigirn and of the poets, and probably also of Maelgwn and Cunedda, in chap. 62 ; certainly the passage on Urien and the other Northern princes in chap. 63 ; and very likely the note on the con­ quest of Elmet at the end of the same chapter.1 Also the reference to the baptism of the Northumbrians by himself.2 The pre-emi­ nence for courage given to Urien over the other kings of the Britons, and the statement that Morcant betrayed him out of envy,3 is certainly consistent with personal family feeling, as Thurneysen points out. We may add that Rhun’s personal interest in North­ umbria implied by the story of his share in the baptism of 627, and by the fact that his granddaughter married Oswy probably less than ten years later (if he was still alive then), would be quite enough to account for his wishing to leave on record some notes on the connections between the Northumbrians and the Britons of the North down to his time. If all this is so, one would date the nucleus of the original Northern History derived from Rhun at about a .d . 625 (or about 635 if the note on Rieinmelth belonged to it) ; and, on the theory outlined above, this nucleus would have been continued in the form of contemporary annalistic notes by some later writer down at least to the death of St Cuthbert. The theory is attractive—it would give the passages on sixth-century British history a very high authority indeed—but it cannot be regarded as much more than a hypothesis. In any case the mention of the Northern poets strikes one as of a different character from the rest, and it could have been derived at a later time from a knowledge of their surviving works or reputation. It is generally agreed that the lost original Northern History used by Nennius consisted of a summary of relations between the Britons and the Angles of the North4 from the first settlement of 1 Thurneysen includes the ‘Arthuriana’, but it is very unlikely that this was part of the Northern History; see p. 21 n. 2 above. 2 It could be argued that the curious wording S i quis scire voluerit quis eos baptizavit, Rum map Urbgen baptizavit eos, is a sort of self-deprecatory modesty; ‘Well of course, if you really must know who did it, as a m atter of fact it was m yself’. This seems to glance indirectly at the story that the credit all belonged to Paulinus (not mentioned in the Harleian recension). But perhaps this inter­ pretation is a little too modem English ! 8 iugulatus est Morcanto destinante pro invidia, quia in ipso prae omnibus regibus virtus maxima erat instauratione belli. 4 The mentions of Penda and his Welsh allies have sometimes been taken to imply a Welsh source for these, not a Northern one, but this is quite unnecessary since they appear in H B . only in connection with Northern events.

50

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Bernicia by Ida down to the time of Ecgfrith.1 Zimmer12 and Thurneysen envisaged a northern Briton writing a history of the Britons and Angles to his own day in 679, the deaths of Ecgfrith in 685 and Cuthbert in 687 being later interpolations. Lot,3 who accepts the above general view, has shown that the date 679 was mistaken ; that the deaths of Ecgfrith and Cuthbert are not inter­ polations; and that the compiler was not improbably using the Moore Memoranda of 737 (wrongly dated 774 by Lot), and there­ fore working in the middle or later part of the eighth century. His composition, one may say, consists of a framework of English material quite likely drawn from the Moore Memoranda, probably (Lot thought certainly) from Bede,4 and doubtless other English sources, with which he combined some northern British informa­ tion drawn from a lost British ‘Northern Chronicle’ used also by the Annales Cambriae> which came down to about 750 and may have been in large part contemporary—the earliest notices in it coming possibly from Rhun son of Urien. The compiler’s British sources may also have included vernacular oral tradition, though this is uncertain; there is no reason why some details, such as the story of Urien, may not have been known to him from bothy the one reinforcing the other. This compilation became known to Nennius and was used by him in constructing his Historia Brittonum at some time between 796 (the date of the Saxon Genealogies) and the oldest surviving recension of it, the Harleian, which seems to date from 82Ô.5*As a matter of fact there really does not seem to be any good reason why the Harleian recension should not have been the original form of his work. It should be pointed out that the forms of the Old Welsh names and words in chapters 56-65 of the Historia Brittonum are almost all those of Nennius’s own day or not much earlier, and do not differ from those in the other parts of that work. Thus Flesaur is not older than the latter part of the eighth 1 Thurneysen tentatively included the Arthuriana, as just remarked. 2 N V . pp. 275 ff. 8 See N H B . pp. 71-80. 4 Nennius himself is believed not to have known Bede. 6 Or less likely 829 or 819; see Thurneysen, ZCP. xx, 106-7; Williams, B B C S. vn, 383 ff. T he mention in chap. 49 of Ffemfael (flourished c. 800, Lloyd, H W . I, 224 n. 144) as ‘now reigning* in Buellt and Gwrtheymion has often been taken to mean that Nennius was writing about or soon after 800. But FfemfaeTs date is very approximate, and we cannot know that he was not still reigning some twenty-six years later. The fact that Nennius had been a pupil of St Elfoddw who died in 809 does not show that he composed the H B . before 809, of course.

51

4-2

ON THE NO R TH ERN B R IT ISH SECTION IN N E N N IU S

century.1 Only in Cunedag and quite probably Atbret do we seem to have forms which are earlier. But there is no especial difficulty here. The compiler of the original Northern History in the second half of the eighth century simply modernised most of the older spellings, in the way usual with such authors, and anything that he missed would have been picked up by Nennius, with the exception of the two just noted. If we may accept the outline given in the preceding paragraph, we may well ask why the original Northern History was not con­ tinued down well into the eighth century instead of stopping at 687. Lot did ask this question, and his answer is ingenious and (if we agree that the Compiler used Bede as the main source for his English framework) probable.12 To expand slightly what he says, Book v of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica is concerned almost exclu­ sively with English affairs, and the few references to the Celtic peoples include nothing which would interest a Briton of the North concerned to give an account of the relations between his people and the Northumbrians. Therefore the Compiler confined himself to Books i-iv, in which however the latest event of this sort is pre­ cisely the death of Cuthbert. For Lot,3 the Compiler was a Briton of the North writing in one of the north-western districts which still remained British in the eighth century,4*though he allows that he may have been a subject of Northumbria while remaining British at heart. Mrs Chadwick has tried to pin him down more closely. She has proposed that what has been called here the ‘Northern Chronicle* was compiled at the monastery of Whithorn,6 and that Rhun’s contribution to this was put together by him at Carlisle.6 Unfortunately there is no evi­ dence at all that there was ever any sort of monastery at Carlisle in his time, and the identification remains speculative. The argument for Whithorn is rather more securely based. This is the only monastery of Celtic origin in the British N orth-West whose existence in the eighth century is known of for certain,7 though it was by that 1 See LH EB. §11. 2 N H B . pp. 78 f. 8 N H B . pp. 79 f. 4 He says ‘Cumberland or Strathclyde*, but Cumberland was of course English in the eighth century. Perhaps he means ‘Cum bria’ and uses it as synonymous with Strathclyde. 6 SEBC. pp. 60 ff., especially 62 ff. 6 Op. cit. pp. 72 ff. 7 There is no evidence that the later site at Hoddom was so old as this ; see op. cit. p. 65 and n. 2. 52

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H SEC TION IN N E N N IU S

time in the hands of the English Church ; and Whithorn is generally considered to have been within the territory of Rheged. Even before the area was taken over by the English the relations of the monastery with the Northumbrians, or at least its interest in their affairs, must have been not inconsiderable, and indeed if Rhun entered the British Church it is just the place he must surely have retired to more than a century before the compilation of the ‘Northern Chronicle* (that is, if we do not accept the proposal that it was Carlisle). Considering, however, that the *Northern Chronicle* itself, with its strong independent British sympathies, and the material on which it is based, is really not likely to have been put together (perhaps over many years) at an English monastery, whether previously British or not, the present writer would like to put in a word for Glasgow. The story of the founda­ tion of a Church and monastery at Glasgow by St Kentigern in the late sixth century may or may not be apocryphal; but there can be no reasonable doubt whatever that Strathclyde was a Christian country like all the rest, and a kingdom as pre-eminent as Strath­ clyde must certainly have had its ecclesiastical centre. The tradi­ tion is that this was at Glasgow, not far from the political capital of Dumbarton, and there is no reason to doubt it. Strathclyde was not part of Northumbria in the eighth century, but was a powerful independent kingdom able to meet Northumbria on equal terms ; and in my view the most probable place for the compilation in the eighth century of historical material relating to the Britons of the North is the centre of Christian learning of this great and only independent northern British power—namely Glasgow. Where Rhun was writing, in the first part of the seventh century, may be left without further discussion, but it must be regarded as plausible that when he retired it may have been to Whithorn. We have now envisaged the following stages in the history of the Northern material in Nennius. First, perhaps Rhun son of Urien put down some notes on the early connections between Britons and Northumbrians from the time of Ida to his own day, perhaps as late as about 635, when his granddaughter married Oswy and when he himself would be aged about 75. Then, a document was drawn up somewhere within the range of the northern British Church soon after 750 giving in annalistic form a number of entries concerning the history of the Britons of the North between the latter part of the sixth century and the middle of the eighth; this 53

ON THE N O R TH E RN B R IT I S H S EC TIO N IN N E N N IU S

document, called here the *Northern Chronicle ’, was probably based on entries in Paschal Tables or some brief chronicle material, and if the notes supposed to be compiled by Rhun really existed, it used these too. Later, someone in the same general area1 put together a sketch of the history of the relations between the Northumbrians and the Britons ; he may well have taken for his framework, and his chief source for the English side of this, the first four books of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica of 731 and the notes in the Moore Memoranda of 737, and into this he fitted details from the British side derived in the first place from the ‘Northern Chronicle’, though he may doubtless have used other material as well, includ­ ing quite possibly vernacular poetry and other oral tradition. This sketch we have called ‘the original Northern History’.2 The question is, then, how did this northern material reach Nennius (who, as we have already seen, composed his Historia Brittonum between 796 and the 820’s, most probably in 826)? It is a significant fact that during the time of Merfyn and Rhodri, kings of North Wales respectively 8253-44 and 844-77, Welsh scholars were showing an interest in the history of the Britons of the North, and were collecting northern material which they included in the Annales Cambriae and the Old Welsh Genealogies, both of which, along with the Historia Brittonum, can be traced to this period. The matter has been well summarised by the Chadwicks, and the reader is referred to their discussions.4 Sir Ifor Williams points to the fact that in the ‘Nennian recension’ of H B .} Nennius says that the information on the baptism of the Northumbrians by Rhun was given him by Renchidus episcopus and Elbobdus episcoporum sanctissimus. The former is unknown, but the latter is St Elfoddw,5 who died in 809. Williams suggests that Elfoddw may have had some knowledge of Urien’s family, and may even have been Nen­ nius’s source for the information on the poets of the North who celebrated Urien.6 At first sight the note about Renchidus and Elbobdus (which, by the way, is absent in the oldest and best 1 I should regard it as probable that it emanates from the same place as the *Chronicle *; in my view, most likely from Glasgow. 2 Reserving the phrase ‘the Northern History’ (without qualification) for the version of it in the Historia Brittonum of Nennius. 8 So Lloyd, H W . 1, 231 ; but the Chadwicks argue for 816 as the date for the beginning of his reign (GL. p. 154). 4 GL. pp. 158 f. ; and N. K. Chadwick, SE BC . pp. 79-93, 118 f. 6 The reading in Nennius should be emended to Elbodgus. 6 LEW P. p. 51. 54

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R I T I S H SEC TIO N IN N E N N IU S

recension, the Harleian) is not consistent with the account given above of how the material dealing with Rhun got into the Northern History, and it seems to imply a separate source for this item. But the explanation may very well be that it was Renchidus and Elfoddw who gave Nennius the manuscript of the original Northern History which he must have used, which they themselves had acquired from northern sources; and which contained the note on the baptism by Rhun as it appears in the Harleian recension, minus any refer­ ence to them ; but that the two bishops laid especial stress on this baptism, for some reason unknown to us—they may have had some particular interest in the line of the kings of Rheged ?—and Nennius mentioned this fact when he came to add in the ‘ Gildas recension* the extra notes which constitute the ‘Nennian recension*.1 There is one further point remaining to be discussed. It has been shown that the northern British material in the section in Nennius called the Saxon Genealogies appears to be of exactly the same kind as that in the part called the Northern History, and if so must surely have had the same origin. But if the original Northern History was drawn up in Glasgow or elsewhere in the north some time after 750 (or 737 at earliest), with the British material fully incorporated, how is it that a considerable part of it appears not in the Northern History but in the Saxon Genealogies, which is based on a document of Mercian origin belonging to the year 796 or the period between the years 787 and 796? This is a question which has been silently passed over above, but now that a probable back­ ground for the Northern History has been established it is neces­ sary to deal with it here. Previous writers have scarcely touched it. Since Thurneysen it is mostly agreed that the Genealogies, taken from a lost English (Mercian) document of the year 796 or 787-96, our M.j and belonging thus exactly to Nennius*s own time, were probably inserted by Nennius himself;12 but the question where Nennius found the considerable British material which in that case he must have added himself to his copy of M. has scarcely been properly faced. Thurneysen, who holds that it was Nennius who 1 On this see Thurneysen in ZCP. 1, 161 ff., and xx, 131 f. He thinks that by the time he produced the ‘ Nennian recension’ Nennius regretted he had left this out, and that he felt it necessary now to defend himself for having made Rhun do the baptising (when the general opinion was that it was Paulinus) by quoting the impressive authorities he followed. 2 See Thurneysen, Z N . p. 101 ; Lot, N H B . pp. 92-3 ; Sisam, P B A . xxix, 294. who does not say this in so many words but would evidently not reject it. 55

ON THE N O R TH E RN B R IT I S H SEC TIO N IN N E N N IU S

inserted these things, guesses vaguely ‘from British sources \ Lot1 thinks he ‘glossed the Genealogies by adding here and there a few words inspired by chaps. 61-4 and also oral traditions*. But when he comes to detail these they mount up to a formidable list. Lot attempts to dismiss them lightly: Nennius knew of Eanfled from chap. 63 of the Northern History;2 it is not known where he got the name Riemmelth,3 but perhaps from a genealogy; the note in chap. 60 that Nennius knew the names of two of Pybba*s twelve sons was derived from chap. 65, though it is not known where he discovered that he had twelve sons ; the remark on the victory of Meicen comes from a Welshman (that is, Nennius himself) because the credit is given to Cadwallon king of North Wales; and Nennius got the Welsh names of battles (Meicen, Linn Goran4), the epithets of English kings, the names Birdei and Catguollaun, and the facts of the battles themselves, from ‘récits épiques Bretons, tout comme son prédécesseur* the author of the original Northern History. All this is not good enough ; apart from the detailed objections just mentioned in the footnotes, these are not ‘a few words inspired by chaps. 61-4 and also oral traditions ’, they are an impressive body of material exactly parallel to that in the Northern History, clearly from written historical sources as has already been shown, and all of it of Northern origin—the reason why a Northerner as well as a Welshman should be interested in Cadwallon has already been explained, and is obvious enough in any case. The fact that Lot has to fall back on ‘récits épiques* for both the Northern History and the Saxon Genealogies is significant. The conclusion which forces itself upon us would seem at first sight to be this : If Nennius was himself responsible for introducing the Saxon Genealogies, having discovered them in some copy of the Mercian pedigrees of 796 or 787-96; if the Northern material incorporated into them in HB. was put there by himself ; and if this material is of precisely the same origin as that in the Northern 1 N H B . p. 94. 2 But if that was his only source, one might well ask, how did he know she was Oswy’s wife? 3 But it was more than her name, it was also her father’s and grandfather’s, and particularly the fact that she was Oswy’s first wife. 4 Lot mentions that chap. 65 of the Northern History supplied the fact of the killing of Ecgfrith by the Piets but not the name of the Pictish king, the fact that he was Ecgfrith’s cousin, or the name of the battle. Lot fails to note that chap. 65 does not mention, as 57 does, that Ecgfrith was killed with all his army and that the Northumbrians never exacted tribute from the Piets again.

56

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History, chaps. 61 (end)-65 î then it follows that he found it in his copy of the original Northern History put together after about 750. If so, it is not there now, in Nennius’s own rendering of the Northern History section, except for the fact that the nickname Flesaur is repeated in both, and the account of Nechtansmere is uncomfortably split between the two. This would necessarily mean that the original Northern History was something considerably dif­ ferent from what it now is in the HB. ; its content must have been distinctly larger, including all the British items now appearing in the Saxon Genealogies and doubtless most if not all the English ones not present in the Vespasian pedigrees, and when Nennius sat down with it and his copy of the English pedigrees before him he must have edited it extensively, extracting some of the British and English1 material from the original Northern History to gloss the pedigrees and therefore presumably rearranging what was left into the form of his Northern History as we now have it. He adopted the Genealogies for the purpose of illustrating the notes in the Northern History on the kings of Northumbria and Mercia, but adopted them almost complete—Kent, East Anglia, and all—which was unnecessary; and inserted his version of them, with its British additions, clumsily into the middle of the mention of Ida which is thus now split between the end of chap. 56 and the end of chap. 61. This explanation is possible, but it is perhaps not very satisfying. Would Nennius have undertaken such extensive editing, and have done it so comparatively successfully? He is generally regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a dim-witted and muddle-headed person. Would there not have been more repetitions like those mentioned above, and contradictions of all kinds? It is impossible to say, of course; but there are considerations which suggest a different solution. The tendency has always been to suppose that the original Northern History was compiled much earlier than Nennius’s time. Hypnotised by Zimmer’s date of 679, and perhaps in some cases 1 Among other things, perhaps the notes on the twelve sons of Ida, the seven sons of Ethelfrith, the three sons of Oswy, and the twelve sons of Pybba, which are not in the Vespasian collection and are not very likely to have been in M . if we can judge its character from Vespasian—a simple list of direct descents. The comment on the twelve sons, quorum duo notitiores mihi sunt qtiam alii id est Penda et Eua, may very well be due to Nennius himself and learned by him from chap. 65 ; and that this manner of introducing himself is characteristic of Nennius, as Lot thought (N H B . p. 95). 57

ON THE NO R TH E R N B R IT I S H S EC TIO N IN N E N N I U S

unconsciously by the wish to make it as early and as reliable as pos­ sible,1 writers have tended to think in terms of the late seventh or early eighth century as its date. Lot—whose prejudices were all the other way—did indeed date the Moore Memoranda in the year 774 (wrongly, as it happens), and therefore put the original Northern History after that time, but he does not seem to have followed up the implications of this. Substituting the correct 737 for 774, the original Northern History (if it does derive from the Moore Memo­ randa) cannot be much older than the middle of the eighth century, and if it is really based on a ‘Northern Chronicle* coming down to about 750, it must belong to the second half of that century. We must ask ourselves, then, is it possible that the whole thing, all the section in Nennius from the end of chap. 56 to the end of chap. 65, was compiled in Northern Britain after 796 or at any rate after 787 ; that the compiler had before him the Moore Memoranda and other information on Northumbrian history (probably including Books i-iv of Bede), the ‘Northern Chronicle*, and a copy of the English pedigrees called here M. which he wanted for the purpose of illustrating the background of the Northumbrian and Mercian kings who appeared in his other sources ; that it was he who pro­ duced the composite account of the relations between the Britons and the English of the North; and that Nennius’s part was limited at most to transferring the Genealogies clumsily into the middle of the notes on Ida in the ill-conceived desire to throw some light on his family history in particular? It will be objected to this that since M. was of Mercian origin the insertion of it must be the work of a Welshman, that is, Nennius, not to mention the fact that the date within Nennius’s lifetime has been held to mean that it must be due to him. But once again, I should like to protest against the curiously narrow concept of things which says that events and documents of Midland connections were of no interest to the Northern Britons and can only point to Welsh intermediaries. Besides, these things were of Northern interest as well as Midland ; just as Penda and Eowa of Mercia12 and their doings were recorded 1 A wish which is in any case unnecessary if its sources are as old and as com­ paratively reliable as has been indicated above. 2 And Cadwallon too. Because Cadwallon was king of North Wales does it follow that everything lauding him must have been written by a Welshman? This is an absurdity. Cadwallon was a hero of the British people who made the English of Northumbria tremble ; this was quite enough to ensure his immortality in the hearts of the Britons of the North. 58

ON THE N O R THE RN BR IT ISH SECTION IN NENNIU S

in the original Northern History because these doings had a very intimate connection with the affairs of Northumbria and the Britons of the North, so a document listing the pedigrees of the kings of Northumbria and Mercia would be seen by those Britons to pro­ vide a valuable illustration to a history of Northern Britain in the sixth to seventh centuries. It would be foolish to suppose that a text hailing from Mercia could not possibly have been known in Glasgow or Whithorn or elsewhere if one considers the history of learning in the English Church at the time,1 and the fact that Whithorn (whence Glasgow was easily accessible) was a prominent English ecclesiastical centre in the eighth century. When we re­ member that there seems in fact to be nothing to prove that Nennius had really put together any version of the Historia Brittonum before his Harleian recension,12 the date of which is probably 826, perhaps 829, and in no event earlier than 819, and that there is reason to suppose that the interest in Northern affairs shown in Wales in the ninth century is a consequence of the acces­ sion of Merfyn in 825 or perhaps 816, it is surely clear that the theory sketched above is possible. The original Northern History might have been put together in, say, about 810, and then came south at some time such as 818 or even later.3 This hypothesis has advantages. It accounts for certain facts not hitherto adequately explained. In the first place, Nennius himself tells us in chap. 63 of the ‘Nennian recension* that he has omitted the genealogiae Saxonum because his teacher Beulan thought them valueless ; but in fact what this recension omits and the older Har­ leian recension preserves is not simply the Saxon Genealogies but the whole of the Northern material from chap. 57 to chap. 65, except for the note on the baptism of Eanfled and Edwin by Rhun (with the addition about Renchidus and Elbobdus and the gloss identifying Rhun with Paulinus). This seems to mean that Nen1 For example, the way Bede collected written information from many parts of England. 2 Cf. p. 51 n. 5 above. 3 A further objection is scarcely worth mentioning except in a footnote. Thum eysen held that the fact that the Northumbrians are called Saxones in chap. 57 means that the glossator of the Genealogies was a Welshman, because the Northumbrians were Angles (which a Northern Briton would have known) whereas the Welsh called all the English ‘Saxons’ (Z N . p. 99). But Thumeysen forgot that the Northern poetry of Taliesin and Aneirin also calls them Saxons (in short, that it was a general British usage); and besides the Mercians were Angles too and yet the Welsh called them Saxons.

59

ON THE N O R T H E R N B R IT I S H S EC TI ON IN N E N N I U S

nius regarded this entire section as ‘genealogiae Saxonum \ Again, in his preface he tells us that he used what he calls annales Saxonum, and it has generally been considered that this means the Genealogies, though it is admitted that annales is not a very suitable word for these.1 It would fit the Northern History very much better. The solution may be that Nennius did not make any clear distinction between the Northern History and the Saxon Genea­ logies, and that he thought of the whole as genealogiae and annales indifferently; and this would only be probable if he had received the entire section as one single text from his predecessors—that is to say, if he himself was not the interpolator of the Genealogies, the combination having been made before his time (in the North), even though he may have been responsible for moving the actual Genea­ logies to the uncomfortable position which they now occupy. In the second place, there is the curious, hitherto unexplained, and scarcely even noticed, pedigree of an unknown Oslaf which appears in the Saxon Genealogies in chap. 61. The English texts know nothing of this. It states that Oswy was father of Ecgfrith (Ecgfrid Ailguin) father of Oslach father of Alhun father of Adlsing father of Echun father of Oslaph. These people are unidentified, but the descent from Oswy, and the context, immediately before the pedigree of Eadbert ( = Vespasian no. 3 a)> shows that it represents some line of Bernician nobles or princes since forgotten. Now, this might have been in M .y the common ancestor of Vespasian and Nennius’s Saxon Genealogies, but there seems no reason at all why Vespasian and the other English manuscripts should leave it out. In that case it is an addition in the Historia Brittonum. But this obscure Bernician pedigree could scarcely have been inserted by Nennius himself, and it is far more probable that it was put in by the Compiler of the original Northern History with his strong interest in Bernicia, and that it represents some local dynasty of sub-kings ruling in the far north-west of Northumbria in close contact with Strathclyde. In that case, however, the Compiler must have had the Saxon Genealogies already before him. But there is an even more suggestive feature here : the Oslaf in question, descended from Oswy through five generations, himself the sixth, cannot have been born very much before about 780. Oswy himself was born in 613, and Ecgfrith (the youngest of three sons of the marriage between Oswy and Eanfled soon after 642) in 645 or 64b.2 1 Cf. Lot, N H B . p. 92.

2 Cf. P. 11, 165. 60

ON THE N O R THE RN B R IT ISH SECTION IN N E NNIU S

At the usual reckoning of thirty years to the generation this would make Oslaf born about 795,1 or if we reduce it to a rather unlikely average of twenty-five years the generation, as early as about 770; his father could have been dead, and himself recognised as king, while he was still a child. In any case it puts the date of the Northern Compiler very late indeed, very probably after 787-96 as already proposed. Further, another instance where the Saxon Genealogies give a detail of Northern interest which is not in the English texts, and is certainly not likely to have been in M., is the mention in chap. 61 of Ecgbert the Archbishop of York who died in 766, as brother of Eadbert, the Northumbrian king whose genealogy is given as Vespasian’s pedigree 3 a. To the words genuit Eadbyrth in this pedigree HB. adds et Ecgbirth episcopum qui fuit primus de natione eorum. Nennius would scarcely have inserted this himself, even if he had known it,2 but it is just the kind of thing which might have been interpolated into the genealogy of Eadbert by some member of the Church in the North (whether Northumbria or Strathclyde) who remembered that Eadbert’s brother had been Archbishop of York in or shortly before his own time, and therefore his own eccle­ siastical superior or at least the greatest Christian dignitary in Northern Britain. Taken together, the two considerations summarised in the pre­ ceding paragraph constitute, it seems to me, a strong argument for the theory already propounded, that the fusing into the Northern History of the English pedigrees derived from M., and the intro­ duction into them of the Northern British material which the Saxon Genealogies now contains, was the work not of Nennius but of the Northern Compiler; and that the latter was working at some time between 796 (or 787) and 826 (or perhaps 829 or 819). His very late date would not detract in any way from the value to us of his work as a historian, if, as is set out above, he was using a ‘Northern Chronicle’ which was more or less contemporary for most of the events of the seventh century which he recorded and perhaps drew for the sixth and early part of the seventh century on 1 Thum eysen reckons 200 years for six generations and notes that this makes him a contemporary of Nennius (Z N . p. 100, cf. ZCP. xx, 108), but he does not appear to see the implications of this ; and so far as I know no one else has paid any attention to them. 8 Lot’s attempt to show how he might have known it is a failure ; and he con­ fuses him with another Ecgbert, as has been already pointed out above, p. 26 n. 6 (see N H B . p. 94 n. 3). 6l

ON THE NO R TH E R N B R IT I S H S EC TIO N IN N E N N I U S

notes left by Rhun son of Urien. This theory, alternative to the one found not altogether satisfactory on pages 56-7 above, and appearing to account for certain features not explained by that theory, is set out here simply for what it is worth. It may well be rejected, and with good reason produced; but it seems desirable to draw attention to certain aspects of the problem of the Northern chapters in the Historia Brittonum which appear never to have been considered.

II Some Observations on the cH istoria R egu m 3 A ttribu ted to Sjymeon o f D urham BY P E T E R H U N T E R B L A I R

Historia Regum is the handy title given to an important northern English compilation which had been attributed to Symeon of Durham before the end of the twelfth century. The attribution rests on no sure foundation, but this is not of great consequence since the value of its content for English history before the Norman Con­ quest depends more upon the accuracy with which it has recorded earlier material, now lost, than upon any original contribution made to it by a twelfth-century writer. Apart from a greatly abbreviated version now to be found in Paris,1 the work survives in but a single manuscript which formed part of Matthew Parker’s bequest to the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where it bears the number 139. Now consisting of a single volume of ii +180 folios, the book was formerly two separate volumes with the division falling between fos. 165 and 166. Fos. i-ii consist of preliminary matter which includes a fifteenth-century sketch of the Virgin and Child, a list of contents of similar date, and references to the works of Gennadius, Jerome, Eusebius and Dexter, son of Pagatianus. Fos. 166-80, which contain a copy of the Historia Brittonum and of a Life of Gildasy have no organic connection with fos. 1-165 an(^ no further account will be taken either of them or of the preliminary matter on fos. i-ii. Fos. 1-165 f°rm a b°°k of twenty gatherings written in double columns. The gatherings are numbered in the lower margin on the last page of each, save for the twentieth which now contains only four leaves. A note on the upper margin of fo. 165 v reads hie desunt septem folia. The purpose of the study which follows is two­ fold, first to see whether this book contains sufficient internal evi­ dence to show the place and date at which it was written, and 1 Paris, Bib. Nat. MS. nouv. acq. lat. 692.

63

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second, to look more closely at item 7, the Historia Regum attri­ buted to Symeon of Durham, in order to discover what can be learnt about the different elements which have gone to its making.1 i. T h e C o n t e n t o f M a n u s c r i p t C.C.C.C. 139, fos.1-165 In the list of items which follows account is taken of evidence which may help to show where and when the manuscript was written.2 (1) Fos. ir-i6 v , a Universal History {historia omnimoda). On fo. 16 there is a list of popes ending with Calixtus II, 1119-24. (2) Fos. i7r~35 v, extracts from the Ckronicon of Regino of Prum. (3) Fos. 361-461:, Richard of Hexham’s de gestis régis Stephani et de hello Standardii.z The incipit ascribes the work to Richard who was elected prior of Hexham in 1141 and formally confirmed in office in 1142. He was still in office in 1154, but was dead by 1167.4 Against the background of the major events which he describes— the death of Henry I and the accession of Stephen, the battle of the 1 I am deeply indebted to the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, particularly to the librarian, not only for giving me such ready access to the manuscript, but also for allowing it to be deposited at the University Library, Cambridge, so that it could be seen beside U.L.C. MS. Ff. 1. 27. I am also grateful for permission given to reproduce the photographs which appear facing p. 117 (Plate 1), taken by the University Library’s photographer. 2 T he contents have been listed in modem times by J. Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. Li (1868), pp. lxvii-lxxiii, and by M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (1912), I, 317-23. T he MS. was never paginated in the red chalk familiar from many of the Parker MSS., and remains still without any complete pagination. My folio references are con­ sistently one less than those given by Hodgson Hinde because he ignored fo. i, which is covered with paper on the recto, and reckoned fo. ii as fo. 1. T he first leaf of each gathering from itoxi inclusive now bears a pencilled foliation num ber in a modem hand. There is no such number on the first leaf of xii (fo. 93 r). T he numbering is resumed on the first leaf of xm , but the number written is 103 when it ought to have been 101, and from here to the end of the book the pencilled foliation numbers are consistently in error, being two ahead of the correct number. Since the same error occurs in M. R. James’s account of the MS. it seems probable that it was he who added the pencilled numbers. Thus my folio numbers agree with his as far as the incipit on fo. 51 v, but with the explicit on fo. 129 V they become consistently two less. Though the error is a trivial one which can easily be set right on the MS. itself, it seems important to record it lest subsequent comparison of the MS. with the catalogue might suggest the loss of two leaves from the thirteenth gathering. 3 Ed. J. Raine, The Priory of Hexham, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. X L iv (1864), I, 63-106, also R. Howlett, Chronicles of Stephen, Henry I I and Richard I, Rolls Series, vol. in (1886), 137-78. 4 For biographical details see J. Raine, op. cit. pp. cxlii-cxliv. 64

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

Standard, the visit of the papal legate Alberic and the terms of the treaty between Stephen and David—the work contains internal evidence which amply confirms its Hexham origin. It ends with events of 1139. (4) Fos. 46 r-48 v, a chronicle from Adam to the emperor Henry V. Most of this work consists of little more than a reckon­ ing of the passage of years from the beginning of the world. From 718 it expands into a brief chronicle of Frankish affairs. Thereafter follow some entries which relate to English, and predominantly Northumbrian, events of the seventh century, but these entries have no independent value. (5) Fos. 48v~5or, a letter to Hugh, dean of York, de archiepiscopis eboraci. The incipit attributes the letter to Symeon, called monk of the church of St Cuthbert of Durham, and Symeon refers to himself in the first person in the body of the letter.1 The content of the work, which has little historical value, consists for the most part of a briefly annotated list of the archbishops of York. After Oswald (972-92) only the list of names is given. The last three in the list are William Fitzherbert, Henry Murdac and Roger of Bishop’s Bridge. Roger held the archbishopric from 1154 till his death in 1181.2 In another manuscript of this work3 the list of archbishops ends with Thurstan who was in office 1119-40.4 Raine6 states that the recipient of the letter was Hugh, dean of York 11302, but there was an earlier Hugh who held the same office 10901119. Symeon is believed to have been alive in 1104 and 1126, but the dates of his birth and death have not been recorded.6 Just as the Corpus manuscript seems to represent a later recension than that which is found in the fifteenth-century Cottonian manuscript, so also the Cottonian manuscript may reflect a recension later than that which may have existed in a manuscript no longer surviving. Certainly it would be unwise to argue from this letter that Symeon was still alive in 1130, though he well may have been. 1 Ed. J. Raine, The Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, Rolls Series, 11 (1886), 252-8. 2 Handbook of British Chronology, ed. F. M. Powicke, Roy. Hist. Soc. (1939)* p. 177. 8 British Museum MS. Cotton Titus A xix, attributed by J. Raine, Historians of the Church of York, 11, xvi, to the fifteenth century. 4 Handbook of British Chronology, p. 177. 6 Loc. cit. 6 H. S. Offler, Medieval Historians of Durham, Inaugural Lecture at Durham (1958), 6-8. 5

65

CCS

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

There is one other major point of distinction between the two manuscripts of the letter. The Cottonian text has this to say of Archbishop Wulfhere at the time of the Danish attack on York— Inter has strages remotius se agebat apud Hatyngham episcopus.1 The Corpus manuscript reads— Inter has strages remotius se agebat episcopus Wlferius apud addingeham in occidentali parte eboraci in ualle que uocatur hweruerdale. super ripam fluminis hwerf inter oteleiam et castellum de scipctun (sic MS., Raine reads Scipetun).2 Raine states3 that this additional passage is an interlineation in the Corpus Christi manuscript, but this is not the case. The text of the letter in this manuscript is written in a single hand throughout and has no interlineations or marginal additions. The reference to the local topography of western Yorkshire should be noted. (6) Fos. 5or-5iv, a tract de obsessione Dunelmi et de probitate Ucthredi comitis.4 This short, but historically valuable, work is mainly concerned with the history of several estates which were given by Aldhun, bishop of Durham 995-1018, as his daughter’s dowry on her marriage to Uhtred, earl of Northumbria. Its narra­ tive spans the eleventh century as far as 1073, but seems to stop short of the death of Waltheof, earl of Northumbria, in 1076.5 It was probably written at Durham late in the eleventh century. A sixteenth-century addition to the incipit attributes the work to Symeon, but there is no other evidence to support this attribution. (7) Fos. 51V-129V, the Historia Regum. This work, which occupies nearly half the book, is enclosed within an elaborate incipit and a slightly less elaborate explicit. Both will be examined in detail below with the other evidence bearing upon the date, com­ position and origin of the work as a whole. (8) Fos. 129 v-147 r, the continuation of Symeon’s Historia Regum by John, prior of Hexham, entitled historia Johannis prions haugustaldensis ecclesie. xx v . annorum.6The continuation covers the years 1130-53, but in this the only known manuscript the regularity 1 Raine’s text. 2 C.C.C.C. MS. 139, fo. 50v, col. i. 3 Op. cit. p. 255 n. i. 4 Ed. T . Arnold, Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, Rolls Series (1882), 1, 21520. Arnold’s edition of Symeon’s works is cited hereafter as T . Arnold, Symeon. 6 F. S. Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof of Northumbria*, Archaeologta JEliana, 4th series, xxx (1952), 150. 8 Ed. J. Raine, Hexham, 1, 107-72, and T . Arnold, Symeon, 11, 284-332. 66

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

of the annals is interrupted in the middle of the entry for 1138 (fo. 132T) by a number of items derived from other authors. These intrusive items are listed below as items (9)-(i2). Prior John’s continuation is resumed on fo. i38r and the work proceeds without further interruption until its end in 1153. (9) Fo. 132 r, rubric erased. Prior John’s account of the battle of the Standard ends at fo. i32r, col. 2, line 20. The next three lines formerly contained a rubric which was later erased1 and in the central part of the erasure there is now a rough sketch of a comet. Following the erased rubric there is an entry which begins— Anno. M.c.xxxiii. Stella cometis__ There follows an account of the burning of London and of a variety of natural phenomena. Raine, who seems to have regarded the placing of the entry at this point as a mere error of copying, transferred it to the appropriate year in his edition of Prior John’s work and he remarked that the whole passage had been borrowed by the continuator of Florence of Worcester.2 It seems certain, however, that the entry formed no part of Prior John’s work as he himself left it. The borrowing has surely been the other way and the passage is rather to be regarded as a late insertion into Prior John’s work borrowed from Florence of Worcester’s continuator.3 (10) Fo. 132 v, an account of the battle of the Standard composed by Serlo in 72 lines of verse.4 Bom in 1109 and educated at York, Serlo went to Fountains in 1138, the year in which the battle was fought. In 1147 he went to help in the foundation of Kirkstall where he is thought to have died c. 1207 after dictating, when almost a hundred years old, an account of the origin and early history of Fountains.5 1 Traces of the red ink can still be seen but they seem to have been over­ looked by M. R. James as well as by the editors of Prior John’s Continuation. My enumeration of items is accordingly ahead of James’s from this point. 2 J. Raine, Hexham , I, n o n ote/. 8 Both Raine and Arnold overlooked the erased rubric and Arnold gives no hint that the whole passage from § 7 on p. 295 to the bottom of p. 296 in his edi­ tion of Symeon’s Historia Regum is found verbatim, save for one or two minor changes in the continuation of Florence of Worcester, ed. B. Thorpe, Florentii Wigomiensis Monachi Chronicon ex Chronicis (1848-9), 11, 93-4. 4 Ed. J. Raine, Lazorence of Durham^ Surtees Society Publications, lxx (1880), 74- 6* 8 For biographical details see Diet. Nat. Biog., also D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (1949), pp. 232-3. 67

5-2

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

(11) Fo. 133 r, v, an account of the defeat and death of Somerled.1 The work consists of 80 lines of doggerel Latin verse, usually with both internal and end rhyme. According to its last couplet, it was composed in honour of St Kentigern by a man called William who is thought to have been a clerk at Glasgow and who claims that he was an eyewitness of the events which he describes. The poem gives an account of an attack which was led by Somerled against Glasgow in 1164 and which is well documented in contemporary Scottish and Irish sources.12 (12) Fos. 133 v -i 38 r, a tract on the battle of the Standard written by Ailred of Rievaulx.3 The exact date of its composition is uncer­ tain, but the evidence points to the period 1155-7.4 (13) Fos. 147^149 v, the story, written by Ailred of Rievaulx, of the erring nun of Watton, a Gilbertine house in Yorkshire.5 The nun is said to have been comforted by Henry Murdac, archbishop of York, who appeared to her in a vision after his death. The story must therefore be later than 1153 and a likely approximation would be c. 1160.6 (14) Fos. i5or-i52v, an account of the foundation and fortunes of St Mary’s abbey at York. (15) Fo. 152v, a very brief item which includes a reference, in elaborate chronological terms, to the foundation of Fountains in 1132. (16) Fos. 153 r - i 58 r, a letter, written by Thurstan, archbishop of York 1119-40, to William of Corbeil, archbishop of Canterbury 1123-36, about the exodus of monks from St Mary’s, York, which led to the foundation of the Cistercian house at Fountains in 1132.7 There are several other manuscripts of this valuable and contem­ porary account.8 (17-20) Fos. I5 8 r-i6 iv , four brief extracts from the G esta 1 Ed. W. F. Skene, The Historians of Scotland, 1, Fordun (1871), 449-51 ; J. Raine, Lawrence of Durham, pp. 78-80, and T . Arnold, Symeon, 11, 386-8. 2 A. O. Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History (1922), 11, 254-8. My items 10 and 11 correspond with James’s 9 and g a. 3 Ed. R. Howlett, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry I I and Richard I, hi (1886), 181-99. 4 F. M. Powicke, The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx (1950), pp. xcvii and xcix. 6 Migne, Pat. Lat. 195, coll. 789-96. 6 F. M. Powicke, op. cit. pp. lxxxi-lxxxii. 7 Ed. J. R. Walbran, Memorials of Fountains Abbey, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. xlii (Durham, 1863), 1, 11-29. 8 Ibid. p. 11 n. i. 68

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ‘H IS TO R IA R E G U M ’

Regum of William of Malmesbury: (a) De uita et conversacione Gereberti pape,* (b) Visio Karoli imperatoris^ (c) Visio Sancti Mauriliiy1 *3 (d) De anulo statue commendato.4 (21) Fo. iÔ2r, a fragment of Northumbrian saga telling of the relations of Ælla who was ruling in Northumbria at the time of the Danish attack on York in 867, with the wife of Ærnulf, a merchant of York. This is a variant of the well-known story of Beorn Butsecarl.5 (22) Fo. 165 r-v, a brief item de eo quod eboracensis ecclesia nullum dominium super scottos habere debet. (23) Fo. 165 V , a brief item in which a clerk interrogates the spirit of Malcolm appearing to him in a vision. The Malcolm in question is Malcolm IV of Scotland who died in 1165.6 This list of items speaks plainly enough the answer to one of the two problems to which answer is needed, namely the approximate date at which the manuscript was written. The latest episodes of which its compilers show knowledge are the death of Somerled in 1164 (item 11) and the death of Malcolm IV of Scotland in 1165 (item 23). The item recording the death of Somerled is interpolated into the midst of Prior John’s Continuation of the Historia Regum and it follows that not only Prior John’s work (item 8) and the other interpolated items (9, 10,12), but also all the other items to the end of the book (items 13-23) were written in the form in which we find them in this manuscript not earlier than 1164. The list of arch­ bishops in Symeon’s letter (item 5) to Hugh, dean of York, ends with Roger of Bishop’s Bridge who was in office 1154-81 and there is a fair presumption, wanting evidence to the contrary, that Roger was still in office when this version of the letter was written. It will be shown below7 that the rubrics which mark the beginning (fo. 51 v ) and end (fo. 129 V) of the Historia Regum were not composed before 1164. It will also be shown8 that the entry in the Historia 1 W. Stubbs, Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi de Gestis Regum Anglorum, Rolls Series (1887-9), b 193-201. 8 Ibid. I, 112-13. 3 Ibid. 11, 327-8. 4 Ibid, i, 256. 6 For the text of this version see T. D. Hardy and C. T. Martin, Gaimar, Lestorie des Engles, Rolls Series (1888), 1, 328-38. For Gaimar’s own version see ibid, i, 104-17. See also C. E. Wright, The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England ( i 939)> 73 . 77 , 107-15• W. F. Skene, Fordun, p. 452; J. Raine, Lawrence of Durham, pp. 81-2; and A. O. Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History, 11, 262. 7 See below, pp. 77-8. 8 See below, pp. 110-11.

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Regum for 1074 contains a list of the abbots at York and Whitby, the York list ending with a reference to Clement qui et in praesenti and the Whitby list with Richard qui nunc superest. Clement’s pre­ decessor at York, Severinus, died in 1161 and Clement himself in 1184.1 Richard of Whitby succeeded Benedict in 1148 and died in 1175.2 There seems to be little room for doubt that the book as a whole was compiled in the second half of the twelfth century and perhaps c. 1170 will seem a likely approximation. The list of contents speaks no less plainly of the northern origin of the book, with its works written by, or attributed to, Symeon of Durham, Richard of Hexham, John of Hexham, Serlo of Kirkstall and Ailred of Rievaulx. Hexham in particular has been claimed as its home,3 but there are difficulties in the way of accepting a Hexham attribution for the book as a whole, despite strong indications of Hexham interest. The two entries in the Historia Regum which record respectively the death of Acca in 740 and the death of Alchmund in 781 have been embroidered by the addition of long passages of Hexham interest and relating to translations of the relics of these two bishops.4 In the case of Acca the translation is described as having taken place more than 300 years after his death (i.e. after 1040) and in the case of Alchmund the translation is placed more than 250 years after his death (i.e. after 1030). Saving perhaps its foundation in 1112, the outstanding event in the domestic history of the Augustinian house at Hexham during the twelfth century was the ceremonial translation of the relics of the early bishops of Hexham in 1155. Ailred’s de Sanctis Ecclesiae Haugustaldensisf thought to be based on a sermon preached by him at Hexham on this occasion, contains an account of the trans­ lation of the relics of four of the eighth-century bishops of Hexham —Acca (d. 740), Frithuberht (d. 766), Alchmund (d. 781) and Tilberht (d. 789). Ailred himself was not in any doubt that the trans­ lations of 1155 about which he wrote in his de Sanctis were wholly distinct from the translations recorded in the Historia Regum, for he added to his own account of Alchmund's translation in 1155 an account of the earlier translation in terms which show a large mea1 V.C.H. York, in (1913), h i . 2 Ibid. p. 104. 3 M. R. James, Catalogue, 1, 323, also F. M. Powicke, Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, p. xcv. 4 T he entries are discussed in greater detail below, pp. 87-90. 5 J. Raine, Hexham, 1, 173-203. 70

O B S E RV AT I ON S ON T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

sure of verbal identity with the Historia Regum,1 If the author of the Acca and Alchmund interpolations in the Historia Regum had been aware of the translations of 1155, it seems likely that he would have made use of the additional material about Acca and Alchmund and also that he would have adorned the obits of Frithuberht and Tilberht in a similar way. Yet nowhere in the whole book is there any hint of an awareness of the Hexham translations of 1155. This must surely seem a difficulty to anyone wishing to claim that the book was written at Hexham c. 1170-80 when many witnesses of the events of 1155 would still be living. A second difficulty about the Hexham attribution arises from the manner in which Prior John’s Continuation of the Historia Regum is laid before the reader. Its narrative is not presented as a continuous whole, but is divided into two parts which are separated from one another by four interpolated items (numbered 9-12 above). The break occurs after Prior John’s description of the battle of the Standard in 1138, and two of the four interpolated items, the accounts of the same event by Serlo (item 10) and by Ailred (item 12), although interrupting the flow of Prior John’s narrative, are at least immediately relevant. So much cannot be said of the other two interpolated items, the account of the comet and subsequent phenomena of the year 1133 (item 9) and the account of Somerled’s death in 1164 (item 11). Little is known about the details of Prior John’s life, but it is thought that he became prior of Hexham c. 1160 and it is known that he was still prior in 1189.2 The Hexham case must therefore meet the difficulty of explaining how a Hexham scribe came to present in this mutilated form a work written by a man who at that very time was holding office as prior of Hexham itself. These are both negative arguments and both rest on the claim which cannot be regarded as more than a probability, that the book was written c. 1170. Even so they seem to weaken considerably the case for Hexham authorship, and this case may seem to become untenable against positive arguments which point strongly to a dif­ ferent part of northern England. The extracts from Regino of Prum (item 2), the works of Richard and John of Hexham (items 3 and 8) and the Historia Regum (item 7) account for approximately threefourths of the content of the whole book, but these are works which, though striking a dominantly northern note, are yet con1 de Sanctis, chap. xii.

2 J. Raine, Hexham, pp. clii-cliii.

71

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cerned with matters of much more than merely local interest. Very different are the last eleven items (13-23), which are contained in the last nineteen folios (fos. I47r-i05v). Setting aside the four extracts from William of Malmesbury (items 17-20), the remaining seven items concern the story of a nun of Watton in the East Riding written by Ailred of Rievaulx (item 13), St Mary’s abbey, York (item 14), the foundation of Fountains abbey (item 15), preliminaries leading to the foundation of Foun­ tains abbey (item 16), the wife of a merchant of York (item 21), the relations between the church of York and the Scots (item 22) and finally a clerk’s vision of Malcolm IV (item 23). It is the last, and only the last, of these seven items which yields no signs of a particular local interest. All the rest are directly concerned either with York or with Yorkshire, and it is surely these small items, the miscellanea filling up the remaining pages of the book after the major items had been copied into it, that give the better indication of where the book was written. Keeping in mind the pronounced Yorkshire interest among the miscellanea in the latter part of the book, it may be recalled that the earlier part contains no fewer than four separate accounts of the battle of the Standard which was fought near Northallerton (items 3, 8, 10 and 12), that Symeon’s letter to Hugh, dean of York (item 5), is distinguished from the Cottonian manuscript of the same work in part by the additional detail which it gives about the topography of the West Riding, and that what seems to represent the latest addition to the Historia Regum consists of references to the contemporary abbots of York and Whitby. It may fairly be said that the whole body of internal evidence points clearly in one direc­ tion, and it may be claimed that the weight of the evidence is suffi­ cient to establish that the book came, not from Hexham, but from the scriptorium of a Yorkshire house. Although the list of items will not of itself allow the book to be more exactly located, there seem to be one or two pointers. Despite the concern of several items with York itself, a York origin would be difficult to reconcile with the inclusion of item 22 which is devoted to a statement of the reasons why the church of York had no right to exercise supremacy over the Scots. On the other hand, there seem to be one or two positive hints of connections with a Cistercian house. Rievaulx, the home of Ailred who wrote items 12 and 13, was the first Cistercian foundation in Yorkshire, and as one thinks of Ailred, so 72

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ‘HI S TO R IA R E G U M ’

one thinks of his close connections with Hexham (items 3 and 8) and with Scotland (item 11). In item 13 the Cistercian archbishop of York, Henry Murdac, is portrayed in a markedly favourable light, and the Cistercian interest is again apparent in the two items relat­ ing to Fountains (items 15 and 16). A survey of the content of the book, without taking any other factors into account, suggests a Yorkshire origin in general and perhaps a Cistercian house in particular. It was long ago observed by others1 that this manuscript might be connected in some way with another of the manuscripts which at one time belonged to Matthew Parker and which is now housed partly in the University Library, Cambridge, and partly in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, its two parts being respectively U.L.C. MS. Ff. i. 27 and C.C.C.C. MS. 66. These two manuscripts between them contain two books of which one comes from Bury St Edmunds and the other from St Mary’s Abbey at Sawley in Yorkshire, but the two books have been so split that part of the Bury book and part of the Sawley book are in Ff. 1. 27 and the remainder of both are in C.C.C.C. 66.2 We are here concerned only with the Sawley book which consists of U.L.C. MS. Ff. 1. 27, pp. 1-40,73-252 and C.C.C.C. MS. 66, pp. 1-114. The attribution of the book to Sawley rests upon the note liber Sancte Marie de Salleia at the top of p. 2 of C.C.C.C. MS. 66 in a hand attributed by Ker to the twelfth or thirteenth century.3 MS. Ff. i. 27 includes the de Excidio of Gildas (pp. 1-14), the Historia Brittonum (pp. 14-40), Bede’s de Temporibus (pp. 73-116), Symeon’s Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae (pp. 122-86), the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto (pp. 195-202), Æthelwulf’s de Abbatibus (pp. 203-14) and Richard’s de Moderno et Antiquo Statu (Haugustaldensis) Ecclesiae (pp. 221-36). Among minor items are a list of estates alleged to have been given to St Cuthbert by Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria (p. 186), a list of relics preserved in the church at Durham (p. 194) and the Old English verses de Situ Dunelmi (p. 202). Thus the Sawley book, like C.C.C.C. MS. 139, is a mis­ cellaneous collection of works showing a strong antiquarian in1 J. Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis. . .opera, p. lxxi, and T h. Mommsen, Auct. Antiquiss. xm (Berlin, 1898), 124. 2 See M. R. James, Catalogue, 1, 137-44 f°r the content of C.C.C.C. MS. 66, and p. 145 for the original contents of the two Bury and Sawley manuscripts. 8 N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (1957), p. 12. 73

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ‘HI S T O R IA RE GÜ m ’

terest in the history of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria and more particularly in the history of St Cuthbert’s see. Indeed these two volumes between them contain a large part of the surviving material relating to the history of Northumbria between the death of Bede and the Norman Conquest. Although two such volumes might have been compiled independently at different centres, the coincidence of content between the two is striking and no doubt this was the main ground that inclined Mommsen to the belief that C.C.C.C. MS. 139 was a Sawley book, a belief which was rejected by James in favour of Hexham. Sawley, lying in the extreme west of the West Riding of Yorkshire close by the Ribble and not to be confused with Sawley near Ripon, was a Cistercian house founded in 1147/8 by monks from Newminster which was itself a daughter house of Fountains. It thus meets the conditions suggested by the content of MS. 139 for a Yorkshire, and prob­ ably Cistercian, origin for the book, and such an origin would explain the local topographical interest in the West Riding shown in item 5.1 The argument that C.C.C.C. MS. 139 comes from the same scriptorium as the Sawley parts of U.L.C. MS. Ff. 1. 27 and C.C.C.C. MS. 66, and therefore must itself be a Sawley book, does not rest solely on the common antiquarian interest which the two books show in the past history of Northumbria. The Sawley text of Symeon’s Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae takes third place in order of date and importance behind the Durham Cosins MS. V. 11. 6 and the British Museum Cotton MS. Faustina A v and is itself followed in fourth place by the Phillips MS. which has recently been restored to Durham, its original home.2 One of the ways in which the Sawley text of the Historia differs from all the other known manuscripts of the work is in the terms in which it refers to the author, Symeon, in the rubrics. The incipit to the Preface reads thus: Incipit prefatio reuerendi symeonis | monachi et precentoris ecclesie sancti Cuth|berti Dunelmi. in historia de exordio christia|nitatis et religionis tocius northumbrie. | de fide et origine sancti oswaldi regis. et | martiris . et de predicatione sançti aidani . | episcopi . |3 1 See above, p. 66. a J. Conway Davies, ‘A Recovered Manuscript of Symeon of D urham ’, Durham University Journal, vol. xliv, new series vol. xm (1951), 22-8. 8 U.L.C. MS. Ff. i. 27, p. 123, col. i. 74

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The incipit to the Historia itself reads : Incipit historia | sancte et suavis me|morie simeonis | monachi sancti cuth|berti Dunelmi . de exordio christianita|tis et religionis tocius | northumbrie . et de exortu | et processu lindisfarnensis siue dunelmensis | ecclesie I1 No such detail is found in the explicit which reads simply: explicit historia simeonis12 The terms of these rubrics may be compared with the rubrics marking the beginning and end of the Historia Regum in C.C.C.C. MS. 139. The incipit reads: Incipit historia sancte et suauis memorie | Symeonis monachi et precentoris | ecclesie sancti Cuthberti Dunelmi de regibus | anglorum et dacorum et creberrimis bellis. ra|pinis. et incendiis eorum . post obitum uenerabilis Bede presbyteri fere usque ad obitum | régis primi Henrici filii Willelmi nothi | qui angliam adquisiuit. id est. ccc. | .xxix. annorum .et. iiii mensium. |3 The explicit reads : Explicit historia suauis et sancte | memorie Symeonis monachi et | precentoris ecclesie sancti Cuthberti Dunelmi. annorum .cccc. xxix. et mensium quattuor. |4 The words historia sancte et suauis memorie Symeonis occur both in the incipit to the Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae and in the incipit to the Historia Regum, and also, save for the transposition of sancte and suauisy in the explicit to the Historia Regum. The words Symeonis monachi et precentoris ecclesie sancti Cuthberti Dunelmi occur three times—once in the incipit to the Preface of the Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiaey a second time in the incipit to the Historia itself and a third time in the explicit to the Historia Regum. The incipit to the Preface calls Symeon precentor and so also do both the incipit and the explicit to the Historia Regum. Nowhere else save in these two manuscripts is this title given to Symeon. There seems to be no room for doubt that all these rubrics were composed by the same person, and we shall not be surprised to find that thèy are 1 U.L.C. MS. Ff. 1. 27, p. 131, col. i. 2 Ibid. p. 186, col. 2. 8 T he incipit is on fo. 51 v and occupies lines 29-37 of c°l- 2, that is to say the bottom of the column. Most of the column, that is lines 12-28, is blank. T he top of the column, lines 1-11, is occupied by the previous item. For comment on the placing of this incipit see below, p. 77. 4 Fo. 1 2 9 V, col. 2 . 75

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all in the same handwriting (see plate I, facing page 117).1 It seems certain that Mommsen was right and that C.C.C.C. MS. 139 is a Sawley book. 2. A n A n a l y s i s o f I t e m 7 i n M a n u s c r i p t C.C.C.C. 139 Item 7 is the material which lies between the two elaborate rubrics of which the indpit is found on fo. 51 v and the explicit on fo. 129 v. Although it is a convenience, established by the usage of several generations of scholars, to call this material the Historia Regum, this title does not occur either in the rubrics or in the body of the material itself, and care must be taken lest a mere convenience of terminology may seem to impose upon the material to which it refers a unity of substance and form which that material is very far from possessing. The ascription of it all to a named author, Symeon of Durham, creates additional need for care, and it would perhaps be well to accept as a point of departure that the so-called Historia Regum is a miscellaneous collection of material, some of it in narrative and some of it in annalistic form, some of it derived from known sources, some of it from lost sources, and some of it original, but all of it having an artificial unity imposed upon it from the fact that it is found consecutively in one book written at Sawley in the second half of the twelfth century and defined by rubrics professing to mark its beginning and end. The contents of the work will be examined under the following heads : The Rubrics. (1) The Kentish Legends. (2) The Early Northumbrian Kings. (3) Material derived mainly from Bede. (4) A Chronicle from 732 to 802. (5) A Chronicle from 849 to 887, derived mainly from Asser. (6) A Chronicle from 888 to 957. (7) Extracts from William of Malmesbury. 1 J. Hodgson Hinde (Symeonis.. .Opera, I, bad) thought that the hand that wrote the Historia Regum in C.C.C.C. MS. 139 also wrote the Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae and several other items in U.L.C. MS. Ff. 1. 27. This could only be determined by a detailed palaeographical examination of both MSS. After placing the rubrics side by side and studying them carefully I am convinced of the identity of hand, but am not competent to give an opinion on the wider question. 76

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(8) A Chronicle from 848 to 1118, derived mainly from Florence of Worcester. (9) A Chronicle from 1119 to 1129. The Rubrics The incipit occupies the last eight lines of the second column of fo. 51 v. The first eleven lines of this column are occupied by the pre­ vious item and the remainder of the column (11. 12-28) is blank. The corresponding explicit is found at fo. 129 V , col. 2.1 The incipit ought to mark the beginning of a history running from or soon after 735, the year of Bede’s death, but in fact it is followed immediately at the head of fo. 52r by a second rubric2 and by a variety of material which extends over eighteen pages of the manuscript (fos. 52r-6ov) and which all relates to times before the death of Bede. The inference to be drawn from this fact, and also from the posi­ tion of the rubric on the page, is either that the rubricator was illinformed about the content of the work whose beginning his rubric was intended to mark, or else, and perhaps the alternatives are not exclusive, that when he came to add the rubric after the work itself had been copied, he found that no space had been left at the right place and he therefore wrote it in the nearest convenient blank space, which happened to be at the bottom of fo. 51V. The explicit on fo. 129 V follows the entry for 1129 and is itself followed by the incipit which marks the beginning of Prior John’s Continuation from 1130. The incipit to the Historia Regum defines it as a work extending ‘after the death of the venerable Bede, priest, almost as far as the death of King Henry I, son of William the Bastard who conquered England, that is 429 years and 4 months*. The explicit repeats exactly the length of the work in years and months, but without reference to the death of either Bede or Henry I. The reference to Henry as the first king of that name will at once suggest that this rubric was not composed until after the accession of Henry II in 1154. The explicit follows the entry for 1129, six years before the death of Henry I, and there can be no doubt that it is to this year 1129 that the phrase fere usque ad obitum régis prirni Henrici refers, but the interval between the death of Bede (735) and the year 1129 is not 429 years and 4 months as the 1 For the text of both rubrics see above, p. 75. 8 See below, p. 78. 77

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ‘H I S T O R IA R E G U M ’

rubric states. If we subtract 429 from 1129 we reach the date 700 which has no particular significance for the Historia Regum> nor do we reach any more significant date by subtracting 429 from 1153, the year in which Prior John’s Continuation ends. The alternative, and seemingly most natural, course is to add 429 years and 4 months to the date of Bede’s death, and this will give September 1164, a date far beyond the point to which the current of the Historia Regum reaches. Yet this date has a clear significance, not so much for item 7 itself, the Historia Regumy as for the whole book of which it forms a part. We have seen that the latest events to which this book refers are the death of Somerled in 1164 (item 11) and the death of Malcolm IV of Scotland in 1165 (item 23). The reasonable conclusion is that September 1164 marks the date by which the copying of the Historia Regum at Sawley had been completed and the rubrics themselves written. The rubricator thus distinguished, in a somewhat muddled way, between two dates—1129, the year at which Symeon’s work was believed to have ended, and 1164, the year in which the Sawley copy was completed. A similar distinction can be observed within the Historia Regum itself. The entry for the year 1072 which contains a list of the earls of Northumbria ends hodieque rex Henricus Northymbriam in sua tenet manu. The context shows that the reference is to Henry I, although primus is not here used to qualify Henricus as it is in the incipit. This passage is appropriate to a work which con­ tinued no further than 1129, that is, in the words of the incipit, almost as far as the death of Henry. Part of the entry for 1074 shows by its reference to the contemporary abbots of York and Whitby that it is appropriate to a date between 1161 and 1175.1 (1) The Kentish Legends The incipit of the Historia Regum at the bottom of fo. 51 v is immediately followed at the head of fo. 52 r by a second rubric which reads : Incipit passio sanctorum Ethelberti atque Ethelredi regie stirpis puerorum. The matter to which this rubric refers runs from fo. 52 r to fo. 54 V (pp. 3-13 of Arnold’s text) and its earlier part, which relates to the kings of Kent from Æthelberht to Egbert (d. 673), is derived almost 1 See above, p. 70. 78

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wholly from Bede.1 The remaining and greater part tells of the martyrdom of Æthelberht and Æthelræd, two Kentish princes who were murdered by Thunur, an evil counsellor of their cousin Egbert, the reigning king of Kent, of Egbert’s gift of land in Thanet, in atonement for his failure to prevent the crime, to Eormenbeorg/Domneva, sister of the murdered princes, and of the foundation on this land of a religious house of which Eormenbeorg became abbess, to be followed later by her daughter Mildred. T htpassio of the two Kentish princes forms part of a widespread group of legends which relate historically to the second half of the seventh century, geographically to Minster-in-Thanet and Canterbury, and personally to Eormenbeorg/Domneva and her daughter Mildred. The legends are found in greater or less detail in two Old English sources, Pa halgan on Angelcynne, which Lieber­ mann believed to have been composed shortly before iooo,12 and a now fragmentary Life of S t Mildred which is preserved in an eleventh-century manuscript.3 The latter is closely related to the first part of the former and sometimes agrees verbally with it. There is a brief reference to the passio in a Canterbury addition to the entry for 640 in the A text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The legends are also recounted in a Latin Life of S t Mildred written by Goscelin of Canterbury late in the eleventh century,4 as well as in the works of various historians writing in the twelfth and thir­ teenth centuries. This considerable body of material would require detailed study before any sure conclusions could be reached about the growth and distribution of the legends and the relations of the different versions to one another. Meanwhile note may be taken of some points relevant to two problems—the date at which the legends became current in the north and the reason for their inclusion in the Historia Regum. According to the version found in the Historia Regum, Deusdedit, archbishop of Canterbury, was present at the meeting sum­ moned by King Egbert after the murder of the two princes had 1 H.E. 11, 5 and m , 8. T he amount derived from Bede is much greater than is shown in Arnold’s text. 2 F. Liebermann, Die Heiligen Englands (Hannover, 1889), p. iv. For Liebermann’s texts of Pa halgan and comparative material, see ibid. pp. 1-19. 8 Ed. O. Cockayne, Leechdomsy Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Rolls Series (1866), h i , 422-9. See also N. R. Ker, Catalogue, pp. 172-3. 4 T . D. Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, Rolls Series (1862), 1, pt. i, 376-9. 79

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ‘H I S T O R IA R E G U M ’

been discovered. Deusdedit, however, died in 664 on the same day as Eorconberht, Egbert’s predecessor on the Kentish throne,1 and it follows that Deusdedit cannot have been archbishop when Egbert was king. The Old English Life of S t Mildred agrees with the Historia Regum in this error, but Goscelin, presumably drawing upon additional information about the dates of the Kentish kings and of the archbishops which would be available to him in Canter­ bury, removed the name of Deusdedit and substituted that of Theodore. Secondly, the Historia Regum mentions Eastry as the first and Wakering as the second burial place of the two princes, but it makes no reference to the translation of their relics to Ramsey in 991.2 The form of the place-name—Easterige—pre­ serves the archaic element *gë which is no longer recognisable as such in the forms of the name current after the Norman Conquest.3 Thirdly, the version of the legends told in the Historia Regum refers to no detail later than the death of Mildred, who is said to have been buried in a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It contains no reference to the claim to the possession of the relics which was advanced by Goscelin on behalf of St Augustine’s or to the counter-claim made by the canons of St Gregory’s, Canterbury.4 Fourthly, the Historia Regum agrees with the Old English Life of St Mildred in making Eormenbeorg and Domneva5 alternative names of the same person, while Goscelin, in his Life of the saint, makes them two sisters. It seems clear from these four points that the passio reached the north in a form untouched by Goscelin of Canterbury who is thought to have been at work on his Life of St Mildred in the last decade of the eleventh century,6 and in this respect it belongs to an earlier rather than a later stage in the growth of the legends as a whole. The archaic form of the placename Easterige and the absence of any reference to the removal of the relics of the two princes to Ramsey in 991 may further suggest that an antique text lies behind the Northumbrian version. What1 Bede, H.E. iv, i. 8 Liebermann, op. cit. p. 13. The relics were still claimed by Ramsey in 1192 when they were placed in shrines. W. H. Hart and P. A. Lyons, Cartularium Monasterii de Rameseia, Rolls Series (1893), ni, 177. 8 J. K. Wallenberg, Kentish Place-Names (Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift, 193O, P- 73; 4 W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), p. 199 n. i. 6 The name is a conflation of domina and O.E. Safe. 6 T . D. Hardy, Catalogue, 1, i, 379. 80

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ever its form and whatever its date, no reader of the Historia Regum can be left in any doubt that it was largely rewritten by an editor who delighted in conceits of syntax, the use of uncommon words and the most bombastic language which his ingenuity could devise. It is not easy to see why this Kentish material was included in a work which was primarily concerned with northern affairs and which, according to the rubric, referred only to the times after the death of Bede. A guess, unsupported by any evidence, might be that at some stage Eormenbeorg of Minster-in-Thanet was con­ fused with the lady of the same name who became the second wife of Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria, and who likewise became an abbess, though not in the south. Yet the version of the legends found in the Historia Regum gives no hint of any such confusion and it may be that a passage in the fragmentary Old English Life of St Mildred will suggest a more likely explanation. Eormenbeorg was married to Merewalh, one of the rulers of the Magonsætan whose lands lay in northern Herefordshire and southern Shropshire.1 There were three daughters of the marriage, all of whom came to be recognised as saints. Mildburh, the eldest of the three, built a nunnery at Wenlock of which she became abbess. She is thought to have died c. 722 and she was buried in her own nunnery. Mildred (O.E. MildÖryÖ), the second, became abbess of Minster-in-Thanet in succession to her mother. She enjoyed a widespread cult after her death and is the most promi­ nent figure in the legends associated with Minster. The youngest of the three was called Mildgyth. The first part of Pahalgan on Angelcynne gives a considerable amount of information about Mildred,12 and the second part records that Mildburh’s relics were at Wenlock,3 but neither part records anything beyond the name of the youngest, Mildgyth. There seems to be only one source which records anything about Mildgyth beyond her parentage, namely the O.E. Life of S t Mildred in which it is said: See mildgyft rested on norSembran, pær wæron hire mihta oft gecyftede 7 get sindon. St MildgyS lies in Northumbria where her miraculous powers were often exhibited and still are.4 1 F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (1947), PP- 46-72 Liebermann, op. cit. pp. 3-5. 3 Ibid. p. 11. 4 O. Cockayne, op. cit. pp. 424-5. 6

8l

CCS

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

The phrase 7 get sindon may be no more than a stock remark and should not necessarily be interpreted as meaning that the particular whereabouts of the relics in Northumbria were known at the time of writing. Both the date and the historical value of the Life of S t Mildred have yet to be established, but it is certainly a compila­ tion of southern origin and it seems very unlikely that a southern hagiographer would admit that the bones of one member of a family so distinguished for its saintliness, and of southern connec­ tions, were in Northumbria unless he believed that that was in fact the case. Yet unhappily there seems to be no evidence to show either the date at which the relics were translated to the north or the place in Northumbria at which they were kept. Even so the presence of Mildgyth’s relics in Northumbria provides a possible reason for the inclusion of the Kentish legends in a Northumbrian compilation. (2) The Early Northumbrian Kings The transition from the Kentish passio to the material which follows is achieved somewhat awkwardly by the following passage on fo. 54V : In exordio huius opens genealogiam regum cantuariorum strictim prælibauimus, nunc northanhymbrorum libet demonstrare ut ad eorum tempora ualeamus peruenire, de quibus non est narratum post obitum reuerentissimi sacerdotis Bedæ.1 The material to which this introductory sentence refers consists basically of a list of the Northumbrian kings from Ida to Ceoluulf with their regnal years. The source of this information is undoubt­ edly a regnal list such as has been preserved in a variety of texts, but the bare bones have been clothed in that same kind of bombastic phraseology that characterises the Kentish Passiot and further adorned with two suitably adapted passages from Boethius’s de

1 This same passage, with the exception of the words cantuariorum strictim prælibauimus, nunc marks the beginning of Roger of Howden’s Chronicle. Arnold, Symeon , II, xiii, held these four words to be an interpolation into a sentence whose earlier form is preserved by Roger of Howden. It is, of course, equally possible that the change has been the other way and that the four words were omitted from Roger’s Chronicle because that work did not include the Kentish passio. I have deliberately limited the scope of this present study to the Historia Regum itself. Stubbs’s preface to his edition of Roger of Howden, Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedenet Rolls Series (1858), is of the first impor­ tance for its discussion of the relationship of the Historia Regum to other works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 82

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

Consolatione Philosophise. The oldest and most authoritative of the regnal lists dates from 737 and forms part of the Moore Memoranda on fo. 128 V of the Moore manuscript of Bede’s History} The Northumbrian list is also found on fo. 65 V of C.C.C.C. MS. 183, the book which contains a copy of Bede’s prose Life of S t Cuthbert believed to have been presented by Æthelstan to St Cuthbert’s see at Chester-le-Street in the tenth century.12 The order in which the eight pagan rulers of Bemicia from Ida to Æthelfrith are given in the Historia Regum agrees exactly with the order found in the Moore Manuscript and in C.C.C.C. MS. 183 and there are no more than slight variations in the numbers of the regnal years. In three other and later sources, Florence of Worcester3*and the two north country tracts entitled respectively Libellas de Primo Saxonum Adventtâ and Series Regum Northymbrensium6 there are marked differences not merely in the regnal years but also in the order of the kings themselves. It is clear that the Historia Regum follows the older and more authoritative tradition. (3) Material derived mainly from Bede The content of most of fos. 55r-57r, corresponding with pp. 1522 of Arnold’s text, is derived verbatim, or occasionally in para­ phrase, from Bede’s Historia Abbatum, with two or three intrusive passages marked by the ornate style characteristic of the preceding parts of the Historia Regum. The eight known manuscripts of the Historia Abbatum* were divided by Plummer into two clearly de­ fined groups7 of which one comprises the tenth-century British Museum MS. Harley 3020, designated Hx, and what Plummer took to be a twelfth-century transcript of it, Bodleian MS. Digby 112, designated A. These two form the H-text which was that adopted by Plummer. The remaining six manuscripts form a separate group and in most cases where they differ from the H-text they agree among themselves. 1 Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, vol. 9, The Moore Bede, ed. P. H unter Blair (1959), fo. 128 V. 2 N. Ker, Catalogue, pp. 64-5. 3 Ed. B. Thorpe, 1, 268. 4 Ed. T . Arnold, Symeont 11, 374. * Ibid. 11, 390. • M. L. W. Laistner, A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts (Cornell, 1943), pp. 112-13. 7 C. Plummer, Bedæ Opera Historica (Oxford, 1896), 1, cxxxii-cxxxviii. 83

6-2

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

Since the Historia Regum only uses extracts from the Historia Abbatum full and detailed comparison between the different texts is not possible at every point, but there is enough common ground to allow significant conclusions to be drawn about the affinities of that version of the Historia Abbatum which is found in the Historia Regum. Plummer drew attention to three peculiarities which dis­ tinguish the Hj and A text from the other group—the readings militons for militarey leuam for aquilonem and nomine for regimine— and in all three instances the Historia Regum agrees with Hlf thus leaving no room for doubt that its source was an H-text.1 Plummer also noted certain minor differences between and A, but he could only find one instance of importance in which A shows a reading in agreement with the other group. In § 7 of the Historia Abbatum2 Hx has the meaningless quia bene se ac fructuose ordinatum esse conspexity but A and the other six manuscripts read donasse for ordinatum esse. Plummer thought that this might have been an independent correction made by the scribe of A and that perhaps the original reading was ordinasse. The corresponding passage in the Historia Regum reads quia bene acfructuose ordinatam conspexitz which in its context gives good sense, though sense rather different from that given by the reading found in A and the other six manuscripts which agree with A. The Historia Regum is here closer to than to A, and it seems possible that it may even have preserved the correct reading. The extracts from the Historia Abbatum are followed by a poem of twelve lines upon times and seasons, with an additional couplet in which the verses are attributed to the authorship of Bede. The poem is introduced with an expression of the writer’s wish to say something about Bede himself and’with a reference to a work of Bede’s which he calls de annalibusy hoc esty de rebus singulorum annorum. The poem was certainly not composed by Bede, though evidence of its wide popularity suggests that he is likely to have been familiar with it in one form or another. It is preserved in the form found in the Historia Regum in a number of manu­ scripts ranging from the ninth to the twelfth century, most of them continental and the oldest being a ninth-century Reichenau 1 The references to Arnold’s text of the Historia Regum are p. 1 6 ,1. 5; p. 17, 1. 1; p. 18, 1. 30. For the corresponding passages in Plummer’s text of the Historia Abbatum see p. 365, 1. 3; p. 368, 1. 2; p. 372, 1. 1. 2 Plummer, op. cit. p. 370, 1. 11. 3 Arnold’s text, p. 17, 11. 12-13. 84

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

manuscript.1 An earlier, but slightly different version of the poem is found in the Versus Sancti Columbani ad Sethumy thought to have been composed c. 6io.2 In this version are found lines 2-9, 11 and 12 of the version found in the Historia Regumy but Columbanus was not their author any more than Bede. Six of the twelve lines in the Historia Regum version go back beyond Columbanus to the Satisfactio of Dracontius.3 Some of the lines may go back even beyond Dracontius since Jerome, in his com­ mentary on Ezekiel i. 7, refers to a poem very æstasy autumnus, kiems et mensis et annus.4 The short poem on times and seasons is followed by a much longer poem under the rubric lamentatio bede presbyteri (fo. 57 r, col. 1). There seems to be no doubt that this poem, otherwise known as de Die Iudiciiy was written by Bede himself. In Migne’s text5 the poem ends with a nine-line Precatio ad Deumy which was shown by Manitius6 to be derived from Eugenius of Toledo, but the text in the Historia Regum lacks this Precatio and in its place has five other lines, the last of which contains a reference to Acca. Laistner noted that the copy found in the Manchester MS. Rylands 116, of the tenth or eleventh century from Trier, likewise lacks the Precatio and quotes the first four of the five additional lines found in the Historia Regumy understandably omitting the invocation of Acca in the fifth, since continental readers *would have no interest in a Northumbrian bishop of Bede’s day’.7 It is not easy to under1 Karlsruhe Landesbibliothek Aug. 167, fo. 13, see A. Riese, Anthologia Latina (Leipzig, 1906), I, ii, no. 676, pp. 151-2. This MS., which dates 836-48, also contains Bede’s H.E. v, 24, his de Natura Rerum, his de Temporibus and his de Temporum Ratione; see Laistner, Hand-List, pp. n o , 140, 145 and 149. The reference in the Historia Regum to Bede’s de annalibus, hoc est, de rebus singulorum annorum is perhaps to the chronicle which forms c. lxvi of the de Temporum Ratione, and it is significant that the poem and the de Temporum Ratione should be associated with one another in this early manuscript. 2 Ed. W. Grundlach, M .G .H ., Epist. in (Berlin, 1892), 185, 11. 63-71. 3 Ed. F. Vollmer, M .G .H ., Auct. Antiquiss. xiv (Berlin, 1905), 114-29. The six lines of the Historia Regum version are lines 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 12, and they corre­ spond respectively with lines 219, 247, 249, 251, 259 and 253 of the Satisfactio. It will be noted that only odd-numbered lines are borrowed, that is to say only the hexameters from the elegiac couplets in which the Satisfactio is written. 4 A. Riese, loc. cit. p. 152 note. 5 Patrologia Latina, 94, coll. 633-8. 8 M. Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich, 1911), 1, 86. 7 M. L. W. Laistner, Hand-List, pp. 126-7. Laistner lists thirty-six MSS. of the de Die Iudicii, and while it would be of great interest to establish the place of the Historia Regum text in the general textual tradition of the poem, the task would be too big an undertaking for the scope of this present study. 8S

OBSERV A TIO N S ON TH E ‘H IS T O R IA REGUM*

s ta n d w h y th e c o m p ile r o f th e

Iudicii t o

Historia Regum t h o u g h t

th e

de Die

b e r e le v a n t to h is p u r p o s e a t th is , o r in d e e d a t a n y o th e r ,

p a r t o f h is w o rk , th o u g h th e r e m a y p e r h a p s b e a p o in te r , if h is r e f e r e n c e t o w h a t h e c a lls

de annalibus h a s

b e e n rig h tly in te r p r e te d

l x v i o f t h e de Temporum de Temporum Ratione is c o n c e r n e d w i t h t h e s a m e t o p i c a n d is e n t i t l e d de Die Iudicii. The remainder of the Bedan material is derived chiefly from H.E. v, 23, Bede’s account of the state of Britain in 731, and to a smaller extent from H.E. v, 24, with Bede’s account of his life and works. Apart from the fact, of no great significance, that the events of 731 are wrongly attributed to 732, there are only two points in this material which call for comment. The death of Berctwald, archbishop of Canterbury, is placed die V Iduum lanuariarum. This reading is characteristic of C-type manuscripts of the History, in contrast with the M-type reading which omits V.1 Secondly, the writer states that if anyone wishes to know more about what Bede did legal capitulum X X V historiæ Anglorum gentis. In most manu­ scripts of the History Bede’s chronological summary and his account of his life and works form a single and final chapter, that is, v, 24, but in the Durham MS. B 11 35 (Plummer’s MS. D), and in other manuscripts dependent on it, the account of his life and works forms a separate chapter, that is, v, 25. The Durham manu­ script is of the late eleventh century and of the C type, being closely akin to C itself.2

a s b e i n g to t h e c h r o n i c l e w h i c h f o r m s c h a p ,

Ratione,

in th e fa c t th a t c h a p ,

lxx

o f th e

(4) A Chronicle from y32 to 802 The entry for the year 732 marks the beginning of a chronicle which, apart from some minor interruptions and irregularities, retains an annalistic form throughout the remainder of the Historia Regum. The entries from 732 to 802 (55 in all, with 16 blank years) have long been recognised as providing a source of high value for the history of Northumbria in the eighth century, a value which is enhanced by the scarcity of other records for this period. The dis­ tribution of the sixteen years for which there is no entry is more or less even, but there is a marked contrast between the very short 1 C. Plummer, op. cit. 1, 349 note 13. a R. A. B. Mynors, Durham Cathedral Manuscripts, no. 47 ; M. L. W. Laistner, Hand-List, p. 96; C. Plummer, op. cit. 1, cv and 356. 86

O B SER V A TIO N S O N TH E ‘H IS T O R IA REGUM*

entries from 732 to c. 750 and the much longer and more detailed entries from c. 750 to 802. Although there can be no doubt that this part of the Historia Regum has preserved what is basically an eighth-century chronicle, there can equally be no doubt that this chronicle has been modified and subjected to interpolations by more than one writer of later date. Several passages reveal an editor or a scribe copying from a source and making minor modifications as he does so—refert historia uel cronica huius patriae (740), quidam referunt.. .nos uero dicimus (745), ueluti declarat subsequens sermo scriptoris (774), quid gestum sit dcclxxix sequens declarabit sermo (778), ut sequens demonstrabit articulus (779). (a) The Acca and Alchmund interpolations At two points, 740 and 781, the annals are interrupted by long passages which concern the relics of two of the Hexham bishops, Acca and Alchmund, and which are undoubtedly interpolations. The Acca interpolation, under the year 740, records that Acca died on 20 October and was buried outside the east end of the church at Hexham, where his tomb was marked by two sculptured stone crosses, of which one bore an inscription. More than 300 years later—post annos plusquam ccc depositionis suae—when his remains were translated, his vestments were found to be preserved as new in the tomb and on his breast was a small wooden altar bearing a dedi­ catory inscription. There follow a number of miracle stories designed partly to show that all Acca’s bones were at Hexham and partly to demonstrate the miraculous powers of the saint himself. The first story tells of a Hexham monk called Aldred of whom it is said that he was brought up in the house of his brother who was a priest at Hexham before that place had been given by Thomas II, archbishop of York, to the canons regular who still served there. Aldred’s brother wished to separate the bones of Acca from the dust of his body. While he was preparing to do this, it happened that Aldred found himself alone with the relics and the thought entered his mind that even a very distinguished church would con­ sider itself greatly honoured to possess a single bone of so great a saint. He therefore tried to steal one bone in order that he might give it to another church, but his efforts were thwarted by divine intervention. The other stories tell of cures effected by Acca’s relics and of an occasion on which Acca and the saints of Hexham saved the church from being destroyed by Malcolm, king of Scots. The 87

O B SER V A TIO N S ON TH E ‘H IS T O R IA REGUM*

story was well-known by common report, says the writer, but it was well to commit it to writing lest it should be forgotten through the lapse of time. The Alchmund interpolation under 781 is similar in character though shorter. Alchmund, it is said, was buried near Acca and his remains were translated more than 250 years later. The story of this translation relates that Alchmund himself appeared in a vision to a certain man of Hexham telling him to go to Alfred, son of Westweor, a priest of the church of Durham, and bid him remove Alchmund’s remains to a more honourable position in the church of Hexham. Alfred went to Hexham and preparations for the translation were made. There was not time to complete the work in a day and the relics were therefore placed in a side aisle for the night, whence they were to be moved to a more prominent position on the morrow. Alfred, the Durham priest, stole one of Alchmund’s finger bones with the intention of giving it to the church of Durham. When the morrow came all attempts to move the relics proved in vain. Dur­ ing the following night Alchmund again appeared in a vision to the same man as before, showing him one of his hands, from which a bone of the middle finger was missing, and demanding that resti­ tution should be made. The vision was made known to all the brethren the next day, Alfred confessed his crime and restored the missing bone, whereupon the translation of the relics was completed without further difficulty. A terminus post quem for the composition of the Acca interpola­ tion is supplied by the reference to the gift of Hexham to the canons regular by Thomas II, archbishop of York, an event which occurred in 1113, and there are several other chronological pointers. Acca’s translation is dated after 1050, Alchmund's after 1030. Aldred’s brother, unnamed in the story, can be identified with Eilaf, priest of Hexham who died in 1138 and who was the father of Ailred of Rievaulx, and the Malcolm, king of Scots, whose vain attempt to destroy Hexham was in danger of being forgotten through lapse of time, was Malcolm Canmore (1058-93). Although the Alchmund interpolation contains no evidence which proves that it could not have been written before the twelfth century, there can be no real doubt that it was written at the same time and for the same purpose as the Acca interpolation. The clue to that purpose lies in the activities of Alfred, son of Westweor, as they are described by Symeon in the Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae. 88

O B S E RV AT I O NS ON T HE ‘H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

Symeon devoted a whole chapter to Alfred, a zealous collector of relics, whose greatest triumph was to secure the bones of Bede for Durham.1 He had been commanded in a vision, says Symeon, to visit the sites of the ancient monasteries and churches of North­ umbria, and as he did so, he excavated the relics of many saints, leaving them above ground to be venerated by the people, but bringing a portion of them to Durham to be placed by the body of Cuthbert. Among the saints whose relics were thus recovered Symeon names two anchorites, a king, two abbesses and two bishops —Acca and Alchmund of Hexham. Comparison of Symeon’s chapter in the H is to r ia D u n elm en sis E c c lesia e on the activities of Alfred, son of Westweor, with the Acca and Alchmund interpola­ tions in the H is to r ia R e g u m leaves little room for doubt that the prime purpose of the latter was to refute Symeon’s claim in the former that Durham possessed some of the relics of the two Hexham bishops. Even a very distinguished church {e tia m p r a e c e ls a q u a e lib e t ec c le sia )y Aldred is made to say, would think itself highly honoured at possessing but a single one of Acca’s bones. The reference is surely to Durham, but Aldred failed to secure even that single bone. Similarly with the Alchmund interpolation—there is a ready admission that Alfred, the Durham priest, did indeed visit Hexham to secure relics, as Symeon claimed, but a detailed demon­ stration of his utter failure to secure even one finger bone. All this is surely the work of a skilful Hexham propagandist seek­ ing to show that the discoveries made when the two Hexham bishops were translated in the eleventh century reflected no less honour upon the church at Hexham than did the discoveries attending the translation of Cuthbert in 1104 upon the church at Durham. Acca’s vestments were no less well preserved than Cuthbert’s, and if there was a portable altar in the tomb of Cuthbert, so also there was one in Acca’s.1 2 If, at the time when these interpola­ tions were made, the H is to r ia R e g u m was already associated with Symeon’s name, they become all the more effective as propaganda through being inserted in the work of the most notable Durham historian of the time. The date of the insertion must lie after 1113, when the Augustinian canons first went to Hexham, and probably 1 Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, hi, 7. Ed. T . Arnold, Symeon, 11, 87-90. 2 In the light of this strong propagandist element in the Acca interpolation, how much trust can be put in what is said about the two stone crosses which are said to have marked Acca’s tomb? 89

OB SE R VAT I ONS ON T HE ‘ H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

before 1155 when there was a further great translation of Hexham relics, including those of Frithuberht and Tilberht.1Arnold assumed that these interpolations were made at Hexham by a Hexham writer, but this assumption does not seem to be a necessary one. It has been noted above2 that the Corpus Christi book, of which the H is t o r ia R e g u m forms item 7, contains two pieces written by Ailred of Rievaulx, items 12 and 13. Were the Acca and Alchmund interpola­ tions also written by Ailred, whose father was a Hexham priest, whose family was prominent in the neighbourhood of both Hex­ ham and Durham and whose works include the d e S a n c tis E cc le sia e H a u g u s ta ld e n s is ? Whether this be so or not, they are written in a simple, lucid style which offers the strongest contrast with the turgid bombast characteristic of some earlier parts of the H is t o r ia R egum . (b )

O th e r se c o n d a r y m a te r ia l

Parts of the entries for 732-4 are found in certain eighth-century manuscripts of Bede’s H i s t o r y as an appendix to the H i s t o r y proper. Two small points of detail may be noticed. In manuscript M of the H i s t o r y the eclipse of the sun in 733 is dated x v i i i i K L S e p t . y whereas manuscript C has x v i i i K L S e p t. In the same entry where M reads sc u to y C reads sic u t. The H is to r ia R e g u m follows the M reading at both places, yet we are not bound to suppose that these annals were derived from a manuscript of the H i s t o r y at all since they are likely to have had an independent existence. The H is to r ia R e g u m entries for these years do in fact include some material not found in any manuscript of the H i s t o r y . The entry recording the death of Tatwine, archbishop of Canter­ bury, in 734, is followed by the names of his eight predecessors. As with the early Northumbrian kings, a mere list of names of the archbishops has been expanded with a quantity of uninformative verbiage whose style shows plainly enough that it proceeds from the same hand that worked upon the Kentish P a s s io and the North­ umbrian regnal list. The notice of the death of Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria, in the entry for 764 is followed by the opening lines of Bede’s P r e fa c e to his H i s t o r y . Where the received text of the H i s t o r y reads n u n c a d tra n sscrib en d u m a c p le n iu s e x te m p o re m e d ita n d u m r e tr a n s m itto , the H is to r ia R e g u m has the unintelligible m e d ita tu r u m for the correct 1 See above, pp. 70-1.

