The Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England [Paperback ed.] 0719048281, 9780719048289

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The convert kings

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

The convert kings Power and religious affiliation in early Anglo-Saxon England

/ N. J. HIGHAM

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin’s Press

Copyright © N. J. Higham 1997 Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Higham, N. J. The convert kings : power and religious affiliation in early Anglo -Saxon England / N.J. Higham. p. cm. ISBN 0-7190-4827-3 (c). - ISBN 0-7190-4828-1 (p) 1. Great Britain - Politics and government - 449-1066. 2. AngloSaxons - Kings and rulers - Religious aspects. 3. Christianity and politics - England - History. 4. Power (Social sciences) - England History. 5. England - Church history - 449-1066. 6. Civilization, Anglo-Saxon. 7. Paganism - England - History. 8. Civilization, Medieval. 9. Anglo-Saxons — Religion. 10. Conversion — History. 11. Converts - England. I. Title. DA152.H533 1997 942.01-dc21 96-52281 ISBN 0 7190 4827 3 hardback 0 7190 4828 1 paperback First published 1997 01 00 99 98 97 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in 10/14 Monotype Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd Printed in Great Britain by Bell &C Bain Ltd, Glasgow

For Naomi

Contents

Figures

page viii

Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgements

•

x

Introduction

1

1

Out of Africa: the nature of conversion

7

2

King TEthelberht: conversion in context

53

3

Differentiation, reinforcement and imperium: religion and

4

dynasty, c. 616-33

133

Dynasty and cult: Bernician kings and the protection of God

201

Epilogue

276

Index

283

vii

Figures

1

The geographical context of the Kentish court, c. 600

2

The division of Merovingian Gaul on the death of Chlothar I in 561

3

page 67

68

The division of Merovingian Gaul on the death of Charibert I in 567

69

4

Merovingian Gaul at the death of Guntram in 593

83

5

Being different: Kent, culture and ethnicity in the early seventh century

84

6

King Edwin’s imperium

174

7

The organisation of the Anglo-Irish church c. 654

235

8

The organisation of the Anglo-Irish church c. 655

236

Vlll

Abbreviations

AC: Annales Cambriae or ‘The Welsh Annals’, in Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals, Chichester, 1980, ed. and trans. J. Morris, pp. 85—91. Gregory, Epist.: Gregory I, Register, edd. P. Ewald and L. M. Hartmann, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae, vols 1, 2, Berlin, 1887-90. On occasion, a second reference is given in brackets with the Roman numeral in lower case. These provide a reference to the translation in Register of the Epistles of Saint Gregory the Great, trans. C. L. Feltoe, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1894, xii, pp. 73-243; xm, pp. 1-111. HB: Historia Brittonum or the ‘British History’, in Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals, ed. J. Morris, Chichester, 1980, pp. 5084. HE: Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum or ‘The ecclesiastical history of the English people’, in Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1969. Vita Wilfridi: The life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. B. Colgrave, Cambridge, 1927.

IX

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Drs Nancy Lindisfarne and John Hines for reading and advising me on Chapter 1 of this text and Dr Conrad Leyser and Sandra Duncan for comparable services as regards Chapter 2. In each case their scholarship and generosity are gratefully acknowledged and the text has benefited enormously from their atten¬ tion. I am also very grateful to the two anonymous readers of the full text, whose helpful and friendly criticism has led to considerable improvements. This volume owes much to the staff of Manchester University Press, whose benign oversight of this publication has placed me in their debt. My thinking about this subject has benefited enor¬ mously from an entire generation of extra-mural students and my thirdyear undergraduates at the University of Manchester, yet the ideas offered herein are my own, as too are all errors. I am grateful in addi¬ tion to the University of Manchester for sabbatical leave during the second semester of 1995—6, during which this text was written. My greatest debt, as ever, is to my daughter, who continues to remind me of the richness of life beyond and beside the computer screen. This book is for her, with all my love.

Introduction

This volume focuses on the value of religious conversion to AngloSaxon kings in the period c. 590—670. It is offered as a companion to two works on southern Britain in the early Middle Ages which have already been published by Manchester University Press: The English conquest: Gildas and Britain in the fifth century in the summer of 1994, and An English empire: Bede and the early Anglo-Saxon kings in the summer of 1995. This is not intended to be a textbook on the subject of the Christianisation and conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. Nor is it a general study of kings and kingship, although inevitably it has been necessary to examine the careers of particular rulers in as much detail as possible. Its starting point is the proposition that first-generation Christian kings did not share the world-picture, value system or beliefs of the mission¬ aries whom they protected and patronised. In that case, their purposes cannot be explained by reference to a commitment to spreading the spir¬ itual message of Christianity.1 What is under examination, therefore, is the utility of religious affiliation to the ambitions of secular rulers. Some kings gave protection, resources and encouragement to Christian missionaries and even themselves accepted baptism, but none did so unstintingly. Some accepted baptism or imposed it on others as just one part of the expression and reinforcement of unequal political relations between different courts. Others again excluded missionaries or renewed non-Christian rites after having accepted baptism. In all instances, it is the underlying rationality of royal decision-making as regards their religious affiliation which is here under examination. What will emerge is the view that rulers treated religious policy as ar integral part of the strategies available to them by which to pursue their own self-interest. What was different about religious affiliation in the 1

The convert kings period under review was its capacity for change, and the considerable advantages which a powerful dynasty could obtain by converting from one religion to another. Such conversion was not, of course, solely in favour of Christianity but occurred in various directions. It will be sug¬ gested that Christianity eventually emerged as the favoured religion of rulers not for any spiritual reason but because of the particular value to them of its ideological, organisational and authoritarian characteristics - and something very similar had already occurred in Ireland, Pictland and Frankia. These characteristics offered kings novel means of aug¬ menting or reinforcing kingship and ‘overkingship’ and facilitated their gradual shift away from tribalism and towards state formation. The non-Christian religion which was traditional among the Anglo-Saxons did not offer kings such useful mechanisms for social control and polit¬ ical advantage as they could obtain from the Christian missionaries. This is, therefore, not a study of Christian belief or of the Church but of what kings could gain from religion. It is an unashamedly secular work of history. This is also a book about meaning and about discourse. The main sources of information concerning the spread of Christianity in early England are a handful of letters written in far-off Rome between 590 and 670, and a small group of texts written in Britain, so nearer to home, but written in the rarefied atmosphere of major monasteries during the very late seventh and early eighth centuries. The stories which these sources offer sometimes differ as regards the achievements of individual missionaries, and as regards the authority and status of different Church traditions, histories and clerisies, yet all provide a quintessentially Christian perception which is necessarily far-removed from that of the English at large during the era of conversion. All are charged by the contemporary perceptions of their authors regarding divine providence and Christian truth. In consequence, the literary evi¬ dence on which the history of the conversion period is based is imbued with a Christian world-picture which was imposed on the Anglo-Saxon community from outside. The questions raised, the assumptions made, the values aired - all are external to the English in the conversion period yet all condition what we today can, and what we cannot, say about it. This issue is also about power, therefore: it is about the way that Christian sources dominate all later discourse and disempower the pre¬ conversion and early convert communities who have left no written record of their systems of value or meaning. In this volume an attempt will be made to reconstruct some at least of these silenced voices and 2

Introduction explore, for example, the role of such ceremonies as baptism and the consecration of a church in the perceptions of powerful kings. Problems of meaning do not, however, end there, since we too, like Bede, are meaning-makers and concept builders, and our views on the English conversion depend heavily on our own starting point. Most nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing on this subject is imbued with implicitly Christian value systems. Although modern Christianity differs markedly from that of the seventh and eighth centuries, many of the assumptions made by Pope Gregory, for example, or Bede, about the comparative value of different cults and kingships, retain sufficient res¬ onances still to command some respect. This is particularly prevalent regarding such issues as apostasy, for example. Even where scholars are careful to distance themselves from overt value judgements, the reli¬ gious policy still tends to be examined from an exclusively Christian perspective, to the detriment of our understanding of its meaning to the individuals involved. Most of us at some point read Bede’s great Historia Ecclesiastica sufficiently uncritically to concur with his approval of the decision of some king with a more or less unpro¬ nounceable name to accept baptism for himself and his people and to decry with him the failure of another to achieve the same. Christians are still good, and pagans bad, and Irish Christians are in some respects even better than the rest. Furthermore, we tend to study religious affiliation and behaviour within a conceptual system which derives from, and is only appropriate to, Christianity, and then express surprise when other religions seem inexplicable. The very language which we use has been shaped by a Christian past which stretches back over more than a millennium and carries a multitude of values which, unless we take great care, invalidate our perception of the thinking of men now long dead who did not share our Christian history. Yet historians are not such beleagured figures as they sometimes feel. Several other modern literatures also explore the nature of religion and religious conversion. Many of the same problems as are experienced by the early medievalist also confront the social anthropologist, and this is as true of problems of evidence as of meaning. Better acquaintance with such parallel literatures does not, of course, provide the early medievalist with simple answers to complex questions but it does offer very different perspectives and suggest new questions to be asked of the available evidence. For the purposes of this study, it is of particular sig¬ nificance that social anthropologists have moved in recent years away

3

The convert kings from formulaic definitions of religion towards treating it as a cultural system with numerous but more or less separate diagnostic features, none of which is absolutely essential. The religion of a particular social group may, therefore, show some interest in godlike beings, a dichotomisation of phenomena into profane and sacred, regularised rituals, a foundation mythology, and so on, but such lists provide only a polythetic class of meaning since relig¬ ions differ quite markedly.2 Such checklists offer only a very weak analytical construct through which to explore behaviour in seventh century England, yet the downsizing of religion from the status of a monolith to that of a basket of other things has many advantages. For example, it opens the door to treating both early Christianity and nonChristian religions less as integral constructs of behaviour, belief, doc¬ trine, organisation and ritual than as packages or systems, the individual components of which were separately capable of change, adoption and rejection. One consequence is the recognition that religious conversion is better characterised as a dialogue than as a conquest, with the interface managed not merely by the missionary but also - and even primarily by the recipient. Another is the reintegration of religious change into broader cultural and societal processes. In that context, issues of reli¬ gious affiliation among the early English are readily viewed as integral to the wider concerns of opinion-forming sections of society - primar¬ ily the royal courts. Religious affiliation, Christian marriage, baptism, baptismal sponsorship, church foundation and resourcing - all were necessarily matters of political and dynastic consequence with some¬ thing to offer those in power. It is that relationship between religion and wider royal policy which is the principal focus of this work. First, however, is a chapter which seeks to outline the way that thinking on this subject has developed among social anthropologists in the recent past, so as to contextualise the approach adopted in the three chronologically organised chapters which follow. These explore in as much detail as possible the objectives and policies of the better known convert kings between c. 590 and 670, when King Oswiu of the Bernicians - the last survivor of a generation of kings whose parents were non-Christian - at last died. Much of this is comparatively well-trodden ground,3 but the focus adopted here is quite specific to religious affiliation as an aspect of pol¬ itics and, in that, it differs from other studies of conversion-period England. The baptism or conversion of a particular ruler is generally a

4

Notes matter of fact. What is not is the rationality of the kings who patron¬ ised early missionaries, even in some instances prior to their own baptism. If we can explain the religious policies of these several kings, then we will have moved some small distance towards comprehending the rationality of religious affiliation - both Christian and nonChristian — in early England. The Christian value systems implicit in the literary evidence do, of course, make this quest a very difficult one and one consequence is a resort to much hypothesis regarding purpose on the basis of what rulers were said to have done. It must be admitted that there is a danger of building a metaphorical house of cards on insuffi¬ cient evidence, yet even this risk may be preferable to the only real alter¬ native, which is to rest content with the facts of religious affiliation and ignore the objectives which these rulers were pursuing. That alternative leaves seventh-century kings to a system of explanation imposed upon them in the eighth century and to a history in which they can never be more than two-dimensional. This new study is offered, therefore, in the hope that it will contrib¬ ute to our understanding of the insular early Middle Ages. It is antici¬ pated that it will have something to offer historians and those reading church history or comparative religion, and also perhaps archaeologists and social anthropologists. If it helps to facilitate a greater exchange of ideas between disciplines, then it will have achieved all that was intended, and more. Each chapter is offered with endnotes which are designed to provide sufficient references to both primary and secondary texts to sustain the arguments being offered and encourage further reading. The book is aimed at an English-speaking audience, so references are predominately to works in English. The first chapter necessarily refers to numerous studies of conversion, but otherwise cross-referencing to medieval par¬ allels to the English conversion is kept to a manageable minimum. This volume is not intended to provide a full book-list for even England, let alone western Europe, in the conversion period. Its scope is more spe¬ cific than that. There is no bibliography, in conformity with the format already adopted in its sister volumes, since the referencing system used within each chapter provides adequate details of sources used.

Notes 1

The same basic proposition is implicit throughout H. Mayr-Harting, The

coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn, London, 1991.

5

The convert kings 2

M. Southwold, ‘Religious belief’, Man, xiv, 1979, pp. 628-44. For further

discussion, see p. 16, below. 3

Most obviously by R H. Blair, The world of Bede, London, 1970; Mayr-

Harting, The coming of Christianity; J. Campbell (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons, London, 1982, pp. 41—100. For a wider perspective encompassing western Europe in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages there is a vast literature: as a starting point, see A. Angenendt, Kaiserherrschaft und Konigstaufe: Kaiser, Konige

und

Papste

als

geitliche

Patrone

in

der

abendlandischen

Missionsgeschichte, Berlin and New York, 1984; T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: theology and politics in the Constantinian Empire, Cambridge, Mass., 1993; P. Brown, Power and persuasion in late Antiquity: towards a Christian Empire, Madison, Wisconsin, 1992, and The rise of Western Christendom, Oxford, 1996; A. Gurevich, Historical anthropology of the Middle Ages, Chicago, 1992; J. Herrin, The formation of Christendom, Princeton, New Jersey, 1987; K. Hughes, The church in early Irish society, London, 1966; R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, New York, 1987; S. Mitchell, Anatolia. Land, men and gods, II, The rise of the Church, Oxford, 1993; B. Sawyer, P. Sawyer and I. Wood (edd.), The Christianization of Scandinavia, Alingsas, Sweden, 1987.

6

1

Out of Africa: the nature of conversion

The evidence and its limitations The earliest Anglo-Saxons whom we know to have adopted Christianity while in England did so during the very end of the sixth and the first half of the seventh centuries. The sources available for their study are few, of dubious reliability and demanding of special scholarly skills of inter¬ pretation. These factors have tended to leave interpretation of the English conversion as peculiarly the task of Anglo-Saxonists. Yet it remains so largely by default: such are the intrinsic difficulties of this subject matter and so great is its opacity that academics in other disci¬ plines with an interest in conversion have tended to study more access¬ ible communities than those of early England. To take a seminal early example, Emile Durkheim used a study of ‘traditional’ belief from con¬ temporary, Australian ethnology to provide a base for his own wider theorising concerning religion,1 then extrapolated from it as if contem¬ porary aborigines could be equated with other ‘primitives’ across space and time. Where parallels to the English conversion have been sought, the normal recourse has been to those Germanic regions of continental Europe whence the Angles, Saxons and Jutes believed themselves to have migrated and which can provide a wide range of comparative material across both time and space.2 Yet the ease with which details concerning traditional beliefs and conversion experiences have on occa¬ sion been transferred from one region or one century to another has quite properly been seen as unacceptable by most modern scholars.3 Icelandic sagas cannot be treated, therefore, as a guide to the role of Woden in sixth-century England. Nor can the continental conversions of the eighth century be seen as necessarily indicative of English expe-

7

The convert kings riences a century earlier. Yet they are to an extent contingent, both geo¬ graphically and historically - hence the conundrum facing modern scholars whose insights into the thought processes of English converts are obstructed beyond all else by a lack of appropriate evidence.4 The core of that evidence is provided by four resources: a handful of writers of the period have left us a small number of brief texts con¬ nected with the conversion of the English, but all were written by com¬ mitted Christians who were themselves professional priests and external to Anglo-Saxon society. The papacy was responsible for the bulk of this output;5 the larger part of the additional literature on which we now depend was written in England but generations later, and again by professional clerics whose religious perceptions had more in common with those of a Gregory or an Adomnan than with those adult Anglo-Saxons who first underwent the rite of baptism at the hands of Roman, Frankish or Scottish clergy before c. 650;6 the third is the corpus of place-names which contain the names of gods, elements referring to temples, or similar.7 This body of material is sometimes considered the best single guide to pagan England,8 yet its distribution seems anachronistic when compared with that of sixth- and seventh-century Anglo-Saxon burials and known ritual sites; it therefore remains at present of incalculable value, with much detailed local work still to do. The fourth resource is the material record derived from archaeology. The bulk of this consists of evidence of mortuary practices although there has been some valuable recent discussion of the fragile physical imprint of what might perhaps have been temples or ritual enclosures.9 The contemporaneity of this mass of information is beyond question and much recent effort has been invested in attempts to extract from it significant insights into the social and religious perceptions of the English in the conversion period.10 Archaeological research is advan¬ taged by the unselfconscious nature of some at least of the process of deposition, which promises some relief from the subjectivity which so compromises the relevant texts and the overtly Christian world views which dominate their content. There is, however, a gulf between, on the one hand, a type of evidence which is all but devoid of language and, on the other, recognition of the world of ideas by which such material, and its deposition, should be contextualised. The material record provides valuable information concerning crafts¬ manship and technology, the movement and amassing of goods and the depositional relationships between objects of different types but we cannot now expect to divine from material objects the systems of

8

Out of Africa meaning which gave them value for the individuals who made, used and deposited them.11 This may be less of a barrier to the discussion of conversion if contemporary and characteristically holistic visions of that process be adopted (see below). Yet even then, archaeology alone offers very little scope for the investigation of the relationship between politics and religious affiliation and that is primarily what is under dis¬ cussion in this volume. Most archaeologically-based investigations which ostensibly target preliterate religious ideas turn into discussions of mortuary practices.12 These are related and very important issues and can only be effectively explored by excavation. However, burial is at best only one aspect of religious affiliation or perception of the world. At worst, it may not have been considered something which was inherently religious at all, since the assumption that burial is character¬ ised by religious perceptions and rites owes a great deal to Christianity and is far from universal. On the basis of the available evidence, it is impossible to reconstruct the thought world of the pre-Christian or non-Christian English. We can, of course, postulate a handful of seasonal ceremonies, but the details and purposes are entirely opaque; we know the names of a few gods, but their roles, rites and places within the hearts and minds of individuals and communities are all necessarily obscure; idols appar¬ ently existed and were worshipped but we have no clues nearer than North Germany and Denmark as to their appearance; we know that augury was widespread and we have some limited information about the mechanics which might have prevailed in some instances, but little understanding of the way in which this operated alongside decision¬ making at large or perceptions of the relationship between man and man (and I use the term in the generic sense), and man and the world. Attempts have been made to distinguish pre-Christian religion from mere superstition but this dichotomy is unlikely to be one which these communities would then have either recognised or understood. Our ignorance far outweighs our knowledge, therefore, and this is a major problem when discussing the conversion to Christianity since we cannot easily establish from what people were converting. It is a fact, in a subject desperately short of facts, that we know today far more about early medieval Christianity than non-Christian, Anglo-Saxon religion. It is also a fact that most of the little information we do have about this obscure ideological landscape derives (with incalculable lacunae) from Christian texts, so has already travelled through an inimical and highly misleading cultural net before reaching us. Such information comes not

9

The convert kings from some virgin age of undiluted pre-Christianity but from the age of large-scale contact, cross-fertilisation and condemnation, in the seventh and eighth centuries. It is a relief, therefore, to affirm that it is not the purpose of this volume to offer yet another study of this subject, for which readers are directed in the first instance to the several excellent works cited in note 4 (p. 44). Rather, this work is an attempt to reconstruct the motives which led several powerful English rulers who had been born into nonChristian households to patronise bishops and their clerisies and to accept baptism. At the heart of this volume lies the assumption of a fundamental sylloge between royal and episcopal interests as the driving force behind the English adoption of, and adaptation to, Christianity, and the view that it was this, rather than psychological or intellectual processes, which primarily facilitated and empowered the process of conversion. The nature of the evidence is such that the focus will nec¬ essarily be on the same small number of great kings and ‘overkings’ as were central to my own recent discussion of imperium - that is ‘overkingship’ - in the work entitled An English empire, published in 1995. In this context, contemporary and near-contemporary texts remain the foundation of modern studies of the English conversion,13 and there has been much recent enrichment of our understanding of them. Whereas Bede’s narrative was once treated with reverence as the defini¬ tive statement on the subject which later writers did little more than paraphrase, attention has been diverted to his sources, the likely origins of both information and disinformation reaching him, and of the manner of his selection, presentation and perception of that informa¬ tion - so his purposes. The Historia Ecclesiastica is, therefore, not now treated as a complete description of the Christianisation of the English but as a source requiring detailed and critical analysis. Both Bede and other English writers are today more than ever recognised as belonging within a long tradition of Christian writing which stretches back - via Gregory, various saints’ lives (and particularly those of the desert fathers), early works of exegesis and the ecclesiastical histories of Orosius and Eusebius - to the Bible: this has in turn encouraged modern conversion-period textual scholarship to become immersed in the texts and thought world of late antique Christendom.14 Bedan scholarship has therefore tended to become linear in its approach, backwards and forwards through time, as influences and borrowings are traced from one text to another. Our understanding of authorship and Christian thought in the period has been massively enhanced by this process but 10

Out of Africa studies of the English conversion have become a little introspective at a time when other conversion studies have become increasingly inter¬ disciplinary. This weakness is best explored under the guidance of the first two editions of by far the best known, and arguably also the best, general study of the English conversion this century - The coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England by Henry Mayr-Harting. The first edition, published in 1972, made little effort to cross the traditional boundaries of early medieval textual history, albeit with occasional forays into the archaeological and art historical literature. In contrast, the second edition in 1977 incorporated a new preface, wherein the author suggested certain amendments to his earlier text among which was a comparison of the abandonment of paganism by the Mercians with the Christianisation of the South Sea islanders on Tikopia.15 Mayr-Harting was so struck by this similarity that he returned to it in the course of his comparative study of the conversions of the AngloSaxons and Bulgars, published in 1994,16 to the exclusion of any other works of social anthropology. The lesson that research and publication within the world of social anthropology has some potential to illuminate our understanding of the English conversion is an apt one. What it offers is a valid starting point for discussion of the rationale of the religious affiliation of early English kings by drawing on better documented instances of conversion to Christianity in a variety of other cultures. First, however, we must consider what we mean by such terms as ‘religion’ and ‘conversion’. Changing perceptions of conversion There has been considerable and wide-ranging discussion of both relig¬ ion and conversion over the last century or so. In particular, sociologists and social anthropologists have repeatedly attempted to define religion and construct theories of religious change which they have then tested by observation of various conversion-type experiences. This has culmi¬ nated in a substantial literature which attempts to integrate the study of conversion across disciplines and across space and time, which seeks to find commonality within conversion processes and which recognises that conversion studies have their own history. Social anthropologists enjoy an advantage over medieval historians in their ability to test the¬ ories in contexts selected from among numerous options so as to maxi¬ mise the relevance of the observations made.17 Although the results of such studies have no universal relevance, cumulatively they suggest

11

The convert kings some common features and processes across numerous conversion epi¬ sodes. On this basis the formulation of more general hypotheses becomes possible, and it becomes easier to generate explanations of decision-making as regards conversion with a wider relevance than the individual case study. Such broader enquiries have a very direct rele¬ vance to any attempt to discuss the English convert kings. This is not to argue for some sort of dependence on the part of Anglo-Saxon history on ideas current wdthin the world of social anthropology: it is to suggest that perspectives which derive from the comparison of better informed studies of conversion to Christianity have the capacity to suggest new ways of investigating and interpreting the actions of the Anglo-Saxon elite.18 Twentieth-century assumptions concerning conversion to Christian¬ ity have developed out of the colonial experiences of the Western world post-1500. Recent European civilisation was (and still is) characterised by highly developed state structures, widespread literacy and complex divisions of labour. Christianity, in its variant forms, was viewed by European empire-builders as fundamental to the superiority of their civilisation. They distinguished it - from the religions with which colonialism brought them into contact - in part by the assertion that it was ‘The Truth’, as opposed to the error of other beliefs, in part by claiming a superior rationality, moral code and intellectual coherence on its behalf. In contrast, the religions of other communities with which Europeans came into contact were viewed as irrational and unfocused cults - mere congeries of magic, fetish and taboo - and described as ‘primitive’, ‘childish’ and ‘valueless’. Europeans believed that they had a responsibility to deliver their ‘inferiors’ from error via conversion, as part of the broader process of spreading human enlightenment. The white man envisaged himself as the adult, and the indigenes as children, to be instructed or coerced at need and at will. The model of religious change implicit in this vision was evolution¬ ary and developmental and its value judgements operated entirely to the benefit of Christianity and Western culture. One has only to read the works of Edward Tylor, for example, to grasp just how condescending were nineteenth-century European writers towards other cultures, and why the eradication of deep-rooted cultural prejudice has since become so political an issue.19 Several influential social thinkers operated in this climate. Durkheim proposed that all the principles of religion could be found in its most primitive forms and sought to define it as an inherently collective manifestation of systematised beliefs, symbols and behav-

12

Out of Africa iour.20 Despite his willingness to use terminology such as ‘church’ ubiq¬ uitously for Christian and non-Christian alike, he shared the develop¬ mental theory of religious change common to his age. The concept of religious evolution was given greater intellectual coherence by Max Weber, who distinguished ‘world’ from ‘primitive’ religions on the basis of their superior rationality. In contrast to the Christian or Muslim clerisies, the specialist within an ‘inferior’ religion was considered a mere magician, whose role lay primarily in the manipulation of the everyday concerns of his community.21 Weber was unclear as to the origins of the rationality of world religions, but there was general agreement during the first half of this century that they could be distinguished from more localised or ‘traditional’ cults by reference to an agreed canon of sacred scripture, regularised and liter¬ ate clerisies and a church conditioned by routmised ceremony.22 Standardisation over great distances and long periods of time was seen as typical of ‘world’, but not ‘traditional’, religions, and the value systems ot ‘world religions’ were considered appropriate to people in many different cultural and language groups. To this model was then added a perception of the Avorld-changing’ or ‘transcendental’ capa¬ bilities of ‘world’, but not ‘traditional’, religions, and their tendency to derive from, and produce, prophet figures, charismatics and intellectu¬ als.23 Although the general characteristics which here identify a ‘world reli¬ gion’ such as Christianity retain considerable currency even today, per¬ ceptions of different religions have tended to change in ways which have closed the gap between ‘world religions’ and more localised cults. Numerous studies have revealed a multitude of different, comparatively localised religions, each with complexities such that they defy categor¬ isation as ‘primitive’. Furthermore, there emerged from this work an appreciation that many of the defining characteristics which had hith¬ erto been attached exclusively to world religions were not absent from traditional religions, many of which, for example, produced their own intellectuals and charismatics or had professional clerisies and stan¬ dardised rituals.24 An important consequence has been increasing Western recognition of the legitimacy of other religions over and against western ‘civilisation’ and Christianity,23 which has in turn neces¬ sitated abandonment of all value-laden, unilinear, predictive and evolu¬ tionary models of religious change. To leap forward to the present for the moment, many social anthropologists now acknowledge that the distinction between ‘world’ and ‘traditional’ religions is a construct of

13

The convert kings Western domination of the intellectual process, and the premises and assumptions on which that has been based. As such, the contrast has no independent validity or value as a tool for the analysis of different relig¬ ions and their interactions, the only useful distinction in this context being between Christian and non-Christian. Discussion of conversion has depended heavily on what is meant by religion. Christianity has often been viewed in the West as a monolithic entity — a unitary but highly complex and integrated model of belief, knowledge, authority, canon, organisation and both social and ritual behaviour, all of which a convert was expected to accommodate and accept, via a world-changing process of shedding the old and taking on the new. Although Durkheim broke new ground by emphasising the col¬ lective and social context of religion (see above), others sought a more internalised definition than this trenchantly atheistic approach, and found it in definitions which stressed its psychological parameters. They sought to analyse it as a means of satisfying basic and underlying desires variously in the realms of cognition, solution, expression and adaptation of life and its problems.26 Religion was, therefore, ‘defined as a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life’ — death, frustration and so on.27 In that context, conversion was characterised by profound personal changes in values, beliefs, identity and behaviour. Such psychological definitions aim to distinguish the ‘true convert’ from the fellow passenger, the uncommitted and those who publicly adhere to the ceremonies central to a religion without experiencing internal and psychological change. The narrowness and precision which are the principal characteristics of such definitions have an obvious appeal to those involved in defining conversion, since it focuses atten¬ tion on the ‘real’ convert. It also has a long history: differentiation of ‘conversion’ - involving ‘the reorientation of the soul’ of an individual - from mere ‘adhesion’- so public compliance with ritual and legisla¬ tion without much knowledge or faith, was already dominating the dis¬ cussion of religious change in Antiquity as early as the 1930s.28 This distinction does, however, pose major difficulties. The circum¬ stances under which conversion has been studied have often made it very difficult to ascertain the extent to which this tight definition of a convert has any value, since it requires external judgement of the quality of someone’s belief and the extent of change. Of necessity, there has a been a tendency to accept either an individual’s claim to be a member of a particular religion, or their participation in its ritual as

14

Out of Africa evidence of intellectual conversion. However, neither of these are nec¬ essarily accurate indicators of large-scale intellectual change.29 There is a major difficulty herein, since it is impossible to agree just how radical personal change needs to be before the conversion of an individual be credited. Furthermore, such judgements disempower the participant in favour of the observer, who can embrace or exclude the individual or group from his or her categorisation. One attempt to resolve the subjectivity in this process has led to the exploration of different criteria. So, for example, some sociologists have developed and tested complex sets of what have been termed rhetorical indicators - including biographical reconstruction and the adoption of a new causal schema — in order to determine whether or not an indi¬ vidual should be acknowledged as a convert.30 This, however, has two fundamental weaknesses: it is only remotely practicable in circum¬ stances where comparatively detailed information derives from direct contact between researchers and converts; secondly, it still externalises responsibility for the accreditation of religious affiliation, so disempowers the individual and the context concerned. The entire exercise is so fraught with difficulties that it is best set aside as neither practica¬ ble nor desirable. Attempts to restrict the term ‘conversion’ to the convert experiencing ‘real’ psychological and intellectual change fall down therefore because of the impossibility of excluding those involving themselves in public ceremonies and ritual without significant shifts occurring in their pre¬ existing visions of the world. Empirical difficulties increase as the society which is the object of study recedes from the immediate cogni¬ tive experience of the researcher, for example into the past, but the dif¬ ficulties are also conceptual and relate to the status and authority of individual converts and their and others’ use of language within their world. This does not mean that narrow definitions of conversion are entirely irrelevant, since what has been termed ‘metamorphosis’ in the religious sense undoubtedly occurs. To revert to the seventh century, Bede was born to a family which had accepted baptism no more than two genera¬ tions previously yet he was himself a Christian and a monk in most senses in which the term would have been understood in southern Gaul or Italy at that date. A real transformation had obviously occurred within these two generations which had distanced Bede’s world-picture from that which his grandparents had known and drawn it into confor¬ mity with a very different and very Christian system of belief.

15

The convert kings This apart, however, a much more holistic vision of the convert has far greater value than a narrow one to the scholar seeking to explore conversion in seventh-century England. It is of central importance to recognise that modern definitions of what might now be expected of a Christian convert would be entirely inappropriate to perceptions of conversion and what passed for a convert in the past. This issue has recently been given seminal treatment by Robert Markus, who focused on contemporary confusion in the Roman period over what did, and what did not, identify a convert to Christianity.31 Externals, such as dress and appearance, and negatives, such as the rejection of previous mbits of worship and ritual behaviour, emerge as significant and perhaps even characterising features of contemporary perceptions of the process. Markus’s work provides a salutary warning against adopt¬ ing some current definition of what conversion is, then attempting to impose that retrospectively on the past. Changing perceptions of religion A closely related issue is the nature of religion itself. In the late 1970s, Martin Southwold successfully criticised the then current view that reli¬ gious belief was something which was the preserve of the psychologist and argued instead that basic religious tenets have certain general characteristics: that they are ‘empirically indeterminate’ (that is, they are untestable); that they are axiomatic; that they are symbolic (as opposed to factual); and that they exist in the collective sphere.32 Southwold sought to rationalise religious belief, therefore, within as universal a context as was feasible, and proposed that religion was essentially polythetic, rather than unitary. This proposition has received very considerable support. Southwold’s reasoning has led social anthro¬ pologists to turn away from studying religion as such, in favour of examining broader conceptual systems. He particularly pointed to certain problems which have a relevance to the early Middle Ages, for example that of translation from one language to another where these belonged to very different cultures. Southwold warned against impos¬ ing dogmas on other communities on the basis of unwarranted assump¬ tions concerning the meaning of ‘belief’ within the conceptual framework internal to those communities. Even the term ‘religion’ is now dropping out of use among social anthropologists. Although it will be retained here for pragmatic reasons within what is an essentially his¬ torical work, it is important that we acknowledge the direction being taken by alternative literatures and the imperatives driving them.

16

Out of Africa Following on from Southwold’s views comes the realisation that the academic community has long tended to view Western Christian culture as the norm and other cultures as exotics which diverge from that norm, to be examined from a Western standpoint and articulated within a conceptual system native only to that norm. This point has a direct bearing on our own approach to the rationality of conversion in early England. Take for example the status of faith. Christianity pecu¬ liarly treats belief as the principal defining characteristic of the group member. To a Christian, conversion and belief in Christ’s resurrection are all but synonymous, and this relationship was already articulated in the creed by the fourth century, both as a precursor to the rite of baptism and as a test of clerical orthodoxy.33 This has considerable rel¬ evance to seventh-century England when, for example, those assem¬ bling under Archbishop Theodore’s chairmanship at the synod of Hatfield made a public declaration of their collective adherence to ‘true and orthodox faith’ and the creed {HE, iv, 17 (15)). The centrality of belief within Christianity should not, however, be allowed to mask the fact that belief as such is not central to most other religions and need not be the basis for alternative patterns of behaviour or morality. When the Christian asks questions of non-Christians con¬ cerning belief, these are predicated on the implicit assumption that such centrality is universal. Yet the question, ‘what do you believe?’ - when asked of the non-Christian — may be very far from diagnostic of the essentials of their religion. Rather, the question may be of the most dubious relevance or even incomprehensible within the conceptual framework of that other culture and language. Such lines of enquiry or comparison may introduce precisely those risks of imposing dogmas from outside against which Southwold cautioned. This is a problem which we should beware in current attempts to define and/or interpret sixth- and seventh-century English nonChristian religion, since that has largely been pursued via the question, ‘What did the pagan believe?’. When English clerics set about trans¬ lating Bede’s Latin Historia Ecclesiastica into the vernacular in the late ninth century, they used, for example, the term geleafa to translate Latin fides (faith). Yet the primary meaning of this word lies in the area of ‘permission’ or ‘licence’. Such dissonances suggest that the conceptual framework native to Old English was very different from that reflected in Latin. It may well be that what English non-Christians did or did not ‘believe’ was not diagnostic of their religious perspective. We have perhaps been tending to ask the wrong questions, in which case we have

17

The convert kings necessarily ended up with the wrong answers. In fact, however, the answers are so abstruse that we do not even know this. Differences of language and world-pictures are also problems which bedevil our understanding of the interface between Christian mission¬ aries and English converts in the same period. Those adult nonChristians who declared themselves willing to undergo baptism were, theoretically at least, expected to have received an education in Christianity and then committed themselves to the creed as a precondi¬ tion of that rite. The teaching to which great kings and their immediate followers submitted presumably familiarised these catechumens with a vernacular version of the creed.34 To the missionary, the verbal adher¬ ence of the initiate to his own articles of faith was the critical test which enabled baptism to proceed. If, however, the convert’s own worldpicture placed little or no significance on religious belief or failed even to identify it, then neither this test nor the baptism which followed could have the same meaning for the convert as for the priest. It arguably had even less for the groups of initiates who commonly passed through baptism at this date en masse, supposing that such had been even worse prepared than the privileged few such as King Edwin, who arguably absorbed all the time and energy available from the handful of mission¬ aries in attendance. Baptism was undoubtedly seen by sixth- and seventh-century missionaries working in England as the doorway by which a non-Christian became Christian. It would be most unwise to suppose that it was perceived in the same way by the new convert, for whom it need not have carried much religious meaning at all. Social

anthropologists

have established

that

new

converts

to

Christianity experience very different levels of understanding of, and commitment to, their new religious affiliation and that their attitudes depend primarily on the world-picture with which they were already familiar. Additionally, they exhibit very varied reasons for seeking or accepting membership. Such reasons could be psychological and involve a genuine shift in the belief patterns of the individual. This might bring them into line with parts at least of both the systematised vision of life and the world, and the moral and behavioural demands made upon them by the institutionalised clerisies at the core of Christianity. If relig¬ ion is defined as a means of conceptualising general problems of exis¬ tence,35

then

conversion

might

be

‘internal’,

‘psychological’

or

‘intellectual’. Alternatively, a more holistic vision of both religion and conversion - one which is prepared to accept the viewpoint of the convert as being

18

Out of Africa of at least equal legitimacy with that of the missionary — has the capac¬ ity to reveal an entirely different set of reasons for seeking or accepting membership of a new religion.36 Such an approach avoids the insoluble problem of distinguishing between different categories of initiates and empowers the convert’s vision of the meaning of the whole process. Reasons for religious change which are commonly identified are improved access to power or social status, the desire to conform with kin or the wider community, a search for better medical care or educa¬ tion, or resource-access and advantages deemed the exclusive property of members of the religious group into which the convert seeks access.37 In such instances, conversion should be seen less as an individual’s objective in its own right than as a strategy adopted in pursuit of some¬ thing else. Such a conversion may be devoid of any immediate, psycho¬ logical or intellectual significance for the individual. Markus’s point concerning the validity of contemporary perspectives on conversion (see above) leads on to a very obvious methodological problem: all studies of conversion prior to living memory rely heavily on contemporary or near-contemporary literature, almost all of which was produced by the missionaries themselves or by members of the recipient community - often several generations later - who had achieved intellectual conversion and adopted much at least of the thought-world of the new religion. Such texts are characterised by the assumption that conversion fell, from the very beginning, within the tighter definition discussed above, and involved the inception of belief as that was understood exclusively by the Christian. They habitually speak for converts as if their lives had been radically changed. The voices of the converts themselves are invariably silent - and this con¬ trasts with the widespread use of converts’ own accounts in modern sociological studies. This issue is particularly relevant to poorly docu¬ mented periods like seventh-century England, and the retrospective claims made by authors such as Bede and Stephanus for the conversion of entire kingdoms in a single episode. These are generally phrased as if the individuals concerned were all converted intellectually and psychologically. We are left, thereby, with passages such as: ‘So, King Edwin, with all the nobles of his people and very many of the common¬ ers received the faith and regeneration by holy baptism’ (the opening lines of HE, n, 14), as our principal guide to the nature and spread of Christianity in Northumbria in the 620s. Such visions of the process are powered by their own internal assumptions, which are those of later Christian authors and not of the

19

The convert kings converts concerned. A recurring feature is exaggeration of the meaning¬ fulness of conversion which derives not from an accurate appreciation of what was occurring but from a vision of what being Christian meant to the writer a century later. What distinguished the convert from the non-Christian in such retrospective narratives was neither under¬ standing nor belief but primarily the rite of baptism. That and that alone was singled out as proof that radical change had indeed occurred. Unbaptised kings sometimes patronised and enriched bishops but such were neither converts nor Christians until baptism had occurred. One consequence is an extreme view in these texts of the potency of the missionary as a catalyst of change, yet these narratives portray their clerical heroes as operative in a context which belies that such changes generally occurred and requires that societal and political aspects be prioritised above and beyond the response of the individual.38 The different perception of baptism by convert and missionary was, there¬ fore, and still remains, a crucial issue within the English conversion, of no less significance as regards the conversion of kings as other sections of society.