2 P. 68.

90

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ‘H IS TO R IA R E GU M ’

In all the manuscripts of Bede’s H i s t o r y known to Plummer he found the reading m e d ita tu r u m in only one, the eighthcentury British Museum MS. Cotton Tiberius C ii.1 The description of Lindisfarne under the year 793 draws upon Bede’s d e N a t u r a R e r u m , Aldhelm and Boethius. There are also two short passages which recur in Symeon’s H is to r ia D u n elm en sis E c c le sia e y but there is nothing to show which way the borrowing has been. Other annals contain brief quotations from Pliny’s N a t u r a l H i s t o r y (752) and Boethius’s d e C o n so la tio n e P h ilo so p h ia e (779,799, 801, 802). m e d ita n d u m .

(c) E p is c o p a l succession In the chronicle which remains after setting aside late interpola­ tions and secondary matter, many of the entries are concerned with episcopal succession. Including Canterbury there were thirteen dioceses in the southern province of the church in England in 735, and there is some reference here to the episcopal succession at all but two of them, Winchester and Dunwich. The succession of arch­ bishops at Canterbury is complete from the death of Tatwine in 734 to the election of Æthelheard in 791, save that there is no reference to the death of Cuthbert, whose appointment is recorded in 740, or to the appointment of his successor, Breguwine, whose death is recorded in 765. The omission of these two events is prob­ ably due to the editorial manipulation of the annals for 759,760 and 761, since some of the events for these three years have been run together into a single entry. For Rochester, London, Elmham, Selsey, Sherborne, Hereford and Worcester, it appears to be the case that all changes in the episcopal succession which are known to have occurred in the period 732-45 are recorded, though not in any detail. With the exception of the death of Hathuberht, bishop of London, in 801, there is no reference to the succession at any of these seven dioceses after 745. It seems as if the necessary informa­ tion had ceased reaching the north after this date. The information about the midland sees is fuller, but not com­ plete. Two bishops of Leicester are named, Totta (for Torhthelm, 737 »764) and Eadberht (764), but there is no reference to Eadberht’s death. The succession is complete for Lindsey as far as the death of Ceolwulf in 796, but the Lichfield succession does not go beyond 1 He found it as an alternative reading in the fourteenth-century Oxford MS. Bodleian 712. See Plummer, Bede, 1, cxiv.

91

O BS E RVAT I ONS ON T HE ‘ h I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

the appointment of Cuthfrith in 765. In the four Northumbrian sees the succession is complete for York and Hexham. Four of the eight entries concerning the York succession relate the events in question to the day of the month, and six of the thirteen entries re­ ferring to the Hexham bishops do likewise. The record is complete for Whithorn save for the lack of any reference to the death of Pectwine in 735 and the appointment of his successor Frithuwald, but one event in the succession, the death of Pectwine (776) is related to the day of the month. The Lindisfarne succession is complete only as far as the resignation (780) and death (783) of Cynewulf. The record of the appointment of Hygebald (781) is a marginal addition not in the text hand. No event in the Lindisfarne succes­ sion is dated to the day of the month. In addition to the bishops in England, there is record of a succession of three English bishops at the see of Mayo in Ireland (768, 773, 786). This succession does not seem to be recorded in any other chronicle of English origin. Several entries refer to ecclesiastics other than bishops. Five abbots are named in association with particular monasteries— Wulfhæth of Beverley (773), Botwine (786), Alberht (786) and Sigred (787), all of Ripon, and Edwine of Gainford (801). There is also record of the deaths of five abbots whose monasteries are not named—Herebald (745), Frehelm (764), Sibald (771), Swithulf (772) and Ebbi (775). Abbot Osbald who died in 799 is said to have been buried in the church of York. In addition the death is noticed of two anchorites, Balthere (756) and Etha (767), and of two men who are styled le c to r , Egric (771) and Colchu (794). ( d ) R e g n a l succession

Except in the case of Northumbria, the amount of information given about regnal succession is much less than that given about episcopal succession. The complex history of the Northumbrian dynasty is traced in close detail, but for the rest of the country this kind of information is no more than incidental. There are two references to regnal succession in East Anglia (737, 749), two to Wessex (739, 786), one to Mercia (796) and two to the Pictish kings (761, 775 )(e) I n f o r m a tio n a b o u t c o n tin e n ta l a ffa irs

Pauli was the first to realise to the full the importance of the series of entries in this part of the H is t o r ia R e g u m relating to con92

OBSERVATIONS ON THE *HISTORIA RE G U M ’

tinental affairs.1 The entries number twelve in all, beginning with the death of Boniface in 754 and ending with the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome in 800, and in respect both of their content and of their chronology they are of high value. Continental sources differ between 754 and 755 for the date of the martyrdom of Boni­ face, but Levison pronounced in favour of Tangl’s view that 754, the date given by the Historia Regum, is the correct one.2 The second of this series of entries records the consecration of Aluberht in York as bishop of the Old Saxons (767). The next five relate to Frankish affairs. They record the death of Pepin (768), the death of Carloman and the accession of his brother Charlemagne to the whole kingdom of which he had previously held only half (771), Charlemagne’s first expedition against the Saxons (772), the de­ struction of the Lombard kingdom through Charlemagne’s capture of Pavia and the Lombard king Desiderius (774), and Charlemagne’s campaign against the Saxons in which he captured the Eresburg and the Sigiburg and recovered prouincia Bohweri (775). The remain­ ing five entries in the series concern the Adoptionist controversy (792), the death of Pope Adrian (794, the correct date being 25 December 795), Charlemagne’s victory over the Avars (795), the maltreatment of Pope Leo III (799) and finally the visit of Charlemagne to Rome in 800. As Pauli showed there is only one demonstrable error in the chronology of these entries, namely the placing of Adrian’s death in 794 instead of 795, and this could well have arisen through different usages for the beginning of the year. The entries them­ selves are in some instances (notably 775, 795, 800) remarkably detailed and informative, and they are certainly to be regarded as primary sources of information, not merely as derivatives of continental annals. The light which Levison was able to throw on the very close relations which existed between England and the continent in the eighth century makes it appear less a matter of surprise now than it did to Pauli some ninety years ago that a Northumbrian chronicle should contain information of this kind. Northumbrian churchmen played a dominant part in the English mission to the continent in the eighth century and these 1 R. Pauli, ‘Karl der Grosse in northumbrischen Annalen’, Forschungen zur Deutschen Geschichte, Zwölfter Band (1872), pp. 139-66. * W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (1946), P- 90 n. 2. 93

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A R E GUM*

continental entries are a reflection of the close interest which the Northumbrian church would take in the progress of continental affairs.1 (/) C h ro n o lo g y There are thirty-four events in these annals whose dates are recorded to the day of the month on which they occurred. Two of these thirty-four refer to continental happenings, the death of a pope (794) and the visit of Charlemagne to Rome (800). A third refers to the death of Tatwine, archbishop of Canterbury (734). The remaining thirty-one refer to episodes in Northumbrian his­ tory. The proportion of these events is markedly higher in the later stages of the chronicle than in the earlier. In the period 732-58 there are entries for twenty of the years concerned, but only seven events are dated to the day of the month. In the period 792-801 there are entries for each of the ten years concerned and fourteen events are dated to the day of the month, as many as five of them in the year 796 alone. There are twelve entries which themselves yield evidence enabling some check to be made of their chronological accuracy: (1) 732—d ie x k l s e p te m b ris v f e r i a (Thursday, 23 August). In 732, 23 August fell on a Saturday, but since 732 was a leap year, 23 August fell on a Thursday in 731. There is therefore an error here, but it does not consist in the faulty correlation of the date of the month with the day of the week. The fault is in the misplacing of all the events recorded in this annal under 732 instead of 731. There are four such events and since the other three of them can all be shown on independent evidence to have occurred in 731, it is reasonable to suppose that the fourth (that is the event assigned to Thursday, 23 August) likewise belongs to 731. (2) 733, an eclipse of the sun x ix k l se p te m b ris c ir c a h o ra m d i d te r d a m (14 August). This eclipse is correctly dated.2 (3) 734» an eclipse of the moon i i k l f e b r u a r ii d r c a g a l l i c a n tu m (31 January about cockcrow). This is correct as to the year and the hour, but the day of the month is one week late. The eclipse was on 1 W. Stubbs, Roger of Howden, 1, xxix n. 2 thought that Alcuin might have been concerned in the transmission of information, but there are likely to have been many others in a position to secure and transmit to Northum bria informa­ tion of the kind recorded in these entries. 8 J. Fr. Schroeter, Spezieller Kanon der zentralen Sonnen- und Mondfinster­ nisse (Kristiania, 1923), p. 85. 94

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ h ï S T O R I A REGUM*

24 January and the period of totality was 02.24 to o ^ o z . 1 If for it the reading were ix k l y an easy corruption, the date would be correct in all respects. (4) 734, the ordination of Frithuberht to the bishopric of Hex­ ham d ie v i id u s se p te m b ris (8 September). This date marks the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary and is therefore a likely one for the ceremony in question. (5) 740—d ie x k l J a n f e r i a v i i (Saturday, 23 December). In 740, 23 December was a Friday. If the year was reckoned to begin in September, 740 corresponds with 739 when 23 December was a Wednesday. Perhaps f e r i a v i i is a corruption of f e r i a iiii. (6) 741—i x k l m a i. f e r i a i (Sunday, 23 April). In 741, 23 April was in fact a Sunday. (7 ) 75 2—p r i d ie k l a u g u s ti (31 July), an eclipse of the moon. This is correctly dated.2 (8) 756— v i i i k l d ecem b ris (24 November), an eclipse of the moon. This entry is of particular interest because of the period of the year at which the eclipse took place. There was only one total eclipse of the moon in 756 and it occurred on 18 May, but there was a total eclipse on 23 November in 755. The eclipse began at 16.53 an mortuus esty interemptus est, interfectus est—contrast with a wide variety of bombastic circumlocutions on the other, such as nectigal morti egrediens et pergens ad eum qui mortuus uitam perpetuam concedit (775), ergastulum huius laboriosæ uitæ deseruit mercedem iubelei anni perdpiendo (786), ex rapidis flatibus huius sæculi spiritum emisit ad superos eternæ felidtatis iubilos (787). Although some of the shorter, conventional expressions are used several times in these annals, there is no instance of any of the elaborate circumlocutions, of which there are some twenty-five in all, being used more than once. Moreover, there is only one instance in which one and the same term for death is used twice in the same annal, and in this particular year (796) the writer had occasion to refer to death six times. It is evident that a determined attempt has been made to achieve literary effect and to depart from the monotony of an annalistic chronicle recording isolated events. This peculiarity is by no means confined to the later years of the chronicle but is characteristic of the whole series of annals from 732 to 802. Another feature of the style of these annals is the use of three verbs placed in immediate succession to one another. There are eight examples of this trick distributed more or less evenly through the annals—captus, attonsus et remissus est (732), tenuity amisit, perdidit (758), ocdditurysepelituTy obliuisdtur (775), uallatuSy comfortatuSy glorificattis (775), subrogatury consecratur eleuaturque (781), quassauity perdidity contriuit (794), adoraty ditaty exornat (800), conseruarety regeret ac defenderet (800). In the previous section of the Historia Regum there is found fundauity perfedt, rexit in a passage quoted from Bede’s Historia Abbatum1 and daty tollit minuitque occurs in the eleventh line of the poem on times and seasons.2 Two other instances which occur in section 5 will be noticed below.3 Alcuin used the device in his poem de sanctis Eborads.4 Pauli commented on the lavish use of superlatives in the annals relating to continental events. Carloman is called famosissimus, and Charlemagne rex inuictissimusy bellicosissimusy fortissimusy benignissimus and armipotens imperator. A number of other phrases recall the same inflated phrasing which characterises not only the other annals 1 T . Arnold, Symeon, 11, 21. 2 Ibid. 11, 23. 3 See below, p. 103. 4 Line 1450—docuit, nutrivit, amavit, but the words seem to be borrowed from an earlier source, see W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, p. 150 n. 6. 7

97

CCS

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

in the period 731-802, but also the earlier parts of the H i s t o r ia such as m a n u u a lid a (772, 795), in e d ic ib ilia (775, 788), b e llicosis su a e m a ie s ta tis u ir is (772), b e llic a u ir tu te e t r e g a li m a ie s ta te (800).

R egum ,

(h ) P la c e o f o rig in

There is no direct internal evidence to show where these annals were written. The strong ecclesiastical interest is no more than might be expected in a chronicle of this period, but perhaps the detailed information given about the successive Northumbrian kings may be held to suggest a source in close touch with the main centre of government. There are two entries which seem to give a hint of the geographical viewpoint of their author, those which refer respectively to the expulsion of Alhred in 774 and of Osbald in 796. Alhred, after what seems to have been a formal deposition from the throne, is said to have departed with a few companions first to Bamburgh and then to Kenneth, king of the Piets. Osbald, after being deserted, put to flight and expelled from the kingdom, then withdrew, accompanied by a few companions, to Lindisfarne, whence he took ship to the king of the Piets. The account of Osbald’s flight is followed immediately by a reference to the en­ thronement of his successor at the altar of St Paul in St Peter’s church at York. In both these instances the words used by the annalist are those of a man who looked upon the two exiled rulers as going away from the place at which he was writing, not coming towards it. There are other entries which refer to Bamburgh and Lindisfarne (750, 793) in some detail, yet a Lindisfarne annalist is not likely to have written in this way of his own immediate neigh­ bourhood. Moreover, as we have seen, the information given about the episcopal succession at Lindisfarne is imperfect. Other places mentioned in these annals that now lie in the county of North­ umberland are Corbridge (786), Hexham (788) and Tynemouth (792). S c y th le s c e s te r iu x ta m u ru m (788) probably refers to a place in Northumberland (perhaps Chesters), and so also may B a r tu n , modern Barton, and W d u f o r d a , modern Woodford (797), but the identity of these two places is not certain. There are references to two places in the county of Durham—Sockburn (796) and Gainford (801)—though both of them lie close to the Tees. It is probable that the m o n a ste riu m a d o stiu m D o n i (794) refers to Jarrow. In Yorkshire there are references to Catterick (762, 796, 792), Ripon (786, 787, 790), Beverley (773), Crayke (767) and Doncaster 98

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

(764). There are many references to York itself—the burning of the minster at York on Sunday, 23 April 741, further damage to York by fire in 764, the location of Crayke as lying ten miles from York (767), the death in York of Eadbert, once king and then cleric, on 20 August 768, the forcible tonsuring of King Osred in York in 790, the abduction of the sons of Ælfwold from the principal church in York in 791, the death in York of Æthelheard, once ealdorman then cleric, on 1 August 794, the death in York of Alric, once ealdor­ man then cleric, shortly before 28 March 796, the coronation of Eardwulf at the altar of St Paul in the church of St Peter at York on 26 May 796, and the burial of Archbishop Eanbald in the same church in the same year, and finally the burial of Osbald, succes­ sively d u x ypatriciuSy r e x and a b b a s y in the church at York in 799. These entries, and particularly the detail into which some of them enter, make it seem very probable that the annals in which they occur were compiled if not in York itself, at least in some monastery not very far away from York. On the other hand, it might be argued that a predominance of entries referring to York is no more than should be expected since York was both the civil and ecclesiastical capital of the kingdom of Northumbria at this date. Moreover, there are a number of unidentified place-names whose identification might well alter the picture. These names are : m e th il w o n g tu n e (758),1 w in c h a n h e a le (765, cf. p in c a h a la at 787 where, as at 765, the place-name is in an oblique case preceded by the preposi­ tion in , and p in c a n h a lth 798) ;2seletu n e (780, the form being governed by the preposition in ) ; w lfe s w e lle (781); sc y th le sc e ste r iu x ta m u ru m (788, presumably in Northumberland and near the Roman Wall); h e a rr a h a lc h (790); w o n w a ld re m e re (791, governed by in ) ; a y n b u rg (792); æ tlæ te (796) ;3 c e ttin g a h a m (800). (5) A C h ro n icle fr o m 8 4 g to 8 8 j Regarded chronologically the entry for 802 belongs to the previous section of the H is to r ia R e g u m (the chronicle from 732 to 802), since there is a gap of nearly half a century before the next entry, which is for the year 849. In content, however, the entry for 802 marks a 1 Both Hodgson Hinde and Arnold misread methil as mechil.

2 T he confusion between the initial w and p is the common confusion between p and O.E. wynn. T he old identification with Finchale is not now accepted. Arnold’s reading Wincanheale is mistaken. 8 Hodgson Hinde’s reading Etdetè is undoubtedly mistaken. 99

7-2

O BS E RVAT I ONS ON T HE ‘H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

sharp break with the preceding annals. The Northumbrian interest ceases abruptly with the entry for 801 and is replaced in 802 by an exclusively West Saxon interest—the death of Brihtric, king of Wessex, and the succession of Egbert, the story of Eadburga, Brihtric’s wife, her treatment at the hands of Charlemagne and her death in Pavia. Much of the story of Eadburga is identical with the version of the story told by Asser in his L if e o f A l f r e d .1 The entries from 849 to 887 are normally introduced with the formula a n n o d o m in icæ in c a r n a tio n is .. .n a t i v i t a t i s a u te m E l f r e d i . .. in place of the simple a n n o of the previous section. There are no entries for the years 850, 856-9, 861-3, 865, 878 and 885. Both in the introductory formula and in the years for which there are no entries the H is to r ia R e g u m corresponds with the annals which formed the framework of Asser’s L if e o f A lf r e d , save in one or two minor details. The H is to r ia R e g u m places under 852 information which Asser has under 851, and under 877 information which Asser has under 878. Under 854, a year for which Asser has no entry, the H is to r ia R e g u m records that Archbishop Wulfhere (of York) received the pallium and that Eardwulf became bishop of Lindisfarne. The relationship of this part of the H is to r ia R e g u m to Asser pre­ sents an extremely difficult, and in the end perhaps insoluble, prob­ lem because of the now complete lack of manuscript authority for Asser’s work. There is record of only one manuscript, the Cottonian MS. Otho A xii, thought to have been of about the year 1000, and it was burnt in the fire of 1731. Stevenson thought that this very manuscript was itself the source for this section of the H i s t o r ia R e g u m , basing his belief on the existence of some half-dozen errors which were common to Otho A xii and the H is to r ia R e g u m ,2 but he was well aware of the difficulties of reaching a sure conclusion because of the omission from the H is to r ia R e g u m of whole chapters of Asser and the paraphrasing of others. Yet there are some points which suggest that Stevenson may have been mistaken. There are six passages involving place-names where the H is t o r ia R e g u m differs from the presumed readings of Otho A xii. In chap. 49 Asser refers to Exeter q u i d ic itu r S a x o n ic e E x a n c e a s tr e , B r i t a n n ice a u te m C a iru u isc , L a tin e quoque c iv ita s in o r ie n ta li r ip a flu m in is U u isc s ita e st.

Plainly there has been an omission after

c iv ita s

and

1 W. H. Stevenson, Asset's Life of King Alfred (Oxford, 1904), chaps. 14-15. 2 Ibid, xlviii-xlix.

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O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

Florence of Worcester,1 here drawing upon Asser, supplies E x a e after c iv ita s , but the H is to r ia R e g u m reads c iu ita s a q u a ru m (s .a . 876). But a q u a ru m is added, suggesting that there was indeed a word missing in the exemplar. In chap. 55 Asser describes the whereabouts of Ecgberht’s Stone as being in the eastern part of the forest q u i d ic itu r S e lu u d u , L a tin e a u te m s y l v a rnagna, B r ita n n ic e C o it M a u r . The H i s to r ia R e g u m (s .a . 877) here reads q u i a n g lice eloqu io d ic itu r M u c e lp u d u , L a tin e u ero m a g n a s ilu a y B r ita n n ic e m o re C o itm a p u r . Arnold here read m u cel p u r lu y but there is no doubt that the manuscript reading is m u cel p u d u y nor is there any doubt that it should be amended to m u cel w u d u y the O.E. w y n n having been confused, as it so often was, with the Roman p . The same confusion has given rise to the reading m a p u r for m a w u r. The use of M u c e l W u d u y the Great Forest, in place of Asser’s S e lu u d u , Selwood, is very striking. The wood is twice called by some form of the name Selwood in the A n g lo - S a x o n C h ro n icle (878, 894), and once it is called simply The Forest (w u d u y 709). The H is to r ia R e g u m here seems to have preserved a local south-west English usage, a reading for whose presence in a Northumbrian chronicle it is very difficult to account except on the supposition that it was present in the compiler’s source. The other four passages show the presence in the H is to r ia R e g u m of an idiomatic usage which does not occur in the corresponding places in Asser. Where the text of Asser reads S a n d w ic (chap. 6 , 1.3), C ip p a n h a m m e (chap. 9, 1. 12), R æ d ig a m (chap. 35, 1. 5) and Æ scesd u n (chap. 37, 1. 3), the H is to r ia R e g u m has e ts a n d w ic (852), e tc ip p a n h a m a (853), e tre d in g u m (871) and etscesdu n (871). In each case the H i s to r ia R e g u m has preserved the familiar Old English usage of the locative preposition æ t before a place-name. In Latin works O.E. æ t or on was sometimes translated by Latin in or a d y as in Bede’s in G y r u u m , in H r y p u m , a d G e frin . An example of the use of æ t in the previous section of the H is to r ia R e g u m is found in the unidentified æ tlæ te (796). The a?J-formula was not used in the lost Otho A xii, and unless we are to imagine a copyist deliberately introducing into his work an outmoded formula which was not present in his source, we can but suppose that it got into the H i s t o r ia R e g u m from a source which at least was not Otho Axil. Arguments based on the absence from the H is to r ia R e g u m of passages occurring in Asser are dangerous, yet there are some 1 Ed. B. Thorpe, 1, 93.

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O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

points of detail which should not be overlooked. Stevenson (p. 155) commented on the use by Asser of the word p a g a with a meaning virtually equivalent to O.E. s d r , for example S u m m u r tu n en sis p a g a e com es (chap. 12), in p a g a q u a e d ic itu r L in d e s ig (chap. 45), om n es a c co la e S u m m u rtu n e n sis p a g a e e t W iltu n e n s is y om n es a c c o la e H a m tu n e n s is p a g a e (chap. 55). This term in this sense seems not to occur in Latin annals of English origin except where there is dependence on Asser, and Stevenson thought that its occurrence in Asser might be due to Frankish influence. Apart from the examples quoted above there are other instances of a similar use of the word in chaps. 1, 5, 12, 35, 42 and 53 of Assess work. Although the word p a g a is used in the corresponding passages in Florence of Worcester where he was drawing upon Asser, and also in the later section of t h e H is to r ia R e g u m (section 8, see below, pp. 107 ff.) which draws upon Asser, but only indirectly through Florence of Wor­ cester, it is never found in the present section of the H is t o r ia R eg u m .

In chap, i Asser states that Alfred was born

in v i l l a r e g ia y q u a e

d ic itu r U u a n a tin g , in ilia p a g a y q u a e n o m in a tu r B e r r o c s d r e ; q u a e p a g a ta lite r v o c a tu r a B e r r o c s i lv a y u b i bu x u s a b u n d a n tissim e n a s c itu r .

The corresponding passage in the

849) reads with no reference to the location of Wantage in Berkshire or to the etymology of the name Berkshire. In chap. 3 Asser refers to the pagans wintering in in s u la y q u a e v o c a tu r S c e a p ie g y q u o d in te r p r e ta tu r ‘ in s u la o v iu m ’; H i s to r ia R e g u m (s .a .

in r e g a li v il la q u a e a b A n g lis W a n e tin g e a p p e lla tu r

q u a e s ita e st in T a m e s i flu m in e in te r E a s t- S e a x u m e t C a n tu a r io s y s e d

In the correspond­ 851) reads in in su la q u a e v o c a tu r S c e p ig e y i d e st in su la o v iu m without any reference to the geographi­ cal position of the island. In chap. 5 Asser has in S u th r ie , q u a e p a g a

a d C a n tia m p r o p io r e st q u a m a d E a s t- S e a x u m .

ing passage the H is to r ia

s ita e st in m e r id ia n a

R e g u m (s .a .

T a m e sis flu m in is r ip a a b o c c id e n ta li p a r t e

but in the corresponding passage the H i s to r ia R e g u m (s .a . 851) has simply a d su h trig e without any reference to its geographical situation. Is the absence of the term p a g a from this section of the H is to r ia R e g u m y as also of the passages of geographical description, simply due to the whim of a copyist or editor, or does it suggest the use of a different source ? The evidence is perhaps sufficient to raise doubts about the rightness of Stevenson’s view that the lost Cottonian MS. Otho Axil was the source of this section of the C a n tia e y

H is to r ia R eg u m .

102

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

In the whole section there are only three entries which are of particularly Northumbrian interest and which are not dependent in some way upon Asser. These three record the receipt of a pallium by Wulfhere, archbishop of York, and the succession of Eardulf to the bishopric of Lindisfarne(854), the flight of Bishop Eardwulf and Abbot Eadred from Lindisfarne with the body of Cuthbert (875) and the appearance of Cuthbert in a vision to Alfred (877). Whereas section 4 of the Historia Regum is original and almost wholly of Northumbrian interest in its content, section 5 is secon­ dary and almost wholly West Saxon. In this respect the contrast between the two parts of the work could scarcely be sharper, yet there can be little doubt that both sections proceed in their present form from the same editorial hand, as the following points will show : (i) Again and again where the compiler departs from the literal text of his source, he breaks into that florid, bombastic style of writing which characterises the earlier parts of the work. In particular we find a continuing delight in elaborate expressions for the recording of death. Under 871 the death of Ethelred of Wessex is thus recorded— . . . plenus etate et perfectus in bonitate, post perpetrationem insignium bellorum, future vite et perpetui regni felicitatem coepit videre, cum rege seculorum in terra viventium.

Similar language is used of the death of Burgred in 874 and of Pope Marinus in 884. (ii) Comment has been made above on the frequent use in section 4 of three consecutive verbs. In section 5 may be noted cepity occidity subdiditque (853) and turbati sunty admitati sunty commoti sunt (871). There is a somewhat similar usage in the entry for 869—debacchans et insaniensy occidens et pergens. None of these occurs in Asser. (iii) Section 5 contains further instances of attempts to avoid the monotony of the annalistic form by the use of phrasing tending to­ wards the narrative. Thus the entry for 869 opens with the standard— anno dccclxix, aetatis uero Elfredi xxi. . .

but for the following year we find— sequenti uero anno, dum solis jubar mundi perlustraret orbes, et annus advenisset dccclxx ab incarnatione domini tunc refulsit tempus quo Elfred rex vicesimum primum habuit annum. 103

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

All this is sheer bombast. In the entry for 882 is the phrase q u id d e in d e g e stu m s i t r e f e rre l i b e t . . . which may be compared with the similar phrase in the entry for 799 (section 4) q u id g e s tu m s i t eo d em a n n o , r e f e rre lib e t. The closing words of the entry for 849 (section 5)— His sic praelibatis jam pro posse susceptum exequamur negotium suscepti opens. . .

may be compared with the phrase which links section 1 (the Kentish Legends) with section 2 (Early Northumbrian Kings)— In exordio huius operis genealogiam regum Cantuariorum strictim praelibavimus, etc.

(iv) There are certain verbal parallelisms between sections 4 and 5. Compare the following from 871 (section 5)— Sciebant pro certo ipsi principes populorum beatas fore res publicas, si eas vel studiosi sapientie regerent, vel si earum rectores studere sapientie contigisset (Boethius, de Cons. P h il. 1, 4).

with the following from 800 (section 4)— Intellexit beatas fore res publicas, si eas vel studiosi sapientie regerent, vel si earum rectores studere sapientie contigisset.

Compare also R o m u le a s

from 855 (section 5) with from 800 (section 4). The word in e d ic ib ilis seems to have been a particular favourite of the compiler. In section 4 may be noted in e d ic ib ilib u s (775), in e d ic ib ilia (788), in e d ic ib ile m (793), in e d ic ib ilite r (798) and in section 5 in e d ic ib ilis (853) and in e d ic ib ilia (877). I n e d ic ib ilia also occurs in section i.1 (v) Quotations from Boethius have been noted in sections 2 and 4. Boethius is also quoted in section 5 under 868, 871 and 887. The formula a n n o d o m in ic a e in c a r n a tio n is was used by Asser only as far as 887 (chap. 84), the remainder of his work (chaps. 85-106) being written wholly in narrative form. The H i s to r ia R e g u m follows the same arrangement. Although the compiler abbreviates or para­ phrases his source considerably, his dependence upon Asser is here much greater than Arnold’s text of the H i s to r ia R e g u m suggests.2 (6) A C h ro n ic le f r o m 8 8 8 to 957 Excluding the marginal entry misplaced under 891, there are entries for 33 of the 70 years covered by this section of the H i s to r ia a d ir é sedes c o e p it

R o m u le a e u rb is m o en ia in g r e d itu r

1 Arnold’s Symeon, 11, 13, line 8. 2 All the material in large type on pp. 89-91 of Arnold’s edition as far as the entry for 888 is dependent on Asser, chaps. 91-2, 98-101, much of it verbatim.

IO4

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

The span of time is much the same as that covered by the annals of section 4 (732-801), but whereas those occupy more than 35 pages in Arnold’s edition (of which the Acca and Alchmund interpolations account for about 9), this series occupies a little less than 4 pages. In matters of content, accuracy, outlook and style the annals for 888-957 are *n striking contrast with the earlier series. The ecclesiastical interest is very slight, with only two references to the archiépiscopal succession at York (892, 900) and two to the bishops of St Cuthbert’s see (899, 925), but perhaps this is largely a reflection of the state of the church in Northumbria at this time. The detailed interest shown by the earlier annals in matters purely Northumbrian is replaced by an interest which, although still recognisably Northumbrian, is much more national in outlook, again perhaps reflecting changed conditions. The succession of the kings of England is fully recorded from the death of Alfred to the accession of Edgar, and a considerable number of the entries are concerned solely with their activities. Although there are some annals of primarily southern interest (888, 890, 894), a strong northern interest is reflected in a series of entries relating to the Norse kings who ruled at York during the first half of the tenth century, as also in the accounts of Athelstan’s invasion of Scotland in 934, of the battle at W en d u n (B ru n a n b u rh ) in 937, and of several other items in the history of northern England and southern Scotland. Much of this material is valuable, yet the annals as a whole seem to have suffered in point of accuracy from careless compilers or careless copyists. The death of Edward the Elder is dated 923 instead of 924 and that of Edmund 948 instead of 946. Eadwig is wrongly called E a d w in u s twice (955, 957) and his death is wrongly dated. Guthrum is mistakenly called r e x N o r th a n h y m b r o r u m (890), the mistake evidently arising from a mis­ translation of the O.E. se n o rß e r n a c y n in g which is found in all texts of the A n g lo - S a x o n C h ro n ic le (890). The entry recording that Athelstan ordered his brother Edwin to be drowned in the sea (933) is in sharp conflict with what is recorded of Edwin’s death in the G e s ta a b b a tu m S . B e r ti n i,1 and the end of the Northumbrian monarchy appears to be dated two years too early to 952 instead of 954. There are no references to any eclipses nor are there any events dated to the day of the month. The individual entries are written with an economy of words

R egum .

* D. Whitelock, English Historical Documents, c. 500-1042, p. 318. 105

OBS ER VA T IO NS ON T HE ‘ H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

and a simplicity of style which provides a striking contrast with the preceding parts of the H is to r ia R e g u m . Nowhere do they show any trace of those stylistic features which have been found to be charac­ teristic of sections 1-5. Although the northern interest of the annals is strong enough to make a Northumbrian origin seem prob­ able, there is not sufficient detail to allow them to be ascribed to any particular locality within Northumbria. Several of the entries evidently derive from a copy of the A n g lo - S a x o n C h ro n ic le and their general air of impersonality may suggest that they have been culled from a common stock of information parts of which may well have been available in slightly varying form and with slightly varying emphasis at more than one centre where records were being kept. The last entry in the series, that for 957, after recording the death of Edgar, refers to his successors Edward the Martyr, Ethelred the Unready and Edward the Confessor, so that it cannot have taken its present form earlier than the accession of Edward in 1042. (7) E x tr a c ts f r o m W illia m o f M a lm e s b u r y Thus far the H i s to r ia R e g u m , though composed of materials vary­ ing in kind and in historical value, has maintained a more or less regular chronological sequence from the times of the earliest Northumbrian kings as far as the middle of the tenth century, but after the entry for 957 there comes a change more abrupt than any that has been previously noted. The reader is first prepared for a recapitulation of what has already been said of King Alfred by the following sentence on fo. 76 r, col. 1 : Sequitur recapitulatio superiorum de rege elfredo. Deinde successio regum per ordinem, qui et qualiter ad regnum peruenerunt anglorum.

But no such

r e c a p itu la tio

follows. Instead there is a rubric :

De historia Willelmi Malmesbirie.

The remainder of fo. 76 r and the greater part of fo. 76 V contain extracts from the G e s ta R e g u m of William of Malmesbury relating to portents seen by Edgar and their interpretation by his mother, to a prophetic vision of the happiness of Edward the Confessor’s reign, to the portent of female twins which some interpreted as sig­ nifying the union of England and Normandy, and finally to a vision seen by Edward the Confessor on his deathbed of the forthcoming conquest of England. The insertion at this point of the H i s t o r ia 106

O B S E RV AT I ON S ON T H E ‘H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

Regum of these seemingly irrelevant extracts from William of Malmesbury may perhaps have been suggested by the references to Edgar and Edward the Confessor in the annal for 957, and certainly they would have seemed less out of place had they preceded rather than followed the sentence sequitur recapitulation etc. It will be recalled that items 17-20 of the Corpus Christi book consist of extracts from the same work. (8) A Chronicle from 848 to 1118 The last entry in section 6 is for the year 957, but the first entry for section 8 is for the year 848, so that there are two parallel accounts for the period between these two dates. The sentence sequitur recapitulatio was evidently intended as an explanatory comment on the interruption of the normal chronological sequence at this point, but it has been moved from its appropriate place by the insertion of the extracts from William of Malmesbury. Almost the whole of this section of the Historia Regum from 848 to 1119 is derived from Florence of Worcester and is therefore of only slight value as a primary source. The only available edition of Florence of Wor­ cester’s Ckronicon is wholly inadequate as a basis upon which to examine the exact relationship of this section of the Historia Regum to its principal source, yet something can be done towards determining the relationship of the two overlapping sections of the Historia Regum not only towards one another, but also towards Asser on the one hand and Florence of Worcester on the other. Florence himself made extensive use of Asser, but, as Stevenson pointed out,1 he took great liberties with the text, transposing large sections of it to suit the convenience of his own plan. If we compare the text of the Historia Regum with the text of Florence of Wor­ cester at points where Florence’s text is itself dependent upon Asser, we find that in this section the Historia Regum invariably follows Florence in his rearrangement of Asser. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate the point. After copying under the year 871 Asser’s account of Alfred’s family and of his patronage of the arts, drawn from Asser, chaps. 75-6, Florence turned back to Asser, chap. 42 in order to extract from it Asser’s account of the battle of Wilton. At the corresponding passage in the Historia Regum Florence’s rearrangement of Asser is followed precisely although 1 W. H. Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, pp. lvi-lvii. 10 7

OBS ER VA T IO NS ON T HE ‘H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

the whole is compressed into a much shorter space. In 872 Florence recorded the consecration of Wærferth, bishop of Wor­ cester, and he followed this item, which he had derived from some source other than Asser, by quoting the greater part of Asser, chaps. 77-8. He then turned back to Asser, chaps. 45-6, from which he derived his material for the next two years. The same arrangement is found in the corresponding passage in the H i s to r ia R egunty though again with considerable abbreviation. The opening lines of the H is to r ia R e g u m entry for 872 derive from Florence where he is not dependent upon Asser and are immediately followed by Florence’s quotation from Asser, chap. 77. There can thus be no doubt that the borrowing into the H is to r ia R e g u m has been made indirectly through Florence and not directly from Asser himself. There are many other passages in which the H i s to r ia R e g u m can be shown to follow Florence in his rearrangements of Asser’s text. There are also numerous passages in this section of the H i s to r ia R e g u m which follow Florence in minor verbal alterations of Asser’s text. Three examples will suffice : (i) Asser, chap. 11—filium suum Aelfredum iterum ---Flor, and HRy 855.—filiumque suum Aelfredum, quern plus ceteris dilexit, ite ru m .. .. (ii) Asser, chap. 30—et Aelfred fratrem dirigunt___ Flor, and HR, 868.—et ad fratrem eius Aelfredum dirigunt___ (iii) Asser, chap. 35—in loco qui dicitur Englafeld obviavit___ Flor, and HRy 871.—in loco qui Anglice Englafeld, Latine Anglorum campus, dicitur obviavit___

Many other instances could be quoted. On the other hand there are certain passages in this section of the H is to r ia R e g u m which contain material found in Asser, but not in Florence. It may have been these passages which suggested to Stubbs, in the introduction to his edition of Roger of Howden,1that this part of the H is to r ia R e g u m showed signs that its compiler had made independent use of Asser. The entry for 848 consists mainly of the genealogy of Alfred which is found in Asser, chap. 1, and there are several details in which it follows Florence in slight modi­ fications of Asser’s text, thereby showing derivation from Asser through Florence. But Asser’s text contains a ten-line quotation from the C a rm e n P a s c h a le of Sedulius. These lines do not occur in Florence’s version of the genealogy, yet the first three of the ten do 1 Chronica Rogeri de Hoveden, ed. W. S. Stubbs, Rolls Series, I, xxx. I08

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A REGUM*

occur in the version given by the H is to r ia R e g u m . It might be assumed that the H is to r ia R e g u m had here been making direct use of Asser, but for the fact that the same three lines also occur under the year 848 in section 5 of the H is to r ia R e g u m y that is to say in the first of the two parallel sets of entries. The quotation from Sedulius is evidence that section 8 of the H is to r ia R e g u m (the chronicle from 848 to 1119) has been influenced by section 5 (the chronicle from 849 to 887), not that section 8 has made direct use of Asser. An­ other example of the same process is found in the entry in the H i s to r ia R e g u m for 866 (section 8). The first part of the entry for this year is derived through Florence from Asser, chap. 21, but the remainder consists of an account of Alfred’s childhood, including the famous story of the book of poetry which he learnt by heart. This account is not given by Florence, but the whole passage is found verbatim under 866 in section 5 of the H is to r ia R e g u m . There can be no doubt that the passage in section 8 of the H is to r ia R e g u m is derived from the corresponding passage in section 5, because the story as told in section 5 is in some parts verbally identical with Asser and in some parts not, but the story as told in section 8 is verbally identical throughout with the version in section 5. The relationship of the H is to r ia R e g u m towards Asser may be sum­ marised thus: (i) Section 5 of the H is to r ia R e g u m (849-87) appears to be derived direct from a text of Asser. (ii) Section 8 of the H is to r ia R e g u m (848-1119) draws upon Asser indirectly through Florence of Worcester. (iii) There is some material in section 8 of the H is to r ia R e g u m which is found in Asser, but not in Florence, but wherever this occurs the same material is found in section 5 of the H is to r ia R e g u m whence it has been borrowed into section 8. Setting aside all that is derived from Florence of Worcester there remain within the period 848-1069 some twenty-five entries which relate to northern affairs and a very small number (898, 906, 941, 994) which refer to Rollo and Richard of Normandy. About ten of these twenty-five northern entries refer to the activities of English and Norse rulers in Northumbria, a few of them being duplicates of entries under the corresponding years in sections 5 and 6, and the remainder are of ecclesiastical interest. Among these last there are four entries relating to the archiépiscopal succession at York, but three of them (854, 892, 900) correspond with entries in section 6. 109

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

The remaining one (873) refers to the restoration of Wulf here to his archbishopric from which he had previously fled before the Danes. After 900 and as far as 1060 changes in the York succession are only recorded in so far as they are also recorded by Florence of Worcester from whom they were derived. In other words there is no hint of any local interest emanating from York itself. The remaining ecclesiastical entries all relate to St Cuthbert’s see whether at Lindisfarne, Chester-le-Street or Durham. Some of the entries relating to St Cuthbert’s bishops in section 8 correspond with similar, though not identical, entries in sections 5 and 6, but at two places the material in section 8 is markedly different from that found in section 5. Both record the appointment of Eardwulf to Lindisfarne in 854, but section 8 adds a detailed list of the posses­ sions of the see of St Cuthbert. Again both sections record the establishment of St Cuthbert’s see at Chester-le-Street in 883, but section 8 adds details about rights of sanctuary at St Cuthbert’s shrine and about the gift to his see of all lands between Tyne and Tees. Whereas information about the succession at York for most of the tenth and eleventh centuries is derived second-hand from Florence, the succession of Durham bishops is not always, or even normally, dependent on Florence, but has been derived from an independent, presumably Durham, source, as may be seen from the entries relating to Aldred in 968, Aldhun in 1018, Eadmund in 1020 and 1042, Edred in 1042 and Egelric in 1043. In the light of this evidence there can be no doubt that these northern interpola­ tions were the work of a Durham writer, and that therefore section 8 as a whole can be confidently regarded as a Durham work without taking into account the authenticity of the rubrics ascribing the Historia Regum to Symeon himself. Although Florence of Worcester continues to be the principal source for this part of the Historia Regumy the entries for the later part of the eleventh century contain an increasing amount of origi­ nal matter relating to northern affairs, the change being marked by the long and detailed entries for 1069 and 1070. Three of these original northern entries contain passages yielding evidence which bears upon the construction of this section of the Historia Regum. Under 1074 an account of the restoration of monastic life to Northumbria includes references to Clement and Richard as being the present abbots of York and Whitby respectively. These pas­ sages, as we have seen, are likely to have taken their existing form no

O B S E RV AT I ON S ON T HE ‘ H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

between 1161 and 1175, most probably in 1164, the year in which, it has been argued, the rubrics were compiled.1 Under 1072 there is an account of the successive earls of Northumbria from the time of Eric, the last of the Northumbrian kings, until the time of Henry I who is described as holding the earldom hodie. This passage we have seen to be appropriate to a work which ended in 1129.2 Thirdly, under the year 1070 in the midst of an account of Malcolm Canmore’s invasion of England there is a reference to Gospatric qui ut supradictum est purchased the earldom of Northumbria from William I. The words ut supradictum est are inappropriate at this point because at no previous place in the Historia Regum has there been any reference to his purchase of the earldom. There is, how­ ever, a reference to this transaction in the list of Northumbrian earls in the entry for 1072. The reasonable inference, made by Arnold, is that some part of the text has been shifted and that at some stage the list of earls now placed under 1072 formerly held a place before 1070. Arnold suggested 952 as being a likely place because the list would then follow appropriately on the statement under that year that henceforth the province of Northumbria was administered by earls, and partly because the list is in fact found under 952 in Roger of Howden’s Chronica.3 (9) A Chronicle from m g to 112g This part of the Historia Regum is, with the exception of a small number of passages derived from Eadmer, an original authority of high value. It is certainly of northern origin, but, apart from the rubrics ascribing the whole of the Historia Regum to Symeon, there is no evidence to show who wrote it. The Historia Regum ends with the entry for 1129 on fo. 129 V. There follows the explicit and then the next item—John of Hexham’s Continuation for the years 1130-53. It is the last two of the nine sections into which the Historia Regum has been analysed that present the least difficulty, the chronicle from 849 to 1119 and the chronicle from 1119 to 1129. These two combine to form a history of England from the 1 See above, p. 78. 2 See above, p. 78. 8 See Arnold’s Symeon, 11, 196-7 note. I do not agree with Arnold in think­ ing that the ‘blundering interpolator’, as he calls the person supposedly respon­ sible for misplacing the list of earls, was the Hexham writer, since I do not believe that Arnold’s Hexham writer ever existed.Il Ill

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

birth of Alfred until shortly before the death of Henry I, the distinction between the two being that, whereas the first and much the greater part is almost wholly derived from Florence of Worcester, the second is all but wholly original. The additions made to the text of Florence in the first part are primarily concerned with the bishops and lands of St Cuthbert, and the annals from 1119 to 1129 reflect a predominantly northern interest. Judged solely upon internal evidence, there can scarcely be any doubt that the combined sections 8 and 9 running from 848 to 1129 are a twelfth-century Durham compilation. Symeon of Durham is known to have been alive in 1104 and also in 1126, and there is a presumption that the scribe at Sawley who composed the rubrics attributing the entire Historia Regum to Symeon had at least some ground for associating the two with one another. There seems to be a fair case for regarding the additional northern material inserted into Florence’s work and the writing of the entries for 1119-29 as being the contribution of Symeon himself. It is possible, though not certainly known, that the interruption of the work after the end of the entry for 1129 was due t0 Symeon’s death in or soon after 1130. If the combined sections 8 and 9, the chronicle from 848 to 1129, can be accepted as being the work, mostly derived but partly original, of Symeon himself, is it then possible to determine whether this work underwent any changes during the thirty-five years between the last entry supposedly written by Symeon and the date which has been argued for the making of the Sawley copy, namely 1164? Since Symeon merely copied Florence until well on into the eleventh century, some may wonder why he did not begin where Florence began, namely at 450, instead of at 848 as the Sawley copy suggests that he began. Perhaps he did, but this problem seems beyond solution. There are three other ways in which it seems prob­ able that Symeon’s work was altered after it had left his hands. First is the addition of a name or names to the lists of the abbots of York and Whitby in the entry for 1074 so as to bring them up to date. This alteration, which will have been made between 1161 and 1175, can confidently be attributed to Sawley. Next there is the apparent removal of the list of Northumbrian earls from some part of the work earlier than 1070 to the year 1072 where it now stands. And finally there is the insertion into those parts of the work where Symeon’s source, Florence, was itself dependent on Asser, of some passages from Asser which had not been used by Florence, but 112

O B S E RV AT I O NS ON T H E ‘H I S T O R I A R E G U M ’

which were derived from section 5 of the Historia Regum. These last two alterations might, like the first, have been made at Sawley, but we cannot be so sure because there is no means of determining the date at which they were made. Moreover, we do not know whether Symeon’s work reached Sawley direct from Durham or whether it came in a roundabout way, perhaps from Newminster, the mother house of Sawley, or perhaps from Fountains, the mother house of Newminster. Symeon’s history, if sections 8 and 9 may be so called, is preceded by some extracts from William of Malmesbury. The Gesta Regum, from which the extracts are taken, was finished in 1125, so that it would have been chronologically possible for Symeon to have read and used the work. On the other hand it has been seen that four other extracts from the Gesta Regum of William of Malmesbury occur in a later part of the Sawley book, forming items 17-20 on fos. I5 8 r-i6 iv . Moreover, it has also been noticed that the Sawley copyist maltreated John of Hexham’s Historia (item 8) by inserting into its midst four short items (items 9-12) of which two (items 9 and 11) are wholly without relevance to the matter in hand. For these reasons it seems better to regard the extracts from William of Malmesbury which form section 7 as being the work of the Sawley scribe, rather than to look upon them as part of Symeon’s History, to which they do not belong either chronologically or in respect of their subject-matter. There remain sections 1-6, a strangely assorted collection of material, some of it northern in its interest, some Kentish and some West Saxon, some of it derived from known sources, some of it not now to be found elsewhere. Superficially these sections are linked chronologically in so far as they are in general sequence, although there are some breaks and interruptions. The chronological links appear to be strongest between section 4 (732-802), section 5 (84987) and section 6 (888-957), but this chronological bond is partly illusory and there is in fact a sharp and real break of a different kind between sections 5 and 6. Frequent comment has been made on the stylistic peculiarities which characterise the early parts of the Historia Regum. Section 6 is wholly free from all these peculiarities, displaying an economy of words which offers the strongest contrast with the verbosity of all that precedes it. It is difficult to believe that the author of the bombastic circumlocutions was also the author of the entries for 901, 902, 914 and 919 which contain 8

“ 3

CCS

O B S E R V A T I O N S ON T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A R E GUM*

respectively four, three, seven and four words each. Two further points about section 6 call for comment, first that it contains several demonstrable errors and second that its entry for 957 did not reach its present form until after the accession of Edward the Confessor. If section 6 had stood wholly in isolation it might well have been judged to be a compilation of the eleventh century or later, preserving some valuable information derived, but not always without error, from one or more lost sources which were probably northern in origin. Style is perhaps an uncertain touchstone, yet close study of sections 1-5 of the H is to r ia R e g u m can hardly fail to leave a strong conviction that it is the style in which they are written that forms the real bond between them, that, in other words, all these five sections bear the imprint of one and the same writer. This style is characterised by ornate and flowery language which is particularly noticeable in the circumlocutions used for the simple o b iit, d e fu n c tu s e s t , etc. A brief, but characteristic, passage from each of the five sections may help to demonstrate the point: Section 1—the Kentish Legends: Unde, regni monarchia sollertissime pro sibi illato posse disposita, vocante sequi enim inter omnia fecerat justi remuneratoris clemencia, carnalibus privatur, et ad ardua ætheris cum sanctis regnaturus sustollitur.1

Section 2—the Early Northumbrian Kings: Is sécréta inferni visitans Theoderico imperia deriliquid qui bis binis annis regnum tenens, regnum simul perdidit et vitam.2

Section 3—material from Bede: . . . celestia régna petiuit ut duo diademata capiti imponeret secundum nominis sui palmam, hoc est Easter et Wine, uerum pascha ipse inclitus percipiendo, quod est uerum epinicioh.3

Section 4—chronicle from 732 to 802: . . . qui in domino deo confisus ad montem virtutum secundum nominis sui palmam transmigrauit victoriosus.4

Section 5—chronicle from 849 to 887, from Asser: His temporibus fideliter glorioseque regimine rexit ecclesiam Christi Plegmundus archiepiscopus, qui venerandus vir sapientie fructibus renidebat, præditus bis binis columpnis, justitiæ, videlicet, prudentiæ, temperantiæ, fortitudinis.5 1 Arnold’s Symeon, 11, 4. 2 Ibid. 11, 14. 3 Ibid. 11, 19. The first three words are Bede’s. T he rest is added. 4 Ibid. 11, 31. 6 Ibid. 11, 88. II4

O B S E R V A T I O N S O N T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

Comment has been made above on other points which suggest the work of a single editorial hand—the device of using three successive verbs of which there are two instances in section 3, eight in section 4 and two in section 5, the quotations from Boethius which occur in sections 2, 4 and 5, the use of the word in e d ic ib ilis which has been noted once in section 1, four times in section 4 and twice in section 5, as well as occasional verbal parallelisms between one section and another. All these points touching the style in which the material has been presented seem to bind sections 1-5 into a unit and at the same time to distinguish them from the remainder of the H is to r ia R e g u m . There are, however, two passages within sections 1-5 which are demonstrably late and which reveal none of the peculiarities shared by the material in which they are embedded, although both are long enough to provide a fair test. The two passages, both of them in section 4, are the Acca and Alchmund interpolations under 740 and 781 respectively. The simple, lucid style in which they are written is in striking contrast to the flowery language of the material within which they are embedded. These interpolations, it has been argued, were written after 1113 and probably before 1155 by some­ one who was seeking to support Hexham against claims advanced by Symeon on behalf of Durham in his H is to r ia D u n elm en sis E c c le sia e . There is no reason for supposing that they were written at Hexham and good reason for thinking that they were not written at Durham. Since it is inconceivable that the Acca and Alchmund interpolations, and these alone, could have escaped the stylistic adornments marking the rest of sections 1-5, we may fairly suppose that sections 1-5 already formed a single unit before the Acca and Alchmund interpolations were made. This at least enables it to be said that it was not the Sawley scribe who was responsible for joining these sections together. Those who are familiar with the style of the H is to r ia D u n e lm e n sis E c c lesia e will be equally sure that it was not Symeon of Durham. It is indeed impossible to find any parallel to this kind of writing among the northern English historians who were at work in the twelfth century. Let us look again at the points which have emerged from the analysis of sections 1-5, particularly with regard to their sources. In section 1 (the Kentish Legends) there is no reference to the translation of the relics of the murdered princes in 991 nor any in­ dication of the influence of Goscelin of Canterbury. The place-name I]C5

8-2

O B S E R V A T I O N S ON T H E ‘ H I S T O R I A RE GUM*

retains a form no longer current in the eleventh century. In section 2 the list of Northumbrian kings agrees with the eighthcentury list in the Moore Manuscript of Bede against the corrupt order found in Florence of Worcester and Northumbrian lists of the twelfth century. In section 3 the readings of the extracts from the H is to r ia A b b a tu m generally agree with the tenth-century Hx text, but where Hx has the meaningless q u ia bene se a c fr u c tu o s e o r d in a tu m esse c o n sp e x ity we find q u ia ben e a c fr u c tu o s e o r d in a ta m c o n sp e x it which is not found in any other manuscript of the H is t o r ia A b b a tu n iy but which is convincing enough to suggest that it may well be the original reading. Section 3 also preserves what seems certainly to be the original ending of Bede’s d e D ie I u d i c ii in con­ trast with those manuscripts of the work which have an ending borrowed from Eugenius of Toledo. In section 4 the annals from 732 to 802 show a remarkable degree of accuracy wherever they can be tested, especially in their chronology. The reading m e d i ta tu r u m for m e d ita n d u m in the entry for 764 finds its only known parallel in the eighth-century British Museum MS. Cotton Tiberius C. ii. In section 5, the text of Asser which was used con­ tained what seems to be a local south-west English usage M u c e l U u d u for Selwood and also used the æt-formula in place-names. These several points suggest that, in addition to the stylistic characteristics which sections 1-5 share with one another, there is another feature which they have in common, namely their depen­ dence upon sources of good quality and their use, wherever appro­ priate tests can be made, of earlier rather than later versions of those sources. Saving the Acca and Alchmund interpolations which are undoubtedly late insertions, there is no point in the whole of these five sections where it is possible to show the use of a source, or of a particular manuscript of a source, of a date later than c. 900, the date by which a copy of Asser’s L if e o f A l f r e d could have reached the north.1 It will never be possible to unravel completely the different stages which have gone to the making of C.C.C.C. MS. 139. There is good evidence for believing the manuscript to have been written at Sawley in the West Riding of Yorkshire during the second half of the twelfth century, probably c. 1165-70, and for regarding it as one of two Sawley books which bear witness to a strong interest in E a s te r ig e

1 It is implied in chap. 91 of the Life that Asser was writing in 893. T he work ends in a way which suggests that it was left unfinished. Il6

}ncqjir Kidoua (S’n (uanjf mctnoMC Sv-incomf mottachi m prccctrauf «de (cVCucHm Bunrtnu ta rcc&i atidoi- "idarov ~serdm •öitnf-^infcrimi( col- i»o(t c-Iîtrfï itc

nabil Bràc^Vtirçv id'vaa' -T,'ai rtgifpuu Ivntn.i yotTn qvu «tnaüani adqinfmtc-T cccc. vVTi^-‘TiW p.-viiutnctiixi:o>.. (a)

Jutiptr pttfetio itucndi fÿmconts monatkeC-pcennnif «tttc-Sci {W>

Im 5tindnu.il) taftwifl de cttwfio.ra

rotatifcevduporoftwinfncflitîtme. dtfid1 öcnj^i"’ fn of^ildi itrçifce

t1' tuf.»devote rove fn lifam. (*) foftœ w me m ont ^ u iw n is

ta (tuf; BVFH Bmichnik

çrwdio.rpiatma et rrtigioine. rca t .et de çï subsequently erased and not now visible to the naked eye. 1 Gesta Regum, Rolls Series, 1, 144. 2 Professor Whitelock kindly read this article in proof and I am indebted to her for a number of helpful comments.

Il8

I ll

The E arliest L ife o f S t Gregory the Great, W ritten by a W hitby M onk BY B E R T R A M C O L G R A V E

In the monastic library of St Gall, among many MSS. of AngloSaxon origin or association, is one written on the continent in the first half of the ninth century, which contains the earliest known Life of Gregory the Great.1 The work was known quite early, for John the Deacon writing a Life of S t Gregory somewhere about 785 refers to it,12 while another writer, about the end of the ninth century, interpolated passages from it into a Life of Gregory which had originally been written more than a century before by Paul the Deacon.34 For many centuries it lay forgotten, bound up in a com­ posite volume containing a number of saints* Lives* These Lives are written in various hands and each single biography ends with the gathering, of which the last leaves if unused are cut off. In the 1 Cod. 567. Fuller descriptions of the MS. can be found in: S. Brechter, Die Quellen zur Angelsächsenmission Gregors des Grosses (Beiträge zur Geschichte alten Mönchtums und der Benediktiner Ordens) (Münster, 1941), p. 118; G.Scherrer, Verzeichniss der Handschriften des Stiftsbibliothek von S. Gallen (Halle, 1875), p. 182 ; H. F. Brauer, Die Bücherei von S. Gallen und das althochdeutsche Schrifttum (Halle, 1926), pp. 12, 17, 41, 55; A. Brückner, Scriptoria medii aevi helvetica. II. Schreibschulen der diözese Konstanz S. Gallen, 1 (Geneva, 1936), p. 79; P. E. Munding, Das Verzeichnis der S. Gatter Heiligenleben (Leipzig, 1918), pp. 12934; L. Traube, Nomina Sacra (Munich, 1907), p. 219; W. Levison, Monumenta Germaniae Historical Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, vn, p. 680, no. 726. 2 Vita Gregorii auctore Johanne Diacono, Migne, P.L. lxxv, col. 61. Pope John V III asks why there is no life of Pope Gregory ‘praesertim cum et apud Saxones et apud Langobardorum. . .gentem, gestis propriis ubique polieret’. By the Langobard life he means that of Paul the Deacon. 8 Vita Gregorii auctore Paulo Diacono, Migne, P.L. lxxv. 4 Pp. 142-53 of the MS. are palimpsests. The Life of S t Lucius is written above in a ninth-century hand, while beneath are parts of the Old Testament in the Vulgate edition, namely the books of Amos, Jonah, Micah and Malachi written in a half-uncial script of the sixth century. Another St Gall MS. (193) also contains some leaves from the same Bible codex used as palimpsests. E. A. Lowe, ‘A Handlist of Half-uncial M anuscripts’, Miscellanea Francesco Ehrle I V (Studi e Testi, vol. 40), p. 55 II9

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case of the Life of Gregory two gatherings have been used and two extra leaves added at the end of the second one. The last Life of the group was that of St Martin mostly written in an eighth-century hand.1 This group of Lives was formed into a single volume some­ where in the ninth century; several of the Lives are written in a ninth-century hand and the last Lifef that of St Martin, was the last in the volume when the codex was listed in a ninth-century catalogue.1 2 The volume is in a medieval binding with strap and pin fastening. The Life occupies eighteen folios, covering the sixth and seventh gathering with the extra two leaves as we have already said. Each page measures 9 x 6f in. consisting of 25 lines, with the exception of the last two leaves where there are 26 lines to the page. The leaves are numbered 75-110, in the modem pagination. The writ­ ing of the first two gatherings is that of a scribe who wrote about the middle of the ninth century or somewhat earlier. It is some­ what carelessly written, in a continental hand, and many correc­ tions have been made by a second and later scribe. The last two folios are in a new hand which is much more accurate than the original hand of the rest. The first scribe was faced with the work of an author who wrote rough and often ungrammatical Latin. He is obviously often unable to understand what he is copying, so one cannot put all the blame on him for the frequent obscurities in the text as it has come down to us. The chapter titles are in coloured— usually red—majuscules, and the initials are also simple majuscules. For many centuries the Life was forgotten or perhaps it would be fairer to say that it was known by the reference to it in the Life of Gregory written by John the Deacon, but no one knew where it was to be found. It is true that Canisius3 refers casually to the Life in alio quondam S. Galli codice, sedfabulis adeo passim scatentem ut si exscripsissem ac vulgassemy et operam et chartam ludos fecisse non injuria censeri possem. His description of this Life did not en­ courage others to study it, so that its true importance was not recognised until 1886. In this year Dr Paul Ewald printed several 1 The Lives are St Silvester 1-73, St Gregory 75-110, St Hilarius 111-33, St Lucius 135-52, St Lonochil and St Agnofled 155-63, St M artin 164-70, additions to St M artin’s Life 172-99. 2 P. Lehmann, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz, 1 (Munich, 1918), p. 78, 1. 2. 8 H. Canisius, Thesaurus monumentorum ecclesiasticorum et historicorumt tomi 11 pars in (Amsterdam, 1725), p. 252. 120

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extracts from it together with an introductory essay in a book con­ sisting of a series of essays dedicated to the memory of the historian Georg Waitz.1 Ewalde introductory essay was a very important piece of work and for the first time established the fact that the Life was written by a Whitby monk. He gave also general indications as to its date and its relation both to Bede and to the other two bio­ graphers of Gregory, John the Deacon and Paul the Deacon. In 1888 J. R. Seeley1 2 discussed the Life at some length in an article in the English Historical Review quoting some long extracts from it. In 1896 Charles Plummer also printed some extracts in his edition of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, seeking to show that Bede had known and used the Life.3 But it was not until 1904 that the Life was made available in its entirety when an edition of it was published by Cardinal Gasquet.4 This brought forth two important reviews, one by Fr. Herbert Thurston who, after some well-justified criticism of Cardinal Gasquet’s text, reached the conclusion that the work was written after Bede’s time and was based on Bede.5 Abbot Butler’s discus­ sion of the subject in 190767was a very judicious summing up of the situation as he saw it, in which he came to the conclusion that ‘neither the Venerable Bede nor the Whitby monk was acquainted with the work of the other’. Since then a little more light has been thrown on the problems connected with the Life? and the time has now come not only for a fresh edition of the text but for a fuller consideration of the Life as a whole. All that the writer intends to do here is to consider a few of these problems and to call attention once more to the very great interest that the book has for students of seventh- and eighth-century hagiography and history. 1 P. Ewald, ‘Die älteste Biographie Gregors I*, Historische Aufsätze dem Andenken an Georg W aitz gewidmet (Hanover, 1886), pp. 17-54. 2 J. R. Seeley, ‘Paul Ewald and Pope Gregory I ’, English Historical Review, in (1888), 295-310. 8 Bedae Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorumy ed. C. Plummer (2 vols., Oxford, 1896) ( = H .E ), 11, p. 389. 4 A Life of Pope S t Gregory the Great, ed. by Cardinal F. A. Gasquet (London, 1904). 6 Fr. Herbert Thurston, ‘ The Oldest Life of Gregory’, The Month, civ (1904), 337-53. • E. C. Butler, ‘Chronicle, Hagiographica’, Journal of Theological Studies, vu (1906), 312-13 ; see also H. Moretus, Analecta Bollandiana, xxvi (1907), 66-72. 7 Dr C. E. Wright’s discussion of the Life in The Cultivation of Saga in AngloSaxon England (Edinburgh, 1939), PP- 43“8, 85-91 is particularly interesting and

important. 121

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We have no definite information about the author but we can gather certain details about him from the work itself. He speaks of Gregory with great affection, calling him the apostle of the English (p. 7)1 and referring to him as ‘doctor noster* (p. 4), ‘papa noster* (p. 35), ‘apostolicus noster’ (p. 42), while he refers to Edwin as ‘rex noster’ (p. 19), and speaks of ‘gente nostra quae dicitur Humbrensium* (p. 16). Finally we are told that the bones of King Edwin were translated ‘ad Streunesalae. . . nostrum coenobium’ (pp. 21 and 23), that is to say to ‘our monastery at Whitby*. So altogether it becomes clear that the anonymous writer is a monk in the Whitby monastery. The story he tells begins with the praises of Gregory and very soon turns to the account of the conversion of the English through the great saint’s instrumentality. Stories connected with the con­ version follow naturally and Edwin for the time being occupies the stage ; from pp. 86 to 93 of the MS., that is to say for nearly 8 of the 36 pages, the Life is concerned with what might be called irrelevant material. On the other hand it is important to remember that the work is closely associated with the Whitby church. It was almost certainly written to provide ‘lectiones *for the feasts of St Gregory. There was in the church an altar, as the writer informs us, dedi­ cated to St Gregory in which there would be undoubtedly, though we are not definitely told, a relic of the saint. But the relics of Edwin are in the church too, buried close to the altar of St Gregory ; so what was more natural than that the Life of Gregory should con­ tain an account of Edwin as well as of Paulinus whose memory was also honoured in the church. After all, it was Gregory who sent Paulinus and it was Paulinus who converted and baptised Edwin. The writer begins with a short ‘proemium* in which he declares his intention to write the story of ‘magister noster’, the one whom all the world joins ‘with us* in calling ‘ St Gregory*. The first two chapters describe his origin, his life as an envoy of the pope and his grief at having to leave the cloister. At this point (chap. 3) the writer complains of his lack of information about Gregory’s miracles, but he goes on to observe that miracles are not strictly necessary as a proof of sanctity, as Gregory himself has declared. He does know, however, some anecdotes handed down by tradition and these he proposes to relate ; but he again emphasises the fact that Christ can accomplish as much by speaking through the mouth 1 T he references are to Gasquet’s edition. 122

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of his servant Gregory as by making Peter walk on the waves or causing Paul to strike Simon Magus blind. He then (chap. 7) goes on to relate that Gregory taught us humility, not by walking on the waves or raising the dead but by his behaviour when he was elected pope. Somewhat illogically, he then relates how Gregory escaped from the city, hidden in a merchant’s vessel, and concealed himself for three days, until a miraculous pillar of fire revealed his presence to the people and he was taken off and consecrated. In the ninth chapter the writer gets to the point of the relations of Gregory with the English race and his longing to convert them and how he was guided to bring it about. Then follows the famous story of the English youths in Rome, a story which the writer had learned from trustworthy witnesses. Before Gregory was pope, he heard one day that certain people of ‘our nation* had arrived in Rome, fair-skinned and fair-haired. He hastened to see them and this version of the story does not even mention that he went into the market-place, as Bede does. Though he knew who they were, being for the moment confused by their unusual appearance and, what is more important, being prompted by God, he asked after their origin. Now some people, the writer tells us, say that they were lovely boys and some that they were curly-headed and hand­ some youths. When Gregory asked them the name of their nation, they answered, ‘Our people are called Angles (Anguli)’. He thereupon replied, ‘Angels of God*. Then he asked the name of their king. They answered, ‘Ælli*, whereupon he replied, ‘Alleluia, for the praise of God should be sung there*. Thirdly he asked the name of their tribe and they said ‘Deire*. He answered, ‘Fleeing from the wrath of God to the faith*. Thereupon (chap. 10) he went to the pope, Benedict I, to ask permission to conduct a mission to England. The pope gave his consent, but as soon as the people heard of it, they divided themselves into three companies and, as Benedict passed along his way to the church of St Peter, each com­ pany in turn cried out thrice, ‘Petrum offendisti; Romam destruxisti: Gregorium dimisisti*. When the pope heard this threefold cry thrice repeated, he was terrified and sent messengers to recall Gregory. The latter, however, had already gained knowledge of this threefold repetition by a sign from the Lord; for a locust had three times settled on his book while he was reading during the afternoon rest which the travellers were taking. He knew that the locust

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(locusta) was, as it were, saying ‘loco sta’ or as the text puts it, ‘sta in loco ’, that is ‘stay in the place \ But nevertheless he hastened on until overtaken by the messengers who took him back to Rome. The next chapter (chap, n ) describes Gregory’s election to the pontifi­ cate, whereupon he sent Augustine, Mellitus and Laurentius straightway to England. The pope consecrated Augustine bishop ; Mellitus was consecrated bishop in England by Augustine; Mellitus in his turn consecrated Laurentius. Æthelberht king of Kent was the first of the ‘Anguli’ to be baptised and Edwin son of Ælli in due course became king of Northumbria. After a chapter in which the writer comments on the pope’s puns on Angles and angels, on Ælli and Alleluia, making further and even more unsuccessful puns on the words himself, he goes on (chap. 14) to record the baptism of Edwin by Paulinus. The next chapter tells the story of the baptism of the courtiers who were bound not only by heathenism but by unlawful marriages, meaning, of course, marriages within the forbidden degrees, such as a marriage with a step-mother, to which the Germanic races were prone. As they were leaving the hall, after being instructed by the bishop, a crow was heard crying from an unlucky corner of the heavens, to the great distress of all, until the bishop ordered his servant to shoot it with an arrow. Then showing the people the dead bird, he explained that a bird so foolish that it could neither foretell nor avoid its own death was a very poor prophet. He then proceeds (chap. 16) to tell the story of Edwin which he had also heard as an ancient tradition ; he will do his best to tell the truth, though he warns his readers that a tradition such as this is apt to be changed when it is transmitted through long periods and widely distant places. This story, he says, took place long before the days of all now alive. He then goes on to relate how, when Edwin was in exile from Northumbria, through the tyranny of Æthelfrith, at the court of Rædwald, King of the East Angles, Æthelfrith sought by payment to encompass his death. One day when Edwin was fearing for his life, a man of beautiful appearance, crowned with the cross of Christ, appeared to him, promising him a happy life and a successful reign if he would obey him. Edwin said he would do so, if what the vision promised came true. ‘You shall prove it true’, said the vision, ‘and you must obey him who first appears to you in this shape and with this sign.* It is said that it was the Bishop Paulinus who first appeared thus to him. 124

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After having described (chap. 17) how the soul of Paulinus was carried to heaven in the shape of a great white bird, like a swan, the writer goes on in the next two chapters (chaps. 18, 19) to describe the bringing of the relics of Edwin to Whitby. There was a priest and monk called Trimma (a relative of the narrator) who was from Deira but was living in a certain monastery in the south of England ; he had a vision of a man who bade him go to Hatfield Chase, the place where King Edwin was slain, and find his relics; he was then to take them to the monastery at Whitby over which ruled Eanflæd, Edwin’s daughter, and her daughter Ælfflæd. On the monk’s objecting that he did not know where Hatfield Chase was, he was told to go to a certain ceorl named Teoful who lived in a village in Lindsey whose name the narrator had forgotten. Twice the vision appeared but he took no action; the third time the man came threatening him with a whip. Thereupon he obeyed the vision and, with the help of Teoful, he discovered the remains of Edwin and brought them to ‘this our monastery’. And now they are honour­ ably buried with other of ‘our kings’ on the south side of the altar dedicated to St Peter.1 At this point (chap. 20) the writer turns from the stories which concern ‘u s’ to some which deal more particularly with Gregory. He proceeds to tell four miracles of the saint, all of which he claims are based on oral tradition. He first tells the famous story of the Mass of St Gregory which was afterwards incorporated in St Gregory’s Life in the Golden Legend. Then follows the very enlightening story of the relic hunters (chap. 21), who were dis­ satisfied with receiving pieces of cloth because they preferred to have bones or something which was more definitely part of the saint. Next comes the story of the two magicians who were hired by an enemy of Gregory to stand on a high place and perform their magic on his horse by putting a devil into him. There follows the quaint tale of the Lombard king, who in return for promising Gregory that he will not invade Rome during his lifetime, receives when ill a prescription from Gregory which heals him, the prescrip­ tion being to the effect that the king is to stick to a diet of milk 1 It is clear from the above story that Trim m a came from a monastery in the south and not from Lindsey. So I see no good ground for supposing, as M rs Chadwick does (pp. 143 f.), that the writer got his information about Paulinus and Edwin from a Lindsey source. After all, like Bede (though the latter did learn something about Paulinus from Lindsey), he had plenty of other available sources as I have tried to show above.

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foods! The writer seems to have treated the story as a joke, for he ends the chapter with an obscure reference to a saying of Gregory’s about ‘rustic speech* which in the context looks like a pun. From this point on (chaps. 24-8), the writer devotes his atten­ tion to Gregory’s writings, his Homilies, the Moralia and the Dialogues, adding a story attributed to tradition to the effect that his homilies on Ezekiel were dictated to him by a white dove. After a story to illustrate Gregory’s power of ‘binding and unbinding’, borrowed from the Dialogues, he turns to the very unpleasant account of the end of Gregory’s unpopular successor Sabinianus, though the writer does not name him. Gregory appeared to him in a vision, reproaching him for his jealousy and greed and then, be­ cause Sabinianus was obdurate, he kicked him on the head. Sabinianus died as the result of this blow. This unpleasant story the writer claims to have found in some ‘historical writings’. It is followed by the first telling of the miracle of the conversion of the just emperor Trajan.1 This anecdote, he says, is one which ‘some of our people say was told by the Romans ’. It is a story which was to become famous all through the Middle Ages and even found its way into Dante’s great poem. It relates how Gregory was one day walking through the magnificent forum built by Trajan, when he found out about Trajan’s kindness to a widow (it is not made clear how), and became convinced that the emperor was a Christian at heart, though unbaptised. But because no one can be saved without baptism he did not know what to do for his salvation; but he was led by the inward promptings of Christ to enter the church of St Peter and there with flowing tears he prayed for Trajan until it was revealed to him that the tears he had wept had served as the waters of baptism and the emperor was duly saved. In the next chapter (30) the writer, in words reminiscent of the typical introduction to the standard saint’s Life, again apologises for the meagreness of his story and declares that he has told the truth so far as he was able. He knows the order is somewhat con­ fused but he pleads that this is found even in the scriptures; for 1 The story is to be found in Dante, Purgatorio, x, 11. 73-93 ; Paradiso, xx, 11. 106-17. In later versions Trajan comes to life long enough to declare his faith. The story also received an English dress in medieval times and a fourteenthcentury poem still survives in which Pope Gregory becomes St Erkenwald, bishop of London, while Trajan becomes an ancient British judge. I2Ô

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Matthew1 puts the cleansing of the temple at the end of his gospel while John2 puts it at the beginning. And let it not disturb anyone, he adds, if any of the deeds he has mentioned were not done by Gregory but by some other saint, for the apostle agrees that we are all members of one body.3 Therefore if some of the things which have been told of Gregory are really the deeds of another man, it must be remembered, the author says, that he did not learn of his deeds from the lips of someone who saw and heard them, but only from common report. After this there follows a chapter which seems to be out of place, in which the writer discusses Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis. In the last chapter (33), after apologising for knowing so little about the saint’s death and quoting the Liber Pontificalis as to the date of his death and the length of his episco­ pate, he ends with the usual ascription of praise to God. The first point to strike the reader who is at all familiar with the saints’ Lives of this period is its unlikeness to them all. The typical Life such as the anonymous Life of Cuthbert written at Lindisfame or Felix’s Life of Guthlac are composed very much to a pattern which shows the influence of certain hagiographical writings, particularly the Latin translation made by Evagrius of Athanasius’s Life of Antony.* These Lives usually begin with a preface in which the writer explains how, being urged to write the Life, usually by some superior whom he finds it impossible to refuse, he feels totally unfitted for the task. Then follows a humble declaration of un­ worthiness, the writer deprecating his lack of eloquence and his rustic style. The Life proper begins with the story of the birth and occasionally the youth of the saint with attendant miracles. A series of miracles then follows, ending with the death of the saint which is generally described at great length, the writer often putting into his mouth a farewell speech. The work ends with an account of his death and burial and some miracles which took place at the tomb. The object of the book was partly laudatory, partly instructive. The whole arrangement of this book is quite different and the obvious reason for this is that our Whitby author had none of the Lives and Passions of the saints to fall back upon such as Bede collected for the purpose of making his Martyrology5 or such as Acca gathered 1 Matt. xxi. 12. 3 John ii. 14-16. 3 I Cor. xii. 12. 4 Vita Beati Antonii, auctore sancto Athanasio interprète Evagrio, Migne, P.L. LXXIII, cols. 125-70. 3 Cf. H. Quentin, Les Martyrologes historiques du moyen âge (Paris, 1928), pp. 17-119. 12 7

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together at Hexham.1 It is true that the miracles are there though the writer is constantly complaining of his lack of material in this respect. The preface is brief to the point of baldness, and the usual declaration of unworthiness is missing, though the writer does later add such an apology towards the end of the work (chap. 30). It is quite out of place there from the point of view of the Antonian Life, though on the other hand his apologies sound less of a rhetorical trick and more sincere than most of the formal deprecatory pre­ faces. The author even attempts some sort of a defence for the con­ fusion and lack of order of his story. The story of the saint’s birth is simply a brief quotation from the Liber Pontificate,1 2 followed by a pious quotation from the preface of Gregory’s Dialogues. But one interesting fact is that even here the writer shows his knowledge of independent tradition, for he knows the name of Gregory’s mother (Sylvia). This appears neither in the Liber Pontificate nor in Bede nor in the Lives of either Paul or John the Deacon though the inter­ polated version of Paul adds it, where it is obviously borrowed from the Whitby Life. It is most improbable that he had any written source for this; it was pretty certainly part of the oral tradition to which he refers several times. The account of his prepapal life at Constantinople is borrowed with considerable quota­ tions from the Epistle to Leander with which Gregory prefaced his work on Job, known as the Moralia. The apology for the lack of miracles, repeated more than once, would also seem very much out of place if he had modelled his Life on the standard pattern where the miracles form the essential fibre of the work. The title of such Lives is generally, as in our Life, de vita et virtutibus, ‘concerning the life and miracles* of the saint. It brings us up at once against the essential difference between the task of our author and that of the writers of Lives such as those of Cuthbert, Guthlac and Wilfrid ; each of these is writing the Life of a local saint and has an ever growing body of local tradition on which to draw. At Whitby all that the writer has is a few stories handed down by oral tradition, not from recent history but from the distant past, for Gregory had been dead for something like a hundred years. In one place (chap. 30), as we have seen, the writer even goes so far as to ask forgiveness 1 H.E. v, 20. 2 Liber Pontificate, ed. Mommsen, Auct. Antiq. xm , 227 f. and Gesta Pontificum Romanorum, 1 (1898). He used a copy of the second recension of the text just as Bede did. 128

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of the hearer if the miracles he relates really belong to some other saint. Felix, Eddius and even Bede (at any rate as hagiographer) would have had no such scruples. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the Life should break the canons of the Antonian model in a variety of ways, even if the writer had been familiar with any of them. The purpose is the same, to do honour to the saint and to edify the hearers, but the method is necessarily different. We have already seen the good reasons why the writer chose to bring in the Edwin material, but it is certainly out of place from the point of view of the standard Life. It is almost like bringing in a rival to Gregory in the person of Edwin. But, from a purely practi­ cal point of view, he was almost forced to do something of the kind. His information about Gregory being so limited, it is not to be wondered at that he gladly seized upon the material which lay to his hand to eke out this scanty Life. Here too he was on safer ground. If our dating is correct, the prioress of his monastery was the granddaughter of the king, the late prioress was the daughter; and it is quite possible that he may have known her too. One of the brethren of his own monastery was a relation of the priest Trimma to whom the vision of the whereabouts of Edwin’s relics came. The writer now had second-hand information at his disposal and would therefore feel that he was on safer ground. Nor can it be said that his introduction of the chapters which deal with Gregory’s writings, the Moralia, the Dialogues, or the Homilies on Ezekiel are in any sense in line with the pattern of the orthodox Life. One little incident in his chapter on the Ezekiel homilies bears a resemblance to stories popular in the typical Lives, the tale of how the Homilies were dictated by a white dove.1 The secret help obtained by the saint in his discovering of the spy, the rebuke he received and the strict injunction not to reveal the incident during the saint’s lifetime, are all common motifs in the Lives especially of the Irish type, though in themselves they do not necessarily imply a knowledge of any written Lives, but merely the existence of traditions possibly of Irish origin. But the general dis­ cussion of the works written by the subject of the biography is unusual when the writer is dealing more specifically with the virtutes of a saint who is the actual or prospective origin of a cult. 1 T he tradition of the book being dictated by a bird may well be the mis­ interpretation of some painting—where the white dove represents, of course, the Holy Spirit inspiring the writer. 9

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Finally the writer has to confess that he knows very little about Gregory’s death and ends with a jejune statement of the date of his death and place of burial borrowed from the Liber Pontificate. It is clear then that the Life is lacking in the background know­ ledge which other writers of the eighth century possess. The Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne, even at the turn of the eighth century, quotes at length from Victorius of Aquitaine, from Atha­ nasius, Sulpicius Severus, the Actus Silvestriy Isidore and Ambrose, as well as having the deep knowledge of the scriptures which is common to most monastic writers. But as we have noted, our writer apart from his deep knowledge of the scriptures knows nothing but some of the works of Gregory and the Liber Pontificate. It may be that the library at Whitby was not so well stocked as those at Jarrow and Wearmouth, Ripon and Hexham, where the great travellers, Benedict Biscop and Wilfrid, had provided a noble foundation. Lindisfarne too seems to have been well supplied and to have had plenty of contacts with the other libraries. All these were also seats of a bishopric. Hilda’s school at Whitby had turned out five bishops, not to mention the earliest English poet. But it may be significant that it is the knowledge of the scriptures which Bede emphasises in each of these men except Oftfor, and he, when he wished to reach greater perfection in his studies, went to Arch­ bishop Theodore in Kent and later to Rome.1 John of Beverley, another of the five, also apparently studied under Theodore though his stay in Kent is only mentioned casually in connection with his knowledge of the correct days for blood-letting.2 Even Caedmon is fed with scripture stories only and ‘like a clean beast chewing the cud’ ruminates over them and produces his songs.3 Hilda like Gregory the Great probably felt that the scriptures alone sufficed for instruction. Gregory on one occasion severely rebuked a certain Bishop Desiderius because of his passion for classical studies.4 It is not likely that Ælfflæd, brought up in the Hilda tradition and strengthened by the Gregory tradition of her mother Eanflæd, would make any changes in that direction. It is therefore very likely that the Whitby monastery would not be strong in books other than those strictly bearing upon the scriptures and that the instruction was consequently limited. 1 H.E. IV, 23. 2 H .E . v, 3. 3 H.E. iv, 24. 4 M .H .G . Epp. tom. 11 (xi, 30), p. 303. 13O

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Where then did the writer get his Gregory stories from? There is no evidence whatever for any earlier Life than the one we have before us. It is true that John the Deacon knows these stories, but, on his own acknowledgement, he gets them from the Whitby Life} Paul the Deacon did not know them but the later interpolator added them afterwards from the same source. It was from these writers that they became generally known, but our author can claim to have the earliest version of these tales of wonder, some of which gained great popularity throughout the Middle Ages. The author himself claims no authority other than that of oral tradition. Each of the stories has a very obvious moral, reminding one of the pulpit legend, the story that the preacher tells to illustrate his point. The homiletic literature of Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest times abounds in such ‘exempla’. Could it be that the stories of Gregory are ‘exempla* told from the pulpit on St Gregory’s feast and now by the efforts of our writer promoted to ‘lectiones *to be read at the Mass of the saint? It is clear that there was a strongly developed cult of Gregory at Whitby which would account for such a Life having been contemplated and written there; there was an altar dedicated to him, and the writer is familiar with Gregory’s works and apparently with Gregory’s alone. All this goes to show how strong was the Gregory tradition there. Whence did this Gregory cult derive? One would hardly associate it with Hilda; though she was converted by Paulinus, she always seems to have been much friendlier with the Celtic saints and was ranged on the Celtic side at the Council of Whitby. But on the other hand Eanflæd and her daughter Ælfflæd were for some time joint abbesses at Whitby. Eanflæd was the daughter of Æthelburh of Kent and was the first Northumbrian to be baptised by Paulinus. She was taken by him as a baby to Kent after Edwin’s death and returned as wife of Oswiu to be a strong advocate of Roman allegiance. It was she who encouraged young Wilfrid on his visit to Rome, even to the point of arranging his journey for him, and who was largely responsible for the summoning of the Council of Whitby in 664. No one was more familiar than she with the Canterbury tradition and she would surely have heard stories of Gregory both from her mother and from others in Kent, where her childhood was spent. She may well have brought a Gregory relic to Whitby to place in the Gregory altar. So with such an abbess it 1 S. Gregorit vita auctore Johanne Diacono, 11, 41. Migne, P.L. lxxv, col. 103. I 3I

9-2

E A R L IE S T L I F E OF ST G R E G O R Y T H E GR EA T

is only natural that a Gregory cult grew up and that Gregory tradi­ tions were strong. And who was more likely than she to know the story of her father’s vision of Paulinus at the court of King Rædwald, and the story of Paulinus’s soul being carried to heaven in the shape of a swan? Furthermore, the bringing of Edwin’s relics to Whitby was the obvious task of a devoted daughter venerating the memory of her father, though she can only have known him through her mother’s stories. In addition to all this the coming of Edwin’s relics provided Whitby with a saint whose cult might spread even as that of Oswald, the other martyr king, had spread.1 Oswald had perished fighting as a Christian king against a heathen leader, just as Edwin had perished earlier fighting against the same heathen foe, Penda. Oswald’s relics had been taken to Bamburgh, Lindisfarne and Bardney. So the headless body of Edwin (though it is Bede and not our writer who mentions the lack of a head)2 might easily become the centre of a cult of another king. Furthermore, from the burial-place of Cuthbert at Lindisfarne, of Chad at Lichfield, and Æthelthryth at Ely, miracles were reported and a cult was well established by the end of the seventh century. So it was a happy accident that Edwin should become the saint at Whitby at whose tomb miracles might be expected to happen. For it was at Whitby that his daughter and granddaughter were to be buried while, as the writer tells us, ‘others of our kings’ also lay buried there. The date of the Life cannot be settled with any certainty. The author gives few facts which can be definitely dated relating to his own period, and in one passage where it might be possible to date it, the writer’s words are ambiguous. ' One would guess that the Life would be written not very long after the translation of Edwin’s relics to Whitby, an incident which took place during the rule of Eanflæd, that is to say, from the death of Hilda in 680 to the death of Eanfiæd in 714. We are told that the translation took place while Æthelred was still king of the South Anglians. This limits the date to 704, for in that year Æthelred retired into the monastery at Bardney. The writer himself describes the date as diebus Edilredi régis illorum, which would seem to imply that Æthelred was no longer king when the Life was written. If it is legitimate to take it 1 H.E. hi, 13. Plummer, 11, p. 159. * H.E. 11, 20. His head was buried at York. 132

E A R L IE S T L IF E OF ST G R EG O RY T H E GREAT

in this sense it gives us a terminus a quo of 704. The writer then goes on to describe Whitby in these words: quod est coenobium famosissimum Aelfledae filiae supradictae reginae Eanfledae nataey ut supra diximus, Edwini. The writer has been quoting words uttered by the man who appears in a vision to Trimma, and it is not quite certain where the quotation ends. But the words ut supra diximus seem to imply that the words quod est coenobium, etc., are also the words of the writer himself. In this case it seems legitimate to conclude that the author is telling us that Ælfflæd is still alive, in other words, that the Life was written before 714. This would make a date for the Life between 704 and 714. But because the reference to Æthelred is so ambiguous, there is no reason to suppose that the Life could not have been written considerably earlier. On the whole an early dating seems reasonable enough. It is clear that the writer had no knowledge of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, which was finished in 731, and it is equally clear that he did not know the Lindisfarne monk’s Life of St Cuthbert written some time between 699 and 705. As we have seen, he is ignorant of any type of contemporary literature, theological, hagiographical or secular, except those already mentioned. He is clearly experiment­ ing, and he produces a crude, shapeless, ill-written piece of work which gives the impression of being quite outside the run of litera­ ture of the eighth century. As one reads it one is forced to the con­ clusion reached by C. W. Jones, who has said that the work gives the impression of having been written ‘earlier than the other Lives, before English hagiography had settled on a form’.1 But it cannot be denied that the evidence for dating the work is at present vague and slight. Finally, we reach the most hotly debated question of all with regard to this Life, namely whether Bede was aware of its existence and, if so, did he use it. Bede begins his second book with an account of Gregory’s death based upon the Liber Pontificate. He then goes on to give an account of his parentage, his life in the monastery and at Constantinople, using as his source the Liber Pontificate and Gregory’s own writings. After that he goes on to tell the story of the boys at Rome of which the monk of Whitby has a version, claiming oral tradition as his source. Plummer, in print­ ing the relevant passages from chap. 9 of the monk of Whitby’s 1 C. W. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England (Ithaca, 1947), p . 65.