From Africa to England Perhaps the most important single landmark in the development of conversion studies was Robert Horton’s attempt to contextualise and explain the conversion of traditional African communities to one or other of the world religions.39 Horton offered what might today be crit¬ icised as an overly psychological definition of a typical non-Christian African cosmology as one which ‘provides an impressive instrument for explanation, prediction and control’.40 Such cosmologies character¬ istically have, Horton suggested, two tiers, a lower one peopled by lesser spirits of importance to the local community and its microcosm, and a higher one which was the property of a supreme being and of rel¬ evance to the macrocosm. Where the intellectual needs of a society are characterised by a need to explain the microcosm, then the lesser spirits tend to dominate the cosmology. In Horton’s view, it is the expansion of the limited horizons of a microcosmic world outwards towards the macrocosm which leads to the marginalisation of lesser spirits, the elaboration of theory concerning the supreme being and the develop¬ ment of a battery of new rituals by which to approach that figure and direct its influence, new moral codes conditioned by the man/supreme being relationship and a growing distinction between man and the

20

Out of Africa divine. Where this shift in the horizons of a traditional society coincides with access to a world religion, then conversion to that religion is likely to be adopted as a convenient means of attaining a necesary end point.41 Horton’s theory has important resonances and has since conditioned much discussion of conversion from traditional to world religions. It offered a context within which to seek to understand the very different responses of various traditional societies to incoming world religions and particularly the varying robustness of existing cultures to proselytisation. Within the process of conversion, it empowered the recipient community over against the missionary, whose responsibility had hith¬ erto been assumed to be paramount whatever the outcome, and it acknowledged and legitimised the highly conditional acceptance of baptism which is such a feature of much modern conversion to Christianity.42 Horton’s was, however, even in the 1970s, far from being a universal theory of conversion, since it was always specific to colonial eras in which traditional societies need to adjust to contact with a macrocosm characterised not just by different religious precepts but also by differ¬ ent technologies and different systems of economic activity, societal control and authority. Even within the African context, it has, of course been criticised and amended.43 So, for example, Horton’s distinction between the microcosm and the macrocosm has proved less clear-cut than he had proposed, and his emphasis on the active role of the convert has been redressed to some extent by reiteration of the power of the institutions of world religions combined with colonialism as engines of change.44 Yet his prediction that many traditional religions would have developed the role of supreme being if insulated from world religions but not necessarily insulated from other cultural and societal processes - has found some support.45 So too has his recognition of the adaptabil¬ ity of many religions in the face of new forms of worship - and this is an important issue in an English context. Indeed, the realisation that all religions are in some sense mutable in the way that they relate to larger cultural structures has gone a long way towards undermining the special value of the notion of ‘syncretism’ to conversion studies,46 and the emphasis has tended to shift from the more restricted study of transi¬ tion — so conversion over a limited time-scale — to the longer term pro¬ cesses of change within cultural systems of which religion forms only a part. To give an example which has some value in an early English context,

21

The convert kings divination and augury have long retained both credibility and popular¬ ity alongside acceptance of baptism among populations in various parts of Africa.47 Such might be considered syncretic, but there is now a growing tendency to attach greater weight to the individual elements within such congeries of religious ideas than is inherent within the uni¬ linear, evolutionary models from which concepts such as ‘transition’ and ‘syncretism’ necessarily derive. Religion is an essential and integral part of everyday, practical, cultural activity, as well as a vehicle for understanding the world, and in most societies economic, political and artistic behaviour are permeated by its ideas and symbolism.48 Divination and augury flourish within communities where they are valued sufficiently to render them resistant to the hostile attentions of incoming religious professionals and where they are integrated in complex ways with other cultural strategies. In such contexts they may continue to be valued even among those converts who have experienced a more radical type of conversion. As such, they are an entirely legiti¬ mate part of the religious and cultural perceptions of those societies and not just some embarrassing survival from an illegitimate past, the rapid demise of which should be anticipated. This too has an obvious relevance to Anglo-Saxon England, wherein attempts to study non-Christian religion depend heavily on the identification of specific terminology, practices and beliefs within texts which were written for Christian purposes and were generally inimical to traditional religion.49 There are considerable dangers in the assump¬ tion that such were necessarily the central or defining characteristics of English religion prior to sustained contact with Christianity. Yet this issue becomes even more controversial when it is recognised that the non-Christian religion of early Anglo-Saxons had numerous points of contact with Christianity from the initial migration period onwards, simply because the British indigenes were Christian. There was no insular, pre-contact period and the problems of defining non-Christian religion as being something entirely distinct from Christianity and unique unto itself thereby become unmanageable.50 Contact-period religion is to some extent accessible: pre-Augustine, English religion is lost beyond the static of the conversion period. All religions are (or were) adaptable - as Horton recognised - and this seems to have been true of Anglo-Saxon religion, at least when that emerges in the seventh and eighth centuries. As such, it was a grouping of ideas and myths, rituals, behaviours and attitudes, the cohesiveness of which was conditional. Not all the components were accepted,

22

Out of Africa adapted or rejected in the same way or within the same time-scale, with or without external religious colonisation. But so too did Christianity necessarily appear as less monolithic and systematic to the conversion-period Anglo-Saxons than it was to seem to Bede and later Christian writers. From the very variable glimpses which they achieved, the English are most unlikely to have gained a vision of a developed theology and conceptual framework, particularly given the problems of language which were involved at several levels. In this context, it seems pointless to consider Christianity as a unitary phe¬ nomenon but rather as something which can only usefully be consid¬ ered in polythetic terms, so as a ‘congeries of mythic, doctrinal, ritual, epistemological and sociological elements’ capable of ‘separate and uneven influences in different cultural contexts’.51 That congeries did of course have considerable powers of internal cohesion which it tended to exhibit over time, but at first acquaintance such would have been far from obvious. Both non-Christian and Christian religions in seventhcentury England are, therefore, best approached in polythetic terms and viewed as congeries, some aspects of which had potential to cross over with or without others under the stimulus of cultural contact or more deliberate borrowing. Such reasoning offers considerable potential for an individual to be termed a ‘convert’ by contemporaries or near-contemporaries at the point at which they adhered to whichever specific characteristics they considered diagnostic, irrespective of the extent to which their worldpicture had actually changed. In early England, only some Britons among existing Christians refused to acknowledge that baptism made a Christian convert of an Anglo-Saxon. The logic was impeccable since baptism required the adherence of the catechumen to the creed which in turn defined Christianity. This perspective was shared by Pope Gregory and later English writers. The unbaptised was pagan, the bap¬ tised was Christian: it was as simple as that, provided only that the Christian refrain from pagan ritual, in which case they were in danger of being termed apostate. This is, however, a fundamentally Christian perspective and not one which need have been shared by non-Christian contemporaries. There was room, therefore, for more than one under¬ standing of both Christianity and conversion in England c. 597—670, and there were surely many. The opinion of foreign clerics regarding what did and what did not constitute Christianity differed radically, of course, from the unbaptised secular indigenes, but probably almost as much from the newly baptised English. Even many of the indigenes who

23

The convert kings had been educated for the priesthood are likely to have had less in common with expatriate Italian, Frankish or Irish monks than with their own English kin as regards their conceptual systems. Add to this the problems of translation, from and into Latin, Frankish and Gaelic. There was also, therefore, as much room for alternative understandings of Christianity by non-Christians and new converts alike as there was for different understandings of pre-existing religion by Christians. In some respects, Horton’s theory of conversion does not translate very readily from modern Africa to seventh century England. Even taking account of the out-datedness of some of his assumptions, it must be acknowledged that his theory is posited on processes of cultural contact which are based on political, intellectual and economic coloni¬ alism. Although it would be perverse to dismiss the significance of England’s contacts with Rome, Frankia and the Celtic world during the conversion process, those contacts are not readily described as colonial. The perplexing question of Frankish political influence in Kent apart,52 the Anglo-Saxons are more readily characterised as the incoming colo¬ nial power in an insular context than are any of their neighbours.53 Nor did those same neighbours enjoy substantial technological advantages as regards production, communication or warfare. Certainly specific technologies were routinely utilised by specialists within contemporary Christian communities but not by the English - and the production of vellum and paper, the use of writing and coining (in Frankia) are impor¬ tant examples of relevance to this study.54 Yet it would be unwise to suppose that the English conversion was powered by a desire to obtain access to these technologies per se. Nor, obviously, was it forced on the Anglo-Saxons by external powers. Horton’s emphasis on the capacity of traditional religions to change has found wide support. A crucial variable governing the process of conversion is the mutability of pre-existing thought patterns and values within the community and its social structures. Where cosmologies are comparatively flexible and belief is of low value within an existing world-picture, then elite groups are freer than otherwise to explore the social and political value of alternative clerisies and theories of organ¬ isation.55 If access to those assets required baptism, then that elite might well judge it to be a price worth paying. Indeed, it might not in the first instance be seen as a significant cost at all. The result in contemporary Christian parlance was a convert, and the beginnings of the process of what is now termed Christianisation.

24

Out of Africa Conversion and authority In most colonial contexts, missionaries have gained a toe-hold only after existing political regimes have been undermined, often either directly or indirectly by an external power with an interest in promoting Christianity. Yet this did not occur in England, where the conversion period was characterised above all else by the consolidation of the power of ever fewer English kings over society at large. Hardly any foreign lay rulers entered English territory during the period and the few who did either left quickly or perished by the sword. Anglo-Saxon relig¬ ion was almost certainly responding already to internal societal change even before the arrival of Augustine, since that was a normal process. The appropriation of divine-descent as something exclusive to the greater royal lineages is likely to have been occurring during the latter part of the sixth century.56 Mortuary rites display shifts in fashion throughout the nonChristian period and continued to do so well into the seventh century. Such would be observable now by archaeologists even without the impressive boat burials of Suffolk in the early conversion period, which arguably made a powerful political and ideological statement to con¬ temporaries.57 Ritual and ritual sites were also changing, with the pos¬ sible emergence of pagan ‘temples’ of some sort and artificial ritual complexes, perhaps for the first time in an English context in the decades around 600.58 English religion had, therefore, its own internal capacity for change even without colonisation by Christianity and was capable either of reacting internally or of adopting protoypes and ideas from a variety of donor societies, both Christian and non-Christian and both present and past.59 It was clearly in close contact with Christianity, since British and English communities had shared space for generations in most areas of England. Horton’s contrast of the microcosm and the macrocosm does have some place in the study of English conversion. From what little we know of existing cult it would seem to be focused on sites with a compar¬ atively localised clientele. The literary evidence refers unambiguously to idols, shrines, groves and trees as objects or places of worship.60 Although veneration at a particular shrine may have had some poten¬ tial to encourage the congregation of participants from a considerable distance, the idol is portrayed as individually the object of prayer rather than as an icon symbolic of some universal deity, in the manner of the Christian cross for example. Each was probably associated primarily

25

The convert kings with a particular ‘people’, a ‘provincia’ (‘kingdom’), a ‘regio’ (a small kingdom or subdivision of a larger one) and/or perhaps a kingship, wherein it and the priesthood who presided there played an important identifying role.61 Congregation at a cult site and collaboration in specific rituals there around a priest - as in HE, n, 13 - was arguably a powerful factor in the reinforcement of the self-identity and cohesion of each and every local Anglo-Saxon community Kingship was, however, increasingly coming to transcend the boundaries of a particular community and extend to other, similarly cult-defined communities. The interests of greater kings were arguably ill-served by the community-forming and -defining prop¬ erties of local shrines. The larger the clusters of peoples subject to their kingships the broader their visions of society necessarily became and the greater the impetus to centralise. In such circumstances, local cults probably became ever less appropriate as the partners of kings at the core of society. More powerful kings then had good reason to develop or import cults with more universal and hierarchical characteristics with which their own core communities could identify on a local level but which could then be used as a mechanism for colonial control of dependent communities. Had English kingship developed in isolation from Christianity then existing religious institutions might well have accommodated the institutionalisation of larger kingships. England was, however, far from isolated. Christian cult offered a range of characteristics which kings were increasingly coming to value and access. It carried little baggage within a contemporary, English context and had no pre-existing clerisy with established interests. It could be focused, de novo, at royal sites in support of the relevant king’s own centralising authority, in contrast to existing cult sites. Its senior personnel could assume authority over the totality of a king’s territories irrespective of internal boundaries between different peoples and cults and by virtue of his kingship and ‘overkingship' - just as Wilfrid did under Oswiu (Vita Wilfridi liii). It offered such kings monotheistic models of authority which accorded well with their own, wider and more macrocosmic political ambitions. Yet at the same time it accommodated the religious needs of local com¬ munities via the saints who populated a dependent but integrated level of the Christian cosmology. It offered rulers an hierarchically organised clerisy, which initially operated primarily under the patronage and pro¬ tection of the king himself. It offered also standardised and routinised rituals which could be endlessly replicated at cult sites established by

26

Out of Africa kings in every province under the control of themselves and their bishops and used to refocus local populations on a political structure which they themselves headed. Great kings arguably sought instruments capable of consolidating, reinforcing and extending their own power, and making the world over which they ruled more effectively plural than it had been hitherto, in their own interest. They found crucial allies in Christian bishops, who were generally prepared to place their skills, ideologies and organising capabilities at the disposal of convert kings in return for royal backing for missionary activity. That fact, beyond any other, made many of the greatest kings welcoming and committed patrons of Christian mission¬ aries. Those of the same generation who abstained (like Penda of the Mercians, for example) probably did so more out of hostility to rivals who were convert kings than out of any particular animosity towards Christianity itself (HE, iii, 21). In a sense, therefore, Christianity was adopted in England because systems of authority and organisation which were inherent within it offered attractive solutions to political problems confronting powerful kings and ‘overkings’. It was not primarily the intellectual or spritual message which attracted such kings — indeed none can be shown to have grasped such messages in any sense meaningful to a Christian. Rather, they clearly and visibly took over the ideas about organisation, hierar¬ chy and authority which were on offer. If such convert kings were con¬ scious of the remainder of the package then they may have believed they could ignore it. Given the dependence of the early Christian priesthood on royal protection and patronage, such assumptions on their part were arguably justified, though they took insufficient account of the develop¬ mental and mind-changing capacity of Christian missionary activity over a longer period and the adhesiveness of their message once their authority had become established. Yet that was hardly their concern. Horton’s treatment of microcosm and macrocosm was predicated on assumptions based on colonialism, where European influence was the critical stimulus to the conceptual shift from local to wider horizons. In conversion period England, the principal external impetus which brought Christianity into the microcosm was still English. That is a sig¬ nificant difference. His thesis does, however, encourage us to look beyond the English conversion as a single phenomenon to the conver¬ sion of localities and local communities, and the stimuli at work therein. It is in that context that royal power was very often external to - and sometimes perceived as alien by - the regional community, even

27

The convert kings despite its Englishness. Take, for example, the hostility of the monks of Bardney in Lindsey to the deposition there of the body of King Oswald of Bernicia, whom they considered had been an external oppressor of their own province (HE, hi, 11). In such a context, the king represented a macrocosmic world view and the local community which resented his rule a microcosmic one. The emphasis placed by Horton on the recipient community in a conversion situation has been reinforced by much recent work. Indeed, it has since been concluded that ‘in accounting for religious develop¬ ment, the local perspective is the primary reality’, and the English conversion is now generally interpreted as a process of cultural negotia¬ tion, rather than subordination.62 Several variables which are often highlighted in conversion studies have little or no relevance in this context. Take for example, the degree of popular satisfaction with traditional religion, or the economic and scientific development of either the target or colonising cultures.63 There is no reason to think that non-Christian English religion had failed in the perspective of most of its adherents - that is, the increasingly dominant kings and their asso¬ ciates excepted, whose interests led them outside. Whatever else drove the English conversion, it was not primarily popular disenchantment with, and abandonment of, existing religious provision in search of a more meaningful alternative. It is difficult to identify any popular element within the process of conversion within the first half century or so and there was certainly some hostility expressed towards Christianity and the political leaders who imposed it, for example, at the East Anglian court c. hT7 (see below). However, the little we think we know about non-Christian English religion may have been just as specific to the social elite as was early English Christianity. To an extent, but an unknown extent, so too was the very notion of Englishness. Persuading the Saxons Popular religion is necessarily a red-herring in the context of seventhcentury England and cannot aid our interpretation of the conversion as a process, if only for lack of data. It was, rather, social and political change - imposed on the majority by a powerful but numerically small minority - which can be seen to have planted Christianity at the very heart of power. The presence of missionaries was condoned not by the general populace but by powerful kings whose own political ambitions became closely bound up with the advancement of particular Christian cults and clerisies. The comparative safety in which these missionaries

28

Out of Africa operated is evidenced by the lack of clerical martyrs; but this is indica¬ tive not of widespread enthusiasm for Christianity but of a mix of royal power, on the one hand, and broad acceptance of royal authority on the other. Missionaries operated under the protection of rulers, and this was granted them not only by baptised kings but also by some unbaptised rulers, such as yEthelberht of the Kentings (before 597), Edwin of the Deirans (prior to 627) and the West Saxon Csedwalla. In practice, of course, there may well have been very little difference in their attitudes to Christian clergy before and after baptism, but it was, in the last resort, the great English kings of the period whose authority enabled clerics to baptise large numbers of their subjects. Without their active support, the foreign missionaries who conducted the actual ceremonies were powerless to persuade many to accept the rite at all. Indeed, wellknown narrative accounts tell of the abandonment of the task of conversion by Italians, Franks and Irish alike,64 when royal protection and support were less than total and/or the populace more intransigent than the individual missionary had expected. Convert kings ensured that their immediate associates were prepared to involve themselves in a collective act of baptism, and the example of the whole court made the rite fashionable among numerous of their dependents. And what sort of converts did the English make? To take a single, but late, example from within the available narrative tradition, one which is not discussed elsewhere in this volume, Bishop Wilfrid arrived in the kingship of the South Saxons (Sussex) after being expelled from his native Northumbria - and from all the kingships subordinate to his ‘overkingship’ - by King Ecgfrith (in the early 680s).65 He went immedi¬ ately to King TEthelwalh, who was a close political associate of the Mercian court (where the king had been baptised, although that fact was omitted from the text here under discussion66). TEthelwalh ‘immediately promised him such friendship under a treaty of peace that none of his enemies should strike terror into him by the threatening sword of any warlike foe, or undo the treaty thus inaugurated between them by the offer of rewards or gifts, however great’. Wilfrid then preached ‘for many months’. According to Wilfrid’s hagiographer, his message consisted of urging his audience to repent and accept baptism before the imminent and damning arrival - for the non-baptised - of the Kingdom of God, and he backed this up by emphasising ‘the works of Almighty God to confound idolatry, from the beginning of the world down to the day of judgement, when eternal punishment will be pre-

29

The convert kings pared for sinners and everlasting life for the elect of God’. There fol¬ lowed a mass-baptism, ostensibly involving ‘many thousands’. Some were willing participants but some complied only in obedience to the king. Wilfrid baptised the South Saxons, therefore, with the full support of their ruler and with his insistence that his people should participate in the ritual which was being offered. Behind the king lay the implicit power and authority of the even more potent Mercian court. King Wulfhere, 2Ethelwalh’s erstwhile godfather, protector and patron, was now dead but his brother yEthelrasd was at least as powerful a king and the principal focus of opposition to King Ecgfrith inside England, albeit not actively at war with him.67 The South Saxon king was active as a surrogate for the Mercian royal house in protecting an influential Northumbrian refugee who was considered a potent mediator with the divine. The external considerations weighing on the king’s patronage of, and friendship with, Wilfrid were emphasised by the ‘treaty’ between king and bishop, augmented by gift-giving and -receiving, which explic¬ itly provided him with personal protection. This unequal - but intimate and mutual - relationship conditioned the societal and political context within which Wilfrid was enabled to preach; and it amounted to a treaty between two powerful men, one of whom was a noble exile and the other a minor king, a treaty which enshrined their friendship, amity and co-operation within a much broader diplomatic context. In the opinion of Stephanus, some of Wilfrid’s new converts sub¬ mitted themselves to baptism out of respect for royal authority. Others were persuaded, having listened to Wilfrid. If, however, his preaching was anything like this representation of it, then they accepted baptism as an act of insurance intended to stave off, by the efficacy of the ritual itself, the risk of some ill-understood but apparently imminent calam¬ ity which the bishop claimed was about to descend upon them. Gregory’s letter to King 2Ethelberht referred to the same ending of the world (HE, i, 32) and this may have been a common method of secur¬ ing converts. Many religions invest efficacy in ritual per se,68 and the apparently widespread use by English non-Christians of animal sacri¬ fice as a rite of propitiation implies that they did so. Their perception of baptism may well, therefore, have been in terms of its mechanical effectiveness against the calamity which had been urged upon them. This is very different from the Christian perception of baptism as a rite of passage to a new state of mind characterised by changed beliefs. The South Saxons provide, therefore, a good example of the sort of

30

Out of Africa factors which could bring large numbers to accede to baptism. Coercion was clearly important but it was not the only factor; otherwise, Wilfrid is portrayed as offering baptism as a one-off, ritual solution to the immi¬ nent disaster of which he was himself the herald.69 His approach has some similarities with the stress induction which some modern cults are popularly believed to utilise so as to make the targeted individual recep¬ tive to new ideas but it seems unlikely that Wilfrid was able to generate sufficient fear to achieve many converts just by this means.70 The promise of continuing well-being was an enticing message and the rite which Wilfrid prescribed had no obvious dangers. Wilfrid’s converts cannot be assumed to have experienced any sort of life-changing revela¬ tion either before or in consequence of baptism, to have learnt anything very meaningful about Christianity, or to have come to any under¬ standing of the behavioural changes which that might later impose upon them. Via baptism, however, they became Christians in the view of other Christians, and were exposed to the authority of a bishop who was supported by the king. That construct had the ultimate potential to challenge - and eventually to alter and Christianise - existing patterns of behaviour and belief. Christian conversion was, therefore, in this instance conditioned by an array of political calculations regarding their own empowerment and their own agendas by king and bishop. Baptism stands out yet again as the critical rite,71 for which the bishop strove and which he — and later Christian authors — considered dis¬ tinguished the convert (that is, the new Christian) from the nonChristian. Apostasy is in many respects the touchstone of these different percep¬ tions of religious affiliation and practice. The very idea is charged with pejorative meaning for the Christian, and the individuals who were labelled apostate by Bede and others were portrayed either implicitly or explicitly as condemned not just by man but also by God. Such anathematisation still, even today, retains some potency across a wide spec¬ trum of modern Western viewpoints. Bede’s perception of apostasy depended, however, on a very particular world-picture which was shared by very few, if any, Anglo-Saxons in the first generation of conversion. Crucially, the individual who was said to have apostatised is most unlikely to have shared such a world-picture. Efforts will be made in succeeding chapters to explore the objectives of such apostates and reveal their underlying rationality. The terms ‘apostasy’ and ‘apos¬ tate’ will continue to be used of necessity since there are no simple alter¬ natives. It must be stressed, however, that they will be employed

31

The convert kings non-judgmentally as descriptions of a particular sub-set of behaviour. For the purposes of this work, an apostate was an individual who prac¬ tised non-Christian rites after having been baptised. Tensions exist, therefore, between different visions of the English conversion. What some have termed superficial conversion (so ‘adhe¬ sion’, as Nock defined it) was arguably the norm but some individuals - such as Deusdedit, the first English archbishop - may have undergone a fuller process of change which had spiritual qualities and the capac¬ ity to alter the very intellectual and emotional substance of the individ¬ ual. Equally, of course, it is possible that he did not, and any attempt to distinguish ‘real’ converts from others will founder on the illogicality of the criteria adopted. All converts were identified by the same rite of initiation - baptism. Almost all were portrayed as intellectual converts - so as ‘believers’ in the full Christian meaning of belief laid out above - by the Christian authors on whose later works we now very largely depend.72 Even so, Christian missionaries are unlikely to have consid¬ ered that their converts did share their vision of the world. For example, King 2Ethelberht’s lack of interest in the papal agenda for wider conversion, even following his own baptism, seems to have been reported back to Rome as a matter of grave concern to the mission in 601 (see below, pp. 90-102). This at least corroborates the Kentish king’s independence in matters of religious policy and his detachment from the papal agenda being pursued by Augustine. He was a baptised Christian but there must be some doubt as to whether or not he ‘believed’, in any Christian sense of that term. His Christianity cer¬ tainly differed from that of his clerics and perhaps also his Frankish wife, who had been born and raised within Frankish Christianity. Then again, when writing to King Edwin and urging conversion on him, Pope Boniface focused on the potency of the Christian God and the con¬ trasting impotence of idols and augury, the rejection and destruction of which constituted a fundamental part of what he sought (see below, p. 165). The negative aspects of this message have obvious parallels with perceptions of the convert highlighted by Robert Markus in the context of antiquity (see above, p. 16). Much of Pope Boniface’s letter was probably incomprehensible to Edwin, even after translation, but the potential offered by a God with universal attributes and potency through both time and space will not have been lost on him and it was this on which both Pope Boniface and Bishop Paulinus focused. Gregory too sought to entice yEthelberht into a closer collaboration with his own purposes by emphasising the potency of the Christian God as the

32

Out of Africa deity responsible for empires such as that of Constantine. In Gregory’s world-picture, Christianity and its cosmology was the religion of the Empire and deeply embedded in the Justinian and post-Justinian polity in which TEthelberht was being invited to participate. Paulinus was as much Gregory’s disciple as was Augustine, and both offered royal patrons opportunities to enhance and regularise their own power. Bishop Daniel later sent to St Boniface in Germany (c. 723-4) in order to give his young friend the benefit of his own long experience of con¬ verting the English. He proposed that Boniface should dispute with the heathen so as to uncover and ridicule the lack of system within nonChristian cosmology and mythology regarding, for example, the nature of creation. He was to highlight the greater rationality of biblical treat¬ ment of the same subject. He attacked also the logic of sacrificing to the gods in expectation of temporal profit.73 His strategy was in many ways profoundly negative. It was by focusing on the unsystematic nature of the non-Christian world-picture and by undermining belief in the effi¬ cacy of existing rites and divinities that he recommended tempting indi¬ viduals towards conversion.74 Only with that achieved should pagans be offered a Christian message. King Edwin was similarly represented by Bede as having abandoned his idols on the occasion of promising to accept Christ, a year previous to his eventual baptism (HE, n, 9). Being Christian was, therefore, associated as much with what men could be persuaded not to do or believe as by any other criteria. This again has echoes of the Roman world (see above, p. 16). In seeking converts among the English, Christian missionaries there¬ fore seem to have been prepared to shape their message to the needs and world-pictures which confronted them, in the expectation that they might, with baptism achieved by almost any means and under any pretext, work thereafter towards a shift from adhesion towards deeper and more radical conversion. Such need not always have occurred, of course, and even when it did it would be unwise to assume that the reli¬ gious perceptions of the convert were ever likely to approximate to those of a foreign missionary.75 This point may be usefully illustrated by a better evidenced and more recent example. Missionaries in pre-war Tongaland recognised that converts were initially enticed by various socio-cultural inducements to accept baptism even though they found the religious message which they were receiving unattractive and even incomprehensible. They anticipated, however, a gradual deepening of conversion which they expected to be able to monitor through the acquiescence of their initiates in other sacraments.76 In England,

33

The convert kings however, only a minority of missionary initiatives enjoyed the man¬ power or the long-term resourcing to systematise the process in this way in the first generation of conversion: the successive, short-lived mission¬ ary efforts in Wessex and among the East Saxons provide relevant examples of ‘stop—start’ style conversions. Most communities in the first generation or so of conversion rarely if ever saw a cleric, so were left to devise their own means of accommodating themselves to Christianity or Christianity to themselves, yet almost nothing of this comes out in the limited literary evidence available to us. Christianity and behaviour In some areas of Anglo-Saxon life there were very obvious difficulties when missionaries attempted to enforce what they considered to be behaviour appropriate to the convert. Polygamy was perhaps the norm among English aristocracies but was unacceptable to the clerisy who introduced the notions of monogamy and legitimacy. Even so, they seem to have been no more capable of excluding the illegitimate sons of kings from the succession than were their counterparts in sixth- and seventh-century Gaul,77 although legitimacy did eventually begin to affect inheritance among the English to the detriment of the offspring of less regular liaisons. Marriage within prohibited degrees of kinship is another example of such difficulties. That an heir might marry his step-mother or some other close relation was arguably important within traditional inheritance practices but became an issue after baptism.78 There were further problems in matters as mundane and everyday as diet, the treatment of horses and consumption of horse flesh, personal dress and appearance - specifically as regards hairstyle and facial hair - and observance of the sabbath and feast days within the Christian calendar. When Kentish royal legislation first did more than merely protect churchmen and their property (during the reign of Eorcenberht: 640X664), it reportedly focused on some of these areas:79 idols were to be foresaken and destroyed — the negative criteria once again emerge - and the Lent fast was to be enforced. English

converts

experienced

considerable

difficulty

with

the

individualism inherent in Christian doctrine, so for example with the concept of personal sin and guilt. The ultimate destiny of the soul of the individual as distinct from those of close kin was probably difficult to accept within a culture which emphasised the mutuality of responsibility in all matters legal and societal within the kin or the warband.80 So too did Christian views on the efficacy of relics and on

34

Out of Africa the continuing community of the dead with the living pose problems of comprehension as well as adhesion within English society.81 AngloSaxons clearly placed considerable importance on descent and utilised various means - ceremonial, physical and oral - to commemorate some at least of the dead, but they are unlikely to have been well-placed to assimilate Christian perceptions of the afterlife and of the conditions which facilitated access to it. Indeed, very much of this will have been conceptually abstruse and much may also have seemed positively unde¬ sirable. A more immediate tension existed between traditional and Christian practices regarding who could and who could not act as a priest. According to Tacitus, in ancient Germany the head of the household was responsible for taking and interpreting auspices relating to private matters.82 Bede portrayed King Edwin as himself giving thanks to his gods for the safe delivery of his daughter - so presumably making sac¬ rifice83 - and both augury and private sacrifice attracted much hostile attention from the Church later.84 Even if the conversion of elites marginalised and eventually closed pagan cult sites,85 it is unlikely to have had much immediate impact on rites of propitiation within the individual household. Christianity may therefore have become the relig¬ ion of king-centred ceremonial and public occasions alongside nonChristian rites within the household. The latter were still considered sufficiently valuable to be conducted, despite public anathema, well into the next century. The upsurge of private monasteries during Bede’s own later lifetime might to some extent reflect attempts by the heads of wealthy households to retain the traditional role of priest and compe¬ tence to intercede with the divine, translated into terms which con¬ formed with the new religion.86 The only obvious alternative was to employ one of the clerical professionals whom Christians considered had a monopoly in such areas as intercession. That is of course what eventually occurred but the proliferation of churches and priests which this involved is characteristic not of the seventh or eighth centuries but the tenth. The role of women may also have been much affected by conversion. By the sixth century, Christians had accepted a virtual male monopoly of all ranks within the priesthood. Although many powerful women in Barbarian Europe were patrons of the Church, more active options within its ranks were limited to the government of the nunneries of Merovingian Gaul and, in England, the double monasteries housing both monks and nuns. There are occasional signs that royal women

35

The convert kings played a role in religious policy in the conversion period - and King Rsedwald’s wife is just one example of this (HE, n, 12 and 15), but it may well be misguided to attempt to distinguish religion from dynastic politics and socially aceptable behaviour in this context. When convert kings were in need of divine aid they tended to give their female kin into the service of the Christian God. Several, such as Edwin and Oswiu, did this at such moments of crisis that the act itself was necessarily invested with considerable potency. The obvious parallel is with dynastic alliance, and the central idea implicit in these transactions may well be that of an alliance between king and Christ, cemented by the marriage of the ‘bride of Christ’. In general, however, it has been argued that the era was one which witnessed the role and power of women in decline as a direct consequence of conversion to Christianity.87 There is some evidence which suggests that even some kings altered their religious affiliation and only then discovered that this involved them in unpalatable adjustments to existing norms of behaviour. One such was King Oswiu: having taken the highly public step of legitim¬ ising a particular group of clergy at the expense of those hitherto at the helm of the Bernician church at Whitby in 664, he had invested too heavily in his volte face to retract. Yet his frustration thereafter at the intricacies of canonical consecration to the episcopacy comes over quite clearly (see below, p. 264). Again, more recent studies provide apt par¬ allels.

When

considering

the

conversion

of

Muslim

Javans

to

Christianity, Robert Hefner noted that most public converts had no more than the most elementary understanding of it. When Christianity later made unexpected demands, the public commitment and self-legit¬ imation which they had already invested in most cases ensured their continuance. That in turn brought about an unanticipated and more radical process of individual resocialisation,88 so, in layman’s terms, a deepening of conformity with the new religion. In practice, the conflicting claims of rival priesthoods are often treated experimentally by recipient communities, to be judged in the immediate present and for the moment without necessarily pre-judging the issue of religious choice for the future, and on the basis of variable criteria relating to group reactions and proof of efficacy.89 The result can be a religious world characterised less by the superficial stability and structures of a newly esconced Christian priesthood, churches and rites -- which is what is most visible in an English context - than by transient cults, changing allegiances and extreme variability in access and atten¬ dance. The nearest illustration of this in an English context lies in the

36

Out of Africa fragility of Christianity and, to adopt the Christian universe of dis¬ course for a moment, the successive ‘pagan reactions’ and periods of apostasy among such peoples as the East Saxons between the turn of the century

and

the 660s.90 Even

in

the

heartland

of

Anglo-Irish

Christianity, around the Bernician monastery of Melrose, St Cuthbert was represented as attempting to suppress idolatry, incantation and the use of amulets, among other ‘devilish arts’ (HE, iv, 27), and this is argu¬ ably a fair reflection of the low level of Christianisation in the late seventh century outside the rarefied atmosphere of some courts and monasteries. In early England there is, however, a disarming absence of evidence for the type of cross-cultural cults which are commonplace in other conversion studies and which draw on easily identifiable, and often crudely conjoined, strands of the traditional and the new, often by a congregation gathered around a single charismatic leader. Such cults proliferated in colonial Africa and in the Pacific Islands (where they included cargo cults), and they can be long-lived. They also occurred in the early Middle Ages. The point is best illustrated in eighth-century France: Pope Zacharias wrote to Bishop Boniface in May 748 in terms which suggest that a plague of false priests and ministries had taken possession of popular cult in Frankia, although only two figures were actually identified — an Irishman named Sampson and ‘a certain Vergilius’ in the employ of the Duke of Bavaria.91 Other letters in the same collection refer to baptism by pagans and ‘those who are uncer¬ tain whether they have been baptised or not and those who were bap¬ tised by a priest who also sacrificed to Jupiter and who ate of sacrifical food’.92 Such concerns reflect a weakness of episcopal management which perhaps enabled some individuals to present themselves as priests without subscribing to the due processes of training, ordination and authority which the Church hierarchy prescribed. Such may well have included members of the traditional, pagan priesthood -those who ‘sac¬ rificed to Jupiter’ - in which case there are numerous comparisons avail¬ able in more recent studies of conversion.93 The absence of comparable examples from England surely reflects the agendas internal to our literary sources, rather than their actual incidence. The Penitentials ascribed to Archbishop Theodore make it clear that the eating of sacrifical food and the making of offerings to pagan gods remained prevalent within Bede’s adult lifetime, without revealing what sections of society were involved. It reveals also a wide gamut of ‘magical’ strategies, most of which relate to divination, health

37

The convert kings (good or bad) or divine favour,94 much of which is reiterated in the Penitential ascribed to Bede’s friend Egberht as archbishop of York and which comments acerbically also regarding celebration of the pagan New Year.95 None of these practices were necessarily pre-Christian, since any or all could have been developed within the conversion period, but there does seem at least to have been a significant input from the indigenous culture. Christianity and power One stimulus which encouraged the East Saxons to reopen their pagan temples and revive their cults on the last occasion, in the 660s, was a par¬ ticularly severe outbreak of plague (HE, hi, 30). This is a useful reminder of the extent to which health and the divine were enmeshed in early England - and the point is no less valid among Christian converts than among non-Christians. Bede was predictably dismissive of the effi¬ cacy of pagan shrines at this moment of crisis and ridiculed the pre¬ occupation of these apostates with life on earth, as opposed to life everlasting, but the entire episode illustrates the extent to which belief in the efficacy of non-Christian ritual and divine forces remained a viable alternative to Christian rites even among a substantial regional elite. As far as Bede was concerned, their revival of traditional ritual constituted apostasy, but this perception is unlikely to have been shared by King Sigehere and his advisers, who presumably felt entirely justified in their actions once they had found Christian rites ineffective in redressing the immediate problem. It is probably relevant that one of the two East Saxon kings opted for non-Christian rites while one stayed with Christian rituals: there was, in other words, probably a political contest underlying the resumption of pagan ritual by only one of two East Saxon courts. Their reaction does, however, imply that acceptance of Christianity was conditional on its satisfying various criteria, some at least of which were functional or to do with power. It was outside, Mercian interference which eventually brought this process to a close (see p. 249). The capacity to affect health which is here at issue was to become a decisive factor in the development of the cults of saints and in the deployment of relics, and was a central feature of Christian hagiogra¬ phy in England as elsewhere. There emerged an extremely wide range of approaches to medical problems in early Christian England, which included the strategies common to conventional Christendom, such as pilgrimage and access to relics. It also encompassed large numbers of

38

Out of Africa herbal and formulaic remedies administered by professionals and ama¬ teurs alike, the efficacy of which required either or both of spells and potions. In many of these it was the ritual itself - the correct procedure of administering words and material in conjunction - which was apparently considered efficacious.96 Although only a tiny proportion of those examples which survive has any claim to be pre-Christian, it seems fairly certain that they represent a tradition of healing already old

by

the

seventh

century,

among both

Christians

and

non-

Christians.97 This is not, however, a book about magic or early English health care. Nor does it seek to pursue the process of the religious re-education and accommodation of the Anglo-Saxons far forward from the point of baptism. It is a study of the political imperatives underlying conversion in the first generation, and the extent to which such factors conditioned the decision whether or not to accept baptism and whether or not to patronise Christian clerisies. For the vast majority of individuals, their perceptions when accepting baptism are beyond recall but in no instance is there any evidence that first-generation English converts had much psychological grasp of the religion into which they had been ini¬ tiated. Hereafter it is the context in which baptism occurred that will be the subject of detailed investigation, and that was dominated by polit¬ ical and societal imperatives. It was, for example, King Edwin who oversaw the mass-baptisms undertaken at a whole series of his own palace sites by Bishop Paulinus (see below, p. 173), and King /Ethelberht who patronised and protected Augustine and enabled him to undertake similar mass-baptisms among the Kentings. It was kings who provided the resources to augment Christian ritual at key sites with gold icons, illuminated manuscripts and other rare and exotic objects.98 It was kings too who gave their new clerics the extensive estates necessary to support substantial monastic communities. Kings dominated the entire process and it is their objectives that we should seek to understand above all else, if y/e are to interpret the conversion in an appropriate context. In only a handful of instances is less generalised and more detailed information available concerning baptism which can be used to under¬ stand early English conversion more effectively. Not surprisingly, this pertains exclusively to royal baptisms. Kings arguably shared much of the general world-picture of the societies over which they reigned but each was the principal point of contact between that society and its neighbours - both human and divine. The king was a protector figure, 39

The convert kings as war-leader and diplomat, and as an intermediary between man and god. Such a role placed greater responsibilities vis-a-vis public ritual and ceremony on the individual king than on his people, and facilitated - at times even encouraged - both experimentation and opportunism. It has often been recognised that missionaries specifically targeted kings, but kings also consciously exploited missionaries in pursuit of their own objectives and sought much from them in terms of both immediate and dynastic returns; and it was for that that they invested so heavily. King Tithelberht may have sought the presence of a bishop at his court and Oswald certainly did. An interesting parallel to the political context of the English conver¬ sion lies with the conversion of the Kandyan kingdom of Sri Lanka to Buddhism: this involved, from the very beginning, the interlocking of the organisational aspects of the Buddhist religion with the concentra¬ tion of political authority in kingship, with a shared goal of political integration and centripetality." Kings endowed a scatter of temples which had the effect of reinforcing royal power over the various dispar¬ ate provinces of the kingdom, and they established a pattern of national festivals synchronised across the realm but tied to the royal court for ceremonial necessaries. Their religious policies were not just a cynical pursuit of political objectives but reflective of the vast scope for sylloge between royal and clerical authority which Buddhism offered and which advantaged both. It is with such integration of royal and priestly ideologies, philoso¬ phies, authorities and calendars - rather than as a system of beliefs and behaviours - that we should review the support given by powerful English kings to Christian cult. It is no accident that the earliest Italian missionaries to England behaved more like ‘diplomats, lawyers and architects, who wove Christianity into the framework of the [Kentish] state, and by so doing strengthened it and gave it a chance for develop¬ ment’.100 Mass-baptisms at royal sites, the appointment of bishops and the foundation of churches and specialist religious communities in control of a new and standardised calendar of festivals - all these and more played a fundamental role in the consolidation of royal power over existing territories by reorientating ceremonial and ritual on sites designated for the purpose by the king, and controlled by him in collaboration with an hierarchically organised, professional clerisy under his immediate protection. The same strategies could be used to reinforce authority over neighbouring communities and lesser kings. The structure of authority within a religion which looked to a single

40

Out of Africa dynasty of God the Father and Christ the Son as the sole legitimate founts of authority had obvious attractions for royal hegemons and their heirs. Those who opposed them might be successful but their power could be construed as diabolical, rather than God-given, so their successes dismissed as intrinsically temporary - and Bede was a past master at this manoeuvre. Such as they were they would ultimately be swept into the abyss with the coming of the kingdom of the saints. So too were the pagan Mercian opponents of Bernician Christians ulti¬ mately doomed - at least in Bernician and Christian perceptions, if not in reality. In practice, Christianity did not prove itself a particularly effective religion on the battlefield in early England. While yEthelberht fought no known battles as a Christian or otherwise, his contemporary, the pagan yEthelfrith, conquered Christians and non-Christians alike, as did the unbaptised Penda in the 630s and 640s. With the exception of Edwin’s defeat of the West Saxons (in 626) and Oswiu’s of the Mercians (655), battle honours generally went to non-Christian kings or Christian forces (such as Cadwallon’s Welsh) whom later English writers would dismiss as heretics. Both Edwin and Oswald were overwhelmed by British Christians in alliance with English non-Christians. There was no English Constantine, therefore; yet Christianity became the religion of the royal courts of England within a century of its introduction. This fact confirms that it was primarily organisational and ideological factors which attracted English kings to Christianity, not its victory¬ giving capablilites. The close collaboration of king and Christian clergy resulted in a new uniformity of cult, ritual, festivals and doctrine that reinforced royal control. Christianity also offered kings numerous ceremonies within which they were expected to play a central role, which gave them the opportunity to emphasise their own status at the expense of others and construct new systems of control. Mass-baptism is a case in point. So too is the use of baptism as a means of reinforcing ‘overkingship’.101 So too was the opportunity to chair a Church synod and/or pose as its principal protector. Even the foundation of a church offered an opportunity for a cere¬ mony at which a king could advertise his own power, generosity and influence. The best evidenced example is arguably the dedication cere¬ mony at Ripon,102 where Bishop Wilfrid had constructed what was, in the early 670s, the first great basilican church to be seen in northern England, modelled on Frankish exemplars and like them built of

41

The convert kings dressed stone. The dedication rite of this novel and quite wondrous building occurred in the presence of the two Northumbrian kings, the brothers Ecgfrith and TElfwine, but also attended by a crowd of ‘abbots, reeves [meaning royal officials] and sub-kings’. This was, therefore, a comparatively full meeting of the Northumbrian elite and their clients. Wilfrid read out from the altar a list of the lands granted to his church by the kings, and witnessed by the bishops and chief men. As his hagiographer noted, ‘it was truly a gift well pleasing to God that the kings had assigned so many lands’. Wilfrid gained estates and revenues thereby, but the kings gained the credit and they did so as publicly and with as much advertisement as was possible, and with the support of the polit¬ ical classes visibly conjoined. There was, of course, a political agenda underlying this ceremony. Ripon had been granted to Wilfrid in highly controversial circum¬ stances shortly before the synod of Whitby by King Alhfrith, Oswiu’s eldest son then in Northumbria and the sub-king of the Deirans from 655. Alhfrith was a serious contender for the succession to his father’s throne and was probably at this stage considered the likeliest to inherit, given that his half-brothers were not yet mature. Ripon seems to have been the only significant church founded by Alhfrith, and his grant of it on a second occasion to the Romanist party - after his earlier grant of it to monks of the Northumbrian—Irish church at Melrose — precisely reflects his shift of religious adhesion from one clerisy to the other during the early 660s (see p. 253). By the time the church was ready for dedication a decade or so later, Alhfrith had fallen into the political abyss and was probably dead. Instead, his younger half-brothers and erstwhile rivals were in power following King Oswiu’s death early in 670. Their presence at the ceremony of dedication and their public generosity to Wilfrid’s new church just a year or so after their joint accession was surely calculated to lay aside past differences and adver¬ tise their control over the kingdom. It also, of course, advertised their generosity - which was a sine qua non of early medieval kingship. The kings left Bishop Wilfrid, who had been promoted and befriended by their discredited half-brother, in no doubt as to where power and patronage now resided. In a world which had not developed the rite of coronation, this sort of ceremony had important legitimising and rein¬ forcing functions, and kings and clergy both had much to gain from such elaborate public rituals. Royal gifts to the church were not as dis¬ interested as clerical writers liked to portray them. The remainder of this volume consists of three detailed studies

42

Notes which focus in turn on the context in which Kings TEthelberht of Kent and Edwin of the Deirans accepted baptism, and on the Bernician patronage of the Irish church. It is not intended that these conversion histories be thought entirely representative of English conversion, although it is important to remember that all four of the kings involved were exceptionally powerful and all were at some stage imperiumwielding kings or ‘overkings’. As such, the several baptisms of these four were more influential in encouraging the wider dissemination of Christianity than that of any other English figure before 670. In the last resort, it is, however, the quantity and quality of the evidence which has conditioned this selection. Only in the instances of these focal figures and their immediate associates is it possible to reconstruct sufficient of the context in which the English themselves chose baptism. Indeed, few others enjoyed the freedom of choice which is so distinctive a feature of their decision-making when confronted by, or seeking out, that option. The approach adopted is pragmatic, empirical and source-led, rather than self-consciously theoretical, but it is the intention that the fore¬ going more general discussion of religious affiliation should help to contextualise their acceptance of baptism and facilitate interpretation of that process within the wider boundaries of political, dynastic and cultural behaviour. The ensuing studies are as detailed as possible, and chronologically organised in a way which is intended to facilitate recognition of the policy changes through time which undoubtedly occurred, at times with great rapidity. To TEthelberht, then, and his attempts to control and profit from the complex web of interconnections between Kent, the several different Frankish courts and even Rome during the 590s, which brought Augustine’s ill-assorted and unenthusiastic following to Canterbury and the first baptism of an English king known to history.