133

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Life in his appendix,1 has marked in italics all words which are common to the two accounts. It will be seen at once that the verbal echoes are very slight, and that there is no real evidence of borrow­ ing. It is of course impossible that in telling the same story there should not be some similar expressions, but it is surprising that there are so few. In addition, when we come to consider the sub­ ject-matter of the story, certain differences appear. According to Bede the Anglian youths were slaves who had been brought to Rome for sale; according to the Whitby monk they are just ‘certain people’ who had come to Rome, no reason being stated. Bede declares them to be boys, the Whitby monk does not know whether they are boys or curly-headed handsome youths. In Bede’s account Gregory goes by chance to the market-place and finds them there; in the other account, Gregory hears of their arrival and hastens to see them, but where we are not told, for there is no mention of the market-place. Gregory’s three questions are naively addressed directly to the boys themselves and they answer him regardless of any language difficulties. In Bede, the five questions are apparently put by Gregory through some interpreter. The anonymous writer places the incident in the days of Pope Benedict (575-9), whom he obviously supposes to be Gregory’s predecessor, but Bede does not mention the pope’s name. What is even more suggestive is the way in which the story goes on in each case. On the one hand we get Bede’s brief prosaic statement that Gregory wished to come to England himself, that the pope was willing but the people were not;2 on the other hand the Whitby monk adds two stories, one about the appeal of the citizens to the pope with their threefold cry repeated thrice, the other the punning story about the locust. It does not seem likely that Bede would have omitted such a picturesque story as the legend of the soul of Paulinus being carried to heaven in the shape of a white bird. But again he misses it altogether. We need not suppose that Bede refused to use the incident because it was too crudely incredible ; for he was quite willing to take over the tale which he had obtained from the Passio S. Albani3 of the dropping out of the executioner’s eyes as he delivered the fatal blow to St Alban. One is forced to the conclusion that he did not use all these stories because he did not know them. 1 Plummer, H.E. a H.E. II, i .

II,

pp. 389-90. * H .E . 1,7. r 34

E A R L IE S T L I F E OF ST G R EG O R Y T H E GREAT

In the Whitby account of Edwin’s vision at the court of King Rædwald the man who appears to him in the vision is said to be Paulinus, though in Bede’s account the identity of the visitor is not revealed. It is clear that the two traditions differ. Bede’s story is much more vivid and dramatically conceived and it may well be that he has considerably moulded the tradition for the sake of dramatic effect, though it is unlikely that he has invented fresh facts. The Whitby tradition is briefer, less developed and altogether cruder than the tradition which Bede knew and worked up into one of the most striking of his stories. Perhaps even more noticeable is Bede’s failure to use the story of the translation of Edwin’s relics to Whitby. Bede obviously knows nothing about it. Yet it seems extraordinary that news of the event should not have reached Bede, even if the Whitby Life never came into his hands. Indeed, it is noticeable that Bede seems to have had little news at all of Whitby after the death of Hilda in 680. All that he seems to know is that Trumwine retired there after the battle of Nechtansmere in 685, while Eanflæd and Ælfflæd were in charge of the monastery and that after living a long time he was buried there; yet in describing the foundation of the monastery,1 Bede mentions that Edwin is buried there, but without any comment. We may therefore be quite sure that the account of the translation with its attendant miracle, as described by the Whitby monk, would have found a place in his history if he had known it, for it would have been a story after Bede’s own heart about a king whom he greatly admired,2 and would have taken its place naturally side by side with the story of the discovery of the relics of Oswald and of their reception by the monks of Bardney. Another group of miracle stories which Bede does not use are those concerning Gregory (chaps. 20-3) together with the anecdote of the conversion of Trajan, all of which must have attracted Bede’s attention, as they later attracted the attention of a much wider public, through the pages of John and Paul, and made the stories famous throughout the Middle Ages. There are many other smaller signs to show that Bede did not consult the Whitby Life. One of the most striking is that Bede and the Whitby monk both used the account of the Liber Pontificate for the details of the parentage and death of Gregory, but the Whitby monk alone adds the name of Gregory’s mother. On the other 1 H.E. hi, 24.

2 Cf. H.E. 11, 16 ad fin. and 11, 20 ad init.

*35

E A R L I E S T L I F E O F ST G R E G O R Y T H E G R E A T

hand, the Whitby monk makes Augustine, Mellitus and Laurentius come together to England, whereas Bede says that Gregory sent Mellitus later. According to the monk, Augustine was consecrated by Gregory, but Bede tells us that he was consecrated by Archbishop Aetherius while Laurentius was consecrated not by Mellitus, as the anonymous writer says, but by Augustine himself in order to be his successor in the Canterbury see.1 And finally, if Bede had used the Whitby Life, would he not have acknowledged it as he does the other Lives he uses, such as the Life of Fursey, the Life of Cuthbert by the anonymous Lindisfame monk or the account of the miracles in the monastery at Barking? It is true he does not mention his use of Eddius’s Life of Wilfrid, but it is possible that he had a reason for not doing so. Yet it is difficult to believe that he would not have made use of the book if he had known it or would have failed entirely to make any acknowledge­ ment of it. In fact the evidence is almost insuperable that Bede never saw the Whitby Life. The Latinity of the Vita is of only a poor order. It makes a very bad showing compared with Bede’s straightforward narrative style. One imagines that there was little rhetoric taught at Whitby when our author was writing. Unlike Bede he seldom or never stops to pluck some flower of oratory. His sentence construction is involved, his word order is confusing, his vocabulary is limited and often awkward, while grammatical mistakes are common. He is fortunately not influenced by the strange bombastic style of the Hisperica Famina type, and in all probability had never heard of it. It is true that the work has come down to us in one MS. only and that written by a careless scribe. Doubtless a fresh edition of the text is badly needed, gaining such help as can be gained by a careful study of the MS. and a comparison with the best MSS. of the interpolated Life of Paul the Deacon and of John the Deacon, both of which use it considerably ; but there is little hope that the result will do much to clarify the crabbed, awkward, ungrammatical and sometimes infuriatingly ambiguous Latin of the original. What conclusions then are we to come to? First of all there is every evidence that the anonymous Life is based on a strong tradi­ tion which probably stems from Canterbury. Bede also had access to Canterbury tradition but it would seem that that of Whitby goes back to an earlier time, derived through Eanflæd and her contem1 H.E. i, 27 and 11, 4. 13 6

E A R L IE S T L I F E OF ST G R EG O R Y T H E GREAT

poraries at only one remove from Paulinus and Augustine and the original group whom Gregory sent. Bede is using the Gregory tradition as it was told in his time, either at Canterbury or in North­ umbria or perhaps both. The two traditions varied, mostly in detail, but that at Whitby was fuller and contained many more picturesque stories. The Paulinus tradition may have been briefer at Whitby but it certainly differed to some degree. There is less mystery about the Edwin story, for instance, probably because it is nearer to Paulinus himself. There is as we have seen a good deal of fresh material at Whitby concerning Gregory and Paulinus and Edwin. The Gregory material was eagerly taken over by continental bio­ graphers, but the new Paulinus and Edwin material was never incorporated into later history. This in itself suggests that the Whitby Life was always better known on the continent than in this country. It is clearly stated both in the anonymous Life and in Bede that Edwin was baptised by Paulinus. There is no mention of the story of his baptism by Rhun, son of Urien, in either. If this Welsh tradi­ tion had been known to either, surely it would have been men­ tioned, if only to deny it. Equally unknown too is the other Welsh tradition that Edwin was brought up at the court of Cadfan and that he and his mortal enemy Cadwallon were brought up together. In view of this double silence one can hardly doubt that both of them are later Welsh inventions. Otherwise we have to explain a conspiracy of silence on the part of both of these eighth-century writers, for if these were actual facts it seems impossible that they should both be ignorant of them. But perhaps enough has already been said to show that this Life deserves more careful study than it has yet received, both because of the fresh light it throws on Northumbrian history in the seventh century, and also because it may yet be possible to substantiate the claim often made for it that it is the earliest piece of surviving literature produced by the Anglo-Saxons.1 1 Besides acknowledging my debt especially to the works mentioned in the notes, I should like to thank Professor R. A. B. Mynors of Corpus Christi College, Oxford who allowed me to use his own collation of the St Gall MS. with Cardinal Gasquet’s edition. I hope, before very long, to publish a new edition of the text of the Life, with translation and notes.

137

IV The Conversion o f N orthum bria : A Comparison o f Sources1 BY N O R A K. C H A D W I C K

Our sources for the conversion of Northumbria are very varied, even in some measure contradictory in character. All are agreed* however, that the conversion took place in the reign of King Edwin (616 or 617-62); but while our most acceptable authorities, Bede and the anonymous monk of Whitby (cf. pp. 119 ff. above), attribute the conversion of Edwin to St Paulinus of Canterbury, other sources of Celtic provenance suggest that he was baptised in a Celtic milieu, and by a priest of the Celtic Church. These latter sources, while far less authoritative than those of Bede and the Whitby monk, suggest a possible derivation from contemporary material, perhaps a century earlier than Bede or the Whitby monk. It is worth while, therefore, to examine these varied traditions as they have come down to us and to seek to estimate their relative value. Bede’s account is by far the fullest. The whole account of Edwin’s reign, as we pick it out of the various passages in the narra­ tive of Bede, is a strange and inconsequent one. We notice first of all the fact that much of it is obviously based ultimately on oral tradi­ tion, in contrast to the Canterbury documents which he also uses ; and secondly, the curiously episodic and broken-thread nature of the whole story. Bede (or more probably his informant) has arranged his material of Edwin’s conversion as a skilful serial story, pieced together from varied sources of a somewhat heterogeneous kind. He had begun his account of Edwin’s reign and the conversion of Northumbria (H.E. 11,1) by a clear summary. ‘The nation of the Northumbrians, with their king Edwin, received the faith by the preaching of St Paulinus *;2 Paulinus among others had been sent to Britain at 1 This study was read as the O’Donnell lecture at Edinburgh in 1959. 2 My references to Bede throughout this and the two following articles are to the edition by Charles Plummer, Venerabilis Baedae Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, etc., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), which I have generally abbreviated to Baedae H.E. when referring specifically to Plummer. 138

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OF N O R T H U M B R IA

the request of St Augustine by Pope Gregory the Great.1 Bede adds12 that it was as a result of Edwin’s conversion that he received an increase of his earthly power, reducing all the Britons of North­ umbria under his sway, and also the Mevanian islands, that is, Anglesey and Man.3 He then goes on to say that the occasion of the king’s conversion was his marriage with the Christian princess Æthelberg of Kent in 625 on condition of his granting her and her suite complete freedom of worship, and a further conditional pro­ mise to accept Christianity himself if, upon examination, it should prove acceptable. Here, then, we have Conditional Promise one— a perfectly clear account. The king’s conversion was evidently not a technical condition of the marriage, and did not take place immediately. At this point Bede4 introduces a brilliant saga into the narrative, in which he relates that in the following year (626) an attack was made on Edwin’s life in his royal vill on the Derwent by a certain Eumer at the instigation of Cwichelm king of Wessex. Edwin’s life was saved by the heroic action of his faithful thane Lilia. Bede also adds gratuitously that another of the king’s men, Forthheri, was killed in the struggle. It is a perfect heroic story5 but Bede uses it for ecclesiastical narrative. This attack on Edwin’s life took place on Easter Sunday, and the queen gave birth to a daughter. The king promised Paulinus that if he were victorious in his punitive expedition against the West Saxons6 he would become a Christian. Here, then, we have Condi­ tional Promise two—quite different from number one. The story has passed through a ‘cautionary ’ milieu. We note (1) the attack on Edwin’s life and the birth of a princess at Easter; (2) Paulinus exacts a conditional promise. The king again defers fulfilling his promise, which is now 1 H.E. i, 29. Paulinus arrived in Britain in 601, and was consecrated in 625. 2 Ibid. 11, 9. Cf. 11, 5. 3 Both the Cambrian and the Irish annals are silent about both his fosterage at Cadfan’s court (referred to in the Life of S t Oswald, cf. pp. 148 ff. below), and also his campaign in Wales. The absence of mention of the latter is all the more striking in view of the importance evidently attached to Edwin in Celtic records. Both the Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach mention his death. 4 H .E. 11, 9. 6 Cf. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (2nd ed., Oxford, 1950), PP- 65 f. 6 A later version of the Chronicle, probably Northumbrian, says he killed five kings. 139

THE C O NV ERSIO N OF N O R T H U M B R IA

apparently made conditional on the attitude of his peers,1 and as to what his own conviction should be after receiving Paulinus’s instruction.2 At this point Bede introduces into his history the text of the admonitory letters sent from Pope Boniface V to both the king and queen *about this time*.3 But Bede gives no indication as to the effect of these letters. He only states expressly that Paulinus found it difficult to persuade the king to accept the faith of a humble Christian.4 Bede’s narrative becomes strangely disjointed at this point, for he proceeds with the bald statement that at length, so it would seem, the nature of the revelation which had formerly been made to the king was made clear to him ‘in spirit *.5 Paulinus at once urged the king to fulfil the vow which he had made at that time. At this point Bede introduces in retrospect another saga, an episode of Edwin’s earlier life, to which he seems to be here refer­ ring, but which he now relates for the first time, obviously from oral tradition, and in the fully developed saga style. From this we gather that before he came to the throne, and while he was a fugitive in the court of Rædwald of East Anglia, he had been visited at dead of night by a stranger who promised him (i) safety in the present ; and (2) vengeance over his enemies; and (3) a great and powerful king­ dom in the future, in return for a promise of spiritual obedience in the future to the man who could foretell for him such benefits, and who in addition (4) would give him better and wiser counsel for his salvation than anything known to his relatives and forebears. The king readily gave his unreserved promise, and the stranger laid his hand on the king’s head, enjoining on him that when he should receive this sign he should remember what had passed between them, after which, ‘so it is said’,6 he vanished, and Edwin realised that he was not a man but a spirit. It is not at all clear whether Paulinus was identical—whether in Bede’s mind or in the original version of the story—with this spiritual visitor. 1 H.E. 11, 9. Cum suis primatibus quos sapientiores noverat curavit conferre quid de his agendum arbitrarentur. * Sed et ipse. . . saepe diu solus residens ore quidem tacito, sed in intimis cordis multa secum conloquens, quid sibi esset faciendum, quae religio servanda tractabat. 3 Ibid. 11, 10. 4 Ibid. 11, 12. 6 As Plummer rightly points out (H.E. 11, p. 98), Bede only puts forward this vision and interpretation as his own way of accounting for the facts. And it should be noted that he does not specifically state that it was Paulinus to whom the explanation was made clear in spirit. • ‘ut ferunt’.

I 40

TH E CO N V ERSIO N OF N O R T H U M B R IA

After telling this story, Bede proceeds to relate that while Edwin was hesitating to accept Paulinus’s teaching, and spending long periods in silent deliberation, ‘the man of God* (apparently Paulinus) came and laid his hand on the king’s head, reminding him of the ‘sign’, and of his promise. The king said, like the British bishops to St Augustine, that he must confer with his friends, princes and counsellors. The account of the Council which follows is too well known to require further comment here, and Edwin was baptised at York in 627.1 Bede then proceeds to relate (11, 14) that Paulinus tempore sequente baptised other children of Edwin and Æthelberg, and that he accompanied the king and queen to the ‘royal villa’, the villa regia quae vocatur A d Gefrin (the modern Yeavering, near Wooler in Northumberland), where he preached and baptised for thirty-six days in the river Glen. Similar mass baptisms were performed by him subsequently. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was completed in 731. The account which he gives of Edwin’s conversion by Paulinus was therefore written before 731. It is not our only account from this period. In the anonymous Life of S t Gregory, that is, Pope Gregory the Great, composed ‘from ancient tradition’ by a monk of Whitby, whose name is unknown, we are told that Edwin was baptised by Bishop Paulinus who had been sent by Gregory.2 In this narrative we are also given (chap. 16) another, though much shorter, version of Edwin’s vision at the court of Rædwald, and of the part of Paulinus in it. According to this Whitby version, while Edwin was in exile from Northumbria through the tyranny of Æthelfrith, and was staying at the court of Rædwald, king of the East Angles, his life was threatened by the tyrant who had expelled him from his home­ land. At this time a beautiful vision crowned with the cross of Christ appeared, and began to console him, promising him a happy life and a future reign over his people if he would obey him, to which Edwin agreed, should the promise prove true. The reply was: ‘You shall prove it true, and you must obey whoever first comes to you with this appearance (specie) and sign, etc---- He will teach 1 For the date, see W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), p. 272. * See the Vita Antiquissima : A Life of Pope S t Gregory the Great, edited by F. A. Gasquet (Westminster, 1904), chap. 14. English translation by C. W. Jones, Saints* Lives and Chronicles in Early England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1947)» P* io5* For an analysis and discussion of this Life by D r Bertram Colgrave, cf. pp. 119 ff. above.

Hl

THE CONV ERSIO N

OF N O R T H U M B R IA

you about the One God*, etc.; and the writer adds: ‘They say that in that form (specie) the aforesaid bishop Paulinus first appeared.’1 The Whitby monk tells us that he has ‘heard *the story of Edwin from ‘ancient tradition’ (quomodo antiquitus traditur), adding that he will do his best to tell the truth, but warning his readers, much like Constantius in regard to his account of the Life of St Germanus, that such traditions are apt to undergo changes when transmitted through long periods and over wide areas, and he assures us that what he is about to relate of Edwin took place before the days of all those who are still alive. He does not, however, give us at this point any indication of the source of his traditions. We are very much in the dark as to the date when the Whitby Life was written, though a date between 704 and 714 seems on the whole possible.2 Plummer held that the work is almost certainly earlier than Bede, and he adds: ‘When we consider how freely Bede often deals with his materials, the fact that so many words [sc. in common] can be traced is strong evidence that Bede had the Life before him.’ And he gives extracts from the Life italicising words common to Bede, and noting in the margin ‘parts of Bede which it chiefly illustrates’.3 But, as Colgrave points out (p. 134 above), the parallels of phrasing are probably due to the nature of the subject. The exact relationship of these two variants has never yet been clearly established, and Plummer’s parallels are inconclusive for his claim that they are ‘strong evidence that Bede had the Life before him ’. Is a textual relationship the only possible one? Bede con­ stantly refers himself to his oral sources.4 A notable instance is the description which he gives of the personal appearance of St Paulinus himself on the testimony of the priest Deda, abbot of the monastery of Peartaneu (Partney), in Lincolnshire, ‘and a most reliable authority’. Deda had obtained his information from an eyewitness who had been present as a young man at the time of Paulinus’s activities in Lindsey, and had been baptised by him, along with many others, in the river Trent in the presence of King Edwin.5 1 Op. cit. chap. 16. 2 For a discussion of the date see D r Colgrave’s article above, p. 134. 3 Baedae H.E. 11, 389. 4 A convenient list of these will be found in Plummer, Baedae H.E. 1, p. xliv note 3. 6 H.E. 11, 16. 142

THE CO NV ERSIO N OF N O RT H U M B R IA

Now there is perhaps a closer relationship, whatever its exact nature, between Bede’s story of Edwin’s vision and that of the Whitby monk than can be accounted for by a ‘floating tale’, to which Professor Stenton would ascribe their origin.1 The Whitby monk is writing the Life of Pope Gregory whose emissary Paulinus was, and, as Gasquet pointed out,2 Paulinus is his ecclesiastical hero. This is an essential element in his theme. In view of Bede’s declared purpose of tracing the conversion of his country to the Roman Church, we must expect to find him in all good faith stress­ ing the part played by Bishop Paulinus, emissary of Pope Gregory the Great, in the conversion of Northumbria. Yet Dr Colgrave’s study earlier in this volume makes it very doubtful if Bede was indebted to the Whitby monk, or, indeed, if either was indebted to the other. Both would seem to be drawing upon a common tradi­ tion ; and in view of the variation in the two accounts it seems prob­ able that this original account was in part oral, not written. Where, then, did Bede obtain his account of the Roman baptism of Edwin? If, as we have seen reason to believe, his source was oral,3 it is natural to think of Deda, abbot of Partney, to whom, as stated above, he himself tells us he was indebted for information about the personal appearance of Paulinus which Deda had him­ self received from an eyewitness who had been one of Paulinus’s converts in Lindsey baptised by Paulinus himself in the river Trent in the presence of King Edwin. Moreover it is clear that Bede was in close communication with Partney, because he also tells us that when Osthryth, the Mercian queen and daughter of Oswiu, was sojourning (moraretur) in the abbey of Bardney in Lindsey, she was visited by the venerable abbess Æthelhild, sister of Æthelwine, bishop in the province of Lindsey, and of Ealdwine, abbot of Partney, not far from Æthelhild’s own monastery. Bede gives a detailed report of the conversation between the queen and the abbess Æthelhild, and of the events which followed. Bede adds that the abbess Æthelhild is still living, and there can be little doubt that he obtained his intimate information about this incident either from Æthelhild herself or from one of her brothers Bishop Æthel­ wine or Ealdwine the abbot of Partney. One naturally thinks of 1 Stenton, op. cit. p. 114. 2 Op. cit. p. vii. 8 On this cf. P. Hunter Blair, ‘T he Bemicians and their Northern Frontier*, in Studies in Early British History, ed. by N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1959)» p. 144. I 43

THE C O N V ERSIO N OF N O R T H U M B R IA

Ealdwine, in view of Deda’s information, as an oral source about Paulinus, and of Bede’s testimony to the value of oral information obtained from Lindsey.1 Having concluded his account of the baptism of Edwin, after an intervening chapter relating exclusively to Paulinus, the Whitby monk goes on to tell2 of the bringing of Edwin’s relics to Whitby, as he has heard the story from one of his fellow monks, who had received it from one of his own relatives, a priest and monk called Trimma in a South Anglian monastery3 in the days of King Æthelred when Eanfled, Edwin’s daughter, was leading a monastic life. Trimma had a vision of a man who ordered him to go to Hæthfelth to find Edwin’s body4 and take it to the monastery of Whitby. In order to aid him in identifying the spot the vision directed him to a maritum (ceorl?) named Teoful in a town in Lindsey, of which the narrator had forgotten the name. With Teoful’s directions Trimma was able to find Edwin’s remains and bring them to Whitby, where they are honourably buried in the Church of St Peter beside those of ‘others of our kings’ by the side of the altar, and east of the altar in the same church which is consecrated to St Gregory.5 All our evidence makes it clear that the Whitby monk has derived his information about Edwin entirely, or almost entirely, from oral traditions. It was natural that he should give prominence to these traditions, for if the dating of the Life of Pope Gregory is correct (see above), he was writing in the monastery of Whitby at the time when the prioress was Edwin’s grand-daughter Ælffled, who had pre­ viously been joint prioress for a time with her mother, Edwin’s daughter, Eanfled. It was in all probability at their request that the Life of Pope Gregory was written—a wish inspired by pietas, since it was Gregory who had sent Paulinus who had baptised Edwin into the Roman Church. It is in accordance with this royal interest that the writer is at pains to record the circumstantial story of the finding of Edwin’s remains, and of their subsequent burial, with 1 Baedae H.E. u, 16 (relating to Deda), and cf. Bede’s preface. 2 Life of S t Gregory, chap. 18. 3 ‘Trimma, in quodam monasterio sundaranglorum. . .diebus Edilredi régis illorum.’ 4 Edwin’s head had previously been carried to York, and was ultimately placed in the porticus dedicated to Pope Gregory in the Church of St Peter (Bede, H.E.

n, 20).

6 C. W. Jones, Life of Saint Gregory, chaps. 18, 19. (Saints’ Lives and Chronicles, ed. cit.).

*44

TH E CO N V ERSIO N OF N O R T H U M B R IA

other of ‘our kings* by the side of the altar and east of the altar consecrated to St Gregory in the Church of Whitby. The minute if slightly tortuous account of the steps by which the tradition of the finding of the remains is related shows how much weight was attached to the relics and how important it was held to be to establish their genuineness. In this matter the Whitby monk claims divine guidance. He has the story from one of the monks of his own community, a relative of Trimma, who is described as a priest in a south Anglian monastery in the days of King Æthelred when Eanfled the daughter of Edwin was living a monastic life. This possibly points to the monastery of Bardney in Lindsey, into which Æthelred, king of Mercia, had retired in 704 and of which he became abbot. We have seen how according to this tradition, for which the monk and priest Trimma is responsible, Trimma was ordered by a man who appeared to him in his sleep to secure Edwin’s bones from near the spot where he was slain at Hæthfelth and to take them to Whitby, and how he was directed to ascertain in what way he might discover the spot from a certain ceorl (maritum) whose name was Teoful, and who was to be found in a certain place1 in Lindsey of which Trimma had forgotten the name. The Lindsey foyer of the tradition is thus made clear, but as the name of the ‘place * is forgotten we cannot be more precise. The fact that Bede had traditions of Paulinus from Partney, and further relates traditions of St Oswald from Bardney, and at the same time repre­ sents these two monasteries as in close communication on oral hagiographical traditions, makes it extremely probable that Trimma’s story, relating to somewhere in Lindsey, originated in one of these two monasteries, with a hint in favour of Bardney. In any case it is clear that oral traditions regarding not only Paulinus but also Edwin himself were actively cultivated in Lindsey, and the possibility that both Bede and the anonymous monk obtained the story of Edwin’s vision and subsequent conversion independently from Lindsey tradition is a not unlikely surmise, and would best account for both the similarities and the differences of the two stories. Similarly, a common origin in oral tradition may account for the similarities and differences in the story of Gregory and the Anglian youths as told by both Bede12 and the Whitby monk.3 1 T he word is vicus. * H.E. 11, i. 3 Life of S t Gregory, chap. 9. 10

145

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There is another consideration which perhaps serves to support the suggestion of a Lindsey foyer for traditions of Paulinus and Edwin. Eddius represents King Æthelred of Mercia as ‘always a most faithful friend* of St Wilfrid, who enjoyed papal favour, and draws a striking picture of Wilfrid’s visit to Æthelred after Æthelred’s resignation of the kingdom of Mercia and retirement to the monastery of Bardney. The king actually wept through excess of joy ; they kissed and embraced each other, and Wilfrid was, as usual, most honourably received by his friend.. .. The king bowed himself to the ground and obediently made a promise in these words : ‘As for the writings of this most Apostolic authority I will never in my life disobey one single jot or tittle in them, nor will I consent to those who disobey them; but I will do my best to get them fulfilled.* And what he had promised he carried out----For he at once summoned Cenred whom he had appointed king in his place, and begged him .. .to obey the precepts of the Apostolic See. This he willingly promised to do.1 Of course Eanfled and her daughter Ælfflæd both had the strongest reasons for supporting the cult of Paulinus, Gregory’s emissary, and Eanfled in particular was an active and staunch sup­ porter of Wilfrid, and had been largely instrumental in summoning the Council of Whitby in 664. As Colgrave points out (p. 131 above), she knew the Canterbury tradition of Gregory, and was likely to know the story of her father’s vision at Rædwald’s court. Thus by a second channel the Whitby monk would be likely to hear the Canterbury version of the story viva voce from the abbess of his own monastery, as well as the story of the bringing of Edwin’s relics to Whitby—an act of pietas for which she was doubtless responsible, and of which Bede has nothing to tell us except that Edwin is buried in the Church of St Peter, along with other members of his family and many other noble persons. It is perhaps not surprising that in a monastery so strongly proRoman as Bardney the monks demurred at receiving the bones of King Oswald, who had originally introduced the Celtic Order into Northumbria.12 More important perhaps, first Edwin, and later it would seem Oswald, had made themselves overlords of Lindsey ; and this Lindsey monastery of Bardney was now under the rule of King Æthelred of Mercia who had always been its great benefactor, and 1 The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and transi, by Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), chap. lvii. 2 Bede (H.E. hi, 11) has a different explanation. For alternative suggestions as to the cause of this reluctance see Plummer, Baedae H.E. 11, 155. 146

TH E C O N V ERSIO N OF N O R T H U M B R IA

who had retired to it on his clericatus and become its abbot. He was, moreover, always a zealous upholder of the Roman Order, as we shall see from his support of St Wilfrid. If we are right in suggest­ ing a close contact between Bardney and Partney already at this early date (Partney became a cell of Bardney in the later Middle Ages) and that this was a foyer of Paulinus traditions and of honour to Pope Gregory, it is natural to suppose that these two monasteries took an active part in the struggle between the Celtic and Roman parties in Northumbria, and would emphasise the Roman interest. Dr Colgrave has shown reason to believe that both Bede and the Whitby monk are independently indebted to Canterbury traditions for information about Paulinus, and he suggests that that of the Whitby monk goes back to an earlier time, and was transmitted through Eanfled, whose childhood was spent in Canterbury in close touch with Paulinus and the group sent by Gregory. Thus this tradition is in many respects fuller and more direct than that of Bede, and though the Paulinus tradition appears in a briefer form from Whitby and with less mystery about the Edwin story (per­ haps, as Dr Colgrave believes, because this version is nearer to Paulinus himself), Colgrave believes Bede’s tradition to have come direct from Canterbury, through the channels which Bede sets forth in his Dedication of the Hist. Eccles. ; and he nowhere introduces Lindsey into the picture. And he places complete reliance on the testimony of both Bede and the Whitby monks that Edwin was baptised by Paulinus. The silence of both Bede and the Whitby monk on the British tradition of the baptism of Edwin by Rhun, son of Urien, which I am about to discuss, is in Colgrave’s view a final argument that neither of them knew it. And he similarly emphasises the silence of both regarding the Welsh tradition that Edwin was brought up at the court of Cadfan with Cadfan’s son Cadwallon. ‘One can hardly doubt that both of them are later Welsh inventions.’ I will consider separately these two Celtic traditions, one of which claims that Edwin’s childhood and early youth were spent as an exile in Wales, whereas a second claims that his baptism was performed by a prince of the North Britons. As our fullest source for the Welsh tradition has its origin in Lindsey, and since we are at the moment discussing tradition in Lindsey, it will be convenient to consider next very briefly this Lindsey tradi­ tion of Edwin’s youth. In considering the reign of Edwin we cannot fail to be struck by 14.7

i o -2

THE CONVERSION OF N O R T H U M B R IA

the silence of both the Cambrian and the Irish annals, not only about his fosterage at Cadfan’s court, but also about his later cam­ paigns in Wales, of which Bede gives us such a striking account. The absence of testimony in either Welsh or Irish annals to Edwin’s presence in Wales at any point is all the more surprising in view of the importance which was evidently attached to him. As mentioned above (p. 139 n. 3), the Irish annals of both Ulster and Tigernaeh record his death. The Lindsey story which connects Edwin’s childhood and youth with Wales comes to us directly from a very late source ; but it was evidently widespread, and has found its way, as Sir John Rhys1 and Sir John Edward Lloyd2 pointed out, into Welsh medieval bardic records. Lloyd cites the triad ‘Three oppressors of Mon, nurtured within the Island*. Mon is, of course, Anglesey, and the triad con­ tains a double allusion to Edwin’s early youth at the court of Aberffraw on the west coast of the island, and to the later attack on the Mevanian Islands which Bede ascribes to him.3 This triad, however, is not among the earliest group contained in the Peniarth MSS. and is probably of relatively late date. A fuller and more important tradition of Edwin’s exile in Wales occurs in the Life of S t Oswald,4 written in 1165, as we learn from a reference in chap. 55 of the work itself.5 The Oswald in question is the king who reigned in Northumbria (1642) before his brother Oswiu (1671) ; but the Life tells us something also about Edwin and his residence in Wales, though it places it erroneously after the battle of Chester, and reports details of the relations of Gwynedd and Northumbria of which we have no hint from Bede.6 The work is thought to have been composed by Reginald of Durham, a friend of Ailred of Rievaulx, and the author also of the Life of S t GodriCy and of a Libellas on St Cuthbert.7 1 Celtic Britain (London, 1904), p. 129. * History of Wales (3rd ed., new impression, London, 1954), 11,183. In Lloyd’s opinion (op. cit. n. 90) Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘account of the nurture of Edwin and Cad wallon together no doubt rests on this tradition’. 3 H.E. 11, 5, 9. 4 The complete work has never been published. T he text of the more import­ ant parts is printed as appendix in in vol. I of Symeon of Durham, Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, ed. by T . Arnold in the Rolls Series, 1882. 6 Cf. Arnold, Vita Osw. p. 382. The date in the introduction, p. xli is an error. 6 Clearly, however, since Ælle died in 588, when Edwin was three years old, his nutritus Cadfan cannot have brought him up with Cadwallon (+634) after the Battle of Chester, if we accept the date of this battle as recorded in the Annals and Bede. 7 Cf. Arnold, loc. cit. 14 8

TH E CONV ERSIO N OF N O RT H U M B R IA

Among other interesting information about the early North­ umbrian kings, the Life states (chaps. 9 and 27) that Ælle, the father of Edwin, had been slain by Æthelric,1 the father of Æthelfrith of Bernicia, and that Æthelric had forthwith annexed his kingdom, married his daughter, and driven Edwin into pro­ longed exile. Edwin’s age is not indicated, but Plummer notes that he was three years old at this time, having been born in 585,2 and he suggests that Edwin’s sojourn at the court of Cadfan, king of Gwynedd, vouched for by ‘Welsh tradition ’, was possibly the cause of the Battle of Chester.1*3 Reginald’s account passes straight from the arrival of St Augustine in ‘Anglia* to a statement that ‘Æthel­ frith, the father of Saint Oswald, conquered Brochfael at Chester where the monks of whom Bede wrote were slain’.4 Then Cadfan, ‘ruling on this side the Humber’, fostered Edwin, the sororius of St Oswald, with his own son Cadwallon.5 Then when both Edwin and Cadwallon were reigning King Edwin conquered Cadwallon and put him to flight into Armorica. The story goes on to relate that at length Cadwallon came back with large forces and first conquered Penda, king of the Mercians, and united him with him­ self, and that later Edwin and King Eanfrith, the elder brother of St Oswald who preceded him on the throne, and King Osric, nephew and successor of Edwin, were killed, and that Penda, king of the Mercians, slew St Oswald. Bede says nothing specific of Edwin’s exile in Celtic lands, though he represents him as having wandered widely as an exile, and he records, without accounting for the fact, that two sons were ‘born to him in exile of Quenburg, daughter of Cearl, king of the Mercians’.6 It will be noticed also that the nuances of this notice 1 Plummer notes that he has found no earlier authority for this statement (Baedae H.E. 11, 93). * Baedae H.E. n, loc. cit. See Bede, H.E. 11, 20. 3 Plummer, Baedae H .E . 11, 93. Plummer cites Lappenberg, Geschichte von England, 1, 144 (English translation by B. Thorpe, London, 1881), and Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 128. 4 Ethelfridus Brogmail apud Leicestriam vicit, ubi monachi de quibus sanctus Beda scribit occisi sunt. 6 Postea Cadwanus cis Humbram regnans Edwinum . . . nutrivit cum Cadwallone filio suo. Reginald adds (erroneously) Predictus itaque Cedwalla rex paganus fuit. 4 H.E. 11, 14. Plummer points out {Baedae H.E. 11, 103) that this passage implies that Edwin during his exile had resided at the court of Mercia and further that Osfrith, a son by this marriage, can hardly have been bom before 612, which proves that Edwin’s Mercian sojourn must have preceded the battle of Chester, though it gives no indication in regard to his sojourn in Gwynedd. Plummer 14 9

THE CONVERSION

OF N O R T H U M B R IA

in the Life of S t Oswald regarding the Battle of Chester are not precisely the same as those of Bede,1 despite the author’s direct references to Bede, both here and later. Here, as in the Irish Annals which record the battle, no discredit is attached to anyone, least of all to Brochfael, who is spoken of as if he had been an honourable opponent of Æthelfrith. It is evident that the writer is familiar with Bede’s account, but that he is making use of additional infor­ mation, whether written or oral.2 Can any value be attached to Reginald’s late story? It has much in common with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s narrative of the same period in his Historia Regum? Geoffrey’s story is well known, and it is needless to relate it at length here. Among other items we may note, however, the rearing of Edwin and Cadwallon as fosterbrothers at Cadfan’s court; the placing of the Battle of Chester before Edwin’s sojourn with Cadfan; the implication that this battle was fought primarily between Æthelfrith and Brochfael; the statement that Cadwallon conquered Penda before making him his ally;4 the reference to Salomon, king of Brittany, and his court as a refuge for the fugitive British princes.6 On the other hand the dif­ ferences between the accounts of Reginald and Geoffrey are much wider than these points of agreement, and seem to me to preclude adds that Cearl of Mercia does not appear on the pedigrees. According to Florence of Worcester Quenburg was the daughter of Creoda, Penda’s grand­ father, which is chronologically very improbable. Henry of Huntingdon makes Cherlus the cousin and successor of Penda’s father. But if Cearl (? for Ceorl) is a proper name it is surely a strange one for the ruling king of an important dynasty. 1 On these differences see C. W. Jones, Saints’ Lives and Chronicles, p. 212 n. 14. 2 The word used of Cadfan’s protection of the young Edwin—mitrivit— suggests the terminology regularly used of this typically Celtic institution. T hus Gildas refers to the nutritus of the two young princes of Devon slain by Con­ stantine (De Excidio Britanniae, 11, 28). In Adamnân’s Life of S t Columba, ill, 3, the presbyter Cruithnechân is spoken of as beati pueri nutritor, while in the same Life (11, 33), the magus Broichân is referred to as the nutricius of King Brude of the Northern Piets; cf. further J. T . Fowler, Adamnani Vita S. Columbae (Oxford, 1894), p. 130 n. 3. 3 The texts of Geoffrey which I have used are those of A. Griscom, The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (London, 1929), which includes an English translation of the Welsh MS. no. lxi of Jesus College, Oxford, by R. E. Jones; and the Brut y Brenhinedd, ed. and transi, by J. J. Parry (Cambridge, Mass., 1937). 4 Plummer notes (op. cit. 11, 115) that in Bede’s own words (H.E. 11, 20) Penda is here also spoken of as merely Cadwallon’s assistant. 6 Geoffrey represents Edwin as accompanying Cadwallon to Brittany in youth ; but Reginald has nothing of this. 150

T H E C O N V E R S I O N OF N O R T H U M B R I A

the possibility that Reginald is indebted to Geoffrey, though the earliest edition of Geoffrey’s Historia is believed to have been pub­ lished in 1139. It would seem rather that both at a late date are drawing independently upon traditions which had much in com­ mon and which are not found in Bede. The tradition which lies behind the story as represented by Reginald and Geoffrey can hardly be pure invention. The corre­ spondences are too close, and the underlying implications are too consistent, while at the same time differing from the story as told by Bede, of which Reginald shows himself nevertheless well aware. This story as related by Geoffrey is by no means our only evidence that he knew of Welsh traditions which have not found their way into the accepted canon. At the same time he has everywhere intro­ duced so much deliberate fiction that it is perhaps needless for our present purpose to seek his more immediate source for his present tradition. From the element of pure fiction, however, Reginald appears to be exempt. In fact fiction, even if not independent of Geoffrey, would hardly have created a tradition so strangely consistent with our genuine records (for example, Bede, the Celtic annals, and epi­ graphy) as the picture reflected in these traditions. For here the prominence given to Cadfan, of whom Bede and the Annals are silent, not only helps to explain the grandiloquent inscription in Llangadwaladr church, near the capital residence of the royal family of Gwynedd at Aberffraw: Catamanus rex, sapientis[s]imus, opinatis[s]imus omnium regum,1 but it carries a generation further back the hostility which somewhat unaccountably in Bede’s narra­ tive breaks out between the two ‘foster-brothers’, Edwin and Cadwallon, and would certainly help to explain it. We may suggest therefore that if, as the Welsh tradition consistently avers, Cadfan (the Catamanus of the inscription) received and brought up Edwin in his exiled youth, the ruler of Gwynedd must have been already in touch with Deira—apparently in friendly touch. We may note here that there was a Celtic kingdom Elmet in South Yorkshire still apparently unconquered in Æthelfrith’s reign which was conquered by Edwin later. A friendly contact with Deira in Cadfan’s time would clearly imply a hostile one with Bernicia and with Æthelfrith. In that case we should expect Cadfan to have been in alliance 1 See V. E. Nash-Williams, Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff, 1950), pp. 55 f., and pi. vu, no. 13. I

5I

T H E C O N V E R S I O N OF N O R T H U M B R I A

with Powys at the Battle of Chester. In fact the death of his father Iago ap Beli is mentioned in the same Welsh annal as that of the battle itself, though without comment. Such a background would supply a rationale to the course of events narrated by Bede without in any way contradicting them. Bede’s account leaves much un­ explained, and, as we have seen, is itself based on tradition which may well have been, indeed must in any case have been, incomplete. This tradition introduces Cadfan into Anglian politics a generation earlier than Cadwallon,1 but supporting Deira against Bernicia. Such early prestige of Cadfan, and the rising fame of Edwin later, would help to stimulate the rivalry between the royal houses of Gwynedd and Deira in the seventh century. The political situation implied by this Welsh tradition can hardly be the creation of fiction alone. It would, moreover, help to account for Edwin’s first marriage in exile to Quenburg, daughter of Cearl, king of the Mercians, who was the mother of his two sons Osfrith and Eadfrith (on the subject of Cearl, cf. p. 149 above). If his sojourn in Gwynedd really took place it may have been of some duration, and certainly would have preceded his sojourn at the court of Rædwald of East Anglia. How did Reginald obtain his tradition, and what is its value? In chap. 45 of his Life of S t Oswald he tells us that a certain monk, to whom he refers as ‘Brother P ’, had related to him miracles of St Oswald which he had seen with his own eyes, and the same monk had also vouched for records of others which he declared existed in some crude and mutilated fragments in the monastery of Bardney.2 Caution is needed in giving any credence to such references to lost written sources, for we know how widespread was this literary convention throughout the Middle Ages. Even if we suspend judgement on this matter, however, the reference to Bardney as the fountainhead of Reginald’s traditions is of the first importance for the story which he relates about Edwin. How does it come to be associated with Bardney? The monastery of Bardney in Lindsey was, in fact, in a particu1 Incidentally also of the same generation as Cynan, son of Brochfael of Powys, and father of Selyf, the king of Powys killed in the Battle of Chester. * In monasterio de Bardney informibus exarata lituris et rudibus mutilata scripturis anxius deploravit, quia sensum dictaminis barbariem reasonare discriminis penes eos astruxit. C. W. Jones (Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England, p. 212 n. 14), suggests that this ‘ancient book may have been Bede’s source ’ ; but for various reasons this seems unlikely. 152

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larly favourable position for acquiring reliable information about Cadwallon, and the political relations between Gwynedd, Mercia and Northumbria in the seventh century. It was a double monastery1 and had a distinguished origin. Bede calls it *a noble monastery’ (monasterium nobile)y and tells us that it was greatly loved, favoured and enriched by the Mercian queen Osthryth, daughter of the Northumbrian king Oswiu, and by her husband Æthelred, son of Penda (quod eadem regina cum viro suo Aedilredo multum diligebat, venerabatur, excolebat). Thirty years after the battle of Maserfelth in which Osthryth’s uncle St Oswald was killed, the queen Osthryth caused his bones to be brought to the abbey and interred in the church.2 She herself was murdered by the Mercians in Ô97-3 In 704 her husband Æthelred, Penda’s son, retired into the monastery4 and afterwards became its abbot,5 end­ ing his life and being buried there.6 Bede tells us, in a very interesting passage (cf. p. 143 above), that on one occasion after the bones of St Oswald had been enshrined at Bardney, when the queen was making some stay (moraretur) in the monastery, she was visited by the ‘venerable abbess Ethelhild’, the sister of Aldwine, abbot of the monastery of Partney due east of Bardney.7 It is obvious that the abbey of Bardney (indeed Partney also) was in a singularly favoured position to possess authentic traditions, transmitted through Mercia, of Edwin’s exile in Gwynedd, had such taken place. Queen Osthryth, Oswiu’s daughter, could not have failed to be interested in her family history; and how deeply 1 H.E. in, 11. Florence of Worcester says that Æ thelred had himself built this monastery. * I.e. the trunk. The head and arms had been removed by Penda (H.E. in, 12), but were rescued next year and taken to Northumbria. The hands were kept in a silver box, at St Peter’s Church on the summit of the hill of Bamburgh (H.E. in, 6), Symeon of Dur. Hist. Reg. 48. The head was interred by Aidan at Lindisfame and removed in 875 in the coffin of St Cuthbert. William of Malmesbury (De Gestis Pontificum, h i , 134) says that when the tomb of Cuthbert was opened in Durham cathedral ‘the head of Oswald was found between his arm s’. See Reginald’s minute description of the head, as it was preserved in a purple bag, ‘beside the head of C uthbert’ (chap. 51). He was told that for a time it had been taken away to Bamburgh, and thence, by a stratagem, brought back to Lindisfame. 8 H.E. v, 24. Chronological Summary. 4 Ibid. 6 H.E. v,19. 4 ‘De Regibus M erciorum ’, Libellus Incerti Auct. (ed. Raine, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, 1 (Surtees Soc., 1868), 205. 7 Bede, H.E. hi, 11. 153

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she identified herself with the noble Christian traditions of her father and uncle is made clear by her singular munificence to the abbey of Bardney and by her determination that it should receive the bones of her sainted uncle Oswald. Her husband Æthelred, son of Penda, who, as already stated above, entered this monastery in 704 and became its abbot, must have been in direct touch in early life with those who had known Cadwallon, prince of Gwynedd and Penda’s great ally, if not his overlord. It looks very much as though the account of Edwin’s fosterage at the court of Gwynedd, and the early companionship of Edwin and Cadwallon, had reached Bardney through Osthryth, Oswiu's daughter, and her husband Æthelred of Mercia, who had learnt it, perhaps from Penda, for Cadwallon had been killed at a date which is believed to have been 634. It also seems likely that Reginald of Durham had obtained his information from a monk of Bardney; but whether we ought to give credence to the scrappy written sources which he claims to have found there is another matter.1 It may be objected that Æthelred as abbot of Bardney since 704 might be expected to be outside the current of Mercian tradition. Against this, however, we must set the fact that before his clericatus he had been the reigning king of Mercia since 675, in succession to his brother Wulfhere, and he seems to have been ruling over terri­ tory which extended as far as the British kingdoms of Powys and Gwynedd on the west, and southwards to the country bordering on the middle and upper Thames.12 In 678 he had recovered the pro­ vince of Lindsey for Mercia from Northumbria,3*to which it had been annexed by Ecgfrith in 674.* Moreover, we have it on the authority of Eddius’s Life of St Wilfrid that as abbot of Bardney he continued to take, not only an active interest, but to some degree an influential part in Mercian politics.5 These considerations would seem to lend some weight to traditions from Bardney relating to the early fosterage of Edwin with Cadwallon in childhood, despite the late date of our record. Bede, we know (cf. p. 142 above), obtained oral traditions of St Paulinus from an old man who had been bap1 C. W. Jones thinks it possible that Bede obtained from them material for his account (H .E . hi, 2) of the annual pilgrimage of the monks of Hagustald (Hexham) to Hefenfelth, the scene of the battle in which Oswald met his death (Saints' Lives and Chronicles, p. 212 n. 14). 2 Stenton, op. cit. p. 201. 3 Ibid. p. 85. 4 H.E. iv, 12. 6 Ed. cit. chap, lviii (cf. p. 146 above). 154

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tised by St Paulinus in the presence of King Edwin, in a mass baptism in the river Trent.1 We know that he also obtained oral traditions about the circumstances of the reception of St Oswald’s body into Bardney abbey,12 and also the close correspondence between the two abbeys of Bardney and Partney. At some date early in the Middle Ages Partney became a cell of Bardney,3 and from what Bede says it is clear that the two monasteries were in close touch with one another already in the early eighth century at latest (cf. p. 143 above). Although the question of Bede’s account of the Battle of Chester does not directly affect our present con­ siderations, we may ask if it is possible that Bede obtained his account of the battle from the same source. He gives no indication of his source or sources, but as he tells the story, in continuation of St Augustine’s mission to the unco-operative British bishops, he probably derived it in the form of an ecclesiastical written saga from a Mercian monastery hostile to the Welsh Church and with strong pro-Roman sympathies—a source, moreover, which pre­ served contemporary forms of the Welsh names Dinoot4 and Brocmaily and some precise details of Welsh Border affairs, both political and monastic. It would have been in no way surprising if, during an early exile in Celtic lands (Wales), Edwin should have been baptised as a Christian. Other Northumbrian kings would seem to have been baptised during exile in Celtic and Pictish lands in the seventh century. Cadfan’s court is known to have been a highly cultivated one, and his whole family were zealous Christians,56from his greatgreat-grandfather Maelgwn to his father Iago ap Beli, whose death is entered in the Cambrian annals with the battle of Chester in terms suggestive of an ecclesiastic. The inscription to Cadfan him­ self, built into the Church of Llangadwaladr two miles from the royal seat at Aberffraw in Anglesey, makes it clear that Cadfan was 1 Baedae H.E. 11, 16. 2 Ibid, hi, 11. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 909, records the transference of Oswald’s body from Bardney to Mercia proper. Florence of Worcester records its reinterment at Gloucester in 910. Reginald reports (chap. 43) that only three small bones then remained at Bardney. 3 A hospital apparently in the twelfth century, a cell by 1318. 4 On the value of this form as evidence for Bede’s source see K. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, p. 41. 6 See further the Life of S t Beuno, transi, with full and valuable notes by A. W. Wade-Evans, ‘Beuno Sant*, Archaeologia Cambrensis, lxxxv ( i 93°)> 315 ff-

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an educated man and a Christian,1 and the Church in which the inscription now stands takes its name from his grandson Cadwaladr, who seems to have been the founder. It is impossible to believe that if Edwin was indeed ‘fostered* by Cadfan with his son Cadwallon he would have been brought up a heathen. The source from which we have derived our Lindsey traditions of Edwin’s youth is of course a very late one, and in fact it says nothing about his conversion. We have, however, yet another group of Celtic traditions relating specifically to Edwin’s baptism, which come from quite a different quarter and which are, moreover, at variance with those of Bede, and in this case make no reference to Bede. These Celtic traditions have come to us from British (Welsh) sources though written wholly in Latin, and in these sources the conversion of Edwin is attributed, not to Paulinus or any Roman emissary, but to a Briton. The first is contained in the Historia Brittonum, a work which is commonly attributed to an unknown writer who refers to himself in the preface attached to one group of MSS.2 as Nennius. The work itself appears to have been compiled from various sources in the early ninth century. Here in the final section of the two best groups of MSS. of the work, the section commonly referred to as the ‘Northern History and the Anglian Genealogies’, we have a brief account of Edwin (Edguin). Edwin son of Alii reigned seventeen years, and he took Elmet and drove out Certic, the king of that region. Eanfled, his daughter, on the 12th day after Pentecost, received baptism, and all her people with her, both men and women. And Edwin in the following Easter received baptism, and 12,000 persons were baptised with him. If anyone should wish to know who baptised them, Rum map Urbgen3 baptised them and for forty days ceased not to baptise, etc.4

Again in the Annales Cambriae, s.a. 626, we read in the oldest and best text: ‘Edwin is baptised. And Rhun son of Urien baptised him.’ Some clumsy later redactor of Nennius has been aware of the contrary tradition of Bede and has sought to reconcile them by the 1 The adjective sapientissimus here applied to him means simply, in the Latin of the period, a ‘highly learned m an’, and presumably therefore an ecclesiastic. Cf. the epithet attached to Gildas (sapiens), which carried with it no suggestion of natural wisdom, but implies clerical status. Cf. Irish ecnaide. 2 See Chadwick, etc., Studies in the Early British Church, p. 39. 8 I.e. Rhun map Urien. 4 For variants see F. Lot, Nennius et VHistoria Brittonum (Paris, 1934), p. 203 n. 3. 15 6

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inept statement that Rhun map Urien was identical with Paulinus, bishop of York. We can ignore this. The British tradition is curious however, and merits careful con­ sideration. The two accounts, that of the Historia Brittonum and the AnnaleSy are doubtless not independent, but are derived independently from a common source. The question is, how did the tradition arise? What is the date of the original tradition? What is its value? During the period which we are studying, the sixth and early seventh centuries, an identical language, British, which had already developed into Welsh, was spoken over the whole of Scotland south of the Antonine Wall (Forth-Clyde) and throughout Cumbria and Wales and south-western England. Culturally and intellec­ tually the Britons of southern Scotland were relatively highly developed. We have no contemporary written records from them but we know from lapidary inscriptions that they were Christians, though we know little about their Church from early sources. Oral tradition was highly cultivated by the court bards and transmitted with the jealous care of professional skill from generation to genera­ tion. Town life as we understand it was unknown. But various local princes and their courts existed throughout the area and in close relationship with one another, sometimes forming loose con­ federations, sometimes engaging in mutual hostilities. We know a good deal about the little courts and kingdoms of Southern Scotland and Cumbria in the sixth and seventh centuries : and we know still more about the princes themselves—enough to compile a Who's Who of the North British Heroic Age. We know more about them than about the Britons of Wales. But strangely enough all the records we possess, in Welsh poetry, in Latin annals, and in the Historia Brittonumy and genealogies, have been preserved, not in the north, but in Wales itself. In early medieval records the Welsh refer to these North Britons familiarly as the Gwyr y Gogledd, the ‘Men of the N orth’. In view of the lack of political development, the warlike charac­ ter represented in their records, the prominence of great heroes and the general personal character of our narrative, as well as the preservation in oral tradition of a wealth of panegyric and elegiac poetry, we may regard the sixth and early seventh centuries as the North British Heroic Age. The ‘Men of the N orth’ formed a strong resistance movement 15 7

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against the northward and westward encroachments of the Bernician Angles. It was not merely a defensive movement or a rearguard action. In the sixth century the British clearly engaged in aggressive warfare. In four texts of the Historia Brittonum, which include (chap. 65) the (earlier) eighth-century ‘tract* already referred to as the (lost) Northern History, which had perhaps already incor­ porated a brief collection of seventh-century annals, composed by a Briton of the North, we read of five Anglian kings and of strenuous fighting between them and the British chieftains. The British leader was called Urien, though three others are named, including Rhydderch (of Dumbarton), Morcant (Urien*s enemy) and a certain Gwallawg. The incident must have taken place in the late sixth century. Urien is said to be the greatest war leader whom the Britons had, and he besieged the Angles for three days and nights in the island of Lindisfarne, which was virtually the Anglian base, only five miles from Bamburgh, which Bede refers to as their ‘royal city*. Both the Latin sources and the Welsh poems give pride of place to Urien, and it is inevitable that he should have had enemies. The Historia Brittonum says that he was slain (jugulatus) at the instance of Morcant pro invidia (‘out of envy*); but more than one version of his death seems to have been current. His death is believed to have taken place no later than 592, and perhaps considerably earlier.1 He must have been famous in the sagas of the North, for we hear much of his sons, as well as the statement in the Historia Brittonum that one son, Rhun, baptised King Edwin. Nennius tells us that King Oswiu married Riemmelth (Rægnmæld in the Durham Liber Vitae)y a granddaughter of Rhun, who is probably Urien’s son. If so Urien*s family was of sufficiently high status and prestige to marry into the Northumbrian royal- house. Both Urien and another son Owen are great heroes of the finest early Welsh poems. Indeed, in the later Welsh romances Owen became even more famous than his father, for he is the hero celebrated in the Lady of the Fountain and the Dream of Rhonabwy, both of which became attached to King Arthur at a later date (cf. p. 328 below). Moreover, in the anonymous twelfth-century Life of St Kentigern —surely a romantic ecclesiastical saga if ever there was one—Owen is the lover of Thaney, daughter of the king of Lothian, and becomes the father of St Kentigern. Poetry, romance, saint’s life— Owen is a brilliant figure in them all. 1 See K. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, p. 707.

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Where was the eyrie of these eagles of the North—Urien and his sons Owen and Rhun? Urien is always referred to as ‘Urien of Rheged*, and there are grounds for believing that this was a wide kingdom embracing all the lands round the Solway Firth, prob­ ably centring on Carlisle. Sir J. Morris Jones and Sir I. Williams1 are surely right in the view that Merin Rheged is the British name of the Solway Firth, and that Carlisle at its heart was U rie ls capital. Where else in the Solway area could it have been?2 Before the Anglian conquest of Cumbria and southern Scotland there must have been a good deal of precise information available about the ‘Men of the North*. Thirteen of their princely gene­ alogies have been preserved in MS. Harleian 3859 written c. 1100. These show that all the heroes seem to have lived about the same time, towards the close of the sixth century, and the British were then still in possession of the greater part of the North. Not more than one-third of the north of England was in English hands ; but all these princes disappear from history almost simultaneously, whether conquered or assimilated. After the early part of the seventh century British rule vanished in much of the area, and with it, as a natural consequence, the dynasties, place-names, records of the British Church and all the literature. Soon after this date our references to them cease in both the Annales Cambriae and in Nennius. The latest reference in the Annales Cambriae to the ‘Men of the North* is to the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria by Rhun, son of Urien, entered in the annals s.a. 626; and in the Historia Brittonum Nennius records (chap. 57) the marriage of the Northumbrian King Oswiu to Riemmelth, granddaughter of Rhun, who may be Urien*s son (cf. p. 158 above). The Saxon conquest accounts for the disappearance of early British literature in the north. It does not account for the survival 1 Book of Taliesin, ‘T ra merin Reget* (‘ Beyond the sea of Rheged*). Cf. ‘T ra merin Iodeo’, Gododdin, 1209 (i.e. the Firth of Forth) (Sir Ifor Williams, Canu Taliesin (Cardiff, i960), p. xxvii. Cf. Idem, Wales and the Northf pp. 83 ff.). 8 A possible source of the continuing importance of Carlisle since Roman times may have lain in the silver and lead mines on Alston Moor in south-east Cumber­ land and contiguous to Northumberland, Durham and Westmorland, which were certainly worked under military supervision as late as the third century a.d ., and twelfth-century records make it clear that the mines were known and worked before that date. See Ian Richmond, Roman Britain (Penguin, 1955), pp. 153 f. ; and cf. the article by J. Walton, ‘The Medieval Mines of Alston’, in Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, n.s. xlv (1946), 22 ff.

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of the entire body of such northern literature in Wales. On textual grounds we believe that the oral poetical literature was carried into Wales from the northern courts by professional bards and recorded there in the ninth century. We have reason to believe that certain Latin prose records were made earlier in written form somewhere in the north, some of them in the form of brief notes or annals, probably early in the seventh century, and that they were included in the eighth century in the British (Latin) historical narrative— the ‘Northern History* incorporated in Nennius’s History of the Britons. These early seventh-century annals, if such there were, can only have been written down in a centre of learning, which means an ecclesiastical centre; and this centre must have been in the north because all that has survived from these early annals of the seventh century relates to the north in the sixth and seventh centuries, and is wholly northern in its interests and sympathies, and much of it is not known elsewhere. Therefore, although these northern notes or annals have not survived as an independent text, they once had an independent existence as a text in their own right, written in some cultural centre, some ecclesiastical centre in the north. We may accordingly refer to them as ‘the lost northern annals’ as distinct from the later ‘lost Northern History’, the latter largely concerned with matters relating to the history of North­ umbria, and incorporated by Nennius in his Historia Brittonum. A scriptorium of the early seventh century would most probably be a monastic centre of the type known in the Celtic Church as a clas—a monastic community of early Celtic type, of which the members were married and lived with their families. Reasons into which I cannot enter here incline one to suspect that our scripto­ rium was probably at Carlisle, and that the annals or notes were first kept there by a Celtic c/as, and incorporated later into the ‘Northern History ’ and subsequently into the Annales Cambriae, and eventu­ ally into the northern portion of the History of the Britons used by Nennius—in both cases perhaps through an intermediary stage elsewhere, perhaps in Powys. It should be stressed, however, that we have no precise indications as to the locale of our northern scriptorium. It might have been at Whithorn or Hoddom. It should be borne in mind that the scriptorium of the original (lost) northern notes or annals was not necessarily the same as that of the original (lost) ‘Northern History’. Some close relationship between the two would seem natural, however, and I would suggest that a later 160

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parallel may be the ancient School of Learning at Llanbadarn Vawr on the coast of Cardiganshire, where the writing of the earliest Welsh chronicle undoubtedly began under the das of the learned family to which belonged Bishop Sulien of St David’s. Then, with the foundation of the Benedictine abbey of Strata Florida a few miles away, the chronicle was transferred and con­ tinued there. The lost northern annals referred to above contain our most important specific information about the north, including details of the family of Urien, on whom they focus a special interest. This special interest in Urien’s family, and the stress laid on the impor­ tant part played by Urien, ‘the greatest war-chief of the north’, and on the treachery of his death (at variance with the poems), suggest that the records may have been made, not only in the actual terri­ tory of the ‘Men of the North’, and of course at an ecclesiastical centre, but at the seat of their great prince, probably by his own family, perhaps his sons, of whom one or perhaps two were apparently in Holy Orders. The records suggest this but of course they do not prove it. We must look into it further. We have seen that Urien’s son Owen figures in later Welsh medieval romances as a great secular hero. In contrast to these secular traditions, however, we have ecclesiastical traditions about him from the north. The twelfth-century anonymous Life of S t Kentigern (f6i2) represents the saint as the son of a daughter of the king of Lothian and of Owen ap Urien.1 He is described as ‘a most graceful young man, sprung from the most ancient stock of the Britons’ and as famous ‘among the tales of entertainers’ (in gestis histrionum)} Kentigern is the chief saint of the Britons of Southern Scotland and the ‘Men of the North’, and the patron saint of Glasgow cathedral. His connection with St Asaph in North Wales is late and spurious. This traditional link of the story of Kentigern with the family of Urien is therefore of some interest. In fact tradition associates the two chief saints of the early British Church with sons of Urien. The chief saint in fifth-century British 1 In certain genealogies of the saints Kentigern is sometimes the son, some­ times the grandson of Owen, but in later Scottish record Owen is his father. 2 T he meaning is probably sagas or oral stories of Strathclyde heroes. Cf. K. Jackson, ‘T he Sources for the Life of St Kentigern’, in Studies in the Early British Churchy by K. Hughes, C. Brooke, K. Jackson and myself (Cambridge, 1958), p. 283. 11

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tradition, and especially in Welsh tradition, is St Germanus. The Historia Brittonum, after relating at length the saint’s hostile encounters with the British chief Vortigern, concludes (chap. 47) : ‘This is the end of Vortigern as I have found it in the Book of St Germanus.’ The earliest (Chartres, c. 900?) text of the Historia Brittonum has an obscure heading which seems to say that filius Urbagen (‘The son of Urien’) was responsible for the version of the Book of S t Germanus which follows, and which is undoubtedly the one referred to in chap. 47 of the Historia Brittonum. About this time (the early ninth century) a British scholar (who was also a monk and bishop) was declaring on oath to French ecclesiastics that a book on St Germanus was in existence in Britain in his own day.1 We have, then, several independent pieces of evidence that c. 800 an ecclesiastical saga on St Germanus existed in book form, and our earliest text of the Historia Brittonum ascribes it to a son of Urien. The author of this text must have been in Holy Orders and the book itself written in a monastic scriptorium. It may have been Rhun, or it may have been another son of Urien, but it is clear that two or perhaps three sons of Urien were important in the ecclesiastical traditions of the British Church in the early seventh century, that at least one, perhaps two, were educated men in Holy Orders. The tradition that at least one of Urien’s sons was a literary man in Holy Orders may help to account for the fact that we know more about Urien’s family and his highly emphasised prestige than about other Men of the North. Nennius probably had knowledge of at least four generations of them. Moreover, the prominent part which is assigned to Urien himself, in the ‘Saxon genealogies’, in notes which seem to be derived from the seventh-century lost Northern written annals, is probably due to the literary influence of the same family. Who else in the north would have been so likely to have emphasised his prestige? And who else would have had such precise information about his prowess and deeds? We are not told the name of Urien’s clerical son who wrote of St Germanus ; but we have seen that one son of Urien was called Rhun, who is said to have baptised Edwin and who must therefore have been in Holy Orders. This is the most remarkable of all 1 Cf. N. K. Chadwick, Studies in the Early British Church (Cambridge, 1958), p. 112. I Ô2

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Urien’s sons. He may be the author of the Book of St Germanus, but not necessarily so. For what our traditions are worth, however, they suggest that two, perhaps three, sons of Urien were prominent in the ecclesiastical traditions of the North British Church, and that at least one, perhaps two, were in Orders, and that one of these was an educated man, a hagiographer. Here then, in this family, tradition points to an early British ecclesiastical nucleus. If the statement that Rhun baptised Edwin is an original contemporary entry in the lost Northern notes or annals, it may even be as early as Rhun himself. The statement is contained in both Nennius and the Annales Cambriae. Both are doubtless derived from the same original source and constitute a forthright British claim to Edwin’s baptism by Rhun, son of Urien. This may, indeed, have been the original climax to which the original notes led, and a major motive for their compilation. The Annales Cambriae apparently ceased to make entries relating to the ‘Men of the North* after the death of Edwin in 632. Was Rhun himself responsible for the compilation of the original nucleus of the (lost) northern annals? This would almost seem to be suggested by the internal evidence of the annals themselves. We have, of course, to take into account the possibility that the record in question of Edwin’s baptism by Rhun is not an original contemporary entry but a later addition. In both Nennius, chap. 63, and the Annales Cambriae, s.a. 626, the statement that it was Rhun, son of Urien, who baptised Edwin, is entered as an indepen­ dent statement after the record of Edwin’s baptism, and has all the appearance of an addition. It is perhaps pressing Nennius’s idiom too closely to point out that the phrase ‘If anyone would wish to know’, etc., which introduces his statement that it was Rhun, son of Urien, who baptised Edwin, is used by him elsewhere (chaps. 10, 15) to introduce legendary, not to say highly speculative anti­ quarian matter. But whether as an original entry in the common source of Nennius and the lost northern notes, or whether as a later interpolation in this common source, the statement reads like a challenge, the challenge of the British Church to the Roman claim for the conversion of Northumbria. If the claim was a part of the earliest original lost record it would carry back the record of the claim for the conversion of Edwin by the British priest Rhun about a century earlier than the record of Bede’s claim for his conversion by Paulinus. It is a delicate matter, for the ecclesiastical politics of 163

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the sixth and seventh centuries have undoubtedly left a heavy mark on these records, Celtic and Saxon alike. Nennius notes in chap. 57, in the part of his History which incorporates the ‘Anglian Genealogies that King Oswiu, son of Æthelfrith, had two wives, of whom one was called Riemmelth, the daughter of Royth, son of Rhun; and the other Eanfled, the daughter of Edwin, son of Ælla; but Bede makes no mention of the British wife, only of the daughter of Edwin. The difficulty of reconciling the contrary traditions of the allimportant matter of the nature of the Conversion of Northumbria is felt by all our historians. Any suggestion that Rhun and Paulinus may have acted jointly in the baptism is difficult to reconcile with the seriousness with which the controversy between the Celtic and the Roman Churches was waged, and neither Bede nor our Celtic sources give any hint of ecclesiastical co-operation. Indeed the contrary is stressed by Bede. We have also to take into account the possibility that if Edwin had passed a period of his youth in Celtic lands, as Welsh tradition avers, he would already have been bap­ tised in the British Church in his youth, and might have under­ gone ‘conditional baptism’ at the hands of Paulinus later. The hostility of the Roman to the Celtic Church practices and ritual would be likely to stiffen sharply in regard to the Northumbrian king. Paulinus, as Æthelberg’s chaplain, could not fail to put pressure on her husband the king to undergo ‘conditional* baptism by an orthodox Roman rite if he had formerly been baptised by the rite of the Celtic Church. We might perhaps better understand the unusual and somewhat inexplicable procrastination of Edwin in accepting baptism at the hands of Paulinus if he had already under­ gone the ceremony at the hands of a British bishop. Our difficult task is to try to estimate the relative value of con­ trary traditions on a point of historical fact. Our records, however, have come down to us as fragments of the literature of a con­ troversy which was raging between the old established Celtic Church and the new Anglo-Roman Church, both in Edwin’s day, when it was just beginning, and in Bede’s day, when it was almost worked out. These records are inspired by this great historical event—on the one hand Northumbria’s abandonment of the Irish form of Christianity into which she had been originally converted, with the prestige of Iona as her only authority; and on the other hand her adoption of the newly established Roman Order, and an 164

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Anglo-Roman authority, derived directly from Canterbury. Our records of this ecclesiastical revolution (for it was nothing less) were written primarily in relation to this controversy, and in the interests of the two Orders whose ideals on certain points were at variance. The present writer entertains not the slightest doubt that all our traditions of Edwin’s baptism are, without any exception, strongly coloured by this controversy. Early records of the Celtic side of the controversy are few. It cannot be said that the Celtic aspect is fully represented, nor is this to be looked for, given the outcome of the Council of Whitby and the political superiority of the English. Bede’s account, on the other hand, is detailed and circumstantial, though manifestly based on oral tradition. And it may well be, as our latest Anglo-Saxon historian suggests,1 that in telling a story which must have been dear to his heart Bede has exaggerated the importance of the Roman mission in Northumbria; yet, as the same historian reminds us, it would be a mistake to discredit Bede’s account of the early days of Christianity in Northumbria, simply because it is told in the form of popular traditions which contrast strongly with the documentary evidence from which Bede learnt of the conversion of Kent. It is an important element in our problem that Bede’s critical standard of oral tradition is a very high one ; that his account of Edwin’s con­ version by Paulinus is at least consistent with that of the Whitby monk; and that his circumstantial account of the foundation of the church of York, and also of Paulinus’s missionary activities from the royal manors at Yeavering (H.E. n, 15), of the Deirans near Catterick on the Swale (H.E. 11, 15), and in Lindsey on the Trent (H.E. 11, 16) are similarly derived from oral tradition. We have also to bear in mind that the papal letters to Edwin and Æthelberg, the texts of which Bede reproduces in extenso, would hardly have been inserted in his narrative if their fulfilment had not been implied. We know from Bede (H.E. 11,11) that before Edwin came to the throne he spent some time as a fugitive at the court of Rædwald, the king of East Anglia. It was during this period that he had his first vision, which Bede apparently, and the monk of Whitby certainly associated with St Paulinus. But it is manifest that Bede is not quite clear in his mind about the incident or the identity of the stranger of his vision. There are matters in the life of Edwin of which Bede does not claim to be fully informed, and of which he 1 P. H unter Blair, Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1956), p. 118. 165

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has left us only very summary statements. This is perhaps one instance. It is to be suspected in regard to both Edwin’s career and conversion and to the Battle of Chester that a perfect vortex of oral traditions was current, and was doubtless utilised to subserve the great religious controversy between the two Churches, which has been the occasion of their preservation. Evidently contrary claims were put forward in regard to the Conversion of Northumbria. Yet we have seen that the traditions in question are not isolated or chance survivals. They have been carefully cherished and developed in an area and an atmosphere strongly favourable to the Roman party and to the memory of Paulinus. It is not to be looked for that any counter-claims of the Celtic Church, their avowed and ultimately their defeated opponents, would be similarly registered and accredited. Bede’s informants told him the story which he has told us. It may not be the whole story, but it is the story cultivated in the eastern and most completely Anglicised and articulate part of the country. Perhaps it will be wiser to leave it at that for the present. As so often happens in studying the sources for Dark Age History, we find on a closer examination that they tell us more of the period and milieu in which they were compiled than of the period to which they relate. If in addition they also tell us something of the condi­ tions which governed the cultivation and the selection of the traditions, the pietas and the loyalties to kindred and to saints, Celtic and Anglian, which went to the building up of our story of the Early Church in the North, we shall have enriched our know­ ledge of the beginnings of English Christianity, even though we have not elucidated it. Perhaps, as Dr Sisam says of an analogous puzzle between contrary traditions, ‘it is enough to have stated the problem’.1 1 Studies in the History of Old English Literature, p. 61 n.

16 6

V The B attle o f Chester: A Study o f Sources BY N O R A K. C H A D W I C K

Bede is our only original authority for the first scene of the conflict between the British and the Roman Churches.1 He tells us of two conferences between the British bishops of the West and St Augus­ tine of Canterbury, and of their ultimate consequences in the fulfilment of St Augustine’s prophecy in the disastrous Battle of Chester. The first conference was arranged by King Æthelberht of Kent, St Augustine’s first convert, and took place at a date believed to have been c. 602 or 603 on the borders of the West Saxons and the Hwicce. The saint began by urging that the British bishops or learned men’ (episcopi sive doctores) should co-operate ‘with him* (secum) in Catholic unity (pace catholica) to convert the ‘heathen *(that is, the Saxons ; gentibus evangelizandi). His aim was to persuade the Britons to observe the revised dating of Easter adopted by the Roman Church and to conform in other matters of custom and ritual. The Britons were unconvinced by his arguments, but the saint brought them to confess the superiority of his case by a miracle—a method of argument for which Bede feels himself under the necessity of apologising Çjusta necessitate compulsas’)— but the Britons still insisted that they could not abandon their ancient ways without the consent of their people, and asked for a second and fuller conference. Bede, obviously reporting from hearsay (ut perhibent), goes on to tell us that a second synod was held, attended by seven British bishops, and a number of their most learned men ( V II Brittonum episcopi et plûtes mri doctissimi), especially from their greatest monastery, called in English Bancornaburgyover which at that time a certain abbot Dinoot is said to have presided. From the sequel related by Bede later it seems clear enough that this is Bangor is y Coed on the Dee, just to the east of Wat’s Dyke. Nevertheless, 1 Historia Ecclesiastica, n, 2. My references to Bede throughout are to Plummer’s edition, see p. 138 above. 167

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before attending the synod the British delegates went and took the advice of a certain ‘religious and wise man *(ad quendam virum sanc­ tum acprudentem) who had ‘adopted the life of an anchorite among them* (qui apud eos anachoreticam ducere vitam solebat)t and con­ sulted him as to whether they ought to abandon their own customs for those advocated by St Augustine. It was the anchorite's advice which guided their conduct and decision. It is to be remembered that Bede was writing in the period of the so-called Anchorite Reform of the Celtic Church, and the precedence accorded to the advice of the anchorite is an interesting detail of the ultimate Celtic source of which Bede is evidently making use. The advice itself is similarly characteristic of the traditional standards of the Celtic Church. If, said the anchorite, he is meek and lowly, and rises as you approach, he is a man of God and you may follow him. The sequel is well known. Augustine remained seated, and the Britons were angry, censuring him for pride, and persistently rejected his proposals, though he expressed himself ready to accept them into the Roman Church, and to allow them to retain their traditional customs if they would observe the Roman dating of Easter, and rite of baptism, and join ‘with him ' in preaching the word of God to the English (ut genii Anglorum una nobiscum verbum Domini praedicetis). The Britons refused all these things, and declined to accept Augustine as their archbishop. Augustine ‘threatened in prophecy* (minitans praedixisse) that if they would not enter into peace with the ‘brethren* (fratribus) they would encounter war from their enemies; and if they would not preach the ‘way of life' to the English nation ‘in unity with him ' (una nobiscum) they would suffer the vengeance of death at their hands. The third episode of Bede's narrative follows immediately in his account of the Battle of Chester. Bede relates the destruction of the monks of Bangor by King Æthelfrith of Northumbria, and reports it as a direct fulfilment of St Augustine's prophecy. Bede also adds that in the same encounter Æthelfrith made a great slaughter of that ‘perfidious race' (perfidagens), but he relates in detail only one incident. This is to the effect that a large number of monks from the neighbouring monastery of Bangor assembled with others in the neighbourhood of the battle to offer up their prayers under the protection of a certain Brocmail who was to defend them from their 16 8

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foes while they were intent on their prayers. Bede goes on to relate that at the first onset of the enemy Brocmail and his followers fled, leaving the monks unprotected to be slaughtered by Æthelfrith’s •army. As a result of this desertion about twelve hundred of those who came to pray were slaughtered, and only fifty escaped by flight. Bede gives no date. He merely says that it was multo tempore after Augustine’s death, which is believed to have taken place in 604 or 605 } It is clear that Bede is not transcribing Canterbury documents. He has related for us a well-rounded ecclesiastical saga in three parts, with all the characteristics of oral saga style, expanded, leisurely, detailed, circumstantial and dramatic. Place-names and proper names are recorded, and conversations reported verbatim. The proper names Brocmail, Bancornaburgy and Dinoot are all, in part at least, Celtic, and suggest that Bede’s material is ultimately derived from a source which was familiar with the British milieu of the story. Brocmail is a Welsh name (modern Brochfael). Bancornaburg is the Welsh place-name Bangor with the addition of the Anglo-Saxon burh. Dinoot is a particularly interesting form. Bede’s spelling with 00 suggests that at the time when the English learnt the name the vowel was a long one. By Bede’s time, however, it would have become a short vowel in Welsh. The fact that he writes it as a long vowel, therefore, suggests that he got the name with this early form from a written source of English origin which rendered the Welsh sound by ear almost contemporarily with the battle itself. I suggest that this written source of English origin was a written narrative or saga composed in a monastery, probably a Mercian monastery at no great distance from the Welsh Border. It is very unlikely that Bede got the name from a Welshman in his own day, and, as Professor Jackson observes,2 this form of the name as given by Bede is a valuable piece of evidence on the date of the source for the story of Augustine’s Oak. Bede’s interest in the battle is limited to its fulfilment of Augustine’s prophecy that the obdurate British ecclesiastics would suffer at the hands of their Saxon enemies. In accordance with this limited interest he does not mention the names of the combatants on the British side, but only relates the slaughter of the monks and others at their prayers, and the flight of their protector Brocmail at 1 See Plummer’s edition of Bede, H.E. 11, p. 77. 2 Language and History in Early Britaint p. 295. 16 9

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the outset. In other respects his account is curiously precise. He notes as points of especial interest the name and position of the monastery, its exceptional size and prestige, and some details of its organisation. The whole account makes it seem that he is selecting his material from a much larger body of information than he has been interested to deploy. The name of the monastery, and its proximity to the site of the battle near Chester, make it possible for us to identify the Bancornaburg of St Augustine’s second conference with the unhappy scene of the battle. A striking feature of Bede’s narrative throughout is the bias against the Britons—ostensibly against the Britons themselves, but to be explained more fairly as a bias against the British Church. The Britons are referred to as gens perfiday and their army as nefanda militia.1 Bede is apparently making use of a source which was written during the ‘Anchorite Movement’ of the Celtic Church, and this is faithfully reflected in the pre-eminence accorded to the anchorite above all the episcopi and viri doctissimi as adviser to the Bangor monks in a matter of the highest ecclesiastical importance, while at the same time his counsel is represented as the source of the ultimate disaster to the Britons. This bias against the Britons and the British Church comes out most strongly, as we shall see, in the account which Bede gives—doubtless from the same source— of the Battle of Chester and the cowardice of Brocmail, on which he places special emphasis, and for which, indeed, he is our only authority. Yet it is doubtful if Bede himself cherished any serious racial prejudice. It is true that the whole story of St Augustine’s interviews and their consequence is related with the consistent purpose of decrying the British Church, the Welsh Church most of all; but all this was probably reflected in his source, which he seems to have incorporated as he found it. This would appear to be implied by the fact that he makes no attempt to explain or excuse St Augustine’s remaining seated on the entry of the British bishops. We have to remember that Bede was writing in the heat of the controversy for the supremacy of the Roman over the Celtic Order in Britain—the Roman Church to which it may be said his whole life was a dedication. Of the rest of the Celtic churches in the British Isles, Ireland, and Scotland had already conformed ; but it 1 Plummer observes : ‘ It shows Bede’s national and political prejudices that he should apply such an epithet to men who were only defending their own country against attack’ (H .E . n, p. 78). 170

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was not till after Bede’s lifetime that Wales gave up her separatism in the points at issue, and Bede could not forgive them. A saga such as the one he records here of this struggle and its disastrous conclusion suggests that the point was hotly contested in the Border monasteries—in this case probably a western Mercian monastery—from which Bede seems to have obtained his basic material, as we shall see. It occurs to me as quite probable that Bede may have inter­ preted variant versions of a single interview between Augustine and the British bishops as separate interviews—a practice not uncommon in early written history based on oral tradition.1 In this case the first interview is perhaps derived ultimately from Aldhelm, who is known to have taken a special interest in the controversy, and who, Bede tells us elsewhere (H.E. v, 18), wrote an important treatise against the errors of the Britons in relation to the Easter Controversy, and by his zeal was the means of converting many to the imitas catholica. The source of the second interview is less obvious, but is probably to be looked for in some monastery near the Welsh Border, perhaps in Mercia, where local saga would pass through the crucible of Catholic persuasive narrative.2 As the story has come to us in the form presented by Bede, however, the two interviews are two well-developed episodes in an elaborate cautionary saga consisting of three parts. No saga of the battle comparable with that of Bede has survived from the Celtic countries. We have, on the other hand, a number of dry annals from both Wales and Ireland recording the same event, but having little in common with Bede’s account. It is clear, how­ ever, that information about the battle was widely current in some form throughout Celtic lands. First of all the Annales Cambriae, s.a. 613, enter ‘The Battle of Chester in which fell (cecidit) Selyf 1 I believe that this has happened in the case of the second visit of St Germanus to Britain. Cf. my study of this question in Poetry and Letters in Early Christian Gaul (London, 1955), pp. 256 f. * Reference may be made to the vision of the Mercian youth in the reign of Cenred, which Bede tells us (H.E. v, 13) was related to him by Pecthelm, Aldhelm’s former pupil. Cenred reigned in Mercia 704-9, and from this pas­ sage, and from Cenred’s resignation and pilgrimage to Rome and eventual entry into monastic life (H.E. v, 18), it is natural to suppose that ecclesiastical sagas of the kind discussed above would be cultivated in Mercia in his day. Cenred’s predecessor Æthelred is said to have become a monk after reigning for thirty years, and in 704 to have resigned his kingdom to Cenred. Mercia was exactly the area from which ecclesiastical saga at this time would be a likely source for Bede.