Notes 1 E. Durkheim, The elementary forms of the religious life, English edn trans. J. W. Swain, London, 1915. 2 For migration as a central tenet of Anglo-Saxon identity, see N. Howe, Migration and mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, New Haven, Connecticut, 1989. For a recent, collaborative investigation of conversion in the Germanic homeland, see B. Sawyer, P. Sawyer and I. Wood, (edd.). The Christianization of Scandinavia, Alingsas, Sweden, 1987, which offers a useful bibliography to that date.

43

The convert kings 3

See, for example, B. Branston, The lost gods of England, London, 1957;

W. A. Chaney, The cult of kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester 1970; H. R. E. Davidson, Myths and symbols in pagan Europe: early Scandinavian and Celtic religions, Manchester, 1988. The transfer of religious ideas across cultures and centuries is a feature of most popular modern writing on pagan¬ ism: see for example, P. Jones and N. Pinneck, A history of pagan Europe, London, 1995. See the caution expressed by I. N. Wood, ‘Pagan religion and superstition east of the Rhine from the fifth to the ninth century’, in After Empire: towards an ethnology of Europe’s barbarians, ed. G. Ausenda, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1995, p. 254. 4

The best brief introduction to traditional English religion is J. D. Niles,

‘Pagan survivals and popular beliefs’, in The Cambridge guide to Old English literature, edd. M. Godden and M. Lapidge, Cambridge, 1991, but see also, Branston, Lost gods-, E. G. Stanley, The search for Anglo-Saxon paganism, Cambridge, 1975; G. R. Owen, Kites and religions of the Anglo-Saxons, Manchester, 1981; D. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, London, 1992. A discus¬ sion of the pre-Christian, English calendar occurs in K. Harrison, The frame¬ work of Anglo-Saxon history to AD 900, Cambridge, 1976, pp. 3—4. 5

See below, for Gregory, pp. 58-102, for Boniface, pp. 140-3, 165-6, for

Honorius, pp. 184—8, and for Bishop Daniel, p. 33. 6

Bede’s HE is the single most important text, but see also hagiograph-

ical narratives such as The earliest life of Gregory the Great by an anonymous monk of Whitby, ed. B. Colgrave, Lawrence, 1968; The life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. B. Colgrave, Cambridge, 1927; Two lives of St. Cuthbert, ed. B. Colgrave, Cambridge, 1940; Adomnan’s life of Columba, edd. A. O. Anderson and M. O. Anderson, London, 1961; other works of hagiogra¬ phy, such as Felix’s life of St. Guthlac, ed. B. Colgrave, Cambridge 1956, lie beyond the chronological scope of this volume. 7

M. Gelling, ‘Place-names and Anglo-Saxon paganism’, University of

Birmingham Historical Journal, vm, 1961, pp. 7-25; M. Gelling, ‘Further thoughts on pagan place-names’, in Otium et Negotium: studies in onomatol¬ ogy and library science presented to Olof von Feilitzen, Stockholm, 1973, pp. 99-114; M. Gelling, Signposts to the past, Chichester, Sussex, 1978, pp. 154—61; D. Wilson, ‘A note on OE hearg and weoh as place-name elements representing different types of pagan Saxon worship sites’, Anglo-Saxon studies in archae¬ ology and history, iv, 1985, pp. 179-84; ibid., Anglo-Saxon paganism, pp. 5-21; A. Meaney, ‘Pagan English sanctuaries, place-names and Hundred meeting places’, Anglo-Saxon studies in archaeology and history, vm, 1995, pp. 29-42. 8

H.

Mayr-Harting,

The coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon

England, London, 3rd. edn 1991, pp. 22-5. 9

Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, pp. 44-66; J. Blair, ‘Anglo-Saxon

pagan shrines and their prototypes’, Anglo-Saxon studies in archaeology and history, vm, 1995, pp. 1-28. The insular evidence of shrines and temples is more

44

Notes substantial than that of Germany east of the Rhine, perhaps for reasons of contact with Roman traditions of temple and church construction, but see dis¬ cussion in Ausenda (ed.), After empire, p. 271. 10

See most recently Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, pp. 67ff.

11

As recently restated by J. Hines, ‘Cultural change and social organisa¬

tion in early Anglo-Saxon England’ in After empire, ed. Ausenda, p. 75. 12

For example, D. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, London, 1992. For a

reassessment of appropriate uses of archaeological evidence, see J. D. Richards, ‘What are archaeological data? Gender, Age, Status and Identity in AngloSaxon England’ in After Empire, ed. Ausenda, pp. 51-66. 13

For example, R H. Blair, The world of Bede, London, 1970; Mayr-

Harting, Coming of Christianity, N. Brooks, The early history of the church of Canterbury, Leicester, 1984. 14

For example, the many excellent papers in Famulus Christi: essays in

commemoration of the thirteenth centenary of the birth of the venerable Bede, ed. G. Bonner, London, 1976; P. Mayvaert, Benedict, Gregory, Bede and others, London, 1977; C. B. Kendall, ‘Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica: the rhetoric of faith’, in Medieval eloquence, ed. J. J. Murphy, Berkeley, California, 1978, pp. 145—72; P. Brown, The cult of the saints. Its rise and function in Latin Christianity, Chicago, 1981; R. Markus, From Augustine to Gregory the Great, London, 1983, and The end of ancient Christianity, Cambridge, 1990; S. Lerer, Literacy and power in Anglo-Saxon literature, Lincoln and London, 1991; W. D. McCready, Miracles and the venerable Bede, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1994. 15

Of which he was aware via Sir Raymond Firth’s Rank and religion in

Tikopia: a study in Polynesian paganism and conversion to Christianity, London, 1970. 16

H. Mayr-Harting, Two conversions: the Bulgarians and the Anglo-

Saxons, Reading, Berkshire, 1994, p. 13. 17

For an evaluation of the relationship between history and social anthro¬

pology, their methodologies and their respective philosophies, see B. S. Cohn, An anthropologist among the historians and other essays, Oxford, 1987, pp. 1-77. See also, G. Ausenda, ‘The segmentary lineage in contemporary anthro¬ pology and among the Langobards’, in After Empire, ed. Ausenda, pp. 15-45. 18

J. C. Russell, The Germanization of early Medieval Christianity: a

sociohistorical approach to religious transformation, Oxford, 1994, is charged with a wide range of sociological theory but far less social anthropology. 19 version’

R. W. Hefner, ‘Introduction: world building and the rationality of con¬ in

Conversion

to

Christianity:

historical and

anthropological

approaches, Berkeley, California and Oxford, 1993, pp. 3^44, offers the best recent synthesis of the subject. For Edward Tylor, see Primitive Culture, 2 vols, London, 1871; for recent comment, see E. W. Said, Culture and imperialism, London,1993.

45

The convert kings 20

Durkheim proposed that ‘a religion is a unified system of beliefs

and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and for¬ bidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them’. He also, however, saw religion as ‘an eminently collective thing’, so as a social construct; Elementary forms, p. 47. 21

M. Weber, The sociology of religion, originally published 1922, English

edn trans. E. Fischoff, London, 1963, particularly pp, 160-5. 22

See, for example, A. D. Nock, Conversion: the old and the new in relig¬

ion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo, Oxford, 1933, p. 4. A developmental theory of conversion to Christianity is likewise central to Bede’s Historia. 23

Nock, ibid., stressed the prophetic nature of Christianity and Islam,

p. 5; R. N. Bellah, ‘Religious evolution’, American Sociological Review, xxix, 1964, pp. 358-74, stressed the tendency of world religions to offer a transcen¬ dental reality, a consequence of which was a tendency for adherents to attempt to remodel the world; for recent discussion, see Hefner, ‘World building’, pp 9-13. 24

Ibid., p. 14.

25

For example R. Horton, ‘African conversion’, Africa, xli, 1971, pp.

101-8. 26

M. E. Spiro, ‘Religion: problems of definition and explanation’ in

Anthropological approaches to the study of religion, ed. M. Banton, London, 1966, pp. 85-126. For a definition, see p. 96: ‘I shall define “religion” as “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postu¬ lated superhuman beings”.’ 27

J. M. Yinger, The scientific study of religion, New York, 1970, p. 7. This

is a topic too vast for satisfactory discussion in this context. For an overview, see B. Morris, Anthropological studies of religion: an introductory text, Cambridge 1987. For a briefer survey of several approaches, see C. Geertz, ‘Religion’ in Magic, witchcraft and religion: an anthropological study of the supernatural, edd. A. C. Lehmann and J. E. Myers, Chico, California, 2nd edn, 1989, pp. 9-12. 28

Nock, Conversion, pp. 4—8, 14. This distinction was later restated by

W. C. Shepherd, ‘Conversion and adhesion’ in Religious change and continuity: sociological perspectives, ed. H. M. Johnson, San Francisco, 1979, pp. 251-63. 29

D. A. Snow and R. Machalek, ‘The sociology of conversion’, Annual

Review of Sociology, x, 1984, p. 171. 30

Ibid., pp. 173—6, based on D. A. Snow and R. Machalek, ‘The convert

as a social type’ in Sociological theory, ed. R. Collins, San Francisco, 1983, pp. 259-89. 31 R. A. Markus, The end of ancient Christianity, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 5-14.

46

Notes 32

M. Southwold, ‘Religious belief’, Man, xiv, 1979, pp. 628-44.

33

M. Ruels, ‘Christians as believers’ in Religious organization and reli¬

gious experience, ed. J. Davis, London, 1982, pp. 9-31. 34

See, for example, the teaching of King Edwin and his associates in

preparation for baptism in The earliest life of Gregory the Great, ed. B. Colgrave, Cambridge, 1968, xiv, xv. For a discussion of adult baptism, see J. H. Lynch, Godparents and kinship in early medieval Europe, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986, pp. 83-116. 35

See discussion of religion as a system of explanation by C. Geertz,

‘Religion as a cultural system’ in Anthropological approaches to the study of religion, ed. M. Banton, London, 1966, pp. 12-24, and ibid., ‘Religion’, pp. 6-15. 36

Ibid., p. 15: ‘a mature theory of religion will consist of an integration

of them all [i.e. all existing models of religious purpose] into a conceptual system whose exact form remains to be discovered’. 37

As recognised in a literature stretching across more than half a century,

from Nock, Conversion, p. 5ff, to P. Wood, ‘Afterword: boundaries and hori¬ zons’ in Conversion to Christianity, ed. Hefner, pp. 307-20. 38

The general point is well made by W. L. Merrill, ‘Conversion and

colonialism in northern Mexico: the Tarahumara response to the Jesuit Mission Program, 1601-1767’, in Conversion to Christianity, ed. Hefner, pp. 152-3. For comment on the Anglo-Saxon conversion, see Chaney, Cult of kingship, p. 156. 39

R. Horton, ‘African conversion’, pp. 85-108, later reinforced by his ‘On

the rationality of conversion’, Africa,

xlv,

1975, pp. 219-35, 373-99. I here

retain his use of terms such as ‘traditional’ and ‘world’ so as to reflect his argu¬ ments as clearly as possible, although most social anthropologists would no longer accept the terms nor the fundamentally functionalist vision of religion which he adopted.

40 41

Ibid., ‘African conversion’, p. 101. A point sustained by E. Ikenga-Metuh, ‘The shattered microcosm: a

critical survey of explanations of conversion in Africa’ in Religion, develop¬ ment and African identity, ed. K. Holst Petersen, Uppsala, Sweden, 1987, pp. 11-27, and reiterated in a late antique context by W. E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: the making of a Christian community in late antique Gaul, Cambridge, 1994, p. 202. 42

A point recently reinforced by D. K. Jordan, ‘The glyphomancy factor:

observations on Chinese conversion’ in Conversion to Christianity, ed. Hefner, p. 291. 43

For example C. N. Ubah, ‘The supreme being, divinities and ancestors

in Igbo traditional religion: evidence from Otanchara and Otanzu’, Africa, 1982, pp. 90-105. 44

Hefner, ‘World building’, pp. 22-3.

47

lii,

The convert kings 45

T. Ranger, ‘The local and global in Southern African religion’ in

Conversion to Christianity, ed. Hefner, pp. 65-98. 46

J. D. Y. Peel, ‘The pastor and the babalawo: the interaction of religions

in nineteenth-century Yorubaland’, Africa,

lx,

1990, pp. 338-69, particularly

p. 338. 47

Ibid., pp. 340—3; D. M. Anderson and D. H. Johnson, ‘Diviners, seers

and spirits in Eastern Africa: towards an historical anthropology’, Africa,

lxi,

1991, pp. 293-7; S. Heald, ‘Divinatory Failure: the religious and social role of Gisu diviners’, ibid., pp. 299-317; E. Fratkin, ‘The loibin as sorcerer: a Samburu loiban among the Ariaal Rendille, 1973-87’, ibid., pp. 318-33. 48

The point is made, albeit less universally, by D. Lee, ‘Religious per¬

spectives in anthropology’ in Magic, witchcraft and religion, edd. Lehmann and Myers, pp. 16-23. 49

See, for example, the group of texts examined by A. L. Meaney, ‘Anglo-

Saxon idolators and ecclesiasts from Theodore to Alcuin: a source study’, Anglo-Saxon studies in archaeology and history, v, 1992, pp. 103-25; Bede, De Temporum Ratione, in Bedae opera de Temporibus, ed. C. W. Jones, Cambridge, Mass., 1943, pp. 174—291. 50

For a recent discussion of this issue in the context of nineteenth-century

Yorubaland, Africa, see Peel, ‘The pastor and the babalawo’, pp. 339-40. 51

The quotation is from Wood, ‘Afterword’, p. 307. Earlier use of a poly-

thetic strategy to define religion occurs in Southwold, ‘Religious belief’, for which see above, p. 16. 52

See below, pp. 70-2, 86-90.

53

And this remains true whether the Anglo-Saxon settlement be consid¬

ered a mass migration or a phenomenon characterised by elite dominance. 54

Although the English used runes, they do not appear to have utilised

paper or vellum, pre-conversion: in general, see R. I. Page, Runes and runic inscriptions: collected essays on Anglo-Saxon and viking runes, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1995; R. Delorez, ‘Runic literacy among the Anglo-Saxons’ in Britain 400—600: language and history, edd. A. Bammesberger and A. Wollmann, Heidelberg, 1990, pp. 397-436; J. Hines, ‘The runic inscriptions of early AngloSaxon England’, in ibid., pp. 437-55. 55

P. Wood, ‘Afterword’, pp. 308-10.

56

See discussion of E. John, ‘The point of Woden’, Anglo-Saxon studies

in archaeology and history, v, 1992, pp. 127-34. 57

For example A. Boddington, ‘Models of burial, settlement and

worship: the final phase reviewed’ in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries: a reappraisal, ed. E. Southworth, Stroud, Glos., 1990, pp. 177-99; H. Harke, “‘Warrior graves”? The background of the Anglo-Saxon weapon burial rite’, Past and Present, cxxvi, 1990, pp. 22^-3; W. Filmer-Sankey, ‘Snape Anglo-Saxon cemetery: the current state of knowledge’ in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed. M. Carver, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992, pp. 40—50; H. Geake, ‘Burial practice in seventh-

48

Notes and eighth-century England’ in ibid., pp. 83-94; M. O. H. Carver, ‘The AngloSaxon cemetery at Sutton Hoo: an interim report’ in ibid., pp. 343-72. 58

Blair, ‘Anglo-Saxon pagan shrines’, pp. 21-2, but the subject is highly

speculative. 59

For the redeployment of ancient landscape features in an attempt to

invest present societal constructs with authority, see R. Bradley, ‘Time regained: the creation of continuity’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, cxl,

1987, pp. 1-17. Such has an obvious relevance to the siting and status of

Yeavering, see below, p. 146. 60

For example, letter of Pope Boniface quoted by Bede, HE, n, 10. For a

more general discussion, see A. L. Meaney, ‘Anglo-Saxon idolators’, pp. 103-25. Trees featured more obviously in continental Saxony than England, and venera¬ tion recorded as late as the early eleventh century could owe as much to Viking introduction as local survival, but see A. L. Meaney, ‘.Tdfric and idolatry’, Journal of Religious History, xm, 1984, pp. 129-31; Wood, ‘Pagan religion’, p. 257. 61

Harrow is the best evidenced example, ocurring as Gumeninga Hergae,

‘the temple of the Gumeningas’, who are otherwise unrecorded and presumably comparatively localised. See also Besinga hearh, ‘the temple of the Besingas’, in Surrey, who were probably a similarly parochial community: P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon charters, London, 1968, nos. 106, 235. For the Deiran shrine in the 620s, see HE, 62

ii,

14.

Wood, ‘Afterword’, p. 306; S. Hollis, Anglo-Saxon women and the

church: sharing a common fate, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992, p. 2. 63

Adapted from Russell, Germanization, pp. 24—5, and retaining the lan¬

guage used therein. 64

HE, ii, 5, for the departure from England of Mellitus and Iustus; hi, 7,

for the treatment of Bishop Agilbert; hi, 5, for the departure of Aidan’s unnamed predecessor, who may or may not have been Corman. 65

Vita Wilfridi,

66

HE, iv, 13.

67

Assuming that the situation was at this stage governed by the peace

xli.

negotiated by Archbishop Theodore, c. 679-80, after the great battle by the River Trent. For discussion, see N. J. Higham, An English empire: Bede and the early Anglo-Saxon kings, Manchester, 1995, pp. 116-30. 68

The point is well made by Merrill, ‘Conversion and colonialism’, p.

154. Christianity should, of course, be included. 69

For comments on the preaching of missionaries, see R. E. Sullivan, ‘The

Carolingian missionary and the pagan’, Speculum, xxvm, 1953, pp. 715-22; Russell, Germanization, pp. 24—7. For a broader review of preaching in early England, see A. Thacker, ‘Monks, preaching and pastoral care in early AngloSaxon England’ in Pastoral care before the parish, edd. J. Blair and R. Sharpe, Leicester, 1992, pp. 137-70. Preaching was more effective where it was both in

49

The convert kings the vernacular and unpretentious: see Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles, pp. 146-51. The simplicity of Wilfrid’s message increases the likelihood that this is a comparatively accurate description. 70

Snow and Machalek, ‘Sociology of conversion’, pp. 178-9, for criticism

of this process as a general explanation of conversion. 71

For what little is known about the actual rite, see S. Foot, “‘By water in

the spirit”: the administration of baptism in early Anglo-Saxon England’ in Pastoral care before the parish, edd. Blair and Sharp, pp. 171-9. For discussion of the geography of baptism, see R. Morris, ‘Baptismal places: 600-800’ in People and places in Northern Europe, 500-1600, edd. I. Wood and N. Lund, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1991, pp. 15-24. 72

There are occasional exceptions, e.g., HE,

ii,

5, wherein Bede referred

to ‘political’ converts in Kent and Essex who readily abandoned Christianity when royal pressure was removed. 73

Boniface, Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, Monumenta Germaniae Historia,

Epistolae, i, Berlin, 1916, xv; trans. E. Emerson, The letters of St Boniface, New York, 1940. 74

S. Hollis, Anglo-Saxon women, p. 18.

75

Merrill, ‘Conversion and colonialism’, p. 154, makes the point that a

definition of conversion which fails to accommodate differences between the per¬ ceptions of new converts and existing adherents is neither possible nor desirable. 76

B. Carmody, ‘Conversion and school at Chikuni, 1905-39’, Africa,

lviii, 1988, pp. 193-209. 77

King Aldfrith of Northumbria seems to have been considered an ille¬

gitimate son of King Oswiu: HE, iv, 26 (24). For royal illegitimacy in Frankia and the opinion of St Columbanus on that subject, see I. Wood, The Merovingian kingdoms 450-751, Harlow, Essex, 1994, p. 132. 78

As in Kent in c. 616: HE,

ii,

5. Augustine’s queries nos. 4 and 5, which

Gregory addressed in the Libellus Responsionum, reflect his concern about marriage within the prohibited degrees: HE, i, 27. 79

HE, in, 8, although this may be a very partial record of this legislation,

which does not otherwise survive. 80

For example Russell, Germanization, p. 27.

81

For a Christian perspective, see R Brown, The cult of the saints: its rise

and function in Latin Christianity, Chicago, 1981. English mortuary practices - and particularly the common deposition of food and/or drink with the body - demonstrate belief in an afterlife, contrary to Bede’s vision of the oblivion characteristic of the pagan world-picture: HE,

ii,

13.

82

Tacitus, Germania, ed. M. Hutton, London, 1914, x.

83

HE,

84

As in the Penitential attributed to Archbishop Theodore, xv, in

ii,

9.

Medieval handbooks of penance, edd. J. T. McNeill and H. M. Gamer, New York, 1965, p. 198.

50

Notes 85

Royal legislation requiring the destruction of idols may imply the

destruction or conversion of shrines in Kent during the reign of Eorcenberht; the Deirans deliberately destroyed Goodmanham in 627; HE, ill, 30, refers to the restoration of derelict temples among the East Saxons c. 664, which had been abandoned only within the last decade. 86

Bede, Letter to Egberht, in Baedae Opera Historica, Oxford, 1896, i,

trans. in Bede: the ecclesiastical history of the English people, edd. J. McClure and R. Collins, Oxford, 1994, pp. 351-2. 87

See generally, S. Hollis, Anglo-Saxon women, passim.

88

R. W. Hefner, ‘Of faith and commitment: Christian conversion in

Muslim Java’ in Conversion to Christianity, ed. Hefner, pp. 120-1. 89

Parallel Jordan, ‘The glyphomancy factor’, p. 291.

90

For a more recent example, see R. M. Baum, ‘The emergence of a Diola

Christianity’, Africa, 91

lx,

1990, p. 371.

Boniface, Letters,

lxiv.

‘Vergilius’ was presumably Vergil of Salzberg,

who was a bona fide priest, but the accusation must imply that ‘false priests’ were commonplace or at least believed so to be. See discussion in Wood, ‘Pagan religion’, pp. 254—5. 92

Ibid., xx.

93

For example Horton, ‘African conversion’, p. 104, remarks that experts

within traditional religions often become the leaders of religious and wider cul¬ tural change. 94

For discussion of which see V. I. J. Flint, The rise of magic in early

medieval Europe, Princeton, New Jersey, 1991, and the reply of R. Kieckhefer, ‘The specific rationality of medieval magic’, American Historical Review, xcix, 1994, pp. 813-36. 95

Meaney, ‘Anglo-Saxon idolators’, pp. 107-11. For examination of

similar Irish evidence, see R. Sharpe, ‘Hiberno-Fatin laicus, Irish laech and the Devil’s Men’, Eriu, xxx, 1979, pp. 75-92; K. McCone, ‘Werewolves, cyclopes, Diberga and Fianna: Juvenile delinquency in early Ireland’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 96

xii,

1986, pp. 1—22.

G. Storms, Anglo-Saxon magic. The Hague, 1948; M. F. Cameron,

Anglo-Saxon medicine, Cambridge, 1993; Niles, ‘Pagan survivals’, p. 136; 97

For ethnographic parallels, see Culture, disease and healing: studies in

medical anthropology, ed. D. Fandy, New York, 1977; Magic, witchcraft and religion, edd. Fehmann and Myers. 98

As recently emphasised by J. Campbell, ‘Elements in the background

to the Fife of St Cuthbert and his early cult’, in St Cuthbert, his cult and his community to AD 1200, edd. G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989, pp. 4-5. 99

H. F. Seneviratne, ‘Religion and legitimacy of power in the Kandyan

kingdom’ in Religion and legitimation of power in Sri Lanka, ed. B. F. Smith, 1978, pp. 177-87.

51

The convert kings 100

C. H. Talbot, The Anglo-Saxon missionaries in Germany, London,

1954, ix, the truth of which has more recently been regretfully acknowledged by Hollis, Anglo-Saxon women, p. 18. 101

See

A.

Angenendt,

‘Taufe

und

Politik

Fruhmittelalterliche Studien, vii, 1973, pp. 143-68. 102

Vita Wilfridi, xvii.

52

im

friihen

Mittelalter’,

2

King yEthelberht: conversion in context

Why did King yEthelberht convert to Christianity? This is a seemingly simple question but one which is rarely asked so directly,1 and which is very hard to answer since we actually know precious little about him — and this includes such basics as his date of birth and the inception and length of his reign (see below). Even much of what is generally accepted as historical is a matter of probability rather than proven fact and a poor basis on which to construct explanations. Yet yEthelberht’s baptism and its context are critical to our under¬ standing of the conversion of the English to Christianity, if only because he was the first individual of real consequence within the regional and supra-regional elites then controlling England whom we know - and Bede knew - to have accepted baptism. Like other barbar¬ ian societies at this date, England had a social system within which ritual behaviour tended to cascade downwards from the kings, so the first royal baptism was crucial. Was yEthelberht attracted by spiritual truths, as Bede implies - in which case his objectives are largely beyond recall?2 Or should we see him as a ruler for whom variation in ritual was just one in a portfolio of strategies used for dynastic and political ends?3 In that case the acceptance of baptism was a matter of strategy rather than conviction, a matter which assumes a spiritual significance primarily in retrospect. The problems inherent in explaining yEthelberht’s conversion underline many of the fundamental dichotomies which beset wider conversion studies which were discussed in Chapter 1. Here the focus will be on TYhelberht’s conversion, his patronage of Christian priests and treat¬ ment of his new cult as a part of his wider political and diplomatic activities, in the expectation that this approach will render his decision¬ making as transparent as is now possible.

53

The convert kings

Whatever his immediate intentions, however, yEthelberht’s conver¬ sion to Christianity was something new in as much as it diverged from the strategies hitherto adopted by English elites - at least as far as those are documented. Yet his action may not then have been viewed by non-Christian contemporaries as so very different. The sacral kingship of early English rulers necessarily intertwined the sacred and the dynastic, rite and policy,4 and other Anglo-Saxons kings are likely to have often adapted their ritual behaviour to political purposes. yEthelberht’s action was novel in that he opted for the Christian God and the different set of priests and rites associated therewith, but this may well have seemed a minor difference to English contemporaries, whose cosmologies and rituals were mutable rather than fixed, so capable of incorporating new deities and rites.5 It was arguably only the Christian community - exclusive of recent converts - who inter¬ preted yEthelberht’s baptism as fundamentally significant, since only to them was it also an act which excluded sacrifice to other gods, consort with other priests and recourse to other ritual. Later Christian historiography may have been wrong to assume that dEthelberht himself adhered to this interpretation but there is no simple method of examining the matter.6 By breaking away from the established norms of cultural, political and religious behaviour hitherto favoured by Anglo-Saxon kings, vTthelberht inaugurated a chain of like events. He had responsibility for only a minority of the latter, at the courts of the East Saxons and East Angles (see below), but it is not surprising that subsequent Christian writers wove together his acts with those of others to make a continu¬ ous developmental and providential history of English Christianity. Even so, later royal baptisms do seem to have taken careful account of previous examples, and the logic of that necessarily looks back ulti¬ mately across all England to yEthelberht’s decision and the degree of success he enjoyed thereafter. In that limited and retrospective sense later writers were correct in depicting the arrival of Augustine and the conversion of yEthelberht as epoch-making events.7 Take, for example, the brief reference to yEthelberht by the anony¬ mous author of the vita of Gregory the Great written at Whitby about a century later:8 The first of all the kings of the English to be led to faith in Christ by these men [the Roman mission] was yEthelberht, King of the Kentings, who shone forth with his nation after he had been cleansed in the waters of baptism.

54

King ALthelberht

But it is important to distinguish between the events themselves and their later reportage and treatment: 2Ethelberht’s baptism deserves to be considered as an historical event detached from the baggage which later became attached to it. In this context, one wonders just how shiny 2Ethelberht’s Christian persona actually was, and how different from his contemporaries he believed himself, and they considered him, to be. The clarity of definition which enabled Pope Gregory, for example, or Bede, to separate Christian from non-Christian is unlikely to have been appropriate to yEthelberht’s household, let alone his wider court and kingship. What significance should now be attached to yEthelberht’s decision to accept baptism? Modern scholarship is more or less agreed that royal conversions were critical to the wider onset of Christianity - and Roman missionaries were certainly of that opinion c. 600.9 Barbarian kings were undoubtedly targeted, sometimes by their wives, but for the more powerful at least it was generally their own decision whether or not to accept baptism, and that fact should be acknowledged. 2Ethelberht’s own input should, therefore, be recognised; yet his decision-making pro¬ cesses are desperately obscure. Hence most recent writers have focused on Gregory’s motives in launching his mission to the English, the actual progress and chronology of that enterprise, and the Frankish and/or British background to the conversion.10 The principal issue of debate pertaining to yEthelberht’s baptism relates to its date.11 Only the views of Gregory are directly evidenced but detailed atten¬ tion to his opinions has some potential to reveal those of the king, who was the recipient of two parties of missionaries and one papal missive, as well as being the English ‘strongman’ whose regime contextualised others of Gregory’s letters. ^Ethelberht’s own attitudes may not be quite so obscure as has sometimes been assumed. Bede’s description of the early conversion period might be thought to provide an alternative point of entry, but his discussion is far from con¬ temporary and is directed by his own rhetorical imperatives.12 Yet his description of 2Ethelberht’s conversion has exercised a dominating influence on much later historiography, even to the present day,13 and this alone requires that it is not ignored. It is with that, therefore, that the present discussion will open. Bede and ALthelberht’s baptism

To Bede, then, and in particular books i (chapters 23-33) and ii, (chap¬ ters 1-3) of his Historia Ecclesiastica. Bede made much of yEthelberht’s

55

The convert kings

decision to accept baptism, treating it as the loosening of the proverbial pebble, which set in motion a divinely predicted, sanctioned and impelled avalanche of Christianisation. It was, therefore, a cusp event in his vision of English history. Roman responsibility for it was used by Bede to sustain his vision of the God-chosen status of the English, in contrast to the iniquitious and heretical Britons who had made no attempt (in HE, i, 22) to bring salvation to them.14 Bede’s comparative understatement of the strength and significance of the early Frankish input was probably also a victim of this imperative.1^ Yet, surprisingly, Bede did not describe TEthelberht’s actual baptism within his narrative: he did not locate it (although it must surely have occurred at Canterbury); nor did he date it. In these respects his treat¬ ment of TEthelberht contrasts strongly with his very detailed treatment, in HE, book n, chapter 14, of the baptism of King Edwin on Easter Day 627, at York.16 It may be objected that his Canterbury sources were insufficent to the task of locating the King’s baptism as effectively as that of Edwin within a narrative account,17 but this rings a little hollow. This incident was as fundamental to Canterbury’s foundation mythol¬ ogy as were stories about Edwin and Paulinus in the north. That Bede included the detail that TEthelberht had died on 24 February proves that his obit had been remembered (or conceivably reconstructed at a later date). Another is the apocryphal proposition (in HE, n, 5) that TEthelberht protected his Kentish people even after death.18 His tomb was, therefore, perhaps the focus of some sort of royal cult at Canterbury c. 731 of the same kind as that focusing on Edwin at Whitby. If Deira’s clergy could still contextualise Edwin’s baptism then it seems most improbable that the Kentish clergy were incapable of doing the same for TEthelberht. Bede may, therefore, have reined-in the impact of his account of the conversion of vTthelberht - the loosening of the metaphorical pebble to the advantage of the subsequent avalanche: which, in Bede’s terms, was the triumph of Christianity at the northern courts, first of Edwin, then Oswald.19 He was at least as keen to narrate the origins of the York diocese - where his friend Egbert was then bishop and soon to be arch¬ bishop - as of the Canterbury archdiocese. He was perhaps also exer¬ cising restraint in his treatment of /Ethelberht to the advantage of his contemporary, the Saul-like and all-conquering yEthelfrith, pagan king of the Bernicians,20 whom he seems to be casting here in a pseudo-impe¬ rial role.21 From TEthelfrith descended the great, Irish—Christian Bernician kings, the first of whom - Oswald - Bede portrayed as if King

56

King ALtbelberht

David, and as the very image of perfect monarch and saint. The earliest baptism of an Anglo-Saxon to be explicit in his narrative as an actual event (in HE, n, 9; v, 24) is that of Princess Eanflaed, later King Oswiu’s Queen throughout the apogee of Northumbrian fortunes, to which apogee he referred (in II, 5) in the context of /Ethelberht’s imperium. Bede may, therefore, have been struggling with sources which were of poor quality concerning Kent c. 600, but there are hints that he was also exercising a degree of discretion, so as to best pursue his own, Bernician-centred historical imperatives. Bede did, however, make it perfectly clear that he believed that TEthelberht had been baptised: his most explicit comment on that event occurs in retrospect when dealing with the king’s death, wherein Bede noted that he died twenty-one years after having accepted the faith.22 If he died in 616 then Bede’s calculation places his conversion in the year 595, that is two years before the arrival of Augustine at Canterbury. Although he had placed Augustine’s departure from Rome a year earlier in his Cbronica Maiora, it seems unlikely that he was in any doubt by the time he was completing the latter that Augustine reached Kent in 597, as he asserted in book v, 24. Nor does interpretation of these as regnal years remove the difficulty. Bede seems poorly-informed about the basic statistics concerning TEthelberht’s reign, and this is not entirely explicable by the assumption that he obtained many of Gregory’s letters only very late in the process of composition. In this same passage he offered what is generally agreed to be an exaggerated estimate of the length of TEthelberht’s reign as fifty-six years, although whether or not this was deliberate is open to question.22 Whatever explanation of these anomalies is preferred, Bede does seem to assume that TEthelberht converted to Christianity very soon after Augustine’s arrival. The obvious alternative - that TEthelberht had already been baptised by Bishop Liudhard (Bertha’s Frankish bishop) in or around 595,24 before Augustine’s arrival, is superficially attractive but it runs counter to the powerful currents of Gregory’s correspondence, which

assumes

both

that

TEthelberht

was

non-Christian

when

Augustine arrived and that the latter was responsible for his conversion (as in HE, I, 25; 26). Either Gregory blatantly claimed for Augustine an achievement which more properly belonged to a predecessor, or each and every theory concerning a previous Frankish baptism of King TEthelberht must fall. That Liudhard was present at TEthelberht’s court seems well established (see below) but that he had already actually bap¬ tised the king when Augustine arrived should be set aside as implausible.

57

The convert kings

As far as the timing goes, Bede’s assumption does appear to have been correct. The letter which Gregory wrote to Eulogius, bishop of Alexandria, dated July 598, referred to the baptism of ‘more than ten thousand of the English’ on the Christmas Day previous (so 597).25 The number itself is apocryphal but Gregory had recently been in receipt of letters from the mission at the time of writing, which had brought him the welcome news of mass-baptisms timed to occur on one of the key Christian festivals. Bede’s very generalised comments (HE, i, 26) suggest that large numbers of baptisms occurred only after TEthelberht believed, but this may be no more than his own assumption, drawing on knowledge of later conversions rather than information specific to this one. Bede does not refer explicitly to a mass-baptism of the Kentings of the kind mentioned by Gregory and may not have been aware of it. Yet his logic is probably sound. Such an event as Gregory boasted of requires that TEthelberht approved it and that is necessarily far more likely if he led the way by per¬ sonal example.26 The ideas inherent in sacral kingship condone this interpretation and it finds further corroboration in Gregory’s letter to TEthelberht himself, dated June 601,27 which refers to ‘the grace which he had received from God’, and otherwise uses language which necessitates that Gregory was then entirely confident that TEthelberht was baptised. Gregory’s letter to Queen Bertha in the same year confirms this conclu¬ sion.28 We can, therefore, be reasonably confident that TEthelberht was baptised either on Christmas Day 597 or in the previous months. The opportunity which that date offered - to stage an elaborate, king-centred ritual capable of advertising his own supremacy and binding his support¬ ers and people to his decision - may suggest that it should be preferred. Bede attempted to explain TEthelberht’s decision to accept baptism in HE, i, 26, by reference to his being attracted by ‘the pure lives of the saints’ - by which he meant Augustine and his companions, to whose imitation of the lifestyle of the early apostles he had just referred - and by ‘their most precious promises, whose truth they confirmed by per¬ forming many miracles’. Bede’s use here of sancti is unusual, since he had hitherto restricted use of the term to saints known to him from existing authoritative literature.