I7 I

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son of Cynan; and the death (dormitatio) of Iago (i.e. Jacob) son of Beli.’1 The Selim here mentioned can be identified with Selyf (Old Welsh Selim, Solomon), son of Cynan Garwyn (‘of the White Car*), son of Brochfael Ysgithrog (‘of the tusks*) of the ancient line of Powys, and so, as Sir John Edward Lloyd observed,2 the natural defender of the valley of the Dee. All these are well-known princes of Powys, whose names occur on the genealogy in MS. Harleian 3859, no. 22; and the MS. in Jesus College, Oxford, XX, no. 18; and elsewhere. Moreover, Selyf is mentioned both here in our annal, and also in the Irish annals, as the most notable among the slain. It will be noticed, however, that the Welsh annals make no mention of Brochfael, and this might be explained naturally enough if his behaviour is correctly reported by Bede ; but in fact no source except Bede makes any reference to Brochfael except the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle> which has derived its account from Bede. In any case the absence of any reference to the slaughter of the monks in the Welsh annal is remarkable. The inference that the Welsh annal has omitted mention of Brochfael on account of the discreditable conduct imputed to him by Bede is by no means a safe one. It is a striking fact, as Miller first pointed out,3 and Plummer has since emphasised,4 that the passage which reflects so severely on Brocmail in Bede’s original Latin text is deliberately omitted from the Anglo-Saxon version,5 and Plummer suggests that the omission in the present chapter may be due to the possible proximity to the Welsh Border of the monastery responsible for the Anglo-Saxon version of Bede, and that it may have had various reasons for wishing to conciliate Brochfael’s descendants. This, however, does not explain why the Irish notices of the battle also omit all mention of Brochfael, while noting the slaughter of the monks, as we shall see. It was suggested by Lloyd6 that the Brocfael of this battle can hardly have been Brochfael Ysgithrog, ruler of Powys, since his 1 The Latin is curious. It reads: Gueith Cair Legionis. Ibi cecidit Sell filii Cinan. Et Jacob fill Beli dor. (i.e. dormitatio) (MS. Harl. 3859). Bellum Kairlion in quo Seysil fill Chynan et Iago fil. Beli m oriuntur cum multis aliis (MS. B). Bellum Caer Legion, in quo Silla filius Kenan cecidit (MS. C). 2 History of Wales (London, 1954), I, 181. 8 T . Miller, The Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, part 1 (London, 1890), p. lviii. 4 Baedae H.E. 11, p. 78. 6 Plummer, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 11, 19. ® History of Wales, 1, 180. 172

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grandson was slain in the battle, and therefore Brochfael Ysgithrog would be too old for such an identification ; and Lloyd emphasised the fact that the name was a common one. This is certainly so, for the name occurs on several stone inscriptions. Against this, how­ ever, it must be said that the Brocmail of Bede must have been a person of outstanding importance since his name is the only one recorded by Bede in connection with the battle, and the difficulty of his age is not insuperable against the identification. Moreover, the fact that he was in charge of the monks, yet closely involved with the Welsh leaders, could be explained naturally enough if, like many Celtic princes of the period, he had undergone the clericatus, enter­ ing a monastery and leaving the throne to his heir, in this case his grandson Selyf, who is referred to as ‘king* in the Irish annals. It was by no means rare for a king who had entered a monastery to emerge at a later date and take part once more in warfare. Reference may be made to Selbach, king of Dalriada, who c. 722 is reported to have entered a monastery, but who, on the expulsion of his son Dungal from the throne of Dalriada c. 727, came out of his monastery and endeavoured to regain the throne.1 In 724 the Pictish king, Nechtan IV, became a cleric, but re-entered secular life later and endeavoured to regain his throne.2 Count Macliau of Vannes in eastern Brittany was tonsured and became a bishop; but later he left his monastery and returned to the world and his former wife, and succeeded to his brother’s inheritance and ruled from 560 to 577. Nothing would be more natural at this period than for Brocfael, who had been king of Powys and the natural defender of the Valley of the Dee, to take part in defence of the kingdom, —even if he had become a member of the monastery of Bangor— and to make the protection of the monks his especial assignment. This, however, is no more than a suggestion. The battle is widely recorded in the Irish annals. Even the Annals of Inisfallen, chiefly interested in Munster affairs, have an entry s.a. 614, though characteristically brief: ‘The battle of (Caer) Legeon between the Saxons and the Britons in which many holy men fell.’ No names are mentioned, but it is clear from the other annals that this is merely an abbreviated entry. The Annals of Ulster enter s.a. 612 (recté 613): ‘Bellum Caire 1 W. F. Skene, Celtic Scotland (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1886), 1, 285 f. a Ibid. pp. 284, 288. 173

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Legion ubi sancti occisi sunt, et cecidit Solon mac Conaen rex Erhandum .’ ‘The Battle of Caer-legion (i.e. Chester) in which holy men were slain, and Solon son of Conan, king of the Britons, fell.* The Annals of Tigernach, s.a. K . ui.1have the same entry in almost identical words,12 but with the additional information: ‘Et Cetula rex cecidit. Etalfraidh victor erat, qui post statim obiit.’ It will be noticed that this is the only passage in which Æthelfrith or Cetula is mentioned in connection with the battle in our Celtic sources ; and it will also be noticed that none of the Irish sources refers to Brocfael or to any discreditable action, though all note the massacre of the sancti. The indications point to a written source for the Celtic annals. First we may point to the name of the Welsh king in the Irish and Welsh texts.3 In Annales Cambriae the name occurs in the Harleian text as Sell filii Cinan, and in the two later variant texts as Seysilfilii Chynan (B) ; and Silla filius Kenan (C), both of which are doubtless corrupt forms. The form Solon in the Irish annals is doubtless an expansion of a written contraction Solo for Solomon, which in later Welsh became Selyfi There can be no doubt that the Irish entries are derived from a common original, those of the Annals of Ulster and of Tigernach immediately, and the Annals of Inisfalien as an abbreviated deriva­ tive from the same source.4 It seems likely that the Welsh entry comes ultimately from the same archetype; and there can be no doubt that this was a written one, and that it was fuller than any of our extracts. But while all the extracts differ to some extent in the details which they have derived from the common original, there is no contradiction or discrepancy among them. They overlap and supplement one another. I have shown elsewhere56that at least as far as a. 607 the Annales Cambriae, and the Annals of Ulster, 1 As Lloyd pointed out (op. cit. 1, p. 179 n. 68), if this indication of date is correct the date implied should be either 611 or 616. See Stokes, Revue celtique xvii, p. 119. 2 The only difference is that Tigernach uses cath, the common Irish word for ‘battle*, where the Annals of Ulster use bellum. 3 For some account of the manuscripts of the Annales Cambriae, see the preface to the edition by J. Williams ab Ithel (Rolls Series, London, i860). 4 The common source of the Annals of Ulster and of Tigernach was long ago recognised by E. MacNeill (Ériu, vu, 40), who ascribed it to an original (lost) Old Irish Chronicle. MacNeill, however, failed to recognise the relationship to the source of the Cambrian Annals. 6 Studies in the Early British Church (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 49 ff. !7 4

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Tigernach and Inisfalien have all incorporated material from a com­ mon source, which appears to be a lost set of annals, and that these annals were drawn up somewhere in North Britain in the seventh century. The five succeeding years are left blank in Annales Cambriae, then in 612 the deaths of Conthigirn and of Bishop Dibric are entered. The Battle of Chester is the next entry, and it would seem probable on the whole that this entry also is derived from the same lost Northern Annals—that, in fact, the common Northern source comes down at least as late as 613, and indeed even later, as I have shown elsewhere (cf. p. 177 below). This Northern source was compiled in a North British milieu. It is therefore easy to see why all our Irish annals and the Annales Cambriae are wholly free from the anti-British bias of Bede’s narrative. They are, in fact, a direct statement about a battle, and derived from a native British source, and probably written in a North British scriptorium before it was transformed to the AngloRoman pattern in the latter part of the seventh century. Before returning to a discussion of Bede’s narrative we may ask how it comes about that the Annals of Tigernach alone among our Celtic sources associate Æthelfrith and Cetula with the battle. These supplementary facts are not the only ones which are found in Tigernach but not in the Annals of Ulster, and which have therefore been added by Tigernach from some other source to the common body of the annals derived by the Annals of Ulster and Tigernach from the matter in the lost earlier chronicle which they both embody. MacNeill, who made a careful analysis of the Annals of Tigernach,* came to the conclusion that most of this supplementary matter in Tigernach consists of either quotations in extenso from Bede’s chronicle, or of obits of provincial kings; and he notes that the provincial regnal entries are usually inserted at the end of the annals in question. *The supplementary matter is thus mainly such as almost any scribe could have introduced.’2 Our references to Cetula and Æthelfrith both come at the conclu­ sion of the entry in Tigernachy and the reference to Æthelfrith might well have been added from Bede, though this would not account for Cetula. It will be obvious at a glance that in these dry annalistic entries we are in a totally different milieu from that of Bede’s narrative of the battle, with its picturesque personal details. Yet ultimately the 1 Op. cit.

2 Op. cit. p. 40. I 75

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two strands of tradition—the annals and Bede, which hardly over­ lap at all—must go back to the same source. It may be suggested that the ultimate source on which our knowledge of the battle is based is Welsh heroic elegiac poetry, probably a considerable body of elegiac poetry comparable with the elegiac poems in the Welsh corpus of poems known as the Gododdin. The Gododdin consists of an assemblage of elegiac poems composed on a great British defeat at the hands of the Saxon in the north of England apparently just about this time, and celebrates and mourns the dead British princes in elegy and panegyric. It is indeed on such foundations as this that early historical records are commonly founded. Abundant instances can be collected from the fragments of the earliest Irish poetry published with German translation by Kuno Meyer between 1913 and 1919.1 The Annals of Tigernach in particular make liberal use of such poetry as their sources, not infrequently quoting the actual Irish verses on which a given entry is based, and in this way these particular annals are especially instructive as an indication of the methods by which the early annalist went to work, though naturally, as an Irishman, he does not quote any poetical material in the case of the battle of Chester, which had already been recorded in annalistic form when it reached him. In Bede’s narrative the tradition has developed in a different milieu from that of the annals during the century which had inter­ vened between the battle and the formation of his History. He appears to be making use of ecclesiastical saga, in form an artificial elaborate narrative, cautionary in purpose, and developed some­ where in the interests of the reforming Roman party. I suggest he is using an ecclesiastical saga, composed in an English milieu in a Mercian monastery. We have seen that in addition to the divergence of the details of the battle and the personnel, the most notable dif­ ference throughout between the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon records of the battle is the bias, a bias marked not only in Bede’s disparaging references to the British, and to the selfish flight of Brocmaily but also in the high prestige of the anchorite, and the disastrous consequences of his advice. Bede’s disapprobation of the strongly contested opposition of the North Welsh Church to the unitas Catholica—not amicably settled, if we can trust the 1 ‘ Uber die älteste irische D ichtung’, Abhandlungen derPreussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1 (Berlin, 1913); 11 (1914); also ‘Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrik Irlands’ (ibid. 1919). 17 6

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Welsh annals, till 768—is reflected in this story as reported by Bede, and also in his account of the two previous conferences of St Augustine with the British bishops. We may take it that, what­ ever the original basis of our various accounts of the battle, it was as an element in this controversy that this saga was developed in some milieu hostile to the Welsh Church and the anchorite prestige, and that it was ultimately incorporated by Bede as suiting well with his own attitude of mind. An Anglo-Saxon monastery in Mercia, prob­ ably near the Welsh Border, would be a natural place to which to look for the composition of a monastic story like this about Bancornaburg, and the retribution which befell the obstinate adherents of the Celtic Church and of the so-called ‘Anchorite Movement*. I think we may presume also that it is Bede’s strong disapprobation of the ecclesiastical policy of the British Church, rather than racial animosity against the Welsh people on the part of Bede, that has allowed him to make use of a story couched in terms so hostile to the Welsh. We have no lack of ecclesiastical sagas, both incorporated in the works of Bede, and elsewhere. We have seen in the preceding study (pp. 145 ff.) that the province of Lindsey was a foyer of ecclesiasti­ cal sagas which seem to have been transmitted to both Bede and the anonymous Whitby biographer of Pope Gregory the Great, perhaps independently. Bede’s account of the Council of Whitby is certainly an elaborate form of ecclesiastical saga, while that of the poet Caedmon is yet another; and, pieced together from various places in the Ecclesiastical History, the story of St Colmân resolves itself, like Bede’s account of the Battle of Chester, into a tripartite saga—a literary form, it may be added, which was in favour as a form for ecclesiastical stories at least from the time of the composi­ tion of Adamnan’s Life of St Columba in the seventh century to that of the tripartite Life of St Patrick in the ninth. The date of the battle can be fixed with some confidence as 616. The date is given variously in the annals. Bede gives no indication of date except by stating that it was in Æthelfrith’s reign, and multo tempore after St Augustine’s death. The date given by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (605 E; 607 (a)) is an erroneous inference from Bede. Tigernach is the only other authority who mentions Æthelfrith in connection with the battle, and he tells us that he died immediately (statim) after the battle. He died in 616 or 617. Tigernach’s wording of his entry of the battle is identical with that of the 12

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Annals of Ulster, and both the Annals of Ulster and the Annales Cambriae have dates which suggest 613. All three come from a single source. Now this source antedates the events of the years immediately preceding by three years. For example, Tigernach and the Annals of Ulster date the death of St Columba and of Eogan mac Gabrâin in 594 (recté 595) ; and these two annalistic entries are virtually identical. Annales Cambriae enters Columba’s death 595 ; but William Reeves has shown that it took place1 in 597, and this date is universally accepted. Again, Tigernach and the Annals of Ulster date the Battle of Degsastan in 599 (recté 600).2 Bede (H.E. i, 34) with great precision dates it 603. To take a somewhat later example, the Annals of Ulster and Tigernach enter the death of Edwin s.a. 630; but the date is actually known to have been 633. It would seem, therefore, that the Battle of Chester has been pre­ dated in the basic annals by three years as 613, but should be 616 ;3 and, as Plummer points out,4 this would be consistent with Tigernach’s statement that Æthelfrith died immediately afterwards, that is, in 616 or 617 (Etalfrith victor erat qui post statim obit). Bede’s narrative has many curious features. Plummer long ago observed,5 in relation to his sudden introduction of a full-scale portrait of the heathen Northumbrian king Æthelfrith and his hos­ tile relations with the Britons and his narrative of the Battle of Daegsastan, which is added as an appendix to Book 1, that this fragment of Northumbrian history comes in rather awkwardly in the midst of the account of the conversion of south-east Britain, and that it would have come in ‘better’ before 11, 9 in connection with the mission to Northumbria. Plummer attributes its insertion here to a wish on Bede’s part to prepare the way for the connection of Æthelfrith with the fulfilment of Augustine’s prophecy. It is, in fact, a part of his cautionary story ; and we may perhaps attribute to this general purpose of emphasising the retribution on the recalci­ trant Britons his detailed portrait of their enemy Æthelfrith as the king who ravaged the Britons more cruelly than any other English leader, and one who overran more of their territory than any other English king or chief, exterminating or enslaving their people, extorting tribute, and annexing their lands for the English. It 1 The Life of S t Columba (Dublin, 1857), pp. 309 ff. 2 Though Tigernach gives the name of Æ thelfrith’s brother slain in the battle as Eanfrith, whereas Bede mentions only the death of his brother Æthelbald. 3 Baedae H.E. 11, 77; cf. 66. 4 Loc. cit. 6 Baedae H.E. 11, 64. 178

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should be noted, however, that he makes no direct reference here to any action on the part of Æthelfrith against the Britons of Wales or the Welsh Border; and before he continues his account of Æthelfrith he opens a new book (n, i) with a long account of Pope Gregory and his project, already before he became pope, of sending a mission to England. It is only in the following chapter that the story of Æthelfrith’s attack on Chester is introduced by the word interea, which has probably no strict chronological significance, but merely indicates Bede’s intention to continue his interrupted thread—that of the vengeance of God on the Britons—of which he or his source evidently regarded Æthelfrith as the instrument, in fulfilment of St Augustine’s prophecy. It is indeed remarkable that Æthelfrith should have found him­ self in a position to penetrate to this north-west corner of the country at so early a date. The kingdom of Elmet to the south­ west of his own territory of Bernicia was still in Celtic hands, a fact which had retarded the Anglian expansion westwards, and which must have made the route to Chester round the southern edge of the Pennines difficult if not impossible. The northern route from Cumbria and through Lancashire must have presented great diffi­ culties from the standpoint of the physical terrain, and even if some slight amount of Saxon settlement had taken place, the population was still undoubtedly almost entirely a Celtic one. This may well have been the most arduous journey undertaken by Æthelfrith in any of his campaigns. The prominence given to the battle in the Celtic annals and in Bede naturally raises the question as to wherein lay its importance, and what was the immediate result. Most historians have regarded it as an event of major importance for two reasons. F irst, it is looked upon as the event which brought the English for the first time to the Irish Sea; and second, it is considered to have finally separated the Britons of Wales from those of the North. It is doubtful, how­ ever, if the battle had either of these results. Bede himself does not indicate any immediate result of the battle, partly perhaps because of the death of Æthelfrith immediately after. Indeed, as Sir Frank Stenton points out,1 apart from the massacre, Bede has little to tell of the battle, and there is nothing to suggest that he regarded it as in any sense a turning-point in history. There do not seem to be serious grounds for supposing that the 1 Anglo-Saxon England (2nd ed., Oxford, 1950)» PP- 77 f179

12-2

THE BATTLE OF CHESTER

battle separated the Cumbrians and Strathclyde Britons, the ‘Men of the North* as they are called in Welsh records down to the ninth century, from the Welsh of Wales. It is indeed doubtful if they were actually separated at so early a date. Æthelfrith may have overrun Cumbria long before, and Anglian settlement would doubtless gradually follow; but Professor Jackson has produced an impressive series of arguments indicating that the Anglian settle­ ments west of the Pennines can hardly have taken place before the middle of the seventh century,1 and in that case the separation of the ‘Men of the North* from their southern neighbours can hardly be assumed to be a result of the Battle of Chester. It is very doubt­ ful if a solid block of Anglian settlements existed at this early date in Lancashire. Despite the fact that Æthelfrith*s reputation seems to rest less on his series of victorious wars in the North than on the Battle of Chester, it is not easy to see any general historical importance in the battle itself. The surrounding country was not added to Æthelfrith’s kingdom, and it was his successor Edwin whose expedition to the west expanded British territory to the Irish Sea, according to the story related by Bede of the conquest of the Mevanian Islands. For Bede, who is our only authority apart from Tigemach to mention Æthelfrith’s name in connection with the Battle of Chester, the only significance of the battle is that of pointing a moral. Æthelfrith could hardly have seriously expected that a victory at Chester would have separated the Britons of the North from those of Wales. The land route north through Lancashire, though not impossible, as we know from references in Welsh bardic poetry, was at all times a difficult one, unsuitable for movements of large bodies of men. The south was forest-clad; the centre boggy and waterlogged; the rivers ran from east to west, and were not easily forded in their lower courses. To the east the Pennines stretched from north to south, inconveniently steep to the west. The more natural route from Strathclyde or Cumbria would have been across Morecambe Bay, though this route would, of course, be conditional on the Isle of Man being in friendly hands. For some reason or other it seems to have been felt, first by Æthelfrith and later by Edwin, that the Anglians of Northumbria 1 Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953), pp. 214 fr. Cf. also P. H unter Blair, Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 48 f., and the references there cited. 180

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must obtain a foothold on the Irish Sea. It may possibly have been that in this way they hoped to cut off the sea route between the Britons of southern Scotland and those of Wales, though Æthelfrith’s earlier northern campaigns must have done something to reduce the danger from Cumbria. What Bede has to say about the subsequent campaign of Edwin in North Wales and the Mevanian Islands leads one to think that perhaps a more serious danger was apprehended from a different quarter. In the west the chief danger was, and had always undoubtedly been, from Ireland. Agricola had long ago realised this peril and had dreamed in vain of taking the offensive. Ammianus Marcellinus tells us of the share of the Irish in the conspiratio barbarica which overran England in 367-9. Moreover, an accumulation of evidence of admittedly very unequal value, but always consistent in its general significance, makes it clear that Irish penetration of our west coast had been going on throughout late Roman times from Cornwall to Argyll, and the Constantian fort at Lancaster, excavated by Professor Ian Richmond in 1953,1 of the same kind as the Saxon Shore forts in the east and south, must have been intended to function chiefly against raiders from Ireland. Similarly, the large fort at Elslack guards the Aire Gap in the Pennines, 4preventing*, as Richmond tells us,2 4penetration by raiders landing in the Ribble or Morecambe Bay*. The function of these and other forts was to prevent the disorganisation of the rearward economy of the northern frontier by sea-raiders, and at the same time to counter deep thrusts. Bede tells us later that Edwin 4brought under English rule the British Mevanian Islands which lie between Ireland and Britain* (cf. p. 139 below). Though the passage is not very lucid it seems fairly clear that Bede is here referring to the Islands of Anglesey and Man, and that he regarded this as an important addition to the Anglian possessions. It is, in fact, in his narrative, the crown of Edwin’s achievements, though he gives us no indication as to wherein, in his view, its exact importance lay. The Isle of Man is, of course, of the utmost strategic value in the power politics of the Irish Sea in this period, not only as controlling the communica­ tions between the ‘Men of the North* and the Welsh of North Wales, but also as a menace to the family and court of Cadwallon, 1 Hist. Soc. Lancs, and Cheshire, cv (1953), 8-10. 2 Roman and Native in North Britain (Edinburgh, 1958), PP- 113 fl8 l

THE BATTLE OF CHESTER

Edwin’s chief enemy. It is perhaps easier to understand Edwin’s long and arduous campaign westward to conquer an island in a sea removed from his own kingdom by the Pennines, Delamere Forest, and North Wales if he regarded it as a potential base for attack from Ireland. The same apprehension of an Irish penetration would help to account for Ecgfrith’s apparently motiveless attack on Ireland in 684, which Bede found it hard to justify. Æthelflæd’s fortresses in the neighbourhood of the mouth of the Mersey and the Dee later prove that she regarded Chester as the most vulner­ able spot for Irish penetration. In view of the lack of evidence for immediate important political results of the battle, one naturally wonders how it has come about that it has been so widely recorded in historical notices from Northumbria to the Shannon. How did it originally gain currency in written record? We have seen reason to believe that Bede obtained his material from Mercian written monastic saga, and this material gives evidence of detailed knowledge of the British personnel in the proper names Brocmail and Dinoot, names which he alone has placed on record. What are the oral materials likely to have formed the basis of this monastic saga with its knowledge of British names? And how are the names of the two Welsh kings, Selyf and Cetula, most likely to have been available to the annalists? The Welsh annals and Bede by no means exhaust our knowledge of Selyf and Brochfael. The Welsh Life of St Beunof written in 1306, and based, in its earlier part at least, on a lost Vita of earlier date, relates to Brochfael, king of Powys, and his sons and descen­ dants ; and here a close connection between Powys and Gwynedd is implicit in the story, for when the sons of Selyf treat the saint badly he makes his way to Arfon, where he is treated with respect by King Cadfan. Of Selyf ap Cynan Garwyn ap Brochfael we have many notices in Welsh literature. He was a well-known figure of heroic poetry and romance. The Battle of Chester records only his death, perhaps the last echo of a heroic elegy. His name is found on the royal genealogy of Powys (Harl. 3859, no. 22 ; and also Jesus College XX,1 1 The Welsh text of the Life of S t Beuno (Hystoria o Uuched Beuno) is edited by A. W. Wade-Evans in Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae (Cardiff, J944)> PP- 16 ff. ; also translated with full introductory m atter and notes by the same scholar in Archaeologia Cambrensis, lxxxv (1930), 315 ff. 182

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no. 18). It also occurs in the Welsh triads, and in a very interesting context in the medieval prose romance The Dream of Rhonabwy, and his name is frequently associated with members of the family of Urien of Rheged, especially with Urien’s son Owen. These references have, of course, no historical value in themselves, but they make it abundantly clear that Selyf was one of the early heroes famous in the traditions of the bards, and therefore that he must have been the subject of heroic elegy or panegyric. It would indeed be surprising if Selyf should not have been re­ membered in Welsh and Northern poetry, or if a body of elegiac poetry should not have developed in the valleys of the Severn and the Dee after the battle and the death of the king of Powys. The name of Selyf’'s own personal bard Arofan1 has come down to us in tradition, and in later times the great bard Cynddelw is proud to compare himself to him;2 but all Arofan’s poetry has perished, and was doubtless never written down. Selyf’s grandfather Brochfael was famous as a patron of the bards. Taliesin, the court poet of Urien of Rheged, and himself the traditional composer of his elegy, declares that Brochfael appreciated his poetical inspiration : *I sang in the meadows of the Severn before a famous prince, Brochfael of Powys, who loved my awen* (i.e. ‘poetical genius’). The Trawsganu for Cynan Garwyn, son of Brochfael and father of Selyf, is one of the historical poems believed by Sir Ifor Williams to be either a genuine poem by Taliesin, or to belong to the group dealing with sixth-century persons and events and containing a hard core of tradition.3 He is remembered in the Armes Prydein—if the identification is correct, as there seems little reason to doubt—as the great hero of the past, who will come again to lead his countrymen against the English; and here his paramount reputation in heroic tradition must rest on far more extensive poetical remains than the Trawsganu alone. It is abundantly evident that the great period of the British heroic exploits against the Saxon invaders—the sixth and early seventh centuries—was also the period when panegyric and elegiac poetry was highly cultivated from the Severn to the Solway, from Powys to Cumbria. Indeed at all times till the final union with England Powys was a great home of bardic poetry. It 1 See T . Parry, A History of Welsh Literaturei transi, from the Welsh by H. Idris Bell (Oxford, 1955), p. 10. 2 Gwyn Williams, A n Introduction to Welsh Poetry (London, 1953), pp. 6, 78. 3 Sir Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin, 1944)» P- 55'»cf. p. 51; Canu Taliesin (Cardiff, i960), p. 1. 183

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would be surprising, in view of this, if the Battle of Chester should not have become the centre of a body of elegiac poetry, lamenting and commemorating the dead, especially the dead kings, and the whole disastrous event. Had the poems of the Powys heroes been collected they would in all probability have resembled the corpus of poems of another great disaster, that of the Gododdin, which was roughly contemporary, and it is not easy to account for the fame attached to the Battle of Chester in both Northumbrian and Irish records in any other way, a fame which would suggest that it was the battle held in remembrance more than any other between the Britons and the Saxons before Brunanburh. The tragedy of the slaughtered monks, the dramatic nature of the event, and above all the disastrous death of the king of Powys, were the very stuff of heroic elegiac poetry, and a challenge to the court bards such as Arofan. The historical importance of a given battle, as viewed by the eyes of later generations, bore little or no relationship to the fame which it might acquire from the recitals of the bards. The great collection of poems known as the Gododdin consists largely of poems extolling the prowess of the heroes, and lamenting the deaths of the princes who had taken part in the Battle of Catraeth; but it commemorates a disaster unknown to history, of uncertain date, and relating to heroes wholly, or almost wholly, unidentified. In conclusion it must be emphasised that whatever Æthelfrith’s immediate object in making his attack, the Battle of Chester is no isolated event. It has its place in the series of the aggressive struggles of the Men of the North (Urien of Rheged, Rhydderch Hael, etc.) against the Angles of Northumbria, and it seems to be of the period of Catraeth. After Chester we have, so it seems, the invasion of North Wales by Edwin—if we can trust Bede’s account of the conquest of the Mevanian Islands, which Edwin is said (11, 9) to have brought under English rule, and which are said (11, 5) to lie between Britain and Ireland. It is generally read in connection with the entry in the Annales Cambriae, s.a. 629 (recté 632): ‘Obsessio Catguollaun régis in insula Glannauc’, ‘The siege of Cadwallon in Priestholm’. Then Cadwallon, the son of Cadfan (‘sapientis[s]imus opinatis[s]imus omnium regum’) was not pre­ pared to submit to the Northumbrian bretwalda, or more correctly Bretene Anwealdat ‘Sole ruler of the Britons’, and in 632 or 633, with his ally Penda, he swept across England, as Urien and his allies had done before him, and in 633 killed Edwin in his own 184

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territory. He was, so Bede informs us, ‘resolved to cut off all the race of the English within the borders of Britain*. We may compare what Bede has said of Æthelfrith: ‘He ravaged the Britons more cruelly than any other English leader and over­ ran more of their territory than any other English king or chief, exterminating or enslaving their people, extorting tribute and annexing their lands for the English.* It was a war of potential extermination. It looked as if Cadwallon would have his way and supplant Saxon rule in Northumbria; but again the pendulum swung, and about a year later Æthelfrith’s son, Edwin’s successor Oswald, overwhelmed Cadwallon’s forces and killed him. By yet another swing of the pendulum Penda, after repeatedly invading North­ umbria and even laying siege to Bamburgh, defeated and killed Oswald in 641. As in the case of Cadwallon Bede tells us (11, 24) that Penda ‘resolved to extirpate all this nation from the highest to the lowest*. By a final swing of the pendulum in 654 at the Battle of Winwæd the Northumbrian king Oswiu defeated Penda and his East Anglian and Welsh allies and cut off Penda’s head (hi , 24). But the Anglian power now began to penetrate westwards by intermarriage. It was not till the Armes Prydein, that great clarion call of perhaps the early ninth century, that the Britons planned another attack on the grand scale, and the last great battle in this heroic series was that at Brunanburh in 937. The Britons and the Saxons were fighting for great stakes. It was a war to the death. The Battle of Chester was not a minor engagement made famous by the slaughter of a number of ecclesi­ astics. It was a great incident, involving the deaths of two kings, in a great and prolonged struggle—nothing less than a struggle for Britain—who should be Bretene Anwealda, Saxon or Briton?1 Had the struggle already begun under King Cadfan, with his magnilo­ quent inscription, echoing, as the late Dr Nash-Williams reminds us, ‘the formal language of the Imperial Byzantine court*?2 His is the proudest of all the epigraphic inscriptions of early Wales. Was his perhaps the prestige which Cadwallon was concerned to uphold, against Edwin the Bretwalda, as ‘Cadfan, king, the most illustrious of all kings*? 1 Reference may perhaps be made here to my note ‘Bretwalda. Gwledig. V ortigem ’, The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xix (1961), pp. 225 ff. 2 Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff, 1950), p. 57. 185

VI Bede, S t Colmân and the Irish A bbey o f M ayo BY NORA K. C H A D W I C K

Among the references which Bede makes1 to the resort of students to Ireland from Britain for purposes of study and monastic dis­ cipline, the most interesting is his account of the foundation of the abbey of Mayo (Mag Eo), which is known to later records as Mag n-Éo na Saxan (or Saxonum), ‘Mayo of the Saxons*. His account is our earliest reference to the monastery, the foundation of which he attributes to Bishop Colmân of Lindisfarne. He devotes a whole chapter to the subject,12 evidently attaching considerable importance to it, and his information is very precise. In a previous passage3 he has already referred to the settlements of English nobility, and also men of lower rank, in Ireland under Finân, Colmân’s predecessor in the bishopric of Lindisfarne, and also during the bishopric of Colmân himself, both for purposes of study and the pursuit a life of stricter devotion. He adds that some of these subsequently adopted the monastic life, while others preferred to pass from one to another of the various cells of the teachers.4 And he adds that the Irish welcomed them and provided them with books and teachers without charge. Bede does not state specifically that those who had gone to Ire­ land for study and religious discipline under Finân and Colmân went to the spot subsequently settled by Colmân and his monks. The context would make this not improbable, but Bede also refers56 to a certain monastery in Ireland, Rathmelsigi by name, in which two young English nobles studied, one of whom became famous as the priest Ecgberht who spent most of his life in Ireland and who 1 See C. Plummer, Baedae Historia Ecclesiastica (Oxford, 1896), 11, 196; cf. J. Kenney, Sources for the Early History of Ireland (New York, 1929), 1, 231. 2 H.E. iv, 4. 3 H.E. hi, 27. 4 For a similar custom in the monasteries of Lower Egypt, we may compare John Cassian, Collationes, passim, edited by M. Petschenig (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. xm (Vienna, 1886)). 6 H.E. iv, 27. l 86

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did much to win over the northern Irish and Iona to the Roman obedience. Rathmelsigi has not been satisfactorily identified.1 Bede’s reference to it occurs in the same chapter as that in which we are told of the visits of Englishmen to Ireland for study during the episcopate of Colmân and his predecessor Finân. Its connection with Ecgberht is therefore to be borne in mind and I shall return to this later. Bede’s narrative of Colmân is not confined to the chapter relat­ ing specifically to Mayo, but is related piecemeal in several places, and Bede is perhaps drawing upon a continuous saga or Vita> a navigatio of Colmân, the thread of which he is following and weav­ ing into his account of the Easter Controversy. First of all we learn2 that under Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne, though the Easter ques­ tion was already a source of dispute between Rome and Canterbury on the one hand and the Northumbrian Church on the other, yet love and respect for Aidan were so great that no serious discord arose during the seventeen years of his episcopate, nor apparently during the ten years of his successor Finân. On the death of Finân, however, when Colmân, ‘who had been sent from “ Scotland” ’,3 came to be bishop, a greater controversy arose about the observance of Easter. Bede then proceeds to relate the story of the Council of Whitby held by King Oswiu of Northumbria in 664 with a view to settling points of difference. At this council Colmân, now bishop of Lindis­ farne, was representative and spokesman on behalf of the Irish Church against Bishop Wilfrid, speaking on behalf of the Roman Church. On the decision of King Oswiu, who presided at the council, to adopt the Roman ruling, both in regard to Easter and the tonsure—‘for there was considerable argument about this as well*—Colmân returned to ‘Scotland’4 ‘in order to consult with his people what was best to be done*, taking with him those who would not conform. 1 For a note and references, see Plummer, Baedae H.E. 11, 197. Curiously enough a St Colmân of Rathmaoilsidhe is commemorated in the Martyrology of Donegal at 14 December. But our Colmân is commemorated in the same calendar at 8 August as ‘ Colmân, bishop of Inis Bofinne in Conmaicne-mara in the west of Connacht’. Reeves (Vita S. Columbani, Dublin, 1857, p. 379) notes that Colgan (Acta S S , Index Locor.) places it in Connacht; but Reeves adds that the exact situation remains to be identified. Ecgberht is commemorated in the Calendar of Oengus at 8 Dec. : and see the (later) commentary, p. 259. 8 H.E. h i , 25. 3 A Scottia, presumably the Irish kingdom of Argyll. 4 Scottiam regressus est. H.E. in, 26. ï 87

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At this point Bede continues his account of what happened at Lindisfarne after Colmân’s departure, though it is noticeable that he does this with recurrent reference to Colmân himself, whose story he follows throughout the history of the Easter Controversy and the Northumbrian Church at this epoch. It was now, he tells us, thirty years since the coming of the Scottish bishops to England, Aidan (^651) having been bishop for seventeen years, Finân (f66i) for ten, and Colmân for three.1 ‘On Colmân’s return to his own land’ he was succeeded by Tuda, who had come presumably from Iona12 during Colmân’s episcopate, but who ruled the Church for only a short time. He had been trained in southern Ireland,3 for he observed the Catholic Easter customs and the ‘ecclesiastical tonsure’. By Colmân’s request Eata, abbot of Old Melrose, was made abbot of Lindisfarne in succession to himself—a favour which Colmân obtained because of the king’s high opinion of his judge­ ment. Eventually Eata became bishop of Colmân’s see. Bede adds that on Colmân’s departure he took with him some of the bones of Aidan, some of which he deposited in the church over which he had ruled. Bede now interrupts his narrative to insert a passage of some length in praise of the austerity of Colmân and his predecessors, and in the following chapter refers to the plague of which Tuda died, and to its ravages in Ireland, and this he follows by the brief account of the flow of English nobles and others to Ireland to which I have already referred, and which he pointedly places ‘during the episcopates of Finân (f66i) and Colmân’. The information is, in fact, closely related to the story of Colmân. Much later in the work4 Bede again takes up the narrative of Colmân, not precisely at the point at which he had left it, but a little before, repeating the fact and circumstances of Colmân’s departure, but with more detail. He is, it appears likely, returning to the same source and following it more closely ; he introduces or reintroduces his narrative, according to his usual custom after a long digression, by the word interea. It is, moreover, in accordance with this repeti­ tion of the initial circumstances that he now relates the story of Colmân as a complete narrative in itself, occupying a full chapter. 1 H.E. hi, 26. 2 Ibid., ‘de Scottia*. 3 The dominant party among the southern Irish are believed to have accepted the Roman Easter c. 637. 4 H.E. iv, 4. 18 8

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It forms what the Icelandic saga-tellers would describe as a pdttr —a complete short story inset in a longer saga. Colmân, Bede tells us, the bishop 1de Scottia\ left Brittania, taking with him all the ‘ Scots *whom he had collected at Lindisfarne, together with about thirty of the English who had been instructed in what pertained to monastic life1 and leaving some brothers in his church, as we have already learned. Bede then relates, more specifically than before, that he first went to Iona, whence he had originally been sent to preach to the English; but subsequently—the date is believed to be 668—he retired (secessit) to a small island off the west coast of Ire­ land known in the Irish tongue (sermone Scottico) as 4Inis Boufinde, id est insula vitulae albae\ It is noteworthy that Bede gives again the correct form of the Irish name and also the translation. The island is known today as Inishbofin, off the west coast of Co. Mayo and to the south of Clew Bay. Bede’s narrative of Colmân as a whole may thus be said to fall into three parts—first, the departure of Colmân and his monks from Britain and the journey to Iona; secondly, the foundation and brief sojourn on Inishbofin; and finally, the foundation and settlement at Mayo. Bede has little to tell us of this first settlement. On his arrival the bishop founded a monastery (construxit monasterium) and placed in it the monks whom he had assembled (collectos) of both nations. These, however, could not agree among themselves because the Scottiy when the crops (fruges) were due to be collected, left the monastery and wandered off by themselves to ‘places they knew of ’ (nota loca)y but then returned the following winter and wanted to share those which the English (Angli) had gathered (preparaverant). The passage is not very clear, but it suggests that the ‘Irish’ followers of Colmân may have possibly come originally from Inish­ bofin (cf. ‘places they knew of*, nota loco). It is an interesting sidelight on the first problem which must always have faced the leader of a new band of immigrants—the problem of a regular food supply. Bede realised that the dispute between the Irish and the English monks arose from the funda­ mental difference between the economy of the two races, though he may not have fully understood, or perhaps was not interested in its nature. From what he says, however, it is possible that the Irish monks, according to the pastoral habits of the western islanders (cf. Achill), were following the age-old practice known as ‘booleying’ 1 Qui utrique monachicae conversations erant studiis inbuti. 189

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(bo-dirge)t taking the cattle to the upper pastures in the summer months, to return to the settlement in the winter, where the Saxons had perhaps been carrying on agriculture on this fertile and com­ paratively low-lying island. Seeking a solution to this difference, Colmân ‘after searching far and wide’1 found a site (locum) on the mainland suitable for build­ ing a monastery2 and called in the Irish tongue Mag Éot where ‘he bought a small tract of land* (non grandern partem) from the comes (? ‘nobleman’) to whom it belonged, who made it a stipulation that they would pray for him. A monastery was then built there ‘with the help of the comes and all the neighbours,3 and Colmân estab­ lished there his English followers, leaving the Irish in the afore­ mentioned island.4 The subsequent history of the abbey of Mayo is full of interest, and raises many questions. Bede, writing c. 730, tells us that the monastery is still in his day occupied by English monks, and from its humble start has become a great place,5 and is usually known as Muigéo (Mayo). He adds that the whole institution has now been brought to an improved order. It contains a notable community of religious, assembled there from the province of the English, who, after the example of the venerable Fathers, live there by the labour of their hands in great austerity and singleness of life under the rule and an abbot elected canonically.6 Bede could hardly assure us in plainer terms that the abbey of Mayo, whether under Colmân or a successor, had, by the time in which Bede was writing, abandoned their Celtic separatism and adopted the Roman obedience, and the Roman Easter. Unfortu­ nately, he does not tell us how or when this change came about. Bede’s account of Colmân’s establishment on Inishbofin is prob­ ably the earliest record we have of an island sanctuary in Ireland. Columba’s establishment on Iona was about a century earlier, and the interesting question arises as to whether Columba introduced into Britain a custom already established in Ireland, or whether, 1 Circuiens omnia prope vel longe. 2 Aptum monasterio construendo. a Juvante etiam comité ac vicinis omnibus. 4 H.E. iv, 4. 6 Nunc grande de modico effectum. Note the contrast to the partem, non grandem of Colman’s original purchase. 6 Loc. cit. IÇO

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perhaps less probably, he went to Iona because the custom of sacred islands was known by him to be already established in Britain. The traditional establishment of St Ninian on the socalled Tsle of Whithorn* is relevant here, but our information is less satisfactory.1 Bede*s narrative is also our earliest evidence for the story of Colmân and his voyage, an early Northumbrian version of a monk who set sail with his followers to seek an ‘island of the Blessed* in the Western Ocean—what the Irish saga-tellers call an immram> in Latin a navigatio—comparable to the Voyage of S t Brendan. And Bede*s narrative seems to suggest a more immediate form of the motif, and of the kind of ideals which may have originally inspired it, than our Irish immrama. Bede has undoubtedly obtained his story from an Irish source, as his correct forms of the Irish names make clear. He seems also to know a little about the geography and economy of the west of Ireland. These he might have obtained from visiting monks, to whom he must have been indebted for the account which he gives of the contemporary con­ ditions of the monastery of Mayo at the time he was writing. On the other hand, his main narrative does not appear to be based on oral saga, for it lacks the features which characterise his narratives based on oral tradition—oratio rectay picturesque detail, expanded incidents, etc. Bede’s account is especially interesting for its early date and for its detailed account of the establishment of both an early island community in western Ireland, and of the monastic community of Mayo in the second half of the seventh century. Especial value, moreover, attaches to Bede’s narrative because, in addition to its virtually contemporary character, his general description of the nature of the monastery in his own day is borne out by its sub­ sequent history as we can trace it in the following century in the letters from Bishop Alcuin of York to the bishops of Mayo; and also in the notices of the monastery which appear from time to time in the Irish Annals under the name of Magheô na Saxan down to the late fifteenth century, and even according to Ussher2 till 15591 I have discussed this subject in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, Whithorn volume (1948-9), pp. 9 ff. 2 Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates (Dublin, 1639), p. 964. I9 I

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There are, however, some later and discrepant accounts in Irish sources, recorded in Irish and in Latin, which, while they do not of course impair the general validity of Bede’s account, may cause us to examine with a closer scrutiny the part attributed by Bede to Colrnan. First of all the Annals of Ulster record s.a. 667 (recté 668) the ‘voyage (navigatio) of Bishop Columbanus (Colrnan) with the relics of the saints to the Island of the white cow (Inishbofin), where he founded a church*. In 675 (recté 676) the death of Columban (Colrnan) episcopus of insula vaccae albae is again given. So also the Ckronicon Scotorum, the Four Masters and the Annals of Tigernach. For the first of these entries the Annals of Tigernach have the correct form Colrnan. So also the Calendar of Oengus the Culdee (8 August), a composition assigned by its editor, Whitley Stokes, to a date c. 800, refers to ‘Colrnan the excellent (aille) bishop from Inish­ bofin* ; but neither here nor in the annals is there any reference to Mayo. The reference in both sets of annals to the relics of the saints which Colmân took with him may be a reminiscence of Bede’s statement regarding the relics of St Aidan, though this is not a necessary deduction.1 It is important to note that none of these Irish entries gives any hint that Colrnan ever left the island. The church which he instituted there evidently went on, for the Annals of Ulster, s.a. 712 (recté 713) and the Annals of Tigernach record the death of Baetân, abbot of Insula Vaccae Albae. The Annals of Ulster, s.a. 735 (recté 736) and the Annals of Tigernach record the death of Dublittir, a vir sapiens and ‘anchorite* of Insula Vaccae Albae. A further entry in the Annals of Ulster, s.a. 814, and the Annals of Tigernach of the death of Blathmac, dalta of Colgu, abbot of Inish­ bofin, perhaps refers to a different Inishbofin in Lough Ree. It should be added that in both the Félire Oengusso (‘Calendar of Oengus*) and in the Martyrology of Donegal Colman’s festival is on 8 August. In the latter he is again referred to as Colrnan of Inish­ bofin, without reference to Mayo. The foundations of both Inishbofin and Mayo as related by Bede are not earlier than the seventh century, though the circum­ stances certainly suggest that Colrnan had reason to expect that the ground was in some measure already prepared, otherwise his deci­ sion to settle his community in so remote a spot is not easy to account for. The district was already Christian, and if we may 1 The text is not quite certain. T he Annals of the Four Masters have (s.a. 667) go naomhaibh oile imaille fris, ‘together with other saints'. 192

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accept the testimony of Tfrechân, believed to be a native of Crossmolina1 some forty miles away to the north of the modern village of Mayo and on Lough Conn in the Barony of Tirawley, it lay within the territory claimed to have been converted by St Patrick. It would be interesting to know what motive induced the original settlement on Inishbofin. From its remote geographical position off the west coast, and from Bede’s own statement that Colmân went there directly from his own former headquarters on Iona, we may assume some connection with that island—a connection which probably existed already before Colmân’s settlement in 668. Moreover, what Bede says of the learning and hospitality of the Irish, and of the habit of the English nobility of visiting Irish scholars for the sake of learning, not only under Bishop Colmân but also under Finân, his predecessor as bishop of Lindisfarne, suggests that Colmân and his successors were not going among total strangers. It would seem probable that already by the middle of the seventh century Westport was the front door into Ireland, as Limerick was in the Viking Age, and the port of embarkation from Britain seems to have been Iona. We have seen that Inishbofin seems to have had a continuous history as a place of some reputa­ tion as an ‘island of the blessed’. The later notes to the Félire Oenguseo refer (p. 239) to a sixth-century saint Rioc of Inis B6 Finde and as late as 898 the Annals of the Four Masters have this entry: ‘Caenchomhrac, of the caves (uarnh) of Inisbofin died’. The subsequent monastic settlement in Mayo must have been a place of very considerable importance. It is probable that the thirty original Saxon members formed the whole, or at least the majority of the community, for, as we have seen, the monastery in Mayo continued to be known as Mag-n Éo na Saxany ‘Mayo of the Saxons’, for many centuries.12 When Bede wrote, and doubt­ less from the beginning, it was virtually an English monastery, and by Bede’s time, as we have seen, followed the Roman Order. It is interesting to follow the future career of this little Saxon settlement in English (Latin) ecclesiastical documents and in the Irish annals. A letter is still extant3 written by Alcuin ‘to Leuth1 The ruins of a medieval abbey still stand on the edge of this Lough. 2 T he Four Masters have reference to Magh Éo na Saxon s.a. 1169, 1176, 1209, 1478. 8 Text in Epistolae Karolini Aevi (ed. Duemmler, Berlin, 1895), 11, 19. 13

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frith, bishop of the monastery (coenobium) of Mayo in Ireland* between 773 and 786,1 condoling with him on some tribulation which threatens to prevent his fulfilling his office, and offering him the somewhat doubtful consolation that tribulations come upon us for our sins, and urging him under no circumstances to have re­ course to armed conflict. In a still later letter (793-804) to the peregrini of the Church of Mayo he refers to the constant communi­ cation which he has had with the community through the brethren who have visited him.12 He stresses the light of their knowledge, which is spread through a wide area of the land, and exhorts them to be diligent in study and in spreading their light through a semibarbarous nation. Alcuin is perhaps a biased witness, but the stress which he lays on the learning of the monks of Mayo is arresting, and Plummer3 points to the contrast between Bede’s testimony in the early eighth century to the learning of the Irish and its transmission to England,4 and that of Alcuin at the turn of the century to the learning of the Saxons and its transmission to Ireland. In 786 Leuthfrith’s succes­ sor Alduulf, Myiensis ecclesie episcopusywas present at a council held in England by George, bishop of Ostia, as papal legate, and signed sixth.5 According to Symeon of Durham6 Alduulf was consecrated bishop by Eanbald the archbishop (that is, of York), Tilberht, and Hygbald in the monastery at Corbridge, whence he was sent back to his church with great honour. In the late eighth century, therefore, and even to the beginning of the ninth, communication between Mayo and both York and Corbridge was still active. Carrying the succession further back, Symeon of Durham tells us7 that in 773 Hadwinus (that is, Edwin) Migencis autistes sublatus est, et Leuthfrith pro eo est subrogatus episcopus. From this it seems clear that Leuthfrith preceded Alduulf as bishop in Mayo and succeeded Hadwin, who, says Symeon (j.a. 768), was ordained bishop in Mayo. We are thus in a position to reconstruct some dates, and some­ thing of the episcopal succession, and it would seem that records were probably kept at Mayo, perhaps diptychs. Moreover, Alcuin’s 1 The lower date is fixed by the fact that Symeon of Durham states that Alduulf was consecrated bishop of Mayo in 786. 2 Ep. Karol. 11, 287. ‘Per fratres vestros ad nos venientes.’ 8 Plummer, Baedae H.E. 11, 210. 4 H.E. in, 27. 8 Ep. Karol. 11, 28. • Hist. Reg. (ed. T . Arnold, Rolls Series), 11, 51. 7 Hist. Reg. a . d . 773. 194

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letters make clear that Mayo was a centre of learning, as its North­ umbrian origin would lead one to expect. It is important to note that all the names of these early bishops except Aidan are Saxon, either in form or tradition. Four Masters 726 ‘Gerald of Mageo* d. 13 March. 731 Annals of Ulster 731 (rectéy22) Gerald, Pontifex maige heu Saxonum obiit. ‘ Gerald, abbot of Mayo of the Saxons, died. *

Annals of Ulster 772 (recté 773) Aedan episcopus Maige h Eu died. Annals of Ulster 782 (recté 783) Burning of Armagh and Magh h Eu of the Saxons.

If Bede is correct in his statement—and this is hardly open to doubt—that not only the island of Inishbofin, but also the monastery of Mayo were founded by St Colmân, we have to sup­ pose that either Colmân himself, or far more probably one of his immediate successors, accepted the Roman Order, for, as we have seen, Bede leaves us in no doubt that the reform had taken place when he himself was writing, and this is borne out by our sub­ sequent information. In addition to the records discussed above we possess a Life of S t Gerald of Mayo,2 who has a place also in Irish devotional texts. The martyrologies of both Gorman and Donegal enter his day as 13 March, and this is also the day on which he is said in the Life to have died. The former is believed to be a twelfth-century compila­ tion, the latter is a seventeenth-century work. The Martyrology of Tallaght, however, now accepted as an eighth-century text,3 enters at 12 March Garait Maigi Eo cum sociis; while the calendar of his own church, Mayo, has 10 March.4 He and his socii are invoked in 1 Plummer, Baedae H .E. 11, 210. 8 Ed. Plummer, Vitae Sanctorum Hibemiae (Oxford, 1909)» n, 107-15; cf. ibid. I, lxxi f. 8 Edited by by Best and Lawlor, Martyrology of Tallaght (London, 1931), pp. xx f., where a date ‘ hardly later than the first decade of the ninth century’ was assigned to it. Kenney is cautious, but agrees that it ‘ may be of the ninth century ’, op. cit. p. 410 n. 140; but cf. ibid. p. 482. For the significance of the entry in this Martyrology, however, cf. p. 197 below. 4 Ed. Plummer, Irish Litanies (Bradshaw Society Publications, 1925), p. 115. Plummer {ibid. p. xix) associates this litany with the monastery of Killeigh, King’s Co., said to have been the largest monastery in Ireland. For the date of the litany, see ibid. p. xx. See however more recently Kathleen Hughes, ‘On an Irish Litany of Pilgrim Saints’, Analecta Bollandiana, t. 77 (i959)-

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Litany I of the Litanies of Irish Saints1 as the ‘3300 with Gerald the bishop («V) and 50 saints of Leyny of Connacht, who occupy Mayo of the Saxons’, and one of his brothers, Balanus, has been identified by Colgan with Bollain of Tech Saxan in the Martyrology of Donegal at 3 September. It is surely significant, however, that the Martyrology of Oengusy2 believed on good evidence to have been composed not later than the ninth century, has no reference to Gerald, and indeed all these references to him except perhaps the martyrology of Tallaght are too late to have any serious value as historical records. On the other hand, the references in the Irish Annals of Ulster and Tigernach are contemporary, and of high standing for our period, and cannot be lightly set aside. They are on a totally dif­ ferent level from either those of the martyrologies referred to above, or those of the fabulous Life of Gerald about to be discussed. The Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach enter Gerald’s obit s.a. 731 (recté 732): ‘Pontifex maigehEu Saxonum Garait, obiit.’ ‘Gerald, bishop of Mayo of the Saxons, died.’ (A .T .) So also the Annals of the Four Masters, s.a. 726. It should be noted, however, that none of the annals mention Gerald save for the entry of his obit. The Life of S t Gerald {Vita Sancti Geraldi abhatis de Magh Eo)f to which reference is made above, is the only Latin Life of S t Gerald known, and there appears to be no Irish Life. Its date is unknown. The name Gerald in itself is, of course, a late one. In this form it cannot be earlier than the Anglo-Norman period. It does not look like a ‘name in religion’ likely to have been adopted by an early monk with an originally Celtic name.3 If on the other hand it is a Latinised form of an earlier Celtic name the transformation cannot have been pre-Norman.4 Moreover, the main outline of the Life is fantastically unhistorical, and while it contains abundant material relating to Colmân’s own period and even before, it is obviously a confused composition of much later date, and the evidence suggests that, like many other Irish vitae, it owes its origin to the impetus 1 See Plummer, op. cit. p. lxxi n. 3. 2 See W. Stokes, The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee (London, 1905), p. xxxviii. 8 The name occurs in the form Garait in the Martyrology of Tallaghtt and Garett in medieval records of Irish families, for example the Fitz Geralds. 4 The name of the Frankish ecclesiastic Gervold, abbot of St W andrille (787806), who discharged diplomatic errands to Offa for Charlemagne, is interesting. Could this or a similar name have been transformed into Gerald under Norman influence ? 196

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given to the compilation of tht Lives of Irish saints as a result of the reconstitution of many monasteries by the regular monastic orders which followed the coming of the English in the twelfth century.1 On the whole I suspect that, after the refoundation of the abbey2 in the thirteenth century by the de Burghs, a life of the founder was compiled, possibly on an already existing vita of the founding saint. Mayo lies in the Barony of Clanmorris, the territory of the MacMorrises, whose alternative name was MacGarailt (or MacGarrett, whence they have been called FitzGerald) from the original founder of the family, Gerald Prendergast, the great baron of Leinster and Munster who died in 1251, when part of his estate was inherited by the daughter of his second wife, Richard de Burgo. Moreover, Gerald is a frequent name in the family.3 We may suspect, therefore, that the name of a member of this family, probably responsible for the refounding or re-edification of the abbey under the de Burghs, has been substituted in the Life of S t Gerald either for that of the original founder, or for the abbot responsible for the establishment of the Roman Order in the origi­ nal foundation. But much depends on the entry in the Martyrology of Tallaght. If this is really an eighth-century document, or even only a little later, and if the entry of Gerald is an original one, it would go far to establishing the genuineness of a ‘Gerald’ whose obit the annals place c. 732. This, however, is not a foundation on which we can place any reliance.4 In the Life of S t Gerald Colmân is represented as a disciple of St Columba, and as having been ordained abbot on his death; but the community conspired against him and drove him into exile. On coming to England he is made archbishop of the whole country and held in high honour by the king Cusperius and his wife Benicia, whose four sons he educates for Holy Orders. However, he is again expelled, this time by the bishops on the grounds that he is a foreigner, whereupon he departs for Ireland. He is accom­ panied by the king’s youngest son Gerald, and 3000 disciples. 1 See Plummer, Vitae Sanct. Hib. 1, p. lxxxix n. 2. 2 For an account of the new abbey and its subsequent part in the history of the area see H. T . Knox, History of Mayo (Dublin, 1908), pp. 90 ff. and passim. I am indebted to D r H. G. Leask for the reference to this work. 8 See H. T . Knox, History of Mayo. 4 Both Oengus and Gorman refer vaguely in their prefaces to earlier Irish books as their sources for the Irish saints commemorated in their martyrologies. For some observations on probable sources, see Best and Lawlor’s edition of the Martyrology of Tallaght, p. xxii. !97

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From this point the Life is concerned only with Gerald himself and we hear no more of Colmân. The unhistorical nature of this story is patent. St Columba died in 597, whereas St Colmân came to England under Cuimine Ailbe, the seventh abbot of Iona. He became bishop of Lindisfarne on the death of Bishop Finân in 661, and retired to Ireland, c. 668. The king and queen who favour Colmân in the Life of Gerald are un­ historical, though Benicia may, and probably does, contain a reminiscence of the name of the Northumbrian kingdom of Bernicia in which Lindisfarne lay, and the whole may possibly embody a vague memory that before Colmân left for Ireland he had held the bishopric of Lindisfarne. Gerald’s own death is recorded in the annals, as stated above, c. 732. Even if the obit in the annals could be trusted—and this is very doubtful—he could hardly have gone to Ireland with St Colmân ; and the whole chronology of his own Life is equally impossible. The Life represents Gerald as tonsured by Colmân and made abbot of Winchester before he accompanies his master to Ireland. The party arrive in Connacht, ruled by a king (regulus, rex) named Ailill, who, as a reward for Gerald’s resuscitation of his dead daughter and son Catholus (Irish Cathal), grants him land on which he establishes the abbey of Elitherea* placing over it his sister Sigresia (chaps. 6, 14). Later a rex famosus of Connacht, named Ragallus, grants him land for the foundation of the abbey of Mayo.2 Some of the incidents which follow are not without a certain interest of their own, such as his relations with the magus (‘magician’), and the amusing story of the nine reivers (latrunculi) who make a cattleraid on the saint’s pasture and steal his cattle, but are tracked down to their ‘accustomed’ hiding-place in a bog. Later Gerald attends a meeting at Tara under the two kings of Ireland, Blathmac and Diarmait, shortly before the outbreak of the Yellow Plague. It will be noticed that the kings with whom Gerald is brought into contact belong to the seventh century, and would of course be too early for the sojourn of Colmân. Raghallach of Connacht died in 6491 1 Colgan’s suggested derivation from ailither, ‘foreigner’, ‘pilgrim*, is very plausible. See Plummer, Vitae Sand. Hib. 11, 326. * It has been pointed out to me as noteworthy that Gerald founds two monas­ teries on his arrival in Ireland, as does Colmân according to Bede. Is the author of Gerald’s Life following a Life of Colmân here? And has the name of his first abbey Elitherea a reference to the Saxons who are said to accompany him? ‘Foreigner’ is the original meaning of ailither. 198

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or 656. Blathmac and Diarmait are believed to have died in 665 or 668. Ailill and Cathal, however, are probably the son and grandson of Donnchadh Muirsce of the Uf-Fiachrach line,1who died in 681, so that the date of the two latter might conceivably fall within Gerald’s period, whose death, as we have seen, is recorded in the annals in 73 2.2 Towards the close of the Life we are told that Adamnân, after making a visitation of all Ireland, comes to make brotherhood and societatem with Gerald, and Gerald appoints him his successor in the Church of Mayo ‘so that he should defend it from the persecu­ tion of the laity*—a promise which, we are told, Adamnân fulfils. Soon afterwards Gerald died in the Church of Mayo on 3 March, and the Life assures us that after his death Adamnân ruled the monastery for seven years, instructing the monks, making them write books (volumina conscriberefaciens), and writing four Gospels with his own hand. Afterwards he returned to Iona. Finally, the subsequent burning of the monastery by the Norsemen is recorded. The reference to Adamnân is not without a certain interest. It is, of course, quite unhistorical, for Adamnân died c. 704, nearly thirty years before the obit of Gerald. The seven years in which he is here said to have ruled the monastery of Mayo is also the number of years, 697-704, which Adamnân is thought to have spent in Ireland after his failure to win over the monks of Iona to the Roman faith.3 The number seven has probably no value ; but Bede tells us4 that Adamnân became converted to the Roman view during his visit to the court of King Aldfrith, his dalta9in either 686 or 688, and that he then returned to his own monastery of Iona, failing, however, to convert his own monks to his view:5 Navigavit Hiberniam, et praedicans eis ac modesta exhortatione declarans legitimum paschae tempus, plurimos eorumyetpene omnes, qui ab Hiensium dominio erant liberi, ab errore avito correctos, ad unitatem reduxit Catholicam ac legitimum paschae tempus observare perdocuit.6

As Plummer remarks,7this must surely be an overstatement, for the process was probably protracted. One wonders whether Bede 1 T he native septs of the Hy-Fiachrach ruled the lands in north and south Connacht, afterwards under the lordship of the Burkes. 2 For these dates I have followed Plummer, op. cit. 1, p. lxxii. 3 Kenney, The Sources for the Early History of Ireland (New York, 1929)» p. 432 n. 205. 4 H.E. v, 21. 5 For Adamnan’s troubles in Iona see Plummer, Baedae H.E. 1, pp. liii f. • H.E. v, 15. 7 See Plummer, Baedae H.E. 11, note ad loc.t p. 300, and cf. Reeves, Adamnân (Dublin, 1859), p. liii. 199

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can have got this impression from monks visiting from Mayo? Bede’s reference is, in any case, incontrovertible evidence as to the important part played by Adamnân in the conversion of the Northern Irish to the Roman Order, of which we have evidence in Irish sources also. It is just possible that official ratification of the acceptance may have been made at the Synod of Birr, held c. 696,1 and commonly known as ‘Adamnân’s Synod’ because he is believed to have presided. In this tangle of uncertainties a few facts stand out with some clarity. (1) The Irish sources know nothing of Colmân at Mayo. They are all consistent in associating him only with Inishbofin, both as founder of the monastery and as dying there as bishop in 675. (2) The Irish sources associate the foundation of Mayo with *Gerald ’ (Garait) but his death, claimed to have taken place in 732, makes this impossible, quite apart from Bede’s statement that it was founded by Colmân, for it was certainly already a flourishing monastery when Bede wrote. (3) By the time Bede wrote Mayo was fully established in the Roman Order. Was this the work of Colmân—who had left Lindisfarne in protest against this Order? This is highly unlikely. Or was it the work of a successor ‘Gerald’, whose life as abbot there—if indeed it is to be regarded as representing any modicum of genuine tradition—would make this chronologically possible? Or was it the work of an intermediate abbot between the death of Colmân and the abbacy of a later abbot referred to under the name of ‘Garait* ? The first suggestion is not incompatible with the testimony of Bede, who lived only a generation later, and was certainly in touch with Mayo. Had Colmân, after his so strong protest, been con­ verted to the Roman Church in the heart of western Ireland, and at a time before Adamnân’s mission? Bede does not suggest, of course, that Colmân was responsible for the adoption of the Roman Order at Mayo, but only that he was the founder of the monastery; and had Bede known of Colmân as eventually adopting the Roman Order himself he would almost certainly have said so. This first explanation may, I think, be dismissed. Was the change a later one, the work of a Saxon monk whose name in the late Life has come down to us as ‘ Gerald *, and who at some time before 731 had joined the community and perhaps 1 See Kenney, op. cit. p. 246. 2 00

BEDE, ST C O L M Ä N AND I R I S H ABBEY OF MA Y O

‘reformed* the abbey? We have seen that both Bede and later evidence make it clear that regular communication between Mayo and Northumbria was taking place throughout the eighth and apparently into the beginning of the ninth century. This latter possibility of a later Saxon reforming monk would be the natural inference from the Irish sources, and if this were so it would be natural enough that a later age should identify him with the actual founder of ‘Mayo of the Saxons *, and would help to account for the confusion in the part ascribed to Colmân and the reforming monk whom we will call ‘Gerald*. Yet it is strange that Bede, whose sympathies in this matter would be strongly enlisted for ‘ Gerald’s * work, and who was scrupulously precise and specific where proper names were concerned, should make no mention of ‘Gerald*. The fulness of Bede’s account of Colmân, who belonged to an earlier generation than Bede himself, taken in conjunction with the absence of any reference to ‘ Gerald*, who, if we could trust his dates, would have been Bede’s contemporary, possibly strengthens the tentative suggestion which I have already made that Bede had before him some written acta of Colmân, whereas the Life of Gerald as we have it is manifestly much later, and the name has perhaps been transferred from a later Norman benefactor of the Church of Mayo. Was the change at Mayo a gradual one, brought about perhaps by some predecessor of ‘Gerald*? It is a curious fact that the author of the Life of Gerald introduces towards the end of his narra­ tive an apocryphal visit and compact made between the saint and Adamnân, and a statement that on Gerald’s death Adamnân succeeded him in the abbacy. As we have seen, the chronology is impossible. Adamndn’s visit to Mayo, if it ever took place, would have been long before the death of ‘Gerald*. His mission on behalf of the Roman Easter is believed to have taken place between 697 and 704. We are nowhere told in other sources where Adamnân made his headquarters during this period. It may, of course, have been at Birr, the place where the famous synod, which came to be known as ‘Adamndn’s Synod*, took place, according to the Annals of Ulster in 696 (recti 697). But Birr was possibly chosen to be the site of the synod on account of its favourable central position. Adamnân himself was doubtless from the north-west of Ireland, his great-great-grandfather having been a first cousin of St Columba the great-grandson of Conall Gulbdn of the Northern Ui Néill. 20 1

BEDE, ST C O L M Â N AND I R I S H ABB E Y OF M A Y O

It was long ago suggested by Plummer that the dispute between Colmân and the monks in the Life of Gerald maybe a reminiscence of the historical difference between the monks of Iona and their abbot Adamnân. But it is a remarkable fact that all three—Colmân, Gerald and Adamnân—are traditionally stated to have gone to Ireland as a result of a quarrel with their church. All the saints are associated closely with the accounts of the foundation of Mayo. On the whole one is tempted to ask if the author of the Life of Gerald has not reversed the dates of Adamnân and ‘Gerald*, and post­ dated an association of Adamnân with Mayo which may well have been a historical one in fact ; and here it may be observed that in the Life of Gerald the claim for Adamnân’s intellectual training of the monks is perhaps a not wholly imaginary view of Alcuin’s later references to their pre-eminence in learning. Was Adamnân’s activity on behalf of the Roman Order on the occasion of this, his last visit to Ireland, and even perhaps to Mayo, the occasion and immediate cause of the acceptance of the Roman Order by the community of Mayo? It is indeed very probable that the abbey may have come under the compelling influence of Ecgberht, an English monk, of noble birth,1 whose life was spent as a peregrinus in Ireland in faithful service for the Roman Order.12 Ecgberht is believed to have been mainly responsible for bringing about the conformity of the North of Ireland to the Roman Order towards the close of the seventh century. Moreover, after Adamnân’s death Ecgberht crossed over from Ireland to Iona, and when he had been thirteen years on the island succeeded in winning over Adamnân’s own community— whom Adamnân had been unable to persuade—and as a natural corollary all the monasteries under the jurisdiction of Iona. The date seems to have been 716. Bede, after many previous references to the importance of Ecgberht’s work in Ireland in this cause, towards the close of the Historia Ecclesiastica devotes an entire chapter to him, perhaps regarding his conversion of the Columban Churches as the consummation of the ecclesiastical history of Britain down to his own day. Ecgberht died in Iona in 729, but he was then a man of ninety years of age, and almost all his life had been spent in Ireland. His work in Ireland must therefore have 1 On the subject of Ecgberht’s ecclesiastical rank, see Plummer, Baedae H.E. 11, 285. 2 For our information about Ecgberht, see Bede, H.E. m , 4, 27; iv, 3; v, 9. 202

BEDE, ST C O L M Â N AND I R I S H ABBEY OF MA Y O

coincided with that of Colmân as well as with the several visits of Adamnân, and also with the legendary period of the abbacy of ‘Gerald’.1 His signature, under the form Ichtbricht epscop occurs with those of others as attesting the Cain Adamndin at the Synod of Birr,2 and there can be no doubt that the vigour and learning of Ecgberht must have been the most important influence in bringing to an end this long controversy in Northern Ireland and the Columban Churches, and in supporting and encouraging Adamnân’s efforts to this end in both countries. Since we have no shred of evidence as to the centre from which the two men worked in Ireland, it seems reasonable, in view of what has been said, to sug­ gest that the Saxon monastery of Mayo may have played a major part in bringing the issue to a peaceful conclusion. This would account for the sudden and lasting importance of this English monastery in western Ireland. Manifestly the prolonged campaign in northern Ireland must have been carried on from a more or less permanent centre, and Mayo has no competitor. In addition Adamnân’s origin in western Ireland would make the Saxon foundation of Mayo a natural centre for the activities of himself and his colleague Ecgberht. The essential facts, as distinct from traditions, may be sum­ marised as follows. The abbey of Mayo was founded in the latter part of the seventh century from Northumbria by a Saxon com­ munity. It was devoted to the Roman obedience from a very early date. It was a learned community, as we infer from Alcuin’s letters, and as we should expect from the Northumbrian training of its foundation members. It kept up a lively communication with Northumbria from the earliest days, and it continued with no recorded interruption, and as a flourishing community, recognised as distinctively Saxon, for close on a thousand years. It is not easy to account for the permanent and flourishing state of a learned Saxon monastery in the west of Ireland unless it owed its prosperity to some important function. Nor indeed is it easy to account for its foundation in the first place. Why should thirty 1 His death, curiously enough, took place only two years later than the date assigned in the Annals for ‘G erald’ (731 for 732). * See Cain Adamndin, ed. cit. p. 16. This document, however, and especially the list of signatories, is highly suspect. In the Martyrology of Oengus ‘Ecgberht (Ichtbrichtdn) who came over the great sea* is commemorated on Dec. 8, and the commentator describes him as probably, but not certainly, associated with Mayo of the Saxons in Connacht. 203

BEDE, ST C O L M À N A N D I R I S H A B B E Y OF M A Y O

Saxons go to the west of Ireland to make a home among people of an alien race, language, and religion? Certainly the foundation must have been made for a definite purpose, and since its Roman sympathies and Northumbrian origin coincide with the successful efforts of the Northumbrians to bring about the Romanisation of northern Ireland by the instrumentality of Ecgberht and Adamnan, working in Ireland from some centre unknown to us, there can, I think, be hardly any doubt that Mayo owes its importance to the successful rôle which it played in this cause. So much can, I think, be suggested with reasonable confidence. Can we go further and suggest that the link of Northumbria with Inishbofin is not fortuitous—that when Colmân left Iona for Inishbofin he was taking his followers to a community already known to be established there, and already in touch with Iona— another island community like Iona itself? and like Lindisfarne? It is difficult to account in any other way for Colmân’s choice of this remote island. Actually, unlike most of the islands off the west coast, Inishbofin is neither high nor rugged but is very fertile owing to a deep deposit of boulder clay,1 and this is implied by the agricul­ ture practised by Colmân’s Saxon followers during their brief sojourn on the island, and its favourable conditions doubtless influenced the choice of this island for Colmân’s earliest settlement, and in all likelihood an earlier settlement established from Iona.2 It is otherwise highly unlikely that he and his numerous followers would leave Iona for an unknown destination and arrive at the most fertile island off this exceptionally inclement coast. Moreover, the close communication between Iona and the north-west of Ireland is attested, not only by Columba’s own migration earlier, but by the journeys of Adamnan and Ecgberht to Iona later.3 The identity of the ‘Romaniser’ of Mayo remains the great puzzle however. Apart from the name€Gerald *, someone unidenti­ fied, and almost certainly not Colmân himself, must have brought about the conversion of Mayo to the Roman Obedience between 1 The cattle are described as magnificent beasts. See T . H. Mason, The Islands of Ireland (2nd ed., London, 1938), p. 51. * The Tripartite Life of Patrick (p. 82) records a tradition that Patrick had a brother Mo Rfoc of Inis Böfinne. Cf. also Morioc of Inis Böfin in Litany 7 of the Litanies of Irish Saints (ed. Bradshaw, London, 1925). 8 In this connection it is interesting to note that the Amra Choluimb Chille refers to this ‘western island ’ by name, indicating the western limit of Columba’s powers of ‘ illumination \ See the edition by Whitley Stokes, Revue celtique, xx (1899), 170, 171. 204

B E D E , S T C O L M Â N A N D I R I S H A B B E Y OF M A Y O

the arrival of Colmân in Ireland and the time of Bede’s Historia. Yet Bede, who was in touch with the Irish foundation, and who tells us so much about it and about St Colmân, gives no name to its reformer. He does, however, tell us much about the North­ umbrian monk Ecgberht, who was mainly instrumental in bringing about the Romanisation of the north of Ireland as a whole; who was closely associated in this work with Adamnan ; and whose life and death corresponded with close approximation to that of ‘Gerald’. Moreover, we have seen that there is at least a prob­ ability that the work of Ecgberht and Adamnan was carried on from this same monastery of Mayo. One is tempted to suggest—it can be no more than a suggestion—that the man responsible for the foundation of Mayo, at least for its early adoption of the Roman Order, was Ecgberht himself, Adamnan’s colleague, for whom the later Norman writer has substituted the name Gerald, a patron of the later foundation. The serious objection to this suggestion is that if Ecgberht really took part in the founding or reformation of Mayo it is strange that Bede does not tell us so. On the other hand, this silence is perhaps no less strange than his sparsity of details of other important Anglo-Saxon sojourners in Celtic lands. We should never have learned from Bede that King Aldfrith in the land in which his youth was spent was known under the name of Fland Fina.1 1 Readers interested in St Colman’s background and the character of Inishbofin may profitably consult chap, ix of T . H. Mason, The Islands of Irelandt ed. cit. ; T . J. Westropp, Antiquarian Handbook (published by the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, no. v i i , 1905, Guide to the Northern, Western and Southern Islands and Coast of Ireland), p. 43. Its caves served as places of refuge to persecuted priests throughout the Cromwellian régime (see the historical novel, Seek the Fair Land, by Walter Macken (London, 1959))- For a serious study of the medieval abbey of Mayo founded by the de Burghs (Burkes) in the late thirteenth century see H. T . Knox, History of Mayo, vol. xxxn, passim.

205

VII cD e w i S a n t’ (S t D a v id ) in E arly English Kalendars and P lace-N am es BY B R U C E D I C K I N S

This paper deals exclusively with the popular form of St David’s name as recorded in the late Old English and early Middle English period, and with the two aspects mentioned in the title. It has been prompted by S t David in the Liturgy (Cardiff, 1940, but only recently come to my notice), the work of the Rev. Silas M. Harris, who, in chap, hi, queries unnecessarily the forms used by Old English scribes to represent the Welsh name Dewi. The earliest appearance of Dewi in English kalendars is in that of The Leofric Missal} at fo. 40 r of MS. Bodley 579 (S.C. 2675). This was compiled c. 970 at Glastonbury, which was under strong Celtic influence. The entry under 1 March, *... et sancti D ewi episcopi et confessons’, is not however in the original hand, but was made some time before c. 1050, by which time the kalendar was in use at Exeter Cathedral. The next in order of date occurs at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 422, p. 31, which comes from Sherborne, of which Asser of St David’s had once been bishop. This is commonly known as4The rede boke of darleye in the peake in darbyshire ’ from a much later inscription on the last flyleaf ; the reading is not ‘ Darbye ’ as printed by Mr Harris following earlier scholars. The entry under i March is read by M. R. James as ‘ S. d e u - . . . ’, by F. Wormald12 as ‘Sancti Deuin’, which Mr Harris styles ‘an impossible form’. A close examination shows that the original hand wrote ‘Sancfi deui episcopi’, but ‘deui’ has been clumsily altered to ‘deuin’. There is no need to assume, as Mr Harris does, ‘a misreading by the scribe of the copy before him, which probably had degui.’ The third and last occurrence is at fo. 4r of Cottonian Nero A n, in a Wessex kalendar of the eleventh century, which gives under 1 Ed. F. E. Warren (Oxford, 1883). 2 English Kalendars before a .d . 1100 (Henry Bradshaw Society, vol. 72), 1 (1934), 186. 206

‘ D E W I SANT* (ST DAV I D )

i March ‘ Donatiepiscopi martiris et Deawig episcopi'.1 Mr Harris comments: ‘The unusual form which David's name takes here is evidently derived by metathesis from the Old Welsh Degui___This is indeed the form of the name found in Asser's book on Alfred.' It would be an odd type of metathesis, and a simpler way to account for the -ig is to compare it with Tokig, Tostig, etc., the late Old English way of representing Old Danish Tôki, Tosti, etc. There was an Old English adjective dëawig, ‘dewy' which may have influenced the spelling of the name ; this is the first element of Dewhurst.2 There is in fact nothing abnormal about the spelling of dewi, deuior Deawig. To turn to the occurrence of Dewi in English place-names—and I count as English those place-names in Wales that have an English second element—it seems probable that the first part of Dewsbury (W. Riding of Yorkshire) is the genitive of the name, though the saint was not necessarily the eponym. A couple of twelfth-century forms, notably Deuwythbiris 1190 Yorkshire Charters 1748, point that way; see A. H. Smith, English Place-Name Society, xxxi, 185. Ekwall was inclined to support the O.E. name, or common noun, Dëaw recorded in Deawes broc (Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum 1282 of the year 972).3 We are on safe ground in dealing with the following names, which contain, or have contained, an Old English noun preceded by Dewi in the genitive : M

uch and

L it t l e D

ew church,

Herefordshire

Lann Deui Ros Cerion c. 1130 Liber Landavensis. Deuweschirche c. 1125 Gloucester Cartulary.4 D

ew sall,

Herefordshire

Dewyeswelle 1243 Book of Fees. Ecclesia de Fonte David 1269 Bishop's Register. Deweswall 1291 Taxatio Ecclesiastical The second element of the modern form goes back to Old Mercian wælle (West Saxon wielle) ‘well, spring'; cf. St David's Well in Over Stowey.6 D

a v id s t o w ,

Cornwall

Dewestow c. 1230 Bishop's Register ; 1313 Bishop's Register. par. Sancti David 1377 Poll-Tax Roll.1 1 F. Wormald, op. cit. 1, 32. 2 E. Ekwall, Place-Names of Lancashire (Manchester, 1922), p. 72. 3 E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names4 (Oxford, i960), s.n. 4 A. T . Bannister, Place-Names of Herefordshire (Cambridge, 1916), pp. 57-8. 5 Bannister, op. cit. p. 58. 6 E. Home, Somerset Holy Wells (London, 1923), p. 47. 7 E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, s.n. 207

‘ D E W I SANT* ( ST D A V I D )

When a personal name in the genitive precedes Old English stow ‘place’, the name is very often that of the saint to whom the village church is dedicated; cf. Jacobstow (James the Greater), Morwenstow (Morwenna), Padstow (Petroc), all in Cornwall, Instow (John the Baptist) and Marystow (Mary the Virgin), both in Devon, Marstow (Martin) in Herefordshire and Hibaldstow (Hygebald) in Lincolnshire. In Medieval Latin locus was similarly used of an ecclesiastical establishment, and this was borrowed into the Brittonic languages—Welsh Hoc and Breton loc. In Breton loc ‘sacred place’, ‘cell’, ‘hermitage’, is not uncommon as the first element of place-names followed by the name of a saint associated in some way with the site, as Loquenval (Guenvael), Locquenolé (Guenolé), Locquirec and Locronan, to cite only a few incontro­ vertible examples. In Welsh Hoc is obsolete in the sense of a monastery or other ecclesiastical foundation, nor does it occur uncompounded in place-names, unless by any chance in the parish of Whitford in Flintshire where there is a hamlet called Lloc. Here there are two chapels, but one is Methodist and the other Baptist, and it does not seem likely that either is the source of the name. The Welsh lloc is represented however in the compound mynachlogy with which may be compared the place-name in Brittany Locminé (in Breton Loc-menec'h)y and Mrs Chadwick1 tells me that the original site of Strata Florida (Welsh Ystradfflur ‘river-floor of the Fflur’), where the Cistercian abbey stood till it was moved by the Lord Rhys, is still called locally Yr Hen Fynachlog ‘the Old Monastery’; on the i in. O.S. sheet for Aberystwyth the site is marked ‘Old Abbey Farm*. 1 See Studies in the Early British Churchy ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 178 ff. Further examples of mynachlog are to be found in the following Welsh parishes: (1) Mynachlog Ddu (Co. of Pembroke, no. 732), where the church, dedicated to St Dogmael, was appropriated to the Benedictine (Black) priory of St Dogmael’s; in the Taxatio Ecclesiastica of 1291 it appears as Capella de Nigra Grangea. (2) Northop (Co. of Flinty no. 218), where it is possibly the site of a monastic grange. (3) Churchstoke (Co. of Montgomery, no. 132), where was probably a grange of Cwmhir Abbey. (4) Llangurig (Co. of Montgomery no. 549), where was probably a grange of one of the Welsh Cistercian abbeys ; Strata Florida had interests in the parish. (5) Llansantffraid (Co. of Radnor, no. 443), called Wain (? Waun) Mynachlog, where was probably a grange of Cwmhir Abbey. (6) Llandarog (Co. of Carmarthen, no. 241), where was probably a grange of Carmarthen Priory. (7) Pencarreg (Co. of Carmarthen, no. 695), where was probably a grange of Strata Florida Abbey. References of the type Co. of Pembroke are to the inventories published by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire, London, 1911- . 208

‘ d E W I SANT* (ST DAVI D)

Examples from Wales are: in Caldicot, Monmouthshire Dewystowe 1219-75 Deeds in Public Record Office.1

D ew stow

To this may be added Dingestow (Dingad) and Wonastow (Gwnwarwy), both in Monmouthshire, and the Glamorganshire Tythegston (Tudwg), Michaelston Le Pit and Michaelston super Ely, all of which were at an earlier stage names in -stow. D ewsland Hundred, Pembrokeshire Dewisland 1405 Calendar of Public Records relating to Pembrokeshire, ed. H. Owen, 1, 27; Dewesland 1450 ibid. 1, 2g.2 With this may be compared a sentence in Edward Lhuyd’s Parochialia (1699), referring to a piece of land in Caerwys, Flint­ shire: ‘There is a Foot of Land in ye Church-yard called Dewi’s Land for wh reason ye Town will be always free from ye plague.*3 Finally, D. C. Davies mentions that the little valley in Newton Nottage, Glamorganshire, in which springs Fynnon Dewi, was called Dezois-cumbe in the twelfth century and that there was once a chapel near by.4 1 2 3 4

B. G. Charles, Non-Celtic Place-Names in Wales (London, 1938), p. 242. Charles, op. cit. p. 27. Archaeologia Cambrensis, Supplement (1909), p. 67. History of the Ancient Church Situate at Newton, Porthcawl (Cowbridge,

1938), PP- 47 ff-

14

209

CCS

VII I Pre-Norm an Churches o f the Border BY JOAN A N D H A R O L D T A Y L O R ABBREVIATIONS

Archaeological Journal. Arch. J. Baldwin Brown G. B. Brown, The Arts in Early England, 2, AngloSaxon Architecture, 2nd ed. (London, 1925). A. W. Clapham, English Romanesque Architecture Clapham before the Conquest (Oxford, 1930). D.A.y D.H.y G.H.y G.P. and G.R. These abbreviations for published editions of the texts concerned with Glastonbury are explained in footnotes on p. 253. Journal of the British Archaeological Association. J.B.A.A. T. D. Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art to a .d .ço o (London, Kendrick, 1 !938)T. D. Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art (London, Kendrick, 11 ! 949). „ , , Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, England. R.C.H.M. F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. Stenton (Oxford, 1947). V.C.H. Victoria County History. INTRODUCTION The object of this essay is to bring together into an accessible form brief accounts of the churches which have survived from before the Norman Conquest in those parts of Great Britain which formed the borders between Anglo-Saxon England and the adjoining British or Celtic countries. Too much significance must not be attached to the absence of churches from a particular area, for, as Baldwin Brown pointed out nearly half a century ago,1 so many churches have been destroyed in the intervening years, and their destruction has depended on causes that have varied so much from place to place, that dense or sparse distributions at the present time need not at all imply a similar state of affairs before the Conquest. On the other hand, the survival of a church is clear proof that Christianity had reached the district concerned at the time when the church was built, and the survival of churches of closely similar patterns in two 1 Baldwin Brown, p. xviii. 210

PRE-NORM AN

CHURCHES OF THE BORDER

or more districts will give reasonable evidence that the districts con­ cerned were subject to some common influence at or before the time when the churches were built. The alphabetical list of Saxon and Saxo-Norman churches pub­ lished by Baldwin Brown as chapter xiv of his Anglo-Saxon Archi­ tecture gave a comprehensive account of the subject as it was known in 1925. We are attempting elsewhere to bring together the results of later discoveries for England as a whole and so to produce a comprehensive record of the surviving pre-Conquest churches ; in this article we give a very condensed summary for the borders of Anglo-Saxon England. As yet we are far from completing the de­ ductions which we hope will follow from the complete survey of the Anglo-Saxon churches of England, and we have accordingly planned this article more as a survey of the border material than as an attempt to make any very general picture of the period from the rather scanty material which has survived. Although we make a few incidental deductions by the way, our main purpose is to record the evidence and to point the way for further investigation. The three main sections which follow are related respectively to the Scottish Border, the Welsh Border, and the Devonshire Border. In addition there is a very brief section relating to the western sea-board along the coast from Wales to Scotland. Each of the three main sections begins with an introductory general discussion on sculpture and architecture and there then follows a discussion of the architectural features of the district, including both pre-Norman and Saxo-Norman. This is followed by an alphabetical list of the pre-Norman churches in the district con­ cerned. In the section relating to the Devonshire border we have included a note in some detail about Glastonbury in order to bring into a single place both the results of recent excavations and also a convenient summary of the history as it was recorded in the twelfth century or soon thereafter, since these historical sources are very scattered and are not readily available. T

he

S

cottish

B

order

Introduction In Bede's time, the boundary between the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria and the land of the Piets to the north was on the line of the Forth, but Bede's wording makes it clear that, before the 211

14-2

PRE-NORM AN

CHURCHES OF TH E BORDER

defeat and death of Ecgfrith at Nechtansmere in 685, the English border had been considerably further north. Moreover, although Trumwine was driven from the bishopric of the Piets, which he had held for the preceding four years, with his seat at Abercorn, the monastery at Abercorn on the south bank of the Forth remained ‘in the country of the English*. On the west, lower Clydesdale and perhaps Ayrshire were in British hands, but Galloway and the Solway coast were probably already part of the Northumbrian kingdom, for an English bishopric was established at Whithorn about a .d . 731.1 It is therefore disappointing to find how little evidence now survives of any stone churches built in these borderlands before the Norman Conquest. Nothing has been found of an early church at Abercorn, but a fragment of cross-shaft can be accepted as a survival from the period of the bishopric. At Whithorn some foundations at a lower level may be seen at the east of the chancel of the Norman church, and the surrounding district is remarkably rich in crosses which extend to a much earlier period. The ‘Latinus stone * at Whithorn is commonly dated about a .d . 450, while two at nearby Kirkmadrine are claimed for the middle of the sixth century and a third for the beginning of the seventh. All these are dated on the evidence of the character of their inscriptions and of the lettering employed, and they may perhaps be regarded as stemming from the mission of St Ninian in the twilight of the Roman era. The later group of stones in the neighbourhood of Whithorn date from the period of the Northumbrian bishopric or thereafter, and are ornamentally sculptured in the Northumbrian manner. Further east, but still in the same western area, there are the magnificent seventh-century crosses at Bewcastle (Cumberland) and Ruthwell (Dumfries) and the fragments of similar character at Hoddom (Dumfries). But of the early stone churches, none has survived in the eastern areas between the Tweed and the Forth, and on the west none is as far north as Carlisle. Reference will, however, be made below to remains of three interesting later churches of an English preNorman type in the eastern plains of Scotland at St Andrews, Dunfermline, and Restenneth. Although there were several important early monasteries in these border districts, next to nothing is now to be seen of them ; a pro1 Stenton, pp. 88 and 146 n. 212

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tective wall and some scattered foundations on the heights beside St Abb’s Head about two miles north of Coldingham may serve to mark St Ebba’s monastery, and even less is to be seen at Old Melrose, the site of Boisil’s monastery, about two miles east of Melrose, where St Cuthbert began his service of the church. At Lindisfarne all the early buildings have been replaced in Norman times, and it is not until we come south to the Tyne that we reach important architectural survivals of seventh-century monasteries, at Hexham and Jarrow. The great volume of evidence for the nature of the buildings in the former kingdom of Northumbria therefore comes from the smaller churches which, scattered throughout the kingdom, give evidence of building styles from the seventh to the eleventh cen­ turies. But even of these there are not many reliable examples north of the Tyne. One possible explanation of the paucity of survivals of early churches in the northern districts may be that in the early days of Christianity in the north the direction was in the hands of such men as Aidan and Cuthbert whose interests were in a life of sim­ plicity rather than the provision of substantial churches. Further south and slightly later, under the guidance of such men as Wilfrid and Biscop, a great wave of building was begun. Northumbrian crosses The free-standing stone crosses of Northumbria are a most important part of the history of English art from the seventh century onward. Mention has already been made of the important examples at Bewcastle and Ruthwell, and other notable early examples are to be seen in Northumberland at Hexham and Rothbury. At the latter place, part of the broken shaft is now used as the stem of the font, and parts of the head were found during the rebuilding of the church last century and are now preserved in the museum of the Society of Antiquaries at Newcastle. Further north, at Jedburgh in Roxburghshire, a substantial piece of a tenth-century cross-shaft decorated with simple interlacing patterns is preserved in the abbey museum, and at Dryburgh, only a few miles away, the base of an earlier cross is to be seen in the chapter-house, now mounted on a pedestal as if for the bowl of a font. The Northumbrian type of cross does not seem to have become fashionable north of the Forth, but in its place there are to be found examples of the Irish type of high cross, free-standing, and with a 213