It may,

therefore come from

a

Canterbury text.29 This may owe much to retrospective views of its founder at Canterbury but Augustine’s inauguration of a strict, monas¬ tic regime at Canterbury in 597 is very plausible. All the Italians with him were conversant with the monastic ideal, even though not all were monks. They were led by an erstwhile prior who had been appointed

58

King ALthelberht

their abbot in transit and was necessarily well-acquainted with the rule which Gregory had introduced to his own house, albeit this was prob¬ ably not the rule of St Benedict which has since become the best-known of this date. Augustine’s Frankish recruits may also have come from monkish backgrounds, given the growth in popularity of monasteries in contemporary Burgundy.30 Additionally, Augustine’s finances were surely not at this stage capable of sustaining much luxury,31 so a simple lifestyle was presumably de rigueur. This does, however, lead us into a major problem, which is how to treat Bede’s otherwise unsubstantiated stories concerning Canterbury’s foundation, many of which, like this one, seem legendary. Such stories almost certainly reached Bede from Albinus, Abbot of SS Peter and Paul at Canterbury, where Augustine’s body had long since been interred within the church. The significance of that fact is emphasised by Bede’s extended treatment of Augustine’s death, burial and subsequent rebur¬ ial once the church was complete, and his quotation verbatim of the epitaph inscribed on his tomb (HE, n, 3). Albinus was, of course, Bede’s principal insular authority for the history of the Gregorian mission to Kent and its neighbours, having researched and then supplied (through Nothelm) two batches of written materials and oral traditions.32 It was very much in Albinus’s interest to promote cults of St Gregory (to which Bede referred in HE, n, 3), of King zEthelberht (if such existed) and that of ‘the most reverend’ Augustine, within his own church. That his monastery was ultimately reconsecrated to St Augustine may imply that that cult was already of growing importance to the monastic church within this generation - and the comparable hagiography commis¬ sioned by Whitby, Lindisfarne and Hexham to reinforce their own cults would certainly sustain this. Bede’s explanation of Tithelberht’s conversion was, therefore, in part dependent on those letters of Gregory which he had read but also in part either on legends reaching him from Albinus and which he included, or on his own consideration of legendary material which he did not reproduce in detail. This corpus implies that a number of stories were circulating and evolving at Canterbury, and particularly among the regulars of Albinus’s own monastery. Such oral material dominates key passages of Bede’s treatment of dEthelberht: his marriage to Bertha (the basic fact could derive from Gregory’s letter to Bertha but that neglected her Frankish origins - Bede forebore to quote from it and may not have known it33); the presence and status of Liudhard; his initial meeting with Augustine, on Thanet, in the open air for fear of wizardry;

59

The convert kings the arrival of Augustine and his fellows at TEthelberht’s metropolis of Canterbury singing an antiphon from a Rogation litany then probably unknown at Rome (in HE, i, 25) ;34 their exemplary early life at Canterbury (i, 26); the origins, and dedications, of what were to become the Cathedral and St Augustine’s (The Holy Saviour and SS. Peter and Paul, respectively: I, 33); his treatment of some at least of the Augustine’s Oak’ exchanges between Augustine and the British clergy (ii, 2: see below) and, lastly, the miracle-stories associated with Archbishops Laurence and Mellitus

(ii,

6 and 7).

In defence of the historicity of this material, there are several details which can be corroborated from other sources, such as the presence of Liudhard at Canterbury, TEthelberht’s marriage to Bertha and several facts to do with the churches at Canterbury. It does, however, contain implausible items, as, for example, the length of yEthelberht’s reign, the Roman origins of Augustine’s new church (the cathedral),35 and the story of Eadbald’s ‘conversion’ by Laurence (HE,

ii,

6: see below, p. 140).

They also include instances of direct speech, which were necessarily reconstructed, probably by Bede himself. As Ian Wood has recently remarked,36 Bede is a secondary rather than a primary source, at least for those events for which other and nearer contemporary evidence sur¬ vives. Bede’s reasoning concerning TEthelberht’s decision may, therefore, be based on seriously defective information. What is more, it is predicated on a set of value judgements which are implicit, rather than explicit, and depend on yTthelberht, while still unbaptised, behaving at the point of baptism as if already a devout Christian. It seems unlikely that nonChristian Anglo-Saxons of high status would have been attracted by a lifestyle of the sort ascribed by Bede to Augustine and his company or by its system of values, let alone preferred it to the very different one then dominant in their own world. As an explanation of TEthelberht’s rapid conversion Bede’s account therefore lacks credibility and must be set aside as highly retrospective. Yet in one respect he may well have been right, for there is inde¬ pendent evidence that Augustine was credited with miracles, in Gregory’s letter to Bishop Eulogius in July 598 (above) and in one written on 1 June 601 to Augustine himself,3" which Bede quoted (in part) in HE, i, 31: I know, dearest brother, that almighty God, through love for you, has revealed great miracles among the race which he wished to be chosen: thence it is nec-

60

King ALthelberht essary that you should rejoice with trembling concerning that heavenly gift and fear while rejoicing. For you should rejoice because the souls of the English have been drawn through exterior miracles to an interior grace: but you should fear indeed lest among these signs, which have occurred, the weak soul should be raised up in its own presumption, and whence it has been raised up furthest in honour, there shall it fall inwardly through vainglory.

Gregory had received news back from the mission at several stages, the earliest before he wrote to Brunhild in September 597,™ then in early to mid-summer 598,39 and again in the early summer of 601, via Laurence and Peter. Some at least of these told of miracles effected through his servant, Augustine. News of these he shared with his friends while at the same time containing at source the risk that his successes in this respect would lead Augustine into the sin of pride. It was Gregory’s stated opinion that miracles were an entirely appropriate feature of the Christian world and peculiarly relevant to the missionary situation. Augustine and his Italian colleagues were necessarily aware of that opinion and prepared to satisfy expectations that such would occur in England.40 Augustine was, therefore, at this stage of his mission engaging in mir¬ acles, or at least in acts which were capable of, and designed for, a mirac¬ ulous interpretation (and Bede did refer to one example in a little more detail: see below, p. 111). Such should not surprise us. The miraculous was a conspicuous element in the early medieval process of conversion, and more particularly its reportage, not just in England but also else¬ where, and seems to have been an important, and deliberately deployed, part of the arsenal of any well-prepared, Catholic missionary. Its use could be justified by reference to the New Testament (particularly Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, chapters xn, xiv and xv ) and it features in early hagiography.41 As regards the second of Bede’s claims - that promises made by Augustine and his colleagues impressed TEthelberht - it surely goes without saying that the mission members were taking whatever oppor¬ tunity came their way to explain the Christian promise of redemption to yEthelberht. Such may, but need not, have helped draw yEthelberht towards baptism.42 Bede’s reference to promises is, however, open to almost any interpretation. He may have been unaware of the nature of any such promises, or even whether or not they had actually been made. Alternatively, if they went beyond the merely spiritual into the realm of power politics, then Bede (and his informants) may have had good reason to avoid focusing on the detail.43 His account certainly does not

61

The convert kings rule out a more political interpretation than is immediately explicit and the very generality of his comments here could disguise promises of a kind with which Bede, in retrospect, had little sympathy. Gregory’s letter to ^Ethelberht, which Bede quotes, certainly opens up this sugges¬ tion for consideration. Bede’s report of the activities of Augustine at Canterbury before TEthelberht’s conversion may, therefore, be defensible as regards its broad chronological structure, specific details excepted, but it is extremely unspecific and otherwise very incomplete. What is not fully explored is the causal connection that he himself made between these activities and TEthelberht’s conversion. We are left, yet again, with the simple and fundamental question with which we began: why did TEthelberht accept baptism? Secondary but no less important questions must be: why did he give resources and his protection to Augustine even before his own baptism, so that a mission station at Canterbury became a practical reality? Why, if he was now to convert with such alacrity, had he not previously converted (supposing, of course, that he had not)? How did this conversion sit alongside TEthelberht’s wider ambitions and policies as an imperium-wiMing king and how did the king’s atti¬ tude towards the mission change during his reign? Faced by such questions concerning a major political figure of the day, Bede’s brief explanation looks formulaic, imprecise and inade¬ quate. This may be because his information was itself patchy, and his explanation certainly owes much to his providential vision of history. Bede had inherited from Canterbury a well-developed set of stories con¬ cerning the foundation of the archdiocese which may have already, by 731, screened out any substance which was contrary to a simple, mission-centred

and

providential

interpretation

of

/Ethelberht’s

baptism, and an equally simple vision of TEthelberht’s conversion as a full-blown psychological metamorphosis. In search of a fuller explana¬ tion, we must turn to the very limited amount of contemporary written evidence that sheds any light on TEthelberht’s perception of his own role as king and ‘overking’, and to the broader issues concerning power pol¬ itics in southern England and Frankia as they unravelled during his reign.

Frankia, Augustine and Gregory In 596, Gregory the Great dispatched a group of monks from Rome towards Britain to carry out missionary activity among the Angles.

62

King /.Ethelberht Legends concerning Gregory’s long-standing desire to convert the English focus on his putative contact with Deiran slaves at Rome but derive from non-contemporary, English sources, the earliest of which is the anonymous Whitby Life of Gregory the Great.44 Bede included a version of the same punning legend at the end of his own eulogy on Gregory, (in HE, n, 1) but seems not to have himself placed much cre¬ dence on it. Modern opinion has differed as to the underlying histor¬ icity of this story, the more sceptical commentators pointing to its errors of fact and the Northumbrian imperatives which drive it,45 while others have been more inclined at least to credit the basic essentials.46 The only relevant comment by Gregory himself is in a letter of July 599 in which he remarked that he ‘long pondered concerning the nation of the English’,47 but this need not take us back beyond 595, when we know that he proposed to baptise English slaves (see below). Gregory clearly had a continuous and ongoing commitment to the spread of Catholic Christianity through his role as the senior bishop of all Christendom, and more particularly of the West. He saw himself as the key agent on earth through whom God’s plan for mankind might be made manifest before the sixth age of the earth should end - and he believed that ending to be imminent. His interest in conversion was, therefore, ideologically rooted. It certainly encompassed the English but it is unclear whether he became conscious of their existence and unbaptised condition much before 595. Gregory may have given them some special significance in his thinking on the subject at some stage thereafter, perhaps because they were non-Christians within the old Roman Empire,48 but the several other reasons which have been sug¬ gested are less than convincing. Gregory seems to have been poorly informed concerning British Christianity prior to Augustine reaching England, so is unlikely to have been motivated by the desire to pre-empt British clergy baptising the English. Similarly there is little reason to suppose that Gregory was fearful of unorthodox Irish missionaries con¬ verting the English, at least until his correspondence with Columbanus in Burgundy and this seems too late to account for the mission.49 Gregory’s interest in spreading Christianity was in any case far from exclusive to the English, and it seems reasonably certain that he came to have an interest in the English only via his involvement in Gaul, where his correspondence began in June 591 and where he consistently sought to encourage church reform.50 A more realistic approach would be to argue that Gregory’s commit¬ ment to the English conversion was exaggerated in early English histo-

63

The convert kings riography. Gregory is known to have written in excess of 800 letters of which less than four per cent make any reference to his mission to the English and almost all of those were written within just a few weeks in 596 and 601. Despite the several letters to or concerning the mission which were composed in July 601, Gregory’s missive to his friend Eulogius in the same month forebore even to mention his English ini¬ tiative, complaining instead of the Lombards and dealing with other church matters. Gregory’s standing declined rapidly after c. 640 at Rome itself and it is this circumstance that has emphasised the role of the English in the making of his reputation.51 Gregory was much encouraged at the outset of his pontificate by the personal conversion from Arianism of King Reccared of the Visigoths in Spain. Fredegar later remarked that Reccared compelled all the Goths to be baptised to the Catholic faith, and Gregory’s subsequent letter to him confirms this:52 ‘The whole nation of the Goths has through thy Excellency been brought over from the error of Arian heresy to the firm¬ ness of the right faith’. Just as he would send Abbot Augustine to the English, so did he send Abbot Cyriacus to the Visigoths, to build on events there. Similarly, Gregory seems to have been aware of an earlier but broadly similar conversion among the Suevi,53 and cannot have been entirely ignorant of Clovis’s much trumpeted responsibility for the earlier conversion of the Franks.54 The Visigothic success therefore fitted into a pre-existing pattern of mass conversions of barbarian peoples throughout the West and may well have encouraged Gregory’s thoughts concerning other parts of the old Roman empire, including the English at the ‘end of the world’, as he was later to write to Alexandria. His Visigothic correspondence certainly contextualises Gregory’s concentration on the conversion of the English King, and his assumption that the nation over whom he ruled could be made to conform thereafter to their master’s choice of religion. Gregory rou¬ tinely counselled the use of coercion by rulers to achieve wider conver¬ sion and Catholic orthodoxy during his pontificate,55 and expected barbarian kings to use their power in on this way. How much did Gregory know? How well acquainted was Gregory with political and ecclesiastical events in Kent in 596? This is a crucial issue, both because it influenced his plans for the mission and because it is the principal reflection of such events now available to us. It is, however, one which is impossible to resolve with any real certainty. The safest course is to assume that prac-

64

King ALthelberbt tically no factual information concerning the English had reached Rome but this is probably unduly nihilistic.56 There are several hints in his correspondence that imply that Gregory both set himself to learn about those whom he intended should be targets of evangelisation prior to the event, and had some success in so doing. With that knowledge, he may have been able to adopt an agenda which was more politically sophisticated than has generally been recognised, in his dealings with both the English and the Franks.57 In September 595, Gregory dispatched his priest Candidus as his agent to manage the papal patrimony in Frankia.58 This small, scat¬ tered, but predominately southernly bundle of assets existed by the mid-sixth century and was presumably adequately documented at Rome. Up to 593 it had been managed by Dynamius, the Merovingian governor of the south, but his dismissal by King Childebert then neces¬ sitated that Gregory make new arrangements. Candidus had good reason to inform himself concerning the details of his new responsibil¬ ities in the summer of 595, but his master seems to have been more con¬ cerned to understand the Frankish context within which it lay, so the more general state of the Frankish church and the political structures alongside which it operated. Gregory thereafter had someone in Frankia capable of informing Rome on issues relevant to his own tasks and who apparently did so.59 Even before Candidus’s departure from Rome, Gregory established communication with one of the main centres of Merovingian power: letters survive from Gregory to King Childebert II, by then the ruler of all eastern Frankia (Figure 4), dated August and September 595, and to Childebert’s mother, the Dowager Queen Brunhild, in September 595.60 Although the later examples were merely letters of commendation so may never have actually reached the named recipients, Gregory had successfully identified, and corresponded with, the nearer and more powerful of the Frankish kings even before Candidus had set out. The earliest

of

these

letters

presumably

travelled

independently

of

Candidus, so provides valuable evidence of the flow of travellers between Italy and the interior of Frankia. Candidus was dispatched to Frankia but the instructions how to spend his income were sent on after him. Part was to go on the purchase of English boys of seventeen or eighteen years of age, to be educated in monasteries. Gregory’s instructions make it clear that he anticipated they would be unbaptised and that he intended that this be rectified. His purposes in so instructing his agent are no more than implicit, but his

65

The convert kings instructions were not conditional. Gregory had therefore necessarily ascertained both the existence and religion of such transmarine slaves in Gaul previous to the departure of Candidus, but not necessarily long enough in advance for him to advise his agent in person and so dispense with the letter. This is comparatively specific knowledge which for the first time demonstrates his interest in and capacity for retrieving information concerning the English, in this context presumably from Frankia.61 It likewise provides the earliest example in an English context of Gregory’s coercive approach to conversion: these slaves were not to be freed and given the option of a monastic education but placed in monasteries, baptised and educated, willy-nilly.62 Given Candidus’s responsibility for the entire process and the proba¬ ble limitations governing the use of Frankish coin outside Merovingian territory, this was apparently to occur in Frankia, despite the fact that Gregory was concerned in case deaths of unbaptised youths might occur en route to an appropriate monastery.63 It is impossible to be sure just what else Gregory knew about the English, but contact between Candidus and any such slaves whom he bought during the winter of 595-6 would very quickly have provided a new conduit of information concerning at least south-eastern England, whence most would presum¬ ably have been trans-shipped. Had he wished, therefore, Gregory could have obtained information concerning Kent by early 596, prior to Augustine’s departure. Bertha, Brunhild and Liudhard Another well-tried approach to understanding continental links with England is to focus on Queen Bertha. She was daughter of King Charibert of Paris (561-7), so cousin to both the Merovingian rulers of the day, Chlothar II and Childebert II (died 596) - and cousin once removed to the latter’s young sons and heirs. The date of her marriage to ‘the son of a certain king in Kent’ is unrecorded but she can only have been born between late 561 and 568,64 so is most likely to have married between c. 575 and c. 581 - when Gregory of Tours first noted the fact. He attended on her mother in 588-9, some months before the latter’s death, and noted Bertha and her marriage again in that context, but offered no new information.63 This omission need not, however, imply that he was then ignorant of her later career, since she was perhaps still married to a king’s son when Gregory had reason to refer to her for a second time. Despite Bede’s estimate of his reign as 56 years, yEthelberht need not have been king by 588—9, in which case her status

66

King ALthelberht

Figure 1

The Kentish kingdom and its neighbours c. 600. The roads are those

detailed in the Antonine Itinerary, which implies that they were routes regularly used by officials during the Roman period.

would not have changed. Bertha was still there and married to ^Ethelberht in 601, by then as queen.66 The Merovingians did not just lose princesses: that her whereabouts were known within the Frankish royal dynasty in the 590s is sustained by their continuing interest in other brides who had been sent overseas. Bertha was, after all, resident on an excellent system of paved roads, only a score or two miles from the French coast and at the court of a people whom archaeology con¬ firms had continuing and close contacts with Frankia (Figure 1). Given his control of the coastlands of Frankia, Kent’s continental

67

The convert kings

Figure 2

The division Merovingian Gaul on the death of Chlothar I in 561

between his four sons was to the detriment of Chilperic (based on Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994).

contacts in the 570s and 580s were probably with the territories of Chilperic, king of Soissons, rather than those of Childebert II of Austrasia (Figure 3). These two Merovingian courts viewed one another with mutual hostility and had done so as far back as the death of Chlothar I, in 561, when Chilperic had sought to dominate the succes¬ sion in his own interest. He was, however, resisted by his three halfbrothers and the kingdom was divided, with Charibert establishing himself at Paris, Guntram at Orleans, Sigibert at Rheims and Chilperic

68

King ALthelberht

Figure 3

Merovingian Gaul on the death of Charibert I in 567 (based on

Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994).

at Soissons (Figure 2).67 Chilperic was thereafter dissatisfied with what was very obviously an unequal share and attempted to take advantage of Sigibert’s preoccupation with a Hunnish invasion in 562 by launch¬ ing an attack on Reims. The contest went badly for him thereafter and he was on the verge of defeat when his brother was murdered in 575, allegedly by an agent of his wife Queen Fredegund. Sigibert’s death left Childebert, aged five, in an extremely vulnerable position and this was exploited by Chilperic, who successfully expelled his rival from Touraine (to the annoyance of Gregory of Tours and King Guntram of

69

The convert kings Burgundy).68 Chilperic’s death, also by assassination, in 584, relieved the pressure on Childebert, and the latter won the subsequent competi¬ tion for power with the even younger Chlothar II, the heir born of Fredegund posthumously to Chilperic, but - if Professor Brooks’s argu¬ ments are accepted - Bertha’s marriage had already occurred by then. About 575X581, therefore, Bertha married a son of a Kentish king. It was a royal marriage, if not a particularly distinguished one by Merovingian standards. Bertha’s marriage must have reflected amity between the regime at Canterbury and King Chilperic’s court at Soissons. Given the differences between those two regimes, it seems unlikely that Kent was viewed by her powerful continental neighbour as an equal.69 Chilperic’s perception of his own status is clear from his ambition to gain control of Paris, which he reoccupied once both Charibert and Sigibert were dead, so claiming to be heir to the mantle of Clovis and Chlothar I. He courted popularity by building circuses both there and at Soissons, chaired the Council of Paris of the Frankish Church and based his court there.70 Both he and several of his sons were ultimately buried at Paris and it was there too that Fredegund fled into sanctuary at her husband’s death.71 Paris had clearly become Chilperic’s capital in the last years of his life and he then had a highly developed view of his own status, both within Frankia and without. Yet Chilperic need not have exacted tribute from many neighbouring communities. Even while his star was in the ascendant, he spent most of his energies contesting control of Frankish territory and had little time for imperial adventures outside. Venantius Fortunatus extolled his virtues as a great king, referring to his success in protecting the Frankish fatherland from barbarian ravaging: the Goths, Basques, Jutes, Saxons, Danes and Bretons had all been conquered by him - but only in associa¬ tion with his father, Chlothar I, who had died in 561. Of these, only the Bretons are known to have been attacked by the Franks after that date. The Frisians and Suehi (in Spain) he considered to have sought Chilperic’s protection and recognised his hegemony,72 but this might easily reflect their greater fear of assault from other directions. The Jutes and Saxons mentioned herein were likely to be continental, given the company in which Fortunatus placed them. Indeed, the Saxons could have been those resident in Normandy. Their Kentish cousins were, however, obviously an important further piece in the political jigsaw of the Atlantic littoral. Eormenric of Canterbury is unlikely to have negotiated with Chilperic as an equal but the latter’s imperial record is undistinguished and there is no evidence whatever that the

70

King ALthelberbt Kentings had actually been subjugated by him. This was probably a far more subtle relationship than that but it does suggest that Canterbury was a place where it paid to be a keen observer of Frankish politics. Bertha was a fatherless princess whose mother left property to churches at Tours and Le Mans and was visited by the bishop of Tours shortly before she died. This was a region where Chilperic was domi¬ nant in the period 575-84.73 Her daughter’s hand in marriage was prob¬ ably, therefore, his to dispose of. That he dispatched her as a bride to Kent implies the establishment, or perhaps the reinforcement, of a polit¬ ical accord between Soissons and a satellite, the friendly, but notionally independent, regime at Canterbury. The political realities underlying this relationship changed dramat¬ ically in 584. With Chilperic dead, north-west Frankia became some¬ thing of a power vacuum. His infant heir came under the distant guardianship of Chlothar I’s last surviving son, King Guntram of Burgundy, who took control of Paris, much of Chilperic’s more south¬ erly provinces and several of the disputed territories now vociferously claimed by the advisers of both Chlothar and Childebert. Guntram guaranteed Chlothar’s survival and the continuation of his core inheri¬ tance in the north-west of Frankia, in the process protecting Queen Fredegund from the charge of withcraft which Childebert’s aides brought against her. Otherwise, he did little more than preside over a period of armed peace in relations between the heirs of Sigibert and Chilperic, and Fredegund for one clearly distrusted Guntram’s motives and ambitions. When his forces attacked Brittany c. 589, she sought to aid the Bretons clandestinely by inciting Saxons from Normandy to dis¬ guise themselves and assist them.74 Again on the basis of Professor Brooks’s arguments, it was during Guntram’s

distant

and

contested

guardianship

that

TEthelberht

emerged as a king in Kent in succession to his father, Eormenric. The contrast between Chilperic’s dominating presence in Neustria and the comparative power vacuum in western Frankia after 584 is a significant one. It seems unlikely, therefore, that the Kentish court was in any meaningful sense subordinate to either Soissons or Paris between the mid-580s and the mid-590s, despite Bertha’s continuing presence. TEthelberht may well have inherited close ties with Chilperic’s son and widow, but the balance of power had surely shifted in his favour. This does not, however, imply that communication between Kent and Frankia had broken down, or that Bertha had been entirely forgotten by any of the three Merovingian courts with an interest in Chlothar’s sur-

71

The convert kings vival during these years. Rather, the opportunity was there for such communication to become diversified, as the rivals of the beleaguered court at Soissons reached out into areas where Chilperic’s interests had hitherto probably been exclusive. The elder of Guntram’s two nephews, Childebert, came of age in 585, was recognised as heir to the childless King of Burgundy by the Treaty of Andelot in 587, and then inherited his uncle’s dominant posi¬ tion and vast territories at his death in 593. Chlothar was thereafter effectively besieged in north-west France (Figure 4). Very soon after, in the summer of 595, Pope Gregory established friendly contact with Childebert and his mother, Brunhild,75 but not the more distant Chlothar, with whom there is no evidence of direct papal correspon¬ dence prior to a single letter in 601.76 Gregory sought to use this new relationship with the dominant Merovingian court to organise a reforming synod and he also wanted assistance to enable Candidus to perform his duties, which he considered the Metropolitan Bishop Vergilius at Arles was preventing. His letter to Candidus establishes that those duties already included converting such of the English as he could acquire. By seeking the protection of Brunhild and her family for Candidus, Gregory was explicitly involving them in his initiative to baptise the English race. At this stage this was only a very small initia¬ tive, admittedly, and one which was still confined to Frankia, but his strategy, and Brunhild’s positive reaction to Gregory’s advances, both have important implications for the future. What is less clear is how Candidus’s work relates to England. It may be that Gregory’s own writings hint at some awareness thereof at about this date. He had completed his Moralia in Job by April 591, but there¬ after made certain minor changes or additions. One such referred specifically to progress already made in Christianising Britain. If this alteration occurred before Augustine’s arrival, then it must betray his consciousness of pre-existing efforts to convert the English. However, the amendment need not have been made before c. 601,77 in which case it is nothing more exciting than a reference to Gregory’s own mission. Even so, on the evidence of his own letters, Gregory already had an interest in the English by the autumn of 595 and it is a fairly simple step thence to an interest in Britain. His correspondence with Candidus, and with Childebert and his family, provided him with access to further information if he chose to pursue it. Gregory may have been enquiring specifically about Britain’s non-Christian inhabitants and the prospects for their conversion. Alternatively Childebert may have been engaging

72

King ALtkelberht him on this subject for his own purposes — and the options are not exclu¬ sive. Gregory’s links with Childebert therefore provided a potential source of information about recent missionary activity among the insular English, and it may be that Childebert’s cousin Bertha, her English husband and her Frankish bishop, Liudhard, did somehow feature in the flow of information to Rome by the winter of 595. Liudhard was referred to by Bede (HE, I, 25 and by implication 26) in a passage which focused on his role vis-a-vis Bertha and St Martin’s at Canterbury. Since Bede’s sources are unknown, Liudhard’s existence and status might be doubted if it depended solely on his unsupported statement but the bishop’s presence there is confirmed by the single gold coin (or ‘medalet’) found near St Martin’s, which bears the motif leu.dardus ep[iscopu]s.78 Bede’s material concerning Liudhard was, there¬ fore, correct as regards the essential facts of his name, rank and context. Liudhard was a Frankish bishop, albeit a Frankish bishop in Britain, appointed c. 575X581, when Chilperic dominated north-west France. He accompanied a Frankish bride to a friendly court. Chilperic’s treat¬ ment of both Praetextatus of Rouen and Gregory of Tours demon¬ strates his Erastian perspective on the episcopacy and his own supremacy thereover.79 In this light, the appointment of a bishop rather than a simple confessor to accompany Bertha should be viewed in part as a political act and Liudhard interpreted as a figure of diplomatic as well as sacerdotal significance, one who acted as Chilperic’s agent at Canterbury, as well as heading a church of sorts there. As a bishop, it seems probable that he retained contact with fellow bishops in north¬ western Frankia. It is Liudhard, as much as Bertha, who must be viewed as evidence of a link between the two courts, even after Chilperic’s death. It is in this context that Childebert’s associates can be relied upon to have known about Liudhard and his political affinities and would have been capable of providing Gregory the Great with information as early as 595. Brunhild may have even herself known Liudhard, for she had married Chilperic’s own son, Merovich, and briefly resided at Rouen prior to 575, when his appointment may already have been in the wind. That Gregory had sought such information by 596 seems even more likely.80 It does, therefore, seem very probable that Gregory was at least distantly aware of vTthelberht, Bertha and Bishop Liudhard, but he was overly dependent for information on a channel of communication which was dominated by Liudhard’s detractors and the dynastic oppo¬ nents of his patrons. Such may help to contextualise Gregory’s wish to

73

The convert kings himself take control of converting the English - a desire which first emerges in 595 immediately after his first communications with King Childebert. It certainly contextualises his close co-operation thereafter with Brunhild’s branch of the Merovingian royal family as he sought to pursue this end. To what use did Gregory put such information as he had? If he had intended that the English boys obtained by Candidus from 595 onwards should eventually become missionaries among the English, his objective could have been to reinforce the pre-existing, Frankish ministry but his dismissive comments in 597 on the pastoral shortcomings of nearby clergy (see below) do not sustain this interpretation. Yet it seems unlikely that he can have intended such novices to have staffed a mission to the English entirely independent of more seasoned supervision and there is no evidence that they were intended as future missionaries. Gregory may have simply been attempting to establish a role for himself within the wider process of converting the English,81 alongside what¬ ever he knew about existing Frankish activities. Put simply, Candidus’s activity vis-a-vis English slaves may, in 595, have been intended to be Gregory’s own contribution in toto to the conversion of the English. His initiative may well have pleased Childebert II, if it compromised the uniqueness of the existing Neustrian mission to the English. As the secular protector of Candidus, Childebert may himself have anticipated some moral and political advantage from the affair. A change of plan Why, then, did Gregory adopt a very different policy just six months or so later and dispatch a group of Roman monks to England? This does seem to reflect a dramatic shift in papal thinking. The most plausible reason must be the arrival of pertinent new information at Rome, such that either required - or at least made possible - an entirely different approach to the problem of the English. The information most likely to have triggered Gregory’s decision to send his own mission would argu¬ ably have been news of Liudhard’s death, which would have offered Gregory and Childebert together an opportunity to take greater control of the church in Kent. That Gregory was eager to obtain Childebert’s co-operation is suggested by his sensitivity to Brunhild’s request for relics of SS. Peter and Paul in July 596.82 His initiative offered the Burgundian court the means to weaken links between Chlothar and his associates in Kent, and so isolate their rival for power in Gaul. Such a scenario is beyond proof, of course, and must remain no more than an

74

King ALtbelberbt hypothesis, but mutual self-interest is likely to have contextualised the co-operation of the Austrasian—Burgundian court with Gregory regard¬ ing Augustine’s mission. There are separate lines of reasoning which point to, but fail to prove, Liudhard’s recent death in 596. Had Gregory and Augustine been aware of his continuing existence in Kent in 596 it seems unlikely that Augustine would have been dispatched from Rome with a licence to be consecrated bishop of the English. Nor would Frankish bishops have been so willing to consecrate an Italian interloper, despite his papal cre¬ dentials. Gregory’s very general comments on the shortcomings of priests ‘in the neighbourhood’ in his correspondence in 596 are his first on the subject, so if news of Liudhard’s death stimulated Gregory’s sudden initiative it was then very recent. If Liudhard had been over thirty in 575X581 (as canonical election required), then he was at an absolute minimum in his mid-forties and more probably over fifty in 595. Fifteen to twenty years was as much as most bishops could expect to enjoy in post, so his death at this juncture would not be surprising. It is extremely difficult to distinguish between information reaching Gregory from Candidus (and his other correspondents) up to late spring 596, and that which Augustine brought back on his return to Rome that summer. The point reached by the mission, where the others presumably remained while Augustine travelled, can be reconstructed from the letters of commendation which Gregory dispatched with Augustine in August. These demonstrated knowledge on Gregory’s part of bishops and sees as far north as Tours, but referred to Augustine’s good report of only Stephen, abbot of Lerins, Protasius, the bishop of Aix-en-Provence, and the patrician Arigius, the Merovingian governor of the same region who was normally based at Arles.83 They had prob¬ ably, therefore, reached the Rhone valley and there obtained hearsay information about the dioceses of the interior of Burgundy. At that point they discontinued their journey. This occurred, therefore, not as they prepared to leave Frankish territory for England but immediately they became aware of King Childebert’s death and its repercussions. We do not, of course, know the route the mission had planned to take, but given that Gregory eventually acknowledged Chlothar’s assistance to Augustine in 597, they probably intended to travel through his territory in 596, then cross from the north-west coast,84 rather than travel by ship down the Loire.85 Augustine’s arrival back at Rome provided Gregory with an important opportunity to update his knowledge of Frankish royal and ecclesiastical politics, but any new information derived exclu-

75

The convert kings sively from Childebert’s lands and was presumably charged with the prejudices and purposes of its ruling elite. Gregory now dispatched letters via Augustine to several members of the laity, prominent among whom were the two royal children, Theuderic and Theudebert, and their grandmother, Brunhild.86 No letters from Gregory to Neustria exist from 596. He may, of course, have then given Augustine letters of commendation covering the rulers and bishops of north-western France, letters which failed to reach the papal register,87 but such a blanket under-representation of the region seems improbable. Rather, there may have been good reason for Gregory to have withheld such letters if he was pursuing an initiative agreed with Childebert’s regime, despite that king’s death in the interim. His sons had only very recently been orphaned in July 596 and had their inheri¬ tance apportioned, but the courts which they notionally headed remained as committed as their father’s had been to rivalry with that of King Chlothar. That Augustine’s initial journey had been terminated in consequence (in part) of adverse rumours is confirmed by Gregory’s subsequent letter to Augustine’s brethren,88 quoted by Bede in his Historia (i, 23), which refers specifically to maledicorum hominum linguae (‘the tongues of evil-speaking men’). If the political elite in the lower Rhone valley were warning Augustine of the dangers of proceeding, they were referring more immediately to the Christian territories of Chlothar than to the non-Christian communities beyond. In the summer of 596, Fredegund and Chlothar sought to take advantage of Childebert’s sudden death, taking possession of Paris and other cities in the region which had once been held by Chilperic and attacking the forces of Theudebert and Theuderic at Laffaux, near Soissons.89 With the lands between the Seine and the Oise effectively a war zone, and Childebert’s heirs minors, Gregory’s plans had gone seriously awry and Augustine and his companions had good reason to stay their journey in Provence and report back to Rome. There are several details concerning Gregory’s mission which sustain this vision of interconnections between Kent, Frankia and Rome, but fall short of proving it. One is Augustine’s rank. Gregory made him abbot only on his return to Rome in the August of 596. Previously he had been referred to by Gregory as a cleric (servus Dei),90 albeit he had been the prior of the monastery of St Andrew. Gregory then conferred on him a rank which entitled him to coerce his companions into com¬ pleting their journey. In these terms Augustine’s appointment makes

76

King /Ethelberht sense, yet there is a major anomaly. He was intended to head a mission to the English - and there to preach, to baptise and to consecrate others to do the same - but Augustine was not elevated to the rank of bishop in Rome, as would seem to be the more obvious course, despite the assumption to this effect of the anonymous author of the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great (xi). Bede later supposed (HE, i, 27) that he returned to Arles for consecration several years later (in 600—1), once the mission had become firmly established, but his report of this is seriously compromised by factual error and there are good reasons to set it aside, at least in detail.91 When Gregory wrote to Brunhild in September, 59792 he referred to Augustine as his fellow-bishop and this is confirmed by his letter to Eulogius, in July 598,93 which remarks that Augustine, ‘having received my permission, was made bishop by the bishops of the Germanies’. It has been suggested that the time-scale involved requires that this occurred en route in Frankia,94 but Augustine’s party probably reached Kent in the spring or very early summer of 597 so a return to Frankia prior to September cannot be ruled out,95 leaving time for news of the event to reach Gregory thence before he wrote to Brunhild. There is a single piece of evidence which suggests that it is the second of these possibilities which should be preferred. One of the letters with which Augustine left Rome for the second time in 596, addressed to Brunhild, referred to the immediate purpose of Augustine’s journey, which was to discover the wishes of the English regarding conversion.96 Gregory was not, therefore, entirely satisfied that the English were seeking baptism, and Augustine’s task was initially conceived as exploratory. In this context, his consecration as a bishop at Rome might have pre-empted the issue. This is not, however, the end of the matter. Gregory licensed Augustine’s consecration but his elevation at the hands of Frankish bishops is consistent with other evidence for the mutual co-operation of Gregory and one sector of the Merovingian establishment. Where did this ceremony occur, and why? Although it may be tempting to iden¬ tify the ‘bishops of the Germans’ more specifically with northern Frankia, so with Theudebert’s Austrasia,97 the case is unconvincing when it is remembered that Gregory’s correspondent was the bishop of Alexandria, to whom all Franks and Burgundians would surely be equally ‘Germans’. Rather, as Brechter long since recognised,98 the only clue in Gregory’s correspondence lies in his particular debt to Brunhild’s protege, Bishop Syagrius of Autun, to whom he later sent a

77

The convert kings pallium." Autun lay close to the borders of Burgundy and Austrasia, and was arguably an ideal place at which Brunhild could have convened a meeting of bishops from both kingdoms for Augustine’s consecration. Syagrius’s high standing with Gregory need not reflect anything beyond his place in Brunhild’s favours and a strong commitment to reform,100 but Gregory’s special esteem is at least suggestive. What does seem very probable is that it was the bishops of Austrasia-Burgundy, and not Neustria, who consecrated Augustine, the event taking its place within a visible nexus of co-operation between Brunhild’s branch of the Merovingian dynasty and Pope Gregory. Yet Chlothar’s kingdom was far nearer Kent and had bishops aplenty who could have conducted such a ceremony. If Augustine travelled all the way to eastern central or southern Frankia for consecration, it was so as to avoid owing his eleva¬ tion to Chlothar’s bishops. This event probably contrasted, therefore, with the earlier appointment of Liudhard, who arguably hailed from Chilperic’s Neustria. Papal policy in 596-7 therefore points to close co-operation with the Burgundian-Austrasian court and ecclesiastical establishment, and implies that Gregory valued this relationship highly enough to treat them with considerable sensitivity. There is another issue herein. The Frankish church had a legitimate interest in the appointment of a bishop to the English if this was already an office within that same Frankish church. Having provided a candidate for the English diocese, Gregory recognised the rights of Frankish bishops in the act of eleva¬ tion itself. Such recognition of Frankish sensibilities at Rome may imply some knowledge of Liudhard. It also reinforces the impression that a holy alliance between Gregory and Brunhild’s regime had come into being. Gregory wanted control of missionary activity among the English and reform of the Frankish church. Brunhild probably sought to detach the Kentish court from Chlothar, move her own clergy into Kent and so establish political influence there.101 Augustine arrived in Kent, therefore, as an Italian masquerading as a Frankish bishop, with Frankish as well as Italian clergy and under Frankish royal patronage. This has important implications for the interpretation of TEthelberht’s own policy towards baptism (see below). Gregory had already written to Queen Bertha at some date previous to 601, since his correspondence then (see below, p. 101) refers to ‘pre¬ vious letters of instruction’.102 Such do not survive. They could have been sent in 598 after news had reached Gregory from Augustine (by July), but July 596 is another option. Whichever, these letters demon-

78

King ALtbelberht strate that he already knew of Bertha and was attempting to obtain her co-operation before 601. Such letters might be considered particularly necessary if her aid was something which Gregory could not automat¬ ically count upon, despite her Christianity. If Bertha was seen by Brunhild as a symbol of links between Canterbury and Soissons then Augustine’s arrival even had some potential to threaten her. It may be significant that Gregory’s surviving letter implies that she had so far been far from supportive of Augustine and Gregory demanded her aid but with interest for her previous lack of enthusiasm. According to that same letter to Bishop Eulogius to which reference has already been made, the ‘bishops of the Germans’ brought Augustine to the English. This suggests that they, or their repre¬ sentatives, actually conducted him across northern France to the Channel and even to England. Bede was aware of Augustine’s recruit¬ ment of Frankish interpreters in accordance with Gregory’s instruc¬ tions (HE, i, 25) but does not acknowledge that these were priests and accords them very low status within the mission, presumably on the basis of information reaching him from Rome-centred Canterbury. Gregory’s letter to Kings Theuderic and Theudebert paints a rather different picture: The priests in the vicinity neglect it [the English nation] and refrain from kin¬ dling by their exhortation the desires of the English. On this account, there¬ fore, we have arranged to send thither Augustine, the servant of God, the bearer of these letters, whose zeal and steadfastness are well known to us, along with other servants of God. We have also enjoined them to take with them some priests from the vicinity, by means of whom they may be able to get to know the intentions of the English, and, as far as God may allow, assist them to their desires by their admonition.