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wheel-encircled head; or the Pictish type of cross incised, or carved in relief, on a large flat slab of stone. Of the latter type there are many important examples, particularly in the eastern plains, where it is of interest to note that there seem to be no examples of the Northumbrian type of cross although there are three examples of churches of a later English pre-Conquest type. Anglo-Saxon architectural features in Northumberland Unlike the kingdoms of southern England, the kingdom of North­ umbria shows almost no instances of the Anglo-Saxon features which in the south are commonly regarded as characteristic of the later phases of Anglo-Saxon architecture, namely the elabor­ ate external division of the walls into compartments by means of stone pilaster-strips, the strengthening of the angles with longand-short quoins, and the construction of windows with a splay both outward and inward, the so-called double-splayed windows. This absence of such features from Northumbrian buildings should not be taken to mean that very few of the surviving buildings were erected in the later years of Anglo-Saxon England, but rather that these particular features which were then so common in the south did not become popular in the north. It seems not impossible that the plentiful supply of good build­ ing stone in Northumbria, particularly its availability in more or less fully worked form in derelict Roman buildings, may have been the reason why these southern fashions did not appeal to northern builders. It is more than likely that all three of these features were developed in the south for logical reasons associated with the fact that most of the southern buildings used rubble for their main walls and had dressed stone only at angles and in other places where it was needed to give greater strength. There can be little doubt that, in walls that were preponderantly of rubble, the use of long-andshort quoins, pilaster-strips, and double-splayed windows allowed the builder to achieve a stronger result with less effort. There can be equally little doubt that the use of these features offered no similar advantages when the builder was working with a plentiful supply of squared stone, all cut to something like standard sizes. Long-and-short quoins. The only instance of which we are aware of the use of genuine long-and-short quoining in Northumbria is at Whittingham, about seven miles west of Alnwick. It is also of interest to note that the lower parts of the western quoins, and the 214

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whole of the surviving early work in the eastern quoins, is of sidealternate character, that is to say of stones set on their sides and placed with their longer horizontal edges set alternately first along one wall and next along the other. Since this is the normal type of quoining elsewhere throughout Northumbria, it seems likely that the church may originally have been of the usual Northumbrian type and that it was later partially destroyed and then restored under the supervision of someone who for some reason particularly favoured the southern style. In this connection it should also be noted that the long-and-short work on the west quoins at Whittingham is of a type which is characteristic of the extreme south of England, particularly Sussex, in which the special distinguishing feature is that neighbouring upright pillar-stones are not separated by a single flat bonding stone of wide, square plan, but by two stones, each rectangular in plan, of which one extends a consider­ able distance along the face of one wall while the other extends along the adjoining wall. It has occasionally been said that longand-short quoining is to be seen at Heddon-on-the-Wall, about seven miles west of Newcastle, but we believe that this is a mis­ understanding and that the single surviving quoin at that church is of the normal Northumbrian side-alternate character.1 Double-splayed windows. Apart from Skipwith, which is within a few miles of the Humber, the only instance of the use of doublesplayed windows in Northumbria is at Jarrow, where there were two in the first-floor chamber of the tower. One of these, on the south, has long been converted for use as a doorway, but the other survives in its original form. Both are wholly faced in ashlar, where­ as almost all the double-splayed windows in England are formed of rubble. In this connection it is of great interest to note that in the south-west of England double-splayed windows of ashlar seem to have been the rule rather than the exception, since the doublesplayed windows which have survived at Barrow and Diddlebury, in Shropshire, and at Hereford, are all of ashlar and there are no surviving examples built of rubble in those two counties. This fact seems to us to give very strong support to an assignment of this part of the tower at Jarrow to the period of the restoration about 1074 by the Saxon monk Aldwin, who came from Winchcombe in Gloucestershire. Pilaster-strips. There is no instance in Northumbria of the use of 1 Baldwin Brown, p. 458. See also later in this article, p. 222. 215

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pilaster-strips to divide the face of a building into compartments in the way that is common in the south, for example at Earl's Barton, in Northamptonshire, or Headbourne Worthy in Hampshire.1 Northumbria, however, has its own characteristic use of pilasterstrips to form an outlining framework for the double windows of belfries, and this outlining framework is not found elsewhere in England. Normal Northumbrian features. The Northumbrian churches now surviving from before the Conquest have plans which are generally long and narrow, and their walls are usually tall and thin; these walls are almost all built of roughly squared stone, with larger and more carefully squared stones for their side-alternate quoins. In one or two cases where rough rubble is used in the walling, there are small areas laid in herringbone fashion, for example at Monkwearmouth and at Seaham. Windows are usually larger in the earlier churches and become smaller in the later churches; their heads are usually round, with the outer face formed of a large stone lintel that is cut away below to the shape of the head. Internally an even larger lintel is usually used for the wider splay of the head, but in a few of the earlier churches the interior splay is neatly arched, as in the west windows at Monkwearmouth. Less usually the windows have flat heads, as in the north wall at Escomb; or tri­ angular heads, as in three of the belfry windows at Bolam. Door­ ways may have round arched heads or flat heads formed of lintels, and the earliest examples are often rebated for the hanging of the door, as at Escomb and Monkwearmouth. Greater openings are arched, and are usually formed of through-stones, that is to say stones that pass through the full thickness of the walls. Tower-churches in England and Scotland In Scotland the only churches known to us of a distinctly English pre-Norman type are those belonging to the group of towerchurches; in this group St Regulus’s chapel survives largely intact beside the cathedral at St Andrews, a second church survives only as a tower at Restenneth, near Forfar, about 20 miles to the north, and the remains of a third may be seen in outline below the floor of 1 Baldwin Brown, pp. 307 and 463, claimed that Kirkdale (Yorkshire, North Riding) originally had a pilaster-strip on its west gable, similar to that which sur­ vives at Boarhunt (Hampshire). We believe that there never was any such pilaster at Kirkdale and that the drawing of 1821 was an inaccurate copy of an earlier picture that showed wooden beams. 216

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the Norman cathedral at Dunfermline, about 30 miles south-west of St Andrews. These churches and their closest English analogues at Broughton (Lincolnshire) and EarFs Barton (Northamptonshire) were two-cell structures consisting of a square west tower which also served as the nave, and a rectangular eastern compartment or chancel. In the two English examples the eastern compartments have vanished, but they were certainly narrower than the tower-nave, because at EarFs Barton the long-and-short quoins extend right to the ground on the eastern angles of the tower, while at Broughton the marks of the walls of the narrower chancel can still be seen on the east wall of the tower. At Barton-on-Humber (Lincolnshire) the tower also served as the nave, with a narrower chancel to the east, but the plan differed from the other examples mentioned above by having to the west of the tower a third compartment which has survived to the present day. At EarFs Barton the arch opening eastward from the tower has been replaced in Norman times and again much modified later. At Broughton and at Barton-on-Humber the original arches have survived and each is elaborately treated on the western face towards the tower-nave, by contrast with the severely plain eastward face towards the chancel. It was this difference of elaboration which first led to the interpretation that the tower-space was the original nave. At Dunfermline, the surviving plan conforms to the two-cell pattern of Broughton and EarFs Barton, with the eastern compart­ ment narrower than the tower. At St Regulus’s, on the other hand, the eastern chamber is wider than the tower although clearly con­ temporary with it. At Restenneth, only the tower has survived from the early church, and it is difficult now to be certain whether the eastern cell was wider or narrower, although the former seems to be indicated by the alignment of the much later wall of the present nave to the east of the tower. We cannot suggest why this particular type of church should have secured favour both in England and in Scotland, but the similarity of plan, and indeed of certain details, suggests that there must have been some fairly close contacts between the two countries or else some common model elsewhere which was copied in both countries. As to date, EarFs Barton and Barton-on-Humber are commonly 217

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accepted as being of the tenth century and Broughton of the eleventh, perhaps even after the Conquest. We believe that Broughton is of pre-Conquest date, in spite of certain advanced features in its tower-arch, and in particular because of the peculiar way in which its newel staircase is constructed with separate stones for the newel and for the treads. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the Scottish examples of this type of church were built at the same date as their English counterparts, and indeed Bilson has advanced a carefully reasoned argument, which has secured very general acceptance, for a twelfth-century date for St Regulus’s chapel. Bilson’s argument depends upon his having established certain similarities of detail, of an unusual character, between St Regulus’s chapel and the church of Wharram-le-Street in Yorkshire, and upon his having shown that there is historical evidence connecting both places with Nostell Priory, in Yorkshire, early in the twelfth century.1 At the time of the Domesday survey, the manor of Wharram was recorded as lying waste but held by a certain Nigel Fossard. Nigel’s son Robert gave the church at Wharram, along with others, to Nostell Priory, and it was from Nostell that there came to Scotland a group of monks including a certain Robert who, as bishop of St Andrews from 1144, was one of the cathedral’s great builders. This is the merest summary of the evidence upon which Bilson founded his belief that the same group of masons from Nostell had built both churches early in the twelfth century.12 We think that Bilson’s argument requires closer inspection, for the similarities of detail which he noticed in the two buildings were confined to the tower-arch and west doorway at Wharram and the great eastern and western arches at St Andrews. Bilson’s deduc­ tion that these were built in the first half of the twelfth century seems to us to be valid and to be consistent with the similarity of the mouldings of these arches with others at Lincoln, Durham, and Norwich that were built in the last decade of the eleventh century. But the detail of these arches is at variance with the character of the 1 J. Bilson, ‘ Wharram-le-Street church, Yorkshire, and St Rule’s church, St Andrews’, Archaeologia, lxxiii (1922-3), 52-72. 2 The general acceptance of Bilson's argument is well illustrated by the state­ ment in the Ministry of Works Guide to Ancient Monuments of Scotland (Edin­ burgh, 1961), p. 63, that the church of St Rule was ‘built between 1126 and 1144’ and that it ‘was built by Yorkshire masons, but the great height of its tower seems to betray Celtic influence’. 218

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main fabric of the buildings in which they stand, and we believe that they are twelfth-century insertions in earlier buildings. If, as Bilson asserted, the churches as a whole had been built by the same masons, there would surely have been many similarities other than these arches; but in fact the two churches are very unlike. Whereas Wharram is of roughly squared rubble, with larger side-alternate quoins, St Regulus’s is of ashlar, most carefully coursed through­ out the walling, including its quoins. Whereas the tower at Wharram is somewhat squat and has its belfry windows outlined by the Northumbrian type of strip-work hood-moulding, the tower at St Regulus’s is quite exceptionally tall and has its belfry windows recessed in a way that has no close parallel in England. At Wharram it is not easy to see clear evidence that the arches are later insertions, but important confirmatory evidence was recorded by Bilson himself, namely that the arches and their jambs are closely jointed, whereas the main fabric is set with wide mortar joints. Now the windows and other openings in the tower have the same wide joints as the rest of the fabric, and it is therefore unlikely that the closely jointed arches were built by the masons who erected the main fabric.1 At St Regulus’s we believe it is easy to see that the west arch of the tower and the east arch of the chapel are later insertions in the earlier fabric. In the first place, the head of the west arch cuts away part of an elaborate string-course which other­ wise runs round the whole building. Secondly, the jambs of the arch are not coursed with the main fabric but are very badly bonded into it, whereas all the remainder of the building, including its quoins and the jambs of its double-splayed windows, is most carefully laid in continuous courses. To us it is inconceivable that masons who were erecting the main fabric with such careful atten­ tion to detail should have been so careless in the construction of the jambs of these large arches, where careful attention to bonding would have been regarded as of double importance. Since Bilson’s argument shows that a single designer or mason supervised the building of the great arches early in the twelfth century, it follows from our argument that the churches must have been built earlier, probably considerably earlier, since by the begin­ ning of the twelfth century they were thought to be in need of some 1 If one could remove the plaster from the walls beside the tower-arch it would probably be possible to settle with certainty whether or not the arch was a later insertion in a pre-existing wall. 219

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major change. The great difference in the quality of the masonry gives further confirmation, in each case, that there was a con­ siderable lapse of time between the original building of the church and the insertion of the later arches. At Wharram we believe it follows that the church itself was built before the Norman Conquest, since William’s devastation of Yorkshire followed closely there­ after and the district round Wharram was recorded as lying waste at the time of the Domesday survey. Further confirmation of a pre-Conquest date for the towerchurches in Scotland is given by the remains beneath the floor of the Norman nave at Dunfermline. Malcolm Canmore, king of Scotland, married Margaret, great-niece of Edward the Confessor, here about 1070. Shortly thereafter she arranged for priests to be brought from Canterbury to set up regular services in the church, which she enlarged for the purpose. In 1128 her son David began the build­ ing of the present Norman nave, which he modelled closely on the work at Durham. The simple two-cell plan beneath the floor of the nave represents the foundation of the pre-Norman chapel in which Margaret and Malcolm were married; and the eastward extension which was carried out under her direction can also be seen. Alphabetical list of pre-Norman churches of the Scottish border Abercorn ( West Lothian). There seem to be no structural remains of the church of the bishopric which was established here from 681 to 685, but a fine section of Anglian cross-shaft has survived. (For illustrations, see Kendrick, 1, pi. L, or Clapham, pi. 14.) Bamburgh (Northumberland). In the early part of the seventh century, the Anglian invasions which established the northern kingdom of Bernicia seem to have been centred on the stronghold of Bamburgh, whose name, derived from Bebbanburh, preserves its association with King Æthelfrith and his Queen Bebba. Despite its early importance there seem to be no remains from before the Norman Conquest. Bolam (Northumberland). The fine pre-Conquest tower at Bolam, about seven miles west-south-west of Morpeth, has two belfry stages, with double windows in the lower stage and tall single win­ dows above. One of the upper windows is round-headed and the other three have triangular heads. The western quoins of the nave also remain, and a simple square-sectioned string-course running along the south face of the south wall of the nave may indicate that 220

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the wall is original, simply pierced by the later arcade. (For a fuller description, see C. C. Hodges, The Reliquary, n.s. vu (1893), 71-4.) Bywell (Northumberland). This tiny village beside the north bank of the Tyne, about twelve miles west of Newcastle, has two interest­ ing churches. The west tower of St Andrew’s has long been accepted as Anglo-Saxon ; its belfry windows are outlined by a hood-mould­ ing of strip-work that is carried in a single sweep round the head and down the sides of each double window, in the way that is to be found in several Northumbrian churches but nowhere else in England. It has been established only recently that the greater part of St Peter’s is also pre-Conquest, of an earlier period, probably not remote in date from Wilfrid’s great abbey at Hexham. Of this early period there remain the north wall of the nave, with four large and round-headed single-splayed windows, both eastern quoins of the nave, and adjacent parts of the side walls of the chancel.1 Coldingham (Berwickshire). Little is known of the monastery which Ebba founded near St Abbs Head, about twelve miles northnorth-west of Berwick-on-Tweed, possibly in gratitude for her brother Oswiu’s victory over the heathen King Penda of Mercia at Winwæd in 658. That it was a double house for nuns and monks is clear from Bede’s accounts of how Queen Ætheldreda prevailed on her husband Ecgfrith to allow her to go there as a nun and how the story of the destruction of the monastery was told to Bede by his ‘most reverend fellow priest Eadgils who then lived in that monastery ’. At the north-west of the great rocky outcrop beside the sea there still remain foundations that could perhaps represent survivals of two early churches, on two separate sites about half a mile apart. Each site is beside the sea, and one is on a promontory with a ditch and a stonewall separating it from the mainland, while the other is on a hill with an earth rampart as added protection. Vestiges of other buildings within the enclosures are reminiscent of those that were found in Hilda’s early monastery at Whitby. (For Coldingham, see O. G. S. Crawford, Antiquity, vm (1934), 202-4. For Whitby, see C. R. Peers and C. A. R. Radford, Archaeologia, lx x x ix ( 1943), 27-88.) Corbridge (Northumberland). The earliest work at Corbridge may well be contemporary with Wilfrid’s seventh-century abbey at near­ by Hexham. The church then consisted of a square west porch, an aisleless nave, and a small rectangular chancel which has vanished, 1 For a detailed account see E. Gilbert, Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th ser. xxiv (1946), 157-76, and xxv (1947), 140-78. 22 1

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but of which indications have been found beneath the floor.1 In later pre-Conquest times the west porch was raised to form a tower, and in the thirteenth century the church was much enlarged by piercing arcades through the walls of the Anglo-Saxon nave and by building a completely new chancel wider than the nave. Vestiges of the early windows of the nave survive above the Early English north arcade, and a similar early window may be seen in the west porch, in its original state. The tower-arch is a fine example of Anglo-Saxon re­ use of Roman material, and Roman stones may be seen in many other parts of the fabric. Dunfermline {Fife). The interesting early foundations now to be seen beneath the floor of the Norman nave have been noticed in the text, pp. 217 and 220 above. Ebbs Nook {Northumberland). On the south shore of the pro­ montory which juts out eastward from Beadnall there are vestiges of a simple rectangular chapel which may be of early date although too little is at present visible to enable any reliable opinion to be formed without excavation. Edlingham {Northumberland). This interesting church, about six miles north-east of Rothbury, is most attractively set amid rolling moorlands. It is not known whether a church was in existence here when King Ceolwulf gave the place, along with five others, to St Cuthbert in 737 when he resigned his throne in order to become a monk at Lindisfarne. The present church is mainly Norman, with later additions, but the west wall of the nave may incorporate earlier work, particularly beside the south-west quoin, which is of unusually megalithic character. Beside the chancel-arch is a short section of Anglian cross-shaft of which one face is ornamented with simple vine-scroll and another with inhabited vine-scroll. Heddon-on-the-Wall {Northumberland). The only evidence now visible at Heddon of the original church is the south-east quoin of the nave, whose east face may be seen in the angle between the chancel and the much later south aisle. We regard this quoin as a good example of the megalithic side-alternate quoining that was so usual a feature of Northumbrian churches of the seventh and eighth centuries. A mistaken description of the quoin as of long-andshort construction has led to much unnecessary confusion about the dating of this church. It was common practice in the nineteenth 1 W. H. Knowles, in History of Northumberland, io, ed. H. E. E. Craster (Newcastle, 1914), 178-93. 222

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century to use the term long-and-short for quoining that is really of side-alternate character. Hexham (Northumberland), Even the scanty surviving remains of Wilfrid’s great abbey at Hexham are too complex to be described in this brief summary. A full account is given in History of North­ umberland, in, ed. A. B. Hinds (Newcastle, 1896), 105-99. In the light of newly discovered evidence we have recently given a fresh appreciation of this important seventh-century monument (Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser. xxxix (1961) 103-34). Ingram (Northumberland), This remote church, about nine miles north-north-west of Rothbury, beside the upper waters of the Till, has a simple, square, Norman west tower which is clearly a later addition to a pre-existing nave. The tall, thin, side walls of the nave have later been pierced by pointed arcades and no features have survived to fix their date with certainty. Kirk Newton (Northumberland), There is no surviving early fabric in the church at Kirk Newton, about five miles west-northwest of Wooler, but an interesting early sculpture of the Adoration of the Magi has been built into the wall beside the chancel-arch. The church is within two miles of Yeavering, where important dis­ coveries have recently been made by excavation on the site of the royal settlement ad Gefrin mentioned by Bede (H.E. 11, 14) as the place to which Paulinus went with King Edwin in 627 to preach Christianity to the Bernicians and to baptise many of them in the river Glen.1 Long Houghton (Northumberland). The church at Long Hough­ ton, about four miles east-north-east of Alnwick, has a simple, Norman west tower which opens to the nave by a tall, wide, Norman tower-arch of two recessed orders. By contrast, the chancel-arch, of a single square order, is of much more primitive character and, although about the same height, is appreciably narrower. The arch has simple imposts of plain square section, and these are returned along the east wall, which is only 2 ft. 4 in. thick. The fabric at the east end of the north wall of the nave is of earlier character than the remainder of the wall. Melrose (Roxburghshire). The great medieval abbey at Melrose lies outside our period, but the site of the old monastery which St Cuthbert entered under Boisil’s rule may be seen about two miles to the east. Looking across the river from the road on the 1 Medieval Archaeology, 1 (1957), 148-9. 223

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slopes of Bemersyde Hill, it is easy to see how the Tweed enclosed the monastery on three sides and allowed it to be protected by a low bank across the narrow isthmus. It has recently been suggested that the well-known carved stones at Jedburgh, formerly part of a seventh-century shrine, came from this monastery.1 Norham (Northumberland). The village of Norham is attractively placed on the south bank of the Tweed, about midway between Coldstream and Berwick. Bishop Egred built a church here in the ninth century in honour of St Peter, St Cuthbert, and King Ceolwulf who had given the vill to the monks of Lindisfarne. No part of the present church seems earlier than Norman, but several interesting Anglo-Saxon carved stones found last century in the churchyard among some early foundations north-east of the chancel are now in the church. Unfortunately, they have been cemented together to form an obelisk which is placed in a some­ what dark and inaccessible place within the tower. Ovingham (Northumberland). The tall pre-Conquest tower of Ovingham church stands close to the north bank of the Tyne, less than three miles downstream from the twin churches of Bywell. Like the church of St Andrew at Bywell, its double belfry windows are outlined by strip-work hood-moulding. Restenneth (Angus). The interesting tower at Restenneth, about two miles east of Forfar, has been noted in the text, p. 217, above. S t Andrews (Fife). The chapel of St Regulus at St Andrews has been fully discussed in the text, pp. 216-20, above. Warden (Northumberland). The church of St Michael at Warden, at the foot of the ancient camp on Warden Hill, stands in the tongue of land between the north and south branches of the Tyne, less than two miles upstream from Hexham. The western quoins of the nave and the main fabric of the tower are of pre-Conquest workmanship, but the belfry stage was most unfortunately rebuilt or refaced in the eighteenth century. It is at least possible that Warden is the retreat mentioned by Bede (H.E. v, 2), about a mile and a half from Hexham and separated from it by the river Tyne, to which John of Beverley was in the habit of retiring from time to time while bishop of Hexham. Woodhorn (Northumberland). This village, within a mile of the sea by Newbiggin, is another of the vills that were given to St Cuth1 C. A. R. Radford, ‘Two Scottish shrines: Jedburgh and St Andrews*, Arch. J . cxii (1956), 43-60. 224

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bert in 737 by King Ceolwulf when he resigned his throne to become a monk at Lindisfarne. The nave is now aisled, but the simple, round-headed, single-splayed windows of the aisleless nave may still be seen above the Norman arcades which were later cut through these walls. The north and south arcades are both Norman, but of different dates ; the windows which are cut away by these arcades must therefore be of earlier Norman or pre-Norman date, and the latter seems more likely since the walls are only 2 ft. 9 in. thick and about 20 ft. high. The character of the windows suggests to us a date in the early part of the eleventh century. Fragments of several pre-Conquest carved stones are set on the screen-wall between the nave and the tower. These are all appreci­ ably earlier in character than the fabric of the church and some may be as old as the gift of the vill to St Cuthbert. T

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The Anglian kingdom of Northumbria is usually thought to have extended to the Irish Sea along a broad front from the Solway to the Mersey as early as the reign of King Æthelfrith, who defeated the Britons near Chester, about 616. His successor Edwin occupied the Isle of Man and parts of North Wales before his defeat and death at the hands of Penda and Cadwallon at Hatfield Chase in 632.1 It is therefore disappointing to find that there is comparatively little architectural evidence from before the Norman Conquest in the western seaboard counties. In Lancashire there are only the church of St Peter and the ruined chapel of St Patrick, both at Heysham, and both probably of fairly early date, perhaps as early as the eighth century. In Westmorland the architectural remains are more numerous, but later and more fragmentary: Morland church has a massive tower which was probably built shortly before the Conquest, in spite of its thick walls ; Crossby Garret has the remains of a chancel-arch and part of the adjoining south wall of the chancel; at Long Marton the greater part of the nave is AngloSaxon or Saxo-Norman; while a part of the north wall and north doorway at St Michael’s church in the old quarter of Appleby may be of similar date. Symeon of Durham refers to Tilred who was abbot of Heversham at the beginning of the tenth century; nothing remains of his church but in the porch of the present church is a 1 Stenton, pp. 77-80. 15

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section of a cross-shaft ornamented with inhabited vine-scroll, while in the churchyard is a sundial of similar stone, possibly part of this cross. By comparison with the sparse structural remains, the western seaboard counties are rich in carved crosses. The early period of Northumbrian supremacy is commemorated by the stones at Heversham, Hornby, and Halton, as well as in Lancaster itself. But many more of the crosses of this district are of the later period and show considerable Norse influence. These later crosses thus give evidence of the ideas which came either directly from Scandi­ navia or indirectly from the traffic between the settlements in Ire­ land and the Norse kingdom of York. The outstanding work of this later period is the fine wheel-head cross at Gosforth (Cumberland), but there are many other examples, of which it is perhaps sufficient to mention St Bridget’s Beckermet (Cumberland) and Halton (Lancashire). The very complete cross at Irton (Cumberland) is of an intermediate period and has interesting patterns.1 Other patterns of unusual type are to be seen on the cross which now stands in the nave of the parish church at Bolton (Lancashire) and which was found in three pieces under the tower of the fifteenthcentury church, along with other carved stones, when the church was rebuilt last century. T

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elsh

B order

Introduction Although the early accounts of the history of Northumbria indicate clearly the bitter conflict between the Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons, culminating with Æthelfrith’s victory near Chester about 616, there seems by contrast to have been a certain degree of co-operation between the Welsh and their neighbours in Mercia, particularly during the reign of Penda (632-54). Later, too, when the boundary was defined in lasting form by the construction of Offa’s great dyke, the work seems to have been carried out in a period of prolonged peace, with considerable mutual adjustments in order to allow the frontier to follow a simple course.2 1 For illustrations see the following works: Irton, Clapham, pi. 17, Kendrick, i, pi. xcii; Gosforth, Clapham, pi. 57, Kendrick, 11, pi. xliv; Bolton, V .C .H ., Lancashire, I (London, 1906), 264. 2 Stenton, pp. 212-13, suggests the period 784-96. 226

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The northern part of the border district is singularly deficient in churches of the pre-Norman era, but has a pair of notable crosses, probably of the eighth century, at Sandbach, Cheshire. Other crosses of much the same period are to be found in Derbyshire at Bakewell and Eyam.1 If churches of the Anglo-Saxon type were built in the Welsh dis­ tricts to the west of the line of Offa’s dyke, none seems to have sur­ vived, but on the English lands to the east of the dyke there are several pre-Norman churches in Shropshire, Herefordshire, and Gloucestershire. Remains of St Mildburg’s seventh-century abbey were disclosed by excavation at Much Wenlock in 1902, and Shrewsbury is recorded as having had at least four pre-Conquest churches, of which unfortunately nothing now remains to be seen. But at nearby Atcham and Wroxeter the north walls of the two sur­ viving churches are built of exceptionally large blocks of stone, no doubt from the ruins of the Roman station of Viroconium, in a way which suggests to us Saxon workmanship of an early date. The late-Saxon period is well represented in Shropshire by the churches of Barrow, Diddlebury, and Stanton Lacy, and there are problematical remains at Stottesdon. In Herefordshire there are fragments of walling which can with some certainty be dated as pre-Conquest in the Norman churches of Kilpeck and Peterstow, and in Hereford itself there are two double-splayed windows in remains of a building which has now been incorporated into the south wall of the later Bishop’s Cloister. At Deerhurst in Gloucestershire, Odda’s chapel can be dated with certainty to the year 1056 by reason of its dedication stone, and the priory church of St Mary, which was formerly regarded as of the tenth century or later, has recently been shown to contain substantial parts of earlier fabric that is probably at least as old as the eighth century. By contrast with the absence of any evidence of early churches on the Welsh side of the frontier, there is ample evidence in the form of early Christian carved and inscribed stones that Christianity was established in that area from the fifth century onward. It is not, however, until about the ninth century that there is any appearance in Wales of crosses of the pattern that had been current in England from about two centuries earlier. Nash-Williams inter­ preted this change partly in terms of a closer association between 1 These crosses are illustrated as follows: Sandbach, Clapham, pi. 15; Eyam, ibid. pi. 17; Bakewell, Kendrick, I, pi. lxvii. 227

1 5-2

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the churches in England and Wales after the settlement, in 768, of the controversy about the date of Easter, and partly in terms of a possible influx of craftsmen as refugees from Viking raids. The latter cause might explain the presence of Northumbrian motives in the Welsh crosses of the ninth century, but these could also have come by direct contact across the border since examples of Anglian beasts and vine-scroll are to be seen in the cross-shaft at Newent (Gloucestershire), while a fragment of a late type of inhabited vinescroll has survived at Brinsop (Herefordshire). Herringbone masonry An interesting feature of the churches of the Welsh border is the extensive use of herringbone technique in their masonry, that is to say the laying of courses of thinnish stones set on a slope, usually but not always with the elaboration that successive courses are sloped in opposite directions so as to give a zig-zag effect. This type of masonry occurs sporadically over almost the whole area, particu­ larly in churches of the eleventh century, and these eleventhcentury churches have usually been regarded as early Norman, on the basis of Baldwin Brown’s firm pronouncement in 1925 that herringbone work was almost always of Norman origin.1 By con­ trast, we believe that herringbone masonry gives no valid criterion for distinguishing between pre-Conquest and post-Conquest work, and that the dating of a church in which herringbone masonry occurs should be determined on the basis of such other evidence as is available. In particular, we believe that the herringbone masonry at Diddlebury can be shown with certainty to be contemporary with the remainder of the wall in which it stands, and we regard this fact as of importance because Baldwin Brown cited the case of Diddlebury as crucial to his contention that herringbone masonry was a valid criterion against the pre-Conquest date of a building. We therefore argue the case of Diddlebury at some length below. Among the churches of the Welsh border, there are only two for which we think it can be claimed with certainty that herringbone masonry was used before the Conquest. At Deerhurst, consider­ able areas of herringbone masonry are to be seen in many parts of the fabric of St Mary’s priory church, in a way which shows that, when the earliest part of the church was built, the technique was constructional and was used so as to allow the convenient employ1 Baldwin Brown, p. 244. 228

''M^îïHÉr. II. Diddlebury.

III. Diddlebury.

IV. Font at Eardisley.

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ment of thin pieces of stone as part of a fabric that was being built of thicker courses of roughly squared stone. At Diddlebury, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that the herringbone masonry was used as a decorative interior facing and not on grounds of structural expediency. Since the appearance of herringbone fabric in an Anglo-Saxon church has sometimes been explained as later patching by Norman masons,1 it is worth putting on record that one of the areas of this technique in the priory church of St Mary at Deerhurst is in the original west front, where the herringbone masonry has later been partly obscured by the side walls of the tower which in later Anglo-Saxon times was built against the west wall of the earlier church. This area therefore establishes the use of the technique at Deerhurst in the earliest part of the church, per­ haps in the eighth century. Of the other churches of the Welsh Border, none presents clearcut evidence of pre-Conquest use of herringbone masonry in the same way as do Deerhurst and Diddlebury. It might be that pre­ cise dates for some of the other churches could be settled by further investigation, particularly if it were possible to remove some areas of plaster and so to settle the relation of the herringbone fabric to certain other details of the buildings. But this further investigation is not necessary for the establishment of our fundamental proposi­ tion, namely that herringbone masonry by itself is not a valid criterion to secure the rejection of a church which has other features that would serve to establish a pre-Conquest date for it. The following paragraphs give accounts of the appearance of herringbone masonry in the Welsh border, so far as we have been able to establish its occurrence. Apart from the important case of Diddlebury the notes are brief and the results are inconclusive. Bredwardine (Herefordshire). This interesting three-cell church, with a tower on the north, stands in a circular churchyard close beside but high above the south bank of the Wye, about twelve miles west of Hereford. The north wall of the nave has a band of herringbone masonry, three courses in height, along the greater part of its length, but not extending quite to the east end. This herringbone fabric appears both externally and internally and is interrupted towards the west by a simple round-headed blocked doorway, originally constructed of light grey tufa, but later modified by the insertion of a carved lintel and a few jamb-stones of brown 1 Baldwin Brown, p. 245. 229

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sandstone.1 The west wall shows clear evidence of the former exis­ tence of a large round-headed west doorway, now blocked, and the church is now entered by a simple Norman south doorway, wholly built of grey tufa. Two simple round-headed windows in the north wall are also wholly built of tufa and may therefore be accepted as contemporary with the north and south doorways. It seems diffi­ cult to explain the large blocked west doorway except as the original entrance, which was later abandoned and replaced by the lateral doorways. The lower part of the north wall and a considerable part of the west wall therefore seem to be survivals from an earlier church which, having become ruined, was rebuilt soon after the Conquest. Deerhurst (Gloucestershire). We cannot give here any comprehen­ sive account of the important early fabric in St Mary’s church at Deerhurst. The arguments for regarding the core of the building as having been erected before the Danish invasions have been set out in detail elsewhere,2 and it is sufficient for our present purpose to note that herringbone courses can be seen here and there on almost all areas of the surviving fabric. In particular, too, if permission be obtained to ascend the tower, it can be verified that herringbone courses run across the west front of the original nave and are sealed in place by the side-walls of the first-floor chamber of the tower, thus proving that these courses are not later patching by Normans but date from before the construction of the remarkable, double, triangular-headed window which opens from the tower to the nave. Diddlebury (Shropshire). This interesting church, about seven miles north of Ludlow, now consists of a square Norman west tower, later heavily buttressed, a nave with south aisle and south porch, and an early Norman chancel with later north chapel. For our purpose, attention can be directed principally to the north wall of the nave, but it is also of importance to note how the early Norman chancel is joined to it.3 The exterior of the north wall of the nave is carefully built of squared stones, almost ashlar, arranged in courses of very varying height, perhaps for decorative effect. It should be noted how the fabric changes completely near the top of the wall, the uppermost 3 ft. being constructed of rough rubble so 1 The brown sandstone lintel is dated by Zamecki early in the twelfth century {Early Romanesque Sculpture, 1066-1140, pi. 23) and the doorway itself must therefore be of very early Norman date. 2 E. Gilbert, Trans. Bristol Glos. Archaeol. Soc. lxxiii (1954), 73-114. 3 The argument which follows is illustrated by Fig. 1 on p. 232 and by Plates 11 and hi at p. 228. 230

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strikingly at variance with the dressed stone below as to leave little doubt that this is a later raising of the wall. The principal features of the north wall, which have served to establish its claim to late Saxon date, are a blocked round-headed doorway, outlined with strip-work, and a double-splayed, round-headed window that is wholly faced in well-dressed stone like that of the wall itself. The wall stands on a well-defined plinth which consists of three square orders and which runs westward along part of the north wall of the tower. At the east, this plinth turns southward and disappears beneath the later wall of the Norman chancel, thereby serving to show that the original nave ended at this point and that the Normans extended the church by building the north wall of their new chancel in the same alignment as the original wall of the nave. Although the Saxon quoin has disappeared, its position can be fixed precisely by the surviving north-east angle of the plinth on which it stood. The interior of the north wall is wholly faced with herringbone masonry, which is neatly fitted to the interior faces of the doorway and of the double-splayed window; it is also returned southward along the west wall of the nave, but at the east it ends in a ragged line about 7 ft. to the east of the centre of the double-splayed window, and it does not extend along any part of the Norman chancel. In putting forward his proposition that the herringbone masonry at Diddlebury was a later Norman addition to a pre­ existing Saxon fabric, Baldwin Brown claimed that the north wall was originally only 2 ft. 3 in. thick and that the Normans added a decorative internal veneer about 7 in. in thickness. At first sight this seems to be borne out by the facts, for the herringbone interior facing does not extend to the top of the wall and the remaining height is indeed about 7 in. thinner. But closer inspection leads to a different interpretation. In the first place, as has already been noted, the exterior face of the thinner, upper part of the wall is of quite different masonry from that of the wall below, and can reasonably be claimed as a later raising of the wall, probably at the time when the south arcade was built.1 In the second place, the individual stones of the north doorway extend through the full 1 Baldwin Brown, pp. 245-6, noted that the wall containing the south arcade was 2 ft. 3 in. thick and claimed it as ‘almost certainly Saxon in fabric’. There seems to us to be no reason for doubting that the south wall was wholly rebuilt when the aisle was added and that the wall is contemporary with the arcade. Its fabric is quite different from that of the Anglo-Saxon part of the north wall but resembles the fabric of the upper part which we regard as a later addition. 231

232

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thickness of the wall, and the splays of the window are adapted to its present thickness in a way which places the aperture near the middle of the wall and virtually precludes any possibility that the wall could originally have been 7 in. thinner. Finally, there is the evidence provided by the Norman destruction of the east wall of the Saxon nave. The surviving angle of the plinth fixes the position of the destroyed north-east quoin as having been 10 ft. east of the centre of the double-splayed window, while the herringbone interior facing of the wall stops on an irregular line about 7 ft. east of the centre of the window, that is, just where it would originally have turned south to line the east wall of the nave in the same way as it still does turn south to line the west wall. At the east of this irregular ending of the herringbone masonry there follows an irregular area of walling which represents the cross-section of the destroyed Saxon east wall, and then there follows the Norman chancel, with no herringbone facing. We accordingly believe that it is established beyond all reasonable doubt that this herringbone masonry in the Saxon nave is contemporary with the wall of which it forms part. Edvin Loach (Herefordshire). This little two-cell church, between two and three miles north of Bromyard, now stands in ruins in open fields, remote from any village, close beside the Victorian church which replaced it. Although the ruined early church is of a simple rectangular plan, the fabric of the eastern part is of coursed stone while the western part of the north wall is of herringbone construc­ tion both externally and internally. The western part of the south wall is of coursed flattish rubble, also different from the chancel, and this wall contains a tall square-headed doorway of primitive character with jambs, massive lintel, tympanum, and arched head all formed of grey tufa. The only surviving window, in the east end, is of late Norman date, which no doubt represents the date of the chancel. The nave therefore seems to be of an early Norman date, consistent with the primitive south doorway. The completely different character of the north wall of the nave gives an indication that it is a survival from an even earlier church, but there is no independent evidence to confirm this indication. Hatfield (Herefordshire). About five miles north-west of Brom­ yard, and only four miles west of Edvin Loach, is another church with somewhat similar features but in which the herringbone fabric seems more likely to be of post-Conquest date. The church consists 233

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of an aisleless nave and chancel, with a small west porch. Only the eastern part of the north wall of the nave is early ; it stands on a welldefined plinth and contains some courses of herringbone masonry, but neither of these features is continued along the later westward extension of the wall. The early wall contains a square-headed door­ way wholly built in grey tufa, with a massive lintel oddly formed of three stones, above which a semicircular tympanum is enclosed beneath a round arch. In the absence of any evidence to the con­ trary we regard the early part of the wall, including the doorway and the tufa north-east quoin, as having been built at a single time, probably near the close of the eleventh century. Rushbury (Shropshire), This interesting church, about four miles north of Diddlebury and the same distance east of Church Stretton, has a fine Early English chancel. Its interest from our point of view is, however, in the nave. This has a pointed south doorway, transi­ tional in character between Norman and Early English, but the north doorway is of a much simpler and probably early Norman type, tall and narrow in outline, with a simple monolithic tym­ panum under a plain round arch. Both north and south walls have herringbone masonry in their lower courses, and there seems no doubt that the north doorway is a later insertion in this herring­ bone masonry because the fabric is disturbed on either side of the doorway instead of being neatly fitted to it. There is, therefore, an indication that the lower parts of the walls are survivals from a preNorman church, later incorporated into the present early Norman nave. As at Bredwardine and Edvin Loach, however, this indica­ tion cannot be regarded as a certainty. Wigmore (Herefordshire). A little to the west of the Roman road from Hereford to Shrewsbury, and about seven miles south-west of Ludlow, Wigmore church occupies a commanding position above its village on a spur which juts out eastward from the hills into the fertile plain beside the river Teme. Considerable sections of the solid side walls of the originally aisleless nave have survived at the west. The south wall is now wholly enclosed within the later south aisle, but a small Norman window high up in it serves to establish that it was originally an external wall. The north wall has also been pierced for a later aisle, but only a small chapel now survives, and to the west of it the original wall may be seen to be of herringbone construction externally for almost its whole height. Unfortunately, no original openings have remained in this wall to give a reliable 234

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indication of its date, but this could perhaps be obtained if it were possible to strip the plaster from the south wall beside the Norman window. If this were found to be in situ in a herringbone wall like that on the north, the date of both walls would be reliably estab­ lished as post-Conquest; but if the window were found to be set in a wall of quite different character (as is the south doorway at Edvin Loach), or if it were obviously a later insertion in a herringbone wall (as is the north doorway at Rushbury), then the herringbone fabric would be given a reliable indication of pre-Conquest date. Tanner states that this parish church became collegiate about i ioo, that is to say about seventy years before the canons from Shobdon founded the abbey at Wigmore at some distance from the parish church. (See D. Knowles and R. N. Hancock, Medieval Religious Houses (London, 1953), pp. 159 and 344.) The Herefordshire school of carving A remarkable series of Herefordshire tympana and fonts, carved in high relief in a very individual and spirited fashion, is probably to be assigned to about the middle of the twelfth century but has clearly defined links with the decoration of Anglo-Saxon crosses and with certain Viking ornaments. The style is not found else­ where in England and therefore seems best explained in terms of a local school which had retained the pre-Conquest traditions but which was fired by some fresh inspiration from abroad to achieve these remarkable new compositions. A convincing explanation of the source of the inspiration has been given by Zarnecki1 in terms of a visit which Oliver de Merlimond is known to have made to France and Spain shortly before he built Shobdon church between 1131 and 1143. The documentary evidence shows that he visited Compostella and returned by way of western France, where he stayed with the abbot of Saint-Victor in Paris, whence he secured canons for his new church. Zarnecki draws striking comparisons between the details of the Herefordshire sculpture and the designs of similar features at Compostella and at the church of Parthenay-le-Vieux, about 200 miles south-east of Paris. The general resemblance of the Hereford tympana to those above the western doorways at Parthenay gives very strong support to Zarnecki’s theory that this is the place that gave the Herefordshire school its inspiration. The pre-Conquest affinity of the Herefordshire school is, how1 G. Zarnecki, Later English Romanesque Sculpture (London, 1953), pp. 9“ i 5235

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ever, just as remarkable as the inspiration which it drew from France and Spain. This pre-Conquest tradition appears not only in the strangely interlaced foliage that forms a background for many of the figure-panels, but also in the tall thin form in which the men are drawn, with pointed beards and fierce moustaches. It perhaps emerges most clearly in the peculiar way in which their clothing is represented, as if made of quilted material, in which the panels sometimes run round the body and sometimes up and down. This quilted drawing of the folds of the garments is very characteristic of a group of pre-Conquest cross-shafts of which that nearest in style to the Herefordshire school is the shaft at Shelford (Nottingham­ shire) ; but the stylised character of the Herefordshire drawing has been carried so much further that it is difficult to envisage that the intention was merely to represent the folds of a flowing garment, and it seems more likely that the sculptor was copying garments that had some such intrinsic form. The sleeves, in particular, seem preponderantly to show a regular pattern of folds and ridges run­ ning down the upper arm but carried round the lower arm, and ending in a wide bell-shaped cuff. Aston (Herefordshire). This small two-cell church, about four miles south-west of Ludlow, has over its north doorway a tym­ panum that is nearer to the main stream of early Norman tympana than are most of the Herefordshire sculptures. Its main motive is an Agnus Dei in a central circular compartment. Fabulous animals appear as supporters, to the right and left, and a frieze of animals is shown round the circumference, ending at the top with a dizzy interlacing of foliage which seems to grow from the mouth of one of these animals. Within the church is a sculpture of quite a different school. The font, of conical form, seems to have been formed from some re-used piece of much earlier origin, and like the font at Melbury Bubb (Dorset), the sculpture is now upside down. The carvings perhaps represent a dragon and a cockatrice, with long tongues which run into elaborate interlacing patterns. The carved bowl of the font is about a foot tall and about a foot in diameter at the top, tapering to about 8 in. at the bottom. Notes in the church say that it was brought there from an unknown place. Brinsop (Herefordshire). About five miles north-west of Hereford, but still just on the English side of Offa’s dyke, the small two-cell church of Brinsop stands within an earthwork, remote from any 236

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village but within a mile or so of the two Roman roads which inter­ sect at Kenchester. The principal carving is a tympanum represent­ ing St George and the dragon, now set in the interior face of the north wall of the nave, and surrounded by a round arch of carved voussoirs. The equestrian figure is very spirited, with a flowing cloak; and a curiously human touch is provided by two birds, of which one is perched on the cloak while the other is on St George’s raised bridle-hand, just as in later medieval representations of falconry. The dragon is shown as a writhing serpent, with its head upturned and its mouth transfixed by the lance. The carved voussoirs show a series of recesses or arched niches which contain people, fanciful faces with foliage, or signs of the zodiac, as at Shobdon. A much later doorway opening to a north vestry has been arched with carved voussoirs which must have belonged either to the other side of the St George doorway or to the outer face of a second doorway. Another piece of sculpture has survived to show the existence of an even earlier church on the site. This is a panel, now about a foot square but formerly larger, as may be seen by the broken pattern on the right. In its present form the panel shows four circular scrolls, each of which encloses a bird, with its feet clasping the scroll and its tail passing behind it. The pattern seems to be derived from the Northumbrian inhabited vine-scroll, as in the well-known panel at Jedburgh, but is of a simpler and less accomplished form. The fragment was perhaps part of a screen or a shrine, and we suggest for it a date in the ninth or tenth century, by contrast with the twelfth-century date assigned by the royal commission.1 Castle Frome (Herefordshire). As at Brinsop, the church at Castle Frome stands in the grounds of a substantial farm without any nearby village. It is about ten miles east-north-east of Hereford, beside the upper waters of the Frome. The carving here is an elaborate font on a pedestal of three crouching figures that seem to be part man and part lion. The bowl of the font is enriched with foliage and interlacing ornament, together with an interesting representation of the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, which is shown as a round pond containing fish. Chaddesley Corbett (Worcestershire). This church, between Kidderminster and Bromsgrove, has a beautiful font of the same general character as that at Castle Frome, but less pictorial, being 1 R .C .H .M ., Herefordshire, II (London, 1932), 28 and pi. 18. 237

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mainly decorated with interlace and with beasts whose bodies are formed of interlacing. Eardisley {Herefordshire). About fourteen miles north-west of Hereford, the church at Eardisley stands in the centre of its village. Its elaborate font shows warriors in combat, a saint, a large benevo­ lent lion, and Christ rescuing a person from pressing danger. The figures are all in the tall thin style of the Kilpeck angle-shafts, with pointed faces, beards and moustaches, and with strong emphasis on the quilted character of their clothing. (See Plate iv, at p. 228.) Fownhope {Herefordshire). On the east bank of the Wye, about six miles south-east of Hereford, the interesting Norman church at Fownhope contains a fine tympanum, now supported against the interior west wall of the nave. Its main theme is a seated Virgin nursing the holy Child, but much of its surface is covered with elaborately interlacing foliage in which there have been shown an eagle and a winged lion. Kilpeck {Herefordshire). The three-cell apsidal church at Kilpeck, about seven miles south-west of Hereford, is of fundamental impor­ tance, for it alone of the Herefordshire school shows the sculpture complete and in its original setting as part of the fabric of a church built in the first half of the twelfth century. The tympanum of the south doorway is decorated with simple foliage, and the surround­ ing arch and hood-moulding have quite normal Norman motives, including beak-heads and medallions. But on the jambs, and particularly the angle-shafts, the sculptor has given an exuberant example of the Herefordshire school of carving. The jambs show serpentine monsters somewhat elaborately entwined; the eastern angle-shaft is carved with two doves below an interlacing foliage ; and the western angle-shaft has three warriors in an open pattern of interlacing foliage. The warriors are closely akin to those of the Eardisley font, having the same pointed caps, bearded and mou­ stached faces, heavily quilted jackets and long quilted trousers. The chancel-arch is also noteworthy, having angle-shafts with three tiers of saints for which Zarnecki cites an inspiration in the p u e r t a d e l a s p l a t e r i a s , a famous twelfth-century doorway at Compostella, where the marble shafts have three tiers of figures. It would not be fair to leave Kilpeck without a word on its vaulted apse and its magnificent array of corbels. In particular Zarnecki cites a Viking comb found in London as an indication that the open-work corbels at the western angles of the church are in a Viking tradition. 238

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Nor would it be proper to leave Kilpeck without a word on the fragment of an earlier church that has been incorporated into the north-east quoin of the nave, where a piece of earlier wall and its long-and-short quoin have been suffered to remain, even although they are not in the correct alignment.1 Leominster (Herefordshire). The priory of St Peter and St Paul at Leominster proudly claims its original foundation about 660 by Merewald, the father of St Mildburg whose foundation at Much Wenlock is described elsewhere in this article. Of the Saxon church, which may for a time have been the seat of the first bishop of the Magonsaetany nothing now remains, but the later Norman priory founded in 1130 has survived in great part. The capitals of the west doorway are richly carved with a variety of subjects, including a pair of reapers, whose clothing is of the quilted character of the Herefordshire school. The interior face also has carved capitals, but of a simpler character with interlacing ornament. On the north jamb, the chamfered face of one of the imposts bears a small carving of Samson and the lion, reminiscent of the much larger representation of the same subject at Stretton Sugwas. Rowlstone (Herefordshire). This otherwise simple Norman church, about twelve miles south-west of Hereford, has an elaborately carved tympanum in its south doorway, and further carvings of considerable interest on the imposts of its chancel arch. The tympanum has as its central feature a seated Christ in Majesty, supported by four flying angels whose faces are shown with beards and moustaches. The composition is strikingly similar to that of the Majesty at Shobdon, and the quilted clothing has been elaborated to show a fringe of tassels along the front of Christ’s garment. The imposts of the chancel-arch are returned along the east of the nave, and are carved, both on the vertical face and on the chamfer, mainly with pairs of confronted birds. The capitals of the angleshafts are formed of much larger pairs of confronted birds, and the tops of the jambs have carved figures in arched recesses. On the 1 F. C. Morgan, Trans. Woolhope Nat. Fd. Club, xxxiv (1952-4), 85, suggests that this walling is not a survival from an earlier Saxon church but is a much later repair of the Norman fabric. He cites as evidence the survival of the top courses of a flat Norman buttress like the others on the church. It seems to us unlikely that any later repair of the church would have failed to renew the buttress in its original form if it had ever existed on the angle, and still more unlikely that a casual repairer would have used stones in the long-and-short formation of the present quoin. 239

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south jamb, these two figures are shown upside down, an arrange­ ment which must be original since the stone is of one piece with the adjoining capital. Shobdon (Herefordshire). The remarkable Norman church at Shobdon, about fifteen miles north-west of Hereford, was de­ molished in 1753, and its three elaborately carved arches were reerected as ornamental features of the park, where two centuries of exposure to the weather have now removed all but a shadow of their former magnificence. Reference has been given above to Zarnecki’s arguments for the dating of this church to the years between 1131 and 1143 and for ascribing to Spain and Western France a major part of the inspiration for its remarkable carvings.1 Some indica­ tion of the elaboration and beauty of the work before its decay may be gathered from drawings made in 1852.2 Stottesdon (Shropshire), The church at Stottesdon, about eleven miles north-east of Ludlow, is of interest on two counts. In the first place, its font is of the Herefordshire school although its pattern is more formalised and only one of its panels shows any evidence of the characteristic quilted clothing. Secondly, the west wall of the nave can with some confidence be regarded as a survival from an earlier church, probably dating from before the Conquest. This follows because the early Norman tower is clearly built against this earlier west wall and is not in bond with it ; moreover, the original, elaborate, square-headed west doorway, now much mutilated, is enclosed within the tower, where it can no longer be properly seen. A curiously carved lintel now forms the head of this doorway, but its upper surface has been rudely hacked away, and there seems to be some probability that it was originally a tympanum rather than a flat lintel. Above the doorway some much-disturbed strip-work forms the hood-moulding, but it is now impossible to say with certainty whether this was originally a triangular frame, as seems to be suggested by the straight southern side, or whether it outlined a semicircular tympanum as is indicated by the curve of the northern side. Stretton Sugwas (.Herefordshire). This church, about four miles west of Hereford, is now almost wholly modern, but a twelfthcentury tympanum of Samson and the lion has been preserved as 1 G. Zamecki, Later English Romanesque Sculpture, pp. 9-15. 8 G. R. Lewis, Shobdon (London, 1852), also R .C .H .M ., Herefordshire, in (London, 1934), 179. 24O

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the head of the doorway which leads from the nave to the medieval north-west tower. The carving is in very high relief and Samson is shown astride the lion, clothed in a quilted tunic and skirt, with long flowing hair, and a pointed face, with beard and moustache. Alphabetical list of pre-Norman churches of the Welsh border Atcham (Shropshire), This aisleless church, about four miles south-east of Shrewsbury, is of interest both in itself and also as the place where the historian Ordericus Vitalis was baptised about 1075. Its nave is commonly regarded as Norman, but the north wall is built of exceptionally large stones, widely jointed, like those of the neighbouring church of Wroxeter, and we think it is likely that this wall, and the triangular-headed window in it, are AngloSaxon, of quite early date. Barrow (Shropshire), It is unusual for any church to show so many straightforward indications of successive building periods as does the little church of Barrow, about thirteen miles south-east of Shrewsbury. Its chancel is clearly earlier than the present nave, for the marks of an earlier and narrower nave may be seen on either side of the chancel-arch; and the present nave is equally clearly earlier than the sturdy, square, west tower, for this is built against and on top of the west wall of the nave, thus obscuring the elaborate west doorway which must have been intended to be one of the principal decorative features of the exterior. The tower is un­ doubtedly Norman, and probably quite early in the period; the nave is probably also Norman, but with some Saxon affinities; and the chancel is a good example of Anglo-Saxon workmanship of the tenth or eleventh century. It has a fine chancel-arch outlined by a simple square-sectioned hood-moulding, while in the north wall a double-splayed window of ashlar masonry and a vestige of a pilasterstrip provide further evidence of a late Saxon date. Deerhurst (Gloucestershire), The two important churches at Deerhurst have been briefly noted in the text, p. 227, above. Diddlebury (Shropshire), This interesting church has been very fully discussed in the text, pp. 230-3, above. Hereford, A very interesting two-storeyed wall has been incor­ porated into the later south wall of the Bishop’s Cloister of Hereford Cathedral. This wall is the only surviving part of the two-storeyed chapel of St Catherine and St Mary Magdalene which stood at the south of the cloister and was demolished by the 16

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bishop soon after 1737. A plan and elevation made in 17371 show that the chapel was a Norman structure about 57J by 42J ft. internally, with walls 5\ ft. thick. The surviving north wall of this chapel, now part of the south wall of the cloister, contains two double-splayed, round-headed windows, one of which is in the part of the cloister open to the public, while the other is within the music school, further to the west. Careful inspection of the wall shows that it was originally about 4 ft. thick, as it still is in the region of each of these windows. The Norman builders of the two-storeyed chapel thickened the earlier wall southward and carried a new wall upward for their second storey. The thickening of the pre-Norman wall was not effected by a straightforward application of new masonry along the whole of the length, but by adding a skin which is borne on an arcade of round-headed arches below, but becomes continuous above, where it carried the floor and the wall of the upper storey. The two outer arches of this arcade enclose the two double-splayed windows, and the central arch encloses a later doorway. That this arcaded thickening of the wall is a later addition to an earlier wall is shown by the way a straight joint runs round the jambs and head of each of the arches. We therefore believe that the Norman builders of the chapel incorporated the north wall of an earlier building into their fabric, and that this earlier wall, about 55 ft. long, can be accepted as of late pre-Conquest date on the evidence of its two double-splayed windows, faced in ashlar as is customary in this district, for example at Barrow and Diddlebury. Kilpeck (Herefordshire). The evidence for the survival of part of the north wall of an earlier church in the interesting Norman church at Kilpeck has been discussed on p. 238, above. Much Wenlock (Shropshire). Foundations of an early church were discovered within the ruins of the Norman abbey in 1902.1 2 Peterstow (.Herefordshire). The simple, early Norman nave at Peterstow, about two miles west of Ross, incorporates in its north wall part of an earlier structure. This earlier wall, formed of excep­ tionally large stones, seems to have been about 15 ft. shorter than the present wall because, whereas most of its stones are of very irregular outline, there is a well-dressed western edge, as of a quoinstone, on the westernmost of the large stones, directly beneath the 1 Vetusta Monumenta, 1 (London, 1747), pi. 49. 2 D. H. S. Cranage, ‘The Monastery of St Milburge at Much W enlock’, Archaeologia, lxxii (1922), 105-32. 242

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early Norman north window. The megalithic early wall is about 24 ft. in total length and the walling above and to the west is of rough rubble. Presteigne (Radnorshire). The north aisle of the present church of St Andrew clearly once formed the northern half of the nave of an earlier church, for half the original chancel-arch may be seen in the east wall of the aisle, at the north side of the present chancel-arch. We do not know of any other example of this method of widening an early church, a method which suggests to us that the original church was partially ruined so that only its northern wall seemed worth preserving. The existing north wall, about 80 ft. in length internally, is clearly of two periods, since there is a break in align­ ment and in fabric about the middle. The earlier eastern part may itself be of two periods, for the lower part is of flattish rubble laid in courses, while the upper part is formed of courses of larger blocks of squared stone which alternate with courses of thin rubble. This upper part of the earlier wall includes two blocked, round-headed, internally splayed windows of early Norman character. A roundheaded west doorway has survived in the west wall, although now blocked, and partially covered externally by a buttress and inter­ nally by the western respond of the north arcade. The surviving northern half of the chancel-arch defines a round-headed opening which must originally have been about 10 ft. wide and 15 ft. 9 in. tall, and of a single, plain, square order. The available evidence is too slight to justify a claim that any part of the fabric is certainly pre-Conquest, but it suggests that the eastern 40 ft. of the present aisle was the original nave, probably of pre-Conquest date, and was probably extended westward shortly after the Conquest. Notes in the church indicate that an earlier building on the site was destroyed in a raid by Gruffyd ap Llywellyn, King of Gwynedd and Powys, about 1055, and it seems possible that the eastern part of the north aisle may represent a survival of part of that earlier building. Shrewsbury (Shropshire). It is tantalising that in a city which has a tradition of so many pre-Conquest churches there should now be no surviving fabric that can with certainty be dated to that period. Local tradition claims St Chad’s as a foundation by King Offa about 780, St Alkmund’s as a foundation by Æthelfleda, daughter of Alfred the Great, about 912, and St Mary’s as a foundation by King Edgar shortly after the middle of the tenth century. St Julian’s is claimed as the earliest of all on the somewhat dubious evidence of its 243

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dedication, said originally to be to St Juliana, an early fourthcentury martyr, to whom it is claimed that a dedication would have been unlikely as late as Offa’s reign. It seems likely that substantial parts of the early work remained at St Alkmund’s and St Julian’s until both churches were almost completely rebuilt towards the end of the eighteenth century. In 1883 foundations of two earlier churches were found beneath St Julian’s, but no record seems to have been kept of the discoveries. At St Mary’s, earlier foundations were discovered beneath the floor of the transitional Norman church during the course of repairs in 1864. These foundations extended along the whole of the nave and a little beyond the present chancel-arch, where they ended in an apse. The eastern part seemed to be of stone that had been used once only, whereas the western part contained re-used stone.1 At old St Chad’s, an early crypt, originally beneath the north transept, is still visible, although in an advanced state of decay. The greater part of the church collapsed in the eighteenth century and a new church has been built on a quite different site.12 Stottesdon {Shropshire). An account of the font and of the pos­ sibly pre-Conquest west wall has been given in the text, p. 240, above. Tedstone Delamere {Herefordshire). This little church is very pleasantly situated in a park on high land west of the river Teme, about three miles north-east of Bromyard, with a fine view down the valley towards the Malvern Hills. The aisleless nave has two simple round-headed single-splayed windows high up in its side walls, towards the west. These are of a type which might be early Norman or late Saxon, but in the middle of the north wall a blocked doorway is outlined above by a triangular-headed hood-moulding which is still of distinctly Anglo-Saxon type, even though it has been cut back flush with the face of the wall. The nave may with reasonable certainty be classed as Anglo-Saxon or Saxo-Norman, particularly as the walls are only 2 ft. 6 in. thick. Wroxeter (Shropshire). Within the walls of Roman v i r o c o n i u m the church at Wroxeter has an early Norman chancel that has clearly been added to an earlier nave. The north wall of the nave, like that at Atcham, less than two miles away to the west, is built of 1 Lloyd, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society, 2nd ser. vi

(1894), 358-71. 2 D. H. S. Cranage, Churches of Shropshire, 11 (Wellington, 1912), 899. 244

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exceptionally large stones, no doubt robbed from the Roman buildings. A simple string-course of square section runs along the top of the wall, and a square-headed early window may be seen externally near the east. This window is blocked and its inner face is hidden by plaster. On the evidence at present available we think it most likely that this north wall was built fairly early in the Saxon era, before the double-splayed type of window became fashionable, but a better opinion could be given if the window could be opened out to disclose the details of its construction. High up in the eighteenth-century south wall is a section of an interesting cross­ shaft of about the end of the eighth century. T

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At the beginning of the seventh century, the west Saxons were in possession of Berkshire, Wiltshire, and the extreme north of Somerset. Under 658, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Cenwalh, king of Wessex, fought the British a t Peonnum and drove them in flight to the river Parret. This battle may have been fol­ lowed by a Saxon conquest of all Somerset. But the Kingdom of Dumnonia to the west was an ancient and still important power, and there is a surviving letter from Aldhelm to Geraint, king of Dumnonia, exhorting him to adopt the proper date for the celebra­ tion of Easter. Exeter is known to have been in Saxon hands as early as 690, but the Kingdom of Dumnonia certainty existed as late as 710, when Geraint was attacked by the kings of Wessex and Sussex in alliance. In 705 the more newly acquired lands in the kingdom of Wessex were formed into a separate bishopric, with its seat at Sherborne and Aldhelm as its first bishop.1 With the possible exception of Perranporth, no churches of the Anglo-Saxon type have survived in Cornwall, and in Devon there is only the crypt beneath the Norman church at Sidbury, a crypt which may have belonged to a pre-Norman church or, more prob­ ably, a separate shrine.2 In Cornwall there are many carved crosses, but all of a distinctly Celtic type that is not to be regarded as derived from the Anglo-Saxon crosses of Somerset. Glastonbury and Bradford-on-Avon. Early fabric of great impor­ tance has survived at Glastonbury (Somerset) and Bradford-on1 Stenton, pp. 62-3. 2 C. A. R. Radford, ‘Sidbury’, Arch. J. cxiv ( i 957). 166-7. 245

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Avon (Wiltshire), although it is only recently that serious doubts about the early character of the core of the fabric at the latter place have been removed by the interpretation of the later features as subsequent insertions in the earlier fabric.1 It is only recently, too, that patient excavation has disclosed at Glastonbury the remains of churches of the time of St Dunstan, and of King Ine; and indica­ tions of the former existence of a wattled church which, although not itself the Vetusta Ecclesia which William of Malmesbury described with such reverence, yet showed that buildings of that primitive character had existed in the vicinity of Ine’s and Dunstan’s later stone churches. Sherborne. Remains of a lateral western doorway of later preConquest type have long been known at Sherborne (Dorset), but recent excavations by the Royal Commission for Historical Monu­ ments have established with certainty the existence of foundations of a western porch or tower, of which indications were found last century.12The Commission have also given reasons for believing that the irregular pattern of the main arcade of the nave, and the wider plan of the central tower, may well mean that the builders of the Norman abbey retained much of the fabric of the Saxon nave and crossing as the core of their new building. Milborne Port. A few miles to the east of Sherborne, at Milborne Port (Somerset), another important late Saxon church has been commonly misinterpreted as essentially of post-Conquest con­ struction.3 In our opinion, the panelling on the exterior of this church is not a freak enrichment of a casually selected piece of wall­ ing, as Baldwin Brown suggested, but is part of a carefully planned pattern of enrichment which can still be seen to have had a place on both side walls of the chancel and also to have formed an integral part of the exterior treatment of the two windows whose interior faces still survive in part. We believe that this arcading is of similar date to the comparable but simpler work which has survived at Bradford-on-Avon, for which Jackson and Fletcher have suggested a date about the end of the tenth century.4 In this connection it is 1 E. D. C. Jackson and E. G. M. Fletcher, ‘The Saxon Church at Bradfordon-Avon’, J.B .A .A ., 3rd ser. xvi (1953), 41-58. 2 R .C .H .M ., Dorset, West (London, 1952), xlvii, and R. H. Carpenter, Trails. Royal Institute of British Architects (later J .R .I.B .A .) (1876-7), 137-51. 3 Baldwin Brown, pp. 428 and 470 ; and N. Pevsner, South and West Somerset (London, 1958), p. 237. 4 Jackson and Fletcher, jf.B .A .A ., 3rd ser. xvi (1953), 58. 246

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of interest to note that, at about the time when this later work at Bradford was carried out, the manor of Bradford and its monastery were granted by Ethelred II to the nuns of Shaftesbury in order that the monastery might serve as refuge in time of danger from the Danes, and as a hiding-place for the bones of the blessed Edward.1 The particular interest of this association arises from the fact that the nuns of Shaftesbury are recorded in Domesday Book as having had property in Milborne Port. The similarity of architectural treatment of the two churches may possibly have its origin in the joint association of the two places with Shaftesbury. Attention was first directed to the pre-Conquest character of the tower-arches at Milborne Port by Allen and Saunders2 in 1934, and in 1950 Sir Alfred Clapham confirmed their pre-Conquest dat­ ing of the foliage which decorates the elaborate capitals of these arches.3 These capitals are remarkable not only for the character of their foliate decoration and for their collar-like shape, but also because they are formed in part of stone and in part of plaster.4 The eastern and western arches are now pointed, but those opening north and south into the transepts have retained their original form and are important examples of late Saxon arches of three separately constructed orders, each enriched with roll-mouldings. Crosses at Glastonbury. In the south of England there is a very general scarcity of carved crosses, but Sir Alfred Clapham has pointed out that this may not necessarily mean that they were originally very rare, but may be a result of the closer population in the south during the Middle Ages and of the consequently greater destruction and re-use of these monuments. Of the great carved stones which once stood at Glastonbury, John Whitaker who visited the abbey in 1771 recorded that his guide, then an old man, told him that he had himself seen them; Whitaker recorded that he saw the cavities from which they had been removed; and he justly deplored the removal of these historic monuments to make gate1 J. M. Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici (London, 1839-48), no. 706. 2 F. G. Allen and G. W. Saunders, *T he problematical early work at Milborne P o rt’, Proc. Somerset Arch, and Nat. Hist. Soc. lxxx (1934), 25-31. 3 A. W. Clapham, Romanesque Architecture in England (London, 1950), pp. 21-2. 4 Clapham, loc. cit. referred to them as constructed of plaster (stucco) and Pevsner (Buildings of England, South and West Somerset (London, 1958), p. 237), alsofrefers to them as plaster (and as Norman). In fact those of the western arch are wholly of stone and the others are mainly plaster. This was correctly noticed by Allen and Saunders in 1934 and we have verified that it is so. 248

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posts or props for a cottage.1 It does not seem to have been generally recognised that these stones, described by William of Malmesbury as pyramids (pyramides) must have been sculptured stones of the same general character as the Northumbrian crosses, although they were described as crosses (cruces) by William of Worcester, who visited Glastonbury about 1480.12 William of Malmesbury’s description really leaves little room for doubt, since he mentioned that the stone nearer the church was 28 ft. high and of five panels, in the highest of which was a figure in bishop’s robes, and in the next a figure of a king; this stone also had a series of inscriptions which he recorded, though he said he could not inter­ pret them. The second stone was 26 ft. high, with four panels on which he read the names Kentwin, Hedda the Bishop, Bregored, and Beornward. Centwine (Kentwin) was king of Wessex (67685), and Hedda was bishop of Dorchester and Winchester (676705), while Bregored and Beorward are reputed to have been abbots of Glastonbury in the seventh and early eighth centuries. Sir Alfred Clapham first pointed out in 1930 the importance of these identifi­ cations as indicating that tall inscribed stones were erected in this part of England early in the eighth century.3 Ramsbury. A very important collection of carved stones was brought to light at Ramsbury (Wiltshire) during repairs to the church in 1891, when some indications of early foundations were also seen to the south of the chancel. The carved stones comprise three large sections of a cross-shaft and two unusual grave-slabs with rounded ends and domed cross-section. They are now in the nave, where they are properly mounted on a raised platform. They have usually been ascribed to the tenth century, when Ramsbury was the seat of a bishopric, but Kendrick dates them to the period from 860 to 880, with the entirely logical argument that they could have been erected before the establishment of the bishopric and that they should be dated on their merits.4 Colerne. Three fragments of a cross of about the same date as the shaft at Ramsbury may be seen in one of the window-embrasures at Colerne (Wiltshire), not far to the east of Bath. Bath. In the abbey at Bath there are preserved three fragments of crosses and some pieces of interlacing ornament that probably 1 J. Whitaker, Life of S t Neot (London, 1809), pp. 19 and 35-7. 2 William of Worcester, Itinerarium, ed. J. Nasmith (Cambridge, 1778), p. 294. 8 Clapham, pp. 61-2. 4 Kendrick, 1, 211. 249

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formed parts of string-courses like the fragments at Hexham and Peterborough. The crosses are of an unusual form with simple expanding arms bounded by curves.1 On one example only one arm has survived, with its edges all bounded by circular segments. Another example has two adjacent arms, different in outline; one, which we assume to be the top, is narrow like the arms of Cuthbert’s pectoral cross, with its sides only slightly curved, while the other is wider, with its sides much more sharply curved. The faces of the crosses are enriched with two-strand interlace of somewhat angular pattern for which the closest analogues that we have found are at Bradford-on-Avon and at South Kyme (Lincolnshire), which Clapham dates to the late seventh or early eighth century although Kendrick thinks it would be rash to date them earlier than about 8oo.2 William of Malmesbury records the placing of crosses at seven-mile intervals along the route of St Aldhelm’s funeral proces­ sion from Doulting (Somerset) to Malmesbury (Wiltshire), and it is therefore reasonable to assume that crosses must have stood in the churchyard at Bath from 709 onward, although it is impossible to say whether any of the present fragments can be so early. Bradford-on-Avon. The carved slab at Bradford is of outstanding interest, and appears to us to have received much less notice than is its due. It was discovered serving as a lintel over a Norman door­ way in the parish church beside the pre-Conquest chapel, and was described by Irvine,3who interpreted it as the lining of a door-jamb, like the carved slabs at Britford (Wiltshire), an interpretation which was accepted by Baldwin Brown.4 The slab is 13 in. thick and is at present 2 ft. 3 in. broad by 3 ft. 7 in. long. But it is broken at both ends and from the evidence of fragments broken from the ends it could not have been less than 5 ft. in length when complete, although it could have been longer. We believe that the elaborate ornament on this slab is less likely to have been intended for use as a door-jamb than as a screen or a memorial slab, or, most likely, as one wall of a shrine like those of which fragments have been pre­ served at Jedburgh and St Andrews.5 The ornament on the stone at Bradford consists of two rectangular panels within a border of two1 This is the shape called Northumbrian by J. Romilly Allen, Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1903). 8 Clapham, pi. 28; Kendrick, 1, p. 171. 3 J. T . Irvine, J .B .A .A . xxxm (1877), 245. 4 Baldwin Brown, p. 179. 5 C. A. R. Radford, Arch. J. cxii (1955), 43-60. 250

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strand angular interlace. One of the interior panels is covered with an elaborate pattern of stepped character laid out so as to form a diagonal net each of whose enclosures contains a simple, equal­ armed cross ; the crosses and the diagonal net stand in relief, while the enclosures are cut back to a depth of about half-an-inch. The other panel is filled with a continuous pattern of trumpet-spirals of the somewhat debased type that is to be seen on the Deerhurst font. The execution of this panel is less accomplished than the adjoining

Fig. 3. Bradford-on-Avon. Carved stone in north porticus.

fretwork, for the individual features are too close together to allow adequate space for shadows in between ; the panel thus looks rather flat and featureless when seen in the stone, although a drawing in black-and-white (Fig. 3) gives something of the effect of a carpetpage in an illuminated manuscript. This fact may possibly give additional support for a dating of the slab early in the eighth cen­ tury, when the carpet-page was at the height of its popularity in the illuminated manuscripts of the Northumbrian renaissance. Bitton (Gloucestershire). The remarkably long nave of the church at Bitton, about midway between Bath and Bristol, is often regarded as Norman, but its Norman south wall is of different fabric from the earlier north wall, and the Norman corbel-table 251

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along the top of the latter is no doubt an addition at the time when the south wall was rebuilt. The eastern Decorated window in the north wall is set in the blocking of a tall round-headed arch whose jambs are of large stones which pass right through the wall and are laid alternately upright and flat in a characteristically Anglo-Saxon fashion. This arch must originally have opened to a side-chapel or portions, and foundations of the corresponding chapel on the south were found by excavations in the nineteenth century.1 There are vestiges of an Anglo-Saxon chancel-arch and of its outlining stripwork hood-moulding, and, although the arch was destroyed in 1843, the wall above was left undisturbed. A simple string-course of plain square section runs across this wall and supports the remains of a very large Rood. Only the feet remain in situ but, about the time when the chancel-arch was rebuilt, one arm of the Rood was found, along with other carved stones, blocking a squint on the south side of the arch. This arm is of great importance, in our opinion, because of the similarity of treatment of its sleeve and hand to that of the great Rood at Langford (Oxfordshire). Limpley Stoke (Wiltshire). This interesting little church stands high above the Avon, midway between its own village and Freshford, about four miles south-east of Bath. A tall, narrow doorway has survived in the south wall of the nave, which is only 2 ft. 2 in. thick. The arch, imposts, and jambs of this doorway are all con­ structed of stones which pass through the full thickness of the wall. Sidbury {Devon). A small crypt about 10 ft. square may be seen beneath the floor of the Norman chancel of Sidbury church. The crypt seems to have been destroyed and filled in at the time when the chancel was built. Radford has recently suggested that the crypt was not part of an earlier church but was the lower part of a shrine or memorial, possibly to the founder of the church.2 Glastonbury No account of the border churches would be complete unless it included a note in some detail about Glastonbury, for no other church is so rich in traditions that carry its story back beyond the time of the Anglo-Saxons; and, although the reliability of the Glastonbury traditions has been reduced by later medieval accre1 Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society Transactions, 2nd ser. iv (1878), 8; or H. T . Ellacombe, The History of the Parish of Bitton in the County of Gloucester (Exeter, 1881-3). 2 A rch.J. cxiv (1957), 166-7. 252

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tions, yet recent excavations have given strong support to the claim that King Ine’s seventh-century church was by no means the first on the site. Moreover, so much has been written about Glaston­ bury that there is a need for a convenient summary of the recorded history to link it with the results of recent excavations. The principal authority for the early history of Glastonbury is William of Malmesbury. There are valuable incidental references in his Gesta Regum1 and Gesta Pontificum2 as well as in his Vita Sancti Dunstani? but there is also his separate work on the subject, De Antiquitate ecclesiae Glastoniensis.1 2*4* Doubt has been cast on the reliability of his accounts of Glastonbury, particularly because of the extravagant claims that are made in De Antiquitate for the early and miraculous foundation of the church and for the number of saints who visited it or were said to be buried there. But a critical analysis by Robinson in 1921 showed that it was possible to con­ clude that part of the surviving manuscript of De Antiquitate is reasonably trustworthy and is indeed a genuine attempt by William of Malmesbury to construct at a time between 1125 and 1129 a true historical account of the foundation of the abbey from the records that were shown to him and from the traditions that were then current among the monks.6 By contrast, Robinson showed that other parts could be distinguished with reasonable certainty as later insertions of very doubtful value. Thomas Hearne, in editing the manuscript in 1727, had made some attempt to distinguish between the original text and later marginal insertions, but Robinson showed that great blocks which Hearne had regarded as original must really be later insertions. Two later histories of the abbey were compiled by Adam of Domerham and by John of Glaston, the first carrying the history close to the end of the thirteenth century, and the second extending it about a century further.6 There is no indication that either of 1 Ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series, 90 (London, 1887-9); referred to below as G.R. 2 Ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Rolls Series, 52 (London, 1870); referred to below as G.P . 8 In Memorials of S t Dunstan, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series, 63 (London, 1874) ; referred to below as M .D. 4 Ed. T . Hearne, in his Adam of Domerham (Oxford, 1727); referred to below as D .A. 6 J. A. Robinson, Somerset Historical Essays (London, 1921). 6 Both these works were edited by T . Hearne. His edition of Domerham’s Historia (Oxford, 1727) is referred to below as D.H. and his edition of Glaston’s Historia (Oxford, 1726) as G.H.

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these writers had access to any fresh material about the early history of the church but their records are sometimes of value when they record the continued survival of the early buildings or the changes which these suffered in later times. Such evidence is particularly valuable if it serves to link the early buildings with surviving portions of their successors. It will be convenient for our purpose to make a continuous chronicle of the church at Glastonbury by taking in sequence such extracts from the various writers as give information about the fabric or its history. In this chronicle we shall confine ourselves, so far as De Antiquitate is concerned, to those parts which Robinson’s analysis led him to regard as reliable. The Chronicle of Glastonbury The church of which we speak was called by the English the Old Church. It was at first formed of wattles. Plain though it was, its fame was wide­ spread, and pilgrims came to it from all quarters (G.R. 24; D.A. 17, 18). Paulinus, the companion of St Augustine, when bishop of Rochester, after having been bishop of York, is said by tradition to have covered the wattled church with wooden planks, and to have roofed it with lead (1G.R. 28 \D.A. 27).1 The first and oldest church was situated west of all the others. The second was built by St David, east of the Old Church, in honour of St Mary, at the time when he purposed to dedicate the Old Church but was forbidden to do so by God because He had Himself dedicated it.1 2 The third was built by twelve men who came from the north of Britain. The fourth and largest was constructed by King Ine in honour of our Lord and of the Apostles Peter and Paul, east of all the rest, for the sake of the soul of his brother Mul, whom the Kentish people burned below Canterbury3 (D.A. 53, 54). Here King Ine, at the advice of the blessed Aldhelm, first built a monastery, and endowed it with many estates which to this day make him notable for his generosity4 (G.P. 196). There, conterminous with the wooden church, as I have said, is a church of stone which trustworthy tradition assigns to King Ine. To this 1 There is no reliable evidence in support of the claim that Paulinus visited Glastonbury, but this need not throw doubt on the story of the wattled church and its later repair with wood and lead. T he story is closely paralleled by Bede's account (H .E . in, 25) of how Bishop Finân built a church at Lindisfame of hewn oak, thatched with reeds, and how Bishop Eadbert later removed the thatch and covered both the walls and the roof with plates of lead. 2 There is no other authority for attributing any church at Glastonbury to St David. 3 Mul was a brother of Ine’s predecessor and second cousin, Cædwalla. 4 The A text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a marginal entry against 688 : ‘And he (Ine) built the minster at Glastonbury.’ 254

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church Dunstan added a tower. He lengthened the church considerably and, to make its width square with its length, he added aisles, or porticus as they call them. The result of his labours is that, so far as the design of the ancient structure allowed, a church was produced of great extent in both directions, wherein if aught be lacking in seemliness or beauty there is at any rate no want of necessary space (M.D. 271). He enclosed the cemetery of the monks, on the south of the church, within a wall of masonry many feet in length. The space so enclosed by squared stone he raised up into a mound, so as to make a most pleasant meadow remote from all noise of passers-by, in order that the bodies of the saints who are buried there may rest in peace (M.D. 271-2). One day when Dunstan was at the west of the Old Church he heard a voice calling one of the monks. He at once realised that this was a voice from Heaven, and his correct interpretation of the event was proved by the death of the monk within a few days. Dunstan commemorated this event by building a square church on the spot where he had been stand­ ing when he had heard the heavenly voice (M.D. 47-8). Thurstan was the first Norman abbot. William made him abbot in 1082__ But about this time a misfortune befel which cannot be passed over in silence__ Among other things the abbot rejected the Gregorian chanting and began to force the monks to sing the chanting of William of Fécamp__ He addressed the monks about this and other matters with­ out being able to bend them to his will. Blinded with rage, he had his soldiers and bowmen called. The monks took flight as best they could and sought asylum in the church, whose threshold they barricaded. But the servants of Belial burst into the temple and pursued the monks right up to the altar. Nay, they mounted the galleries erected between the columns, the more readily to glut their evü minds with innocent blood. .. .These things took place in 10811 (D.A. 114). Herlewin succeeded in 1101, like Thurstan a monk of Caen, a man of great kindness and generosity, whom Henry I made abbot there with the convent’s consent : and he was abbot for 19 years. The church unfinished by his predecessor he rebuilt from the ground because it did not har­ monise with its possessions. He began a new church on which he spent 480 pounds (D.A. 117). On the day of St Urban, the whole monastery was burned down by fire, except the room and the chapel built by Abbot Robert, in which the monks thereafter met, and except also the tower erected by Henry (of Blois). The other buildings lately erected by that Henry, together with all the ancient churches so overshadowed with relics of the saints, all were reduced to a mound of ashes__ After this there followed very swiftly the death of the said Peter in the year 1184 (D.H. 333-4). Ralph, therefore, chamberlain of King Henry II, built the church of the blessed Virgin Mary, of squared stone, in the place where from the first the Old Church had stood. He built it of beautiful workmanship, leaving out no form of ornament. In this time there were dug up in the 1 T he E text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records this quarrel under 1083.

255

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Old Church the remains of (. .. many named saints. .. ) all of which were collected and placed in reliquaries (D.H. 335 ; G.H. 179-80). Reginald, then bishop of Bath, dedicated it on the day of St Barnabas, about the year 1186 (G.H. 180). The results of recent excavations (See Fig. 2, p. 247) Under the joint direction of the Society of Antiquaries and the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, excavations have been carried out at Glastonbury since 1928. The eastern parts of King Ine’s church were established in 1928, with a square of more massive walling to the east, which was interpreted as St Dunstan’s tower. The work in 1929 established the eastward extent of Dunstan’s church and the westward extent of Ine’s, and thus fixed the total length as 85 ft. The east and west walls of Dun­ stan’s porticus on either side of the nave were traced up to but not beyond the side walls of the medieval aisles, thus showing that Dunstan’s church had been the same width, 85 ft., as its medieval successor, and thus confirming William of Malmesbury’s statement that Dunstan had made its width square with its length. Of the original wattled church, the Vetusta Ecclesia or Old Church, or of St David’s eastward extension of it, nothing was found, but no trace was to be expected since the surviving twelfthcentury Lady Chapel had been built after the disastrous fire of 1184 ‘in the place where from the first the Old Church had stood’, and since the whole of the sub-soil had been removed in the sixteenth century during the construction of Abbot Bere’s crypt. The excavations since 1950 have been directed particularly to­ wards finding the earliest buildings on the site, including the monastic buildings as well as the church.1 They have established the existence of the east walk of a walled and paved cloister of the time of St Dunsta!n, in the same alignment as the east end of his church, but separated from it by a distance of about 20 yards to the south, no doubt because of the intervening graveyard. The excava­ tions also established that there had been a wattled chapel between Dunstan’s cloister and the church, and the post-holes on which this deduction was based defined a building 13 ft. wide and at least 17 ft. long. From its position within the ancient cemetery, the building must have been a chapel and not a dwelling. The east end 1 Brief accounts have been given by C. A. R. Radford, Antiquity, xxv (1951), 213 ; ibid, xxvii (1953), 41 ; and ibid, xxix (1955), 33-4; also Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset (1957), 68-73 and (1958), 165-9. 2 56

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THE

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of this chapel was determined precisely but all evidence of its west­ ward extent had been destroyed by the twelfth-century cloister. It had no paved floor, and the fragments of pottery trodden into the clay included pieces ranging in date from the first to the sixth century a . d . The discovery of this chapel gives independent sup­ port to the tradition of the simple wattled construction of the Old Churchy and also to the belief that the site was occupied from early times. The existence of a monastery of Celtic type on the site was also confirmed by the discovery of part of the enclosing boundary which took the form of a broad ditch 8-9 ft. in depth. This ran roughly from north to south across the axis of the medieval church, about in the alignment of its transepts. As yet it is not possible to say any­ thing about the extent of the area that was enclosed except that it must have included the Old Church and the ancient cemetery with its wattled chapel.

IX S t Peter o f Gloucester and S t Cadoc o f Llancarfarf BY C H R I S T O P H E R B R O O K E ABBREVIATIONS

EA

J. Conway Davies, Episcopal Acts and Cognate Documents relat­ ing to Welsh Dioceses, 1066-12J2, vols. 1 and 11 (Historical Society of the Church in Wales, 1946-8). HG Historia et Cartularium monasterii sancti Petri Gloucestriae, ed. W. H. Hart, 3 vols. (Rolls Series, 1863-7). LL The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. J. G. Evans and J. Rhys (Oxford, 1893). Lloyd Sir J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the earliest times to the Edwardian conquest, 2 vols. (3rd ed., London, 1939). Regesta Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorumy 1, ed. H. W. C. Davis and R. J. Whitwell (Oxford, 1913); 11, ed. C. Johnson and H. A. Cronne (1956). SEBC N. K. Chadwick, K. Hughes, C. Brooke and K. Jackson, Studies in the Early British Church (Cambridge, 1958). V British Museum Cotton MS. Vespasian A xiv. VSB Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae, ed. A. W. WadeEvans (Cardiff, 1944). VSH Vitae Sanctorum Hibemiae, ed. C. Plummer, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1910).

i.

S ources in

the

for th e

E

H

leventh

is t o r y and

T

of

G

loucester

w elfth

C

A

bbey

e n t u r ie s

The history of the churches on the Welsh border in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries has a double interest. The Church played a large part in the Norman attempts to conquer Wales, and its concerns were interwoven with those of secular leaders on both sides in a most complex and interesting fashion. The challenge of1 1 Part I is a by-product of my work with Dom Adrian Morey on the letters of Gilbert Foliot ; I am very conscious of the debt I owe to him. I have also had generous advice from D r Kathleen Hughes, M r R. H. C. Davis, Professor Dorn David Knowles, D r G. Melville Richards, and above all from my wife and from Mrs Chadwick. 258

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the Normans, and the intellectual revival of the age, moreover, stimulated Welsh churchmen to investigate their own past and their own traditions. The bulk of such materials as we have for the early history of the Welsh church was written in this period; and if we wish to interpret it we must understand the context of its authors. Especially is this true in interpreting the lives of the Welsh saints and early Welsh charters, which can make no claim to be authentic historical documents in the accepted sense of the term. The Norman kings and barons who planned the conquest of Wales in the late eleventh century were accustomed to insure for the future by dividing their conquests with the Church. Many of them had already made substantial grants of lands in England to Norman and English monasteries in the years following 1066; and more in the future were to found their own monasteries on English soil. When they began to conquer Wales, they made large gifts to English and continental houses. They found no monasteries in Wales, as they understood the word; they regarded the old das churches as monastic property which had turned to non-monastic uses, and they were very free in endowing English monasteries with das properties. But the conquest of Wales did not proceed in an orderly fashion. The first generation of invaders founded lordships over a wide area; much of this was lost, however, and in the fluctuating fortunes of the marcher provinces English monasteries acquired numerous and conflicting claims. The part which Glou­ cester abbey played in this story is, in general, well known: its records were used by Sir John Lloyd, and, more recently, by Dr Conway Davies ; and Dr Kathleen Hughes has emphasised the close links between Gloucester and the cult of the Welsh saints.1 But the documents for the history of Gloucester abbey in this period have never been subjected to systematic analysis, and so have never been made to tell their full story. The first part of this chapter will deal with the eleventh- and twelfth-century charters of Gloucester which bear on her Welsh possessions, and the later chronicle, of about 1400—and I hope to show, surprisingly enough, that the chronicle is a more reliable document than the charters; and the second part will deal specifically with Llancarfan, and especially with the Lives of its patron saint, St Cadoc, written about the time that the monks of Gloucester acquired the church. 1 Lloyd, 11, 397,432, etc. ; and Trans. Hon. Soc. of Cymmrodorion (1899-1900), p. 161 ; J. Conway Davies, E A , 1, 11, passim; SE B C , pp. 190 ff. 259

17-2

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The domestic chronicles of English monasteries are handy but treacherous sources. They often survive in late manuscripts, and carry a more or less continuous story from the foundation of the house to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. But this does not mean that they are of no value for earlier centuries ; nor even that they are of decreasing value the further back they go. The notorious annals of Bermondsey have made indescribable nonsense of the succession of thirteenth-century priors, but are far more reliable in the twelfth century; the chronicles of Evesham have preserved a contemporary account of Abbot Aethelwig (1059-77), but provide his successors with fictitious dates and put them in the wrong order.1 There is nothing surprising in these errors. For its own history, a monastery had to rely almost entirely on what record had been kept within its walls in each period, that is to say on official documents, charters and the like, and on annals, memoranda, historical notes, biographies and chronicles made by monks from time to time. What is surprising is the amount of information of good quality often available to later chroniclers. The modern historian has to subject these documents to the closest criticism if he is to disclose their history and assess their value. At first glance the history of St Peter’s abbey, Gloucester, is not impressive.12 It was compiled at the turn of the fourteenth and fif­ teenth centuries by Abbot Walter Frocester (1382-1412),3 and con1 On the annals of Bermondsey, see Rose Graham, English Ecclesiastical Studies (London, 1 9 2 9 ) , pp. 9 3 ff. ; on the chronicle of Evesham, D. Knowles, Monastic Order in England (Cambridge, 1 9 4 0 ) , pp. 7 0 4 - 5 . 2 It was printed in part by Dugdale (Monasticon, new ed., 1, 5 4 1 - 5 6 ) and in full by Hart, H G , 1, 3 - 1 2 5 . Hart used two MSS., Queen's College, Oxford, 3 6 7 (pp. 6 5 - 1 2 5 ) and Brit. Mus. Cotton MS. Domitian A v ili (fos. 1 4 5 V - 1 6 0 V ) ; a third MS., the best of the three, is now Gloucester, Dean and Chapter MS. 3 4 (fos. 1 - 4 3 v). All are of the fifteenth century, and it is likely that they were all copied off a single original, which was being revised from time to time while they were being copied. T he Gloucester MS. is clearly nearest to the original state of the history ; a few additions had been made before the Queen’s copy was taken, and a few more are incorporated into the Cotton MS. H art’s edition is reasonably accurate, but he has printed in words dates given in the MSS. in arabic numerals. a Hart doubted his authorship ; but the true beginning of the chronicle (pp. 5 6 , see below, p. 2 6 8 ) consists of some verses on the foundation which conclude : Walterus studuit Froucestre, et hec memoranda In scriptis posuit claustralibus enucleanda. These seem to imply at least that he was responsible for the verses, and it is reasonable to suppose they constitute some sort of claim to authorship of the chronicle as a whole. The point is of small consequence for our purpose ; there is no doubt that the chronicle was compiled, in its present form, in his time. 260

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sists partly of an index of the abbey’s properties with an account of how each was acquired. The chronicle only fills fifty pages in the Rolls Series edition, and is for the most part a brief account of the succession of abbots. Such a book hardly seems likely to contain any material of great importance relative to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. There can be no doubt that the chronicle and the index of pro­ perties are meant to go together. Three manuscripts of the Historia survive, and although there are minor differences between them, they all include both sections. There are, furthermore, crossreferences in the chronicle to the index.1 The index, like most of the kind, is largely an abstract of charters. Although the surviving originals and cartularies of Gloucester are an incomplete reflection of the medieval muniments of the abbey, sufficient charters remain to show clearly where much of Frocester’s information came from. But there remain a large number of entries which cannot be explained as summaries of charters. The section on Newport begins: King William II (junior), attacked by a serious illness at Gloucester, gave to God and the church of St Peter of Gloucester the church of St Gwynllyw of Newport, with 15 hides. Robert filius Omeri gave the tithe of his mill of Ebboth [i.e. on the river Ebbw]2 to the church of St Gwynllyw of Newport. Milo his son confirmed it. Morgan son of Morgan gave 40 acres to the church of Newport in Goldcliff marsh, in the time of Abbot Serlo. The church of St Gwynllyw of Newport was adjudged to the monks of Gloucester in the court of Theobald, arch­ bishop of Canterbury, and afterwards granted by confirmation of Earl William of Gloucester, in the time of Abbot Hamelin.3 With the exception of ‘in the time of Abbot Serlo ’, which may have been misplaced, all but the first sentence of this passage could be deduced from surviving charters.4 But King William’s grant is nowhere else referred to, and can hardly have been recorded in a charter. It may be pure invention, or a piece of local tradition ; but if it has a documentary basis, it seems probable that it began its career as part of the story of Abbot Serlo, the abbey’s second founder (1072-1104), contained in some version of the abbey chronicle. 1 Pp. 12-13, 14, 16, etc. 8 I owe this identification to D r G. Melville Richards. The name was later used for a manor in and around Newport. 3 P. 102. 4 H G t 11, 49 ff261

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It is strange that the abbey should claim to have had St Gwynllyw’s from William II, since there is no other reason to suppose that it was ever his to give. Yet in this lies a reason for regarding the sentence as a very early tradition, if not a fact. William II was not much given to endowing churches ; but there was one occasion in his life when it is recorded that a serious illness forced him to indulge in unwonted acts of charity. This was at Gloucester early in the winter of 1093 ; and the illness is famous because it led to the king’s insisting that St Anselm accept the see of Canterbury.1 The winter court at Gloucester played its part in Welsh history, too, because it was then, no doubt, that the campaigns in Brycheiniog were planned, which led to the destruction of Rhys ap Tewdwr ; and 1093 marked an important stage, too, in the establishment of the lordship of Glamorgan under Robert FitzHamon.2 It was as Robert’s successor as lord of Glamorgan that Earl William disputed with Gloucester the church of St Gwynllyw. It is conceivable that in his illness King William vowed to Gloucester abbey a substantial gift ; and it would be characteristic of him to vow a gift which would only be his if God were generous to him.3 Some such story is needed to explain how Gloucester’s claim to St Gwynllyw could be overlooked by the lords of Glamorgan. In any case, the mention of King William’s illness can hardly be coincidence: the story of his gift must surely go back to a time when men remembered that King William lay ill at Gloucester while the conquest of Glamorgan was being planned. The year 1093 saw the firm establishment of the lordship of Brecon under Bernard of Neufmarché. The earliest date for the conquest of Brecon appears as the following entry in the index under Glasbury: 1 Eadmer, Hist. Novorum, ed. M. Rule (Rolls Series), pp. 30 ff. ; cf. E. A. Freeman, Reign of William Rufus, 1 (Oxford, 1882), 391 ff. * E A, i, 107; cf. Lloyd, 11, 398. 3 ‘To many monasteries he made grants of land, which he subsequently with­ drew when he recovered. . . ’ {Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. G. N. Garmonsway (London, 1953), p. 227). It may be that in fact that gift was withdrawn; it was not the basis of the Gloucester case when the church was disputed between the earl and the abbey in the mid-twelfth century (H G , 11, 52-3, 51, 49-50). But it is also referred to in Henry I*s pancarte, where it is said to have been witnessed by Robert FitzHamon (Regesta, 11, no. 1041 ; cf. below, p. 271). T he monks claimed that it had been granted by Robert of Hay (on whom see Lloyd, 11, 442, 444) with the consent of Robert FitzHamon and the co-operation of Herewald bishop of ‘ Llandaff’ (see below, pp. 321-2). But the evidence for this was oral : they appear to have had no charter from either Robert. 262

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In the year of Our Lord 1088, in the time of Abbot Serlo, Bernard of Neufmarché gave to the church of St Peter’s Gloucester, Glasbury, with all its appurtenances, free and quit, and all the tithe of his whole domain in Brecknock, to wit of corn, cattle, cheese, game and honey ; in addition the church of Much Cowarne (Herefs.)..., King William II granting and confirming, in the second year of his reign. This year Gloucester and the church of St Peter were destroyed on account of the war between the magnates of England.1 This entry ultimately derives, in part at least, from Bernard’s charter;2 but this charter makes no reference to the date, the destruction of the abbey, or King William. A comparison with other entries suggests that the reference to William is to his general confirmation, a spurious document which will be discussed in due course ; the regnal year of his confirmation may simply be inference from ‘ 1088 \ It is highly unlikely that William confirmed Bernard’s acts in that year, since Bernard was one of the leaders in the great rebellion against the king.3 It is clear, then, that the date 1088 is either invention or derived from a chronicle; and the reference to the destruction of the abbey at the end of the passage strongly sug­ gests a chronicle. If we were to move this entry in the index bodily into the chronicle which precedes it, it would fit remarkably well, since it would be immediately followed by an annal which reads ‘ In the year of Our Lord 1089, on Sts Peter and Paul’s day, on the initiative of Abbot Serlo, the foundations of the church of Glou­ cester were begun, Robert bishop of Hereford laying the first stone’.4 This simple piece of surgery has restored the cause to its effect. The number of dated entries in the index is large; and though some of them may derive from dated charters and others from guesswork, it is reasonably certain that the bulk of them derive from entries in the chronicle which provided Abbot Frocester with his main source. This is confirmed by the order of entries in the index. The items are gathered under the names of properties; the names under their initial letters. Within each letter there is no fixed principle—certainly no alphabetical principle of arrangement—but 1 i, 80. 2 i, 314 = in, 5. 3 Freeman, 1, 22 ff., esp. p. 34; on Bernard see Orderic Vitalis, ed. Le Prévost, in , 43-4. It may be that the invasion of Brycheiniog was planned in 1088, but postponed. His victory over Rhys in 1093 clearly marked the decisive phase in the conquest. 4 H G %i, 11 ; the next entry in the chronicle, an earthquake on 11 August, is confirmed by Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E. 263

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the dated items tend to appear in chronological order.1 There are many exceptions and irregularities ; but the tendency is sufficient to indicate that in one of Frocester’s chief sources the items as a whole were grouped in chronological order. It has still to be proved that Frocester transcribed them correctly, or that they were correctly entered in the chronicle. On the whole, most of them can be roughly checked, very few of them precisely. About thirteen of the dates in Frocester’s index can be checked from other documents, and all seem to be accurate ; but with a few of these the argument is circular, since one is checking the date by a so-called charter entered in the cartulary of c. 1300, which is itself no more than an extract from the chronicle.2 A number more can be approximately dated from other evidence—and the dates do not conflict. One date in the index is manifestly wrong, but this is clearly due to a scribal error.3 Two other dates raise difficulties. Harold of Ewyas’s 1 E.g. the following are the main entries under S: (1, 111-14) Standish (821, 823), Stonehouse (1085), Shoteshore (Scott’s Quarry in Harescombe) (1091), Sandhurst (1102), Shipton (no date), Sutmede (in Tuffley) (no date), Sheldon (no date), Stanley (1146 and 1156), Saxlingham (no date), Slimbridge (1224), Southale (in Pencombe) (no date), and finally *De sturgione ’ and *De servitio hidagii et scutagii* (no date). Some of these entries are combined with other grants, and the undated entries could not be fitted into the chronological sequence—some are certainly earlier or later than the dated items adjacent to them ; the order, furthermore, occasionally resembles that in the cartulary printed in H G (c. 1300), and so may be based on the arrangement of the abbey muniments. But when all allowances have been made, the order of dated entries remains a striking fact, and can hardly be a coincidence. (Under Standish are noted the grant in 821 and King Beomwulf’s death in 823 ; the date is as given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, although the events have been telescoped so as to make Beomwulf die at the hands of the West Saxons instead of the East Angles. The actual year was 825.) 8 Entries on pp. 6 0 ( 1 1 2 2 ) , 6 2 - 3 ( 1 1 2 1 ) , 6 9 ( 1 1 2 8 ) , 7 1 ( 1 1 8 2 ) , 7 3 ( 1 0 8 5 ) , 8 0 ( 1 1 4 4 ) , 8 3 - 4 ( 1 2 6 3 ) , 8 5 - 6 ( 1 1 4 3 )* 9 2 ( 1 0 8 0 ) , 9 3 ( 1 0 8 1 ) , 1 0 4 ( 1 2 2 6 , for 1 2 2 6 / 7 ) , 1 0 5 ( 1 1 5 7 ) , h i ( 1 0 8 5 ) can be checked by charters in HG, 1, 164, 2 0 5 , 2 3 2 - 3 , 2 3 4 - 5 , 258, 3 1 1 ; 11, 1 9 8 ; h i , 2 5 7 ; i , 374-5, 386-7, 11, 3 8 - 9 , 1 1 , 1 0 5 - 7 , 1, 258 (cf. Regesta, 11, 3 9 6 . Those italicised look as if they began as entries in the chronicle; cf. below, p. 2 6 9 . In i, 8 5 - 6 the date is given as 1 1 6 3 ; see next note). 8 1009, pp. 80-1, probably for 1099. This must be a scribal error, since the gift is also dated ‘tempore Serlonis abbatis’ (i.e. 1072-1104); the error occurs in all the MSS. Walter de Lacy’s grant of St Peter’s church, Hereford, is dated 1io i in the index, 1100 in the cartulary (1, 84-5, 326); the index is probably correct, and both entries were probably derived from the chronicle. On p. 111 William of Eu is called count in 1085, although he only succeeded to the title in 1089. But it is likely that the title, not the gift, is an anachronism. T he word ‘comes* is miss­ ing in the cartulary version {Regesta, loc. cit.). T he foundation of St Guthlac’s Hereford (1, 85-6), is mis-dated 1163 in the Queen’s and Cotton M SS. It is cor­ rectly dated 1143 in the Gloucester MS. (cf. HG, hi, 257). There are one or two other discrepancies between the MSS. of little significance (e.g. pp. 100-1: 1120, Queen’s; 1121, Cotton, Gloucester; 1121 is clearly correct). 264

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gift of Ewyas, where a dependent priory was founded, is dated i ioo ; but the foundation charter was drawn up in the presence of Bernard, bishop of St David’s, who was consecrated in 1115.1 The foundation charter indicates that the original gift was made in the chapter-house at Gloucester, and laid on the altar of St Peter, and later confirmed ‘per manum venerabilis Bernardi Menevensis ecclesie episcopi in capitulo de Ewyas’. We shall not be far wrong in presuming that Harold’s gift was made on the occasion of the dedication in 1100, and confirmed after 1115. It was nothing unusual for a foundation charter to be drawn up fifteen or more years after the foundation had taken place. A similar problem attaches to the gift of St Padarn, the church of Llanbadarn Fawr ; this is dated 1111 in the index, but the charter of Gilbert FitzRichard (de Clare) is once again witnessed by Bishop Bernard.12 The index may here be wrong : a small scribal error could explain the date m i in place of 1115 or 1116; but it is perhaps more likely that the gift was made in m i , and confirmed by charter between Bernard’s accession in 1115 and Gilbert’s death in 1117. The advent of Bernard, the first Norman bishop of St David’s, meant a new regime in the church of his diocese, in which it was both possible and desirable to set grants of churches on a firmer footing than hitherto. If Llanbadarn was granted in m i , it was, like Glasbury in 1088, the first-fruits of a new principality; Gilbert FitzRichard de Clare had only begun the conquest of Ceredigion in 1110. In placing this great church, one of the most eminent of the Welsh clas churches, under Gloucester, he made what could have been a very notable gift; he showed how little he cared for Welsh traditions; he provided a base for the infiltration of the English Church; and he set the abbot of Gloucester a major problem in administration. In the event Llanbadarn was lost to Gloucester in the Welsh rebellion of 1136, and never recovered; and the church of Cardigan, also granted by Gilbert de Clare, and also the home of a small dependent priory, soon after passed out of Gloucester’s hands, a prey to a dispute with Chertsey abbey.3 This was not the 1 HG, i, 76, 285-6. 2 HG, I, 106; 11, 73-4; cf. Lloyd, 11, 432 and n., and on the founder, II, 426-7. On the other hand, Bishop Bernard does not occur in what may well be an early version of the grant, incorporated in Henry I ’s pancarte attributed to 1114 (below, p. 271). 3 HG , 11, 74, 76; Gloucester Cath. Library, Reg. A., fo. ii3 r - v (Archbishop Theobald); Giraldus, vn, 121, cf. Lloyd, 11, 596. It is possible that the charters 265

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only occasion when a great marcher lord was found to have given away valuable property twice over. Gloucester’s other Welsh dependency, St Michael’s, Ewenny, was founded by Maurice of London, the Lord of Kidwelly, on his Glamorgan property, where Norman power was better established than further west at the time. Its foundation is dated 1141 in the index; other evidence would prove that it was founded in the period 1140-3. This entry is one of many which can be confirmed approximately, though not precisely.1 In all about seventy-three entries in the index bear precise dates. They range from the seventh century to the fourteenth ;2 but the great concentration lies in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, in the time of Abbot Serlo and his immediate successors. Three are pre-Conquest; twenty-four claim to belong to the abbacy of Serlo, all of them between 1080 and 1104; eighteen to the period between 1104 and 1130; two to Walter de Lacy’s abbacy (1130-9) ; three to Gilbert Foliot’s (1139-48); five to Hamelin’s (1148-79); and eighteen are later. It is difficult to be sure in many cases whether the date came from the chronicle or from charters ; but it is a safe generalisation that almost none of Serlo’s was obtained from charters, while, from the mid-twelfth century onwards, an increasing proportion, perhaps a majority, were obtained from charters. If we reflect that a few of these dates can be proved precisely correct and many shown not to be far wrong, it becomes clear that we are in contact here with a large amount of authentic informa­ tion, much of it written down, as monastic annals often were, year by year, as the events happened. A glance at Frocester’s chronicle relating to Cardigan may have been tampered with; and H. E. Malden {Trans, of the Royal Hist. Soc., 3rd ser. v (1911), 141-56) accused the monks of Gloucester of deliberate falsification in their dispute with Chertsey. But it is more probable that their claim to Cardigan represented a genuine tradition, and that the rival claims arose from the political circumstances of the Norman lordships. In any case, Malden’s account of the case needs considerable revision. 1 HG, i, 75-6; cf. the documents in E A, 11, 642-4, idem, Nat. Library of Wales Journal, in (1943-4), 106-37. Gilbert Foliot, ep. 16 (ed. J. A. Giles), appears to suggest that Ewenny priory had been founded by Maurice’s father, William of London; what he probably means is merely that the church of St Michael, in which the priory was subsequently established, was dedicated in William’s time (before 1134). a The very few pre-Conquest entries are based on the narrative charters, whose history has been worked out in detail by H. P. R. Finberg in The Early Charters of the West Midlands (Leicester, 1961), pp. 153 flf. ; see also below, p. 267. 266

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will confirm this impression. Brief though it is, from the moment of Serlo’s accession it provides precise and circumstantial details which could hardly have been invented, and which can sometimes be proved by other evidence to be correct.1 His chronology of the abbots can be checked from other evidence ;2 and when he tells us that Abbot Serlo died ‘in about the 68th year of his life, the thirtythird year of his abbacy, 3 March, on the Thursday after Ash Wednesday, as the day was declining to evening’, we may be sure he had access to authentic information; the day of the week is warranty for that. More striking still is the account of the death of Abbot Walter de Lacy. It is not only full of intimate detail, and has some references to persons and events which only a contemporary could have made, but it claims first-hand knowledge: ‘sicut ex ipsius ore audivimus ’ ; and when Walter was dead, two monks went to Cluny ‘propter electum nostrum *Gilbert Foliot. This passage, at least, must have been written by a monk of Gloucester who lived there during a period that included both Abbot Walter and Abbot Gilbert.3 The accuracy of the chronicle from the accession of Abbot Serlo is in marked contrast to its weakness in earlier passages. The author or authors—whether of the eleventh or of the fourteenth century— had access to early charters and a list of donations of the ninth century; they had a little information (not always accurate) for the period 1022-72.4 Between 862 and 1022 they had nothing. The contrast between this and the fullness and accuracy of the informa­ tion for Serlo’s time tends to strengthen the conclusion that the original Gloucester chronicle for the period from 1072 to 1139 or 1 See Appendix 1. 2 T he full grounds for this for the period 1072-1224 will be given elsewhere; the later dates can be checked approximately from other annals and the Patent Rolls. There are occasional confusions between regnal years and years of grace, but it seems clear that the chronicle is always based on accurate information. The only discrepancy is that the annals of Winchester {Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard, 11, 42) give Abbot Peter’s accession in 1107, not 1104; but it is likely that this refers to his blessing not his election, on the date of which (1104) the chronicle is probably correct. 3 H G , I, 13, 16-18 (the claim to first-hand knowledge was noted by Hart, who did not, however, pursue the m atter further). 4 Finberg,p. 165 n., lists some confusions in the early centuries, and even in the early eleventh; he also shows in an admirable analysis that the early charters were tampered with in the ninth century, and reconstructs the original state of the charter of King Burgred of 862 (pp. 155-7). This text was interpolated at a later time, but it is not clear whether this happened in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth century. 267

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later was a substantial affair, kept up with care by the monks of the house; and that it contained details of the acquisition of new pro­ perties and other affairs of the early Norman abbots. When Gilbert Foliot became abbot in 1139, he must have found, then, copious records of his predecessor’s abbacy. But it is far from clear that Gloucester was as well provided with charters to support its legal claims to property. When its claim to St Gwynllyw’s was challenged it could produce no charter. When the cartulary of c. 1300 was drawn up, it seems clear that entries from the chronicle were used in lieu of charters.1 When Gilbert Foliot was bishop of Hereford, he had to defend himself against the charge of defending Gloucester abbey against the archbishop of York in a lawsuit with forged instruments.2 In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, before it became finally established that all transactions in land should be immedi­ ately described in a charter, it was no uncommon practice, in England and in Normandy and elsewhere, for the beneficiaries to keep a chronicle, a list of donations or something of the sort, which might from time to time be collected into a large pancarte, to which the founder could attach his seal, and later students of diplomatic an often needless scepticism. There was a special reason for doing this at Gloucester, since the early history of the housè, from the seventh to the ninth century, was recorded in the form of a narra­ tive charter composed in the ninth century, which has recently been analysed in detail by Dr Finberg.3 Frocester’s chronicle opens with a summary of Gloucester’s early history from its foundation as a convent of nuns, in 681, to 729. Then it begins again, with Abbot Frocester’s preface, in halting verse, followed by a somewhat different summary from 681 to the early ninth century, when the nunnery gave way to a college of secular priests; it resumes with the refoundation by Wulfstan of Worcester and York in 1022 ; carries the story through to the eve of Abbot Serlo, then strangely goes back to King Burgred and 862, before taking up the story of Serlo and the establishment of the Norman abbey. The explanation of this is quite simple: Frocester began with his verses and his brief narrative of the abbesses ; then worked out a fresh summary of the early history from the charter of Burgred, with some help from Bede and Higden, which was placed 1 See pp. 269 ff. 3 Loc. cit.

* Ep. 109 (ed. J. A. Giles). 268

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on inserted slips or in blank spaces. The incompetence of his own or a later scribe has left the two narratives of the early history in sandwich form, with one between the two parts of the other. The ninth-century narrative was known, then, to Abbot Frocester. It is also probable that it was known to the Gloucester monks of the 1080’s. It is a very strange fact that Gloucester abbey appears to have kept no genuine writ or charter of William I, and probably none too of William II—in spite of the fact that Abbot Serlo was a great man of business, and that the Conqueror was a regular visitor at Gloucester. It may be that devastation in 1088 and fire in 1102 destroyed some of the early charters ; but it seems likely that Serlo preferred to record the many donations he received in a different way. The index to the chronicle and the abbey cartularies between them enable us to reconstruct what appear to be three entries in the chronicle, opening ‘Anno ab incarnatione Domini’ or words to that effect, belonging to the years 1080, 1081 and 1085, and concluding with a list of signa headed by the king’s.1 The form, narrative with signa, is reminiscent of Burgred’s narrative-charter; and it seems highly probable that these documents of 1080-5 repre­ sent entries which only existed (in written form) in the abbey chronicle. In the first, Walter de Lacy gives Lydney to Gloucester abbey: the deed is done at Berkeley (Glos.), and the king and six or more magnates add their signa. The third document records how in 1085 Walter de Lacy died on 27 March and was buried in the chapter-house at Gloucester; then his widow gave the monks Duntisborne, a vill of five hides. So far the index, which gives a fuller version of this entry; the cartulary copies carry on T n the same year William de Ou gave to the same church a mill with a virgate of land attached [in Stonehouse]; William king of the English consenting to and confirming both donations. This was done at Gloucester in the presence of his sons and magnates who also confirmed it.* Then follow the signa of the king, his two elder sons, and eight magnates. This document could either be, as I have suggested, a contemporary record of donations, with the king add­ ing his confirmation, as it were, of the year’s doings, during the Christmas festivities ; or else a later writing-up in document form 1 HGy I, 92 = 374-5 ; I, 93 = 386-7; 1,73» 111 = 258. They relate to Lydney, Linkenholt and Duntisborne and Stonehouse mill (see above), the first two places listed under L, the first under D, and the second (following Standish, granted in 821), under S (cf. p. 264). 269

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of donations not formally recorded at the time. The grant of Duntisborne, and the king’s confirmation, are recorded in Domesday Book, inaugurated at the same Christmas; and this strongly con­ firms the genuineness of the transaction. When the first volume of Davis’s Regesta appeared in 1913» the editors took the reading ‘Signum Willelmi episcopi Landiffarnensis’ to refer to William bishop of Llandaff ( 1186-91), and so condemned the document as a clumsy forgery. This suggestion was suppressed by the editors of volume 11,1 and in fact ‘Landiffarnensis’ can only be a corruption of ‘Lindisfarnensis’, and the bishop was William of Durham (1081-96). The see had left Lindisfarne in the ninth century; but the same style appears in the contemporary record of the Council of London of 1075—it was evidently an affectation of the early Norman successors of St Cuthbert. This, and the consistency of the list of signatories, strongly confirm the record’s authenticity. If any doubt remains that these records are entries from the chronicle, not separate ‘charters ’, it must surely be dispelled by the remaining document, that of 1081. It is given this date in the index, but in the cartulary of c. 1300 it appears on its own, opening ‘Anno subsequenti dédit Arnulphus de Hesdinge. . . terram que vocatur Linkeholte, concessu Willelmi Anglorum régis; quod factum est apud Salesburiam in Purificatione Sancte Marie’, followed by twelve signa, including the king’s. Anno subsequenti makes no sense where the document now is, isolated from its context in the cartulary; but is wholly intelligible as an entry in the chronicle following the other entry dated 1080. Christmas 1085 was the last Christmas spent by William I at Gloucester; but it seems likely that William Rufus continued the practice of adding his signum to Abbot Serlo’s book from time to time. A copy survives of what purports to be an elaborate confirma­ tion by William II, opening ‘Anno incarnacionis Domini millesimo nonagesimo sexto* and closing with a convincing list of eight or more signa.2 But it includes several grants which were made later 1 P• 396, where Llandaff is corrected to Durham, though without explanation. For ‘Lindisfarnensis*, see D. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae, 1, 363. 2 Regesta, 11, 403, 410, no. 379a = L X Ia; its authenticity is discussed on p. 403. It was dated 1086 in the cartulary copy, and so appeared in Regesta, 1, no. 219 as a spurious confirmation by William I. The better version has the date 1096, but in form it resembles, not a genuine document of William II, but the spurious confirmation of King Stephen for Gloucester (see below); it opens by confirming the manors in dispute with the archbishop of York for half a century later than this; and it confirms grants dated 1099, 1101, and 1126 by the index 270

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than 1096; and there are not wanting signs that it began its career as a charter of Henry I. Nor was 1096 its final resting-place, since a version of the same charter was attributed to William I and dated 1086. These documents are clumsy forgeries, bearing little resem­ blance to the genuine charters of William I and William II. Their purpose seems to have been twofold: to provide general confirma­ tions by the early Norman kings of the numerous grants of the period; and to underline Gloucester’s right to the manors of Northleach, Oddington and Standish.1 Their form suggests a local craftsman, working on the genuine models we have just been dis­ cussing and blowing them up into more elaborate charters, as was the manner of forgers. A similar story may lie behind a pancarte of Henry I of 1114.2 In the generation before Abbot Serlo, some of Gloucester’s manors had been absorbed by that remarkable man of the world, Ealdred, archbishop of York (died 1069). The manors of North­ leach, Oddington and Standish are recorded in Domesday Book to have been in the hands of Thomas I, archbishop of York, but to have been formerly held by St Peter’s, Gloucester.3 An entry in (Roger de Busli’s gift of Clifford, and probably Gerin de Loges’s gift of land in Guiting—see above; Hugh de Lacy’s gift of St Peter’s Hereford of i io i (omitted from the ‘ 1086’ version) and Winebald de Ballon’s gift in Framilode of 1126). Above all, it confirms Rudford ‘de dono m eo', a gift by Patrick of Cahors, and a half hide which Tovi *de me tenebat ’ ; yet in King Stephen’s confirmation Rudford is said to have been granted by King Henry and Tovi to have held of King Henry ; and the index tells us that King Henry Senior confirmed Patrick’s gift in the time of Abbot William ( 1113-30) (p. 60). Of other grants the index says that they were confirmed both by William II and by Henry I. We may deduce from these indications that the confirmation of 1086 or 1096 started its career as a confirmation by Henry I and progressed backwards, decade by decade. 1 Together with Barton and land in Condicote (see HG, 11, 105 ff.), all of which was in dispute with the archbishop of York: see below. * This puzzling document (Regesta, 11, 1041) is dated at Gloucester in 1114, and is entirely free from any resemblance to other charters of Henry I. It is a pancarte, and while the pancarte as a whole can hardly be genuine, most of the transactions it describes very probably occurred. Several of the charters it con­ tains are given witnesses, and the witness-lists are usually plausible, and can hardly have been invented. It gives a different form to the grant of Llanbadam (above, p. 265) which could well belong to c. 1111 ; it gives Girmund abbot (of Winchcombe) and Ralph Bloet as witnesses to Robert FitzHamon’s grant of Llancarfan (see below) ; on the other hand we may doubt whether Robert himself really witnessed King William I I ’s grant of St Gwynllyw’s (see above, p. 262). As the editors of the Regesta point out, only one of the grants can be proved later than 1114, and it is possible that Henry I made some genuine confirmation in that year. 8 Domesday Book, 1, fo. 164 ft. 271

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the chronicle records that Thomas restored them on Palm Sunday 1095.1 It is impossible to be sure whether this is an original entry, or an interpolation made in the course of the controversy which ensued. This entry, and the controversy, may help to explain why a confirmation by Henry I was back-dated to 1096. But it seems that the monks of Gloucester were later concerned to show that their rights in the manors had been fully conceded long before 1095-6. Hence, perhaps, the further back-dating of William IFs confirma­ tion to William I and 1086; hence certainly the most accomplished forgery which the abbey produced, an original writ attributed to the Conqueror, written in an apparently eleventh-century hand, with an apparently genuine seal attached to it. This writ has long been under suspicion; but forgery was not finally proved until Dr Chaplais and Mr Bishop identified its seal as a sample from a spurious matrix concocted at Westminster in the second quarter of the twelfth century, and its handwriting as identical with that of two Coventry charters and ten notorious forgeries from West­ minster.2 This document, which was probably produced at a late stage in the controversy with York, is a fine example of the ‘Westminster* school of forgeries. In the event, Gloucester won the case, though not until 1157, and not without having to pay a considerable indemnity; nor did it escape the attention of the arch­ bishop of York that Gloucester abbey had dabbled in forgery.3 The admirable writ may belong to the later stages of the dispute ; the clumsy royal confirmations are probably a few years earlier. They may be associated with a confirmation which passes under the name of King Stephen, and is in form very similar indeed to them, opening ‘Anno ab incarnatione Domini nostri Jesu Christi millesimo centesimo tricesimo octavo*. The history of this curious document can be reconstructed in some detail. Its form alone would be sufficient to condemn it as spurious : it bears no resemblance to the writ-charters which Stephen’s chancery normally issued at this date; it has no witnesses; it is 1 i, 93. Gloucester seems to have recovered part of Standish, de facto, in 1121 (HG, I, 100—i ; Regesta, n, no. 1305; cf. above, p. 264 n. 3). 8 The original is in Hereford Cathedral Library ; on it see T . A. M. Bishop and P. Chaplais, Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A.D. 1100 (Oxford, 1957), pp. xxi, xxii and n. 8 HG, 11, 105-7, cf. Letters of John of Salisbury, 1 (ed. Butler, Millor and Brooke, Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 1955), no. 42, cf. p. 71 ; Gilbert Foliot, ep. 109 (ed. Giles). 272

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similar to the spurious charters of William I and II, though even more inflated. It is dated most meticulously to 1138, ‘the third year of my reign’; and was granted, so it says, at the petition of Abbot Walter de Lacy, who died in 1139. Yet it confirms at least three grants made in the ii4 o ’s: the grant of St Guthlac’s church, Hereford, which is dated 1143; the manor of Eastleach, which came to Gloucester in 1144; and the church of St Leonard of Stanley, made in 1146. At least one of these gifts, that of Stanley, came to Gloucester in very peculiar circumstances; it was made possible, in fact, by the special conditions of the anarchy of Stephen’s reign.1 The earliest surviving text of Stephen’s charter is a copy of the mid-twelfth century, with an accompanying letter from the bishop of Worcester to the archbishop of Canterbury, requesting a con­ firmation. There is no reason to doubt the good faith of Bishop Simon’s letter, nor the confirmation which it elicited from Arch­ bishop Theobald.12 It is hard to imagine a motive for forging the bishop’s letter, save at the moment when it was supposed to have been written—and if that was done, the argument is not affected; and it would have been very odd for Gloucester to have needed to forge a charter from Theobald, since he and Abbot Gilbert (113948) were close friends. But if these documents are accepted as genuine, the whole circumstances of the forging of Stephen’s con­ firmation become plain. Abbot Gilbert is mentioned both by the bishop and by the arch­ bishop, so neither document can be later than September 1148, when he was consecrated bishop of Hereford. Nor can Stephen’s confirmation be earlier than 1146, when Stanley was granted to Gloucester. In 1147-8 Gloucester abbey had to face a crisis in its fortunes: in 1147 Robert earl of Gloucester died, and in 1148 his sister the Empress Matilda left the country. Abbot Gilbert had been a staunch Angevin, and some of the gains of the 1140’s were probably dependent on Angevin ascendancy. The Angevin cause must have seemed doomed in these years, and the abbey had to widen the basis of its support; the ultimate success of Henry II could not have been foreseen. It seems likely that the abbey had profited from the anarchy; or at least saved itself from serious loss 1 On the texts of Stephen’s charter, and these details, see Appendix 11. On Gilbert Foliot, Letters of John of Salisbury, 1, pp. xxvi, xxvii, and literature there cited. 2 A. Saltman, Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1956), no. 111. 18

273

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by taking advantage of some of the situations which arose : Stanley is probably a case in point. Since Gloucester eventually kept almost all it claimed in Stephen’s ‘confirmation*, it is unlikely that there was more than a little sleight of hand in it. But the circumstances of 1147-8 might seem to threaten a return to the status quo before the coming of the empress. At this time it was becoming fashion­ able for English monastic houses in doubt about the political future to turn to Archbishop Theobald for confirmations which in earlier times they would have demanded from the king j1what more natural than that Gloucester should do the same? To save themselves harassing questions about their right to any of the properties claimed, they produced a comprehensive charter of King Stephen to be the model of their confirmation. But Theobald and his clerks would know perfectly well that Abbot Gilbert would never have turned to Stephen for a confirmation while Earl Robert was in revolt or the empress in control of Gloucester—hence the date of the confirmation, 1138, the year before the earl’s rebellion. The closeness in date between the forging and the confirmation, and the fact that Gloucester seems to have kept no ‘original’ of the forgery, suggest that Stephen’s confirmation was forged simply to be con­ firmed by Theobald; and this is consistent with a peculiarity in its text. Theobald’s confirmation follows Stephen’s so closely that he refers at one point to the kings his predecessors—but one phrase in Stephen’s charter is more appropriate in Theobald’s, and reads as if designed for the archbishop’s confirmation: ‘ex dono venerabilis fratris nostri Roberti Herefordensis episcopi*. The enterprise was a highly rational one. To obtain a confirma­ tion from Stephen would have been difficult; to work honestly would have involved tiresome questions about what happened in the period 1139-47, and i t was the purpose of this intrigue precisely to forestall such questions. In a divided country Theobald’s con­ firmations were acquiring special value; and Theobald would be unlikely to ask awkward questions. On the other hand, he would be happier to confirm a charter from Stephen than from the Angevins. It is not certain how big a part Abbot Gilbert himself played in this shady affair; but only by much special pleading could one 1 As appears from num erous docum ents in Professor S altm an’s T h eo b a ld . O ur docum ent is, however, one of the earlier of these general confirm ations: m ost belonged to the period 1149-54. 274

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absolve so active and clear-headed an abbot from a measure of responsibility. It looks as if the twists and turns of the anarchy brought out the early training in legal chicanery, which was later to bear fruit in the agonising circumstances of the controversy with Becket.1 One deduces, then, that Stephen's confirmation was forged at Gloucester in 1146-8, probably in 1147 or early 1148, and sent to Theobald with Bishop Simon's covering letter for confirmation. At its head came the manors in dispute with the archbishop of York, which emphasise its close resemblance to the charters of William I and II, which must have been drawn up about the same time. In both William I and William II's *charters ' the first person singular occurs in the course of two transactions; both were referred, obviously correctly, to Henry I in Stephen's charter.2 We may therefore deduce that Stephen's was forged first; but the charters of the two Williams must have followed very shortly after. That seems to have been about the limit of the forgery; apart from the documents analysed above, one other of the Conqueror, and one or two of a later century,3 there are few of the abbey's docu1 Cf. D. Knowles, Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket (Cam­ bridge, 1951), esp. pp. 115 ff. 2 Rudford and land in Ampney which Tovi held (HG, I, 334; Regesta, 11, p. 410: ‘ex or de dono m eo’, ‘de me tenebat’). Both are referred to Henry I in Stephen’s confirmation ; and both were in fact grants by Winebald de Ballon, the latter specifically dated 1126 (H G , 1, 61, 77, where Rudford is said to have been confirmed both by William II and by Henry I, and to have been granted in the time of Abbot Serlo; but this may simply be inference from the charter of ‘ William II ’ and the lost charter of Henry I. Elsewhere in the index—HG, 1, 109 —is another reference to Rudford, to the effect that it was granted by William II). Ampney was in dispute with Tewkesbury (HG, 1, 61), which may be one reason why these confirmations were back-dated. 3 Of the charters of William I and II in Regesta, I, nos. 167 (and 180, which was simply an extract from 167), 445 alone remain unaccounted for here, apart from some extracts from the index which were included by Davis. Of these no. 167 (HG, 11, 186) is clearly spurious, and was probably composed as part of the same enterprise which produced the spurious confirmations already discussed : it purports to be a confirmation of William I, includes a number of properties not included in HG, 1, 334 (‘ 1086’), is somewhat similar in form to the latter, and has a witness list consisting of four eminent bishops and William the king’s son : this list could be genuine, but could easily have been concocted. Regesta, 1, no. 445 (HG, 11, 293) may be genuine; but William II is king ‘ Dei gratia’, which must be an addition, and the witness could have been borrowed from Regesta, 11, no. 629 (Henry I). Genuine writs of Henry I are relatively numerous. L. C. Hector, Palaeography and Medieval Forgery (London and York, 1959, pp. 12-13 and plate 11), discusses a later forged writ of Henry I, concocted in the thirteenth century.

275

18-2

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ments which arouse suspicion. But enough has been said to suggest that the early charters of Gloucester abbey are less reliable evidence than its chronicle. This investigation enables us, I think, to treat the entries in the Gloucester chronicle and index with greater confidence than has been possible hitherto. We must allow for scribal errors and for the late date of the manuscripts; but we need not hedge their statements with qualifications. The result of this is not substantial, since the source itself has long been well known. But it may make us look with a new interest at the grant of 1109, which refers to Robert de Baskerville's return from Jerusalem, and another of about the same date in which Henry I compensated the monks ‘for the site where Gloucester castle now stands'; above all to the statement that in 1087 Roger of Berkeley the elder ‘in descriptione totius Anglie fecit Nymdesfeld [Nympsfield, Glos.] describi ad mensam régis, abbate Serlone nesciente'.1 For the purpose of the present paper, the chief interest is to con­ firm the validity of the entries relating to Wales, which provide essential information about the opening stages of the invasion of Brycheiniog in 1088 and the planning of the invasion of Glamorgan in 1093 ; also of Gilbert de Clare’s activities in Ceredigion in the period m o -1 7 .12 It also provides some confirmation of the evidence that the most interesting of Gloucester's acquisitions, the church of St Cadoc of Llancarfan, came to her from Robert FitzHamon.3 No date is given, and the entry may simply be a deduction from a lost charter of Robert's or one of the surviving confirmations. The grant was confirmed, so the index tells us, by King William, ‘tempore Serlonis abbatis'; it duly appears (with mention of Robert FitzHamon) in the spurious confirmations of William I, William II and Stephen; and it also appears in the 1 H G t I, 81, 59, 101 and 112 for information that Roger of Berkeley became a monk in 1091 ; on the family, see H. Barkly, ‘T he Earlier House of Berkeley*, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. viu (1883), 193—223. In Domesday Book (1, fo. 163 a) Nympsfield appears as one of the numerous berewicks of the great manor of Berkeley, a royal manor (hence ‘ad mensam régis*) which was held at farm by Roger of Berkeley. This explains the entry in the index, which contains an addition to the hints observed by recent students of Domesday of the influence of the tenants-in-chief in compiling the survey. 2 Also, of the founding of Ewenny (above, p. 266). 8 The entries for Treguff and Radnor (pp. 115, n o ) were almost certainly inferences from the charters in H G , 11, i o - n , 103. 276

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pancarte of Henry I.1 The pancarte may be dubious in its present form, but there is no reason to doubt the elements of which it is composed; in this case that Robert FitzHamon gave the church of St Cadoc, with the witnesses Abbot Girmund and Ralph Bloet. Girmund was abbot of Winchcombe from 1095 to 1122,12 and we may therefore date Robert’s gift between 1095 and 1107, when Robert died.3 If the index is correct in its reference to Serlo, the gift was made before 1104. This may be inference from the ‘con­ firmation* by William I; but it is almost certainly correct. In his last years, Robert was engaged in the endowment of Tewkesbury abbey, and in establishing a dependent priory under Tewkesbury in his own headquarters at Cardiff. This makes it unlikely that he would have made a substantial gift to Gloucester as late as 1102, when he founded Tewkesbury; unlikely, indeed, that it was made within two or three years of that date.4We may safely date the grant of St Cadoc c. 1095-1100, with a prejudice in favour of an early date : it was very likely an offering of first-fruits, so to speak, from the conquest of Glamorgan, just as Bernard of Neufmarché gave Glasbury at the outset of his attack on Brycheiniog, and Gilbert de Clare Llanbadarn Fawr at the outset of his conquest of Ceredigion.

APPENDIX I

The Gloucester Chronicle and Florence of Worcester A number of passages in the chronicle have a close parallel in Florence or John of Worcester, and it would be highly desirable for the argument in the text to establish the relations between them. Unfortunately, the nature and history of ‘Florence* are still 1 HG, 1, 93, 334; Regesta, 11, 410; H G , 1, 222-5 ; Regesta, 11, no. 1041 (printed in full, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xli (1918-19), 87 ff.). The confirma­ tion by Robert, earl of Gloucester, made in 1141-7 and witnessed by his wife Mabel, Robert FitzHamon’s daughter (HG, 11, 10-11) is in the form of a grant, and gives no hint of Robert FitzHamon’s earlier grant. The cumulative evidence, especially of the pancarte, leaves no doubt that it was made ; and it is not uncom­ mon for confirmations to take the form of grants at this period. 2 Winchcombe annals, Brit. Mus. Cotton MS. Tiberius E iv, fos. 21, 22 v. 3 Lloyd, 11, 441. 4 Tewkesbury was refounded in 1102 ; but the plan must have been in the wind for some years earlier (Victoria County Hist., Glos., 11, 62; D. Knowles and R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London, 1953), pp. 62, 78). 277

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uncertain, so that final answers are not possible; for the present purpose I treat Florence and John as a single chronicle, as they are in all the MSS.1 The parallels fall into two groups: A. With the main text of John of Worcester: 1. (1058 : dedication and refoundation by Bishop Ealdred), HG, i, 9; Florence, Chron. ex Ckronicis, ed. B. Thorpe (London, 18489), i, 217. 2. (1100: dedication of Abbot S erb’s church), HG, 1, 12; Florence, 11, 44. 3. (1100: death of Thomas I, archbishop of York), HG, 1, 12; Florence, 11, 48. 4. (1101 in Florence, 1102 in HG : burning of Gloucester), HG, i, 12; Florence, 11, 48.2 5. (1122, 8 id. Mart., feria 4, in John correctly; 7 id. Mart., feria 4 in HG: second fire; both refer back to the first and repeat their disagreement on its date), HG, 1, 14-15; Florence, 11, 77 = John of Worcester, Chronicle, ed. J. R. H. Weaver (Oxford, 1908), P- *7-

6. (1130: resignation of Abbot William, succession of Abbot Walter), HG, 1, 15 ; Florence, 11, 92 = John, pp. 30-1. B. With the additions to John of Worcester in Trinity College, Dublin, MS. no. 503 (E. 6. 4). It has long been known that these additions were derived, in whole or part, from a Gloucester source. Weaver, pp. 5-7, notes the more important additions :3e.g. the death of Roger of Berkeley in 1127; the visits of Stephen and Matilda to Gloucester in 1138-9. Only two of these interpolations concern us now: 1. It adds the words ‘absque tarnen sui conventus consensu’ to no. 6 above: this is not in John, but is in H G . 2. It gives an account of Abbot Walter’s death and Gilbert Foliot’s election under 1148 (HG, 1, 17-18; Florence, 11, 114-15, cf. John, p. 54 n.). This includes the phrase ‘electum nostrum’, but is much less full than the parallel account in HG, 1, 17-18. 1 Cf. R. R. Darlington, Vita Wulfstani (Camden, 3rd series, XL, 1928), pp. xv ff. and nn. * The discrepancy is circumstantial, and repeated in 1122; there seems no way of deciding which was right. Under 1104 Florence (11, 53) records the death of Abbot Serlo (4 non. Mart. ; 5 non. Mart, in H G , 1, 13) ; but it is only a passing mention, and there is no evidence of verbal connection with the parallel passage in HG. 3 On these cf. D. Walker, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxvii (1958), 71-2 n. 278

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The Dublin MS. clearly used Gloucester material, which must have included the chronicle which was the source of Frocester. Whether all its additional information came from this chronicle cannot be decided ; if so, the chronicle contained more information of a general character than Frocester indicates. The relations with the main text of John raise a more difficult problem. John sometimes adds to the information in HG; HG is occasionally somewhat more circumstantial than John. For example, in A i above HG adds a list of properties held by Bishop Ealdred after he had re-established the abbey, whereas ‘Florence* adds a note of his dealings with Wilton abbey ; in 2 they are identical, save that *Florence * adds one to the list of bishops present ; in 6 HG adds that Abbot Walter was blessed at Worcester. The evidence is not sufficient to disprove the possibility that, where they are paral­ lel, John or ‘Florence* is the source of HG. On the other hand, it is not incompatible with the view that they used a common, Gloucester source. In favour of the former is the absence of significant additions in HG (save the list of properties, which could easily be explained, and the mention of Worcester, which might be inference). In favour of the latter is the fact that if Gloucester had a chronicle, one would expect to find some record in it of these events (save those, perhaps, of 1058, if the chronicle started in 1072) ; and the determined opposition of HG to Florence’s date for the earlier fire. The question must be left open.

APPENDIX

11

King Stephen's supposed confirmation to Gloucester abbey A twelfth-century copy, with covering letter from Bishop Simon of Worcester (see p. 273), is preserved in the British Museum, Cotton Charter, xvii. 3 (damaged in the Cotton fire); a copy of c. 1300 is in the cartulary in the Public Record Office, C 150/1, from which it was printed by Hart, HG> 1, 222-5; another (abbreviated) in Gloucester Cathedral Library, Reg. A, fo. i6v. The close associa­ tion of the two documents in the cartulary suggests that the cartulary followed a copy which included both—perhaps the Cotton copy itself. There is no evidence that a separate sealed ‘original ’ ever existed. Bishop Simon’s letter has also been printed 279

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by A. Saltman, Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1956), p. 335. The grounds for doubting its genuineness are summarised above, pp. 272-3. Apart from its form, the chief is the discrepancy between the date, 1138, ‘anno regni mei tercio’, and the fact that it confirms the following grants made in the 1140’s. (1) ‘ecclesiam sancti Guthlaci in Hereford*.. .exdonovenerabilis fratris (sic) nostri Roberti Herefordensis episcopi.’1 The bishop’s charter is in Gilbert Foliot’s letters;12 it confirms a surrender by Roger de Port,3 which is dated 1143.4 The witnesses of the charter include Milo, earl of Hereford, who would date it in any case to I I 4 I“ 3-

(2) ‘ecclesiam sancti Leonardi de Stanleya.. . . ’ A small house of Augustinian canons was established in the church of Leonard Stanley (Glos.) in the 1120’s. Some time in Gilbert Foliot’s abbacy at Gloucester (1139-48) it was subjected to Gloucester under somewhat peculiar circumstances. In ep. 108, Gilbert describes the transfer, and the way in which it was disputed by the prior of Ste-Barbe-en-Auge, c. 1149-50. While this dispute was on, Archbishop Theobald issued a confirmation to Stanley,5 which makes no mention of either Gloucester or of Ste-Barbe, and was probably intended to restore the status quo ante 1146 before the main dispute was fought out. What it does mention is a connection between Stanley and the Berkeley ‘Hernesse*, which links it to one of the most complicated stories of the anarchy. The churches of the Berkeley district, or ‘Hernesse’, lying along the east bank of the Severn south of Gloucester, had evidently at one time been subject to the minster at Berkeley, an old convent which had fallen into decay and eventually been secularised by Earl Godwin.6 In the period 1144-7 Empress Matilda granted these churches to Reading abbey. Her grant was confirmed by Henry II as duke of Normandy; and he subsequently (1153-4) made an arrangement, which reveals that Reading’s rights had been disputed. This was 1 H G reads ‘sancti Guthlaci Herefordiae’. I give the text of the Cotton copy where legible. 8 Ed. Giles, no. 123; also the St Guthlac’s cartulary, Balliol College MS. 271, fo. 88 v. 8 Ibid. fos. 96V-97; HG, hi, 257-8. 4 See above, p. 264 n. 3. 5 Saltman, no. 254. Cam and Arlingham churches are included. 6 C. S. Taylor, ‘Berkeley M inster’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xix (1894-5), 70-84, esp. p. 82. 280

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no doubt due to the fact that the founder of St Augustine’s abbey, Bristol, Robert FitzHarding, who was formally enfeoffed with the manor of Berkeley about this time, was also attempting to grant the churches to Bristol abbey. In the meantime (i 147-50) yet another claimant had appeared in Queen Adela, Henry I’s widow and countess of Arundel. She repeated the grant to Reading, and King Stephen and Simon bishop of Worcester confirmed her gift.1 Her right to Berkeley is not explained; no doubt she regarded it as part of her dower. The great manor of Berkeley, with its numerous ‘berewicks’, had been ‘terra régis* in 1086, but was at farm to Roger of Berkeley. In the period 1152-4 the current Roger of Berkeley was finally dispossessed in favour of Robert FitzHarding.2 Thus at one time or another during the anarchy, part or whole of this manor seems to have been treated as royal demesne, as a queen’s dowry, as the tenure of Roger of Berkeley IV, and as the tenure of Robert FitzHarding. The ‘Hernesse* was ancient monastic property; and it is interesting to compare the history of Berkeley with the history of the Welsh clas churches, like Llancarfan, just over the border. About the same time Stanley, which was not itself in the ‘Hernesse*, but clearly already had links with Berkeley and with the churches of Cam and Arlingham which were, was granted to Gloucester: the grant is dated 1146 in the index,3 and must be later than 1142 (from Foliot’s letter, which mentions a bishop of Salisbury: there was no bishop between a very short time after Foliot’s accession as abbot and 1142). In 1156 the church of Cam was granted or confirmed to Stanley (now definitely established as a dependency of Gloucester) by Roger of Berkeley.4 In 1175 the dis­ pute between Reading and Bristol about the churches of the ‘Hernesse’ was settled: Bristol remained in possession; Reading received a pension of 20 marks; both agreed to co-operate in the attempt to recover Cam and Arlingham. In 1177 a further settle­ ment was made with Gloucester : the latter continued to hold Cam, 1 For Bristol: Monasticon, in, 365 ff., and see next note; FitzHarding’s grant did not include Cam and Arlingham; for Reading: Brit. Mus. Egerton MS. 3031, fos. 15 V, 20, 26; i6v, 19, 53r-v. The empress’s charter must be between 1144, when her husband took the title duke of Normandy, and 1147, when the earl of Gloucester, who witnesses, died. Queen Adela’s charter is addressed to Simon, bishop of Worcester (d. 1150) and witnessed by Hilary, bishop of Chi­ chester (consecrated 1147). 3 Complete Peerage (revised edition), 11, 123 ff., esp. p. 125. 3 H G t I, 113. 4 H G t I, 114. 281

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but paid a pension of 6 marks, which was to be divided between Reading and Bristol.1 For Stanley, Gloucester had to dispute only with Ste-Barbe; but for Stanley's possessions, she had also to engage in controversy and compromise with Reading and Bristol. Thus four religious houses, an empress, a queen and several other lay notables were involved in the tangled case of the churches of the Berkeley ‘Hernesse \ Though we cannot reconstruct all the details, it is clear that the tangle arose from the conjunction of the confusion involved in the dispersal and partial secularisation of the possessions of an old minster, become house of canons, with the chaos of tenures caused by the anarchy of Stephen's reign. Gloucester acquired Stanley in 1146 (even if one doubted the evidence of the index, the date would be after 1142), under peculiar circumstances; very probably honourable enough from Gloucester's point of view, but almost certainly under condi­ tions made possible by the anarchy. It is probable that the confu­ sion was linked with the process leading to the division of the Berkeley inheritance between Roger of Berkeley and the Angevin Robert FitzHarding. (3) *ecclesiam sancti Michaelis de Huggemora. . . . ' This was the church of St Michael, Ewenny, a dependency of Gloucester abbey which was founded in 1141.2 (4) ‘totam terram de manerio de Estleche quam pro manerio Glasberie de Waltero de Cliffort escambierunt. ' The agreement3 is dated 1144, in the presence of Roger, earl of Hereford, who in­ herited the title after his father's death on 24 December 1143. The settlement was a peculiar one, involving an awkward arrangement with the monks of Great Malvern,4 and it may be that the circum­ stances of the anarchy were also behind this agreement. There were thus at least four grants confirmed in Stephen's charter which belonged to the 1140's; and even if we discounted the evidence of the index, three of these could be dated after 1140 on other grounds. If Stephen's charter is a forgery, there is no serious reason to 1 Egerton MS. 3031, fos. 23 v - 2 4 ,4 7 ^ 4 8 , 50V-51, 53V -54,6 9 ^ 7 0 (1 1 7 5 ); fos. 24, 48 r-v (1177). In both cases the settlement was made before papal judges dele­ gate in the presence of the king; the procedure reveals the ambiguity in jurisdic­ tion on cases of advowson and the like which persisted after the compromise of Avranches in 1172. 2 H G y i, 75-6; see above, p. 266 and n. 1. 3 HGy II, 246—7. 4 Cf. Gilbert Foliot, ep. 10. 282

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doubt the authenticity of Bishop Simon’s letter or Archbishop Theobald’s confirmation. The circumstances of the late 1140’s make them fully intelligible, as explained above ; it is not at all clear why Gloucester should have wanted an archiépiscopal confirmation at a later date (anyway after Henry II ’s accession in 1154), still less why it should have forged Bishop Simon’s letter. The relations between Abbot Gilbert and Archbishop Theobald, furthermore, make it seem much easier for the monks of Gloucester to have obtained a genuine confirmation than to have succeeded in floating a forgery. Since Stanley was granted in 1146 and Abbot Gilbert promoted in 1148, the date of Theobald’s confirmation may be narrowed to 1146-8.1 These dates are highly suggestive: they point unmistak­ ably to the crisis in Gloucester’s fortunes induced by the death of Earl Robert on 31 October 1147 and the departure of the empress early in 1148, and this fits in with the evidence that Gilbert regarded Stephen as his de facto sovereign in 1148.12 Gilbert Foliot was consecrated bishop of Hereford at St Omer on 5 September 1148. Since Theobald was in exile at this time, as a result of dis­ obeying King Stephen and attending the Council of Rheims in March-April 1148, the date of his confirmation was probably not later than March 1148.3 The winter of 1147-8 seems clearly to be the period of the forgery.

2. L

i f r i s ’s

L

if e o f

St C

adoc and o th er sources

F O R T H E H I S T O R Y OF L L A N C A R F A N

(i) Authorship and analysis of Lifris's Life of St Cadoc It is probably to the rights of the monks of Gloucester in Llancarfan and to their interest in its legends that we owe the survival of what 1 This fits well the evidence of Theobald’s title ‘archiepiscopus et totius Anglie primas*. There is no evidence that he used the title ‘primas’ before the papal grant of 1145 (W. Holtzmann, Papsturkunden in England, u, no. 43). After 1149-50 he regularly used the title of legate as well; there are exceptions to this, though they probably mostly date from the period 1159-60, when England recognised no pope and so could have no legate ; and by that time Theobald was called ‘Anglorum prim as’, not ‘totius Anglie primas’ (on this see my review of Professor Saltman’s Theobald in J. Theol. Stud, vm (1957), 189 f.). 2 John of Salisbury, Hist. Pontificate, ed. M. Chibnall (Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 1956), pp. 47- 9« 8 See Saltman, pp. 24 ff. 283

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is generally regarded as the most interesting of the Lives of the Welsh saints, the Life of S t Cadoc by Lifris; to which is attached, in the extant manuscripts, other material, genealogies and a diminu­ tive cartulary relating to the das and its founder.1 From another source, the famous Gotha collection of saints* Lives, Père Grosjean has edited another Life, by Caradoc of Llancarfan.2 It has long been accepted that the Life by Lifris was written to­ wards the end of the eleventh century; but its precise character and its precise date have never been determined. The surviving manu­ scripts all go back to a common archetype, Cotton MS. Vespasian A xiv (V) of c. 1200.3 Mr H. D. Emanuel has made a thorough analysis of the composition of the Cadoc material in the Vespasian MS. This consists, basically, of three pieces: first, and far the long­ est, the life, death and miracles, concluding with a short piece of verse in which Lifris claims authorship. This is clearly the end of Lifris*s work. There follows a set of genealogies, tracing Cadoc*s ancestors to the remote past, via the dynasties of Cunedda and Brychan and Gwynllyw; the last of the genealogies goes back to Augustus Caesar. The third section was an addition, made while V was being put together; it contains a list of the prebends of Llan­ carfan and a brief ‘cartulary *; these are followed by short pieces of detached tradition. It is perfectly clear that these three main sections were separate works; so far we may accept M r Emanuel’s searching analysis, which has been confirmed by Dr Kathleen Hughes’s study of the Vespasian manuscript as a whole. M r Emanuel has also shown that after Lifris’s Life had been copied, another scribe interpolated extracts from Caradoc’s Life, some very brief, some quite substantial. He has enabled us to isolate these, which were incorporated, almost without comment, in WadeEvans’s edition.4 Finally, Mr Emanuel has suggested that certain chapters which were embedded in Lifris’s text, as first copied by the main scribe of 1 V S B , pp. 24-141. 8 Analecta Bollandiana, lx (1942), 35-67. 5 H. D. Emanuel, ‘An analysis of the composition of the “ Vita Cadoci’” , National Library of Wales Journal, vn (1951-2), 217-27, shows that many changes were made in the process of compilation and revision of V, and these are incorporated in the later MSS., which clearly derive from V; I have myself con­ firmed this by a brief inspection of the most substantial later MS., Cotton Titus D x x n , fos. 54-137. 4 Listed, Emanuel, pp. 223-4; for D r Hughes’s study of V, see S E B C , chap, in. 284

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V, are interpolations, and not part of the original Life. The sections stigmatised are chaps. 13 and 17, which relate to St David, and chaps. 40-4, which describe some of Cadoc’s posthumous miracles. It is true that the chapters on David sit oddly in the rest of the narrative; but the whole Life is loosely constructed; we shall see reason to think that Cadoc’s relations with David formed part of the earliest stratum in Lifris’s Life, and I think that it is clear that chaps. 14 and 15, as well as 13 and 17, were inspired by Rhigyfarch’s Life of S t David} The miracles are a more difficult problem: there is undoubtedly a discrepancy between the passio and the miracula\ but I shall argue in due course that it is the passio which is the later addition.2 For the rest, the bulk of the chapters can be shown to have been used by Caradoc in his Lifeyso that they were certainly interpolated half a century before V was compiled; and, indeed, it is natural to suppose that they were incorporated in the original text of Lifris. Closer study of the earlier Life will perhaps confirm the impression of the general accuracy and integrity of V’s text. Closely related to Lifris’s Life is the Life of St Gwynllyw, which consists in the main of stories taken from Lifris and miracles belonging to the second half of the eleventh century. These late miracles are not paralleled in Lifris. Nor has he any of the features which disclose that most of the other Lives preserved in V were composed in the twelfth century. Early in his Lifet Lifris described a hidden fire which was extinguished in the time of Hywel ab Owain, king of Morgannwg; since Hywel died in 1043, we may 1 ‘Similarity of content is the main factor governing the order* of the Vita (Emanuel, p. 221), and by this criterion, he argues, chaps. 16 and 19 should adjoin one another. But association of ideas is also a criterion in the very loose construction of the book (e.g. chap. 27, which deals with Gildas ‘son of Caw*, follows chap. 26, the story of Caw, and chaps. 33 and 34 are linked by the gospel of Gildas), and chaps. 12, 14 and 15 contain reminiscences of the Life of S t David (see below). It is essential to the David story that Cadoc be removed from England for a space, and chaps. 14-16 seem to represent Lifris’s somewhat rough and ready attempt to fill in space—and a long journey is an essential element in these chapters, as it is in chaps. 13 and 17; in chap. 17 he returned to David to complete his intention ; chap. 18 is an interpolation in V from Caradoc ; in chap. 19 he takes up an idea suggested by chap. 17. M r Emanuel also points out (a) that David appears in two guises in the Vita Cadociy (b) that Caradoc shows no know­ ledge of these chapters. But the David of chaps. 22, 25 is simply a name (incor­ porated from Lifris’s source, see below, p. 301. Ia m sure M r Emanuel has read too much into the references ; and I shall argue below that there were positive reasons for Caradoc to omit David. * See p. 309. 285

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infer that Lifris was writing at least a generation later. He refers, too, to an archdeacon and a diocese; true, these words occur in an Italian context, but they would hardly have passed without explanation in a Welsh book before the late eleventh century.1 Furthermore, he names a Pope Alexander, which has been taken to mean he was writing after 1061, when the second Alexander ascended the papal throne.2 The passages in which Lifris refers to St David bear some rela­ tion to the Life of David by Rhigyfarch, which has been dated by Mrs Chadwick c. 1081,3 and cannot be earlier than 1072. There is no mention of Cadoc in Rhigyfarch’s book—it is one of the few Welsh saints’ Lives to show no trace of Lifris’s influence ; this and the nature of the links between the two books suggest strongly that Lifris knew and used Rhigyfarch, not vice versa. Some of the links are very slight: the colophon of David’s Life reads ‘Incipit vita beati Dauid, qui et Dewi, episcopi et confessons...’, that of Cadoc ‘Incipit prefatio in vita beatissimi Cadoci, qui et Sophie, episcopi et m artyris... ’.4 These may be the work of scribes, not of the authors of the Lives ; but Cadoc’s colophon certainly reads like an attempt to improve on David’s. There is a verbal connection between David’s rule of life and Lifris’s brief statement of Cadoc’s monastic principles;5 the rule is an essential element in David’s Lifet a perfunctory note in Cadoc’s, and it is natural to suppose that David’s was the source, Cadoc’s the copy. The most substantial parallels come in the section of Cadoc’s Life in which Lifris men­ tions David and his relation to Cadoc. In chaps. 13 and 17 David is specifically mentioned; but chaps. 12, 14 and 15 also contain 1 Chap. 39, p. 106. Archdeacons were introduced into all the English dioceses within a generation after the Conquest, but were almost unknown before. The first evidence in Wales is for Lifris himself: see below. 2 The first lived in the second century, and is a very shadowy figure : he is most unlikely to have suggested the use of the name to Lifris or the author of his source. 3 SEBC, p. 176; it in any case presumably belongs to the second period of office of Rhigyfarch’s father, Sulien, as bishop of St David’s, that is, in or after 1080 (cf. Lloyd, 11,460), rather than to his first (1072/3-78) when Rhigyfarch was a boy (he cannot have been more than nineteen in 1078: cf. ibid. p. 167). 4 V SB , pp. 24, 150. Another slight echo occurs on p. 84: ‘Gildas Cau filius’, cf. Vita S. David, chap. 5. 5 Rhigyfarch, chap. 21 : ‘ Q ui. . . non laborat. .. non m anducet’ ; Lifris, chap. 9 (p. 46): ‘Qui non laborat, nec m anducet’—citing II Thess. iii. 10: ‘si quis non vult operari, nec m anducet’ (that Lifris is nearer to the Vulgate does not argue that he was prior to Rhigyfarch: both knew they were quoting II Thessalonians; what is significant is that they agree in mis-quoting). 286

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echoes of David’s Life. Chapter 12 gives the story of the building at Llancarfan, which will be discussed in detail later; chap. 14 takes Cadoc to Jerusalem, and notes, as it was noted of David on his itinerary to Jerusalem, that he needed no interpreter in the coun­ tries he passed through; chaps. 14 and 15 describe how presents from Jerusalem to Cadoc and two of his disciples were delivered by air mail, just as happened to David and his two disciples. This con­ centration of echoes in the neighbourhood of passages dealing specifically with David cannot be chance: since the parallels are gathered in Lifris and scattered in Rhigyfarch, and since they have every appearance of being dragged in by Lifris (with the exception of chap. 12) by the heels, we may certainly presume that Rhigyfarch was the source.1 We may deduce from this that Lifris’s own book was written after 1072, probably after 1081. It is generally held that Lifris’s Life was written before the conquest of Glamorgan and the cession of Llancarfan to Gloucester, that is, before 1104. We shall see reason later on to believe that part of the Life was actually written very soon after the cession to Gloucester;2 but the main body of it still seems likely to belong to the period c. 1081-1104. The author has long been identified with Lifris, or Lifricus, who appears in the witness-lists of charters in the Book of Llandaff pur­ porting to date from the late eleventh century. Lifris is there described as son of Bishop Herewald, archdeacon of Glamorgan and Master of St Cadoc of Llancarfan.3 The charters to which he is witness, like all the documents in the Book of Llandaff\ have been doctored. But there is every reason to believe that the transactions and the names in the later charters in the Book are as near genuine as it was possible and safe to make them. As the Book was com­ piled in Llandaff only a generation later than the death of Bishop Herewald, possibly by a member of the Llancarfan clan, certainly with their aid, we may be sure that the references to Lifris are based on personal knowledge. We need not doubt that he was Herewald’s son, that he was the leading figure in the clas of St Cadoc and a leading figure in the household of the bishop. Whether he was an archdeacon seems less certain. The compiler of the Book lost no 1 T he parallels in Rhigyfarch are in chaps. 35, 44-5, 48-9. In chap. 49 Rhigyfarch names the synod of Brefi, as in Lifris, chap. 13 (p. 54). 2 Below, p. 309. 8 L L , pp. 271, 273, 274; for the archdeacon of Gwent, see pp. 270,274; on the Book of Llandaff, SE B C , ch. iv. 287

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opportunity to emphasise that Llandaff was, and always had been, a properly constituted diocese. He therefore provided it with every latest improvement, including territorial archdeacons, one for Glamorgan, one for Gwent. This could be mere embroidery; but since Herewald clearly had close links with the English church at one time and another, and must have been aware of what Arch­ bishop Lanfranc and his colleagues were accomplishing, it may be that Lifris was indeed archdeacon of Glamorgan.1 Herewald died in 1104, having been a bishop for forty-eight years. He must therefore have been a young man at the time of his consecration,2 and it is unlikely that his son was bom much before c. 1050-5. Since Lifris was archdeacon and Master of St Cadoc, one might have expected him to succeed Herewald; indeed, the bishopric was very much a family affair, and the next bishop, Urban, was also described as archdeacon, and was also related to Herewald.3 The presumption is, therefore, that by 1104 Lifris was already dead, or had retired from the world. The facts of his career fit very neatly the other evidence that his Life of S t Cadoc was written after 1072 but before 1104. There is, however, a difficulty. The name Lifris was rare in Wales; but it so happens that there is evidence of a certain Leoricus (that is, Leofric or Lifris), called ‘the monk*, who held land in Llancarfan, caused trouble to the abbot of Gloucester, and died in the 1i40*s.4 If Herewald’s son was born after he became bishop, it is not impossible that he died 1 It is sometimes denied that territorial archdeacons were instituted so early in England ; it has been alleged that where one meets more than one archdeacon in a diocese in the late eleventh or early twelfth century their areas of jurisdiction were not precisely determined. There is no real evidence for this view, and in the diocese of Lincoln the territorial division can be proved to go back well before 1092 (the grounds for this will be stated elsewhere); what is certainly unusual is for an archdeacon to use a territorial title in an eleventh-century document. There were apparently two archdeacons in the diocese in the second half of the twelfth century (cf. HG, 11, 11-13). 2 If he had reached the canonical age, he was at least thirty in 1056, so it is possible that Lifris was bom in the i04o’s. T he statement of the annals of Margam {Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard, 1, 8; see E A , 11, 612, no. L15; cf. L 16) that Herewald was 100 years old when he died, is not to be taken literally. 3 LL, p. 280; SEBC, pp. 227—8 n. (The note on Bishop Nicholas, on p. 228 n., should be deleted, as pointed out by Professor I. LI. Foster in Antiquity, xxxiv (i960), 236; but this does not affect the argument here.) 4 Gilbert Foliot (ed. J. A. Giles), ep. 56, refers to a dispute with one ‘dominus Leovricus’ (so MS.) in the diocese of Llandaff; and H G , 11, 138 is a grant by Abbot Gilbert (i.e. before 1148) of the land in Pennon and Llancarfan of ‘ Leorici monachi antecessoris eorum*—presumably now dead—to a group of men, evidently members of the Llancarfan family. 288

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after 1140; equally, if there were two Lifrises, it is not impossible that the younger wrote the Life of St Cadoc. In view of this, the precise date must remain uncertain. But we may be sure that Lifris’s Life had been written and circulated well before 1119, when it was being used by other members of the Llancarfan circle.1 The Life of S t Cadoc by Lifris is a long, untidy narrative, full of strange, fascinating, sometimes conflicting material. No one who reads it could mistake it for sober history. Its author, like many hagiographers, was a story-teller, not a historian. One cannot be certain how clearly he would have understood this distinction ; but it is clear that his purpose was to piece together legends which would reveal the wonder and the grandeur of Cadoc in the past, and his power and standing in the present, rather than to investigate the origins of Llancarfan from surviving evidence, as William of Malmesbury might have done. It is a delicate task to decide how much Lifris believed of what he wrote. Few modern scholars would believe any of it to be historically true; but this is not the same as saying that Lifris invented it, or even a substantial part of it. There are, however, many parts of it which can hardly be explained unless one supposes that the present arrangement of the material, the present form of the stories, and in some cases the story itself, were the invention of Lifris. This is to anticipate a long and tortuous argument : a priori we have no ground for supposing that Lifris was averse to improving the legends he discovered or to mani­ pulating them. Retailers of legend have rarely been merely retailers. For convenience, we may divide the Life into the following segments: (1) (Preface, Prologue, chap. 1)—Cadoc’s family and birth: we are told that his father was Gwynllyw son of Glywys, eponyms of Gwynlliog and Glywysing, and his mother Gwladus, daughter of Brychan, eponym of Brycheiniog (Breconshire). There is primitive local tradition in this story; whether it describes Cadoc’s origin accurately may be doubted, since it was a convention to ascribe the Welsh saints to royal families. Arthur and his companions ‘Cei’ and ‘Bedguir’ (Kay and Bedivere) make a brief incursion into the story of Gwladus’s marriage; and Cadoc’s birth is accompanied by conventional angelic visitations. (2) (chap, i, sec. 2-chap. 7)—His childhood and upbringing: he is baptised and educated by an Irish hermit, Meuthi or 1 See below, pp. 312, 315. 19

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Tatheus.1 Of Tatheus we know little or nothing apart from what Lifris tells us: his Life, also preserved in V, leans heavily on the Life of St Cadoc, and is otherwise insubstantial. (3) (chaps. 8-17)—After describing how Cadoc left his teacher and built his first monastery, Lifris describes his relations with St Finnian of Clonard, his disciple, and St David, in some mysterious way his rival. There is much more to this section: a visit to Ireland, study under Mochutu in Lismore and, after his return, under Bachan (a learned rhetorician recently come from Italy) in Brycheiniog; the naming of his principal monastery ‘Stags’ valley*, Nantcarfan (later ‘Llancarfan’), further travels, to Greece and Jerusalem, and further miracles. (4) (chaps. 19-21)—Two isolated stories: the conversion of St Illtud and the resurrection of an Irish ‘architect* or mason. (5) (chaps. 22-5)—The title-deeds, if such they may be called, of Cadoc’s ‘refuge*, that is, the sanctuary which Cadoc guarantees. King Arthur, Maelgwn Gwynedd, his son Rhun and a king from Brycheiniog, Rhain son of Brychan, are all compelled in turn to accept and confirm the power of this refuge ; and the confirmation is witnessed by the leading saints of Wales, David, Teilo, Illtud and others. (6) (chaps. 26-7)—These chapters take Cadoc to Scotland, where he resuscitates the ‘giant* hero Caw;2 and from Caw we pass to his son, St Gildas, and the story of his miraculous bell. (7) Chapter 28 describes Cadoc’s journey to his dying father, and St Gwynllyw’s pious end. (8) (chaps. 29-36)—These chapters are an assortment of topo­ graphical legends, dealing with islands off the Glamorgan coast, a well in Cornwall, a bridge in Brittany, and other sites connected with Cadoc;3 an interlude reintroduces St Gildas, and the final chapter takes us to Scotland again. 1 S. Baring-Gould and J. Fisher, Lives of the British Saints, iv (1913), 211-14; his cult centred in Caerwent, and his name appears in the name of Llanfeithin, very close to Llancarfan (Analecta Bollandiana, lx (1942), 47 n.). 8 On this story see Mrs N. K. Chadwick, Scottish Gaelic Studies, vii (1953), 119 ff. 8 On these sections see G. H. Doble, S t Cadoc in Cornwall and Brittany (Truro, 1937). Doble concluded that Lifris knew a great deal about Brittany, but had probably not himself visited the île Cado, the centre of Cadoc’s Breton cult. Lifris was much interested in topography, and refers to all the Celtic lands, Italy, Greece and Palestine; but it is not possible to prove that he knew any of these countries except Wales at first hand. 29O

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(9) (chaps. 37-9)— The passio of St Cadoc: the saint is trans­ ported on a white cloud to Benevento, where he changes his name to Sophias, becomes bishop, and is martyred (at his own wish) by the troops of a mysterious tyrant. The good people of Benevento then raise a great basilica over his bones—a basilica which no Briton may enter, for fear he shall steal the relics and return them to Llancarfan. (10) (chaps. 40-4)—But if Cadoc’s human body lay in Italy, his spirit still ruled in Llancarfan, and the closing chapters tell a few of the miracles which he performed after his death. They mostly con­ cern local affairs in Glamorgan ; but one takes us to Ireland, where the saint (that is, the monastery) had property by the Liffey, and a bond of confraternity with the community of St Finnian at Clonard. The conflict between this and the preceding section has already been noticed. (ii) Comparison with the Lives of St Finnian No earlier Welsh source has anything to say of St Cadoc, and our only substantial control of the traditions recorded by Lifris comes from the Lives of St Finnian. These have been analysed in an impor­ tant article by Dr Kathleen Hughes.1 The Lives of Finnian fall into two groups, Irish and Latin, and she has shown that the Irish Lives go back to an original of the ninth or tenth century, while the Latin, though their present form may be two or three centuries later, also include earlier traditions. The story of St Finnian’s visit to Wales, and his relations with St ‘Cathmael*, as St Cadoc was named in these texts, is told in greater detail in the Latin than the Irish Lives ; but the story in both is substantially the same.2 Finnian sails from Ireland and lands at Cell Muine, the Irish name for 1 English Historical Rev . lxix (1954)» 353~72>esp. PP- 364 ff. 2 D r Hughes, pp. 353-6, lists the MSS. and printed editions of the Lives of Finnian. What follows is based (for the Irish Lives) on the translation in Whitley Stokes, Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore (Oxford, 1890), pp. 222-4; (f°r the Latin) C. de Smedt and J. de Backer, Acta Sanctorum Hibemiae ex Codice Salmanticensi (Edinburgh-London, 1888), coll. 191-5, compared with photo­ stats of MSS. Oxford, Bodl. Rawl. B 485 and B 505 and Dublin, Franciscan Convent A 24, kindly lent me by D r Hughes. T he Irish Lives explain that Finnian gave the primacy to David (the point at dispute is not explained in the Latin), and name one Welsh monastery ‘Lann Gharban or G abran’ where the Latin have ‘ Melboc’ and ‘ N ant’ (Nant and Lann Gabran are clearly for Nant- or Llancarfan). The Irish Lives omit the visit to Echni, the descent of the altar and the madness of Elni. Otherwise there is little difference between the versions. 29I

19-2

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Mynyw, St David’s. There he finds three British saints, David, Cathmael (Cadoc) and Gildas disputing the primacy; they call in Finnian, like another Paris, to arbitrate, and he decides in favour of David. Cadoc then tries to found a monastery ; and with the aid of Finnian, who is evidently now his disciple, he succeeds in extract­ ing a large area of land from a local noble, on which many mona­ steries ( 112-14). 2 Some alteration would no doubt have been needed by anyone interested in Finnian who wished to use the material in the Life of Cadoc, in order to bring Finnian into the forefront of the picture ; far more would have been needed by anyone interested in Cadoc, using the Lives of Finnian, in order to hide the primacy of David, and substantially to enhance the portrait of Cadoc given there. But the differences are far more than could be explained by either process ; on the other hand, the relationship is explicable if the Life of Cadoc was based, more remotely, on the legend of Finnian.

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paralleled in Lifris is the defence of the Britons against a Saxon attack. This tale, and the story of the untamed oxen who helped to build a monastery, also occur in the Life of S t Maedoc of Ferns, although the precise relation between the Lives of Finnian and Maedoc is far from clear.1 But the story of the oxen—or stags—was told many times, and a comparison between the versions gives us a remarkable insight into the sources and methods of Lifris of Llancarfan. The story was told at great length in the Life of S t Maedoc : Maedoc was a disciple of St David ; when reading one day, he was attacked by the steward (economus) and set to work ; he left his book open, but it was unharmed in spite of a heavy shower; then he yoked two untamed oxen, and drove them safely across a marsh. There are many further details ; but these are the essential elements of the story. In Rhigyfarch’s Life of S t David there is a shortened version, apparently derived from the Life of Maedoc ; the economus has become a praepositus; the cart is laden with wood; the marsh has become a cliff, from which the oxen and cart fall into the sea. The story, it seems, has been adapted to fit the magnificent cliffs of St Davids. In both these versions the master is St David, the disciple Maedoc. In the Life of S t Teiloy written at Llandaff c. 1120, by a member of the Llancarfan family circle, David is still the master, but Maedoc is joined by Teilo. The details suggest knowledge of the Life of Maedoc as well as of the Life of David—which is the chief source of St Teilo’s Life. But there are also two new details: the waggon is driven to a wood to collect timber, and the oxen have become stags. Both these details suggest the author knew a third version of the story, which is contained in a book well known in Llandaff in the early twelfth century, the Life of St Cadoc by Lifris. The stags, indeed, would seem to be Lifris’s invention. They have been used, with great ingenuity, to explain the name of ‘ Nant Carfan *2 as stags’ valley ; and the story is thus turned into a topo1 VSH , n, 298 (this is the earliest version of the Life, and comes, like Cadoc’s, from MS. V). The other versions of this story occur in the Lives of Cainnech (V SH , I, 153), Cadoc (Lifris, chap. 12, pp. 50-4; Caradoc, chaps, n , 26), David (chap. 35, V SB , pp. 159-60), Finnian (ut supra), Mochutu (V SH , 1, 179), and Teilo (LL, pp. 101-2). 8 The original name of Llancarfan. D r Melville Richards tells me this ‘is a typically “ antiquarian” interpretation’; and that stags (Welsh sing, carw) did not give their name to the valley. Carfùn was really either a proper name or the noun carfan, ‘ridge, boundary’. 294

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graphical legend of a kind which was dear to Lifris’s heart. It seems clear at least that this extraordinary transition was made at Llancarfan. The change, in one way, was easily made, since one word in Irish means both ‘ox* and ‘stag’; and this might be used as evidence that the change was made in Ireland.1 But there could surely be nothing surprising in a man like Lifris, who shows so much interest in Cadoc’s Irish connections, knowing enough Irish for this. Lifris doubtless derived his knowledge of the story, in the first instance, from the Lives of Finnian; and either from Finnian’s or David’s Lives the reference to wood as the oxen’s load.2 But both these versions are perfunctory and brief, anyway in their present form. In scale and form Lifris’s version is more similar to that in the Vita Maedoci, and in the latter the equonomus3 gave the young Maedoc a yoke, which he ‘adhesit.. .ceruicibus bourn’. It is not impossible that the word ‘ceruicibus’ also played its part in con­ verting ‘boues’ to ‘cerui’.4 But it is dangerous to speculate on the precise history of so well known a story as this. In appropriating the story from David to Cadoc, Lifris was doing it little violence; for he already knew from the traditions of Finnian that to Cadoc it had once belonged. But what is surprising is that Lifris should have taken the trouble to study three different versions of the same legend, before making his own—surprising yet not incredible. We have in the Life of Teilo the witness of an author who 1 See above : in a sense, the Irish versions of the Lives of Finnian have both ‘oxen’ and ‘stags’, but the Latin Lives strongly suggest that oxen were meant; no one would have thought of stags but for the special reasons which led some­ one at Llancarfan to make the change. 2 Apart from this detail, Rhigyfarch also has the story of the book left open by the disciple in his haste, which occurs in several versions, but not in Finnian's Lives ; the words ‘a p ertu m .. .a pluuiis illesum. . .(sicut) dimisit' (Rhigyfarch, chap. 35) are repeated, with minor alterations, in Lifris (p. 52); only ‘librum apertum dimisit ’ occurs in the Vita S. Maedoci. These links, and the context of the story in Lifris (see above, pp. 286-7), strongly suggest that Lifris used Rhigy­ farch in composing this passage. But it is well to remember that Finnian's Lives may be based on a fuller original (see Hughes, p. 366). 3 T he word was also used by Lifris, and by the better version of the Latin Life of Finnian (Codex Salmanticensis) ; Rhigyfarch and other versions of Finnian’s Life used ‘prepositus’. 4 T he Life of Mochutu (p. 179) has a rather different story, in which two stags are yoked for ploughing by M ochutu’s disciple ‘Aedan’ (which was St Maedoc’s other name). Lifris makes Cadoc a disciple of Mochutu for three years (chap. 10, p. 48); but it seems impossible to establish any relationship between Cadoc’s Life and M ochutu’s, though it seems likely that the story of the stags in Mochu­ tu ’s derived ultimately from Cadoc’s. 295

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may well have been a pupil of Lifris that three versions could be melted into one by a Glamorgan hagiographer of this age. There is no doubt that the author of the Life of Teilo had used the Lives of Cadoc and David, and it is likely that he knew Maedoc’s too.1 Per­ haps one can guess how he came by these documents. All the four Lives in question, Cadoc’s, David’s, Maedoc’s (in the earliest known version), and the first edition of Teilo’s, are preserved in Vespasian A xiv. In her study of the history of this manuscript, Dr Kathleen Hughes showed that it was compiled at Gloucester, partly out of materials derived from Llandaff ; and she mentioned the possibility that it contained the materials of a professional hagiographer.2 It looks very much as if what Llandaff contributed was the material inherited from Lifris by his successors, with some Llandaff work added to it. A final question must be asked: to whom did this story originally belong, to Cadoc or to David? To this we can give no certain answer, but the indications, such as they are, point clearly to Cadoc. It is a perilous matter to date Irish hagiographical legends, but there is no evidence that the existing lives of Maedoc or David go as far back as one can trace the legends of Finnian. Furthermore, it is certain that the version of the story in the Life of Maedoc is verbally connected with the version in the Life of Cainnech, which attributes the story to St Cadoc.3 Indeed it is a striking fact that the versions in the Lives of Cainnech and Maedoc are more closely linked verbally than any other two versions. Thus we may be sure that the growth of this legend is not due, in any great measure, to oral tradition, but to literary borrowing; and we can draw the ironical conclusion that Lifris, in appropriating to Cadoc what appeared in two of his sources to belong to David, was restoring to Cadoc what had once been his.4 1 The story in the Life of Teilo has no clear verbal links with that in the Life of Maedoc, but details like the haste with which Maedoc deserted his book, the gentleness of the untamed oxen (stags) and St David’s appearance on the scene (‘exivit’. . . ‘exiens’) are told in a similar fashion in both. * SEBC, ch. hi, esp. p. 197 n. 8 They have over twenty words in common in about eight to ten lines of print; but this is rendered the more striking by the fact that the ‘duos boues indomitos et asperos *(feros in Vita S. Cainnici) are yoked by Cainnech for Cadoc in one and by Maedoc for David in the other, and that the details of the story differ considerably. It is quite likely that these links are due to both Lives being derived from an earlier recension of the Vita Finniani. 4 In view of the tentative nature of much of the argument, and the way in which these saints’ Lives have been revised and rewritten from time to time, it 296

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One difficulty remains. The Life of Cainnech refers to St Cadoc as ‘Docum’; the Life of Finnian as Cathmael (= Cadfael). Are these names really identical with Cadoc? Lifris gives Cadoc four names : Cadoc in Wales, Cadfael (Cat(h)mail) in Ireland, Cadfoddw (Catbotu) in Brittany, and Sophias in Benevento. The last is pure fiction, and, as we shall see, most probably fiction of Lifris’s own devising. This does not give us implicit confidence in his other identification, Cadfael = Cadfoddw = Cadoc; one can be toler­ ably certain that Cadfael and Cadfoddw were different men.1 On the other hand, Cadfael’s monastery is referred to by name on two occasions in the Finnian narratives,12 and we may therefore accept that these were meant to refer to the patron of Llancarfan. The form ‘Docus’ has always caused difficulty. It also occurs in the famous passage in the Catalogus Sanctorum Hiberniae (now believed to date from the ninth or tenth century),3 which describes how would be rash to draw any too definite conclusions about the order of the narra­ tives, still more about the order of the Lives in which they occur. With this pro­ viso, the following table lays out the suggestions given in the text : Vita S. Finniani (earlier recension)

e. 1120-50 1 D r G. Melville Richards tells me that Cadoc or Cadog could be ‘a pet or hypochoristic fo rm .. .made up of one o f’ the elements of Cadfael or Cadfoddw, ‘plus a suffix. In this case Cad+og. * Thus Cadoc could stand for either of the official names, and this could lead to the confusion of Cadfael and Cadfoddw. But the two names are clearly quite distinct, and we may assume that the Breton Cadfoddw was not the saint of Llancarfan (on the Breton saint, see Cartulaire de Vabbaye de Sainte-Croix de Quimperlé, ed. L. Maitre and P. de Berthou (2nd ed., Rennes-Paris, 1904), p. 255; Doble, S t Cadoc). 8 See above, p. 291 n. 3 See text and commentary by P. Grosjean, Analecta Bollandianat lxxiii (1955)» 197 *289 ff. St Finnian heads the list of the saints of the second order, to whom the mass was given. 297

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St David, St Gildas and St Docus gave a missa to the second order of Irish saints. The identification with Cadoc is widely accepted, and the Life of Cainnech suggests that it has some early warrant ; but the form ‘Docus* can hardly be a version of the name ‘Cadocus*. It seems to have more in common with the eponym of the neigh­ bouring monastery of Llandough than with Cadocus.1 We need not doubt that St Docco or Docgwin and St Cadoc were separate people ; that the former founded Llandough and the latter Llancarfan ; but we can never be sure that their legends have not been confused, either by vagueness in Ireland about the precise names of two closely connected British saints, or by the development of pious rivalry in south Glamorgan. In any event the Cadoc of history is a shadowy figure. We may presume that he was a leading figure among the monks of south Wales in the age of the saints; since dedications to him are common in south Wales but rare elsewhere, we may presume that his fame and his sphere of influence were not widely spread in other parts of the Celtic world in early days.12 It is doubtful if we can presume any more. But if we wish to establish his date more precisely, we can only do so by following the indications of the Catalogus and of the traditions of Finnian that he was likewise a contemporary of St David and St Gildas, and master of St Finnian. These indications are somewhat confusing. Finnian died at Clonard in 549; Gildas flourished in the second quarter of the sixth century, but apparently lived until about 570. David, however, is recorded in the Annales Cambriae to have died in 601.3 The last date has been disputed, and a case can be made for a date in the 54o*s ;4 and if we take the evidence before us at face value, it suggests an early sixth-century date for St Cadoc. But the association of the four saints may not be historical; and 1 Cf. Mrs Chadwick in Scottish Gaelic Studies, vu (1953), 140 n. (favouring the identification of ‘ Docus ’ and Cadoc) ; Doble, S t Cadoc, p. 5 n. (against) ; also Grosjean, pp. 294-5. Docus is a Latinisation of Doc (mod. Welsh Dog), and would be, as Dr Melville Richards has pointed out to me, a shortened form of a longer name. But it cannot be a form of the same name as Cadocus, although the Latin forms made confusion easy. * On his cult, see Doble, S t Cadoc, esp. p. 4 (with map) and note. 3 Lloyd, i, 142 and n. ; SEBC , p. 131 n. Mrs Chadwick points out that the late sixth- and the early seventh-century entries in the Annales are three years behind, so that this means probably 604. 4 Cf. J. F. Kenney, Sources for the Early History of Ireland (New York, 1929), p. 179; L. Bieler, J. Theol. Stud. n.s. xn (1961), 109 n. 298

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the conclusion can hardly be used as a touchstone for checking the possibility that other traditions about Cadoc may or may not have been historical too.1 (iii) David, Gildas, Arthur, Gwynllyw and Illtud The traditions of Finnian form a substantial nucleus to the Life of Cadoc, and it may well be that they started a train of investigation which led Lifris to introduce other material unconnected with Finnian.12 The association with David and Gildas would naturally lead him to introduce other traditions connected with these two famous saints. It has already been argued that Lifris knew Rhigyfarch’s Life of S t David. This set him one particular problem : how to deal with the primacy of David asserted in the story in the Finnian traditions3 and in Rhigyfarch’s account of the synod of Llandewi Brefi. Lifris solved this by telling the story of the synod, and of how David was extremely reluctant to hold it on Cadoc’s account; and we are left to draw the implication that David was not really asserting—nor Cadoc admitting—any primacy. More difficult, and even more interesting, are Lifris’s references to Gildas.4 He calls him a Briton, a scholar and a craftsman, and refers to him as the son of Caw; he describes how he made a bell which he refused to sell to Cadoc, and how he spent some time on the island of Echni, and made a gospel book which he gave to Cadoc. Some years after Lifris’s book was written, Caradoc of Llancarfan wrote a Life of Gildas for the monks of Glastonbury, who also had traditions of the saint.5 The story of the bell and the retreat on the isle of Echni were repeated from Lifris; to these were added an account of Gildas’s family, a mention of King ‘Triphun’ of Dyfed taken from Rhigyfarch,6 an account of Gildas’s relations with King Arthur (perhaps inspired, in part at least, by Lifris), and the story 1 E.g. the story of St Illtud (see below, p. 304). 2 It should be stressed, however, that the form of the argument is influenced at this point by the survival of other evidence about St Finnian; it would be rash to assume that traditions about St Finnian were the only possible starting-point for Lifris’s speculations. 3 Assuming that he knew a version which, like the surviving Irish Lives of Finnian, asserted David’s primacy. 4 Chaps. 27, 33-4 (PP- 84“6, 94~6)6 Ed. T . Mommsen, Mon. Germaniae Historica, Auct. Antiquissimi, xm (1898), 107-10; also by H. Williams, Gildas (Cymmrodorion Record Series, ill, 1899), pp. 394-413 (stories from Lifris on pp. 402-6).