Gregory wrote at the same time and in almost identical terms to Queen Brunhild.103 The dual use of vicinus - ‘vicinity’ or ‘neighbourhood’ - in both letters contrasts the putative failure of the Franks in or near England (those subject to Chlothar) to convert the English,104 with the antici¬ pated success of the papal-Austrasian/Burgundian mission. This is a sophisticated message: Gregory was here seizing the moral high ground on behalf of Augustine and himself and also Brunhild’s family, while at the same time belittling the efforts of the clergy of their dynastic oppo¬ nent. These letters are transparently partisan, apparently in an attempt to engage the enthusiasm of the Dowager Queen and her young grand-

79

The convert kings sons for the enterprise. The priests whom Augustine was to recruit were to come from their ‘neighbourhood’, to be their subjects, to be dis¬ patched with their approval and to support Augustine all the way to Kent, and then again accompany him on his return thither, once he had been consecrated (see above). We do not know how many there were but they were plural and probably a significant group. Frankish clergy argu¬ ably comprised an important element within Augustine’s following thereafter. Bede reported that Augustine left Rome with ‘several more God-fearing monks’ (HE, i, 23) but that his companions were ‘almost forty in number’ when they landed on Thanet (H£, i, 25).10> If he was right then it seems at least possible that Augustine’s Frankish clergy were as numerous as, or even numbered more than, his Italian col¬ leagues. Whatever the exact arithmetic, therefore, Augustine’s

mission

enabled Brunhild and her grandsons to establish their own clergy in England under papal authority and thereby displace the influence of a pre-existing but temporarily leaderless Frankish mission which had its roots in Chlothar’s Neustria.106 Once again, it is unrealistic to imagine that Gregory and his Frankish allies were entirely ignorant of Liudhard. Rather, their sudden intervention in England suggests that they recog¬ nised, and sought to exploit, a window of opportunity. That opportu¬ nity was interpreted within Frankia against the backdrop of persisting dynastic friction within the Merovingian royal family, and Gregory both accommodated and exploited that fact. The signs are that Liudhard died c. 595 and that information to that effect reached Rome in time to stimulate the sudden inception of a mission in the spring of 596; but the hypothesis remains unproven. Anglo-Saxon attitudes In his letter to Theuderic and Theudebert, Gregory represented his mission as a response to news of English attitudes: ‘It has reached us that the English nation, by the compassion of God, eagerly desires to be converted to the Christian faith’. His letter to Brunhild makes the same point: ‘We inform you that it has come to our knowledge how that the nation of the English, by God’s permission, is desirous of becoming Christian’.107 What did Gregory know of English wishes and how did he know it? It would be too much to argue that he had himself received an embassy direct from the insular English. To be precise, he did not claim that representatives of the English nation had reached him but only news of their wishes. Gregory’s letter to Brunhild specifically pur-

80

King ALthelberbt posed that Augustine should later inform Gregory concerning the wishes of the English: so Gregory was not in July 596 confident of his information. Yet can his source have been merely the comments of a few slaves encountered by Gregory or his agents in either Frankia or Italy?108 It seems difficult to imagine that their words alone would have sufficed to persuade Gregory to dispatch several of his closest associates to such a distant land. Gregory’s source poses, therefore, a conundrum. On the one hand his source was not an official embassy to Rome with which he had himself spoken, yet it was arguably more credible than a bunch of expatriate English slaves. It was not a Kentish embassy to the Austrasian or Burgundian courts since Gregory was informing his allies of English desires, not vice versa. The matter is beyond solution; but it may be that highly placed Kentish travellers were involved, whose business was other than this matter but who had conversed, presumably in eastern Frankia, with someone whose credibility and loyalty Gregory could rely upon - and Candidus seems the obvious choice. Kentish envoys could have been seeking a replacement for Liudhard, engaging in trade or marital negotiations, or otherwise involved in diplomacy. News of such discussions might have very quickly reached the ears of Gregory’s agent and been dispatched to Rome. Gregory did not refer to English wishes merely in order to inform the young kings, but as part of his rhetoric intended to persuade them to support Augustine. He used various devices to this effect, including compliments regarding the orthodoxy of their faith and recognition of their wide power as kings and lords. Reference to the English is woven into this melange in such a way as to imply that the Frankish lordship extended even over the English. If it did, then this was a diplomatic superiority which yEthelberht had conceded to Childebert before his death, perhaps as part of the same set of exchanges which had precipated Gregory’s dispatch of the mission. However, this is not the only possible interpretation,109 since Gregory was trading on the legitimate expectation that good Christian rulers would naturally promote Christianity among their own subjects and he may have represented the Frankish kings as dominant over the English to that purpose. Yet that he should make use of this image of Merovingian hegemony in England is in itself illuminating. It betrays the depth of Gregory’s knowledge of Merovingian views of England as a satellite. It may betray knowledge of Chilperic’s dealings with Kent barely more than a decade earlier and quite possibly reflects more recent contacts between Gregory and

81

The convert kings Childebert.

It

was,

therefore,

Gregory’s

objective

to

harness

Merovingian visions of their own world and the superiority they expected to enjoy over their neighbours to his own purposes, and use those as a means to make Augustine’s mission both more secure and better staffed. His comments are a crucial indicator of the diplomatic world which all these courts inhabited.

The Kentish court 2Ethelberht’s early career as king and ‘overking’ is obscure. Gregory of Tours’ putative but anonymous reference to him as ‘the son of a certain king in Kent’,110 implies that he was not yet even king when his marriage occurred. Bede was later to credit him with an improbable 56-year reign (in HE, ii, 5) but a date of death c. 616 makes this extremely unlikely. Perhaps Bede confused his regnal years with his age at death (and a birth date of 560X566 has been suggested;)111 perhaps he made an arith¬ metical error; perhaps he succumbed to the temptation to confer on /Ethelberht a reign of exceptional length as part of the process of eulo¬ gising him. In practice, 2Ethelberht is unlikely to have been king before the late 580s, at earliest,112 so cannot have been an ‘overking’ for long when Augustine arrived. It is foolhardy to accept any information concerning 2Ethelberht derived exclusively from sources later than Bede. In this regard it is essential that relevant passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle be treated with the utmost caution, since they appear to be little more than an attempt to flesh out the very little Bede wrote concerning the West Saxon ‘overking’, Ceawlin, and to offer a suitable context for vTthelberht’s southern imperium. The Laud Chronicle's account of war between Ceawlin and 2Ethelberht as early as 568 should, therefore, be set aside as unhistorical, or at best pseudo-historical: 2Ethelberht is unlikely even to have been adult at this early date, let alone the leader of a significant war-band. 2Ethelberht was first and foremost king of the Kentings, and primar¬ ily - given the centrality of Canterbury to his regime - of the east Kentings.113 The Kentings - along with the people of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight - were distinguished by Bede in his description of the origins of the English (in HE, i, 15) as of Jutish origin, and the presence of fifth-century cremations in Kent (but not in Hampshire) may confirm this story.'14 The archaeological record suggests, however, a substantial Frankish influence which was almost exclusive to Kent and present from

82

King ALthelberht

the late fifth century onwards. This rich material record helps to define the Kentish community and distinguish it from its neighbours, to a degree which may have further reinforced the otherwise somewhat anachronistic, racial distinctiveness referred to by Bede. Two characteristics of this material culture are particularly clear-cut: one is the transparency of its links with Frankia; the second is its own¬ ership by so small a community — or at least a community within so small an area. The Frankophile culture of Kent focuses on Canterbury and its immediate environs and barely penetrates (at least as a broadly based culture) even Kent west of the Medway (Figure 5). In contrast are

83

The convert kings

Figure 5

Being different: Kent, material culture and Bede’s perceptions of

ethnicity in the early seventh century.

84

King /.Ethelberht the very extensive ‘Anglian’ areas of central, eastern and northern England where cultural developments within the sixth century gener¬ ally reflect continuing contact and interchange with the Baltic region, and the ‘Saxon’ south, where fewer external influences seem to have impacted on the development of an insular, Germanic culture.115 These characteristics offer some insights into group identity within Kent vis-a-vis its neighbours. Attempts to examine English ethnicity inside pre-Augustinian Britain must take account both of those factors which distinguish the total Anglo-Saxon community from its British neighbours and subjects (such as language, legal practice, common customs, rites and cult) and those which reinforce the separateness of different groups of Anglo-Saxons one from another. Communities with some sense of a group identity beyond that of the kin were numerous, since every local or regional kingship reflected, and probably fostered, a degree of separateness, but the Kentings were unique in having such a well-developed tribal identity. Among the major kingdoms, they uniquely had sole custody of a racially distinctive origins myth. The Kentish kings alone are known to have claimed descent from Hengest, and a Kentish vision of the activities of Hengest and Horsa would later be enshrined in English foundation mythology as well as their own, royal genealogical legend.116 East Kent’s cultural and ideo¬ logical separateness from the remainder of Anglo-Saxon England was already a matter of fact by c. 600, but was still then becoming even more accentuated. The Kentings, and more especially their kings, arguably felt less a part of the insular Germanic community, and therefore less bound by the common cultural habits and characteristics of that com¬ munity, than any other people in eastern or southern England. Rather, the Kentish kings presided over a court which habitually looked as much to Frankia as to insular courts as regards material culture, kinship and ideas. This has important implications for ^Ethelberht’s receptiveness to Christianity - which was, from his perspective, a Frankish cult.117 yEthelberht’s kingship seems to have owed a great deal to dynastic strategies for which he himself had no responsibility. He was the son of Eormenric, a Kentish king, so he inherited his fundamental claim to kingship. Eormenric’s own name is more characteristically continental than insular and the suffix of yEthelberht’s own may reflect Frankish influence on his father.118 Given that the resulting offspring was already a king c. 600, it was necessarily also his father who was responsible for the marriage of ./Ethelberht’s sister, Ricula, to Sledd of the East Saxon dynasty and for the subsequent tenure of that kingship by yEthelberht’s

85

The convert kings nephew and close supporter, Sseberht, during the first decade of the seventh century. His name likewise reflects Frankish influence. Sseberht was reputed to have died in or about the same year as /Ethelberht, but he may well have been younger.119 Sseberht was king by c. 604 but he could have already ruled for a decade or so. His commitment to /Ethelberht’s interest was arguably a major factor in underpinning the latter’s ‘overkingship’ and may even have aided his elevation to that status.120 Bertha marries ALthelberht An earlier event of some significance was yEthelberht’s own marriage to Bertha (see above). Her father, Charibert, died in 567, when Bertha cannot have been more than five years old.121 His territories were divided between his two surviving brothers and his half-brother. The Merovingians at this date often used marriage as a political strategy. Both Chilperic and Sigibert married Visigothic princesses - Sigibert’s bride being Brunhild. Reccared later proposed marriage to Chilperic’s daughter, the nun Basina, and her half-sister, Rigunth, was betrothed to him and in transit in 584 when Chilperic died.122 Bertha’s marriage was part of this network of Merovingian alliances and was perhaps deployed by Chilperic to cement relations with the Jutish court on the opposite side of the Channel. Fortunatus referred to his campaign against the Bretons and stressed the respect for him felt by the various peoples of coastal Germany and the south Baltic.123 Bertha’s departure from Frankia occurred, therefore, in the context of relations between Canterbury and Chilperic’s court. Bertha was arguably of some significance to the Kentish court. Her arrival presumably signalled the benevolence of a powerful neighbour, so shielded Kent from predatory seafarers and may have helped TEthelberht to secure the throne on his father’s death.124 His marriage surely reflected perceptions in Kent of the desirability of willing co¬ operation with nearer Merovingian Frankia. It was also a distinction. The royal families of other barbarian peoples on occasion obtained Merovingian brides - and Bertha’s own cousin, Ingund, Brunhild’s daughter, was married among the Visigoths, but no other English con¬ temporary is known to have done so. The connection brought prestige and legitimation to Eormenric’s Kent which may have carried some weight with insular competitors for power. Bertha’s presence also had some potential to facilitate cross-Channel contacts of all kinds, which may well have profited the Kentish king.

86

King ALthelberbt Some at least of the English slaves identified by Gregory in Gaul perhaps derived from this cross-Channel activity. Through Kent too came numerous exotic imports to England,125 the passage of which may also have brought profits to TEthelberht. More pertinently, Bertha had come to Kent with a bishop, the aforementioned Liudhard, who offici¬ ated thereafter at St Martin’s, just outside the walls of Canterbury.126 Liudhard was guardian of Bertha’s faith and that of a Christian congregation at Canterbury, and he must have been a familiar figure at TEthelberht’s court, and before that at that of TEthelberht’s father. Supposing he had survived until as late as c. 595 (see above), there had been a Frankish bishop at the Kentish court for at least a decade and a half before Pope Gregory took any direct interest therein, and much of that period preceded TEthelberht’s own succession. One must, there¬ fore, assume TEthelberht to have become habituated to his presence. That

presence

was

yet

another

feature

which

was

unique

to

TEthelberht’s court: to the best of our knowledge no other English king had previously enjoyed such close co-operation with a Germanic, Christian bishop. In this respect, as in so many others, TEthelberht’s court must have looked far less ‘English’ than its neighbours, particu¬ larly to English eyes. TEthelberht arguably obtained some benefit from Liudhard’s pres¬ ence. If he was indeed active as an agent of the court at Soissons, then Liudhard provided contact between TEthelberht and his nearest Frankish neighbours. The one piece of firm evidence, however, lies in the coin (the so-called ‘medalet’) found near St Martin’s.127 This sug¬ gests that Liudhard developed at least one aspect of contemporary Frankish governance - the minting of a coinage. Other experiments may also have occurred, regarding the use of charters, for example, and the re-organisation of the Kentish court along Frankish lines, but the evidence is not remotely contemporary and may be apocryphal.128 Whatever the force of such examples, it cannot be doubted that Liudhard brought with him Frankish ideas about government to the Kentish court,129 whether that resource was then utilised or not. Liudhard can have had few difficulties in making himself understood at Canterbury, despite the growing separation of the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish tongues which is evidenced by Bede (HE, in, 7). Indeed, the Kentish court was the one place in England where Frankish is likely to have been fashionable. There may have been additional advantages to yEthelberht in the presence of a Frankish bishop. Liudhard had a congregation made up 87

The convert kings of Franks but also perhaps British indigines and English converts.130 St Martin’s was obviously one focus of this flock but there seem to have been others. Reference to a cult of St Sixtus, for example, implies a church probably somewhere other than Canterbury.131 Holy Saviour’s (the Cathedral) was reputed by Bede (HE, i, 33) to have been already then ancient, if in need of repair, although this is not borne out by recent archaeology,132 and an eccles place-name on the eastern edge of the Medway valley may indicate a British church site which was still active at this date, whose clergy may have been administering baptism to English catechumens.133 There is just enough evidence, therefore, to suggest that a scatter of clergy and Christian congregations existed already within yEthelberht’s core territories. What Liudhard offered yEthelberht was a means to control the local Christian community via a figure who was entirely dependent on his own - and his wife’s - pro¬ tection and patronage. In return, Christians perhaps obtained better access to royal patronage than was possible for co-religionists living under other, non-Christian English kings. Yet Liudhard’s role when the marriage occurred became outdated once western Neustria fell under the rule of an infant king (in 584). As long as Chlothar’s regime seemed likely to survive, this may have seemed advantageous to yEthelberht since the nearest Frankish court was incapable of exerting much pressure on himself. Rather, he and his father may have been able to exploit the situation to their own advan¬ tage - and it was presumably in this period that yEthelberht became an ‘overking’ within southern England. It has been suggested that he resisted Frankish pressure to accept baptism at some time previous to 595, so as to preclude any further penetration of Frankish hegemony in Kent;134 but this hypothesis depends on implausible estimates of the length of TEthelberht’s reign. If he came to the throne no earlier than 589, TEthelberht’s first few years were arguably ones of unusual freedom from continental pressures. It is that which contextualised yEthelberht’s relationship with Liudhard and his own Christian wife. So long as King Guntram lived, the regime at Soissons was in no real danger and the Kentish regime may well have long felt that there was no cause to review its Frankish connections. However, the Treaty of Andelot (587: see above) promised Childebert II a disproportionate influence in Frankia at Guntram’s death, and it seems likely that yEthelberht would thereafter have observed Frankish politics with mounting concern. He cannot have been ignorant of existing bones of contention between Soissons and Reims. In 588, Childebert flirted with 88

King JEtbelberbt a marital alliance with the Lombard royal family then rejected it osten¬ sibly on account of religious differences; thereafter he arranged for his sister to marry into the newly Catholic, Visigothic ruling house and he himself invaded Lombardy and exacted tribute therefrom as the price of peace.135 Such treatment of a near-neighbour who did not share Childebert’s religious orthodoxy had disturbing implications for the non-Christian yEthelberht. King Guntram’s restraining hand went, following his death in March 593, and Childebert then entered into his Burgundian inheritance. In the same year, he attacked Chlothar through the agency of the Duke of Champagne. Although this campaign was unsuccessful, it provided a sure portent of what was to come as soon as Childebert was free to march against his rival. That did not occur in 594 or 595, when he set about reducing the Bretons in the west, and then the Thuringians in the east,136 but these campaigns must also have signalled to dEthelberht that he had to deal with a dynamic new king with firm ideas about the status of Frankish satellites, and one too who was busily reducing all Chlothar’s potential allies (such as the Bretons: see above) to heel. Kent was probably, in 595, the last remaining associate to whom Chlothar might turn for aid if and when Childebert struck and the most likely to share the political repercussions of his apparently inevitable defeat. vTthelberht cannot have been either entirely ignorant or unmindful of these developments. If at this stage he considered Chlothar’s cause unduly dangerous to himself, it would be difficult to fault his logic. His immediate need was to come to some form of accommodation with Childebert before the latter finally destroyed Chlothar. Observation of Childebert’s treatment of the Lombards may well have inclined vTthelberht to invite baptism as a means of deflecting similar repercus¬ sions, and the experience of the Bretons and Thuringians underlined the need for prompt action. If Liudhard did die in or about 595, the Kentish king may well have felt all the more free to adjust his policy towards the Franks and seek to realign himself with the now dominant Childebert (Figure 4). The fact that Bertha - the original excuse for Liudhard’s presence - outlived her bishop emphasises the point. By this date she may well have been more an embarrassment to the Kentish court than an asset, but no Merovingian princess could be lightly set aside. That the news reached Gregory by early 596 that ‘the nation of the English is desirous of becoming Christian’ may imply that ^Ethelberht was at this point dangling the prospect of his own conversion in Frankia as part of 89

The convert kings efforts to pre-empt hostility towards himself on the part of the domi¬ nant Frankish king. When Augustine finally arrived in Kent, he brought with him clerics from what had, in 595, been Childebert’s territories, so establishing lines of communication and mutual co-operation between Canterbury and Austrasia/Burgundy which had not previously existed. Proof of TEthelberht’s intentions is, of course, well beyond the limited evidence available, but it is considerations of this sort which must have weighed with him when considering conversion. From his perspective, Augustine offered an opportunity to break long-established ties with Chlothar II and realign himself with Childebert. In that respect, Augustine’s Frankish consecration, his Burgundian clergy and Merovingian patrons were of far more importance to TEthelberht than his papal and Italian origins.

yEthelberht and Augustine If /Ethelberht had sought an accommodation with Childebert’s regime in c. 595, and prepared himself to accept baptism as a part of that accommodation, then Childebert’s sudden death, apparently in late spring 596, was necessarily a matter of some consequence. There is no direct evidence as to how he reacted, but he cannot have been ignorant of, nor disinterested in, the response of the court at Soissons. Fredegund and Chlothar secured Paris and other disputed cities in the region, and attacked the forces of Theudebert and Theuderic at Laffaux.137 The death of Queen Fredegund later in 597 arguably undermined any further progress by the court at Soissons, where her son was still very young, albeit just about of age (he was thirteen in this year), and without the resources to triumph over his enemies. His regime made the best of the situation, enabling Augustine and his partly Frankish fol¬ lowing to proceed through northern France and onwards to England, despite the implications their arrival had for their own Kentish connec¬ tions. Gregory was later to acknowledge Chlothar’s assistance to the new bishop of the English. Even so, Gregory’s understanding with Brunhild was necessarily at Chlothar’s expense, and Augustine’s activ¬ ities in Kent were separated from his Frankish allies by a block of terri¬ tory subject to a king who probably saw his presence there as prejudicial to his own interests. Had TEthelberht not, perhaps, burnt his boats with Chlothar in 595, he might well not have been receiving a mission from Gregory and Brunhild in 597. 90

King Aithelberht Between 597 and 601, we have practically no contemporary informa¬ tion regarding the activities of the Canterbury mission and, unsurpris¬ ingly in this geo-political context, it seems to have operated pretty much in isolation. Gregory referred to an act of mass-baptism at Christmas 597, which logic dictates was of the Kentings led by TEthelberht.138 Otherwise the only vision that we are offered is that of Augustine as miracle-worker, which emerges from Gregory’s correspondence and was later remarked on in very general terms by Bede (HE, I, 26: see above). Augustine seems to have been left by Gregory very much to his own devices during this period, and presumably had to work out on his own a strategy by which to further Christianity among the English, with only the dubious assistance of those pre-existing Christians (such as Bertha) whom he came across in Kent and his own companions, both Italian and Frankish. That Augustine adopted the role of miracle-worker has implications for the relationship between himself and the king, his immediate patron, and particularly his value to the regime. This role was textualised in later and rather better-documented instances of royal conver¬ sion: take for instance the descriptions of Wilfrid’s conversions of the Frisians and the South Saxons respectively in his Vita (xxvi, xli). What was being offered in each instance was some real, temporal advantage, available only through the intercession of the missionary figure with his God. It seems certain that Augustine was encouraging belief in the potency of his own stock of relics, his rituals and his altars to deliver good health and other benefits to new converts,139 but he may have gone beyond this in his efforts to spread Christianity. The only example of a miracle at this date concerning which we have any detail (in HE, ii, 2) is just the sort of instance which Gregory might have deemed a ‘proud’ miracle and it looks to have been stage-managed. This kind of ‘miracleworking’ may, therefore, have been his preferred method of manipulat¬ ing his generally non-Christian audience (excepting this instance). Demonstrations of an ability to channel the power of a god for whom he was claiming extraordinary powers might perhaps have had a consid¬ erable impact on the English. It seems unlikely that non-Christian priests had anything in their own repertoire which could directly compete for royal favour, given what little we know about early English religion.140 What Augustine was offering, therefore, was access to novel kinds of magical power, which had a particular validity if TEthelberht had little confidence in his own prowess as a warrior. The protection of the one true God and his magic-wielding high priest may have had 91

The convert kings fundamental implications for his survival on the edges of Frankia as an ‘overking’ and any plans he may have harboured to further develop that position, by consolidation or conquest.141 Even so, the timing of TEthelberht’s baptism is remarkable. Supposing it to have occurred at or shortly before Christmas 597,142 Augustine can have had no more than about eight months in which to persuade the king to convert and then prepare him for it and may even have been out of England for some six weeks or so of that period for his own consecration. Given this agenda, it seems most improbable that TEthelberht needed much persuasion, or even that Augustine’s teaching was critical to his decision. Having been both married to a Christian and well-acquainted with a bishop for something like a decade and a half, TEthelberht cannot have been anything like so ignorant of Christianity as Bede was later to suggest in his description of the king’s first meeting with Augustine.143 If he did march out as far as Thanet to meet the mission and immediately there listened to Augustine’s preaching (through Frankish interpreters, of course), then he was perhaps exhibiting signs of impatience as much as either caution or paranoia. If Augustine’s arrival in some sense reflected TEthelberht’s own efforts to realign himself with Brunhild’s branch of the Merovingian royal family, frustration at his long delay in Frankia fol¬ lowed by a swift passage towards baptism are the more understandable. At the very least they suggest that Augustine was both expected and welcome at the Kentish court and had little to do in order to push TEthelberht across the threshold of accepting baptism. One crucial factor had, however, changed between the winter of 595-6 and Augustine’s arrival in Kent in 597. The awesome Childebert II was dead and his inheritance divided between two minors. Their succession necessarily reduced whatever political and diplomatic pres¬ sures had previously encouraged TEthelberht to accept baptism. In this new situation, the prospects for the mission arguably depended on the king’s reading of the balance of his own interest in the light of recent events and those prospects were probably far less predictable than might have been the case had Childebert lived. Brunhild’s retention of power, Fredegund’s death in 597 and Chlothar’s youth and comparative feeble¬ ness were probably more trenchant factors than Augustine’s preaching in persuading /Ethelberht of the continuing desirability of an associa¬ tion with the Austrasian/Burgundian monarchy, and so in bringing the Kentings to the font in 597. Beyond this initial breakthrough, however, there is no sign that Augustine achieved much over the next three years, unless Sseberht - and/or Rsedwald - accepted baptism at this early date. 92

King ALthelberht Gregory's plans in 601 This all changed in 601. In the early summer Gregory received messen¬ gers, the priest Laurence and the monk Peter, from Augustine in Britain. They reported to him what the mission had so far achieved and set out its needs for the immediate future. Augustine’s messengers were in a position to acquaint Gregory in some detail from their own experiences with the circumstances and prospects of the mission church. The knowledge he gained thereby is reflected in Gregory’s letters. On or very soon after 22 June and in some haste, he dispatched a second group of missionaries, led by Abbot Mellitus and equipped with the necessary vestments, relics and texts to reinforce Augustine’s efforts. He also dis¬ patched, both with them and after them, a series of letters. To the extent that these have survived, Gregory wrote the following letters (with ref¬ erences for Bede’s transcriptions of several of them): 1

to Augustine, warning against taking pride in miracle-working, dated 1 June 601 (in part, HE, i, 31)144

2

to Augustine, concerning the organisation of the church in Britain, dated 22 June 601 (HE, i, 29)145

3

to Bertha, seeking her aid in strengthening the mind of the king and furthering fuller and wider conversion, dated June, 601;146

4

to Vergilius, bishop of Arles, a letter of stern correction but refer¬ ring to the possibility that Augustine might visit him, dated 22 June 601 (HE, i, 28, quotes only the latter part);147

5

to TEthelberht, concerning his role as a Christian king, dated 22 June 601 {HE, i,32);148

6

to various figures in Frankia, commending Mellitus and others to them but often dealing also with a variety of other issues of rele¬ vance to the Frankish church;149

7

to Mellitus, by this time in Gaul, to an extent contradicting the views expressed in letter 5 (above) and urging a gradualist and less confrontational approach to converting the English, dated 18 July 601 (HE, i,30);150

6

the Libellus Responsionum, being detailed responses to specific questions which had been put to him by Augustine, apparently in a letter carried by his messengers, dated July 601 (HE, I, 27).151 Three of these, here numbered 2, 4 and 5, were all certainly written

on the same day. That to Vergilius reflects Gregory’s concern to avoid problems of authority between the English and Frankish churches — an issue to which he later returned in the Libellus (in answer to Augustine’s 93

The convert kings question seven). The remaining two offer important insights concern¬ ing Gregory’s perceptions of the situation in England, which embody his reaction to Augustine’s report. His letter to Augustine (2 above) granted him the pallium as encour¬ agement for, and in recognition of, his efforts and to enable him to ordain twelve bishops ‘in various places who shall be subject to your rule’. It is this letter, together with that to Vergilius and the Libellus, which effectively detached the English church from dependency on its Frankish neighbours, albeit that the consecration of a papal nominee had already laid the groundwork five years earlier. For the future, the bishop of London was to be metropolitan, in receipt of a pallium from Rome but elected and consecrated by his own synod. Furthermore, Gregory expressed the wish that a bishop of Augustine’s choice, and consecrated by him, should be dispatched to York, where he should then become a second metropolitan and consecrate twelve new bishops for a northern province, provided that the region should accept conversion. This northern archbishop should be subject to Augustine while he lived but thereafter be independent of the southern archdiocesan. Gregory then made provision for future relations between the two archdioceses and reinforced Augustine’s authority in the most unambiguous terms, giving him explicit jurisdiction over all bishops throughout Britain. This oft-quoted letter is fundamental to any understanding of the state of the mission between 597 and 601 and to Augustine’s expecta¬ tions concerning its immediate future. It was written by a pope who was both exceptionally interested in, and at this point unusually wellinformed concerning, English affairs. Gregory knew far more than modern commentators about King TEthelberht and the political context within which the mission was both then operative and planning future operations. In the summer of 601, Augustine was the sole bishop within the papal mission and was to remain so until the consecration of Mellitus to London and Iustus to Rochester, both - according to Bede - taking place in 604 (HE, ii, 3), although there is no way of verifying this fact. The assumption by Gregory that the southern archdiocese would be established at London, rather than Canterbury, has often been discussed.152 Given the freshness of his information from England, it is implausible to dismiss this as dependent solely on ancient documents referring to Romano-British bishoprics at both London and York, albeit that these two do dominate the types of written materials most likely to be accessible at Rome.153 Gregory’s plan for the church has been dismissed as ‘without any 94

King ALthelberht relation to the political actualities of the sixth or seventh centuries’,134 and there is no evidence that Augustine’s see was ever physically located at London (as Brechter once argued)155 and plentiful signs of its con¬ tinuing presence at Canterbury. This conundrum has only one plausible solution. Supposing that Gregory was well-informed in 601, his letter to Augustine can only mean that his informants expected that they would re-establish the metropolitan church in London in the immediate future and had apprised Gregory of that fact with such confidence that the latter had taken their expectations at face value.156 Augustine was, therefore, treated by Gregory in this letter as if already bishop of London, on the assumption that his establishment therein was immi¬ nent at the time of his messengers’ departure, and so likely to be an accomplished fact by the time Mellitus should arrive. It was Bede’s opinion that, in 604, London was metropolis civitas (‘principal town’) of the East Saxons, and was therefore chosen as the site of a diocesan church (St Paul’s) for their new bishop. This people were ruled (regnabat) by Saeberht, Tithelberht’s nephew, whom Bede described as being subject to the potestas of TYhelberht. The latter was here, as else¬ where, referred to as ‘overking’ of all England south of the Humber,157 but Sseberht was the only one of yEthelberht’s several client kings (including Rsedwald of the East Angles) who was certainly his near rel¬ ative, and bore a characteristically Kentish and/or Frankish name (see above). Sasberht’s dependence on TThelberht was arguably far greater than that of his neighbours, albeit that Rsedwald also perhaps named Sigeberht, one of his sons and potential heirs, in deference to Frankish name-forms during Tithelberht’s reign. When Mellitus was later estab¬ lished as bishop at London, it was yTthelberht whom Bede (so presum¬ ably his Canterbury informants) credited with constructing St Paul’s therein (HE, n, 3), implying that the ‘overking’ had control of London despite its status within the East Saxon kingship. The interdependence of dEthelberht and Augustine has important implications for their plans for 601. If Augustine confidently antici¬ pated re-founding the mission at London from Canterbury, then yEthelberht presumably proposed to refocus his own kingship there, also from Canterbury. Such removals were commonplace in the world of high politics at this date: Yeavering’s development as a centre of royal power during the late sixth and early seventh centuries provides an obvious parallel (see p. 146),158 but so too do the seventh-century re¬ focusing of the West Saxon ecclesiastical polity on Winchester (in what had been Jutish territory), the re-development of York by Edwin and his

95

The convert kings successors and the development of Bamburgh and Holy Island. Indeed, the aspirations of ambitious ‘overkings’ regularly required the physical relocation of their foci of patronage. It should not suprise us if dEthelberht proposed to follow suit. yEthelberht’s plan in this respect is beyond proof but London’s geo¬ graphical advantages were considerable. It may already have lain within ^Tthelberht’s grasp, in which case no campaigns were required to acquire it. It was the lowest point at which warriors — and ecclesiasts — could easily cross the Thames between ^Tthelberht’s various sub-king¬ ships and clients. It was the node of Britain’s system of Roman roads, which then as later were the skeleton of the long-distance communica¬ tion system on land. It was also an early trading site, as Bede remarked.159 It may still have been remembered that it had once been the centre of Roman government and, even if not, its extensive and sub¬ stantial ruins may have lent it some distinction, particularly in the eyes of a court already accustomed to the remains of Roman Canterbury. These factors made London strategically important and an obvious first objective for any ‘overking’ based in the extreme south-east who pro¬ posed to make his influence more effective in central and western England. Such purposes surely underly Augustine’s urgent dispatch of messen¬ gers to Gregory to ask for men, relics, vestments and books. With expansion afoot, these would be needed to man new dioceses, to be created in dependent kingdoms once Tithelberht had extended and tightened his hegemony. All those appointed as bishops by Augustine were apparently Italians, and they also monopolised the succession at Canterbury itself thereafter up until Honorius’s death in 653. This looks like such active discrimination against Frankish members of the mission that it may well have been Gregory’s policy during these years to exclude Franks from diocesan rank within the new English church, so as not to compromise its new and separate identity. Mellitus and his companions were dispatched, therefore, most obviously in order to provide Augustine with non-Frankish candidates for consecration. Gregory’s grandiose schemes for the overall structure of the English church reflect this same set of expectations. He authorised Augustine, as metropolitan at London, to ordain a further twelve bishops for the south. He also anticipated a bishopric at York and hoped even for the establishment of a metropolitan see there and a further twelve dioceses in the north. Although he only ‘wished’ to see a bishop at York, Gregory was doing far more than expressing a pious aspiration. Rather this was

96

King Aithelberht his developmental blueprint for the English church and one which his informants must have led him to believe lay within the bounds of the possible. The gulf between this blueprint and Augustine’s actual achievement is enormous: instead of twelve southern bishops and a London metropolitan, Augustine never seems to have removed from Canterbury and appointed only two further bishops - and his own suc¬ cessor - before his own death, while the northern archdiocese remained a pipe dream for a further two decades. There seems, therefore, to have been real expectation of progress in 601 which had come to nought by c. 604, and these must surely involve not just Augustine’s freedom to effect change but more particularly that of TEthelberht to protect him and promote his missionary activities. Put simply, Gregory appears in 601 to have adopted a vastly over-optimistic view of TEthelberht’s ability to further Augustine’s missionary endeav¬ ours and it was with this in mind that he sent advice and a group of potential bishops equipped with the wherewithal to found new churches. Augustine’s messengers must surely have been bringing him overly sanguine expectations from within the mission as much as from the royal court. What led TEthelberht, in the spring of 601, to lay grandiose plans for the expansion of his own hegemony? The stimulus may well have come from Frankia. King Theudebert came of age in 600, and the two halfbrothers then comprehensively defeated Chlothar II near Dormelles, and stripped him of territory, confining his authority to a token twelve districts bounded by the Seine, the Oise and the sea.160 TEthelberht had under his patronage several clerics from the territories of the victors, who were now subject to the authority of that same Italian bishop whose journey and consecration had been actively facilitated by their regimes. The events of 600 must surely have been viewed in Kent with considerable interest. If TEthelberht had realigned himself with Childebert in 595 then he probably welcomed his sons’s achievements in 600, which had brought them the control of Neustria which their father had threatened to achieve five years earlier. The connection is, of course, beyond proof; but that /Ethelberht interpreted this as the moment to expand his own interests in Britain is at least suggestive of a link. He may have felt encouraged by their successes and expected that their God might likewise smile on his efforts to expand Christian rule over the English. He may have felt that the situation required that he achieve something which his Frankish associates would approve, and which might even earn their respect. He may merely have felt that the

97

The convert kings situation required that he pretend to be doing something, and sending to Rome was an effective means of informing - or even disinforming — Frankish policy-makers to that effect. Whichever interpretation is pre¬ ferred, these several events are surely connected. A place in history On the same day that he wrote to Augustine regarding the structure of the church in England, Gregory wrote to King ^thelberht a letter which is a masterpiece of rhetoric, cleverly juxtaposing earthly and celestial kingships and seeking to draw the king into a Christian vision of history and his own role within it:161 Almighty God raises up certain men to be rulers of peoples in order to extend the gifts of His righteousness through them to all over whom they have been preferred. We recognise that this has happened among the race of the English, over whom your majesty is placed for that purpose, so that through the bless¬ ings which have been conceded to you, celestial benefits may also be given to the people subject to you. In Gregory’s vision, ^Tthelberht’s English kingship was a universal one which was justified

within

providential

history

as

the

divinely

appointed means of effecting conversion. This is entirely consistent with Gregory’s world-picture, but there are fundamental political mes¬ sages herein. One feature is the marked discrepancy between the reality of vTthelberht’s ‘overkingship’ and Gregory’s portrayal of it, which cannot be blamed on Gregory’s ignorance. The latter envisaged the existence of subject kings, certainly, but not English kings who were separate from, and autonomous of, vTthelberht. There is some doubt as to the real extent of ^Tthelberht’s ‘overking¬ ship’, which Bede, and some modern commentators, considered reached the Humber,162 but which may in practice have been far more restricted.163 The degree of independence shown by King Cearl of the Mercians in extending his protection over Edwin of the Deiri from c. 604, implies that dBthelberht’s influence was negligible north of the Chilterns. It was there that he may have had immediate designs, if he purposed to relocate his kingship to London. But whatever the realities of his ‘overkingship’, York and the whole of northern England clearly lay beyond yEthelberht’s powers of coercion, but were obviously ‘Anglian’ in the terms adopted by Gregory and later by Bede. Yet Gregory addressed letters to no other English king and treated iTthelberht as if he was the sole, ultimate authority among the English. 98

King yEthelberht Gregory’s dialectic implies, therefore, that he considered that uni¬ versal English conversion depended on the expansion of yEthelberht’s ‘overkingship’. That process was portrayed as in accordance with divine will and as having been granted to yEthelberht already by the omni¬ scient Christian God so as to achieve just such missionary success. This exercise in providential history offers a Christian alternative to the sort of non-Christian augury with which yEthelberht would have been familiar and can only have been interpreted as supportive of his expand¬ ing his power to encompass new English peoples. yEthelberht was being offered a very different vision of history, therefore, from that which he had hitherto possessed and one which was far more advantageous to himself. Nor was his kingship represented as dependent on the Franks. Just as Gregory proposed that the English church should be inde¬ pendent of the Frankish metropolitan, so too was yEthelberht implic¬ itly acknowledged as autonomous. Gregory was, therefore, providing significant ideological support for a new advance by yEthelberht, such as had been represented to him as imminent by Augustine’s messengers. Gregory’s message was substantially reinforced. The letter goes on: So, glorious son, guard with a careful mind that grace which you have received from God; hurry to extend the Christian faith among the people subject to you; increase your righteous zeal for their conversion; supress idol¬ atry; throw down the buildings of shrines; strengthen the customs of [your] subjects by the outstanding excellence of [your] life, by exhorting, by terri¬ fying, by flattering, correcting and showing an example of good works, so that you shall receive in heaven that reward from Him whose name and knowledge you have extended on earth.

This amounts to a call by Gregory to yEthelberht to use his full author¬ ity and influence to spread Christianity by coercion,164 appended to which is the promise that the Christian God will ‘also make your glori¬ ous name even more glorious to posterity’. To a conversion period ‘overking’, the latter meant the fame which came from success in war. English kings expected divine support most particularly in war and Gregory was implicitly - almost explicitly - offering the king the promise of the glorious victories necessary to the posthumous survival of his memory.165 Gregory then enhanced this message by reference to the fact that [Constantine] converted the Roman State, [and] recalling it from the perverse reverence of idols he subjected it to Almighty God and our Lord Jesus Christ,

99

The convert kings with all the subject peoples in like mind with him. Whence it happened that he transcended in his praises the reputation of earlier princes, and surpassed his predecessors as much in fame as in good work. And now therefore let your majesty hasten to instil knowledge of the one God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, into the kings and peoples subject to you, so that [you] may exceed as regards praises and merits the ancient kings of [your] race.

Constantine had won great victories as a Christian emperor. Gregory’s letter acknowledges that fact and offers yEthelberht the prospect of similar achievements leading to a more extensive ‘overkingship’ and great fame. Gregory had explanations sufficient to cover the more obvious setbacks which might have led /£thelberht to doubt the efficacy of his new God should he experience opposition. Various English kings apostatised thereafter in response to military defeat, political crisis or pestilence, and the possibility that /Ethelberht might behave similarly was perhaps a central concern of both Augustine and Gregor: As the ending of the world approaches, many things threaten which have not occurred before, namely changes in the skies and terrors from heaven, unsea¬ sonable storms, wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes in various places...if you recognise any of these things as happening in your land, do not be at all troubled in mind; because these portents of the ending of the world are sent in advance that we should be heedful of our souls.’

Gregory promised, too, further and fuller communication from himself once the conversion of the English was complete, apparently in expectation that such would encourage the King. He referred addition¬ ally to ‘small gifts which will not seem small to you, because you will receive them with the blessing of St Peter the Apostle’. What these gifts were is undisclosed but those which Gregory sent Reccared in Spain may provide some clue.166 They were ‘a small key from the body of St Peter, containing iron from his chains, and a cross in which is some of the wood of the Lord’s cross and some hairs of the blessed John the Baptist’. Such were relics of the rarest kind, which offered access to the divine and the prospect of divine intervention. As gifts to a king from Rome, they were redolent with power and placed ^Tthelberht in Gregory’s debt according to the barbarian practice of gift-exchange. This pair of letters, written by Gregory to Augustine and vTthelberht on the same day, therefore contain important insights not just into papal perceptions of the situation in England but, more significantly, to the plans concocted jointly by the Kentish king and his bishop. Those plans envisaged a substantial expansion of yEthelberht’s power across

100

King ALthelberht England, perhaps even as far as Yorkshire far to the north, and Gregory’s letters imply that he was both cognisant of those plans and in approval of them as a necessary precursor to the wider conversion of the English people. The Christian God would protect yEthelberht and give him victory — and Gregory was concerned to integrate those plans within his own perceptions of providential history in such a way that TEthelberht could be confident of divine protection in the conflicts which would be necessary to bring them to fruition. Augustine had probably been providing TEthelberht with similar assurances during the period 597-601, in which case Gregory was at this stage reinforcing the message of his lieutenant rather than offering some new initiative of his own, but the matter had only recently become urgent. Yet Gregory was aware that TEthelberht was pursuing an agenda which was his own and not just that of Augustine. Most particularly, Gregory was impatient at the slow progress made by the mission in achieving universal conversion, and his frustration at the King’s attitude is registered so openly that it seems TEthelberht was apparently showing very little interest in the entire process. This comes over most clearly in Gregory’s letter to Queen Bertha written in 601,167 perhaps also in June. This is again an elegant piece of writing and has some parallels both with Gregory’s correspondence with Brunhild and that addressed to ^Ethelberht himself. It is Gregory’s opinion that she should ‘strengthen by continual exhortation the mind of your glorious husband in love of the Christian faith’ and ‘kindle his heart even for the fullest conversion of the nation subject to him’. To encourage Bertha to throw her weight behind Augustine, Gregory assured her that her good deeds were known and prayed for among the Romans and would be made known even to the emperor in Constantinople — fame indeed for a barbarian queen beyond the Channel. Bertha was, therefore, to engage TEthelberht with Augustine’s agenda and promote the conversion. Whatever her views on the subject (see above), such would have been quite unnecessary if she had already been seeking to persuade him,168 or if he was already so engaged. Neither Bertha nor her husband seems therefore to have been as keen on prose¬ cuting Gregory’s policy of universal English conversion as he would have liked and there must be some doubt as to TEthelberht’s interest in, and understanding of, this project even in principle. Despite all the excitement of 601, TEthelberht seems ultimately to have recoiled from his plans - if he ever had much enthusiasm for them in first place - and the intended expansion of his imperium seems never to have occurred.

101

The convert kings By c. 604, at latest, Augustine was having to recognise that such would not occur, so confining him to an archdiocese based on the king’s prin¬ cipal centre at Canterbury. It was never thereafter to escape from the narrow confines of east Kent, so rendering Gregory’s letter virtually incomprehensible within only a few years. What happened to the grandiose plans hatched by TEthelberht and encouraged by Augustine and Gregory, and why were they thereafter abandoned? One factor may well have been the ever shifting Frankish situation. The campaign of 600 was soon revealed as the climax of combined operations by Theudebert and Theuderic in the north, although they fought together against the Gascons in 602. Chlothar survived and remained a force locally. He even invaded Theuderic’s territory along the Seine in 604, although he was defeated. The year 605 witnessed the outbreak of the active rivalry between Theudebert and Theuderic, which was eventually to destroy them both.169 If TEthelberht needed to impress them in 601, that need diminished thereafter and his failure to pursue the plans laid then with Augustine may in part be explained thereby, revealing TEthelberht to have been more a wily politician than a conqueror. Even so, those plans may have yielded him some actual benefits. We can identify two or perhaps even three initiatives which did occur and which do seem to conform with TEthelberht’s wider objec¬ tives. ALthelberht and Kcedwald One such event was the baptism of King Rsedwald of the East Angles, which took place, Bede informs us (HE, n, 15), in Kent, so presumably on the occasion of a visit by R^dwald to the court of his overlord. The event is undated but it seems likely that it belongs to the first half-decade or so of the Canterbury mission. Bede forebore to associate TEthelberht this closely with the (to his eyes) miserable apostate, Rsedwald, but given the location and differential status involved - it seems very likely that TEthelberht acted as sponsor and godfather to the royal initiate, with all the ceremony and potential for status reinforcement which that role could involve. Such certainly had considerable potential to adver¬ tise and reinforce existing relationships between the two kings, to ^Ethelberht’s advantage. That TEthelberht used it is beyond proof but it is made the more likely by its adoption by King Oswald (and, less cer¬ tainly, by Oswiu), over the next half-century (HE, in, 7, 21, 22). Edwin too imposed Christianity on Eorpwald of the East Angles (Rsedwald’s son and heir: HE, n, 15) and this probably also occurred within his own

102

King ALtkelberht territories, at his own church and at the hands of his own bishop, given the lack of such facilities in East Anglia at that date (see p. 181). Rasdwald’s baptism was, therefore, from yTthelberht’s perspective, a ritual which advertised and confirmed the latter’s authority over a pow¬ erful client whose kingship was among the more northerly then subject to his own. It may have been carried out as much for a Frankish audi¬ ence as an insular one. To the Kentish king, its role as an act of religious conversion may have been decidedly secondary: Rsedwald certainly betrays little sign of adopting a Christian perspective on what had occurred when he returned to his own kingdom. The implications regarding status were, however, fundamental.170 Rsedwald was by this act accepting vTthelberht in a pseudo-paternal role, with all the author¬ ity which that implied; by accepting the God of the Kentish court he was additionally surrendering to vTthelberht and his priests a portion of his own sacral kingship and his powers of mediation between his own people and the divine. Raedwald does not seem to have taken back a bishop with him or established an exclusively Christian place of worship on his return home, instead inserting a Christian altar beside a small pagan one inside a pagan temple.171 ^Tthelberht’s own perspective on conversion may well have been far closer to that of Raedwald than has generally been recognised, but to the extent that the Christian God was thereafter worshipped by Raedwald, it was aparently through per¬ sonnel and rituals already current in East Anglia, so according to an unaltered world-view. This act of royal baptism did not, therefore, significantly further English conversion in the way envisaged by Gregory. It did, however, reinforce yEthelberht’s ‘overkingship’, so it belongs primarily to his political agenda rather than Augustine’s pastoral one. The entire episode may be an instance of the sort of royal uninterest in wider conversion of the English to Christianity as an end in itself which Gregory’s letters implied - albeit Raedwald’s baptism had not certainly occurred by summer 601.

Augustine’s Oak Bede provides, in passing, one further instance of the wider ambitions of Augustine and dEthelberht, which is his account of the Augustine’s Oak conferences’. This was presented by Bede as the second of a succes¬ sion of calamities to hit the Augustinian mission - the first being Gregory’s death (in 604, but given by Bede as 605) and later ones being

103

The convert kings the deaths of yEthelberht and Sseberht (c. 616). Bede used these several setbacks to inject a sense of doom to the early chapters of his book n, setbacks from which English Christianity could later be rescued to great rhetorical effect by Edwin (see below, p. 169), to the dialectical benefit of his own Historia and its primarily northern audience. What Bede described was an unsuccessful attempt by Augustine to establish his authority over the British clergy. His account is compar¬ atively detailed: with yEthelberht’s help, Augustine arranged a meeting with the clergy of the ‘nearest British provincial (probably ‘kingdom’) and demanded that they recognise his authority and conform with Roman practices; those clergy then sought the advice of a more repre¬ sentative meeting of British bishops and clergy which agreed a response; members of this larger group then met Augustine once more, at an unspecified site but perhaps under that very same oak tree - but nego¬ tiations ended in deadlock. Bede concluded his description of these events with Augustine uttering dire prophecies concerning (or, in effect, cursing) his opponents, and the posthumous fulfilment of this curse. There has been much debate concerning Bede’s source for this story and general recognition that any use of his text depends on its prove¬ nance. Although it has been accepted as a generally authoritative description by several scholars,172 others have considered it no more than an ‘ecclesiastical saga’ of the most dubious historicity, which had reached Bede already formed, perhaps from a Mercian monastery somewhere in the Welsh Marches.173 On the face of it, both views have much to commend them but the text may repay a rather more detailed examination, both as regards this passage in particular but also in respect of its role in the greater work. It is in the latter context that argu¬ ments for a Mercian origin look least convincing, since Bede omitted each and every Mercian cult centre from the list of his nonNorthumbrian sources in his preface. That he had obtained much information thence concerning the founder of the Canterbury church seems improbable. Augustine was central to the acknowledged testimony of Abbot Albinus and he must be the likelier source.174 Augustine was in any case active

two

generations

before

the

Mercian

conversion

to

Irish

Christianity, and three generations before that kingdom’s reconciliation with Canterbury. The alternative, that this information came from a British source, with or without Mercian mediation, depends entirely on the opinion that Bede would have shared the view of some moderns that Augustine’s second meeting with the Britons showed the Italian in an

104

King ALtbelberbt unsympathetic light. That opinion is unjustified since God clearly decided for Augustine as a miracle-worker and against the Britons, even despite his apparent arrogance. That British clergy would have accepted this Canterbury-centred interpretation is entirely implausible. This is confirmed by the description of the battle of Chester which portrays the Welsh, and particularly the Welsh monks, as punished by the pagan English at God’s behest. From a British perspective, this is a parody of providential history and it cannot owe very much to a Welsh story, albeit some information necessarily derived ultimately from a British source. That the entire passage is written from a current perspective is clear from the fact that the colloquium occurred in a place which is ‘even today in the English language called Augustinces Ac\ It bears too the unmistakeable imprint of Bede’s own views, in what amounts to an intrusive gloss by himself as narrator concerning the mistaken method used by the Britons to date Easter. Bede did, therefore, substantially remould his source materials in composing the existing text, and he must be allowed responsibility both for its final form and its purposes, which have more to do with his repeated condemnation of the Britons than anything else. There are significant stylistic differences between various sections of the text which may imply that they derive from sources of very differ¬ ent types. The description of the initial meeting is a continuous and matter-of-fact, but highly partisan, account of events from Augustine’s viewpoint, with only Bede’s own comments on British Christianity obviously inserted therein. The description of the British synod is intro¬ duced by perbibent - ‘they say’ - which is a formula used by Bede else¬ where to denote an oral source. He reinforced that with narratur - ‘it is recounted’ - when referring to Dinoot, Abbot of Bangor monastery, and by fertur - ‘it is related’ - concerning Augustine’s prophecy at the close of the second meeting. Even if it had passed through a written form,175 this material seems to have reached Bede via oral transmission. To this was then appended a highly coloured account of the battle of Chester, the recurring formulae and heroic subject-matter of which suggest an oral and poetic origin, even if the spelling of Brocmail may imply that some details derived from a written element.176 The Bernicians could have been writing down heroic poetry since the 630s or 640s, so written dissemination cannot be ruled out. Bede then rounded off the chapter with a single sentence which underlined the link he was making between Augustine and the rout of the ‘perfidious’ Britons, and this is obviously his own contemporary opinion.

105

The convert kings Given Bede’s own sympathetic treatment of ^thelfrith (HE, i, 34) and his generally pro-Bernician perspective, he must himself be allowed responsibility for linking Augustine’s alleged prophecy at a meeting distant in both space and time from TEthelfrith’s campaign, with the victory of a famous Bernician king over Welsh warriors and their cler¬ ical supporters. If Bede was aware of it, the probable congruence of the Welsh synod (at Urbis Legion is - generally assumed to be Chester - in the Annales Cambriae) and the battle at Legaccestir or Carlegion may have been what suggested this particular solution to him. Whether or not, it seems most unlikely that a link which glorifies iTthelfrith as an instrument of divine providence was made at either Canterbury or at some undisclosed Mercian or Welsh monastery within the seventh century. Rather, Northumbria is the most likely place for an yEthelfrithcentred battle saga to be circulating and such would have been easily accessible to Bede, enabling him thereby to reinforce his earlier allusion to T'Ethelfrith as a great, Saul-like, pagan king of God’s chosen people, and to use him as a vehicle to reintroduce his recurring theme of divine abhorrence of the Britons. There are, therefore, at least four sub-sections of the story as told by Bede: one dealing with the British synod and the second meeting with Augustine and another concerning the battle of Chester apparently reached him orally or in a written form which rested on earlier oral transmission; one was his own

input as narrator, designed

to

contextualise and explain the story and his presentation of it in this par¬ ticular form - so identifying the place, outlining the British errors and providing a terminal gloss on the whole; in contrast, the description of the first colloquium is very different. It lacks the formulae which else¬ where betray an oral source and its matter-of-fact and comparatively detailed narrative is entirely without the legendary element that one might expect to have become attached to the description of an impor¬ tant event concerning which stories had been circulating for a long period before being written down. There is a case, therefore, for supposing Bede to have had access to a contemporary or near-contemporary text for this first part of his account, to which he then added material from a variety of sources so as to complete the discussions themselves and then map out their con¬ sequences. If a written source existed, it was necessarily produced by the Canterbury community, where some such account might have been intended to update the papacy on Augustine’s progress in extending his authority to all the bishops in Britain, as envisaged and explicitly

106

King ALtbelberbt authorised by Gregory’s correspondence in 601.177 The confidence regarding the outcome of the first meeting - which is inherent in this text - was to appear seriously misplaced by the close of the second meeting, at which point a more pessimistic resume of the whole would have been more appropriate. This suggests, but certainly does not prove, that it was an account which dates to the immediate aftermath of the first meeting, written before the next had occurred, which reached Bede. If such did exist, it would thereafter have been quite inappropriate to dispatch it to Rome, so advertising the poor judgement of Augustine at this point, and this could explain its survival at Canterbury, only to be extracted from the archive and dispatched by Albinus to Bede over a century later. That Bede had direct access to a text is beyond proof, but it should be recalled that such meetings of clergy as this were normally recorded in writing. Reference by St Boniface to the ‘synod of London’ might conceivably refer to a meeting presided over by Augustine, of which records had been kept,178 although this interpretation seems improbable (see below). Even so, Augustine and his colleagues came from a highly literate church culture and can be expected to have brought the habit of record-keeping with them to England and to have applied such to what was in some senses a synod of the insular church. It is, therefore, only with these imponderables in mind that we can proceed, and we cannot be entirely confident of the historicity of any of these events, albeit the acount of the first conference is arguably the most reliable element in the entire chapter and is arguably at least as valid a description of an event as is, for example, that of Rsedwald’s baptism.

ALthelbert’s agenda Bede’s account of the first colloquium opens as follows: Meanwhile Augustine, making use of the assistance of King TEthelberht, summoned [convocavit] the bishops and teachers of the nearest provincia of the Britons to his colloquium [literally, ‘conversation’] at a place which even today in the language of the English is called ‘Augustine’s Oak’, that is the oak of Augustine, on the boundary of the Hwicce and the West Saxons.

Commenting

on

this

passage,

Charles

Plummer

wrote:179

‘So

TEthelberht’s supremacy would seem to have extended not only over the Saxon kingdoms, but over the Britons also’, and he noted that Palgrave had already come to a similar conclusion. This interpretation was later

107

The convert kings accepted by my own teacher, Eric John,180 but it has since been chal¬ lenged by Professor Michael Wallace-Hadrill:181 ‘I do not see...that this need imply that the king had some authority over the British. What it does imply is that the king’s protection covered Augustine as far as the Hwiccan-West Saxon border. The meeting did not occur in British ter¬ ritory’. The question of yEthelberht’s involvement and what, if anything, his authority amounted to, is a crucial one. Bede depicted the Augustine’s Oak meeting as Augustine’s personal initiative, with 2Ethelberht in only a supportive role. Augustine had asked Gregory for clarification on the issue of his authority over British bishops, as well as on his relationship with the Frankish church and the metropolitan of Arles, and had received full papal support on both counts.182 By the autumn of 601 (or at latest spring 602), therefore, Augustine was certain that the British bishops were his to command. The Augustine’s Oak colloquia are undated, but are unlikely to have occurred before Augustine received authorisation from Gregory. Bede offered no date, so probably did not know one, but his opening line of HE, ii, 2, suggests that he believed them to have occurred at or around the same time as Gregory’s death in 605 (corrected, 604), and he was probably approximately correct. They necessarily occurred prior to Augustine’s death, which is in itself undated but must be placed no later than 609. If the synod of Urbs Legionis (which is generally identified with Chester), noted in the Annales Cambriae under the year 601, was the same event as that meeting of British clergy which separated the two colloquia of Bede’s account, then that occurred c. 604, since Gregory’s death is noted against the same year. For a variety of reasons, the years 602-4 seem the likeliest but certainty once again eludes us. What did Augustine intend that the British clergy should do? Sasberht apart, the Raedwald episode and Gregory’s letter to Mellitus in August 601 both suggest that Augustine was experiencing little success in his attempts to broaden out the conversion, even where he had achieved access to communities, let alone extend it to those other English king¬ doms which were subordinate to 2Ethelberht. Bede’s account suggests that he convened this meeting with the Britons not only to obtain recognition of his authority and bring them into conformity with Roman practices, but also to harness their clerical manpower to the task of converting the English kingdoms. Had they acquiesced, this might well have rekindled the flagging impetus of the conversion process, since British clergy were already present within many English kingdoms and

108

King ALthelberht were far less dependent on

the patronage

and

self-interest of

TEthelberht than was the church at Canterbury. Moreover, acceptance by the British Christians might have offered Augustine a haven within Britain were Kentish protection for the mission to collapse on TEthelberht’s death. In this context, it is difficult to imagine that Augustine was oblivious to his dependence on the patronage of a single ‘overking’. Unless he could obtain a broader base, his ministry to the English had little realis¬ tic chance of outlasting TEthelberht’s reign. The issues at stake were therefore probably fundamental to the survival of the papal initiative in Britain. That this is Augustine’s only known excursion out of Kentish ter¬ ritory after 597 may underline his estimate of its significance - although the thinness of our information in this respect may conceal further travels.183 When faced by the unenthusiastic response of the Britons, Augustine was therefore unable to let the matter rest but (according to Bede’s account) felt it necessary to attempt to force them to acquiesce. The colloquium was important enough to become a trial of authority. British hostility to the spread of Christianity among the English was generally consistent and deep-rooted. Their religion was a part of their civilisation and their history. More particularly it was the cornerstone of their own perception of their role in providential history as a chosen race, and their concurrent vision of the ‘Saxons’ in Britain as enemies of God whom He would one day expel. Recognition of both papal author¬ ity and Roman customs is unlikely to have posed them insurmountable problems. What arguably did was the requirement that they accept the authority in Britain of a metropolitan whose position was indissolubly linked to the status and patronage of an English ‘overking’. Given his reliance on TEthelberht’s influence in setting up the meeting, the Britons had every reason to view Augustine as an agent of that ‘overking’ and the British king had equal reason to treat his initiative as a barely cloaked bid by TEthelberht for influence over his provincia. It is in this context that we should review Augustine’s reliance on TEthelberht’s assistance in setting up his meeting. Bede implies that TEthelberht’s help was specific to the initial summoning of the British bishops and teachers. That aid was, therefore, instrumental in their answering the summons. There is no hint of TEthelberht undertaking military action in Welsh territory to round up the clergy and deliver them by force to the conference, so it was necessarily his political and diplomatic influence over the local king of this ‘nearest’ British pro¬ vincia which he lent to Augustine and which led to their attendance. As

109

The convert kings an

‘overking’

with

a

hegemonal

role

across

southern

Britain,

yEthelberht was clearly someone whose requests neighbouring, lesser kings felt obliged to accommodate where possible, and this arguably approximates to the reaction of this British king on his frontier. Yet that same British king cannot have been subject to his hegemony, because the British clergy successfully extricated themselves, met with other, more distant brethren at a site far from Kent and without Augustine’s pres¬ ence, and ultimately defied ^Ethelberht. His ‘overkingship’ included the Hwicce and West Saxons, and this conditioned the location of the meeting, under an oak on a three-way boundary point between these kingships and the Welsh,184 but it did not extend further. Had the British clergy, having established a collective response, given way to Augustine then every British bishop, clergyman and congrega¬ tion in Britain would, technically at least, have become subject to his authority. Such can only have threatened to carry with it the authority of his patron, King yEthelberht, and it seems very likely that it was for the purpose of extending his ‘overkingship’ in Wales and among the Britons more generally that he lent his support to Augustine. British kingships and clergy survived to this date deep inside what would even¬ tually become England - and Elmet in Yorkshire, perhaps the Wreocenscete and certainly St Albans are merely the best known exam¬ ples of many such. I have suggested elsewhere that Mercian influence extended at this date over many British communities,185 and there can be no doubt that yEthelfrith in nascent Northumbria was similarly an ‘overking’ of British territories. In this sense, /Ethelberht’s sponsorship and facilitation of Augustine’s meeting with the British clergy looks very much like an attempt to extend his own influence at the expense of neighbouring ‘overkings’, to the west but more particularly to the north. Such an ambition is consistent both with Tithelberht’s treatment of Rsedwald and his apparent intention to relocate his metropolis to London, and it sustains the view that the Kentish king was, in and shortly after 601, embarking on - or at least flirting with - an ambitious policy of expansion designed to achieve the universal kingship of the English which Gregory had conceded him. The term colloquium is something of a euphemism when applied to the event which Augustine reportedly staged. He seems to have presided over the meeting himself (his claims regarding status would have allowed him no other choice and he was portrayed in this role at the second meeting). He attempted to secure the active support of the Britons for his mission to convert the English, then (having failed) is

110

King ALthelberht represented as having browbeaten them into accepting his authority, and Roman doctrines and customs wherever these differed from their own. He rounded off this one-sided performance by what was arguably a thinly disguised, stage-managed miracle, curing a putatively blind Englishman whom his opponents had been unable to cure but whose presence there was surely his own responsibility and intended for pre¬ cisely this purpose. This was precisely the type of ‘proud’ miracle against which Gregory had warned Augustine in 601. As an example of typology, it was arguably based variously on confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal (I Kings xviii), the healing of the blind performed by Christ (as Matthew, xx, 30-34), and any number of healing miracles featured in early medieval hagiography. The conference was not, therefore, a meaningful exchange of ideas by equal parties exploring the possibility of consensus and accommodation but a forum for Augustine’s demands. Only when Augustine had been rebuffed at a second meeting, by a reinforced group of British clergy who owed alle¬ giance to more distant kings, is he represented as offering a compro¬ mise. Even then he retained the crucial element in his manifesto, which was recognition of his own authority, which would later have enabled him to rescind any concessions made at this juncture. Augustine apparently believed, in primis, that he was negotiating with the Britons from a position of strength and he was probably justified in so doing. The Britons were present by constraint rather than free will and treated his high-handed demands with considerable respect. When they returned they were represented as being prepared to offer condi¬ tional acceptance and it was only Augustine’s insensitivity at the second meeting which eventually persuaded them to defy him. That some of this larger group at the second meeting came from more distant kingdoms which were less vulnerable to ^Tthelberht’s political pressure helps to explain their more robust behaviour. Augustine finally overplayed his hand but its underlying strength is indicated by the submissiveness of the response it long evoked. That it was iTthelberht’s influence which brought the reluctant British priests to his presence is confirmed by the freedom with which Augustine pressurised them to concur with his demands. The far more diplomatic attempt by his successors to influence other Celtic Christians who lay beyond the reach of Kentish political pressure underlines the importance of royal power to his approach.186 Augustine’s failure was also, therefore, yEthelberht’s failure.187 An aspect of this event which merits attention is its novelty. Previous English kings were not Christian and there is no sign that English relig111

The convert kings ion was in any way evangelical, or even particularly accessible to obvi¬ ously non-English sections of society. No earlier English king is there¬ fore likely to have had the opportunity to use religious authority as TEthelberht did c. 602-A. Other kings had probably frequently pressur¬ ised - or actually usurped authority over - neighbouring, lesser kingships. Bede’s own comment on TEthelfrith, at the close of HE, i, refers to precisely this type of aggrandisement by an English king against his British neighbours. But Christianity offered TEthelberht a new and far more subtle means of expanding his own hegemony at the expense of his neighbours, a means entirely in line with the little we otherwise know about his activities and the means he used to expand his power. At the same time, the colloquia were also intended to serve Augustine’s interest, and this initiative seems a far more balanced and co-operative venture than Rsedwald’s baptism, undertaken by Augustine and TEthelberht for their mutual advantage. Having said that, what Augustine’ Oak was not designed to achieve may be as important as what it was intended for. Despite his presence somewhere on the Severn - that is on the western side of West Saxon and Hwiccan teritory - there is no hint of an attempt on Augustine’s part to convert either the West Saxon or Hwiccan kings. Both were apparently already subject to the ‘overkingship’ of yEthelberht, so can¬ didates for the same kind of treatment as Rsedwald, but neither is known to have been baptised. Augustine had an obvious interest in just such a conversion but it may be that TEthelberht had far less to gain, or was far less confident than he had been in Raedwald’s case of his capac¬ ity to obtain the necessary co-operation of these more distant kings, one of whose dynasty had apparently exercised imperium on its own behalf not long before. The prospect of an expansion of his influence beyond these territories, so beyond his own hegemony, may have been more attractive to vTthelberht than any attempt to convert existing client kings and it looks very much as though it was considerations of this sort that determined what Augustine could and could not seek to achieve. If such speculation is justified, then it was in the last resort TEthelberht’s interests, not Augustine’s, that established the agenda that his bishop was pursuing at Augustine’s Oak. The synod of London A letter of St Boniface188 to Pope Gregory III in 742 refers to a canon concerning marriage within the prohibited degrees of kinship taken by the ‘church and synod in which I was born and have been raised, that is

112

King ALtbelberbt in transmarine Saxony the synod of London, [which] was first consti¬ tuted and established by the disciples of St Gregory, that is Archbishops Augustine, Laurence, Iustus and Mellitus’. That Boniface could recall the names of the first four metropolitans merely demonstrates his recent reading of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, but his reference to London may be significant. This was hardly appropriate to the English church at large in the early eighth century, although Bede did of course quote Gregory’s letter to Augustine as if metropolitan of London (HE, I, 29) and that may be what Boniface had in mind. Was this a simple piece of antiquarianism on the part of Boniface then, as Professor Nicholas Brooks suggests?189 Or was it a term which he felt particularly appropri¬ ate to an early canon, promulgated at an early synod which actually occurred at London? London was to be the site of at least two synods in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, and its location at the hub of the road system cer¬ tainly made it more accessible than Canterbury, provided some partici¬ pants were coming from further north. The subject of this canon was certainly one which was exercising Augustine in 601, as is revealed by questions four and five in the Libellus Responsionum.190 What is more, Gregory’s response to Augustine’s sixth query in that same document specifically authorised the meeting together of bishops once three or four had been consecrated, for the purpose of appointing more, and those conditions had probably been achieved when Augustine consecrated his own successor. Did a synod of the new English church occur at London during 2Ethelberht’s reign, perhaps to inaugurate either its first or second metropolitans and disseminate papal advice? Boniface’s comments are so ambiguous that we shall never know, but Theudebert and Theuderic’s sponsorship of a synod of the Frankish church at Chalus in 603 might well have encouraged 2Ethelberht to hold a similar event, and his polit¬ ical ambitions might have encouraged him to stage this at London.

vEthelberht, his opponents and his priests His putative intention to remove to London, the baptism of Rsedwald and the Augustine’s Oak affair all imply that Tithelberht did start the process, in or about 601, of establishing himself as (over)king of all the English. Yet he seems to have rapidly lost his way, and certainly by c. 604 the entire agenda seems to have been abandoned. 2Ethelberht and his chief priest subsided back into Kent and the political structures which had already been in place before Augustine’s arrival, and replicated

113

The convert kings these in the only two new dioceses which were then founded. What had occurred to change zEthelberht’s mind? It is quite likely that the failure of the Augustine’s Oak colloquia to establish Augustine as the paramount insular bishop was a significant blow to zEthelberht’s plans and left him short of non-military options by which to further his ambitions. Without a great reputation as a warrior, zEthelberht may have been loath to commit his fortunes to the hazards of the battlefield, given the nature of the opposition that he faced. This included Welsh kings far more powerful than those in the south-east of Wales, probably led by the current representative of the dynasty of distant and inaccessible Gwynedd (perhaps that Iago whose death the Annales Cambriae noted in 613), whose kings likewise claimed to be protected by the Christian God. It may well also have included the Mercian king, Cearl, whose protection was extended, in and after c. 604, to the Deiran emigre, Prince Edwin,191 in direct opposi¬ tion to zEthelfrith of the Bernicians. This bold stance implies that Cearl was autonomous of zEthelberht and had the military capacity to defend that independence. Cearl arguably had British client kings and a far from benevolent interest in the Augustine’s Oak colloquia, particularly if the British synod occurred so close to his own influence as Chester.192 More particularly, yEthelberht cannot have been entirely ignorant of the rise of a successful warrior-king in the far north. Already in the late 590s, dEthelfrith could be represented by Bede in retrospect as the great¬ est conqueror of the Britons in English history, as well as victor in a battle against the Scots.193 Bede had every reason to advertise the suc¬ cesses of this early Bernician king but he invented neither the individual nor his achievements. About 604, zEthelfrith took over the Deiran kingship in Yorkshire, precipitating the flight of its surviving male royals southwards, and thereafter he pursued them across all Britain. If ^Tthelberht had hitherto been in doubt as to the wisdom of a removal to London and a push up Watling Street and had delayed until he was more confident, this event can only have discouraged him. Even by 601, yEthelfrith was already probably sufficiently renowned as a warriorking to give yTthelberht cause for concern. zEthelberht’s ambitions depended on the protection of a God whom his new advisers claimed was uniquely powerful. His priests were appar¬ ently capable of wielding extraordinary powers. Yet they had failed a simple test: their chief showed himself incapable of establishing his authority over the British clergy. Such a setback may have undermined zEthelberht’s confidence in a greater, God-sustained future. Faced by a

114

King ALtbelberht king in the north who was gaining a glorious reputation in war, so as one peculiarly beloved by the gods, TEthelberht may well have decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that a remove to London and expansion northwards into the Midlands might expose him to a military challenge for which he was inadequately prepared. Despite his baptism, it would be astonishing if yEthelberht had himself abandoned all faith in the ability of the gods of his people to affect the fate of men, and yEthelfrith must have seemed peculiarly Wodenfavoured by this date.194 During the remainder of his life, TEthelberht’s position was not to improve. Not only are there no known further efforts to spread Christianity out from Kent but the threat posed by TEthelfrith remained and may even have grown: it was probably not long before his own death that the Bernician king routed his opponents at Chester and Edwin fled once more, this time from the Midlands into TEthelberht’s own ‘overkingship’, taking refuge at the court of Rsedwald. When TEthelberht died he left the south very much at TEthelfrith’s mercy. The latter’s sub¬ sequent shock defeat in battle, and death, owes nothing to either of the Christian kings of Kent or Essex, or their heirs. TEthelberht clearly held to the course he had chosen in 595-7, and continued to protect his new English church and its Italian bishops. With Frankia increasingly self-absorbed by internal power struggles, the abilities of its individual kings to threaten their neighbours was limited. TEthelberht may have been aware of the marriage of a Lombard king and a Frankish princess contracted in 607, which contrasted dramat¬ ically with Childebert’s past treatment of his southern neighbours and which for the moment closed the book on the sort of aggressive postur¬ ing in which he had indulged. He was surely cognisant of the growing struggle between Theuderic and Theudebert which finally broke out in 610.195 In such circumstances he was free to assert the Rome-granted independence of his church vis-a-vis the Franks, and it was perhaps with this agenda in mind that Bishop Mellitus journeyed to Italy and attended a synod which happened to be in progress there in 609, as a representative of the English church.196 At the same time, he was pre¬ sumably aware of, and probably sanctioned, Laurence’s correspondence with the British and Irish clergies concerning Roman customs. If the Augustine’s Oak conferences had a political agenda, so too did these advances, albeit yEthelberht seems to have been doing little more than going through the motions by this date. This period of comparative calm ended abruptly for TEthelberht in

115

The convert kings 613. In Frankia, Theuderic plotted with Chlothar to attack his halfbrother and Theudebert was captured at the battle of Zulpich in 612, then liquidated. Theuderic was preparing to march on his erstwhile and far weaker associate when he died suddenly of dysentry at Metz in 613, leaving Chlothar as the sole adult male representantive of the Merovingian dynasty. Thereafter, he was able to exploit revolts against his cousins’ young heirs and dispossess them.197 Chlothar II, therefore, rose from the obscurity of a minor patrimony in central Normandy to become the undisputed ruler of all Frankia and he achieved this within a twelve-month period. If TEthelberht’s actions in 595-7 did indeed constitute a politic abandonment of his cause, Chlothar’s ultimate rise to universal kingship in Frankia is likely to have been viewed in Kent with considerable alarm. His anxieties in this respect may be guessed at from the attendance of Iustus, bishop of Rochester, and Peter of Dover, abbot of SS Peter and Paul at Canterbury, at the Council of Paris in 614.198 No such ‘English’ clergy are known to have attended the Frankish synod of a decade earlier and, given the metropolitan status of Canterbury and concerns there on the part of its Italian hierarchy to retain independence from the Frankish Church, their presence is remarkable. It is most unlikely that such leading figures within the mission church could have attended at this juncture without the king’s active approval. The concurrence of Chlothar’s triumph and their presence at a synod of the Frankish church therefore implies that TEthelberht was responding with some alarm to a dramatic shift in Merovingian politics by which he had been entirely wrong-footed. By sending them, he may well have been acknowledging his own anxiety as regards Chlothar; it certainly suggests that he was prepared to compromise the status of his own metropolitan vis-a-vis the Frankish church in return for Chlothar’s forbearance. Whatever the reality of these exchanges, the Frankish context once more looms large in any explanation of dEthelberht’s activities. The vision of his role in history which Gregory and Augustine had offered ^Ethelberht therefore proved a chimera and, likewise, the agenda which he apparently set himself by which to achieve wider ‘overkingship’. His most obvious weaknesses were the small size of his core territory, his apparent lack of military credibility and his over¬ dependence

on

second-guessing

unpredictable

Frankish

politics.

TEthelberht had always to look both ways, to Frankia and to England. He was both a powerful king and yet at the same time vulnerable to the often unpredictable changes going on around him. His acceptance of

116

King ALtkelberht baptism was arguably a diplomatic move, occasioned by his need in 595-6 to seek an accommodation with what looked like the winning side in Frankia. It probably achieved this end for a period of a decade and a half. Within England, its rituals and its special claims on behalf of its priesthood advantaged him in several respects but did not, in the last resort, adequately compensate for his several shortcomings, and he was

eventually

once

more

wrong-footed

by

the

accidents

of

Merovingian dynastic history. Yet TEthelberht did achieve a great deal: he may have actually defied the traditional gods of his people, withholding the normal sacrifices and rituals for something like two decades,199 but he apparently died peacefully of natural causes, still ‘overking’ of the south. This was an unheroic conclusion, admittedly, but one which can only have impressed other royal observers interested in making comparable experiments with ritual and the powers of the divine. If /Ethelberht’s religious revolution had not delivered to him all that he might have wished, it still provided far more than it might have, and it had protected him until the end. At the same time it had delivered a blow to the credibility of other deities, who failed to avenge themselves upon him. That in itself could be judged a major achievement and can only have encouraged other kings to conduct similar experiments and accept baptism, in pursuit of the sort of political refocusing of their own peoples and their clients which Christianity offered. The advantages were considerable. TEthelberht’s tenure of western Kent can only have been strengthened by the establishment of the novel cult of Christianity under his patronage at Rochester (on the very edge of east Kent) and St Paul’s at London both advertised and reinforced his hold over the East Saxons.200 At both sites, standardised rites and festi¬ vals linked to his own court had the potential to replace embedded and autonomous rites. His law-code reflects the readiness of his clerical advisers to bring their unique skills to bear on his behalf as much as their own, and so promote a novel and enhanced vision of the king as law-giver. That these laws were in the vernacular reflects the intention that they should be read before the people, and used.201 TEthelberht’s interest in producing his own law-code may well have been stimulated by Childebert II’s publication at Cologne in March 596 of a systematic text of the Lex Salica.102 The establishment of a paramount cult at Canterbury effectively marginalised the traditional (and, one suspects generally independent) pre-existing cult sites in Kent.203 If TEthelberht sponsored the establishment of further churches away from the dioce-

117

The convert kings san centres, then these were primarily on royal estates and they too arguably served to refocus local society ever more exclusively on kingly centres. His patronage of clerics similarly rebuilt contacts between existing Christian groups within his kingdom and the regime, to their mutual advantage. yEthelberht did, therefore, gain considerably from his patronage of the mission, even within his own kingships in the south-east, and English kingship took giant steps forward in conse¬ quence. If they really proposed to convert the entire English race, it seems unlikely that the agenda set themselves by Augustine and his colleagues was anything like as successful as that pursued by yEthelberht. Until they had mastered the English language, the missionaries were inca¬ pable of preaching to the English without the assistance of their Frankish companions. Since these were apparently also clergy, and what is more ones with a much better understanding of the Germanic psyche than Augustine, there seems every reason to imagine that the Italians would have mostly left that task to their colleagues. Augustine and his fellow countrymen were present as monks and as bishops, potential or actual, so as shock-troops of papal intervention rather than hands-on missionaries to the general population. Set against their declared objec¬ tives, their achievements were minimal. The British clergy rejected their authority, Rsedwald effectively excluded them and integrated their message

into his existing world-view

and the impact of

their

Christianity on the East Saxons and western Kentings was so insub¬ stantial that bishops felt unable to continue at either London or Rochester once yEthelberht was dead.204 No other of YEthelberht’s clients is known even to have accepted baptism. After c. 616, the Roman mission was confined to eastern Kent and the single diocese of Canterbury, where it clung on under the apparently covert patronage of yEthelberht’s heir (see below, p. 138). It is difficult to describe the Canterbury mission in its first generation as a success, therefore, par¬ ticularly in the light of the initial objectives of Gregory and Augustine. Where their separate agendas had overlapped, Augustine and YEthelberht benefited from each other. Where one agenda was priorit¬ ised at the expense of the other, it looks from the admittedly frag¬ mentary evidence as though YEthelberht’s objectives were the more likely to be pursued. The lack of interest of both king and queen in Augustine’s agenda contextualised the dispatch of the surviving papal letter to Queen Bertha in 601. Even after Mellitus’s departure the matter continued to trouble Gregory and after long deliberation he wrote once

118

Notes more (quoted by Bede, HE, i, 30) ,205 suggesting Mellitus advise Augustine to convert the temples of the English into churches and their ceremonies into Christian feasts and festivals. Although the colonisa¬ tion of pagan space by Christian ritual was arguably consistent with Gregory’s ideological position, this softer approach was at odds with Gregory’s habitual use of the coercive powers of local rulers versus pagans and reinforces the impression that he had despaired of the effec¬ tive co-operation of King 2Ethelberht in this regard - as Bede actually implies in HE, I, 26. Roman frustration underlines, therefore, the differ¬ ences between 2Ethelberht’s purposes in accepting conversion and Gregory’s vision of

what those purposes ought to have

been.

2Ethelberht’s perception of the Roman mission’s value to him is less clearly evidenced than are their expectations of his obligations to them, but Gregory’s exasperation helps us to recognise the extent to which conversion was, for 2Ethelberht, an act which was primarily of political rather than spiritual significance and one among many strategies to be used to ensure his own survival. The missionaries eventually recognised their impotence to engage 2Ethelberht more effectively in their own agenda and reluctantly adopted other, and in their eyes far less satis¬ factory, methods. Yet it may be relevant that no early church in the region has so far been shown to have been established on the site of a pagan temple and such may not have existed in a form which translated easily into a church.206 Gregory’s advice - in his last letter to Mellitus, in Gaul - was born of frustration and was arrived at after Augustine’s messengers had already left, and he is less certainly well-informed in this regard than in his letters dating to June. Kentish Christianity remained therefore, at 2Ethelberht’s death, very much dependent on the king’s court, a royal cult, the property of 2Ethelberht’s heirs and integral to their political ambitions. It is in that guise that the Canterbury mission survived, to be viewed as a potential asset by another of yEthelfrith’s competitors most of a decade later. But to place that in context it is necessary to transfer attention to the north, much as Bede then did in book n of his Historia, and it is King Edwin’s baptism and his patronage of Bishop Paulinus which will be the princi¬ pal focus of the next chapter.

Notes 1

Although J. M. Wallace-Hadrill did so, offering two contrasting

possibilities in response: Early Germanic kingship in England and on the con-

119

The convert kings tinent, Oxford, 1971, p. 31; see also H. Mayr-Harting, Two conversions: the Bulgarians and the Anglo-Saxons, Reading, Berkshire, 1994, passim. 2

As remarked by H. Mayr-Harting, The coming of Christianity to

Anglo-Saxon England, London, 3rd edn, 1991, p. 63; HE, I, 26, for discussion of which see below. 3

This is, in essence, the assumption of Wallace-Hadrill (see note 1

above), and of most later scholars. 4

W. A. Chaney, The cult of kingship in early Anglo-Saxon England,

Manchester, 1970, passim; Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, pp. 8-20. 5

As, for example, in HE, ii, 15. For discussion, see below, pp. 103, 105.

6

A revealing study of pagan practices at a Christian shrine with some rel¬

evance to this issue is that of D. Tout, ‘Christianizing the Nolan countryside: animal sacrifice at the tomb of St Felix’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, in, 1995, pp. 281-98. Such instances underline the point that TEthelberht and his associates need not have entirely abandoned pagan practices when they accepted baptism. See discussion of ‘conversion’ in R. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, AD 100^-00, New Haven, Connecticut, 1984, pp. 74—85; R. A. Markus, The end of ancient Christianity, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 5-14. 7

HE, i, 23ff, but see J. M. Campbell, ‘Observations on the Conversion

of England’, Ampleforth Journal,

lxxviii,

1973, pp. 12-26, reprinted in Essays

in Anglo-Saxon history, ed. J. Campbell, London, 1986, pp. 69-84. 8

The earliest life of Gregory the Great, by an anonymous monk of

Whitby, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave, Lawrence, Kansas, 1968: this passage from Chapter

xii

offers only a brief preface designed to contextualise the

conversion of King Edwin within providential history, which is given far more prominence. 9

As is apparent from Gregory’s correspondence with the Visigoths as

much as with England and his mission thereto. 10

See particularly, H. Mayr-Harting, The coming of Christianity, pp.

51—68; J. Campbell, ‘The first century of Christianity in England’, Ampleforth Journal,

lxxvi,

1971, pp. 12-29, reprinted in Essays, pp. 49—68; R. A. Markus,

‘The chronology of the Gregorian mission to England: Bede’s narrative and Gregory’s correspondence’, Journal of Ecclesiastical Studies, xiv, 1963, pp. 16-30; H. Chadwick, ‘Gregory the Great and the mission to the Anglo-Saxons’, Gregorio Magno e il suo tempo, XIC Incontro di studiosi dell’ antichrista critiana in collaborazione con l’Ecole Fran^aise de Rome, 2 vols, Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’, xxxm, Rome, 1991, i, pp. 199-212; I. Wood, ‘The mission of Augustine to the English’, Speculum,

lxix,

1994, pp. 1-17; R.

Meens, ‘A background to Augustine’s mission to Anglo-Saxon England’, AngloSaxon England, xxm, 1994, pp. 5-6. 11

Stemming from the attempted revision of Bede’s chronology by D.