6 Chap. 5 (p. 152). 299

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of Gildas’s final retreat to Glastonbury. The account of Gildas’s family shows that Caradoc had access to traditions which are also represented in the Breton Life of Gildasy which is certainly older than Caradoc’s.1 In all these sources Gildas is called ‘son of Caw *; and Mrs Chad­ wick has shown in her article on ‘The Lost Literature of Celtic Scotland ’2 that Caw was a Pictish king who played a great part in early legend, though most of his legend is lost. In the Welsh vernacular story Kulhwch and Olweny which may well be earlier than Lifris, Caw and Arthur are brought together in a single tale. Whether the Gildas of history was really a son of Caw of Pritdin must be considered doubtful: Gildas seems not to have been of noble birth.3 It may well be that the identification was made because Caw was known to have had a son of the same name. In any event, it is clear that Lifris had access both to earlier traditions about St Gildas, now best represented for us in the Breton Lifey and to a cycle of legends about Caw and Arthur; and that Caradoc also had access to these two sources, as well as to Lifris’s Life. It was doubtless these cycles which provided Lifris with his story of Cadoc’s resuscitation of the dead giant Caw, and with his tales of Arthur. One may well doubt whether these tales were linked to St Cadoc before Lifris wrote ; but there are mysterious and archaic features in both the stories about Arthur and the story of Caw which make it clear that they are not of Lifris’s invention. Two stories of Arthur are told by Lifris; in both he is accom­ panied by Kay and Bedivere, and in both he is described as a hero, yet portrayed as a tricky, savage, frivolous man.4 Whatever the source of this tradition of Arthur, we may be sure it was not devised by Lifris ;5 it seems likely nonetheless that it was Lifris who incor­ porated Arthur into the story of St Cadoc. Arthur’s first appear­ ance is before Cadoc’s birth, in the story of Cadoc’s parents* marriage; his second in the group of stories about Cadoc’s ‘refuge’ or sanctuary. The group of stories about the refuge describe how a notable series of miracles led four men in turn to confirm Cadoc’s refuge. Three of them were among the greatest names in Welsh legend : Arthur, Maelgwn of Gwynedd, his son Rhun ; the fourth 1 Williams, Gildas, pp. 322-89. There seems to be no link between the Breton Life and Lifris save the names of Gildas’s father and of one of his brothers. 2 Scottish Gaelic Stud, vn (1953), 115-83, esp. pp. 115 ff., 140 ff. 3 Cf. Lloyd, i, 136. 4 Prologue and chap. 22 (pp. 26-8, 68-72). 6 N. K. Chadwick, art. cit., esp. pp. 129 ff. 300

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was a local potentate, Cadoc’s uncle Rhain, of Brycheiniog.1 To the fourth Lifris brings the testimony of the graphium of the refuge, presumably some written document preserved at Llancarfan. The last item in the collection in V which deals with Cadoc appears to be an extract from this graphium. It describes the blinding of King Maelgwn and his confirmation of the refuge ; and it gives a list of the ‘witnesses’ to Cadoc’s agreement with Rhain.2 The account of Maelgwn’s blinding is clearly related to Lifris’s account, even verbally related ;3 but it differs in two main ways. It has more names and circumstantial details; and it makes no mention of Arthur’s confirmation of the refuge. There can be little doubt that these two items came from a document at Llancarfan which Lifris also used as his source. This document included confirmations by Maelgwn and Rhain; perhaps also by Rhun; but not by Arthur. Arthur was Lifris’s addition. Whether the stories have any historical founda­ tion is another question. Maelgwn Gwynedd died in or about 547 ;4 and was certainly a contemporary of St Finnian and St Gildas; but he was also a very eminent man who figures in many hagiographical legends, and his real home lay in North not South Wales. The first mention of Arthur is embedded in the story of Cadoc’s parents’ marriage, and is thus connected with the difficult problem of Cadoc’s ancestry. We are told that he was the grandson of the eponyms of Glywysing and Brycheiniog; his father Gwynllyw, eponym of Gwynlliog, married Gwladus, daughter of Brychan, after 1 Chaps. 22-5, pp. 68-80. On Rhain’s kingdom see Lloyd, 1, 281-2; P. C. Bartrum, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1948), pp. 296 ff. 2 ‘Tertiam nempe virtutem fecit Deus per sanctum Cadocum in testimonium graphii refugii generis sui Gundliauc’ says Lifris (p. 78). The words are obscure, but graphium presumably refers to a written document or register of some kind (cf. Baxter and Johnson, Med. Latin Word-List, s.v.), and as the account of Maelgwn’s confirmation of the refuge (chap. 69, pp. 136-40) comes after the cartulary or extract from the cartulary of Llancarfan, it seems clear that this must be an extract from the graphium. In chap. 70 (p. 140), however, we are referred back to the Life for the story of King Rhain; but this need not hinder the conclu­ sion in the text, that chaps. 69-70 represent the source more faithfully than chaps. 23 and 25. The scribe of V apparently copied chap. 69 exactly from his source, but then became aware of the repetition, and so in chap. 70 confined himself to giving a fuller list of the witnesses than was included in chap. 25. Chap. 70 calls Rhain son of Brychan and uncle of Cadoc; it must remain an open question whether these details were in the graphium, or were deduced by the scribe of V from Lifris. If the argument that Lifris invented Cadoc’s parentage is accepted (below, p. 303), the latter must be correct. 3 T he verbal parallels are very slight ; the phrase ‘ bile furie ’ (applied to Mael­ gwn) is the most significant. 4 Lloyd, I, 131.

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forcibly abducting her; Brychan attempted revenge, but Gwynllyw reached home safely with Arthur’s help. The story into which Arthur has been intruded—one suspects by Lifris himself —is the combination of two common types of Welsh legend. Many of the names of the principalities, cantrefs and commotes of Wales con­ tained a personal name; and more were supposed to contain such than really did. These were clearly the names of historical charac­ ters, though often we know nothing about them. A favourite line of speculation was to make the eponyms of a group of these the sons of a famous ruler. The most famous, and perhaps the earliest of these legends, made the nine sons of Cunedda give their names to Ceredigion, Meirionydd, Edeyrnion and other districts in North and Central Wales.2 In a similar way, the opening of Lifris’s Life gave Glywys ten sons, of whom nine gave their names to principalities or cantrefs, and married Gwynllyw to a daughter of the eponym of Brycheiniog. Brychan’s twelve sons and twenty-four daughters were not mentioned by Lifris, and may be a later development. This description of the family of Glywys undoubtedly enshrines early material. By the eleventh century the name Glywysing had been replaced by Morgannwg; and the kings of Morgannwg did not trace their ancestry from Glywys or any member of his family.3 This fact, which underlines the antiquity of some of Lifris’s material, also casts grave doubts on whether Glywys was really the founder of a family remembered in early tradition at all. Like Cunedda, Glywys may well be historical; but his relationship to other eponyms was probably the product of later inference. Similarly, Brychan may well have been a historical character; and although the pedigree of his house is corrupt, it is conceivable that there is truth in the legend that the later kings of Brycheiniog were 1 On the analogy, merely, of the evidence that he intruded Arthur into the story of the refuge ; and there is no other evidence that Brychan and A rthur or Gwynllyw and Arthur were associated. The suspicion is therefore based on a guess; but it is essential to remember that Lifris was a story-teller not a historian. * 9 ,*? see Lloyd’ l>1I9; Melville Richards, ‘Irish Settlements in South­ west Wales ,J. Royal Soc. Antiquaries of Ireland, xc ( 1960), 138 ; N. K Chadwick SEBC, pp. 32 ff. * 8 Lloyd, i, 273-4 and nn. Lloyd argued that Morgannwg was named after an eighth-century king Morgan; but since the name Morgannwg seems to have replaced Glywysing in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the alternative view that it was named after the king Morgan who died in 974, seems to have some! thing to commend it. P. C. Bartrum, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1948) pp. 279 ff., attempts to reconstruct the history of Glywysing from LL. On the legends and family of Brychan, see Lloyd, 1, 270-1. 302

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descended from him; though we may surely attribute the large number of his children to later speculation. Glywys, Gwynllyw and Brychan, then, may well have been historical characters; but when they lived and whether Cadoc was related to them must remain uncertain. On the whole, it seems likely that the specula­ tion about their families included by Lifris was of recent origin, and may even belong to his own day. We have seen the way in which Gildas may have come by a kingly father ; it was very likely Rhigyfarch who invented St David’s royal, but exceedingly shadowy parents j1 it may have been Lifris who discovered Cadoc’s royal parentage. Of none of this can we be sure ; but it is significant that Lifris himself does not suggest that Cadoc received patronage from his father in founding his monasteries,2 nor is there any hint that he was related to the local kings in the Lives of Finnian ; and it is clear that the notion that a Welsh saint ought to have royal parents was growing at the end of the eleventh century, and that it bloomed throughout the twelfth. Not far from Llancarfan lies Llantwit Major, the church of St Illtud.3 In early tradition Illtud was the most famous of the saints of Glywysing, the head of a great school, the teacher of the saints ; as such he appears already in the first Life of S t Samson, generally assigned to the seventh century. Other stories are told of him in early Lives, notably in the Life of St Paul Aurelian of the ninth century. The Life of Paul appears not to have been known in Wales in the eleventh and twelfth centuries ; but it drew on legends about Paul Penichen, who figures in Lifris’s Life (chap. 8) as Cadoc’s uncle. The Life of Samson was known at Llandaff a generation later, at most, than Lifris. But the tale told of Illtud by Lifris is indepen­ dent of both these, and appears in no earlier source, though it was 1 Cf. SEBC , p. 137. 2 Gwynllyw is notably absent from the story from the moment when Cadoc, though his eldest son, is handed over to be instructed by St Meuthi (chap. 6, p. 36), until his death, when he commends his kingdom to Cadoc and grants a privilege to Cadoc’s cemetery at Llancarfan, though he himself was buried by his own church in Newport (chap. 28, p. 90). It was no doubt from this that the legend grew which is represented in Caradoc’s chap. 16 (see below, p. 3 ion.), which made Cadoc a prince, and in Walter M ap’s De Nugis Curialium (11, 10, ed. M. R. James (Oxford, 1914), p. 72), which made Cadoc a king. Map gave a brief sum­ mary of Cadoc’s career and mentioned the conversion of Illtud ; his story is not close to that in any surviving Life, but is rather nearer to the version in the Vita Iltuti ( V S B , pp. 196-8) than to Caradoc’s or Lifris’s Lives of Cadoc. 3 For what follows, see G. H. Doble, Saint Iltut (Cardiff, 1944); on the Vita Iltuti, cf. SE BC , pp. 228, 234-5.

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later retold by Caradoc in his Lives of Cadoc and Illtud, and again by Walter Map. In the Life of Samson Illtud is an old scholar, ordained priest years before by St Germanus. Lifris (chap. 19) makes Illtud a soldier in Paul Penichen’s army; his comrades were swallowed up by the earth for an insult to Cadoc, but Illtud, who had prudently abstained from the insult, was alone saved, was con­ verted, and became a monk. That Illtud was a disciple of St Ger­ manus is incredible, since Germanus died in 448 and Illtud was still alive c. 540.1 But this is no argument for giving greater credit to Lifris, writing 450 years later than the author of the Life of Samson. He may have derived the association with Paul Penichen from local tradition ; the miracle is of a very conventional character ; it is hardly likely in the conditions of the sixth century that a great teacher should have graduated as a soldier ; nor does the little we know of Cadoc’s and Illtud’s dates make the tale very probable. On the whole it seems likely that this was Lifris*s way of disposing of a dangerous rival to St Cadoc, by attributing the foundation of Llantwit Major to a miracle performed by the founder of Llancarfan.2 The story of Illtud in the Life of Cadoc includes a few verses; and it has been held that these verses represent one of Lifris’s sources. This is unlikely, but they are worth a moment’s attention, for the style and form of the work certainly have something to tell us. Most of the book is written in somewhat ungainly prose; not wilfully obscure, yet occasionally rendered grotesque by blundering efforts at rhetoric. Lifris had a wide vocabulary, and like other pre­ tentious writers of the period, had a fondness for words of Greek origin.3 The style of Lifris is not so different from that of the English hagiographical literature of the age—English so-called, since its chief exponents were Flemings. The mixture of moder­ ately lucid prose and obscure verse is a characteristic of Goscelin of St Bertin and the anonymous author of the Life of King Edward (the Confessor). Lifris affects the hexameter, usually with an internal rhyme; this too was the favourite metre of the Vita Aedwardi. The metre, indeed, is an argument against these verses 1 For Illtud’s dates, see Lloyd, 1, 145, cf. 147. 2 The Sunder of the third leading monastery of south Glamorgan, St Docco or Docgwin, is notable by his absence from the Lives of Cadoc ; it is even possible that Lifris has intentionally suppressed him, or absorbed some part of his legend into Cadoc’s; see above, p. 298. E.g. basileus (pp. 72, 74, but not in the other version of the story of Maelgvvn on pp. 136 ff.), didascalus (p. 52), uranicus (p. 106).

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being ancient: the hexameter with internal rhyme was known before the tenth century and after the eleventh, but the tenth and eleventh centuries were its age of fashion—especially the eleventh. I have little doubt that further study will reveal links between Lifris and other Anglo-Norman or Anglo-Flemish saints’ Lives of the late eleventh century.1 (iv) The purpose of the Life and the Passio Although Lifris’s Life is somewhat shapeless and sprawling, it is informed throughout by a unity of interest and purpose which lends it a kind of form. First of all, the bulk of the stories were clearly told as topographical legends. We cannot always be sure that they were local legends collected by Lifris ; some, perhaps many of them, seem rather to be ingenious rationalisations of problems raised by local cults, especially by churches, chapels and wells dedicated to the saint. Nonetheless, the range of his knowledge is impressive. It may well be that some of these legends had been collected by an earlier biographer, or were current at Llancarfan in earlier genera­ tions ; but a great part of the Life is aimed to unmask the origin of names and legends in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brit­ tany, and even perhaps in Italy.12 This kind of legend-making was a commonplace in Celtic hagiography but it clearly had a special fascination for Lifris. What is not so clear is whether he really added anything to what he learned from the legends of St Finnian which can, by any stretch of imagination, be called a genuine reminiscence of the age of the saints.3 The second theme which gives the Life of St Cadoc a measure of 1 For the Vita Aedwardi see now the edition by F. Barlow (Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 1962); on Goscelin, ibid, appendix C, and references there cited. The similarities of style between Lifris and Goscelin are, however, only of a very general kind. In detail, there is much difference : e.g. Lifris is not at all consistent in his use of rhymed prose. 2 Further progress in the study of Lifris’s Life would demand a close topo­ graphical study of the places named in the Life and the cartulary which follows it in V and V S B . This the present writer is not competent to undertake ; nor can he enter into the further question of how much Lifris himself knew of the places he names. T he answers to many essential questions will be clear when D r Melville Richards completes his fundamental work on Welsh place-names. 3 Although most sections of the Life have been discussed sooner or later in this article, there is a good deal, especially of the rich detail of the stories, unaccounted for ; some of this is hagiographical commonplace ; some of it has claimed the atten­ tion of the experts on Welsh vernacular literature; much of it is folklore. There is m uch in the Life which still needs exploring. 20

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unity is its attempt to glorify its hero. Such was always the aim of a saint’s Life; but there is something especially grandiose, even megalomaniac, about Lifris’s efforts. St David, King Arthur, Maelgwn Gwynedd all tremble before him; he has no secular superior, nor, so far as one can see, any spiritual superior, save pos­ sibly the pope. If one considers the portrait which Lifris provides of his favourite saint, it cannot be said to be attractive. Cadoc s chief concern is to defend his property, his subjects and his name. All this is quite normal: Celtic saints, in their legends, were great wonder-workers, stern defenders of their own in troubled times; little given to any human emotion except anger.1 Once again, however, one cannot help feeling that Lifris has carried this tradi­ tion to the extreme. So, it would seem, thought Caradoc, who has consistently toned down his predecessor’s extravagances. The patron saint of a medieval church or monastery was its living head; and all the things which Cadoc did to protect the property and honour of his house could be paralleled elsewhere many times over. One almost constant feature of other saints’ Lives is missing in Cadoc’s. Lifris expressly tells us that Llancarfan made no pretence to possess any of his relics. However one views it, this is an astonishing admission; indeed, it is more than an admission, it is a bold claim, and there is reason to suppose that it was a claim first put forward by Lifris himself. In the first miracle recorded after Cadoc’s death, we are told how the clerks of St Cadoc, fleeing before an Anglo-Danish sheriff in the time of Cnut, carried with them the shrine of the saint and other relics; and how nonetheless it was captured by the invaders, but handled them so roughly that they left it behind and treated Cadoc and his property with due respect.2 Clearly when this miracle was 1 One should emphasise that this is how they appear in their legends, many of which were partly drawn up to help protect the saint’s properties from secular marauders. There is no reason to suppose that St Cadoc himself in any way resembled Lifris’s hero; on the Cadoc of history we have no information. 2 Chap. 40, pp. 10-12. M r Emanuel {National Library of Wales Journal, vn (1951-2), 219 f.) has argued that these chapters are a later insertion. He notes the discrepancy mentioned above, which does indeed need explanation ; but most of his other points are not substantial (for example, the difference of vocabulary is largely due to the different historical circumstances of the miracula (hence vicecomes, Dad, Angli, Morcanentes) ; the change of epithets for Cadoc may simply be due to the fact that he was dead). The significant difficulties could equally well be explained by the miracula being earlier than the passio as by their being later. It may indeed be that an earlier document was here interpolated into Lifris’s text after his death; if so, my argument is not affected. 306

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written down the clas of St Cadoc had a shrine which they supposed to have Cadoc’s relics in it. In Lifris’s text as we now have it, this story immediately follows the account of Cadoc’s death, in which it is made plain that the relics are in Italy. The discrepancy can be explained in one of two ways : either the miracle, which assumes a normal death and burial at Llancarfan, is the earlier, and the death in Italy a later insertion; or the death in Italy is the earlier story, and the miracle has been inserted under the influence of a different tradition or by sheer inadvertence. The latter hypothesis seems almost incredible : it presumes that Lifris or his editor could insert the story of the shrine without noticing the massive contradiction of the Italian burial story close by. The other way round the difficulty is less pronounced: the miracle story assumes burial in Wales only by implication ; the relics are never actually mentioned. Probability seems on the side of the view that the passio is a late addition to Lifris’s narrative ; though it is in our present text so essential a part of the Life that we need not doubt that Lifris himself wrote it. In any event the Italian burial was accepted by Caradoc in his Life in the mid-twelfth century, which in almost all respects, as we shall see, is an abridgement of the Life by Lifris. The passio of Cadoc1 is the most extraordinary episode in this bizarre collection ; and is in many ways the most interesting section of the Life. It is pure fantasy, and hardly tries to touch reality at any point. An angel appeared to Cadoc and told him he was to leave Wales; and without delay he was transported, like Elijah, by air, to Benevento. He arrived just in time to be elected abbot of the Beneventan monastery ; but the distance did not sever all connec­ tion with Llancarfan. Cadoc’s successor, Elli, visited his old master from time to time, and on each occasion some of Cadoc’s old dis­ ciples died and were buried at Benevento : ‘there are indeed eight very fine marble tombs to them there/2 Presently the bishop of Benevento died, and the archdeacon was instructed to arrange for Cadoc, who had now changed his name to ‘Sophias*, to succeed him. Sophias ruled his diocese in a just and holy manner for a short time, and then an angel came to inquire of him what manner of death he would choose. Sophias chose martyrdom; and, sure enough, the next day a cruel king ravaged the city, and one of his soldiers slew Sophias at the altar, while he was celebrating mass. So Sophias was buried at Benevento, and a great basilica raised over 1 Chaps. 37-9, pp. 102-10.

2 Chap. 38, p. 106. 307

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his tomb, ‘which no Briton (or Welshman) is permitted to enter. This is done, as learned men of Benevento say, because in the future (futurum est) a Briton from .. .Llancarfan will come and steal the holy dust of the relics of his body secretly away. . . ’ and take them to Llancarfan. There has been much speculation on the origin of this story. In­ genious scholars have identified ‘Beneventana civitas’ with various places in Britain, but there was a marked reluctance to follow Caradoc of Llancarfan in accepting the obvious identification with Benevento in Italy, until Mr Emanuel swept these conjectures away in 1953 and established that Lifris meant to take Cadoc to Italy to die; and established too that there is no reason to sup­ pose that Lifris could have found any legends at Benevento to support his extraordinary story.1 At Benevento there was, and is, a real basilica dedicated to Sancta Sophia—Holy Wisdom—built in the eighth century. One might conjecture that Lifris knew some­ thing of the contribution of Celtic monks to earlier continental monasticism; and a knowledge of Lombard attacks on Benevento in the sixth century or the organisation of Italian dioceses and chapters may underlie some parts of the story. Mr Emanuel sug­ gests, very plausibly, that Lifris was interested in Benevento as a centre of monastic and intellectual life in his own day. These speculations may help us to explain why Lifris chose Benevento ; but they hardly reveal the motive for the story—its real meaning and significance have surely no connection with Italy. It is useless to attempt to rationalise the story: every effort has been made to render it as irrational as possible. Lifris gets as near as he can to saying that at the end of his life Cadoc vanished ‘into thin air*. It is sufficiently plain that no one in Benevento in the late eleventh century would have supported this preposterous story : they would have known enough Greek to know that Sophia meant Wisdom, and was not a pseudonym for an obscure northern saint. The fiction could only hold water in England and Wales. The point of the story seems to be this. Lifris is telling his audience that the relics of St Cadoc are no longer at Llancarfan ; they will be there, one day ; but not yet. That is all that we can deduce with reasonable certainty from the story ; but it is extremely suggestive. The relics had been there before ; we may be sure of that ; Lifris boldly asserts that they were never there; but he does not preclude the possibility of their return. 1 J- H™?- Soc. of the Church in Wales, h i (1953), 54-63. 308

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Chicanery over relics was common in this period of the Middle Ages; but I know of no other case in which it took the form of deliberately losing the relics. It is in marked contrast to the story told of St Teilo less than a generation later by another member of the Llancarfan circle : on Teilo’s death his three leading monasteries fought over his corpse, a dispute which the saint diplomatically solved by providing three bodies.1 St Cadoc, so Lifris tells us, pro­ vided none. There are many stories told of the time of the Danish and other invasions of how the relics of saints were hurriedly removed from their churches so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy. This, surely, is the point of the story of Cadoc and Benevento. When the Normans came to Llancarfan, and seized the church and handed it over to Gloucester abbey, their first question no doubt would be, where are the relics of St Cadoc? To this Lifris gives answer: they are not here: they never have been here; they are a thousand miles away—in Benevento ; which is as if we should say—in Timbuktu. It is exceedingly difficult to imagine any other circumstance which could have led the das of St Cadoc to admit that they had no relic of the saint. If this reconstruction is correct, it may well be asked, where were the relics? To answer this question is to pile speculation on specula­ tion; but it can be said at least that there seems to be only one indi­ cation. In the margin of Caradoc’s Life of St Cadocy in the fourteenth-century Gotha manuscript, is a note: T t is said that this St Cadoc lies in Wales at St Davids.*2 It may be that when the Normans invaded Gwynlliog in the ioço’s, the das of St Cadoc removed his relics to what they supposed to be a safe distance. The tendency of this argument is to suggest that Lifris’s Life was being written in the years immediately before the Norman invasion, and that it received its present form about the time of that invasion, and of the gift of Llancarfan to Gloucester abbey, that is to say in or soon after 1095; and probably not later than 1104.3 Lifris, then, was an avid collector of topographical legends and other traditions, and a man well acquainted with the vernacular legends of his day ; he was a man, too, with a strain of pure fantasy in his disposition, which comes out most clearly in his passio of Cadoc. What still remains to be defined is his attitude to Llan1 L L t pp. 116-17. 2 Analecta Bollandiana, lx (1942), 67 n. 3 Though this terminus cannot be proved; but see below, pp. 312, 315. 309

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carfan ; the physiognomy of Cadoc’s authority in eleventh-century Wales. It can, indeed, be assumed that this was much in Lifris’s mind ; if there is any truth in our reconstruction of Lifris’s work he is a stubborn defender of Cadoc’s authority; and since every medieval saint was regarded as a living, active leader in the world, this must have reflected some attitude to the power and privileges of the Master of St Cadoc of Llancarfan. (v) Caradoc's Life and the Llancarfan cartulary To set Lifris’s work in the sharpest possible focus, it is desirable to compare it with two works which emanated from Llancarfan in the early twelfth century : the second Life, by Caradoc of Llancarfan, and the cartulary.1 Caradoc’s Life uses very much the same material as Lifris’s. At the most, one or two sections can be said to be wholly independent of Lifris, and most of Caradoc’s additional material can be easily accounted for. If our view that a great deal of the material owes its place in the earlier Life to Lifris himself is correct, it can hardly be questioned that Caradoc’s chief source was Lifris. This has been argued in detail elsewhere,12 and it remains to consider the changes which Caradoc made. Many of these are of no consequence: Caradoc was not a faithful copyist, and had no high regard for the precise form of the stories he retold ; he was, nonetheless, a learned man, and liked to introduce other information or corroborative detail from other sources. He consistently tones down the extravagances of Lifris ; above all, he simplifies and rationalises the passio. Caradoc takes Cadoc to Benevento, but in a natural way, on a pilgrimage, via Rome, to Jerusalem; at Benevento he fell ill, died and was buried. He was not made abbot or bishop ; he was not martyred ; he was not called Sophias. These were the excrescences on Lifris’s story; but the essence is the same : Cadoc died and was buried at Benevento ; and Caradoc, rationaliser though he was, had no doubt that Benevento was in Italy. 1 Analecta Bollandiana, lx (1942), 35-67; V SB , pp. 120 ff. 2 SE B C , pp. 235-6. The main changes made by Caradoc are noted above (and cf. Analecta Bollandiana, lx (1942)» 38 ff-); the additions are (1) chaps. 2-3, 7— infancy tales; (2) chaps. 13, 20—expositions of the gnomic verses in Lifris’s Life (Lifris, chaps. 20, 32); (3) chap. 16—description of Cadoc’s Lent and Easter, of his household, and of the lands over which he was 'abbas et princeps* after his father’s death (see above, p. 303 n.). Even the last, which is the most interesting addition, is mostly hagiographical commonplace. 310

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In Caradoc’s hands, Cadoc reassumes something of his natural proportions, as a great abbot and thaumaturge ; it is true that he is also a great traveller, but his authority in the Church is notably less than that wielded by the Cadoc of Lifris. All mention of St David has been suppressed. The significance of these changes seems clear: Caradoc wished to commend St Cadoc to a wider audience, including perhaps the new masters of Llancarfan, the monks of Gloucester, and to avoid any suggestion that Cadoc was a rival in authority to the great saints of Llandaff, whom Caradoc’s family, and perhaps he himself, were engaged in boosting.1 Lifris’s Cadoc was only an abbot, but a very powerful one ; such a figure one might expect to meet in the Celtic churches in which authority was vested in abbots rather than in bishops; it was not well suited to the image of Llandaff which the family of Llancarfan were devising in the early twelfth century—a diocese on the Anglo-Norman model. The ‘cartulary* of Llancarfan opens with an account of how Cadoc instituted thirty-six canons at Llancarfan; of how the houses and properties were divided between the abbot, the doctor, the priest and the thirty-six canons or prebendaries.2 Narratives of gifts and charters follow, covering a number of properties : of those which were identified by Wade-Evans, all but one lie in modern Glamorgan or Monmouthshire.3 It may fairly be presumed that in form all the documents in this collection have been doctored; but many or all of them may well be based on genuine grants, recorded, perhaps, like the grants in the Book of St Chad, in the margin of a gospel-book.4 The distribution of property has some archaiclooking features;5 but the division between ‘thirty-six canons’ and the word ‘prebendaries’ belong to the Norman period. It is very doubtful if Llancarfan ever had thirty-six canons—the number is reminiscent of Osmund’s foundation at Salisbury ;6 but it looks as 1 Cf. SE BC , ch. iv, esp. pp. 229 ff. 8 Chap. 48, pp. 120 ff. 8 A. W. Wade-Evans, ‘The Llancarfan Charters’, Arch. Cambrensis, lxxxvii (1932), 151-654 SE BC , p. 221 n. (corrected in detail by I. LI. Foster, Antiquity, xxxiv (i960), 236)* 6 It claims to describe an ancient arrangement (‘ ab antiquis temporibus ’) ; and although there were no doubt reasons for this claim, it would be needlessly sceptical to assume that the division of the land and the titles of the officials (abbas, doctor, sacerdos, sepeliarius) and offices (coquina, pistrina) had been invented ; the former receive some confirmation from the Book of Llandaff, but in both cases the antiquity of the titles cannot be determined. 6 Cf. Chron. of Holyrood, ed. M. O. and A. O. Anderson (Edinburgh, 1938)» p. n o . 3 11

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if the document was drawn up to suggest a rival constitution to domination by Gloucester. That the cartulary, in its present form, is later than the ioço’s, is confirmed by the sections on Cadoc and Gwynllyw, which, though differing from the story of Cadoc’s endowment told by Lifris, seem to derive from his text;1 in addi­ tion, there are clauses in the charters which belong to the early Norman period.2 Many parallels link the charters to those in the Book of Llandaff, and we may say with some confidence that it was one of the latter’s sources. In a lively critique of my earlier essay on the Book of Llandaff, Chancellor J. W. James of Bangor has denied this connection.3 It is true that in my previous article I described the connection some­ what incautiously.4 But a comparison of one charter in each can leave no doubt, I think, that there is a close literary connection between them.5 Scitote karissimi fratres quod in Notificandum est posteris, quod tempore Oudocei episcopi diadedit Guoidnerth Lann Catgualbolica admonitione occidit Guidader Deo et sancto Cadoco, quanerth fratrem suum Merchion tinus quot annis vas .iii. modicausa contentions regni, et orum cervise illi persolveretur 1 Chap. 53 (pp. 122-3) describes Gwynllyw’s interest in robbery, his conver­ sion and grant of the cemetery privilege (cf. pp. 28, 90). T he first and third of these points are described by Lifris, who also gives the names of the three disciples of Cadoc mentioned in this passage. He does not describe Gwynllyw’s conversion, but leaves it to be inferred ; and it seems probable that the story in chap. 53 and in the Vita Gundleii ( V S B , p. 175) represent two different inferences based on Lifris’s narrative. It is possible that chap. 53 represents pre-Lifris tradition ; but it is improbable that Gwynllyw, Gwladus, Cadoc, Finnian, Gnauan, Elli, robbery and the cemetery privilege had all been associated before Lifris wrote. 2 Cf. SE B C , p. 221 n. 3 J. Hist. Soc. of the Church in Wales, ix (1959), 5-22. I am grateful to M r James (p. 7) for the correction of two errors in my former article (also noted by Professor Foster, loc. cit.). T he Llandeilo which was a bishop’s seat in Dyfed was probably not Llandeilo Fawr (p. 226 n.); and the abbot who witnesses three of the charters noted on p. 238 was Catgen abbot of Llantwit, not Jacob abbot of Llandough, recte Llancarfan, who only witnessed two. Jacob appears as abbot in Llancarfan charters (chaps. 64-5, 68); Catgen appears too, not as abbot, but as a member of the Llantwit community (chaps. 64-5, cf. 68). 4 It might seem to be implied {SEBC, p. 221) that there is a direct link between many or most of these charters and LL. In style and technique there are many links ; the forms and formulae, for example corroborative, witness and anathema clauses, have much in common with those in many L L charters ; names of witnesses often recur in LL. But only two charters seem to be repeated in LL, so that one can be reasonably certain that Llandaff claimed the same property as Llancarfan: chap. 66 (Lisdin Borrion) is repeated in LL, p. 210 (Dinbirrion), and see below. 6 Vita Cadoci, chap. 67 (p. 134) ; LL, pp. 180-3 ; words in common underlined. 3 !2

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cum omnibus debitis propter fratricidium germani sui Merchiun, atque tandem redditus dedit Docgwinno. Super hoc testes fuerunt Berthgwinus, episcopus, Comnil, Terchan, et congregatio eius ; Sulien, abbas Nant Carban, Lumbiu presbiter, Biuonoi, Iouab, et congregatio sancti Cadoci ; Saturn, princeps altaris Docgwinni ; Marcant, Guoidnerth. Quicunque servaverit, benedictus erit. Et qui temeraverit, maledictus exit a Deo.

perpetrato homicidio fratricida excommunicatus est a beato Oudoceo, et a sinodo simul congregata ab hostio Guy usque ad hostium Tyui Landavie, et ita remansit depositis crucibus ad terram simul et cimbalis versis tribus annis sub eadem excommunicatione, et ex toto sine aliqua Christianorum communione. Finitis tribus annis requisivit veniam apud beatum Oudoceum, et data ei venia, misit eum in peregrinationem usque ad archiepiscopum Dolensem in Cornugalliam propter veteranam amicitiam et cognitionem quam sancti patres habuerant antecessores sui inter se, sanctus Teliaus videlicet et sanctus Samson archiepiscopus primus Dolensis civitatis. Et propter aliam causam eo quod ipse Guidnerth et Brittones et archiepiscopus illius terre essent unius lingue et unius nationis, quamvis dividerentur spatio terrarum, et tanto melius poterat renuntiare scelus suum, et indulgentiam requirere cognito suo sermone. Post hec data sibi remissione cum sigillatis litteris rediit ante caput anni ad patriam et ad beatum Oudo­ ceum, et quia nondum fecerat annum quern promiserat in exulatu neque finierat, noluit ilium absolvere, sed potius in eadem fieret excommunicatione, non servato ab eo primo iugo penitentie, manente eo in eadem prevaricatione et excommunicatione. Ante finem anni sanctus Oudoceus famosissime vite episcopus Landavie transivit ad dominum. Cui successit Berthguinus Landavie, quern Morcant rex simul et Guednerth requisierunt apud Landaviam cum multis senioribus Morcannuc uno ore deprecantes episcopum, videntes cruces adhuc depositas ad terram simul et reliquias cum cimbalis super Guednerth ut veniam daret Gued­ nerth fratricide, et ut solveret excommunicationem elevando cruces de terra et reliquias sanctorum. Post hec Guednerth promittens emendationem vite sue amplius in ieiunio et oratione et elemosina fusis lacrimis cum magna devotione absolutus est de episcopo, et iuncta sibi penitentia plenaria admodum culpe. Postmodum Guidnerth memor divini sermonis, sicut aqua extinguit ignem, ita elemosina peccatum, donavit Deo et sanctis Dubricio, Teliau et Oudoceo, et in manu Berthguini episcopi et omnibus successoribus suis ecclesie Landavie Lann Catgualatyr cum omni sua tellure, cum silva et cum maritimis et cum omni sua libertate sine ullo censu homini terreno nisi ecclesie Landavie et pastoribus eius et cum refugio suo in perpetuo. De clericis testes sunt Berthguinus episcopus, Gunuiu lector, Coniur, Conguarui, Torchan; de laicis: Morcant rex, Guednerth, Iudic filius Nud, Iacob filius Mabsu, Guengarth, Elioc, Gabran, Elfin, Samuel. Quicunque custodierit benedictus sit. Qui autem violaverit, maledictus sit. Amen. Finis illius est [followed by bounds in Welsh]. 313

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At first sight the words in common seem to represent a small proportion of the lengthy document in the Book of Llandajf. But the bulk of this consists of a circumstantial narrative of excom­ munication and penance of the kind loved by the compiler of the Bookf who drew on his general knowledge of the Llandaff traditions of Teilo and Samson, but added nothing else to the document from Llancarfan. The names of the principal persons involved, of the bishop and several of the witnesses, are identical, and the anathemas are closely similar; other witnesses from the Llancarfan charters occur elsewhere in the Book of Llandaffi1 and the forms of witness list and anathema are closely similar to the forms which recur, with minor variations, throughout the Book. Above all, the charters clearly grant the same property. This was denied by Chancellor James, who followed Wade-Evans in making the rent of three modii of beer ‘with all things due* the extent of Guoidnerth’s grant to Llancarfan. This would have been light payment for fratricide, and it is doubtful if the Latin, inelegant as it is, can bear that meaning. If it did, it is difficult to see why Llancarfan should trouble to preserve and record the grant, once the rent had been passed on to ‘Docgwinnus*. It seems to me that ‘d ed it.. .Docgwinno* can only be translated: ‘On account of the killing of his brother Merchiun, Guoidnerth gave Lann Catgualader to God and St Cadoc, on condition that (lit. ‘to the extent that*) a vessel con­ taining three modii of beer should be paid to him (Guoidnerth) every year, with all things due, and later he gave the rents (i.e. the modii) to Docgwin.’ It could perhaps be argued that the charter in the Book of Llandaff was the original, that in the Llancarfan cartulary the copy. This hardly seems likely. There are many indications that Llandaff absorbed, whether by merger or take-over, the properties of the ancient clas churches of Glamorgan—at least of Llancarfan, per­ haps too of Llandough and Llantwit ;12 the church of St Cadoc is included in the earliest confirmation to Llandaff which can reason­ ably be regarded as genuine, that of 1119.3 It is clear, in fact, that the cartulary belongs to the period when the family of Bishop Herewald still regarded Llancarfan as their headquarters. From 1 A number of these links are listed by P. C. Bartrum in Trans. Hon. Soc. of Cymmrodorion (1948), pp. 279 ff. 2 SE B C , pp. 221 ff. 3 L L , pp. 89-92 ; this also includes the vill and church of ‘ Lann Catgualatyr’. 3H

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the invasion of Glamorgan by Robert FitzHamon until the late twelfth century they fought a rearguard action against the new claim of the monks of Gloucester to be lords of Llancarfan.1 In the long run this was solved by compromise ; members of the Llancarfan family leased their old home from Gloucester abbey in return for a substantial rent. But at first they appear to have hoped to retain Llancarfan without reservation by law or by force. We have seen that Lifris implies in his passio of St Cadoc that the monks of Gloucester have not won possession of the saint: a hidden, but a potent challenge. The next stage in the resistance to Gloucester was the drawing up of the cartulary, with its fanciful list of prebends ; the implication of this is that Gloucester was competing with the rights of an ancient das in full operation. The picture was doubtless overdrawn, if not wholly fanciful; and we may be sure that it was inadequate against the combined power of the abbot of Gloucester and the lords of Glamorgan. By 1119 the foundation of Llandaff was in full swing; the family of Llancarfan had transferred its allegiance to the new cathedral, and had also transferred the claims of their ancient das. And so they claimed St Cadoc and his church for Llandaff, and rewrote some of Llancarfan’s charters to make them gifts to Llandaff. If this reconstruction is correct, we can date the cartulary c. 1100 or soon after, and probably well before 1119; and Caradoc’s Life to the next generation, c. 1120-50, when Llancarfan needed a new Life which would suit both its old family and its new masters, and above all not conflict with the claims of the new diocese of Llandaff. (vi) Herewald and the Welsh bishoprics Perhaps the most puzzling feature of this reconstruction is the rôle it assigns to Bishop Herewald. He appears as the founder of the family which laid claim to Llancarfan and laid the foundations of the see of Llandaff. But where lay his own headquarters? Of what was Herewald bishop? To Chancellor James this presents no prob­ lem. Herewald was bishop of Morgannwg, Gwent and Erging. In an eloquent exposition of my ignorance of Welsh history he explains that Welsh bishoprics before the Norman conquest of the Welsh Church conformed to the boundaries of kingdoms.12 By this 1 T he story of the property and its connection with the Llancarfan family is told at length in E A , 11, 506-37; cf. SEBC, p. 227 n. 2 James, pp. 18 ff. 315

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doctrine St Davids was the headquarters of the bishop of Deheubarth; Bangor of Gwynedd; St Asaph of Powys; Llandaff of Morgannwg, Gwent and Erging. As the frontiers of kingdoms shifted, so did the bishoprics—hence the remarkable elasticity of the diocese of Llandaff in the early eleventh century, as it appears from the records in the Book of Llandaff. This is no new doctrine ; nor, if we take it simply to mean that Welsh bishops acted in close liaison with the kings, and would rarely be able to perform episcopal functions outside the territories ruled by their kings, need we take objection to it. But if it means that the Welsh bishoprics had consistently conformed to the frontiers of kingdoms over the centuries before 1066, we must cer­ tainly protest. Chancellor James refers me for instruction to Lloyd’s great History of Wales and to the Welsh Laws. I have searched the former more than once for any indication of this doctrine, but in vain; and the Welsh Laws have mighty little to tell us of bishops, and nothing to the present purpose.1 The diocese of St Asaph is supposed to have been founded by St Kentigern in the sixth century, and left in charge of his disciple Asaph; and to have represented the bishopric of Powys. There is, however, no evidence that a bishop sat at Llanelwy before 1143, nor that anyone thought of seating a bishop in this part of Wales before 1125 ;2 nor is Llanelwy itself in Powys. It is perfectly clear that the Norman earls of Chester placed their bishop at Llanelwy within reach of Rhuddlan castle ; and that the church on the Elwy was intended to perform the function in Powys and eastern Gwynedd performed by the church on the Taff, similarly placed within reach of Cardiff castle, in Glamorgan. It is true that the diocese of Bangor conformed roughly to the frontiers of Gwynedd and the diocese of St Davids to those of Deheubarth. But there is no evidence that they had done so before 1066. It is not impossible ; there is certainly no evidence against it ; there is simply no evidence on the matter at all. The Annales 1 In the present state of knowledge, it would be rash to assume the antiquity of the arrangements or traditions represented by the surviving texts of the Laws, which do not take us back beyond the twelfth century (cf. M. Richards, Laws of Hywel Dda (Liverpool, 1954), pp. 7 ff. ; Sir Goronwy Edwards, Hywel Dda and the Welsh Lawbooks (1929)). a For the events of 1125 and 1143, see Lloyd, 11, 456-7, 485 ; for St Asaph and its legends, see S. M. Harris, J. Hist. Soc. of the Church in Wales, VI (1956), 5 ff. ; K. Jackson in SEBC, pp. 313 ff. 316

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Cambriae called Elfoddw ‘archbishop * in the region of Gwynedd ; Asser called Nobis archbishop and connected him with the parochia of ‘ St Degui*.1 It is possible that the position of chief bishop in a great kingdom was one firmly recognised in the ninth century;12 but it is equally possible that these titles reflect the personal eminence of a leading bishop. In both cases there are indications that Elfoddw and Nobis had colleagues; everything we know tends to the conclusion that there had once been more than the two, three or four ‘bishops’ seats* which we meet in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Seven bishops met Augustine in the famous conference; Rhigyfarch would have us believe that 118 bishops gathered for the synod of Llandewi Brefi ; and the Welsh Laws tell us that Dyfed alone had seven bishops* houses.3 None of these pieces of information gives us any clear picture of the structure of the early Welsh episcopate, and we shall look for such in vain. What seems clear, and generally accepted, is that in the great days of the sixth and seventh centuries the Welsh Church was organised like the Irish, on a monastic basis. In all Christian churches organisation grew out of the central familia of a bishop or a monastery. In the churches of the Roman empire the clergy were the clergy of the cathedral, placed in a great town; they served the area of jurisdiction of that town, an area clearly defined. Thus cathedral and diocese grew up, in general, together. In townless, barbarian kingdoms, this was not easily arranged. Nonetheless, the close links between England and Rome, and the romanised churches of Gaul, and the impress of the powerful personality of Archbishop Theodore, meant that dioceses on the Roman pattern were quickly introduced. Their headquarters lay in a minster or a group of minsters, whose clergy served the diocese. Their frontiers were the frontiers, by and large, of kingdoms or sub-kingdoms. In the Celtic churches the idea of a diocese emerged very slowly. The equivalent of a minster was a Celtic monastery—often very similar in organisation to an early minster in other western churches; and 1 Annales Cambriae (Harl. MS. 3859)» $a. 809 (cf. Lloyd, I, 204 and n.); Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), pp. 65-6. Cf. SEBCy p. 201 n. 2 On the analogy of theprimescop of the Irish Tuath (L. Gougaud, Christianity in Celtic Lands (London, 1932), p. 221). 3 Bede, H.E. 11, 2; V SB , p. 164; M. Richards, Laws, pp. 84, 136 (and see below). 317

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round the monastery sprang up a group of lesser churches, lying near and far, which were the affiliations of the monastery, and sometimes paid dues to it; sometimes were even its property and were served by it. This group of churches formed the Celtic equivalent of the diocese ; and the medieval frontiers of the ancient Breton ‘diocese* of Dol revealed the survival of this pattern: it consisted of a solid core of forty-seven parishes, with substantial islands of authority in several surrounding dioceses.1 In this pattern, as is well known, it was the abbot, the successor, partner, co-arb of the saintly founder, who wielded authority. Bishops were needed, to perform the sacraments of ordination and the like which only bishops could perform. One man might com­ bine the offices of abbot and bishop ; but this was not always, per­ haps not often the case. The bishop who was a tame follower of the abbot must have been a common feature of Celtic monasteries, just as the claustral bishop was not uncommon in the monasteries of Gaul in the eighth century.12 The little evidence that we have about Welsh bishops in the early Middle Ages suggests that their head­ quarters lay in the great das churches. Asser3 refers to the parochia of ‘St Degui*, which is usually translated the ‘diocese of St David’s*, but may equally mean the area over which the das of St David had authority, which would be narrower and wider than the later diocese. The passage in the Laws referring to the seven bishop’s-houses in Dyfed suggests that a group of das churches 1 The Breton dioceses were formed earlier and more precisely than in other Celtic areas, because the Church was fully established there in Roman times, and the Roman organisation was not completely destroyed by the Breton invasions. The pattern of the diocese of Dol is exceptional, and has not been fully explained. The position of Dol as a missionary centre in the sixth and later centuries m ust be at least part of the explanation, and the enclaves survived partly because diocesan frontiers were formed so much earlier here than in other Celtic countries. (On the Breton bishoprics in general the most recent study is by Fr. Merlet, ‘ La formation des diocèses et des paroisses en Bretagne’, Mémoires de la Soc. d'Hist. et d'Archéologie de Bretagne, xxx (1950), 5-61; xxxi (1951), 137-72 (with a bibliography on pp. 167 ff.; I owe these references to Mrs Chadwick); on Dol, see also Gougaud, Rev. Mabillont xn (1922), 90-104; J.-F. Lemarignier, Étude sur les privilèges d'exemption. . .des abbayes normandes (Paris, 1937), pp. 15 ff. ; on Celtic bishoprics in general, Gougaud, Christianity in Celtic Lands, chaps, iv, vii. 8 H. Frank, Die Klosterbischöfe des Frankenreiches (Münster, 1932); Lemari­ gnier, pp. 6-8. Some of these were of Celtic origin. 3 Life of King Alfred, pp. 65-6 : ‘monasterium et parochiam sancti Degui This refers to the depredations of King Hemeid, so that a more or less defined area must be included in the phrase ; this is not incompatible with a *diocese ’ on the model of Dol (for parochia cf. Gougaud, chaps, iv, vii). 318

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could have bishops in them, rather than that they always did ; but the meaning is obscure, and when the Laws immediately go on to say ‘and Mynyw is the chief in Cymru*, we seem to be in the atmosphere of the twelfth century, when the common original of the existing recensions of the Laws may well have been written. Marginalia in the Book of St Chad show that a ninth-century bishop could be called ‘bishop of Teilo V which is evidently parallel to Asser’s ‘parochia sancti Degui*, and suggests that the patron of the das gave his title to the bishop more commonly than a kingdom. We shall never know which of the das churches of Wales had extensive jurisdiction in earlier centuries in any detail. But Rhigyfarch’s Life of St David reflects in a very interesting way the tradition of early Welsh bishoprics as it was remembered in the late eleventh century. David appears to have two rivals and two sub­ ordinates among the bishops of his day : the rivals were Dubricius and Deiniol, the subordinates Padarn and Teilo.12 Deiniol, need­ less to say, represented Bangor, traditionally the greatest, and by the eleventh century the only bishopric of Gwynedd. Padarn represented Llanbadam Fawr, the leading das of Ceredigion, also by tradition the home of a bishop. Teilo doubtless represented Llandeilo Fawr, the leading das of Ystrad Tywi, the probable home of Bishop Nobis and of the Gospels of St Chad. But what of Dubricius? Of Dubricius, or Dyfrig, we know two things : that he was a lead­ ing Welsh bishop within reach of Llantwit Major in the days of Illtud and Samson—he is mentioned in the first Life of Samson— and that the vestiges of his cult are concentrated in Archenfield, in what is now western Herefordshire, but was anciently the tiny Welsh principality of Erging. His chief church lay at Hentland near Ross-on-Wye.3 Without attaching too precise a significance to these dedications, it seems reasonable to presume that this was the area of Dubricius’s main activity, and, more confidently, the area 1 LL, p. xlvi. 2 Deiniol and Dubricius (Dyfrig) are the two messengers sent to call David to preside over the synod of Brefi; Teilo (Eliud) and Padarn accompany David to Jerusalem, where he is promoted archbishop ( V S B , pp. 165, 163—4). The rôle of the other bishops is conjectural; but it is plain that in this part of the Life Rhigyfarch is using a variety of techniques to emphasise David’s primacy. 3 See G. H. Doble, S t Dubricius (Guildford, 1943); E. G. Bowen, Settlements of the Celtic Saints in Wales (Cardiff, I 954 )> PP* 3^ ff.

319

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associated with him in the central and later Middle Ages. But Erging lay in historical times in the diocese of Hereford, and although Bishop Urban of Llandaff tried to detach it from Hereford, he failed in his attempt. Urban’s failure in Erging is, indeed, a striking fact, because there is strong evidence to suggest that Erging was his predecessor’s chief sphere of influence. The list of churches in Erging con­ secrated by Herewald and of priests ordained by him has all the marks of authenticity, and can hardly have been invented.1 It is possible that it has been attached to the wrong bishop, but it clearly belongs to a Welsh bishop, and the hypothesis, therefore, is redundant. Whatever else Herewald did, he probably performed episcopal functions in Erging, and we may presume that Rhigyfarch had him in mind when he referred to St Dubricius. If this be accepted, it raises two difficult questions: where else did Herewald perform his functions, and what was his relation to the bishop of Hereford? The Book of Llandaff tells us that Herewald was ordained priest by his predecessor Joseph, chosen bishop by King Gruffydd (ap Llywelyn) and Mouric ab Hywel and the clergy and people, and consecrated by Cynesige archbishop of York in the presence of Edward the Confessor at London at Pentecost 1059. As usual, the date is wrong—and the circumstances may be partly fictitious. But there are strong grounds for supposing that the author of the Book of Llandaff had before him a document which gave the date 1056, and this may well have been correct.2 King Gruffydd conquered Deheubarth in 1055, and after ravaging western Herefordshire, made peace with King Edward at Billingsley in Erging.3 The result of this may well have been to leave Erging in Welsh hands till Gruffydd’s fall in 1063 ; and it may be that as part of the arrange­ ment the English leaders agreed to provide a bishop to perform episcopal functions in the Welsh parts of Herefordshire ; and it may well be, too, that this was one of the reasons why the new bishop of 1 LL, pp. 275 ff. 2 LL, p. 266 gives Pentecost 1059; but on p. 280 it makes (March) 1104, the year of his death, fall in his 48th year, which suggests 1056. Ralph of Diceto and the entries on the Canterbury profession roll, whose information was ultimately derived from a draft of LL, confirm that he died in his 48th year (their date of consecration, 1070-1, is tendentious and can be ignored: E A, 1, 56 ff.; Diceto, ed. Stubbs, 1, 203; cf. SEBC, p. 205 n.). 3 Lloyd, 11, 364 ff. He must be the Gruffydd referred to, not Gruffydd ap Rhydderch, who died in 1055 (ibid.; cf. E A, 11, 508 n.). 320

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Hereford renewed the war in June 1056, with disastrous con­ sequences to himself.1 This is perhaps matter of conjecture ; but it is at least clear that the author of the Book of Llandaff had access to good information: he is surely right in saying that Herewald was consecrated by Archbishop Cynesige, and it is striking that this was the only period in the Middle Ages—while Stigand was archbishop of Canterbury—that the archbishop of York regularly consecrated bishops outside his province.12 We may take it as correct that Herewald was consecrated by Cynesige with the approval of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. That he had been ordained priest by Bishop Joseph is, however, more doubtful. Joseph is a shadowy figure, and is said to have died in 1046, when Herewald must have been a very young man, prob­ ably too young for ordination. Herewald’s name, furthermore, was clearly English, and so, in all probability, was the name of one of his sons, Lifris, or Leofric; and this fits in with the statement that Herewald had lived in England for some years.3*8 Presumably, if he was acceptable to Gruffydd, he had some knowledge of Welsh ; and it is likely that in the course of his long life he and his family became assimilated, as it were, to their new surroundings. But it seems likely that he was chosen as a young and active clerk from the border country who could maintain the traditions of the bishops of Hereford in Erging, and yet be acceptable to the Welsh. If this was Herewald’s beginning, it would certainly seem that he extended his sphere of influence beyond Erging fairly rapidly; and the rule of Gruffydd throughout Deheubarth may have given him the opportunity, just as the fall of Gruffydd may have compelled him to find a permanent headquarters outside Erging. In any event, it would be excessively sceptical to disregard the evidence that in his later years his family was established at Llancarfan, and that he was exercising episcopal functions in Glamorgan and 1 Bishop Leofgar was killed in battle with Gruffydd (Lloyd, 11, 367-8). 2 Cynesige consecrated several bishops in the Canterbury province in the period between Stigand’s accession in 1052 and his own death in 1060, owing to the ambiguity of Stigand’s position (cf. E. A. Freeman, Norman Conquest, II (Oxford, 1868), 342-3, 446-7, 605-7; and p. 433 for the brief interlude in 1058-9 when Stigand was respectable. The interlude was probably over before Pentecost, so that it does not in itself disprove L U s date). 8 LLy p. 266. 21

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Gwent.1 He may even have begun the process of attempting to define diocesan boundaries. But this is not, perhaps, very likely. All our evidence suggests that the Welsh bishoprics and the Welsh das churches had not, in the main, recovered from the devastating effects of the Danish raids;2 and that in the second half of the eleventh century bishops were few and far between in every part of Wales. It is unlikely that Herewald and the bishops of St Davids were in competition in this period : they must have had sufficient ado to meet all the demands which would be made upon them. It was the Norman invasion, which spelt Norman churchmen in the see of St Davids and Norman monks intruded into the das churches, which led to the great upheaval from which the four dioceses of Wales emerged. St Davids and Bangor were undoubtedly ancient centres of great prestige; but the true physiognomy of the Welsh church before the Danish raids is hidden from us in impenetrable obscurity. The only document conceivably as early as the seventh century which throws any light on the Welsh bishops at all is the first Life of St Samson, and that introduces us, not to St Cadoc or St David or St Deiniol—nor even to St Kentigern—but to St Dubricius. When the monks of Gloucester seized Llancarfan, Bishop Herewald’s family showed real historical flair (however accidentally) in banishing St Cadoc to Benevento, and laying claim to the bones of St Dubricius. ADDENDUM

I regret that I had not been able to read C. W. Lewis’s interesting comments on my chapter in SEBC (.Morgannwg, iv (i960), 50-65) before writing this section. He shows, for example, that there is more evidence than I allowed that Llandaff may have been a centre of St Teilo’s cult before the twelfth century. While I do not think this seriously affects my argument here, p. 316 above would certainly need some expansion and modification in the light of his article. Since p. 276 n. was written, the ‘ hints ’ there referred to have been fully expounded in Professor V. H. Galbraith’s Making of Domesday Book (Oxford, 1961). 1 LL, pp. 267-75, gives five grants to him of places, which, so far as they can be identified, lay in Glamorgan or Monmouthshire; and for other evidence of his work in Glamorgan, see above, p. 262 n. St Anselm referred to him as ‘episcop(us) de Walis qui vocatur Herewardus’, and implied that Herewald had been sus­ pended by him—but no details are known (Opera, ed. F. S. Schmitt, iv, 56). 2 On these, see Lloyd, 1, 351-2. 322

X The Celtic Background o f E arly Anglo-Saxon E n glan d 1 BY N O R A K. C H A D W I C K i.

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‘There is nothing in European history closely parallel to this sudden development of a civilisation by one of the most primitive peoples established within the ancient Roman Empire.* So writes Sir Frank Stenton,2 our greatest Anglo-Saxon historian of modern times. He is comparing the great achievement in culture in AngloSaxon England of the middle of the eighth century with its condi­ tion a hundred years earlier. What, we must ask, stimulated this phenomenal development? The earliest stimulus did not come from Rome, either on the Continent or in this country. When the Anglo-Saxons came to England they came as an illiterate and barbaric people to a remote province of a dying Empire. By the close of the Anglo-Saxon period they had created an independent and coherent state, with a dignity and prestige which gave it a recognised place among the nations of Europe. Where did the English first establish themselves ? It is now com­ monly thought that their first sizeable unit was in the north of England. Was it in the wilder northern part of Northumbria, known by the Celtic name of Bernicia, or in the more smiling and fertile southern part, known also by a Celtic name Deira?3 The kingdom of Deira may have originated in an English settlement at York already in the fifth century under Roman auspices, perhaps entering from the Humber. But what was the origin of the Bernicians further north? Their capital was at Bamburgh, and their stronghold was doubtless the rock—their acropolis. Were the Bernicians an offshoot from the 1 This study was read as the O’Donnell Lecture at Oxford in 1961, and is now published by leave of the Board of Management of the O ’Donnell Fund. * A n g lo -S a x o n E n g la n d , p. 177. a On the origin of the names see K. Jackson, L a n g u a g e a n d H is to r y in E a r ly B r ita in , p. 701.

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Deirans, making their way north by sea? Or did they land inde­ pendently at various sites along the coast? Were they originally a pirate stronghold on Bamburgh Rock? These questions are still under debate. The poverty of their territory made expansion and aggressive warfare inevitable. Yet strangely enough this remote and inclement corner of England gave birth to perhaps the most brilliant dynasty in the history of our country. Its first king was Ida, who is believed to have begun to reign about 547,1 and whose descendant Aldfrith the scholar was reigning when Bede was a young man. In the early days the Bernician dynasty were too feeble to make a successful stand against the native Celtic dynasties eager to dis­ lodge them. Nennius tells us12 that a group of four British kings (reges) attacked them, Urien3 and Rhydderch4 and a certain Guallaug and Morcant ; and although Theodric, king of Bernicia, fought bravely against Urien and his sons, Urien was strong enough to besiege him for three days and nights in the island of Lindisfarne. Not until the reign of Æthelfrith (593-617), Ida’s grandson, were the Northumbrians strong enough to take an effective offensive against the Celtic peoples. Æthelfrith, having possibly strengthened himself by marrying the daughter of Ælle the king of Deira and banishing her brother, Edwin (p. 149 above), during the latter part of his reign ruled the two kingdoms as one Northumbria. He began his northward expansion in 603 by defeating the Gaelic dynasty of the kingdom of Argyll under their famous king Aedân mac Gabrâin—St Columba’s king—and later in 61656he swept south-west against the Welsh, defeating them with heavy losses at the Battle of Chester, though he died himself immediately after. In these campaigns Æthelfrith fully justifies Sir Frank Stenton’s description of the early Anglo-Saxons as ‘one of the most primitive 1 According to Bede, who doubtless drew upon an early Bernician king list. See Stenton, op. cit. p. 76. Cf. also K. Sisam, Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies {Proceedings of the British Academy, xxxix), passim. 2 Historia Brittonum, chap. 63. 3 I.e. Urien prince of Rheged, the most powerful of the north British princes, who ruled somewhere in the Solway area (cf. p. 158 above). 4 I.e. Rhydderch Hael, ruler of Strathclyde, whose seat was on Dum barton Rock. He is referred to by Adamnan in his Life of S t Columba as a contemporary of the saint. 6 The date is commonly given in modem history books as 613, following the Annales Brittonum, which at this point are three years behind. Cf. p. 174 above.

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peoples established within the ancient Roman empire*. Bede tells us that he ‘ravaged the Britons more than all the great men of the English’, and that in the Battle of Chester, before hostilities opened, he slaughtered twelve hundred monks who had come out of Bangor1 to pray for the British combatants. Yet a great change came about in the generation immediately following Æthelfrith. We find his sons expanding westwards into British territory, not by Æthelfrith’s ruthless method of conquest but apparently by intermarriage and peaceful penetration. No wars are mentioned against the Britons of the North, yet the Solway lands seem to have come into Anglian hands, probably already in the reign of Æthelfrith’s son Oswiu; and both of Æthelfrith’s sons Oswald and Oswiu and also Oswiu’s son Ecgfrith were zealous Christians; Oswiu and his brother Oswald had been converted during their exile in Iona. Eddius calls Ecgfrith rex christianissimns, and he is held responsible for the foundation of many northern churches and monasteries. We may surmise that it was probably at about this time that the two superb crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell were set up. We have passed in a single generation from the barbarism of Æthelfrith and his slaughter of the monks at Chester to the eve of the Golden Age of Northumbria. How are we to account for the change? First of all the Anglian settlement in Northumbria had grown up and expanded on the top of a Celtic population. Even at the begin­ ning of the seventh century two-thirds of the North of England were still in British (i.e. Celtic) hands. Moreover not merely the basic population of Northumbria and the surrounding country was British. The whole of southern Scotland was British-speaking, that is to say practically Welsh-speaking; and all west of the Pennines. From Edinburgh to Land’s End was a single Celtic (BritishWelsh) people speaking an identical language, and owning a com­ mon culture (cf. p. 158 above). The pedigrees of the British chieftains of the North12 trace their rise to the period of the Roman decline, and their territory corre1 I.e., Bangor is y Coed on the R. Dee. Harl. 3859, dating from c. n o o , directly based on a text of m id-tenth century ; but these genealogies are ultimately based on oral tradition, having possibly been preserved by carefully trained family historians and genealogists of the N orth British princes from the seventh century, or possibly compiled from material preserved in sagas from the same milieu : cf. K. Jackson, ‘T he Britons of Southern Scotland*, A n tiq u ity , xxix ( i 9 5 S), 78 f.

2 Our earliest written text is in MS.

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sponded roughly with that of the Roman tribes whom they super­ seded and possibly preceded. These seem to have developed with no great change of territory into the North British princes of the sixth and seventh centuries. The Welsh of Wales called the Britons of Scotland the Gwÿr y Gogleddy ‘The_oMen_ofjh *, or, as we might say, ‘Our northern neighbours’. Yet no cohesion seems to have existed between the ‘ Men of the North *and the Welsh of Wales, and even the ‘Men of the North’ themselves consisted of a number of small separate kingdoms or principalities, each independent, though capable of some co-operation. We have already seen that these British ‘Men of the North’ had undergone a certain amount of Romanisation during the closing years of Roman Britain. Many had adopted Roman names. Late in the Roman period the Romans seem to have delegated the defences against Pictish raids to the British princes in the North. In the late Roman document, the Notitia Dignitatum, no returns are sent in from the dux Britanniarum for the north or west, between the middle of the fourth and the fifth centuries. The chiefs of the Votadini guarding the eastern end of the Antonine Wall against the Piets, and those of the Dumbarton dynasty guarding the rock of Dumbarton at the western end, had Romanised names as far back as the period of the great Pictish raid on southern Britain in 367; but the earlier names on the pedigrees are not Roman, but look Pictish. This suggests that native troops were used by the Romans against the Piets. We have for example the interesting epithet of the British dynasty of Dumbarton, Hael, e.g. Rhydderch Hael, Nudd Hael, etc., and a famous inscription of this period on a stone at Yarrowkirk in Selkirkshire,1 which once formed part of an extensive British settlement and cemetery, and which commemorates ‘Two sons of Liberalis*. Liberalis is the Latin equivalent of British Haelf ‘wealthy’. How did this dynasty of the Dumbarton Rock become ‘wealthy’? The Britons of the North had neither coinage nor organised trade. Was it Roman gold, payment? In the fifth century St Patrick had written a letter to the soldiers of a certain Coroticus of this dynasty—probably the Ceredig (Ceritic guletic) of the Dumbarton pedigree2—protesting against their slave raiding. 1 See R. A. S. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum, vol. I (Dublin, 1945), no. 515. Cf. further K. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, p. 166, and reference. 8 MS. Harl. 3859, Pedigree V. 326

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Did this resource increase as the Roman pay ceased? Was the treasure of Traprain Law,1 excavated by the late A. O. Curie in 1919, loot acquired from similar motives? Perhaps their close association with the Romans deprived the ‘Men of the North* of political experience and of the power of developing any central political unity. They had made a good start in their attack on Lindisfarne, but their leader Urien was slain treacherously (pro invidia) just afterwards, by Morcant, one of his fellow princes (see above), and the confederation fell apart. Their poetry shows them as a society still in a Heroic Age, highly skilled in fighting and swift in the field, brave and high-hearted, loyal to the death to their leaders; just the kind of troops to keep the Piets in check; but they could not combine. To the north lay the powerful Pictish nation, Cruithentuach, whom the Romans after long struggles had managed to contain behind the Antonine Wall. Had the ‘Men of the North*—the British of Strathclyde, Lothian and the Solway lands—made common cause with the Piets at the close of the Roman era in Britain, no Saxon could have made headway in England. We might all have been speaking Pictish today. These British ‘Men of the North* formed the basic population of the country which became Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. They were the background from which the culture of Northumbria grew up. They were Christians and had a culture of their own. They had learnt from the Romans the art of cutting stone, and have left us funerary inscriptions, so we know that they were literate. They must have kept some form of notes or annals in Latin, for a set of these seem to have been embodied in the lost Northern History (cf. pp. 48,160, above), to be incorporated later in the Latin History of the Britons compiled by Nennius round about 800. It is chiefly from these notes or annals that we know of the early relations of the British princes with the dynasty of Ida of Bernicia as related by Nennius, and about the family of Urien of Rheged and his allies, and of his death by treachery. The annals themselves were first written down perhaps as early as the seventh century, even the early seventh century, and in the North. No independent written British records in the vernacular have been preserved in the North. Yet we know that oral tradition was carefully cultivated by professional bards and genealogists, and recorded in written texts in Wales at a later date. Nennius men1 Now in the Queen Street Museum, Edinburgh.

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tions the names of five British bards who were famous ‘at this time*,1 and it is believed that we still have the original nucleus of some of the poems of two of these bards whom he names, Aneirin and Taliesin.2 Under Aneirin's name we have the Gododdin, a col­ lection of elegies on a disastrous expedition of the Britons from near Edinburgh against the Saxons about this time. Taliesin claims to have been the official bard of Urien of Rheged in the west. There is no early narrative poetry among the Celtic peoples, but the panegyrics, elegies, the allusions and mise en scène, carry us directly into these little heroic northern courts, and would enable us to compile a gazetteer of their personnel. This Welsh poetry of the North is in no sense rude or crude. There is never a coarse word or allusion. It is formal, dignified, conventional and refined—the poetry of a polished if somewhat elementary society, like Homer's heroes—the finished product of a long oral tradition. This is evident, not only in the elaborate metre, but in the economy and concentrated intensity of expression—not a word superfluous, not an image expanded. Brilliant flashes of imagination expressed with concentration and economy are the most striking features of the style. The family of Urien prince of Rheged gives us a good idea of a Northern princely family of the ‘Men of the North' in the sixth and seventh centuries and the Britons whom the Anglo-Saxons conquered, and who in their turn must have played a part in civilising their conquerors. Urien was the greatest war leader the British had, but our traditions about his family are chiefly not so much military as cultural, and Urien and his son Owen are celebrated in some of the finest of our early Welsh poems. Owen is celebrated in the medieval Welsh romances of the Lady of the Fountain, and The Dream of Rhonabwy, both of which were later attracted into the circle of Arthurian stories. In the twelfthcentury anonymous Life of S t Kentigerny the patron saint of the Strathclyde Welsh, Owen is the saint's father by his union with the daughter of the king of Lothian, and he is described as ‘a most graceful young man, sprung from the most ancient stock of the 1 T he word in the text is tunc, and the passage is followed by the words: 4Mailcunus magnus rex apud Britt ones regnabat.’ T he reference is to Maelgwn Gwynedd, whose death is recorded in the Annales Cambriae, s.a. 547 (recté 550). * Sir Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin, 1944), pp. 50 ff. ; cf. further the introductions to idem, Aneirin (Cardiff, 1938); and Canu Taliesin (Cardiff, i960). 328

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Britons’, and as *famous among the tales of entertainers’ (cf. p. 161 above). The elegy on Owen1 is the masterpiece among the elegies of these Northern princes. Rhun, another son of Urien, is said by both Nennius (chap. 63) and the Welsh annals s.a. 626 (recté 629) to have baptised King Edwin. Moreover, the title of the oldest (Chartres) text of the History of the Britons by Nennius seems to say that a son of Urien wrote the Life of the fifth-century saint Germanus,12 and in fact c. 800 a written account of St Germanus appears to have existed in Britain.3 Cf. p. 162 above. Tradition, then, associates the two chief saints of the early British Church, Germanus and Kentigern, with sons of Urien of Rheged, and Rhun at least must have been in Holy Orders, or the tradition of his baptism of Edwin could never have arisen. The family belonged to the early seventh century and we know more about them than any other family of the North. This is because we have notes on Urien in the ‘Saxon Genealogies’ and still more in Nennius, and the family must have been prominent in the lost Northern annals. It is tempting to think these may have been kept by Urien’s clerical son Rhun. Who else would have known so much about them? Nennius tells us4 that Oswiu, son of Æthelfrith, married Riemmelth, granddaughter of Rhun, who must cer­ tainly have been a British princess. If this Rhun is the son of Urien our early lost records have left us details of four generations of Urien’s family. This would be explained naturally enough if they were the work of Urien’s clerical son Rhun ; and it is not easy to see who else would have had as much knowledge of, and interest in, his family. But for our present purpose the interest of the family and the family traditions lies in the wholly civilised picture which they conjure up of a family great in arms, in the Church, and in ecclesi­ astical culture. It is now generally agreed that the centre of Urien’s kingdom was at Carlisle and that his realm was probably extensive, embracing the lands bordering on the Solway estuary both west, perhaps as far as 1 Ascribed to Taliesin. For the text see Sir Ifor Williams, Canu Taliesin, p. 12. 2 For the text of the Chartres manuscript see F. Lot, Nennius et VHistoria Brittonum (Paris, 1934), pp. 227 ff. 3 Reference may be made to my article in Studies in the Early British Church, by Chadwick, Hughes, Brooke and Jackson (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 112 f. 4 Hist. Brit. chap. 57. 329

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Dunragit (which seems to embody the name Rheged) and south, perhaps as far as Lancashire1 and even west Yorkshire.2 The anonymous Life of St Cuthbert relates eloquently (chap, vm) the impact of the Romano-British civilisation on the Anglo-Saxon officials of Carlisle. While Cuthbert was in his new Saxon see of Carlisle with the queen awaiting news of the battle of King Ecgfrith against the Southern Piets, Cuthbert was taken on a con­ ducted tour of Roman Carlisle by the praepositus (‘reeve*) Waga, who showed them the city wall, and the ‘fountain (fons) wondrously constructed by the Romans*.3 From this picture it is clear that in the latter part of the seventh century Romano-British Carlisle was intact and already civically organised as an AngloBritish Christian city, with its governor, proud of his city, and dis­ playing to his guest the remains of its past grandeur. Our evidence is practically contemporary, and of first-class quality. Bernicia has moved a long way in a single generation from Æthelfrith’s whole­ sale ravaging of the British. The change has undoubtedly come about largely as the work of Christianity, but certainly not wholly. The British population, the ‘Men of the North*, had been Christian from Roman times; but they were a polished courtly society, not monkish but heroic, with a highly developed poetic tradition and a high value set on military prowess and on personal loyalty. Hardly a trace of Christian ethics appears in their poetry, though Christian formulae and invocations appear from time to time. But British Christianity in the North has left no contemporary written records of the North British Church, and we have no evidence that the North British Church as such had any ecclesiastical effect on the heathen Anglo-Saxons. There is, of course, no positive evidence that the Britons of the North had any intercourse with the Bernicians; but such a conclu­ sion is inacceptable. Negative evidence here can only be due to the extreme sparsity of our records and to the common reticence, shared by all conquering peoples, in regard to their intercourse with the conquered and subject population. Intercourse of this kind would be unlikely to be of interest to English writers. On the 1 The name of Rochdale seems to contain the same element as Rheged. It appears in Domesday Book as R eced h a m . * A Celtic kingdom of Elmet, near Leeds, seems to have survived till Edwin’s reign. 3 T w o L iv e s o f S t C u th b e r t, edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 122 f.

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other hand, it is more than doubtful if the recently established Anglian kings in the North could have succeeded in keeping the powerful Piets in check without the experience and alliance of the *Men of the North’, who had had a long experience of their tactics, who were familiar with the terrain, and who could command the loyalty of their followers against their own oldest enemy. The Romans had been unable to dispense with their active co-operation. So far we have said little of Deira, the southern kingdom of Northumbria. But when we trace the Christianity of Northumbria, the most interesting figure is that of Edwin, king of Deira (d. 633), son of their King Ælle (d. 588). The ruffian Æthelfrith of Bernicia had conquered Ælle and perhaps married his daughter and banished his son Edwin, maybe first into Celtic lands, but ultimately certainly to the court of Rædwald, in East Anglia, with whose help Edwin regained his kingdom of Deira. On the death of Æthelfrith Edwin in his turn annexed Bernicia and banished Æthelfrith’s sons, Oswald and Oswiu, who went to Iona. During this period of exile Edwin was baptised. Welsh traditions represented by Nennius, the Annales Cambriae and the medieval bardic poems, claim that Edwin was baptised by Rhun, son of Urien. Bede, with more authority, in a protracted account which is far from clear, claims that he was baptised at York by St Paulinus from Canter­ bury; and in this Bede is supported by the anonymous monk of Whitby in his Life of Pope Gregory the Great (cf. pp. 199 ff. above). The important fact is that on Edwin’s death in 633 Northumbria reverted to heathenism and Paulinus returned to Canterbury. The brief Roman era was at an end for the time being. When Æthelfrith’s son Oswald returned from exile in Iona and succeeded to the throne of all Northumbria on Edwin’s death, he once more established Christianity, but this time in the form of the old-fashioned Celtic Church in which he had been trained in Iona, and which had been introduced and established there by the Irish monk St Columba. Before 635 St Aidan from Iona had founded the Columban monastery and bishopric on Lindisfarne. The earliest direct civilising influence of Christianity in Northumbria was therefore Irish in character. And long after the change to the Roman Order at the Council of Whitby in 664 Irish Christian influences continued in Northumbria and elsewhere. While mentioning the important part played by the Celtic Church in the rise of the Northern and Midland cultures, reference

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should be made to the custom of the clericatus, by which members of the ruling families, especially kings, voluntarily retired from the throne and entered the religious life. The custom was not confined to the Celtic Church. Already in 688 Cædwalla of Wessex had abandoned his throne while still a young and an exceptionally vigorous ruler, and had come to Rome to receive baptism and to die there.1 Even after the Council of Whitby King Ceolwulf of Northumbria resigned his throne in 737 and became a monk on Lindisfarne,2 Selbach, king of Lome in Argyll,3 and Nechtan IV, king of the Southern Piets4 and the correspondent of Bede’s abbot Ceolfrith, withdrew into monasteries, only to emerge later and take an active part in warfare. King Judicaël of Domnonia in the north of Brittany retired to the monastery of Gaël in the Forest of Broceliande c. 637 and became its abbot and patron saint.5 Rhigyfarch’s Life of S t David claims (chap. 32) that Constantine, king of the Cornish men (Cornubii) abandoned his kingdom for the monastic life. In Mercia Penda’s son Æthelred, after thirty years on the throne, became monk and abbot of Bardney, but continued to take part in ecclesiastical politics.6 His brother and successor Cenred, who ruled as king of Mercia from 704 to 709, resigned the throne and became a monk in Rome.7 F rom all this we may determine the value set by these royal members of the Celtic Church on the standard of peace in contrast to heroic warfare, and the strong testimony to the civilised outlook of the early Celtic Church. The royal clericatus must surely have gone far to promote Christianity in early Britain. Owing to our good fortune in having the History of Bede, it is particularly easy for us to trace the strength of Irish influence in Northumbria. In the seventh century Aldhelm, abbot of Malmes­ bury, complained of the number of English youths who went to Ireland for learning; and in a well-known passage Bede tells us early in the following century that it was still customary for the young British nobility to visit Ireland for purposes of study, and he 1 Bede, H.E. v, 7. 2 For references see Plummer, Bede, 11, p. 340. 3 Annals of Ulster, s.a. 722 (recté 723). 4 Annals of Tigemach {Revue celtique, xvn, 231). 6 H. A. Rebillon, Histoire de Bretagne (Paris, 1957), pp. 28 f. ; H. Waquet, Histoire de Bretagne (Paris, 1958), p. 19; cf. the Marquis de Bellevue, Paimpont (Paris, 1912), p. 78. Cf. also the late Canon Doble, S. Mew an and S. Austel (Shipston-on-Stour), pp. 9, 11. • Reference may be made to Eddius Stephanus’s Life of S t Wilfrid. See especi­ ally chap. 58; and cf. p. 153 f. above. 7 Bede, H.E. v, 19. 332

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adds that before long some of these devoted themselves to the monastic life while others preferred to travel, studying under various teachers in turn. Bede adds that the ‘Scots* (i.e. Irish) welcomed them all kindly, and, without asking for any payments, provided them with books and instruction.1 He refers specifically to a certain unidentified monastery, Rathmelsigi12 by name, in which two English nobles were studying, one of whom became famous as the priest Ecgberht who spent most of his life in Ireland, and who did much to win over the northern Irish and Iona to the Roman Order. But it was a two-way traffic. When St Colmân withdrew with his followers after the Council of Whitby in 664, it was in the west of Ireland that he finally established his new Anglian monastery, in Co. Mayo, among a people of alien race and lan­ guage ; and it flourished all through the Middle Ages. Even down to the present day its ruins still bear the name ‘Mayo of the Saxons*. Even Alcuin corresponded with its abbots late in the eighth century, and for long it continued to take an active part in the Northumbrian Church3 (cf. p. 194 above). The most remarkable example of Celtic influence on early Northumbrian culture is King Aldfrith. He came to the throne of Northumbria on the death of his half-brother, King Ecgfrith, in 685, and he was reigning when Bede was a young man. He is said to have been an exile in youth, and had been a pupil of Aldhelm at the Irish foundation of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Thence we have reason to believe that he passed many years in Celtic lands, first in Ireland and then in Iona. According to early Irish sources4 his mother was a direct descendant of the Irish high-king, and a daughter of Cennfaelad Sapiens. Cennfaelad has been called the father of Irish history.5 The authorship of two of the earliest Irish legal tracts is attributed to him,6 and he was the first man in 1 H.E. III, 27. 2 Loc. cit. ; cf. also Plummer, 11, p. 197. 8 Symeon of Durham tells us that Aldulf was consecrated bishop of Mayo at Corbridge. In 786 he signed sixth at a council held in England by George, bishop of Ostia and papal legate (cf. p. 194 above). 4 For a list of these see William Reeves, Life of S t Columba (Dublin, 1857), pp. 185 f. n. i. Cf. further, S. Calder, Auraicept na n-Éces (Edinburgh, 1917)* p. xxvii. 5 For a full-length study of Cennfaelad see E. Mac Néill, Studies, xi (1921), *3 ff-> 35 ff* He seems to have flourished in the mid-second half of the seventh century. • See the Senchas M ar {Ancient Laws of Ireland), h i , 550; ibid, iv, 356; and cf. E. Mac Néill, Studies, loc. cit. 333

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Europe to write a vernacular grammar outside the Classical tradi­ tion.1 King Aldfrith was a poet, famous in tradition12 and in the Irish annals, which also mention his death; and Adamnan, the author of the Life of S t Columba, refers (chap. 46) to his own visit to his amicus, King Aldfrith. He is remembered in later Irish tradition as a composer of Irish poetry under the name of Fland Fina,3 and in the notes in MS. F of the Martyrology of Oengus on 5 August he is confused with ‘the noble high-king of the Saxons, OsualV (i.e. Oswald). Aldfrith’s learning, wholly Irish in origin, was also widely recognised by our best Latin scholars. Aldhelm speaks highly of it, and addressed to him a liber or epistola on Latin metrics and technical literary matters, known as the Epistle to Acircius, claim­ ing him as his own pupil. Bede calls him vir doctissimus; Eddius, rex sapientissimus, Alcuin calls him rex simul et magister. He paid eight hides of land for a manuscript of a work on Cosmography which Benedict Biscop had brought from Rome.4 When Adamnan wrote a book on places of pilgrimage in the East, dictated to him by a Gaulish bishop, he presented a copy to King Aldfrith who richly rewarded the writer and had the book circulated.5 Once more the words of Professor Stenton come to mind : ‘The learning and scholarship of the Northumbrian monasteries of the age of Bede were made possible by the work of Aldfrith in the critical years following the battle of Nechtanesmere *,6yet Aldfrith’s education had come to him wholly through Celtic channels. It is initially to the influence of the Celtic peoples, first the Britons within northern England and southern Scotland, and later the Irish from Iona and Ireland, that I would attribute the swift development of the Anglo-Saxons of Northumbria from barbarism to a lofty civilisation, especially in intellectual matters. I do not underestimate the paramount part played by the Roman influence after the Council of W hitby^?et even in Bede’s day, and in his own writings, we may discern some qualities which he owed to his 1 See the A u r a ic e p t n a n -É ces (‘T he Scholar’s Prim er’), edited and translated by George Calder, p. 7 and cf. introduction, pp. xxv ff. 2 Cf. Reeves, loc. c it. 3 A ltf r ith m ac O ssa . i. F la n d F in a la G a e d h e lv ecn aidh , ‘Aldfrith, son of Oswiu, called Fland Fina by the Gael, a learned man* {A n n a ls o f T ig e m a c h , R e v u e celtiq u ey xvn (1896), 219). 4 Bede, H is to r ia A b b a tu m , xv. 6 I b id , v, 15. • A n g lo -S a x o n E n g la n d , p. 88. 334

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Celtic background rather than to his Roman culture—his superb power as a story-teller, the high value which he set on oral tradi­ tion, his respect for extreme asceticism and visional His story of the visionary monk Drihthelm of Old Melrose 'Is our earliest personal character-sketch of a man with all the masterly under­ statement of a typical Scottish borderer. Drihthelm had been a layman, but one night he had had a terrible vision of Hell, and as a result he became a monk in the monastery of Old Melrose, and developed habits of extreme asceticism, such as going down to the river Tweed at night and standing in the ice-cold water, saying psalms and prayers, sometimes with broken ice float­ ing round him, and then letting his wet clothes dry on him— terrible! Those who beheld it would say: ‘It is wonderful, Brother Drihthelm, that you are able to endure such violent cold*, to which he simply answered: T have seen greater cold.* And when they said T t is strange that you will endure such austerity* he replied: ‘ I have seen greater austerity.* I cannot place Drihthelm in any milieu of the Roman Church, or for the matter of that Bede’s obvious pleasure in the man and the story. But that is not all, for Bede adds that King Aldfrith, ‘a man ’, as he reminds us, ‘most learned in all respects*, very often went to visit and listen to Drihthelm, when he happened to be in his neighbourhood. I think that the initial contact of the heathen Saxon barbarians, first with the polished little British provincial courts of the ‘Men of the North*, and later with the spirituality and learning of the Irish Church, must have been ideal preparation for the continental learning which followed, and go far to explain the miraculously early date of the Golden Age of Northumbria.2 2.