Brechter, Die Quellen zur Angelsachsenmission Gregors des Grossen, Munster, 1941, pp. 248-52.

120

Notes 12

Most recently, Wood, ‘Mission’, p. 4.

13

As, for example, P. H. Blair, An introduction to Anglo-Saxon England,

2nd edn, Cambridge, 1977, p. 116. 14

See discussion in N. J. Higham, An English empire: Bede and the early

Anglo-Saxon kings, Manchester, 1995, pp. 30-40, but see the views of S. Bassett, ‘Church and diocese in the West Midlands: the transition from British to AngloSaxon control’, in Pastoral care before the parish, edd. J. Blair and R. Sharpe, Leicester, 1992, pp. 13-40, concerning the possibility that Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity by British clergy in the West; for Kent, see Meens, ‘Background’, p. 17, but note that Augustine was unlikely to have been in a posi¬ tion to distinguish between Britons who had acculturated sufficiently to pass as Jutes in terms of ethnicity and language but retained their own Christianity, and converts who were racially Jutish or English. 15

Campbell, ‘First century’, in Essays, pp. 54ff. For the history of Bede’s

knowledge of the foundation of Canterbury, see P. H. Blair, The world of Bede, London, 1970, pp. 68-71. 16

Life of Gregory, ed. Colgrave, pp. xii-xix; HE,

ii,

9-20.

Bede’s dating has been the subject of much discussion. See most recently, S. Wood, ‘Bede’s Northumbrian dates again’, English Historical Review, xcvm, 1983, pp. 280—96. Bede’s dates are here used throughout. 17

J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxons, London, 1982, p. 50, notes the poverty

of dates reaching Bede from Canterbury, including that of Augustine’s year of death, but their omission need not imply that Bede had not received such information. 18

Higham, English empire, p. 59.

19

Northern references to the story of Gregory and the Deiran slave boys

may have had a similar rhetorical purpose: Wood, ‘Mission’, p. 2, but see Brechter, Quellen, pp. 120—38. 20

HE, i, 34.

21

W. Goffart, The narrators of barbarian history (AD 550—800),

Guildford, Surrey, 1988, p. 240, fn. 25. 22

HE,

23

See discussion in N. Brooks, The early history of the church of

ii,

5.

Canterbury, Leicester, 1984, pp. 6—7, and ‘The creation and early structure of the kingdom of Kent’, in Origins of English kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett, Leicester, 1989, p. 66; I. Wood, The Merovingian North Sea, Alingsas, Sweden, 1983, p. 16, and ‘Mission’, pp. 10—11. 24

As tentatively proposed by I. Wood, The Merovingian kingdoms,

450—751, Harlow, Essex, 1994, p. 178, even while acknowledging the difficulties. 25

Gregory, Epist. vm, 29; a translation of the relevant passage is in

English Historical Documents, i, ed. D. Whitelock, London, 1955, p. 791. For discussion see Blair, The World of Bede, pp. 53-4; For the artificality of the number, cf. the letter of Gregory III to Boniface (xxxv) of 29 October 739,

121

The convert kings which remarks that ‘as many as 100,000 souls’ have been set free by baptism. For the full reference, see note 178 below. 26

Markus, ‘Chronology’, p. 24, followed by Brooks, Early church, p. 6,

contra, Brechter, Quellen, pp. 243, 251. Later Canterbury tradition claimed that TEthelberht was baptised on June 1: Blair, An introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, p. 117, but the schedule necessary to achieve this would have been very tight indeed, if not impossible. 27

Gregory, Epist. xi, 37 (xi, 66); see Markus, ‘Chronology’, p. 22; Blair,

World of Bede, p. 61. 28

Gregory, Epist. xi, 35 (xi, 29).

29

My thanks to Sandra Duncan for this observation.

30

On the impact of Benedict on Gregorian thought, see C. Leyser, ‘St

Benedict and Gregory the Great: another dialogue’, in Sicilia e Italia suburbicaria tra IV e VIII secolo, edd. S. Pricoco, F. Rizzo Nervo and T. Sardella, Catania, Italy, 1989, pp. 21-43. Gregory expressed his opinion on the matter to Augustine: HE, i, 27, question 1. For Burgundian monasticism, see survey and further references of Wood, Merovingian kingdoms, pp. 183-9. 31

Making new mission stations self-sufficient was a major problem

during the conversion of the Germans: R. E. Sullivan, ‘The Carolingian mis¬ sionary and the pagan’, Speculum, xxvm, 1953, p. 706. 32

HE, preface. Albinus is sometimes given credit for persuading Bede to

write his HE - as in Bede: ecclesiastical history of the English people, edd. J. McClure and R. Collins, Oxford, 1994, p.358, but this is not what Bede wrote. Rather he described him as his ‘principal authority and helper’, then narrowed this down to the particular subject here under discussion. It would be a great mistake to imagine that the HE was written for the Canterbury community in the same sort of way, for example, that Bede wrote two Vitae Cuthberti for Lindisfarne. 33

As argued by Markus, ‘Chronology’, p. 20.

34

For the possibility that the last could have been accurate, see Wood,

‘Mission’, pp. 3^4. This would be the more plausible supposing a significant proportion of Augustine’s following consisted of Frankish clergy, for which see below. Sandra Duncan suggests to me that this episode fits with Augustine’s rather dramatic and symbolic style. 35

See

K.

Blockley,

‘Canterbury

Cathedral’,

Current Archaeology,

cxxxvi, 1993, pp. 124—30. For a defence of the general veracity of Bede’s account, see Blair, World of Bede, pp. 72-5. 36

Wood, ‘Mission’, p. 4.

37

Gregory, Epist. xi, 37 (xi, 66).

38

Ibid.,

viii,

4, in which Gregory acknowledges Augustine as bishop, news

of which must have reached him after the actual consecration in Frankia, although quite possibly direct from Frankia rather than Kent. That Gregory anticipated early communication is established in Epist. vi, 57.

122

Notes 39

As referred to in Epist. vm, 29, written July 598.

40

Wood, ‘Mission’, pp. 13-15. For Gregory’s own attitude to miracles,

which Augustine presumably shared, see J. M. Petersen, The dialogues of Gregory the Great in their late antique cultural background, Toronto, 1984, passim. For Bede’s attitudes, see W. D. McCready, Miracles and the venerable Bede, Rome, 1994, passim. For an example of Gregory’s attitudes in his corre¬ spondence, see e.g. Epist. 41

vii,

23 (vii, 26).

Many New Testament miracles are closely linked with salvation, so

with conversion: see, e.g., Luke, xvn, 11-19. For examples known to Bede, see also, e.g., Constantius, Vita Germani, ed. R. Borius, Constance de Lyon, Vie de Saint Germain d’Auxerre, Paris, 1965; translated in The Western Fathers, ed. F. Hoare, London, 1954, pp. 283-320. 42

For reservations and discussion of preaching, see Sullivan, ‘Carolingian

missionary’, pp. 714—20; R.

Emmet McLaughlin, ‘The Word eclipsed?

Preaching in the early Middle Ages’, Traditio, 43

xlvI,

1991, pp. 77-122.

As in Bede’s treatment of Gregory’s letter to TEthelberht, to which he

attached the inappropriate and misleading introductory sentence which opens HE, i, 32. 44

Whitby life of Gregory, ix, x. See discussion of both texts in Blair,

World of Bede, pp. 76-8. 45

Brooks, Early church, pp. 3^4; Wood, ‘Mission’ p. 2.

46

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 57-8, following Brechter,

Quellen, pp. 120—38. 47

Gregory, Epist. ix, 222.

48

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 60; Two conversions, p. 6.

49

Gregory, Letters, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ix, 127.

50

R. A. Markus, ‘Gregory the Great and a papal missionary strategy’ in

The mission of the church and the propagation of the faith, ed. G. J. Cuming, Studies in Church History, 6, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 29-38; Blair, World of Bede, pp. 42-3. 51

P. A. B. Llewellyn, ‘The Roman church in the seventh century: the

legacy of Gregory I’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxv, 1974, pp. 363-80, particularly 363-75. 52

The fourth book of the chronicle of Tredegar, ed. J. M. Wallace-

Hadrill, London, 1960, 8; Gregory, Epist. ix, 228 (ix, 122), dated August 599. The earliest evidence of Gregory’s interest in Reccared comes in Epist. I, 41 (i, 43), to Leander, Bishop of Seville, dated April 591. 53

See A. Ferreiro, ‘Braga and Tours: some observations on Gregory’s De

virtutibus sancti Martini’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, in, 1995, pp. 195-210. For the text, see Monks, bishops and pagans: Christian culture in Gaul and Italy, 500-700, ed. and trans. W. C. McDermott, Philadelphia, 1975, pp. 159-61. 54

For contrasting views of Clovis, see J. Moorhead, ‘Clovis’s motives for

123

The convert kings becoming a Catholic Christian’, Journal of Religious History, xm, 1984—5, pp. 329-39; I. N. Wood, ‘Gregory of Tours and Clovis’, Revue Beige de Philologie et d'Histoire,

lxiii,

1985, pp. 249-72; W. M. Daly, ‘Clovis: how barbaric, how

pagan?’, Speculum,

lxix,

1994, pp. 614-64.

For the comparison with

/Ethelberht, see Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, pp. 44—5, but, as Ian Wood suggests, the reality of Clovis’s religious perceptions and the chronol¬ ogy of his ‘conversion’ may have been very different to their later portrayal by Gregory of Tours. 55

Markus, ‘Gregory the Great’, passim.

56

Blair, World of Bede, p. 47; Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity,

pp. 60-1. 57

Gregory’s political sophistication in this area has not been generally

recognised, with the exception of Wood, ‘Mission’, primarily as regards the Franks. 58

Gregory, Epist. vi, 10 (vi, 10). See also translation in English Historical

Documents, p. 790. For discussion, see J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, Oxford, 1983, pp. 113-14. For Dynamius, see Gregory, Epist. in, 33; Gregory of Tours, Decern Libri Historiarum, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, Hanover, 1951, vi, 7. For a translation, see Gregory of Tours: the history of the Franks, ed. and trans. L. Thorpe, London, 1974; Blair, World of Bede, p. 43. 59

Although only three letters to Candidus survive among Gregory’s

letters: Epist. vi, 10; vii, 21; ix, 221. 60

Gregory, Epist. v, 60 (v, 55, 15 August), vi, 6 (vi, 6: September); vi, 5 (vi,

61

But note the suggestion that these slaves help sustain the story of

5). Gregory and the slave boys incorporated in the Whitby Life: Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 57-9. If English slaves had come to Gregory’s attention at Rome then Frankia was by far the likeliest source, but had Gregory’s instructions to Candidus been stimulated by his own experiences at Rome, we might reasonably expect the process of acquiring and baptising English slaves to have begun there. 62

Cf. Markus, ‘Gregory the Great’, pp. 30—2.

63

Rather than in Italy: Blair, World of Bede, p. 46, or at Rome, as Mayr-

Harting suggests, Coming of Christianity, p. 59; see also Brooks, Early history, p. 4; Wood, ‘Mission’, p. 2. 64

Brooks, Early history, pp. 66—7. This interpretation assumes that

TEthelberht was the ‘certain son’ of the unnamed Kentish king referred to by Gregory of Tours.

I, 1; iv,

65

Gregory of Tours, Histories,

66

Gregory, Epist. xi, 35 (xi, 29).

67

Gregory of Tours, Histories, iv, 15 (22). See the discussions of E.

124

19; ix, 26.

Notes James, The Franks, Oxford, 1988, pp. 165-82 and Wood, Merovingian king¬ doms, pp. 68

88-101.

For which see his obituary, Gregory of Tours, Histories, vi, 49, and

comments of James, The Franks, pp. 165—77. 69

As argued by Wood, Merovingian kingdoms, p. 176, following F. M.

Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, 3rd edn, 1971, p. 59, and WallaceHadrill, Early Germanic kingship, pp. 24—5, but both the latter assume TEthelberht’s marriage and accession to have occurred in the 560s. 70

Gregory of Tours, History, vi, 19 (27); v, 12 (18); vi, 11 (17), 23 (32),

32 (45). 71

Ibid., v, 2.7; vi, 4,

15, 33

(46); viii, 10.

72

Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 59, but see Venantius Fortunatus:

personal and political poems, ed. and trans. J. George, Liverpool, 1995, IX, 1. 73

Gregory of Tours, Histories, ix, 26.

74

Ibid., 11,

59;

x, 9. /Ethelberht was surely not unaware of these conflicts

along the western seaboard of Frankia. 75

See above, note 60.

76

Gregory, Epist. xi, 51 (xi, 61).

77

Gregory, Moralia in Job, ed. M. Adrian, Corpus Christianorum, series

Latina, 143B, Turnhout, Belgium, 1985, xxi, 11 (21). P. Meyvaert, ‘The enigma of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues: a response to Francis Clark’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxxix, 1988, pp. 348, 357. 78

That is, ‘LEUDARD BISHOP’: The coin is illustrated in Campbell

(ed.), The Anglo-Saxons, p. 43, and see discussion in M. Werner, ‘The Liudhard Medalet’, Anglo-Saxon England, xx, 1991, pp. 27-41. 79

Gregory of Tours, Histories, v, 12 (18), 49.

80

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 61.

81

Wood, ‘Mission’, p. 2.

82

Gregory, Epist. vi, 48, 55; the relics travelled with Leuparic, a priest of

Palladius, bishop of Saintes. 83

For Tours, see Gregory, Epist. vi, 50. The three letters which imply per¬

sonal knowledge are ibid., 53, 54, 56. It is difficult to imagine that Augustine had not also met Vergilius, bishop of Arles and metropolitan, but ibid., 51 makes no reference to the fact. 84

Wood, Merovingian kingdoms, pp. 295-6. D. Hill, M. Worthington,

J. Warburton and J. Barrett, ‘The definition of the early medieval site of Quentovic’, Antiquity, lxvi, 1992, pp. 965-9. 85

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 61.

86

Gregory, Epist. vi, 49 (vi, 58); vi, 57 (vi, 59).

87

As suggested by Brooks, Early history, p. 5.

88

Gregory, Epist. vi, 50 (vi, 51).

89

Chronicle of Fredegar, iv, 17.

90

For example Gregory, Epist. vi, 49 (vi, 51).

125

The convert kings 91

Following Brechter, Quellen, pp. 231—43, and Brooks, Early History, p.

5; contra, Markus, ‘Chronology’, pp. 25-7. Bede was aware that Arles was the archdiocese {HE, i, 24,27) and this may have encouraged him to assume that this was the site of Augustine’s consecration, but he confused the bishops of Lyons and Arles, and the destination of the letter he quoted in i, 24, which is based on Gregory, Epist. vi, 50 - a letter of commendation addressed to the bishops of Tours and Marseilles but to which an erroneous address has been added. 92

Gregory, Epist. vm, 4.

93

See note 25.

94

As Blair, World of Bede, pp. 53-4, but see his doubts on p.

66;

Brooks,

Early history, p. 5. 95

As

Markus,

‘Chronology’,

p.

25;

Mayr-Harting,

Coming

of

Christianity, p. 63, maintains an open mind. 96

Gregory, Epist. vi, 57 (vi, 59): ‘that through them [Augustine and his

companions] we might be able to learn their wishes [voluntates], and as far as possible, you also striving with us, to take thought for their conversion’. Blair, World of Bede, pp. 54-5, recognised the exploratory nature of Augustine’s mission but supposed that he had himself consecrated once he had learned that there was already a Frankish bishop in Kent. 97

Brooks, Early history, p. 5.

98

Brechter, Quellen, pp. 233-40.

99

Gregory, Epist. vm, 4; ix, 222. Blair, World of Bede, p. 56. See Mayr-

Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 63, for other possibilities. 100

As argued by Markus, ‘Chronology’, pp. 26-8.

101

Wood, ‘Mission’, p. 5.

102

Gregory, Epist. xi, 35 (xi, 29).

103

Ibid., vi,

104

That is assuming that Gregory does not here mean British priests:

49

(vi,

58);

vi, 57 (vi, 59).

Wood, ‘Mission’, p. 8, and as confirmed by Gregory, Epist. vi, 59. 105

There is no near-contemporary evidence that Augustine left Rome in

596 with c. forty companions, and only Bede’s much later remark to suggest that it was with this number that he arrived on Thanet, but this view has become deeply embedded in the literature as evidence of the importance Gregory supposedly attached to the mission: e.g. Campbell, Anglo-Saxons, p. 45. 106

Wood makes by far the most convincing case for the relevance of ten¬

sions within the Merovingian dynasty to Augustine’s mission, but has a slightly different perspective on its impact thereon to that being explored here: ‘Mission’, passim. 107

Gregory, Epist. vi, 49: trans. in EHD, 1, pp. 790-1; vi, 57 (vi, 59).

108

As Brooks, Early history, p. 6.

109

This is not to contest the fact that Merovingian kings did at times exer¬

cise a degree of political influence even amounting to hegemony in south-east England: Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 60; Wood, Merovingian North Sea,

126

Notes pp. 12—17 and ‘Frankish hegemony in England’, in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed. M. Carver, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992, pp. 235-42; Campbell, ‘First century’, in Essays, p. 53. 110

Gregory of Tours, Histories, ix, 26.

111

Brooks, ‘Creation’, p. 67.

112

Acceptance of Bede’s vision of a 56-year reign for TEthelberht has

coloured interpretation of his political role: Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 60; Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, p. 24; Campbell, Anglo-Saxons, p. 44. 113

Canterbury is described by Bede, HE,

I,

25, as the metropolis of his

imperium. 114

S. C. Hawkes, ‘The south-east after the Romans: the Saxon settlement’,

in The Saxon Shore: a handbook, ed. V. A. Maxfield, Exeter, Devon, 1989, pp. 78-95. 115

J. W. Huggett, ‘Imported early Anglo-Saxon grave goods’, Medieval

Archaeology, xxxn, 1988, p. 80; J. Hines, ‘The becoming of the English: iden¬ tity, material culture and language in early Anglo-Saxon England’, AngloSaxon Studies in Archaeology and History, vn, 1994, pp. 49-59. 116

HE, i, 15; HB,

lviii.

See also, Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic king-

ship, pp. 23-4. 117

Ibid., p. 29.

118

See note 109. For parallels, see kings Theudebert I, Charibert, Sigibert

I. The first element, sethel-, means ‘noble’, or ‘well’. 119

Sasberht had three adult sons in 616: HE,

ii,

5. For discussion of the

chronology, see below, p. 137. 120

See discussion in Higham, English empire, p. 193.

121

Brooks, ‘Creation’, p. 67.

122

Gregory of Tours, Histories, vi, 32 (45); James, The Franks, p. 173;

Wood, Merovingian kingdoms, pp. 136, 171, 176. 123

See above, p. 70 and note 72.

124

But note the reservations of Brooks, ‘Creation’, p. 67.

125

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 58-9; Huggett, ‘Imported

grave goods’, passim. 126

HE, i, 26. It is by no means certain that Liudhard was responsible for

the dedication, although Chilperic did obtain control of Tours. If not, a congregation was perhaps already present. See discussion and references in J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bedes ecclesiastical history of the English people: a his¬ torical commentary, Oxford, 1988, pp. 36-7. 127

See note 78 above.

128

M. Deanesley, ‘The court of King TEthelberht of Kent’, Cambridge

Historical Journal,

vii,

1942, pp. 101—14. The charters concerned are listed in P.

H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, an annotated list and bibliography, London, 1968, pp. 69-71.

127

The convert kings 129

Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, p. 128.

130

For the presence of Britons, see K. H. Jackson, Language and history

in early Britain, Edinburgh, 1953, p. 246; for converts, see Werner, ‘Fiudhard Medalet’, p. 41 and R. Meens, ‘A background to Augustine’s mission to AngloSaxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, xxm, 1994, p. 17. 131

Brooks, Early history, p. 20. See Gregory in Nicene and post-Nicene

Fathers, xi, 64: ‘the people who formerly said that they venerated in a certain place the body of St Sixtus the martyr, which seems to thy Fraternity to be neither the true body nor truly holy, may receive certain benefits [that is, bene¬ fits which are certain] from the most holy and approved martyr, and not rever¬ ence what is uncertain’.

Gregory’s correspondence elsewhere evidences

churches dedicated to St Sixtus in Italy. 132

K. Blockley, ‘Canterbury Cathedral’, Current Archaeology, cxxxvi,

1993, pp. 124-30. 133

M. Gelling, Signposts to the past, Chichester, Sussex, 2nd edn 1988, p.

83; Meens, ‘Background’, pp. 15-18. 134

Wallace-Fladrill, Early Germanic kingship, pp. 29, 45; Mayr-Harting,

Two conversions, p. 8. 135

Gregory of Tours, Histories, iv, 14,15. Paul the Deacon, History of the

Lombards, hi, 28. An English translation is provided by W. D. Foulke, ed. E. Peters, Philadelphia, 1974. For useful insights into the state of Childebert’s kingship, see G. Halsall, ‘Social change around AD600: an Austrasian perspec¬ tive’ in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed. M. Carver, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992, pp. 265-78. 136

Chronicle of Fredegar, iv, 14, 15.

137

Ibid., iv, 17. Paul the Deacon, iv, 11, suggested that Childebert and his

wife were both poisoned in his 25th year, in which case Fredegund may well again have been responsible. 138

See above, p. 58.

139

P. Brown, The cult of the saints: its rise and function in Latin

Christianity, Chicago, 1981, provides an accessible explanation of late antique belief in the efficacy of saints, relics and miracles but see also V. Flint, The rise of magic in early medieval Europe, Oxford, 1991, pp. 13-35, for magic in antiq¬ uity. For the efficacy of ritual, see D. Turton, ‘Flistory, age and the anthropolo¬ gists’, in After empire, ed. G. Ausenda, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1995, p. 106, and in general see the discussion following I. Wood’s paper in the same volume, pp. 268-79. 140

Although pagan priests are depicted as attempting to influence warfare:

see, for example, Vita Wilfridi, xm, albeit this example is heavily influenced by biblical exemplars. 141

Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, p. 31. yEthelberht was not

accorded any military successes by Bede and may well not have had any. 142

As argued above, p. 58.

128

Notes 143

HE, i, 25. Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 67.

144

Gregory, Epist. xi, 36 (xi, 28).

145

Ibid., xi, 39 (xi, 65).

146

Ibid., xi, 35 (xi, 29).

147

Ibid., xi, 38 (xi,

68).

148

Ibid., xi, 37 (xi,

66).

149

Ibid., xi, 34 (xi, 54); 40 (56); 41 (58); 42 (57); 47 ((59); 48 (62); 50 (60);

See also xi, 45.

51 (61). 150

Ibid., xi, 56 (xi, 76).

151

Ibid., xi, 56a (xi, 64). For arguments concerning its authenticity, see P.

Mayvaert, ‘Le Libellus Responsionum a Augustin de Canturbery: un oeuvre authentique de Saint Gregoire le grand’, in Gregoire le Grand, ed. J. Fontaine, Paris, 1986, pp. 543-9; Meens, ‘Background’, pp. 6-7. 152

See discussion in Brooks, Early history, pp. 9-14.

153

For example Councils and ecclesiastical documents relating to Great

Britain and Ireland, i, ed. A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Oxford, 1869, p. 7, con¬ cerning the Council of Arles in 314. 154

Markus, ‘Gregory the Great’, pp. 31-2.

155

See discussion and refutation in Brooks, Early history, pp. 11-13.

156

Blair, World of Bede, pp. 62-3, and Brooks, ibid., p. 10, must surely be

right on this point. 157

HE, ii, 3; i,

158

B.

25;

ii, 5.

Hope-Taylor,

Yeavering:

an

Anglo-British

centre

of

early

Northumbria, London, 1977, passim. 159

Brooks, Early history, p. 10; A. Vince, Saxon London: an archaeolog¬

ical investigation, London, 1990, p. 13ff. 160

Chronicle of Fredegar, iv, 20.

161

Gregory, Epist. xi, 37 (xi,

162

Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 33; Wallace-Fladrill, Bede’s ecclesi¬

66).

astical history, p. 32. 163

See discussion in Higham, English empire, pp. 47-50.

164

Markus, ‘Gregory the Great’, pp. 133-5.

165

For a comparison with Clovis, see Brooks, Early history, p. 10.

166

Gregory, Epist. ix, 228 (ix, 122).

167

Ibid., xi, 35 (xi, 29). Blair, World of Bede, p. 60, draws attention to

Bertha’s educational opportunities and suggests that she was probably capable of corresponding with Gregory herself. 168

Bertha’s surprising inactivity as a missionary is remarked by Wallace-

Fladrill, Early Germanic kingship, p. 27. 169

Chronicle of Fredegar, iv, 21, 25, 27.

170

Adult baptism had by this date merged with infant baptism in Frankia

and Italy, so had acquired ‘strong’ versions of the role of sponsor and godfather as lifelong guide: J. H. Lynch, Godparents and kinship in early medieval

129

The convert kings Europe, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986, p. 136. For political implications, see A. Angenendt, ‘Taufe und Politik im friihen Mittelalter’, Eriihmittelalterliche Studien, vii, 1973, pp. 143-68; Ibid., ‘The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons con¬ sidered against the background of the early medieval mission’, Settimane di Studi SulVAlto Medioevo, xxxn (2), 1986, pp. 755-66; R. Morris, ‘Baptismal Places: 600—800’ in People and places in Northern Europe, 500-1600, edd. I. Wood and N. Lund, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1991, pp. 15-24. The same strategy was later used by such kings as Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, TElfred, TEthelstan and TEthelred. 171

The use of autem in the opening line of HE,

ii,

16, could conceivably

be argued to associate Paulinus with Rfedwald’s East Anglia, as was actually suggested in the earlier anonymous Life of Gregory the Great, xvi. This has since been credited by several historians, most recently by I. Wood, ‘The Franks and Sutton Hoo’ in People and places in Northern Europe, p. 10, footnote 80, although it seems of the most dubious historicity. For the ‘temple’, see HE, n, 15. Contrast Gregory, Epist. xi, 37 (xi, 66), and see discussion in WallaceHadrill, Early Germanic kingship, p. 76, and After empire, ed. Ausenda, p. 271. For an essentially archaeological review of sixth-century East Anglia, see C. J. Scull, ‘Before Sutton Hoo: structures of power and society in early East Anglia’in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed. Carver, pp. 3-24. 172

Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 110; Mayr-Harting, Coming of

Christianity, pp. 71-3; H. Vollrath, Die Synoden Englands bis 1066, Paderborn, 1985, pp. 38-48. Blair, World of Bede, pp. 80-4, was less interested in the events than

in

the

‘unyielding dogmatism’

that

contextualises

eighth-century

comment on the affair. 173

N. K. Chadwick, The age of the saints in the early Celtic Church,

Oxford, 1961, p. 122, and Celt and Saxon: studies in the early British border, Cambridge, 1963, pp. 167-71, followed by P. Sims-Williams, Religion and liter¬ ature in Western England, 600-800 , Cambridge, 1990, pp. 9-10 and C. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon church councils, c. 650-c. 850, Leicester, 1995, pp. 36-7, 247-8. 174

Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s ecclesiastical history, p. 52, and see ibid.,

addenda, p. 218. 175

Jackson, Language and history, p. 295.

176

Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s ecclesiastical history, pp. 218-19, but the views

of T. Charles-Edwards herein assume that the entire chapter reached Bede from a single source. 177

Gregory, Epist. xi, 39 (xi, 65); xi, 56a (xi, 64).

178

Boniface, Epistolae, ed. M. Tangl, MGH, Epistolae Selectae, i, Berlin,

1916,

xl.

For a rather poor translation, see The letters of Saint Boniface, trans.

and ed. E. Emerton, New York, 1940. See below, pp. 122-3. 179

C. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica, Oxford, 1896, n, p. 73.

180

E. John, Orbis Britanniae, Leicester, 1966, p. 15.

181

Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s ecclesistical history, p. 52.

130

Notes 182

Gregory, Epist. xi, 39 (xi, 65); xi, 56a (xi, 64).

183

Assuming Bede’s story of Augustine’s later visit to Arles for consecra¬

tion to be incorrect. 184

Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, p. 36, suggests that the entire

story derives from a false etymology of the place-name, Aust, which lies most appropriately at the English end of the Severn crossing (once a ferry), very close to where the toll booths for the road bridge now stand. 185

Higham, English empire, pp. 143-51.

186

HE,

187

Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, p. 31. The notion of a ter¬

ii,

4.

ritorial church in a close symbiotic relationship with a secular patron was devel¬ oped by A. Angenendt, ‘The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons considered against the background of the early medieval mission’, Settimane de Studi SulkAlto Medioevo,

xxxii

(2), 1986, pp. 766-8.

188

See note 178. The translation is that of Brooks, Early history, p. 13.

189

Ibid., p. 14.

190

HE, i, 27.

191

HE,

192

Higham, Origins of Cheshire, Manchester, 1993, pp. 85-8.

193

HE, i, 34.

194

Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, pp. 19-20. Woden seems to

ii,

14.

dominate the iconography of Danish bracteates as lord of the gods, and this south Baltic world provided England with its most effective counterbalance both to Christianity and Frankish power at this date. K. Hauck, ‘Gudme in der Sicht der Brakteaten-Forschung. Zur Ikonologie der Goldbrakteaten XXXVI’, Friihmittelalterliche Studien, xxi, 1987, pp. 147-81; M. Axboe, ‘Danish kings and dendrochronology’ in After empire, ed. Ausenda, pp. 231-3. 195

Chronicle of Fredegar, iv, 34, 37.

196

HE,

197

Fredegar, iv, 37^12.

198

Wood, Merovingian kingdoms, p. 178.

199

Unless he took a robustly syncretist or pluralist approach to the new

ii,

4.

deity, in which case he may well have continued pagan rites, despite Augustine. Cf. Mayr-Harting, Two conversions, p. 14. 200

HE,

201

The laws

ii,

3. of the earliest English

kings, ed.

and

trans.

F.

L.

Attenborough, Cambridge, 1922, pp. 2-17. See comments in Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, pp. 33-44; P. Wormald, ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Fegislation and Germanic kingship from Euric to Cnut’, in Early Medieval kingship, edd. P. Sawyer and I. Wood, Leeds, 1977, pp. 105-38. 202

Edited by E. Eckhardt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges, iv, i,

pp. 269-73. 203

For which see the classic study by F. M. Stenton, ‘The historical bearing

131

The convert kings of place-name studies: Anglo-Saxon heathenism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Series, xxm, 1941, pp. 1—41, but now tempered by Gelling, Signposts, pp. 158-61 and D. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, London, 1994, pp. 5-43. 204

HE,

205

Gregory, Epist. xi, 56 (xi, 76).

206

For continental parallels, see I. Wood, ‘Pagan religion and superstition

ii,

5-6.

east of the Rhine from the fifth to the ninth century’ in After empire, ed. Ausenda, pp. 255-6.

132

3

Differentiation, reinforcement and imperium: religion and dynasty,

c. 616-33

Succession and Crisis King ^thelberht’s death, c. 616, was a crisis which the Roman mission in south-east England barely survived. This nadir in the fortunes of English Christianity was one which was fully recognised by Bede:1 On the contrary after the death of ^Ethelberht, when his son Eadbald received the leadership of the kingdom, there occurred a great injury to the tender growth thus far of the church there. For not only had he not wished to receive the faith of Christ, but also he was polluted with such fornication as the apostle declares to have not even been heard of among the gentiles, in that he took the wife of [his] father. By both crimes he gave the opportunity to return to their former vomit to those who had received the rules of faith and continence under the rule [imperium] of his father either for favour or out of fear of the king.

Bede’s comments make clear that he suspected that many had become Christians in Kent under yEthelberht as a matter of policy rather than personal commitment. He is surely right in this assumption, albeit he understated the fact and framed this piece of realism within a broader, providential context, depicting Eadbald as chastised by God thereafter until he accepted correction via baptism (in HE, ii, 6), being in the meantime ‘afflicted by frequent fits of madness and possessed by an unclean spirit’. Bede’s interpretation of the political context of these events is not, however, particularly enlightening. The first difficulty lies in the timing of Eadbald’s baptism. It is often stated that Eadbald was not baptised during /Ethelberht’s reign,2 but that is not what Bede actually wrote in this passage: he had not ‘refused’ to receive baptism,3 but ‘had wished not to’. The use of the pluperfect

133

The convert kings may imply that Bede envisaged that ‘he had wished not to’ at a specific time - that presumably being the date when he was actually baptised, willing or not. Bede’s subsequent reference to him as perfidus — which can mean either ‘perfidious’ or ‘apostate’ - is reasonable enough in that context and consistent with his usage of this term elsewhere in his text.4 That God then chastised him requires that he had done something cul¬ pable: marriage to his stepmother only falls into this category if he had been baptised. There is a case, therefore, for arguing that Eadbald had been baptised prior to 616 but thereafter resumed pagan rites - so in Christian terms apostatised. Recent interpretation has been confused by Bede’s incorporation (in HE, ii, 6) of a miracle tale which culminates in his baptism. The assumption is, of course, that Eadbald could not have been baptised twice, but this second baptism is clearly part of an apocryphal wonder story which seems to have been formulated for didactic purposes, and no part of it has any claim to historicity (see below). This story clearly reached Bede as one of several miracle stories centred on Canterbury and its bishops during these years and he included it and apparently himself gave it some weight - but it is not consistent with other passages of his text. Eadbald may, therefore, have been baptised during his father’s lifetime but the case is not proven either way. The first part of Eadbald’s reign was a time of great difficulty for the mission, during which there was a powerful pagan reaction in both Kent and Essex. Bede contextualised this reaction solely in terms of the personal policies of the new rulers of these kingdoms, so conferring on Eadbald and Saeberht’s three sons full responsibility for the reversals suffered by Christianity. He has been followed in this by several more recent writers,5 but this is to ignore the wider political context. Among the East Saxons, the novel rituals of Christianity were estab¬ lished under ^Ethelberht’s potestas, albeit with the compliance of his nephew, and focused on a diocesan church established and endowed by the Kentish king at London.6 It was, therefore, a rite which was imposed by a political power which was external to their own sense of corporate identity, and staffed by a foreign bishop and foreign priests who depended on the patronage of that greater, external protector and were subject to the authority of a more senior bishop stationed at his court. Among the East Saxons at large, Christianity is likely to have been viewed as a vehicle of Kentish dynastic and political colonialism. Saeberht seems to have been a more or less willing accessory to this process and his kinship with /Ethelberht perhaps offered him consider-

134

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium able benefits therefrom, but his attitudes are unlikely to have been shared by the generality of his own people. To the extent that the East Saxons valued their own self-determination and separateness, they had good cause to resent /Ethelberht’s imposition of Christianity upon themselves and to oppose it once resistance became an option. Bede believed that, unlike their father, Saeberht’s sons had not been baptised while 2Ethelberht was alive,7 preferring instead to distance themselves from their father’s close dependence on Kent. They had, however, ‘seemed to leave off for a time’ from their pagan practices while Sseberht (and 2Ethelberht) lived, so diplomatically disguising their dissociation from the ‘overking’ and their differences with their own father. The East Saxons had, Bede supposed, hitherto been pro¬ hibited from practising pagan rites under Sseberht, or at least actively discouraged therefrom. Coercion was, therefore, in his mind at least, a feature of this colonial enterprise,8 even while yEthelberht’s own Kentings were reputedly free to remain unbaptised if they so chose (HE, i, 26). Sasberht’s sons now removed those prohibitions, allowing their people to participate publicly in whichever rites they preferred. By now ‘coming out’ as non-Christians, the East Saxon kings were therefore making a statement about their own relationship with Kent, differentiating themselves from Canterbury and rejecting the political subordination which had been their father’s lot for at least the last dozen years or so. By so doing they enabled the East Saxons to redefine their own sense of identity, separate from that of Kent and in conjunc¬ tion with their own tripartite kingship.9 Non-Christian cult might be expected to offer the East Saxons the reassurance of traditional values and customary rites at this time of political change, physical insecurity and ideological uncertainty, drawing on a familiar vision of a shared past and a common origin as well as long-established rituals and sacred sites. There is no indication in Bede’s narrative that these kings actively persecuted Christians. He recounts a story concerning the circum¬ stances in which they eventually expelled Mellitus from their territory in HE, ii, 5. This story may well be apocryphal but it at least conveys an impression of what sort of attitudes the Christian community at Canterbury considered appropriate to this context. In it, the kings con¬ sidered the bread of the Eucharist to have a potency which they still wished to share in return for their continuing protection but without accepting baptism. The kings and Mellitus were portrayed therein as in close contact. Indeed, Bede wrote as if the kings were actually present

135

The convert kings in the congregation. It was not Mellitus’s Christianity, therefore, but his refusal to share with them his ‘magic bread’ that led them to eject the bishop and ‘those with him’ - presumably his immediate household, priests among them, most of whom would have been Italians, Franks or Kentings. This does not amount to persecution of Christians although it seems unlikely that any clerics remained thereafter. Once again, English non-Christians seem to have had an essentially inclusive vision of the sacred and of the rituals appropriate to it, which recognised no clear division between non-Christian and Christian and sought advan¬ tage wherever that might be found. It was Christian doctrine which con¬ structed barriers, not the reverse, and it was the Christian logic of retribution which led Bede to associate the expulsion of Mellitus by these kings with their later but undated defeat and deaths at the hands of the West Saxons.10 The East Saxons surely had a very different explanation for this disaster at the time, consistent with a nonChristian world view. If Bede’s story has any substance to it, there is some similarity between East Saxon attitudes towards Christian ritual and those of Raedwald, who positioned a Christian altar alongside a non-Christian one in a temple in East Anglia.11 This may simply be a form of behav¬ iour which came naturally to the English conceptual system during the conversion period and mirrored the open cosmology which was such a feature of their world-picture. Non-Christians arguably found the exclusivity of access to Christian ritual only for the baptised as difficult to comprehend as the Christian prohibition of non-Christian rites to converts. Yet Rsedwald’s attitudes may have influenced their behaviour, since his shock defeat of ^Tthelfrith at the River Idle c. 616 had cata¬ pulted him in turn into the position of an ‘overking’. The East Saxons were his nearest neighbours, so perhaps more vulnerable to his oversight than many. They had also been more closely associated with the previ¬ ous Kentish imperium and with the novel set of rituals and priests who helped sustain it than other of Raedwald’s new clients, Kent alone excepted, so they had more to prove to a superior king who set himself up in opposition to Canterbury-centred Christianity. Mellitus’s expul¬ sion may, therefore, have owed something to the immediate political cir¬ cumstances of Rsedwald’s ‘overkingship’, and the pressures to conform to an anti-Christian stance which that imposed on the new and insecure East Saxon kings. In all probability it also owed much to East Saxon per¬ ceptions of their own group identity and sense of ethnicity, as well as the role of their own kingship and the place of ritual in reinforcing that role.