M

ercia

It is a more difficult task to trace the influence of the Celtic back­ ground on the rapid rise of the culture of early Anglo-Saxon Mercia. This is because we have no Mercian chronicle, and no Mercian historian like Bede to guide us. Yet Mercian development is hardly less remarkable than Northumbrian, and like Northum­ brian can, I believe, be traced directly to its Celtic background. We know almost nothing of Mercian history till the reign of its first great king Penda in the second quarter of the seventh 335

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century. The Saxon settlers are believed to have entered the central plain of England by the Wash and the watershed of the Trent, perhaps as isolated war bands in the fifth century, and to have spread westwards slowly. Bede speaks of them as the provincia Merciorum, so he thinks of them as a political unity, and he clearly regards the Humber as dividing England into two parts. Roughly speaking, early Mercia seems to have extended from the Humber to the Thames, and from the Welsh Border to the Cambridgeshire Fens, and it has been described as ‘not so much a state as a group of peoples held together by an illustrious dynasty’.1 Its develop­ ment is perhaps later than that of Northumbria; but during the eighth century two successive kings, Æthelbald and Offa, ruled Mercia between them for eighty years, and this stability and con­ tinuity must have given exceptional conditions for the rapid development of Mercia at this period. Offa negotiated on terms of equality with Charlemagne, two of whose coins, struck at Lucca, directly imitate types of Offa’s coins.12 Offa’s silver pennies which bear his name have something of the quality of a cameo. In a charter of 736 his predecessor Æthelbald is styled rex Britanniae ;34 and in two documents of the year 774 Offa himself felt in a position to sign himself rex Anglorum, and rex totiusAng lorum patriae* How, we must again ask, has this rapid development come about? First of all it is probable that the relatively slow occupation of the western Midlands by the English may have allowed time for some intermixture with the native British (Celtic) population. The name of their first important king Penda has a Welsh look. In the second place Mercian history begins with the alliance of the Mercians under Penda with the distinguished North Welsh dynasty under Cadwallon, a dynasty founded by the great Maelgwn Gwynedd reproached for his sins by Gildas. The common bond which united Penda and Cadwallon was the aim to exterminate the English nation entirely.5 This at least makes clear the close liaison and com­ munication between the early Mercian rulers and the North Welsh. 1 Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 201.

2 British Numismatic Journal, xxxv, 282 f. ; cf. C. Blunt, Presidential Address to the Royal Numismatic Society (1958), pp. 6, 13. 8 Cartularium Saxonicum, ed. W. de Gray G. Birch, no. 154. Cf. F. M. Stenton, The Latin Charters of the Anglo-Saxon Period (Oxford, 1955), P- 34* 4 Cart. Sax. nos. 213, 214. 6 Cf. Bede, H.E. 11, 20 with h i , 24. Penda’s attitude could best be explained if he were partially of British extraction. 336

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One wonders in what language they communicated? Certainly not directly in Latin, for although Cadwallon belonged to the highly devout and cultured Christian dynasty of Gwynedd in North Wales, Penda was a heathen. Sir Frank Stenton speaks of him as ‘ an obdurate heathen*, and of the period following his death in 654 as ‘the decay of militant heathenism*. Yet we have to bear in mind first of all Penda*s early and close alliance with the Christian Welsh Cadwallon and secondly that Penda*s own sons were Christians almost to a man. His eldest and most distinguished son Peada was baptised in 653 on his marriage to the daughter of the Christian king Oswiu ; while Penda*s son and successor Wulfhere had given his protection to an exiled West Saxon bishop who had sought his court; his third son, Wulfhere’s successor Æthelred, resigned the Mercian throne after a reign of nearly thirty years to become abbot of Bardney in Lindsey, and Penda*s grandson Cenred, Æthelred*s successor in Mercia, abdicated in his fourth year and went to live as a religious in Rome. Moreover, Bede tells us categorically that Penda did not obstruct the teaching of Christianity among the Mercians.1 Finally, and most important, Penda himself had allowed a mixed Celtic and English mission to work in Mercia. It consisted of four priests, and the conversion of Mercia is believed to have begun from this nucleus. Bede speaks of one of their number Cedd, to­ gether with his brother Ceadda, as converting the Mercians to Christianity. Both had been trained wholly in the Celtic tradition. Of the first four bishops of Mercia, the first, Diuma, was an Irish­ man;2 the second, Ceollach,3 also an Irishman both by birth and training; and the third an Englishman, Trumhere, of Irish educa­ tion. As yet the see of Mercia, which included also Middle Anglia and Lindsey, had no episcopal seat, and this was fully in accordance with Celtic tradition. The beginning of the Church in Mercia was in all respects wholly Celtic in character. But here, as elsewhere in England, the influence of the Roman Church soon spread from Canterbury. Archbishop Theodore reconsecrated Ceadda, formerly bishop of York, according to the Roman rite, and created him bishop of the Mercians with his episcopal seat at Lichfield. 1 H .E . hi, 21 . 2 I b id ., loc. cit. 8 Cf. further the interesting suggestion of D r Finberg in regard to Bishop Colmân of Lindisfame, T h e E a r ly C h a rters o f th e W e s t M id la n d s (Leicester, 1961), p. 12. 22

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Before tracing this Celtic ecclesiastical element in the develop­ ment of Mercian culture and learning let us turn to the secular atmosphere on the Welsh Border, and examine its possible effect on Mercian poetry. It is natural to suppose that in Mercia, as in Northumbria, the earliest cultural influences which the English would encounter would be the oral poetry of the British bards. The Powys dynasty on the Welsh Border had always been great lovers of poetry. A poem purporting to be sung by the bard Taliesin1 claims. j sang -m t^e mea(jows Qf the Severn Before a famous prince, Before Brochfael of Powys Who loved my art.2 These medieval Welsh courts each had its professional bard. Brochfael*s grandson Selyf, killed by Æthelfrith at the Battle of Chester in 616 (cf. p. 177 above), had his own court bard Arofan, whose poems were handed down as models of bardic composition for centuries.3 Another of the poems attributed to Taliesin and included by Sir Ifor Williams in *the hard core of twelve historical poems* which have come down to us from the late sixth century4 is addressed to Cynan Garwyn, the son of Brochfael, and the father of this Selyf. Difference of language proves no long-term obstacle in the bardic world, as we see from the presence of the Irish court bards of Brian Borumha and the Irish high-king at the court of the Norse king Sigtryggr in Dublin about the time of the Battle of Clontarf (1014); and of Icelandic poets in Ireland about the same time and even earlier.5 Two cycles of Welsh poetry from this region of Powys—‘the Paradise of Wales* as the poet Dafydd ap Gwyllim called it—seem to have as their background the struggle against the Saxons for the Severn valley, which resulted in the building of Offa’s dyke and the ultimate mastery by the Mercians. They are ‘poems in character*, 1 Nennius (Hist. Brit. chap. 62) includes him among British poets of the sixth century. 8 The Book of Taliesin, facsimile edited by J. G. Evans (Llanbedrog, 1910), p. 33 ; cf. also text in Four Ancient Books of Wales, vol. 11, edited by W. F. Skene (Edinburgh, 1868), no. xiv, 7 f. 8 For Arofan, see Thomas Parry, A History of Welsh Literature, translated from the Welsh by H. Idris Bell (Oxford, 1955), p. 10; Gwyn Williams, A n Introduction to Welsh Poetry (London, 1953), pp. 6, 78. 4 Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin, 1944), p. 55. 8 Cf. A. Walsh, Scandinavian Relations with Ireland during the Viking Period (Dublin, 1922), pp. 70 f. 338

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speech poems, entirely without narrative, conveying the mood and situation of the speaker by allusion and emotional utterance. One of these cycles purports to have been composed by the poet Llywarch Hen, one of the ‘Men of the North *, a cousin of Urien of Rheged. The other cycle relates to a devastating attack on Pengwern (Shrewsbury) by the Mercians. But Sir Ifor Williams has shown1 that both these cycles were in reality composed, not by the sixth-century poet Llywarch Hen, but some time about the middle of the ninth century. They are, in fact, ‘poems in character*, both located in Powys, when attacks from Mercia have recalled to a Border poet the attacks of the Bernicians on Rheged in a bygone age. And so in the Llywarch Hen cycle the poet assumes the name of a poet of the ‘Men of the North ’ of long ago, and has composed for us what Browning would have called ‘dramatic monologues*. But the background of these ninth-century poems, as Sir Ifor has shown, is in sagas of attacks from Mercia on the Welsh Border, on ‘the fringes of Cheshire, Shropshire and Hereford, Shrewsbury in particular*, and the poet laments the death of his twenty-four sons in battle, and his own impotence now that he has grown old and lost his martial valour. Again in the poems placed in the mouth of the Princess Heledd, although the poems are to be ascribed to the ninth century, the period described is the middle of the seventh century, and the set­ ting is Pengwern (Shrewsbury) long before Offa*s dyke was built. Foremost among the Welsh princes of the time who defended the Border against the English was Cynddylan. But the central figure of the surviving songs and the chief speaker is the Princess Heledd. Her brothers Cynddylan and Elfan and Cynan and Gwen were killed by the Mercians, Pengwern was left a mass of smoking ruins, and few of Cynddylan*s household were left alive. From the hill-top Heledd keens the loss of her brothers and the desolation of her home. Cynddylan*s court is dark tonight, Without a fire, without a bed ; I weep awhile, then fall silent. Cynddylan’s court, its roof is the darkness ; Scattered its sweet companionship. Cynddylan’s court is dark tonight, No fire, no songs— Tears wear away cheeks. 1 Sir Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, p. 48; cf. Morgan and Williams, The Saga of Llywarch the Old (Golden Cockerel Press, 1955)» P- *3339

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I look down from Wrekin Fort On the land of Ffreuer. Longing for the land of my brothers breaks my heart. Wandering Heledd am I called. O God, to whom are given The lands of my brothers and their steeds ?1

These are brief extracts. Again they are poems in character, dramatic monologues. Mrs Gordon compares the dramatic mono­ logue of the Saxon poem of the deserted wife, whose name is not given, but who has lost her lord and is forced to live in solitude in an ‘earth-house*, or cavern, ‘surrounded by briars*: All alone before the dawn I must pace under the oak-tree. Here I must sit through the long summer day, weeping over my mis­ fortunes and my many hardships.

And again we think of the Welsh poem: ‘The hearth of Rheged is overrun with thorns, brambles and weeds.*12 The resemblance is not fortuitous. Coming back after many years to the unique little group of Anglo-Saxon poems in the Exeter Book to which this ‘Deserted Wife *belongs, I am more than ever struck by this resemblance to the Welsh poems which Mrs Gordon has so ably traced for us in detail.3 The total absence of narrative; the combination of personal lament with allusions to wild nature; sententious gnomic reflective utterances, so different from the biting, cynical, social gnomic poetry of early Norse litera­ ture; then the setting of the speaker in wild nature, where the weather accentuates the speaker’s tragic mood, and the cries of birds, especially the cuckoo, and always sad. All this suggests a common background, for intimacy with wild nature is a charac­ teristic of both Irish and Welsh poetry, but not generally of con­ tinental Teutonic poetry; and it is totally different in its chilly overgrown open countryside from the earlier Latin poetry of wild nature in Europe, tamed to a garden standard. Even the poetry of the ‘Men of the North* has nothing quite like this strange aware­ ness of wild nature. It is only in the poetry of the Welsh Border and this little group of Anglo-Saxon speech poems in the Exeter Book that we find it. 1 Cf. Sir Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, pp. 45 f. 2 Cf. Ida Gordon, The Seafarer (London, i960), p. 16. 3 Loc. cit. 340

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Even in the earliest Irish nature poetry, which shares so many of the characteristics of the ninth-century Welsh poetry purporting to be the work of Llywarch Hen, the mood is as different as the dif­ ference of climate. Both alike are concerned with ‘the singer’s own reactions to his surroundings, telling us how he feels about them and how they harmonise or clash with his own particular mood’.1 But a very large proportion of the Irish nature poetry claims to be the work of anchorites and hermits. The earliest Irish poems are inspired by a spirit of profound reconciliation and their tone is often wistful but never tragic. On the other hand, it is claimed by Sir Ifor Williams that the Llywarch Hen poems origi­ nally formed the poetry in two saga narratives of English raids on the Welsh Border (cf. p. 339 above), which accounts for their tragic tone. Possibly the Anglo-Saxon poems of the ‘Deserted Wife’ originally formed a speech in a saga; but in any case the affinity with the Welsh poetry is close. I know nothing in the language of these Anglo-Saxon poems against a Mercian provenance, though West Saxon is possible; and the rarity of the form in continental Teutonic poetry tempts one to attribute it to a stimulus received from Welsh Border poetry. This suggestion receives some support from the homiletic tone which is so prominent in both the Celtic and this group of Anglo-Saxon poems, with their recurrent theme of ruin and decay, the constant awareness of human mortality. We may again refer to the cycle of the Welsh poems which lay claim to be the work of Llywarch Hen, the poems spoken by an old man, bewailing the loss of his sons in battle, and of his own impotence in the failing strength of old age.2 The futility of worldly ambition and the transience of worldly glory in the Exeter Book poems find an echo in the Irish poetry of the period also. Take the Death of Alexander the Great'. Four men stood by the grave of a man, The grave of Alexander the Proud : They sang words without falsehood Over the prince of fair Greece. Said the first man of them : Yesterday there were around the king The men of the world—a sad gathering. Today he is alone. 1 K. Jackson, Early Celtic Nature Poetry (Cambridge, 1935), p. 80. * T he theme is echoed in a later Irish poem, translated by Jackson, op. cit. p. 18, str. 5. 341

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In one of the earliest extant Irish poems on the Fort of Rathangan in Co. Kildare the bard enumerates the kings of the local dynasty whom he pictures as buried beneath the earthen rath. Its theme, as the early editor points out, is common to Celtic bards of all ages— that man must perish while his works remain: The fort over against the oak-wood, Once it was Bruidge’s, it was CathaTs, It was Aed’s, it was Ailill’s, It was Conaing’s, it was Cuiline’s, And it was Maeldüin’s. The fort remains after each in its turn And the kings asleep in the ground.1

In another Anglo-Saxon poem in the Exeter Book, commonly known as The Ruin, we have the same sense of ruin and decay, and the passing of human grandeur and the great ones of the world: ‘Wondrous is this masonry, shattered by the F ates... .The roofs have collapsed ; the towers are in ruins. The walls are rent and broken away.. . . The owners and builders are perished and gone, held fast in the. . . ruthless clutch of the grave, while a hundred generations of mankind have passed away___There were splendid buildings. Loud was the clamour of the warriors, many were the banqueting halls, full of the joys of life—until all were shattered by mighty Fate. The dead lay on all sides. Their defences became waste places; the warriors who should have repaired them lay dead upon the earth. And so these courts lie desolate.’ In one respect our Anglo-Saxon poems have developed a theme unknown to Welsh poetry of the period we have been considering, the mid-ninth century, but which is of the very essence of the Anchorites. This is the poetry of the anhaga (the ‘W anderer’), the peregrinusy of whom the Irish ecclesiastical records have so much to tell us. In the seventh century Adamnan tells us of three voyages made by an Irishman Cormac into Arctic regions to seek a solitude in the Ocean; and in the famous entry in the Parker text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 891, we learn of three Irishmen who came to King Alfred in a boat without any rudder (i.e. a curragh), coming from Ireland ‘because they wanted to be on pilgrimage for the love of God, they recked not whither. The boat was made of 1 Kuno Meyer, Early Irish Poetrya (London, 1913), p. 93. Cf. idem, Learning in Ireland in the Fifth Century and the Transmission of Letters (Dublin, 1913), p. 19.

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two and a half hides, and they took with them food for seven nights, and the seventh they landed in Cornwall and made their way to King Alfred/ Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. The movement of anchorite pilgrimage, in this form, obtained great vogue in Ireland. It was called ‘seeking the land of one’s resurrection in accordance with the Old Irish Life of St Columcille, which states that God enjoined it upon Abraham to leave the land of his parentage and seek the land of his resurrection. In the Anglo-Saxon poem on The Ruin, and still more in the melancholy elegiac and reflective themes of the Anglo-Saxon poems of the Anhaga (Wanderer) and the Seafarer, this unique little group of poems seems to enter the Celtic world. The Wanderer and the Seafarer are composed, or at least spoken, by peregrini in the spirit of the Celtic anchorites ; the heirs of an identical religious tradition. I am not suggesting that the author of our Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book poems on the Wanderer and the Seafarer is in this respect exclusively or necessarily directly inspired by Celtic poetry. I think that both the anhaga strain and the homiletic are directly inspired by the so-called ‘Anchorite movement’.1 While the ‘ruin’ motif and the ‘wild nature* motif are the common heritage of the original Celtic element in west Mercia and the Welsh Border, the seafaring anchorite and the homiletic elements are directly inspired by the urge to peregrination which perhaps reached Mercia up the Bristol Channel, partly like Alfred’s three Irish visitors, directly from Ireland, and partly—probably less forcibly—from the Continent. Vleeskruyer has shown2 that the technique of Old English poetry has affected the style and diction of Anglo-Saxon homilies. The striking similarity of one passage in the Bückling Homilies to Beo­ wulf had long been recognised. Indeed this homiletic element is a special characteristic of what we have recently come to realise as an early Mercian school of literature as a whole,3 and the subjectmatter of some of the Mercian texts—S t Chad, Guthlacy and the Martyrology—point to a regional literature. In suggesting direct Celtic, especially Welsh, influence on early Mercian, or West-Saxon, poetry we are, of course, dealing only with suppositions, at most reasonable probabilities; but of the formative 1 On the background of the Seafarer see D. Whitelock, in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, edited by Fox and Dickins (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 259 ff. Cf. V. Smithers, Medium JEvum, xxvi (1957)» xxvm (1959)» PP- iff-» 89fr. a Life of S t Chad (Amsterdam, 1953), p. 198 Rnd. p. 56. 343

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influence of Celtic education and learning on early Mercia through ecclesiastical channels there can be no possible doubt. We have already seen that the earliest Mercian Church was wholly Celtic in character, though Roman influences from Canterbury penetrated at an early date. This fundamental Celtic element in the early Mercian Church coincides with the period of the so-called ‘Anchorite Reform* in Ireland, though this ‘reform* is itself only a later direct development of the ‘Age of the Saints ’ extending from the sixth to the eighth centuries. The early learned Schools of Malmesbury and Glastonbury are both known to have been Irish foundations, and the early development of scholarship and literature in western Mercia is certainly to be in part accounted for on the supposition that peregrini and scholars of the ‘Western Isle* came to Mercia by way of the Severn Sea, and brought their learning with them. Continuity of learning may have linked the Irish School of Malmesbury with that of western Mercia in the seventh and eighth centuries. Western Mercia was relatively free from the more devastating of the early Viking raids.1 Professor Wrenn has pointed out that the strongly conservative character of the later West Midland poetical tradition may suggest that the strongest poetic centres were in that area.1 2 The subject of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is, of course, wholly Celtic in origin. It is now generally agreed that the signed poems of Cynewulf belong to Mercia3— a particularly interesting and puzzling develop­ ment, because narrative poetry appears to have been unknown among Celtic peoples. The two poems on St Guthlac are very much like them in style,4 and both poems, and the prose Life of Guthlac by Felix of Crowland on which they depend, are probably of Mercian provenance,56for Guthlac was a member of the Mercian royal family, so we are dealing with a local cult; these works on 1 Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 268. Cf. K. Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1953), p. 134. 2 Beowulf with the Finneshurg Fragment (London, 1953), p. 19. 3 K. Sisam recently put forward the suggestion that the form of the Cynewulf poems may in part have been dictated by the fact that an early school of prose for narrative purposes had not yet developed in Mercia ÇStudies i n . .. Old English Literature, p. 133). In Gaul, however, biblical subjects, especially Old Testam ent narrative matter, had been developed already by the fourth century, and may well have impressed itself on Mercia by Cynewulf’s day. 4 Sisam, op. cit. pp. 2, 134; cf. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 190; Vleeskruyer, The Life of S t Chad (Amsterdam, 1953), p. 46. 6 Sisam, loc. cit. 344

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Guthlac and the Life of St Chad—another early Mercian prose work—indicate a regional school of literature1 dealing with saints of the Celtic Church. One characteristic feature of this regional school is its homiletic tradition, which we have seen to affect very strongly our English *dramatic monologues \ The Life of St Chad is virtually a homily, probably itself a translation of an earlier version, but of course very early Vitae were usually homilies. Another characteristic feature of this early Mercian school is its tradition of glossing, such as is known to have been a special development of the Irish school of Glastonbury12 and other early Celtic centres.34 Professor Tolkien has shown that such an early tradition of glossing lies behind the Vespasian Psalter Gloss* This development of glosses on the western outskirts of our country is particularly significant at the period when the interchange of learning between Irish and English was in its infancy, and is prob­ ably not unconnected with the development of translation. Perhaps the most marked Irish influence on early Mercian literary style, and a persistent Mercian feature in later English scholarship,5 is the curious form of diction known to us today from its probable Irish home as Hisperic Latin. This is in origin a late Latin continental literary development which in the West estab­ lished itself in Aquitaine in the fifth century, and is believed to have come to Ireland direct from there. Briefly it consists of a highly specialised and fantastic vocabulary containing a large foreign element and an extremely artificial figurative style com­ bined with alliteration. It was especially developed in England at the Irish foundation of Malmesbury and cultivated by Aldhelm and his school. It is a marked feature in the style of the prose Life of S t GuthlaCy and has left persistent traces even in the charter Latin of the tenth century.6 We can now speak with confidence of the predominant part played by Irish learning in the rise of the earliest 1 Vleeskruyer, op. cit. p. 61. 2 See The Collected Papers of Henry Bradshaw (Cambridge, 1889), pp. 455 ff., 483 ff. Cf. further Chadwick, Studies in the Early British Church, p. 127. 3 M. D. Meritt, Old English Glosses (New York, Mod. Lang. Assoc, of America, 1945); see further the Rev. Paul Grosjean, ‘Remarques sur le De Excidio attribuées a G ildas’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, xxv (1956), 155 ff. 4 See his article ‘Sigelwara L and’, Medium Ævum, 1 (1932); cf. K. Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature, p. 4 n. 2. 6 Stenton {op. cit. p. 179) emphasises further the reality of Irish influences on the style and script of early English scholars. Cf. p. 178 and passim. 6 Stenton, op. cit. p. 178. 345

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Mercian Latin culture, and of the pre-eminence of Mercian culture in early central and southern England. The number of early manu­ scripts preserved at the west Midland centres of Lichfield, Wor­ cester, and Evesham suggest that they must have been literary centres. It is now perfectly easy for us to understand how it came about that King Alfred employed at least four Mercian scholars to help him in his literary work, two at least from the Severn valley, probably trained in a tradition uninterrupted from before 700. 3. W

essex

The importance of early Mercian learning has at last received a tardy but unequivocal recognition, and has been emphasised by both Sir Frank Stenton1 and Dr Sisam,2 as well as by foreign scholars such as Vleeskruyer,3 and its priority to that of Wessex is now an accepted fact. Speaking of the influence of the Mercian letter forms in the manuscript of Alfred’s Pastoral Care (Hatton 20) Sir Edward Maunde Thompson wrote: ‘The palaeographical evidence thus bears out other indications that the Alfredian revival sprang from the aftermath of ninth-century Mercian cultural eminence’.4 It would not be difficult to assemble evidence for early Celtic influence on Wessex, quite apart from that which has come to her through Mercia. One could point to Celtic elements, such as the name of the king Cædwalla in the royal genealogy of Wessex; and to the important archaeological and traditional evidence for Celtic population and settlements and Celtic culture in south-west Britain recently assembled for us by Professor Wrenn.5 In the short space at my disposal, however, I want to emphasise the importance of the Celtic background of Alfred himself. This has been underestimated because his work against the Danes has naturally received more attention from English chroniclers. The help which he received in his literary work from his four Mercian helpers is clearly stated by himself, and we have seen reason to believe that the source of this Mercian learning was probably of 1 Anglo-Saxon England*, p. 190.

2 Studies in . . . Old English Literature, p.

133. 3 The Life of S t Chad, passim. See esp. p. 49. 4 Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography3, p. 250. 6 ‘Saxons and Celts in south-west Britain’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (London, 1959)» PP- 38 ff. 346

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Irish origin, and had survived in western Mercia, comparatively unaffected by the most serious early Viking devastations. Our chief source of information about Alfred is the famous Life which claims to be the work of a Welshman, Asser. Asser had been a member of the monastery of St David’s in Pembrokeshire, of which his uncle Nobis had been bishop; but the monastery was suffering heavily from exactions and persecution by the local king Hemeid. Both Bishop Nobis and his nephew Asser were forced to leave; and it was doubtless as a refugee that Asser was invited to Alfred’s court. It is a remarkable testimony to Alfred’s awareness of the importance of Celtic affairs that he persuaded Asser to become his permanent teacher and adviser, and to spend half his time at his court. Asser agreed on the ground that he could do more to help St David’s from Alfred’s court than by remaining wholly in Pembroke—a remarkable admission—and so he occupied a position as Alfred’s confidential adviser, teacher and friend, a position commonly recognised in Celtic courts under the titles of nutritins and nutritor (paedagogus in Gregory of Tours). Asser was a highly educated man and a vivid writer, and the biography of the king admits us to an intimacy with a royal personality unique in our early history. It is naturally our chief source of information about Alfred’s Celtic policy and interests. One wonders how he and Asser communicated so freely in view of the difference of their languages. Alfred’s Latin could not have been adequate, at least in the early days. Alfred himself evidently took a lively interest even in Irish affairs. Asser tells us that he made contributions to the Irish Church. Reference has already been made above to the arrival of three Irish peregrini in a curragh on the coast of Cornwall, and their immediate visit to King Alfred, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 891 (Parker text); and in the same annal record is entered of the death of Swifneh, that is, Suibhne mac Maelumhai of Clonmacnoise, ‘the greatest scholar of his day ’, whose death is entered in the Annals of Ulster, s.a. 890 (recté 891), where he is referred to as ‘ an anchorite and excellent scribe \ What interest did Alfred take in Clonmacnoise on the Shannon? Andin Suibhne, its anchorite and scribe ? It is worth noting that the Chronicle spells his name Swifneh y so the scribe must have heard his name from an oral source, other­ wise he would not have written the Suibhne of the Irish annals thus. Alfred’s interest in Welsh affairs is far less surprising. It was essential to his success that he should conciliate the Welsh, and take 347

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a constructive part in their politics. His successful warfare against the Danes would have been impossible if he had had a disaffected Wales, or even Ireland, at his rear. This would have totally incapaci­ tated him. It was just about 900 that Cormac, King of Cashel in Ireland, was stating in his famous Glossary that the Irish had formerly had kingdoms in Britain no less than their Irish kingdoms, and were ruling both simultaneously. And now in the ninth century the Norsemen were making powerful settlements in Ireland. A coalition of the Irish, and the Norsemen in Ireland, or, far worse, the Welsh, could easily have rendered Alfred powerless. In the next generation Æthelflaed’s worst fears were of an Irish invasion by way of the Mersey and the Dee, and her forts were designed to prevent it. Her strange raid into Brecon can best be explained as a blow at suspected Irish penetration of Brecon from Pembroke, and doubtless Offa’s attack on Pembroke had been similarly directed against the Irish menace. Pembrokeshire was to a very considerable extent an Irish kingdom, and always in close relationship with Brecon, as tradition and archaeology alike make clear.1 In Alfred’s day internal Welsh politics were at a highly critical stage. By skilful diplomacy the royal House of Gwynedd in North Wales had been working toward a unification under the king of Gwynedd, Rhodri Mawr, ‘the Great’, of the numerous separate kingdoms of which it was composed. The kingdoms surrounding Pembroke had already been annexed, and Pembroke was threatened with slow strangulation. It was in this crisis that Asser tells us (chap. 80) that its king, Hemeid, sought help from King Alfred; but Pembroke was not alone in its panic at the encroachments of Rhodri and his sons. Helised, the king of Brecon in south central Wales, always vaguely associated with Pembroke, also sought Alfred’s help against the same threat. The south-east king­ doms of Glywysing and Gwent sought his support against the Mercian threat. Eventually, we are told, King Rhodri’s eldest son and successor Anarawd, abandoning his former reliance on North­ umbria, also placed himself under the protection of King Alfred. Asser,2 our only authority for all this, mentions these appeals in terms suggestive of a series of diplomatic missions, naming each 1 The royal family of Brecon traced its origin to an Irish prince from Pem­ brokeshire, and Brecon and Carmarthenshire have the largest number of ogam inscriptions of any Welsh kingdom except Pembrokeshire. * Ed. Stevenson, chap. 80. 348

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king and kingdom seriatim, each followed by a very similar formula. The upshot is that Alfred is able to take a golden opportunity of intervening in Welsh divided politics, and to range himself along with the southern kingdoms against the growing power of North Wales. And of course the guidance of Asser was invaluable. Alfred was able to shift the balance of power from north to south, with the result that early in the next century Hywel ‘the Good*, a South Welsh prince of Rhodri’s line, but with an advanced proEnglish policy, was able to make himself supreme in Wales, and become a subregulus of the English king, an excellent solution for both Welsh and English so long as the Danish peril lasted. There exists among scholars1 a certain uneasiness about the genuineness of Asser’s work. The manuscript is lost, and it is felt that the style and internal evidence are not above suspicion. The burden of proof still remains with the sceptics, and perhaps the majority of scholars and historians and critics still believe that the Life of King Alfred was written by Asser, as the text claims. The most weighty evidence in favour of the genuineness is generally held to be the passage to which I have just referred, which relates how the Welsh reigning princes each came to King Alfred’s court and did him homage, claiming his protection especially against the sons of Rhodri ; and finally as the climax came the sons of Rhodri themselves from the north. Sir John Edward Lloyd refers to Anarawd’s ceremonial visit to Alfred’s court as ‘the first of the kind on record paid by a Welsh to an English king ’.2 But some of us find it hard to believe that it really took place. The pride of the heir of Rhodri Mawr would have required a strong incentive to induce him to undertake the journey from north-western Wales to Wessex to humble himself to a Saxon king ; and against whom would Alfred’s aid be valuable to him? The statement savours of naïveté. Without for a moment accepting the work of Asser as a medieval forgery, I feel some hesitancy in agreeing to the use made by the late W. H. Stevenson3 and others of this passage as itself indicating Asser’s intimate knowledge of mid-Wales in the ninth century. Undoubtedly the list of reigning kings and the Welsh kingdoms here enumerated is a genuine one. It could not possibly have been 1 Cf. V. H. Galbraith, Historical Research in Medieval England (Creighton Lec­ ture in History, 1949; Athlone Press, 1951). 8 History of Wales (London, 1954), I, 328. 8 W. H. Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred (2nd impression, Oxford, 1959), p. lxxv. 349

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produced by a medieval forger; but does it really represent a first­ hand direct survey made by Asser himself? Or is it perhaps his close paraphrase of a contemporary poem, composed by a supporter of Alfred and his allies, the South Welsh group of kingdoms, against the supporters of the sons of Rhodri in the north? Asser’s text reads like a paraphrase of a contemporary broadsheet, or political ballad, neither a forgery nor a direct survey. Even if this were so, its value as enumerating the contemporary princes would of course be no less high. Its composition by a Welshman is guaranteed by the opening reference to the south as dextralis pars, deheubarth, a direction for South Wales which could never have occurred to an Englishman, but which is regular in Wales.1 Political poems of the kind I am suggesting were certainly current in Wales at this time. A more or less contemporary example is the Armes Pry dein,12 composed in the contrary interest to that of our passage, and urging the Welsh to join with the other Celtic peoples and oppose the policy of Hywel ‘the Good’, and drive the English out of the country and ‘back to their old poverty-stricken homes across the North Sea*. The phraseology of the passage in Asser suggests a paraphrase of a popular poem, with the characteristic feature of a mounting crescendo. We may refer to the following passages :3 (1) H em eid , compelled by the violence of the sons of Rhodri, had sub­ mitted to the dominion of the king [i.e. Alfred]. (2) The kings o f G lyw ysin g a n d G w e n t , forced by the violence and tyranny of Earl Eadred4 of the Mercians, voluntarily requested the dominion and defence of the king. (3) H elised , king of Brecon, compelled by the violence of the sons of Rhodri, voluntarily sought the dominion of the king. (4) Also A n a ra u t, son of Rhodri, strenuously begging the friendship of the king, came into his presence and placed himself under the dominion of the king. 1 Other references to Welsh institutions point to its genuineness. As an instance we may point to the term secundarius used of Alfred (cf. chaps. 29, 3 ; 42, 2; 38, 8) in relation to his elder brother, apparently in the sense of the Welsh edlyg, the term used in the Welsh Laws of the appointed successor, a word believed to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon cetheling, ‘a prince’. But the Welsh word bears a more restricted sense than the Anglo-Saxon, and is probably comparable with the earliest Welsh term for the official heir, gtvrthrychiad, ‘he who looks forward’ or ‘expects’. See D. A. Binchy, Trans. Philological Soc. ( i 9S9), PP. 23 f. 2 Edited by Sir Ifor Williams (Cardiff, 1955). 8 Asser (ed. Stevenson), chap. 80. 4 Recté Æthelred. 350

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(1) Vi compulsus.. .regali imperio se subdiderat. (2) vi et tyrannide compulsi... suapte eundum expetivere regem ut dominium et defensionem haberent. (3) vi coactus.. .dominium régis suapte requisivit. (4) amicitiam régis studiose requirens. .. se régis dominio subdidit. There is a certain artificiality about the whole passage, with its repetition of formulae, its specific reference to prince after prince, reaching its climax with Anarawd, eldest son of Rhodri, who had held out to the last against recognising Alfred as his overlord, and who, unlike the other princes, who stood in awe of Rhodri himself, had nothing to gain by Alfred’s protection. As one reads the passage in Asser, with its well-marked refrain, and incremental repetition, one realises how tempting it must be even now to a Welshman to retranslate the passage into a Welsh poem. Paraphrases of early poems are common elements in early Irish annals and other1 historical writings, and generally the most reliable sources. The Annals of Tigernach contain many actual quotations from early Irish poems. We may suspect that Asser’s text of the Welsh princes belongs to the same series as the Armes Prydein, and the Anglo-Saxon poem on the Battle of Brunanburh, all composed within a few years of one another, the first two relating to the bitter dispute between the Anglicising party of South Wales, and those of the North opposed to them, while Brunanburh is the English paean of victory over the Celtic kingdoms. The passage in Asser, redounding so highly to the prestige of King Alfred, would seem to give the keynote to his whole book. As Stevenson and others have thought, it certainly speaks in favour of the authenticity of the Life, though probably not quite in the sense in which it has generally been regarded. Why did Asser write the Life? A Welshman from the far south­ west of Wales, persecuted by his own king and obliged to leave St David’s cathedral, came as a refugee to Wessex—at the invita­ tion of the king. Alfred was hailed as leader by the powerful South Welsh party who favoured a constructive policy of union with England, and who, like their opponents, did their canvassing in broadsheet songs. Asser was learned and able to give Alfred the education he needed, and all the information about South Welsh politics which enabled him to give unity to the various South Welsh 1 The popular contemporary songs composed during the so-called *Period of Troubles *in seventeenth-century Russia constitute a valuable source of informa­ tion to the m odem historian of Russia for this sparsely documented period. 351

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elements and guide the movement towards the union with England which was brought to a successful issue under his grandson Athelstan and his subregulus, Hywel ‘the Good*. The Life must have given powerful support to the cause Asser had at heart. A busy ecclesiastic like Asser would have neither the time nor the materials to spare for a sustained piece of work merely to give expression to his personal friendship—a form of writing with­ out precedent in England. At this period all works by ecclesiastics were written to serve some definite purpose. Latin prose bio­ graphy of saints had developed in Northumbria and Mercia in the interests of the Church and local cults; but was it quite the moment, or a Welshman quite the person, to write in the interests of a local cult in Wessex? Would it have served the cause he had at heart—that of unity between Wessex and his own South Wales in the face of the common enemy? But from his home in Irish-Welsh Pembrokeshire Asser must have been familiar with Irish prose narratives of secular military heroes—no less than with Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne1—such as became popular in Ireland in the Danish wars, and later in Wales also.1 2 We may compare the Life of Gruffydd ap Cynan.3 How far then is Asser’s narrative reliable? Perhaps it is in reality an idle question. Alfred is the hero of the story—a prose panegyric. We cannot exact the modern standards of rigorous fidelity down to the most minute detail from any early panegyric. The bias is always there, and the models. But we can say with confidence that wherever Asser’s Life of King Alfred can be tested by other evidence in regard to its Celtic elements it stands the test remark­ ably well. This is demonstrably true of the references to the con­ temporary divisions of the Welsh kingdoms and the political geography generally ; to the use of Welsh terminology and references to Welsh institutions; to the difficulties and dissensions of the cathedral body of St Davids; and above all to the Welsh affairs of the time, for which a considerable amount of information is also available elsewhere. 1 Professor Galbraith believes this to have been the inspiration of the Life of Alfred, with whose achievements he felt Alfred would bear comparison (see Historical Research in Medieval England, p. 13). 2 It is now generally believed that the Icelandic prose biographical narrative style, the sagas, had their origin in continental saints’ Vitae, and prose narrative histories. 3 Edited and translated by Arthur Jones (Manchester, 1910).

352

Index abbot and bishop, distinction between,

318

Abercom, 212, 220 Aberffraw, 148, 151, 155 Aber Lieu, 48 Acca, 70-1,85,87-90,115,116,117,127 Adam of Domerham, 253-4 Adamnan, 10, 177, 199-205, 334, 342 Adela, Queen, 281 Adrian, Pope, 93 Aed Bole, 27-8 Aedan mac Gabréin, 28, 324 Ælfflæd, 16, 125, 129, 130-3, 135, 144, 146 Ælfwald, 21, 22, 23, 24 Ælla, 69 Ælle [Aelli], 22, 123-4, 148 n.6, 149, 324

, 331

Æ m ulf, 69 aet with place-names, 101, 116 Æthelbald, 178 n.2, 336 Æthelberg, 131, 139, 141, 164, 165 Æ thelberht [c. 600], 78, 124, 167 (see also Ethelbert) Ætheldreda, 221 Æthelflæd, 182, 243, 348 Æthelfrith, 21, 28, 39, 43, 45, 46, 124, 141, 149, 151, 181, 220, 331; etymology of name, 32 and battle of Chester, 150, 168-9, 174- 5*i7 7 -8 o ,184-5,225, 324- 5, 330 ,

338

Æthelhild, 143, 153 Æthelred, 18, 22, 132-3,144“7, I 53“4* 171 n.2, 332, 337 Æthelric, 149 Æthelstan, see Athelstan Æ thelthryth, 132 Aethelwig, Abbot, 260 Æthelwine, Bishop, 143 Aetherius, Archbishop, 136 Agricola, Cn. Julius, 181 Aidan, St, 187-8, 192, 213, 331 ‘Ailguin’, 43, 45 Ailill, 198-9 Ailred [Ælred] of Rievaulx, 68, 70, 71, 72, 88, 90, 148 23

Alban, St, 134 Alchmund, 70-1, 87-90, 96, 115, 116, 117 Alcuin, 94 n. i, 97, 191, 193-4, 202, 203, 333, 334 Aldfrith of Lindsey, 22, 23, 24 Aldfrith of Northumbria, 199, 205, 324, 333-5 Aldhelm, St, 171, 245, 250, 254, 332, 333- 4, 345 Aldhun, bishop of Durham, 66, n o Aldred, 87, 88, n o Alduulf, 194-5 Aldwin, 215 Aldwine, 143-4, *53 Alfred, King, 106, 109, 243, 342-3, 346-9 Life of, 100-3, 104, 107-9, 112, 116, 117, 207, 317, 318-19, 347-52 Alfred, son of Westweor, 88-9 Alhred, 22, 23-4, 98 Allen, F. G., 248 Alston, 159 n.2 Aluberht, 93 Ammianus Marcellinus, n , 181 Ampney, 275 n.2 Anarawd [Anaraut], 348-9, 350-1 Anchorite Movement, 168, 170, 177, 342- 3, 344 Aneirin [Neirin], 29-30, 328 ‘ angels ’, Pope Gregory and the, 123-4, 133- 4, 145 Anglesey, 139, 148, 155, 181 (see also Mevanian Islands) Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 79, 96, 101, 105, 106, 172, 177, 245, 342, 347 Anselm, St, 262, 322 n. 1 Antony, St, Life of, 127-8 Appleby, 225 Aquitaine, 8, 345 archdeaconries instituted, 286 n. 1, 288 n. i Archenfield, 319 Arfon, 182 Argyll, 10, n , 187 n.3, 324, 332 Arlingham, 281 Armes Prydein, 183, 185, 350, 351

353

CCS

IN D EX

Armorica, 12, 149 Arnold, T ., 90, 101, i n Arofan, 183, 184, 338 Arthur, King, 158, 289, 290, 299, 300-2, 306, 328 Asser, 100-3, 104, 107-9, 112, 116, 117, 206,207, 317, 318-19,347-52 Aston (Herefordshire), 236 atbret, 35, 38, 45, 46, 48, 52 Atcham, 227, 241 Athelstan, 83, 105, 118, 352 Augustine, St on mission to Britain, 124, 136, 137, 139* 149 opposed by bishops, 155, 167, 16871, 177, 178-9, 317 death of, 169, 177 Baetân, Abbot, 192, 193 Bakewell, 227 Balanus, see Bollain Bamburgh, 27-8, 32, 34, 36, 46, 50, 98, 132, 153 n.2, 158, 185, 220, 323-4 Bangor (N. Wales), 316, 319, 322 Bangor (on Dee), 167-70, 177, 325 Bardney, 18, 132, 135, *43, i 45~7, 152- 5, 332, 337 bards, 2, 14, 342 N. British, 5-6, 29-30, 54, 157, 160, 327-8 Scandinavian, 6-7, 338 Welsh, 5, 29-30, 47-8, 148, 183, 328, 338 Barrow (Salop), 215, 227, 240 Barton-on-Humber, 217 Bath, 249-50 Beam, 96 Bebba, 32, 46, 220 Bede, 89, 334-5 death of, 77-8 De Die Judicii, 85-6, 116 De Natura Rerum, 91 De Temporibus, 73 Historia Abbatum, 83-6, 97, 116 Historia Ecclesiastica, 9, 10, 14, 16, 26, 32, 33, 36- 9, 41, 43, 46, 51, 52, 54, 58, 79, 83, 86, 90-1, 101, 116, 123, 130, 132, 146, 148-53, 156, 164, 172-3, 175, 178-81, 184-5, 186, 189-90, 192-5, 199, 202-3, 205, 211-12, 221, 325, 331, 332- 3, 336, 337; date of, 27,

133, 141; sources of, 15, i7- I 8, 59 n. i, 121, 127, 133-7» 138-40, 142-5,147,154-5»165-6,167-71, 176-7, 182, 187-8, 191, 200-1 Life of S t Cuthbert, 83 material in Historia Regum, 83-6, 114-15, 116-17 Benedict I, Pope, 123, 134 Benedict Biscop, 130, 213, 334 Benevento, 291, 3° 7- 9» 3*°» 322 Benicia, 197-8 Beom Butsecarl, 69 Beomred, 23 n. 1 Beomward, 249 Berctwald, 86 Berkeley (Glos.), 280-2 Bermondsey, annals of, 260 Bernard of Neufmarché, 262-3, 277 Bernard of St Davids, 265 Bemicia : at war, 9-11, 151-2, 158, 179, 220, 324, 330-1 conversion of, 223, 331 extent of, 21, 28-9, 43, 48, 323 rulers of, 21-2, 24, 31, 33,43» 51» 60, 83» 149» 324» 327 Beulan, 59 Beuno, St, Life of, 182 Beverley, 92, 99 Bewcastle, 212, 213, 325 Billingsley, 320 Bilson, J., 218-19 Binchy, D. A., 4 Birdei [Bridei], 21, 39, 46; etymology of name, 40-1, 45, 46 Biscop, Benedict, 130, 213, 334 Bishop, T . A. M., 272 Bitton (Glos.), 251-2 Blathmac, 198-9 Bluchbard, 29-30 Boethius, 82-3, 91, 104, 115 Boisil, 213, 223 Bolam, 216, 220-1 Bollain [Balanus], 196 Bolton, 226 Boniface, St, 93 Boniface V, Pope, 140 Border, the, defined, 1, 18, 211-12; pre-Norman churches of Devonshire border, 245-57 Scottish, 211-25 Welsh, 226-45 Western Sea-, 225-6

354

INDEX

Bradford-on-Avon, 245-6, 248, 250-1 Brecon, 262-3, 348 (see also Brycheiniog) Bredwardine, 229-30 Bregored, 249 Breguwine, 91 Brendan, St, Voyage of, 191 Brian Brorumha, 338 Brinsop, 228, 236 Bristol abbey, 281-2 Brittany, 12, 150, 290, 318, 332 Brochfael Ysgithrog, 149-50, 172-3, 182-3, 338 Brocmail [? Brochfael supr.], 155, 16870, 172-4, 176, 182 Broughton (Lines.), 217, 218 Brown, J. Baldwin, 211, 228, 231, 246, 250 Brude III, King, 6 Brunanburh, battle of, 105, 184, 185; poem on, 351 Brychan, 301-3 Brycheiniog, 262, 263 n.3, 276, 277, 289-90, 302 Burgred, King, 268-9 Bury St Edmunds, 73 Butler, E. C., 121 Bywell, 221 Cadafael [Catgabail], 35-6, 44, 46, 48 ; etymology of name, 38-9 Cadfan, 137, 139 n.3, 147-9, i5°~2, 155-6, 182, 185 Cadoc, St, 322; variants of name, 297-8 Lives of, 259, 283-315 pass. Cadwaladr, 44, 156; etymology of name, 35 Cadwallon [Cædwallon], 46, 152, 153, 181, 336-7; etymology of name, 34 at war with Northumbria, 22, 34, 43, 44, 56, 58 n. 2, 184-5, 225 fosterage with Edwin, 137, 147, 148 n. 6, 149, 150-1, 154 Cædmon, 130, 177 Cædwalla, 332, 346 Cainnech, Life of, 296-8 Cam (Glos.), 281 Cambriae, Annales, 15, 16, 32, 33, 34, 36,44, 49, 51, 54,148,155, 156-7, 159-60, 163, 171-2, 174-5, 178, 184, 298, 316-17, 329, 331

Canisius, H., 120 Canterbury: and the Roman Church, 14, 15, 16, 136-7, 146-7, 165, 220, 337, 344 archbishops recorded, 80, 90, 91 ‘Ca[n]tscaul’, 34, 45 Caradoc of Llancarfan, 284, 285, 299, 300, 304, 306, 307, 309, 3 1 0 -n , 3*5 Carlisle, 52, 159, 160, 329-30 Carron, battle of, 6 Castle Frome, 237 Catalogus Sanctorum Hibemiae, 297-8 Cathal [Catholus], 198-9 Catraeth, battle of, 184 Catterick, 99, 165 Caw, 290, 299, 300 Ceadda, 337 Cedd, 337 Cennfaelad, 333-4 Centwine [Kentwin], 249 Cenwalh, 245 Ceolfrith, 332 Ceollach, 337 Ceolwulf, 22, 23, 90, 222, 224, 225, 332 Cearl, 149 Ceredigion, 265, 276, 277, 319 Certic [Ceredig, Coroticus], 7, 46, 156, 326; etymology of name, 32 Cetula, 174, 175, 182 Chad, St, 132 Book of, 311, 319, 343 Gospels of, 319 Chaddesley Corbett (Worcs.), 237-8 Chadwick, H. M., 26, 54 Chadwick, N. K., 52, 54, 208, 286, 300 Chaplais, P., 272 Charlemagne, 93, 94, 97, 100, 336 Life of, 352 charters and writs: as historical sources, 4, 17, 259, 261, 263-6, 312-15 falsified, 8, 271-6, 279-83, 287, 315 Chertsey abbey, 265 Chester, battle of, 148, 149, 152, 325 date of, 171, 177-8, 324, 338 historical sources for, 13, 14, 18, 150, 155, 166, 167-85 pass. significance of, 179-85 Chester-le-Street, 83, n o Chronicon of Regino of Prum, 64

355

23-2

INDEX

Chrvnicon Scotorum, 192 Church Order, Roman v. Celtic, 7, 9, 12, 13, 143-4, 146, 147» 163-6, 167-71, 176-9, 187, 190, 200-5, 330-4» 337, 344 {see also Easter Controversy) churches, pre-Norman, of Devonshire border, 245-57 Scottish border, 211-25 Welsh border, 226-45 Western Sea-border, 225-6 Cian, 29-30 Clapham, Sir A. W., 248, 249, 250 clast the Celtic, 160-1, 259, 284, 31415, 318-19, 322 Clement, abbot of York, 70, n o clericatus, 147, 173, 332 Clonard, 291, 293, 298 Clonmacnoise, 16, 347 Cocboy, 39 Coenred [Cenred], 171 n. 2, 332, 337 Coenwulf, 22, 23, 24, 25 Coldingham, 17, 213, 221 Coleme, 249 Colgrave, B., 142, 143, 146, 147 Colrnan [Columbanus], St, 18, 85, *77» 186-205 pass., 333 Columba, St, 201, 324 and Iona, 190-1, 204, 331 death of, 178, 197-8 Life of, 10, 31, 177 Columdlle, St, Life of, 343 Compostella, 235, 238 Connacht, kings of, 198-9 conspiratio barbarica, 11, 181 Constantine, 11, 332 Constantius, 11, 142 controversy, as element of historical sources, 5, 7-8, 13-14 Corbridge, 98, 194, 221-2 Cormac, King, 348 Cornwall, 245, 290, 332, 343, 347 Coroticus, see Certic Corpus Christi Coll. Camb. MS. 139: contents, 63-9, 70, 90, 107 dates, 67, 68, 69-71, 76-8, 96, 116 place of origin, 70-6 pass., 116 Crossby Garret, 225 crosses Devon border, 245, 248-50 Northumbrian, 9, 212, 213-14, 222, 325

Welsh border, 227-8, 235, 236, 245 Western Sea-border, 226 Cruithentuach, 327 Cumbria, 13, 5211.4, 157, 159, 179-81 Cunedda, 31, 46, 47» 5> 302; etymo­ logy of name, 30, 45, 52 Curie, A. O., 327 Cusperius, 197 Cuthbert, St, 73, 89, 103, 112, 132, 153 n. 2, 213, 222, 223, 224-5 death of, 25-6, 31, 39, 50-1, 52, 9* Lives of, 73, 83, 127, 133, 136, 330 see of, 74, 83, 117 Cwichelm, 139 Cynan Garwyn, 183, 338 Cynddelw, 39, 183 Cynddylan, 39, 339 Cynesige, Archbishop, 320-1 Cynewulf, 92, 344 Dalriada, 5, 10, 28, 173 David, St, 16,254,256,291 n.2,318,322 ‘Dewi* in place-names, etc., 16-17, 206-9 Lives of, 17, 285, 286-7, 294-6, 299, 303» 3*9» 332 relations with St Cadoc, 285-7, 290, 292, 296, 298-9, 306, 311 Davies, D. C., 209 Davies, J. Conway, 259 Death of Alexander the Great, 341 Deda, 142-4 Deerhurst, 227, 228-9, 230 Degsastan, battle of, 178 Deheubarth, 316, 320, 321 Deiniol, St, 319, 322 Deira, 123, 165 relations with Bemicia, 21, 28-9, 43, 151-2, 323-4» 33* rulers of, 21, 22, 24, 43, 324, 331 Deusdedit, Archbishop, 79-80 ‘Dewi Sant’, see under David, St Diarmait, 198-9 Diddlebury (Salop), 215, 227, 228-9, 230-3 Dinoot, 155, 167, 182; etymology of name, 169 dioceses, development of, 316-22 Diuma, 337 Docgwin [Docco], St, 298, 304 n.2, 3 1 3 -1 4

Dol, .318 Domhnall Brecc, 5-6

356

INDEX

Domneva, 79-80 Domnonia, 332 Donnchadh Muirsce, 199 Dream of Rhonabwy, The, 158, 183,

Ecgbert [Egbert] of Kent, 21, 24, 7880 Ecgbert of Mercia, 23 Ecgfrith of Mercia, 22, 25 Ecgfrith of Northumbria, 33, 43, 46, 60, 73, 81, 154, 182, 221, 325,

328

Drihthelm, 335 Dryburgh, 213 Dubricius [Dyfrig], St, 319-20, 322 Dumbarton, 32, 36-7, 53, 158, 324 n.4, 326 Dumnonia, 245 Dunfermline, 212, 217, 220, 222 Dungal, 173 Dunnichen, battle of, 6, 40 (see also Nechtansmere) Dunragit, 330 Dunstan, St, 246, 255, 256 Life of, 253 Duntisbome, 269-70 Durham, 66, 73, 88-9, 110, 112, 115 Dyfed, 299, 317, 318

330

Eadber[h]t, 22, 23-4, 60, 61 Eadburga, 100 Eadfrith, son of Edwin, 22, 43, 46, 152 Eadmer, i n Eadmund, 110 Eadred, Abbot, 103 Eadwig, 105 Ealdred, Archbishop, 271 Eanbald, Archbishop, 95-6, 194 Eanfled, 21, 56, 60, 164 abbess of Whitby, 41, 125, 129, 130, 131-2, 135* 136, 144-7 baptism of, 32-3, 59, 131, 156 Eanfrith, son of Æ thelfrith, 43, 149 Eardisley, 238 Eardu[u]lf, 100, 103, n o Earl’s Barton, 216, 217 East Anglia, kings of, 14,21,22, 23,24, 92, 105, 124, 140-1» 152, 331 Easter Controversy, 7, 167-8, 171, 187, 190, 201, 228, 245 (see also Church Order) Eastleach, 273, 282 Eastry [Easterige], 80, 116 Eata, 43-4, 188 Ebba, St, 213, 221 Ebbs Nook (Northumberland), 222 Ecgberht, Northumbrian priest, 186-7, 202-5, 333 Ecgbert, archbishop of York, 22, 24, 61

death of, 6, 21, 25-6, 39, 45, 48, 51, 56 n.4, 212, 333 Echni, 292, 299 eclipses, solar and lunar, 94-6 Eda, 44 Eddius, 18, 129, 136, 146, 154, 325, 334 Edgar, King, 106-7, 243 Edlingham, 222 Edred, n o Edric, 24 Edvin Loach, 233 Edward the Confessor, 106-7, 220 320 Life of, 304 Edwin, bishop of Mayo, 194-5 Edwin, brother of Athelstan, io j Edwin, King: pedigree of, 22, 42-3 in exile, 14, 15, 124, 137, 139 n. 3, 140, 141, 147-56, 164, 165, 324,

331

vision of, 14, 124, 132, 135, 140, 141-3, 145, 146, 165 baptism of, 13, 14, 15, 16, 32-3, 42, 59,122,124,137,1 3 8 -9 ,1 4 1 ,143, 144, 147, 155-6, 158-9, 162-6, 329, 331 invades Isle of Man, 180-2, 184, 225 death of, 34, 43, 46, 125, 132, 139 n.3, 145, 148, 163, 178, 184, 225, 331 relics of, 122, 125, 129, 132, 135, 144-5, 146 Egelric, n o Eilaf, 88 elegiac poetry, 4-6, 14, 47~8, 157, 176, 183-4, 328-9, 338-44 Elfoddw [Elbobdus], St, 54-5, 59, 3*7 ‘Elitherea*, 198 Elli [Elni], 292, 293, 307, 312 n. 1 Elmet, 31 n.3, 32, 46, 50, 151, 156,

179 Elmham, 91 Elslack, 181

357

INDEX

Ely, 132 Emanuel, H. D., 284, 285 n .i, 306 n. 2, 308 Eogan mac Gabrain, 178 Eorconberht [Erconbert], 21, 24, 80 Eormenbeorg of Kent, 79-80, 81 Eormenbeorg of Northumbria, 81 episcopal succession, 91-2 (see also under individual sees) Epistle to Acircius, 334 Erging, 319-20, 321 Escomb, 216 Ethelbert [c. 750], 22, 23, 24 (see also Aethelbert) Ethelfrith, see Æthelfrith Ethelred of Mercia, see Æthelred Ethelred of Wessex, 103 Eugenius of Toledo, 85, 116 Eumer, 139 ‘Eusebius*, 8 Evesham, 260, 346 Ewald, Paul, 120-1 Ewenny, 266, 276 n. 2, 282 Ewyas, 264-5 Exddio Britatmiae, De, 8, 73 Exeter Book, 340-3 Eyam, 227 Fame Islands, 31 Fiachna, 27 Finân, 186-8, 193, 198, 254 n. 1 Finberg, H. P. R., 267 n.4, 268 Finnian, St, 290, 291, 301, 312 n. 1 Lives of, 291-9, 303, 305 ‘Fland Fina’, 205, 334 ‘Flesaur*, 32, 39, 45, 51-2, 57 Fletcher, E. G. M., 246 Florence of Worcester, 67, 77, 83, 101, 102, 107-10, 112, 116, 117, 277-9 forgeries, literary, 5, 8-9, 271-6, 27983, 287, 315 Förster, Max, 33 Forth, Firth of, 31, 36-8, 211-12 Fountains Abbey, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74, 113 Four Masterst Annals of the, 192, 193, 196 Fownhope, 238 Frealaf, 22, 24 Frithuberht of Hexham, 70-1, 95 Frocester, Abbot, 260-1, 263-4, 2689» 279

‘G a i\ 35, 36, 45 Gasquet, Cardinal, 121, 143 Gaulish Chronicle, 11 genealogies, as historical sources, 13, 54, 157, 284, 325-6, 327 (see also under Nennius) Geoffrey of Monmouth, 150-1 Geraint, 245 Gerald, St, Life of, 195-205 pass. Germanus, St, 304 Lives of, 11, 49, 142, 162-3, 329 Gesta Regum, 68-9, 106, 113, 253 Gilbert de Clare, 265, 276, 277 Gilbert Foliot, 266-7, 268, 273-5, 278, 280, 283 Gildas, 2, 9, 156 n. i, 290, 292, 298, 301» 303, 336 De Exddio Britatmiae, 8, 73 Lives of, 63, 299, 300 Girmund, Abbot, 277 Glamorgan, 262, 266, 288, 311, 314, 316, 321 invaded, 276, 277, 287, 315 Glasbury, 262-3, 277, 282 Glasgow, 53, 54 n. 1, 55, 59, 68, 161 Glastonbury, 16, 206, 299, 300, 344, 345 church of, 17, 245-6, 247, 248-9, 252-7 ‘Glinmaur*, 43-4 Gloucester St Peter’s abbey, 258-83 pass., 309, 312, 315, 322; Frocester’s chron­ icle of, 259-70, 272, 276-9 Glywising, 289, 301, 348, 350 Glywys, 289, 302-3 Gododdin, province of, 31 Gododdin, the, 176, 184, 328 Godwin, Earl, 280 Gordon, Ida, 340 Goscelin of Canterbury, 79, 80, 304, 305 n. i Gosforth (Cumberland), 226 Graham, Angus, 37 Gregory the Great, 15, 130, 139, 179 and ‘angels’, 132-4, i33”4, *45 Homilies on Ezekiel, 129 Life of (anon.), 16,119-37 pass., 141, 331; date of, 132-3, 142, 144; sources of, 131-2, 142-5, 147; style of, 133, 136, 177 Lives by John and Paul, 119, 120-1, 128, 131, 135, 136

35«

IN D EX

Gruffyd ap Llywelyn, 320-1 Guallaug [Gwallawg, Gwallawc], 31, 48, 158, 324 ‘G ueinth’, 29-30 Guiodnerth, 312-14 Guoaroy [Guayrdi], 27-8, 45, 49 Guthlac, St, poems on, 343, 344 Life of, 127, 344, 345 Guthrum , 105 Gwent, 315-16, 322, 348, 350 Gwladus, 289, 301, 312 n. i Gwrgi, 44 Gwynedd, 15, 148, 316-17, 319, 337; etymology of name, 30 kings of, 22, 30, 34, 35, 38, 44, 149, 151-4, 182, 243» 348 Gwynlliog, 289, 301, 309 Gwynllyw, St, 289, 290, 301-3, 312 Life of, 285 Halton (Lancs.), 226 Harleian recension, see under Nennius Harmer, F. E., 4 Harold, king of Norway, 6-7 Harris, Rev. S. M., 206-7 Hart, W. H., 260 nn. 2, 3 Hatfield (Herefordshire), 233-4 Hatfield Chase [Hæthfelth], 34, 43, 46, 125, 144- 5, 225 Headboume Worthy, 216 Heame, Thomas, 253 Hebrides, Inner, 11 Hedda, 249 Heddon-on-the-Wall, 215, 222 Heimskringla, 6 Heledd, 399-40 Helised, 348, 350 Hemeid Hen, 347, 348 Henry I, King, 64, 77-8, 111, 271, 275 Henry II, King, 77, 273, 280 Hereford, 215, 227, 240-1 bishops of, 91, 273, 320-1 Heretic, 32 Herewald, Bishop, 287-8, 314, 315, 320-2 herringbone masonry, 228-35 Heversham, 225-6 Hexham: architecture of, 213, 221, 223 bishops of, 70, 87-9, 92, 95 documents, 64-5,70-4,90,115,117, 128, 130 etymology of name, 34, 45

Heysham, 225 Hilda, St, 32, 130, 131, 132 Hisperic Latin, 345 Historia Brittonum, see under Nennius Historia Ecclesiastica, see under Bede Historia Regum (Geoffrey), 150-1 Historia Regum (Symeon), 15, 18, 634, 66-7, 69-72, 75^6, 194; date, 70-1, 76-8, 89-90, 96, 106, 11218 pass.; style, 81, 82, 83, 90, 96-8, 103-4, 105-6, 113-15, 11718; contents: Rubrics, 77-8, 117 (1) Kentish Legends, 78-82, 11416, 117, 118 (2) Northumbrian kings, 82-3, 11415, 116, 117 (3) Bede material, 83-6, 114-15, 116-17 (4) 732-802 Chronicle, 86-99, 11415, 116-17; chronology, 94-6, 116; place of origin, 90, 98-9, ” 5, 117 (5) 849-887 Chronicle, 99-104,11415, 116 (6) 888-957 Chronicle, 104-6, 11315; place of origin, 106, 117 (7) William of Malmesbury extracts, 106-7, 113 (8) 848-1118 Chronicle, 107-11; place of origin, n o , 112, 113 (9) 1119-1129 Chronicle, in - 1 3 ; place of origin, 112, 117 Hoddom, 9, 52 n. 7, 160, 212 Hodgson Hinde, J., 64 n.2, 76 n. Hornby (Lancs.), 226 Hugh, dean of York, 65, 69, 72 Hughes, Kathleen, 259, 284, 291, 293, 296 H unter Blair, P., 4, 26, 37, 165 Hussa, 31 Hywel ab Owain, 285 Hywel ‘the G ood’, 349, 350, 352 I ago ap Beli, 152, 155, 172 Ida of Northumbria, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 32, 48, 49, 5L 57, 324 Illtud, St, 12, 290, 303-4 immrama, 191 Inchkeith, 37 Ine, King, 246, 253, 256 inedicibilisy 98, 104, 115 Ingram (Northumberland), 223

359

IN D EX

Kings, History of the, see Historia Regum Kirkdale, 216 n. Kirkmadrine, 212 Kirk Newton, 223 Kirkstall, 67, 70 Kulhwch and Olwen, 300

Inisfallen, Annals of, 16, 173-5 Inishbofin, 189, 190, 192, *93» 195, 200, 204 inscriptions on stone, as historical sources, 2, 4, 9, 12, 157, 212, 227, 326, 327 Iona, 164,187,188,198, 199, 202, 325, 331, 333, 334 Colmân and, 189, 193, 204 Columba and, 190-1, 204 Ireland: and Mercia, 343-7 and Northumbria, 164, 180-1, 201, 203-4, 331- 3, 334, 335 menace to Britain from, 11-12, 181-2, 348 poetry of, 5, 6, 340-3 Roman Church Order in, 187, 190, 193, 195, 197, 199-205, 333 St Cadoc and, 291-3, 295 Irton, 226 Irvine, J. T ., 250 ‘Iudeu’, 35-8, 45, 46, 48 Jackson, E. D. C., 246 Jackson, Prof. K., 4, 169, 179 James, J. W., 312, 314, 315-16 James, M. R., 64 n.2, 67 n. 1, 74, 206 Jarla Sögur, 7 Jarrow monastery, 130, 213, 215 Jedburgh, 213, 224 John of Beverley, 130, 224 John of Glaston, 253-4 John of Hexham, 66-7, 69, 70, 71, 778, h i , 113 John of Worcester, 277-9 John the Deacon, 119, 120-1, 128, 131, 135, 136 Jones, C. W., 133, 154 n. 1 Jones, Sir J. Morris, 159 Joseph, bishop of Hereford, 320-1 Judicaël, 332 Kendrick, T . D., 249, 250 Kent, 130, 131 kings of,21,22,23,24, 57,78-80, 124 Kernigem, St, 53, 68, 316, 322, 329 Life of, 158, 161, 328 Kentish Legends of Historia Regum, 78- 82 Kentwin [Centwine], 249 Ker, N. R., 73 Kilpeck, 227, 238-9

Lady of the Fountain, The, 158, 328 Laistner, M. L. W., 85 ‘Lamnguin*, 33-4, 45 Lancaster, 181, 226 Langford, 252 Laurentius, Archbishop, 124, 136 laws, as historical source, 4 Laws, Welsh, 316, 317, 318-19 Leeds, 36, 38 Leicester, bishops of, 91 Leinster, 5, 27, 197 Leo III, Pope, 93 Leofric Missal, 16, 206 Leominster, 239 Leuthfrith, 193-5 Levison, W., 93 Liber Pontificalis, 127, 128, 130, 133,

135

Liber Vitae, 41, 42 ‘Liberalis’, 326 Lichfield, 22, 132 bishops of, 91-2, 337, 346 Liebermann, F., 4, 79 Liffey, River, 291, 293 Lifris, 284-310 pa«., 311, 321 Lilia, 139 Limpley Stoke, 252 Lindisfame, 18, 31, 91, 132, 189, 200, 204, 213, 222, 224 anonymous monk of, 127, 130, 133, 136, 254 n .i, 332 besieged, 158, 324, 327 bishops of, 26, 92, 98, 100, 103, n o , 186-8, 193, 198, 270, 331 Lindsey, 125, 337 bishops of, 91, 143 kings of, 22, 23, 24 oral traditions from, 15, 18, 142-8 152-6, 165, 177 ‘Linn Garan*, 21, 40, 45, 56 Litanies of Irish Saints, 196 Llanbadam Vawr, 161, 265, 277, 319 Llancarfan, 17, 276-7, 283, 287-95, 297- 8. 301, 305-9, 321-2 cartulary, 284, 310-15

360

INDEX

Llandaff, 17, 288, 294, 296, 303, 311,

,

314 315

Book oft 287, 312, 314, 316, 320, 321 Llandeilo, 319 Llandewi Brefi, 292, 299, 317 Llandough, 298, 314 Llanelwy, 316 Llangadwaladr, 151, 155-6 Llantwit Major, 12, 303, 304, 314, 319 Hoc in place-names, 208 Lloyd, Sir John Edward, 148, 172-3, 259, 316, 349 Llywarch Hen, 30, 339, 341 London, record of bishops of, 91 Long Houghton, 223 Long Marton, 225 Lot, F., 21 n. i, 26, 27, 33 n.3, 36 n. i, 39, 46, 51, 52, 56, 58 Lothian, 158, 161, 327, 328 Lydney, 269 Macalister, R. A. S., 4 Macliau, Count, 173 McNéill, Éoin, 4, 174 n.4, 175 Mae doc, S t , Life of, 294-6 Maelgwn, 44, 47, 50, 155, 290, 301, 306, 336; etymology of name, 30 Magnus Maximus, 11 Malcolm IV, King, 69, 72, 78 Malcolm Canmore, 87-8, 111, 220 Malmesbury, 332, 333, 344, 345 Man, Isle of, 139, 180, 181, 225 (see also Mevanian Islands) Manaw Gododdin, 30-1, 47 Manchianus, 8 Manitius, M., 85 Map, Walter, 303 n. 2, 304 Margaret (sister of Edward the Con­ fessor), 220 Martyrology of Donegal, 192, 195, 196 Martyrology of Tallaght, 195, 197 Maserfelth, battle of, 34, 39, 153 Matilda, Empress, 293-4, 280, 283 Maurice of London, 266 Mayo: abbey of, 186-7, 189-205 pass., 333 bishops of, 92, 191, 194-5, 201 Meicen [Meigen], 22, 43, 56 Mellitus, Archbishop, 124, 136 Melrose, 223-4; Old, 17,188, 213, 335 ‘Men of the N orth’, 2, 13, 31, i57~9, 161-3, 180, 181, 184, 326-8, 330-1, 335, 339

Mercia: area of, 154, 336 Celtic background of, 335-46 pass. conversion of, 332, 337, 344 kings of, 18, 22, 23, 25-6, 57-9, 92, 146, 149, 153-4, 226, 332, 335-7 monasteries of, 18, 144-7, 152-5, 169, 171, 176-7, 182 Merewalh [Merewald], 81, 239 Merfyn, 54, 59 ‘M etcaud’, 31-2, 45 Mevanian Islands, 139, 148, 180-1, 184 Meyer, Kuno, 5, 176 Milborne Port, 246, 248 Mildburh, 81, 227, 239 MildgytS, 81-2 Mildred, St, Life of, 79, 80, 81-2 Miller, T ., 172 Minster-in-Thanet, 79, 81 Mommsen, T ., 21 n. 1, 27, 35, 74, 76 Monkwearmouth, 130, 216 Moore Memoranda, 26-7, 51, 54, 58, 83, 116 Morcant [Morgant], 31, 48, 50, 158, 324, 327 Morgan, F. C., 239 n. Morgannwg, 285, 302, 315-16 Morland, 225 Much Wenlock, 81, 227, 242 Munster, 5, 8, 16, 28, 173, 197 Murdac, Henry, 65, 68, 73 Myres, J. N. L., 3 Nash-Williams, V. E., 4, 185, 227 navigatio saga, 187, 191, 192 Nechtan IV, 173, 332 Nechtansmere, 25-6, 39, 40-1, 44, 48, 57, 135, 212, 334 Neirin, see Aneirin Nennius : Historia Brittonum, 15, 63, 73, 156 Northern section of above, 21-62 pass., 156, 158-60, 324, 327-9, 331; date, 16, 25-7, 50, 51-2, 54-5, 57-9, 61, 156, 327; nomen­ clature, 27-44; sources, 2, 9, 1516, 22, 25-7, 44-62, 157, 162-3, 327, 329 (see also ‘Northern Chronicle’ and ‘Northern His­ tory, original’) Saxon Genealogies, 21-5,27,34, 3946, 48, 51, 55-61, 156, 162, 164

36 1

INDEX

Osbald, 98-9 Osfrith [Osfrid], 22, 149 n. 6, 152 Oslaf [Oslaph], 22, 24, 60-1 Osric, 43, 149 Osthryth, 143, i 53“4 Oswald, 10, 33, 34, 145, 325, 331 death of, 39, 132, 149, i53> 185 relics of, 132, 135, 146, 153-5 Life of, 148-50, 152 Oswestry, 39 Oswine, 95 Oswy [Oswiu], 21, 22, 24, 33, 44, 148, 153- 4, 187, 325, 331, 334, 337Î etymology of name, 27 n. 2 and Penda, 35-8, 185, 221 wives of, 41-2, 45, 50, 53, 60, 131, 158, 159, 164, 329 Outigim, 44, 46, 48, 50; etymology of name, 29 Ovingham, 224 Owein [Owen], 42, 158-9, i 6 i , 183, 328-9

(Nennius, cont.) Harleian recension, 27, 29, 31, 3 2 - 3 » 51» 55, 59 Newent, 228 Newminster, 74, 113 Newport (Mon.), 261-2, 268 Ninian, St, 191, 212 Nobis, Archbishop, 317, 319, 347 noms-de-plume, 8 Norham, 224 Northallerton, 72 ‘Northern Chronicle’, 2, 15, 49-54» 58, 61-2, 327, 329 ‘Northern History, original’, 2, 15, 54, 55, 56, 57-9, 60-1, 158, 160, 327 Northern [History] section, see under Nennius Northleach, 271 Northumbria area of, 28-9, 42, 154, 211-12, 225 at war with Piets, 6, 10, 21, 39-40 Celtic background, 323-35 conversion of, 9, 46, 50, 54-5, 146, 187, 325, 331; sources for, 13 ff., 138-66 pass. earls of, 66, 78, 111, 112, 117 ecclesiastical architecture, 17, 21225 , 325

invaded, 36, 37-8, 184-5 kings of, 22, 23-4, 26, 32, 33-5, 41, 44, 57, 58-61,69, 82-3,90, 92, 98, 105, 106, 109, 116, 117, 148, 155, 158, 178, 323 ff. Nostell Priory, 218 Notitia Dignitatum, 326 Nympsfield, 276 Ocg, 24 Oddington, 271 Oengus the Culdee, Calendar of, 192; Martyrology of, 196, 334 Offa, 23 n. i, 25, 243, 336, 348 Offa’s Dyke, 226, 338 Oftfor, 130 ogam script, 12, 348 n. 1 oral traditions as source of history, 2-7, 12-13, 48, 51, 128, 157, 160, 166, 182, 327-8 Bede’s treatment of, 17-18, 133, 138, 140, 142-5, 154-5, 165, 171, 191, 335 Orkneyinga Saga, 7

Padam, St, 265, 319 paga, 102 panegyrics, 4-5, 6-7, 11, 14, 47, 118, 157, 176, 183, 328, 352 Parthenay-le-Vieux, 235 Partney, 18, 142-3, 145, 147, *53, *55 Patrick, St, 8, 9, 193 Confession of, 7 Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, 7, 32, 326 Life of, 177 Paul Aurelian, St, Life of, 303 Paul Penichen, 292, 303-4 Paul the Deacon, 119, 121, 128, 131, 135, 136 Pauli, R., 92-3, 97 Paulinus, St, 125, 131, 134, 254 and Edwin, 15, 16, 33, 50 n.2, 55 n. i, 59, 122, 124, 132, 135» 137, 138- 47, 154- 5,156-7,163-6, 223, 331 Peada, 337 Pecthelm, 18, 171 n.2 Pectwine, 92, 96 Pembrokeshire, 348 Penda, 18, 22, 35-8, 46, 58, 132, 153, 221, 226, 335 allied with the Welsh, 34, 39, 50 n .4, 149, 150, 154, 184-5, 225, 336-7

362

IND EX

Pengwem, 339 (see also Shrewsbury) Peredur, 44 Perranporth, 245 Peterstow, 227, 242-3 Pictish Chronicle, 5, 40 Piets, the, 11, 25, 211-12, 326-7, 330-1 kings of, 6, 10, 21, 39-40, 56 n. 4, 92, 98, 173, 300, 332 Plummer, C., 9, 34, 83-4, 121, 140 n. 5, 142, 149, 170 n., 172, 178, 194, 199, 202 poetry, see elegiac poetry and pane­ gyrics; also under Ireland and Welsh Powys, 43, 152, 154, 160, 316, 338-9 rulers of, 39, 172-3, 182-4, 243 Presteigne, 243 ‘Pseudo-Augustine’, 8 Pybba, 22, 56 Quenburg, 149, 152 Radford, C. A. R., 252 Rædwald, 14, 124, 132, 135, 140, 141, 146, 152, 165, 331 Raghallach [Ragallus], 198 Raine, J., 65-6, 67 Ramsbury, 249 Ramsey, 80 Rathangan, 342 Rathmelsigi, 186-7, 333 Reading Abbey, 280-2 Reeves, W., 178 Reginald of Durham, 148, 149, 150-2,

154

Regino of Prum, 64, 71 Renchidus, 54-5, 59 Restenneth, 212, 216, 217, 224 Rhain, 290, 301 Rheged, 45, 53, 339“40 area of, 159, 329-30 rulers of, 31, 33,42, 55, 159* 184,328 Rhigyfarch, 17, 285-7, 294, 295 n.2, 299, 303, 317, 319, 320, 332 Rhodri, 54, 348- 9, 351 Rhun, 41, 48, 49, 51-4, 62, 290, 300-1 ; etymology of name, 32-3 and baptism of Edwin, 32-3, 42, 46, 50, 55, 59, 137, 147,156-9,162-4, 329, 331 Rhydderch, 31, 48 n.2, 158, 184, 324, 326

Rhys, Sir John, 148 Rhys ap Tewdr, 262 Riagal of Bangor, 6 Richard of Hexham, 64, 70, 71, 73 Richard of Whitby, 70, n o Richards, G. Melville, 4 Richmond, I. A., 3, 181 Rieinmelth [Riemmelth], 21, 42, 50, 56, 158, 159, 164, 329; etymo­ logy of name, 41 Rievaulx, 72 Ripon, 92, 99, 130 Robert, earl of Gloucester, 273-4, 277 n. i, 283 Robert FitzHamon, 262, 271 n.2, 276-7, 315 Robert FitzHarding, 281, 282 Robertson, A. J., 4 Robinson, J. A., 253-4 Rochester, bishops of, 91, 254 Roger of Berkeley, 276, 278, 281, 282 Roger of Bishop’s Bridge, 65, 69 Roger of Howden, 82 n., 108, h i Roman authority decline of, 3, n -1 2 , 325-7 ecclesiastical, see Church Order Rothbury, 213 Rowley Water, 34 Rowlstone, 239-40 Royth, 41, 42 Rudford, 275 n.2 Ruin, The, 342-3 Rushbury, 234 Ruthwell, 212, 213, 325 Sabinianus, 126 sagas as historical source, 7, 14,158 ff., 352 n. 2 Bede’s use of, 155, 169, 171, 176-7, 182, 187, 191 St Andrews, 212, 216, 217-19 St Asaph, 161, 316 St Bridget’s Beckermet, 226 St Davids, 17, 292, 294, 309, 316, 317-18, 319, 322, 347, 351, 352 St Joseph, Dr, 3 St Regulus, chapel of (St Andrews), 216, 217, 218-19 Salomon of Brittany, 150 Samson, St, Life of, 303-4, 319, 322 Sandbach, 227 Saunders, G. W., 248 Sawley, 73-6, 78, 112-13, 115, 116-17

363

INDEX

Saxon Genealogies, see under Nennius Seafarer, The, 343

Seaham, 216 Sedulius, 108-9 Seeley, J. R., 121 Selbach, 173, 332 Selsey, bishops of, 91 Selwood, 101, 116 Selyf, 171-2, 173* 182-3, 338; etymo­ logy of name, 174 Serlo, Abbot, 261, 263, 266-9 Serlo of Kirkstall, 67, 70, 71 Shaftesbury, 248 Shelford (Notts.), 236 Sherborne, 91, 206, 245, 246 Shobdon, 235, 240 Shrewsbury, 243-4, 339 Sidbury, 245, 252 Sigresia, 198 Sigtryggr, 338 Sigurtha, 7 Simon, bishop of Worcester, 273, 275, 279, 281, 283 Sisam, K., 22, 23, 24, 166, 346 Skene, W. F., 34 Snorri Sturluson, 6 Soemil, 43, 48 Solon, see Selyf Solway, 31 n. i, 159, 212, 325, 327, 329-30 Somerled, 68, 69, 71, 78 ‘Sophias’ (of St Cadoc), 291, 297, 307-8, 310 Standard, battle of the, 64-5, 67, 68,

71, 72 Standish, 271 Stanley (Glos.), 273-4, 280, 281-3 Stanton Lacy, 227 Stenton, Sir Frank, 4, 143, 179, 323, 324, 334, 337, 346

Stephen, King, 64-5, 272-5, 276, 278, 279-83 Stevenson, W. H., 100, 102, 107, 349, 3Si

Stigand, Archbishop, 321 Stirling, 37 Stonehouse, 269 Stottesdon, 227, 240 stow in place-names, 17, 208 Strata Florida, 161, 208 Strathclyde, 11, 31, 40, 53, 60, 180, 327

Stretton Sugwas, 240-1

Stubbs, W. S., 82 n., 108 Suibhne, 347 Sulien, Bishop, 17, 161 Symeon of Durham, 14, 40, 63-4, 225 dates of, 65, 112 De Archiepiscopis Eboraci, 65-6, 69,

72

Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiae, 74, 7 5 ,8 8 -9 ,9 1 ,1 1 5 Historia Regum, see under Historia Talhaeam, 29, 30 Taliesin, 29-30, 31, 183, 328, 338 Tatheus, 290 Tatwine, Archbishop, 90, 94 Tedstone Delamere, 244 Teilo, St, 290, 309, 314, 319 Life of, 294-6 Teoful, 125, 144-5 Tewkesbury, 275 n.2, 277 Thaney, 158, 161 Theobald, Archbishop, 273-5, 280, 283 Theodore, Archbishop, 80, 130, 317, 337 Theodric, 31 Thomas I, archbishop of York, 271-2 Thomas II, archbishop of York, 87-8 Thompson, Sir Edward Maunde, 346 Thunur, 79 Thumeysen, R., 4, 22, 23, 24, 49-51, 55, 59 n.3 Thurstan, archbishop of York, 65, 68 Tigemach, Annals of, 5, 16, 139 n.3, 148, 174-8, 180, 192, 196, 351 Tilred, 225 Tirechan, 193 Tolkien, J. R. R., 345 Trajan, Emperor, 126, 135 Traprain Law, 327 Trawsganu, 183 Trent, River, 142, 143, 155, 165 Trimma, 125, 129, 133, 144, 145 Trumhere, 337 Trumwine, 135, 212 Tuda, 188 Uhtred, 66 Ulster, Armais of, 16, 27, 139 n.3, 148, 173- 5, 178, 192, 193, 196, 201, 347 Universal History, 64 Urban, bishop of Llandaff, 320

364

IN D EX

Urien [Urbgen], 33, 44, 46, 47, 50-1, 54» 159, 162-3, 183, 184, 324, 328-9, 339; etymology of name, 31, 49 death of, 31, 42, 48, 158, 161, 327 ‘Virgilius M aro’, 8 Vortigem, 162 Votadini, 31, 326 Wade-Evans, A. W., 42, 311, 314 Wakering, 80 Wall, Antonine, 10, 11, 157, 326, 327 Walter de Lacy, Abbot, 266, 267, 269, 273, 278-9 Waltheof, 66 Wanderer, The, 342-3 W arden (Northumberland), 224 Watton, nun of, 68, 72 Welsh: bishoprics, 17, 315-22 poetry, 4, 46-8, 328, 338-43» 35-i relations with ‘Men of the North*, 2, 31, 157, 161, 180, 181, 326 Wendun, see Brunanburh Wenlock, 81, 227, 242 Wessex: Celtic background of, 346-52 kings of, 92, 100, 103, 139, 245, 249, 332» 346 Westport, 193 W harram-le-Street, 218-20 Whitaker, John, 248 W hitby: abbots and abbess of, 17, 70, 72, 78, n o , 112 anonymous monk of, 14-15, 16, 121-37, 138, 141-7, 165, 177, 331 architectural remains at, 41, 221 Council of, 9,18, 131, 146, 165, 177, 187, 331-2, 333 Whitelock, D., 4 W hithorn : bishops of, 9, 92 monastery, 52-3, 59, 191, 212

Whittingham, 214-15 Wigmore, 234-5 Wilfrid, St, 18, 130, 131, 147, 187, 213 Life oft 136, 146, 154 William I, King, h i , 220, 255, 269, 270-2, 275, 276 William II, King, 261-3, 270-2, 275, 276 William, earl of Gloucester, 261-2 William of Corbeil, 68 William of Durham, 270 William of Malmesbury, 69,72,106-7, 113, 118, 250 on Glastonbury, 246, 249, 253, 256 William of Worcester, 249 Williams, Sir Ifor, 4, 28, 29, 31 n.3, 34, 39, 54, 159, 183, 338, 339, 341 wills, as historical sources, 4 Wilton, battle of, 107 Winchcombe, 215, 277 Winwæd, River, 36, 38, 221 Woden, 21, 22, 24 Woodhom, 224-5 Worcester, 91, 346 Wormald, F., 206 Wrenn, C. L., 344, 346 Wright, C. E., 121 n.7 writs, see charters Wroxeter, 227, 244-5 Wulf here, archbishop of York, 66,100, 103, n o Wulfhere of Mercia, 154, 337 Yarrowkirk, 326 Yeavering, 141, 165, 223 York, 117, 141, 226, 323 archbishops of, 65, 69, 92, 105, 109-10, 194, 271-2, 320-1 invaded by Danes, 66, 69, n o St Mary’s abbey, 68, 72, 165; abbots of, 70, 72, 78, n o , 112 St Peter’s church, 98, 99, 144 n. 4 Zamecki, G., 235, 238 Zimmer, H., 23, 25, 51, 57