136

Differentiation: Edwins imperium It is difficult to establish a satisfactory chronology from Bede’s description of these events. His treatment of Sasberht’s death in HE, n, 5 associates it with that of TEthelberht, which (in v, 24) he dated to 616, but the association is more certainly thematic than chronological. Events in Essex are portrayed as following those in Kent and Bede’s nar¬ rative could easily accommodate a gap of a year or two between the two royal deaths. Whenever it occurred, Sasberht’s death was followed quickly by a resumption of idolatry but this should be distinguished from the expulsion of Mellitus, which Bede introduced as a separate story, albeit in the same chapter. The bishop of London may well, there¬ fore, have remained in post for some time even after Sseberht’s demise. Despite his successors’ resistance to baptism, their close association with the bishop in this narrative implies that they still protected him until they resolved to expel him. It was Bede’s opinion that Mellitus’s Frankish exile lasted only one year (HE, ii, 5, and see below), although this could well be an underestimation. He was appointed metropolitan bishop of Canterbury on the death of Laurence, probably in late January or February 619, so had obviously returned to England by that date, but he need not have left England as an exile as early as 616. When Mellitus returned to England from Frankia it was to enter the protection of King Eadbald of Kent. It was probably in part the bishop’s close and long association with the Kentish dynasty and with its polit¬ ical pretensions that encouraged the East Saxons to continue to exclude him thereafter, since to receive him back would have been tantamount to accepting renewed Kentish hegemony. That was something which they were unlikely to either welcome or dare accept while Rsedwald lived. By excluding him, they committed themselves to a particular ideological position and the East Saxons were to remain resistant to baptism throughout the next generation. The initial reasons for this appear dynastic and political rather than spiritual and it would again be political motives which ended this phase early in the 650s, when an East Saxon king saw some advantage to himself in cultivating the amity of a more powerful, Christian Bernician king (see below). King Eadbald of Kent If the papal mission was to survive anywhere, it would necessarily be at Canterbury

where

it

had

become

intimately

associated

with

TEthelberht’s dynasty.12 That it did continue speaks volumes about Eaabald’s attitude to it and far more than do apocryphal stories about his late baptism (see below). As already established, Bede suggested that

137

The convert kings Eadbald had been unwilling to accept baptism during his father’s reign but he was a patron of the mission. Perhaps he preferred the state of affairs which had prevailed at the Kentish court before 597. TEthelberht had long been a non-Christian who was both married to a Christian wife and the patron of a bishop (see above, p. 87), and Eadbald presum¬ ably lived his own early years under this regime - supposing his birth to have occurred prior to 597. Eadbald may have favoured, therefore, the sort of religious and ideological complexion to the court with which he was familiar as a child, and observation of the political difficulties of his father’s later years may well have encouraged such a stance. He elected for something which looks very much like his father’s associa¬ tion with Liudhard by participating in non-Christian rituals and opting for a marriage which was objectionable to Christian members of his entourage, yet still protecting Archbishop Laurence and his colleagues at Canterbury. The continuing survival of the mission there can only have been under Eadbald’s protection and with his active compliance and it is dif¬ ficult to over-emphasise this point. That the church continued at Canterbury throughout his eight years or so of paganism is further evi¬ denced by the continuing existence of an archive there which included various texts written during his father’s reign, including the law code which Bede remarked (HE, ii, 5) was still in use in his own day, perhaps the Libellus Responsionum and probably also a copy of that letter which Laurence, Mellitus and Iustus wrote to the Irish clergy, from which Bede was able to quote in HE, ii, 4. As pagan reactions go, there¬ fore, this one was characterised by its mildness and the recognition by the king that Christian priests and cult retained some utility. Eadbald presumably expected to benefit from the same sorts of advantages which his father had long obtained from Liudhard’s presence (see above, pp. 87-8), even without himself participating in Christian rites. Like the new kings of the East Saxons, Eadbald was subject to exter¬ nal political pressures. Apostasy may have seemed politic in the context of the imperium of Rsedwald - who was, in Bede’s eyes at least, the arch¬ apostate of this age. His superiority must at the very least have curtailed any further attempts to export Christianity to neighbouring communi¬ ties. If Rsedwald influenced the East Saxon decision to evict Mellitus, he may also have contributed to Iustus’s temporary departure from west Kent, which - of the two kingships of the Kentings — was probably the one less closely associated with Eadbald’s family. As TEthelberht’s heir, Eadbald could certainly expect to be treated with considerable suspi-

138

Differentiation: Edwins imperium cion by Rasdwald, who may well have been instrumental in depriving him of influence over the more peripheral and recently acquired parts of his father’s polity (such as Essex). Eadbald had also, however, to be aware of Frankia, where his reign coincided with the apogee of Chlothar II’s power. The attendance of representatives of the Canterbury metropolitan at the Council of Paris in 614 (see above, p. 116) probably reflected Kentish anxiety to accom¬ modate that power and surely encouraged Chlothar and the Frankish church to think of the Canterbury church as part of their own world. Frankish interests therefore weighed in favour of the survival of the mission to the English. Bede portrayed Mellitus and Iustus as finding refuge in Gaul where they awaited events before continuing on to ‘their own country’ - which for these two at least can only mean Rome.13 If this is in any sense historical, it seems more likely that they awaited interven¬ tion on their behalf from Chlothar than that they anticipated a miracle at Canterbury capable on its own of recalling Eadbald to the faith — such as Bede incorporated at the behest of Abbot Albinus. If they did return just one year after they had left (HE, n, 6),14 then it was presumably on the back of Frankish diplomacy which Eadbald was in no position to ignore, even despite his inability to reinstate Mellitus at London. Chlothar’s power was revealed by the ease with which he crushed a Saxon revolt beyond the Rhine in 622-3 and his son Dagobert was to go on in 630 to attack the Slavs, using the forces of clients such as the Lombards and Alamans as well as the Austrasians for the purpose.15 A united Frankia under an adult king could not be lightly ignored by any ruler in Kent,16 whatever the views of insular ‘overkings’ such as Rsedwald, and Eadbald was perhaps the more open to his influence by virtue of his kinship with Chlothar via his Merovingian mother (that is assuming that he was Bertha’s son). Cross-Channel communication is evidenced by the unfortunate death by drowning of Peter, abbot of SS Peter and Paul at Canterbury (and probably the same Peter who was sent with Laurence by Augustine to Gregory in 601) at Ambleteuse, midway between Calais and Boulogne, ‘having been sent as an ambas¬ sador’ (legatus: HE, I, 33). Bede did not recall the date and may well not have known it but it cannot have predated Laurence’s appointment as archbishop.17 He may well have been on royal business to Frankia. Whether he was or not, he was surely travelling with the knowledge and approval of the Kentish king, and this may as easily have been Eadbald as TEthelberht. Eadbald was certainly on the throne when Mellitus and Iustus jointly received letters from Pope Boniface V (HE, ii, 7).

139

The convert kings In this context, the miracle of Laurence’s scourging - which Bede invoked to explain the recapture of Eadbald for the faith - appears to have been developed principally so as to disguise that king’s vulnerabil¬ ity to pressures from both Rsedwald and Frankia and, in retrospect, to minimise the period of his paganism. Canterbury’s metropolitan status required that all evidence of dependence on the Frankish church be written out of English ecclesiastical history. The Canterbury church wanted

a

mission-centred

explanation

of

Eadbald’s

return

to

Christianity and they effectively manufactured one. They also had good reason not to represent Eadbald, who was later to be a significant patron and protector of the church, as an apostate. The story, like others in this group within the text, is unusually derivative and is a comparatively clear-cut example of typology, drawing on the call of Samuel

in

the temple,

the

scourging of

Christ

and

Gregory’s

Dialogues.18 The Life of Columba, written by Bede’s acquaintance Adomnan, has a similar episode, and scourging miracles occur else¬ where in early hagiography.19 As has already been noted, the central thrust of the argument - that Eadbald accepted Christianity at the hands of Laurence - is rendered implausible by the fact that it is implic¬ itly contradicted by the letters of Boniface V to England which Bede later quoted.20 The first of these letters in Bede’s text (n, 8) was written by Boniface to Archbishop Iustus. The date is not recorded but Boniface died in October 625 and Iustus did not succeed to Canterbury until April 624,21 confining this

correspondence

to

the eighteen-month period

in

between. The letter accompanied a pallium dispatched by Boniface for Iustus’s use as archbishop, but in it the Pope also acknowledged the end of Iustus’s long and uphill struggle to make any headway in spreading Christianity among the English. Before Eadbald’s reign the mission had been active more widely, so Boniface’s comment seems to have been made in the context of the period between 616 and 624X625, during which time Iustus had been bishop of Rochester, then exiled in Gaul before thereafter resuming his post, probably still under Laurence’s archdiocesan supervision (ended c. 619). Laurence, Mellitus and then Iustus himself therefore presided over a mission which had been forced by political circumstances to retrench and mark time. In the very recent past, however, all this had changed. Boniface referred to letters which he had received, apparently very recently, from ‘our son king Audubald'11 and he paraphrased the contents: ‘Your fra¬ ternity [addressing Iustus] has by so much erudition of holy eloquence,

140

Differentiation: Edwins imperium led his soul to belief in true conversion and undoubted faith’. What this does not say is that Iustus had recently baptised Eadbald. Rather, he had persuaded him of the veracity of the Christian faith. The choice of words sustains the view that Eadbald was as likely to have been an apos¬ tate post-616 as unbaptised. Iustus was arguably credited, therefore, by both Eadbald and Boniface, with bringing him back ‘on side’ after a period during which he had participated in non-Christian rites. This interpretation is supported by Boniface’s letter (HE, n, 10) to King Edwin, which may have been dispatched by the same messenger (but see below, p. 159) and which refers to the baptism of 2Ethelburh, Eadbald’s sister and Edwin’s bride, but not to that of Eadbald. Rather, it was the recent ‘enlightenment’ of the illustrious Kentish king which contextual¬ ises this correspondence. Boniface’s letter to Queen 2Ethelburh (HE, n, 11) refers to the conversio - literally ‘turning around’ or ‘conversion’ of Eadbald, but this again could as easily refer to his being recovered for Christianity as to his baptism, since ‘conversion’ and ‘baptism’ were not necessarily the same thing. Once again, there is a political context to which Bede preferred not to call attention, supposing that he was himself aware of it (and he may well not have been). King Rsedwald seems to have died c. 624-5, so the principal external pressure on Eadbald to distance himself from Christianity was removed, temporarily at least. If Eadbald saw this as an opportunity to re-establish his father’s imperium, then a marital alliance with the northern King Edwin had the capacity to strengthen his position considerably - and it may well be that both the West and East Saxons were also actively pressing claims to wider influence at this date.23 Another very obvious vehicle for such ambitions was the resurrection of the religion which had facilitated his father’s pursuit of expansionist and colonial policies towards his neighbours. That he had become convinced of the veracity of the Christian faith and dispatched a bishop to the distant north - where Gregory had proposed a second synod centred on York - were apparently central to the messages that he sent to Boniface at Rome; and the ensuing papal correspondence makes it clear that he could count on enthusiasm there for his wider plans. Yet another precondition was the benevolence of Frankia, and it is unsurprising that Eadbald’s religious about-turn coincided more-orless (the date is unknown) with his marriage into the higher echelons of the Merovingian regime, albeit to a less prestigious bride than his father’s had been.24 From c. 616 until c. 624-5, therefore, King Eadbald was either an

141

The convert kings apostate or non-Christian but still a ruler who was prepared to protect the Christian establishment within his reduced area of influence and to accept back prominent members when they returned from exile. He was arguably subject to considerable and contrary pressures from the English ‘overking’ Rsedwald of the East Angles, and Chlothar II in Frankia. About 624-5, East Anglian pressure dissipated. He reacted by a sudden flurry of diplomatic activity. To the extent that Eadbald initi¬ ated this process, he appears to have been taking advantage of the col¬ lapse of Raedwald’s ‘overkingship’ and his presumed death to promote his own wider influence. To this purpose he set out to reinforce his posi¬ tion by reclaiming his father’s religious affiliation and renewing mutu¬ ally beneficial contact with Rome and with Frankia. Eadbald was, therefore, differentiating himself from insular rivals and additionally from Rsedwald’s erstwhile ‘overkingship’, while at the same time direct¬ ing attention back to the lengthy, Christian hegemony enjoyed by /Ethelberht. The one superficially distinctive component of Eadbald’s policies was his marriage alliance with the Deiran King Edwin, which Bede por¬ trayed as something which Edwin, not Eadbald, initiated. Yet even this has an obvious precedent in recent Kentish politics in the marriage alliance between the Kentish and East Saxon dynasties which King Eormenric had instituted and which had allowed /Ethelberht to inter¬ fere north of the Thames. 2Ethelberht had later cemented this connec¬ tion

by

exporting

Christianity

to

his

nephew’s

kingdom

and

establishing a bishop there. It may well have been these several strate¬ gies pursued by his immediate forebears that now encouraged Eadbald to accede to Deiran requests for a marital alliance and to dispatch his sister with an Italian bishop to Edwin’s court, all as part of one inte¬ grated manouevre. It was a different kingdom from that which Sseberht had ruled under 2Ethelberht’s potestas but otherwise the arrangements look very similar to those accepted by the East Saxons, and had the same political potential.25 With this bundle of strategies, therefore, Eadbald may well have hoped to achieve superiority over the south. He might have succeeded had events turned out slightly differently. Just like his father, the Kentish king seems to have been let down by his lack of achievement — so of credibility - as a warrior. This might have been of little consequence so long as there was no other candidate of proven military competence among the English kings capable of offering a more credible deterrence, and so of emerging as an ‘overking’ by extending his protection to

142

Differentiation: Edwins imperium others. Rsedwald’s death removed from the scene the last surviving figure of his generation whose reputation in war is known to us through Bede’s Historia.16 Eadbald was not, however, allowed simply to assume the role of protector on the basis of his family’s reputation and some far-flung alliances. Rsedwald’s death is likely to have provided the cir¬ cumstances appropriate to the battle which Bede recorded, but failed to date, between the West and East Saxons (see above), which the West Saxons won. Their king, Cuicheim, sent an assassin to kill Eadbald’s ally, Edwin, at Easter 626 (HE, n, 9). Both these events suggest that Cuicheim hoped to achieve ‘overkingship’. According to Bede’s list of imperium-wield¬ ing kings (HE, n, 5), a West Saxon king had held such a position in the not too distant past, so Cuichelm’s ambitions already had a certain credibility before he began. It was Edwin, not Eadbald, who thereafter certainly defeated and probably killed, Cuicheim (Bede was not entirely clear in HE, ii, 9), and to whom military credibility then adhered. It was therefore the Deiran king who donned the mantle of ‘overkingship’ rather than his ally and brother-in-law in Kent, being catapulted into the role of a universal ‘father’ as other kings sought the protection of the only one among them all to establish himself as a credible warrior-king at the end of 626. If Eadbald had hoped that Edwin would play Sseberht to his own 2Ethelberht, or at least dominate the north while he, in tandem, exer¬ cised hegemony over the south, then events eventually proved him wrong, but that they would do so was clearly impossible to predict in 624—5. It is Edwin’s conversion and baptism which next concerned Bede and it is there too that we must now focus, but once again it is the inter¬ action between the political context and ideological change which will be examined.

King Edwin Edwin is the first king in English history whose life story can be recon¬ structed in any real detail and whose baptism can therefore be placed securely in context. He is today best-known as the hero-figure of book ii

of Bede’s Historia, within which he appears in no less than twelve of

its twenty chapters,27 and is personified therein as the champion who rescued English (and Roman) Christianity from near disaster during the 620s and raised it up to unprecedented heights. He also occurs in the anonymous Life of Gregory the Great, written at Whitby about a

143

The convert kings generation earlier than Bede’s Historia.2S That work referred to King Edwin in no fewer than six of its thirty-two chapters, which is a remark¬ able degree of exposure considering the ostensible subject matter and distant context of this work. His personal story opens with royal birth but he was early a victim of dynastic disaster, and there followed a long period of chronic insecur¬ ity and exile. Thereafter a dramatic recovery occurred and he achieved the rule of a substantial kingship, until renewed crisis culminated in universal ‘overkingship’ and conversion to Christianity. His life ended in battle, as befits an early English warrior-king, and ultimately became the stuff of legend. One general feature of this well-known story is worth emphasising ab initio: and that is the infrequency with which Edwin was able to take responsibility for his own destiny - particularly before c. 624, and the potency of dynastic and political pressures upon him. His policies were arguably opportunistic rather than principled throughout the bulk of his career, and conditioned by his weaknesses as much his strengths. Despite the Christian historiography on which we are dependent for information about Edwin, he should be seen first and foremost as a man of his times, of his class and of his own dynasty, whose policies and perceptions, associations and hostilities were shaped first and foremost by his secular ambitions and obligations, rather than by spiritual persuasion or religious commitment. His conversion to Christianity should be viewed within that context. Edwin was born into the royal family of the Deiri - whose provincia at this date probably approximated to the pre-1974 East Riding of Yorkshire.29 A wealth of archaeological evidence confirms that the Deiri were ‘Anglian’ - in the modern and archaeological sense of the term as well as that of Bede - and utilised a variety of traditional rites of burial. The royal family was later reputed to be Woden-descended.30 There is every reason, therefore, to suppose the court of the Deiri to have been non-Christian in the late sixth century. Edwin was probably born about 586: he was certainly of an age to marry and have children by c. 613 at the very latest, and may have been adult (which need have been no more than twelve to fifteen years old if Frankish evidence is relevant) in 604; Bede thought that he was in his forty-eighth year when he was killed in 633 and he was by then a grandfather. The signs are, however, that he was among the younger sons of his father, since his nephew, Hereric, sired children around the same time as himself, if not earlier,31 so was probably the son of a much older sibling. The geographical location of the Deiran provincia placed it between

144

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium two powerful neighbours. Cearl was a king of the Mercians in the very early seventh century who was already then old enough to have fathered a daughter of marriagable age,32 and seems to have been independent of other rulers (see above, p. 114). To the north, King yEthelfrith of the Bernicians was already establishing a reputation as a warrior—king by expelling British aristocracies or taking tribute from their leaders, and by defeating the Scots, reputedly in 603.33 It would not be surprising if 2Elle, Edwin’s father and perhaps king of the Deiri when Augustine arrived,34 had been a tribute-paying client of one of these powerful figures but if so it is unrecorded. What was remembered was 2Ethelfrith’s successful coup by which he usurped the Deiran kingship, driving out its surviving male representatives - 2Elle’s grandson Hereric and son Edwin - and then married dElle’s daughter, Acha.35 yElle was probably already dead, since both 2Ethelric (who may have been Bernician) and Frithuwald appear on regnal lists between yElle and Edwin, and one of them may have been the father of Hereric. The latter was later assassinated while under the protection of Ceretic (or Cerdic), the British king of Elmet,36 leaving two daughters by his marriage to the otherwise unknown but probably royal Breguswith (since Bregus means ‘prince’), namely (St) Hild and Hereswith, later mother of an East Anglian king. Although Ceretic has sometimes been held responsible for Hereric’s death, 2Ethelfrith’s culpability seems the more probable.37 2Ethelfrith’s succession to Bernicia is conventionally dated to 592, his takeover of Deira to 604, and his death to 616,38 but the repetition of two twelve-year periods herein may imply that the figures have been massaged so as to conform with numbers later popular within a Christian idiom. Even so, Oswald’s death in his thirty-eighth year in August 642 does much to confirm the traditional date of yEthelfrith’s coup in Yorkshire,39 since both he and Oswiu (then ‘about thirty’) were the sons of 2Ethelfrith and Acha. Their liaison cannot therefore have occurred after 604, unless Bede computed their ages on the basis of his dating of 2Ethelfrith’s takeover of Deira — in which case the entire argu¬ ment becomes circular. The Bernician usurpation was a catastrophe for male members of the Deiran royal house, so presumably also for the sense of identity of the people at large. Although they probably shared 2Ethelfrith’s funda¬ mental cultural position — his Anglian identity, his non-Christian reli¬ gious perspective, his language, and his general world-picture - his actions are likely to have been viewed by the Deiri as those of an exter¬ nal aggressor whose intention it was to extinguish their own kingship

145

The convert kings and system of patronage and substitute his own Bernician-centred rule. The sons of yEthelfrith’s union with Acha would eventually be able to pose as heirs of the Deiran as well as the Bernician royal house — and this is indeed how Bede was later to treat King Oswald.40 This was, therefore, once again an act of colonialism, but a far less subtle one than those which the Kentish king was perpetrating at pre¬ cisely this date. King yEthelberht appears to have preferred political strategies, by which to advance his own interests, to military ones and the creation of dependent dioceses fits this pattern. What little is known about yEthelfrith suggests that he felt comfortable with a broader set of mechanisms and was readier to fight for his objectives. Yet /Ethelfrith was not without political and dynastic acumen - or perhaps good advis¬ ers - as his marriage to Acha seems to demonstrate. Additionally, this ‘Saul-like’ scourge of the Britons displayed a noticeable interest in par¬ ticular places. He and his first wife, Bebbe, seem to have developed a close association with a fortified site, appropriate to the northern con¬ quests of the first half of his reign, at Bamburgh (HE, hi, 6, 16). This burh was linked, retrospectively at least, with his grandfather, King Ida,41 the putative founder of the Bernician royal house so a potent ancestral figure through whom /Ethelfrith’s own kingship might be legitimised. His occupation of Bamburgh may have had considerable political significance for /Ethelfrith’s claim to the Bernician kingship vis-a-vis rivals within his own dynasty, as control of Paris did among the Merovingian rulers of the day. Thereafter, he was almost certainly the man responsible for the development of the quite exceptional complex at Yeavering, inland from Bamburgh on the edge of the fertile valley of the River Till.42 The location of this monument to yEthelfrith’s kingship was apparently chosen with care. It was already a significant funerary site, with inhumations inserted into a prehistoric round barrow even before dBthelfrith’s reign.43 It arguably gained authority by the close proximity of the massive ramparts of the hillfort on Yeavering Bell and may also have traded on the symbolic status of the most extensive prehistoric ritual landscape in the north, which stretches along the Till valley and consists of a cursus and several henges which attracted pagan Anglian burials during this period.44 TYhelfrith’s new complex was, therefore, positioned in a landscape ‘wrought by giants’ in such a way as to take advantage of all which that had to offer as regards status. Its architecture seems to have consciously developed this same theme. There was at least one substantial hall laid

146

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium out on the same north-south axis as a very similar building which has been interpreted as a temple, and within which large numbers of cattle skulls may suggest cult activity. Alongside was a further building in which feasts seem to have been prepared. A cemetery complemented the ‘temple’ building and rounded off this area of the site. To the east was a massive but crudely constructed, tiered, timber edifice reminiscent of an outdoor theatre, which was arguably designed primarily as an assem¬ bly site - and perhaps as an arena for royal ceremonies and the recep¬ tion of tribute. At a slightly later date, a new great hall was constructed on the eastern side of the complex.45 By the standards of the age, this was architecture on the grand scale, intended to impress on its audience the magnificence, wealth and potency of TEthelfrith’s kingship. The primary ideological statement underpinning the complex was traditional, vernacular and nonChristian — particularly as regards most of the architecture used and the putative evidence of cult. It may be significant that the site lies in an area of Britain where there are very few Roman sites of any description and very little evidence of Romanisation and this aspect of the site parallels contemporary ritual landscapes around the Baltic. It is both the scale of the undertaking and the combination of palace, ritual and assembly on a single site which are so far unique characteristics in the annals of English archaeology and which were almost certainly then also excep¬ tional.46 yEthelfrith seems to have been constructing a new royal centre at a site which was already used for both burial and assembly, so as to associate his own kingship with pre-existing patterns of political, judi¬ cial and cultural activity and so obtain the benefits of sylloge. This manipulation of ritual and ceremony in the interests of his own regime has resonances of King yEthelberht’s establishment of a Christian cult site and high-status sepulchre alongside his own political metropolis at Canterbury, and there may well be some connection between the two, whichever was the earlier. What is more, TEthelfrith’s ‘theatre’ has no precedent in English vernacular architecture and almost certainly owes its inspiration to Roman originals. Such might then have been visible still at Brough-on-Humber in the extreme south of Deira, and amphitheatres probably survived at York and Chester to this date, which might have been known to his builders. However, the long sur¬ vival of the theatre at Canterbury and the possibility that that too was then in use as a setting appropriate to the ritual advertisement of the imperium of Kentish kingship needs to be born in mind.47 Frankish and Lombard kings at this date built horse-racing circuses which they also

147

The convert kings used for ceremonial functions, so ideas which were to some extent comparable were circulating on the continent. It is not impossible that TEthelfrith and his advisers employed the services of someone who had at least seen the Roman theatre at Canterbury and could vouch for its ceremonial value to the southern ‘overking’. There is some reason, therefore, to view Yeavering as a statement by TEthelfrith concerning his own authority, conceived against the back¬ drop of similar statements elsewhere in Britain, borrowing from them and with elements elaborated and re-mixed to conform with northern English and non-Christian perceptions but designed to out-do the insular competition. Borrowing from Roman architectural ideas may reflect TEthelfrith’s vision of himself as a king of imperial status, the equal or superior of the imperium-wielding and Francophile, convert king of Kent. If the ‘temple’ should be credited, then incorporation of a cult centre mirrors TEthelberht’s efforts to refocus ritual authority towards his own royal complex at Canterbury. The archaeology is redo¬ lent of a competition for status between these two contemporary ‘overkings’, which was, for the moment at least, being conducted by subtler means than outright war. TEthelfrith’s palace complex was in some respects more ‘English’ than TEthelberht’s, whose borrowing was principally from Frankia,48 despite the Italian element within his new priesthood, but it was not an unalloyed restatement of traditional, Germanic, non-Christian ideas. Rather, it was characterised by eclecticism and innovation. ./Ethelfrith certainly built on an existing landscape and local ideas about centrality. He borrowed from contemporary perspectives on Roman architecture. He may also have borrowed ideas - about the value of both ritual and cult in reinforcing kingship — from Irish contemporaries, since his life¬ time witnessed the foundation of a new and more overtly Christian ‘overkingship’ by the O’Neills, one of whose princes, Columba, founded Iona in 565, and presided over a widespread family of satellite monasteries in the north by the time he died in 597. The ideological messages emanating from Yeavering were personal and unsystematic and they had neither the durability nor the authority which traditional religions could offer. Deira was taken over, therefore, by a dynast with very ambitious ideas about his own political destiny, who invested heavily in a political and ritual centre some 210 km (about 130 miles) north and west of their own cult complex at Goodmanham {HE, ii, 13) — which is perhaps the most reliable indicator that we have for the ideological heartland of the Deiri

148

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium at this date. By the standards of face-to-face kingship, this is a vast expanse which necessarily distanced the Deiri from Tithelfrith’s regime. To the extent that the dynasty represented the people and sacral kingship their well-being, the Deiri found themselves peripheral to the new political and ideological constructs to which they had been joined and reduced to the status of a satellite community vis-a-vis the Bernicians. The males of the Deiran royal family had an even worse time of it. Hereric did not survive his period in exile (see above). Having escaped the wreck of Deira, Edwin took refuge in central Britain. He spent some part of the next decade under the protection of King Cearl of the Mercians, whose daughter he was allowed to marry and who bore him two sons during his exile.49 Bede considered that ‘he wandered as a fugi¬ tive through diverse places or kingdoms for a period of many years’ before reaching Rsedwald’s court,50 and there is some literary evidence that he had spent some time at the court of Gwynedd.51 Either there or among the lesser British kingships within what is now England, Edwin presumably found himself under the protection of Christian kings and there is a tradition, albeit one which survives nowhere earlier than some manuscripts of the Historia Brittonum, that he was baptised by a British priest.52 On balance, the evidence for Edwin’s early baptism is unimpressive and should not be given too much credence,53 yet it has a certain logic and bears comparison with the careers in exile of TEthelfrith’s sons during his own supremacy (see below). Baptism may have had the capacity to align Edwin with the several Christian kings of the north¬ ern Britons and Irish (Scotti) of Dalriada who had already suffered at the hands of Tithelfrith, and with the more powerful Irish and Welsh kings beyond them. It is likely that both Edwin and the several courts that he visited had heard rumours concerning vTthelberht’s plans for the northward expansion of his own hegemony at precisely the time that Edwin’s exile began. Gregory’s plans for the organisation of the English church (see above, p. 94) postulated the foundation of a second metropolitan see at York. If vTthelberht was ever to facilitate this, it might well have been envisaged that he would need a pliant client king in the region who was prepared to accept baptism. Edwin just might have been making himself the obvious candidate in the hope of attract¬ ing TYhelberht’s benign interest in his own problems. Saeberht’s baptism and the foundation of a diocese at London, putatively in 604, provided an appropriate precedent at just the right time. During a period when authority among the English was becoming increasingly

149

The convert kings polarised between ^Ethelfrith and vTthelberht, a Deiran prince who was a victim of the expansionism of the former might well have sought to interest the latter in his plight. 2Ethelberht’s support for Augustine vis-a-vis the British clergy was necessarily well-known in Wales, and arguably too in central England if clergy had travelled thence to the synod at Chester. This is also likely to have been seen by other royal courts as a sign that the Kentish king sought greater political influence outside his existing ‘overkingship’. Augustine’s dealings at ‘Augustine’s Oak’ also implied that he was pre¬ pared to accept British bishops and their clergy as subordinate partners in the conversion of the English. The message for such as Edwin, with an eye on the possibility of Kentish backing, may well have been that baptism by a British bishop would be acceptable at Canterbury. If the Deiran cetheling did experiment with baptism at this juncture, there¬ fore, it was arguably with the primary objective of attracting benign attention from 2Ethelberht as a counterweight to 2Ethelfrith. If this was Edwin’s expectation, he was for the moment at least to be disappointed. His prospects worsened as it became increasingly appar¬ ent that 2Ethelberht had abandoned any plans for expansion which he might have entertained and had subsided back into the extreme south¬ east. From 613 onwards Kentish eyes were arguably very largely back on Frankish affairs (see above, p. 116). Edwin’s fate depended thereafter on the ability and willingness of the kings of the Midlands and Wales to protect him from dEthelfrith. The death of Iago son of Beli, king of Gwynedd, may have been what tipped the balance, since it is recorded in the Annales Cambriae under the same year (613: corrected c. 615-16) as notice of the ‘Battle of Caer Legion’. At least one Welsh king - Selyf ap Cynan of Powys - was slain in the battle. Supposing this to have been the same ‘Battle of Chester’ as Bede appended to his own description of the ‘Augustine’s Oak’ exchanges (HE, ii, 2), it was a famous victory for iTthelfrith, and it probably opened a new phase in the expansion of his power into central and southern England.54 2Ethelfrith’s objectives in this campaign have gone unrecorded but he was perhaps seeking both to liquidate Prince Edwin - who seems to have remained a thorn in his flesh available to be exploited by any king pre¬ pared to stand up to him - and at the same time to extend his own super¬ iority. That Edwin took refuge at the East Anglian court of King Raedwald suggests that the second of these objectives had been achieved and the ability of the Welsh and Mercians to protect Edwin had been compromised. Later northern writers dressed up subsequent events in

150

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium hagiographical clothing, providing a miraculous interpretation of Edwin’s survival at Rsedwald’s court as a prophetic precursor to his eventual baptism by Paulinus, but the political context is fairly trans¬ parent. Rsedwald granted Edwin protection at his court, in accordance with English custom, but 2Ethelfrith quickly discovered his where¬ abouts and sent three successive embassies armed first with promises, then threats, to seek his death or captivity (HE, n, 12). Rasdwald came close to acceding to these demands but eventually marched out with his army and defeated and killed 2Ethelfrith ‘on the borders of the people of the Mercians on the east bank of the river which is called the Idle’. Interpretation of these events depends heavily on the meaning of the phrase used by Bede to qualify Rasdwald’s imperium in HE, n, 5.55 If, as now seems improbable, Rasdwald had begun to build his own ‘overk¬ ingship’ even before 2Ethelberht’s death,56 then the battle must be inter¬ preted in that context. Alternatively this military activity signifies that vTthelberht was now dead - and he died on 24 February, most probably (and in Bede’s chronology) in 616, which is the likeliest year for the battle to have occurred. Whichever of these options is preferred, the outcome from Edwin’s viewpoint was the same. 2Ethelfrith’s sons and some, at least, of the Bernician warrior class fled to take refuge in the far north (HE, in, 1) and Edwin forthwith became king of both the Deirans and Bernicians. Edwin as a client king: the ideological landscape Bede’s vision of this moment is of a comparatively seamless and stressfree process: once the battle had been won, Edwin ‘succeeded to the glory of the kingdom’.57 This arguably owes something to his knowl¬ edge of contests for the Northumbrian throne between different dynas¬ ties during the early eighth century - when such were becoming commonplace (see HE, v, 23), but more to his concern to push back, for his own didactic purposes, the existence of a single and unified Northumbria with only one dynasty and kingship to the early conver¬ sion period. Today it is widely recognised that friction between the Deiri and Bernicii was deeper and continued to a far later date than Bede wished to acknowledge.58 There was no such thing as Northumbria in 616, despite 2Ethelfrith’s rule of both the core peoples of which it would later be formed. In practice, 2Ethelfrith’s death with his retainers and the flight of his sons and their adherents were traumatic events in the north and it was a society in sudden and deep crisis which Edwin took over. He is unlikely

151

The convert kings to have had any significant military resources of his own at his acces¬ sion, although warriors would presumably have sought his patronage and service thereafter. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he had already acquired a warlike reputation of his own. Assuming he took part in the battle by the River Idle, he presumably did so as guest of the king without his own retinue, so as a gesith or thegn among Rsedwald’s soldiery. He must, therefore, have begun very much as a dependant of the triumphant Rsedwald, whose decisive victory had made his restora¬ tion a possibility. The glorious reputation of the king of the East Angles and the threat of vengeance that he posed to the Bernician elite who had slain Rsegenhere, his son, were Edwin’s most potent weapons in his first regnal year. Nor is it likely that Edwin could easily rekindle much of his family’s traditional political network among the Deiri themselves, given the twelve long years of his own exile and the consequent ageing and death of the generation which had served his father. The Deiri had been forced to accommodate Bernician kingship, and Acha’s role as queen may have made this sufficiently palatable for the process to have gone a long way towards acceptability. The unexpected wreck of 2Ethelfrith’s regime and Edwin’s improbable return as king is likely to have wrong-footed both communities, therefore, and not just the Bernicians, albeit that Edwin’s rule offered the better opportunities to ambitious members of the Deiri. Whether or not he had earlier accepted baptism, Edwin’s reliance on the potestas of King Raedwald arguably necessitated that he now adapt his own to the East Anglian king’s vision of divine authority and the rites appropriate to the propitiation of the gods.59 This certainly involved accommodation of a non-Christian cosmology and ritual, with or without Christ and the Christian God within that cosmology as member deities. It seems most improbable that either king patronised Christian priests or normally had such at their courts during these years. Given that both the Deiran and Bernician warrior classes appear to have been non-Christian, Edwin’s commitment to traditional rituals and association with existing and established cult centres had some potential to reinforce his own tenure of power. This stance did not however differentiate Edwin’s regime from that of his erstwhile mortal enemy and predecessor, yEthelfrith of the Bernicians. Rather, by adopting a very similar religious position, Edwin was effectively stealing the ideological clothes of the previous, famously successful Bernician king, and this may have advantaged him in his

152

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium efforts to project himself as a legitimate successor to his enemy and brother-in-law. The same political objective may have led Edwin to take possession of

the palace complex

most closely identified with

TEthelfrith’s political ambitions, at Yeavering, where Paulinus was later to carry out mass-baptisms in the River Glen, under his protection.60 Edwin’s relationship with Rsedwald probably left him little room for manouevre as regards the domestic presentation of his own kingship, but there are signs that existing ideas about cult may have served him well during these years, and Yeavering’s ‘temple’ and the timber posts which might conceivably have been carved idols were retained. One thing which Edwin’s embrace of traditional English beliefs and rites may have encouraged was the acceptance of baptism by his dynas¬ tic opponents. Bede outlined this process in the opening lines of book in of his Historia: During the whole time when Edwin ruled, the sons of the aforesaid King TEthelfrith, who had reigned before him, with many of the young nobles, were living as exiles among the Scots or the Piets, where they were instructed in the doctrine of the Scots and were reborn through the grace of baptism.

Why did yEthelfrith’s sons abandon the gods who had long served their father so well? We might postulate several contributory factors. First, Prince Eanfrith, TEthelfrith’s son by Bebbe, was arguably the only one of those known to us who is likely to have been adult by 616. His mar¬ riage into the Pictish royal house during his period of exile implies that he spent part at least of this period among the Piets and found it con¬ venient to accept baptism as the price of accommodation and prefer¬ ment there. When this liaison occurred is unrecorded. The only known progeny is that Talorgen who was king of the Piets from c. 653 until his death in 657, but he could have been born at any stage in the period 617-34 and might have been comparatively middle-aged when he became king.61 Eanfrith may well have hoped to return to power in Bernicia with Pictish aid, if and when the opportunity arose. Indeed, it is quite possi¬ ble that some help was forthcoming when he did finally come back in c. 634 - although none such is mentioned by Bede for good ideological reasons, supposing he was aware of it. Baptism was probably, therefore, the price Eanfrith was both expected, and prepared, to pay for a mar¬ riage of high status which carried with it the prospect of significant political and military assistance. His followers among the Bernician youths in exile presumably followed his example. Eanfrith’s Pictish mar-

153

The convert kings riage has interesting parallels with that which Edwin had contracted among the Mercians during his years in exile, and their political objec¬ tives were probably broadly comparable, albeit that it was not his Mercian liaison which encouraged Edwin to flirt with baptism at that date - if flirt he did. Eanfrith’s half-brothers were certainly not yet adult in 616. Oswald, the elder, was probably then around eleven and Oswiu was still a young child of about four, so they may well have been less capable of resisting whatever pressures Christian and Celtic hosts brought to bear upon them as dependants of the goodwill and protection of a foreign regime. Oswald’s later commitment to Iona to the exclusion of all other north¬ ern centres of Christianity implies that he and his brother took refuge at St Columba’s monastery there. It would certainly have made sense for them to have established themselves as independent of Eanfrith, who was their elder and (as their half-brother) a potentially dangerous competitor for power among the northern Angles should any of yEthelfrith’s sons regain power. A long stay at the principal cult centre of the Irish north under the protection of Irish kings arguably offered the young brothers their best hope of security from the threats posed variously by Edwin and Eanfrith. In the circumstances, baptism was probably obligatory and their relative youth may have meant that they were exposed to Christianity to a greater extent than either of their competitors. Neither seem, however, to have considered an ecclesiasti¬ cal career, so their Christian education may well have been compar¬ atively perfunctory. It was Eanfrith who in 616 looked like the one of ^Ethelfrith’s sons most likely to revive the fortunes of the dynasty, so the one who attracted the bulk of the Bernician exiles and foreign support. It is an accident both of history and of historiography that Oswald’s reputation has so overshadowed that of his older half-brother. The several

baptisms of

/Ethelfrith’s sons can, therefore,

be

explained quite adequately by recourse to their individual circum¬ stances in exile, but there may well have been other factors involved. Firstly, the protection and good fortune that yEthelfrith had enjoyed from the divine throughout his reign failed him disastrously at the last, when he was defeated and killed by a figure whose reputation as a godfavoured warrior seems to have been nothing in comparison with his own before that event. The decisions made by his sons necessarily took their father’s fate into account and accommodated the fickleness with which his gods had ultimately treated him. This may well have under¬ mined yEthelfrith’s ideology and exposed his ritual stance as the person-

154

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium alised ragbag which it seems to have been. Both Rsedwald and Edwin were non-Christian kings but neither was untouched by Christianity and they may have had considerable difficulty in defining precisely where they stood in religious terms. There was no political value to /Ethelfrith’s sons in adopting a comparable religious position, particu¬ larly given the difficulties that this might involve while among the north¬ ern Christians. Rather, all three may have preferred to use baptism as a means of differentiating themselves both from their father’s failure and their enemies’ success, or at least augmenting the protection which traditional gods might give via the type of ‘bolt-on’ processes which the non-Christian English cosmology seems to have accommodated without difficulty. Christianity had served other rulers well — and these princes were nec¬ essarily aware of Pictish and Irish royalty and of the Christian British kings. Additionally, they were necessarily not entirely ignorant of King TTthelberht of the Kentings and even the Merovingian kings beyond that. King vTthelberht’s career offered the most helpful precedent at this stage, since his superiority had been recognised until very recently even by their own arch-enemy, King Rsedwald of the East Angles, at a time when Edwin had been no more than a landless exile. If yEthelberht’s God had enabled him to constrain Rsedwald until his own death,62 then He might now assist them too in opposing the East Anglian king and his lieutenant, Edwin. Additionally, yEthelberht had been a baptised Christian for almost two decades, during which time he had success¬ fully retained control of the south alongside and despite the menace posed by their own father, Tithelfrith. Assuming that his career was known to them to that extent, it was /Ethelberht whose life provided the more valuable lessons in the political utility of Christian cult. From the perspective of English cetbelings in exile among the north¬ ern Celts, his cult was identical with that which was available to them within the Celtic Christian world: the sacred language was the same; the ritual of the mass was the same; the priesthood was practically identi¬ cal in terms of organisation and function. All were equally incompre¬ hensible but that need not necessarily have detracted from their efficacy in the eyes of the princes in exile. Tithelfrith’s sons need not, therefore, have accepted baptism merely so as to conform with the culture of the Christian world in which they now found themselves. They may have actively courted it for sound dynastic reasons in the hope that it might facilitate their return to power. Edwin’s identification of himself with non-Christian, English relig-

155

The convert kings ion at this date has some potential, therefore, for having influenced the several decisions made by 2Ethelfrith’s sons. So too may their experi¬ mentation with Christian ritual have encouraged him in his own reli¬ gious stance. As an Anglian king of Angles who ruled in the shadow of an Anglian ‘overking’ whose vision of the sacred was eclectic but not Christian, Edwin’s kingship was legitimised by the gods of his two core peoples. It was his dynastic opponents, not himself at this stage, who found it necessary to test a new ideology; and their experimentation allowed him to identify himself the more closely with traditional rites and pagan cult centres — which included Goodmanham. The empowerment of King Edwin: crisis and reaction, c. 624—7 Rsedwald’s death c. 624-5 was probably the event which signalled the end of this period in Edwin’s career. The death of an ‘overking’ exposed the inherent instability and personal character of the pyramid of commendation, respect, clientship, patronage and fear which consti¬ tuted English hegemony. When a superior king was overthrown in battle - as yEthelfrith had been - the victor was pretty much self-selecting as the next figure deemed capable of both protecting lesser kings and/or coercing others into acquiescence, and Raedwald is the obvious example. In instances when an imperium-wielding king died away from the battlefield - as both 2Ethelberht and Raedwald seem to have done the future was more uncertain, competition more likely and chronic insecurity a real possibility until one or more new hegemons should emerge.63 Warfare was likely to occur at this stage. This danger was the more marked given the extent of Raedwald’s influence. In Bede’s view (HE, n, 5), Raedwald’s imperium was similar in kind to that of yEthelberht, whose ‘overkingship’ he repeatedly depicted as encompassing all the English south of the Humber. There are, however, good reasons to think this was exaggerated, yet the influ¬ ence of the East Anglian king exceeded that of 2Ethelberht, whether or not Bede was right, since he was responsible for the inception of Edwin’s kingship in the far north. His power therefore touched a far wider area, stretching even as far as southern Scotland. That Bede failed to recog¬ nise this is understandable, both in view of his hostility to Rasdwald a hostility which in any case probably already characterised the Christian historiography on which he himself depended - and of his didactic need to exclude the arch-apostate from power within his own Northumbria. That this ‘overkingship’ was the first in history which spanned all of what had once been Roman Britain is, therefore, a matter

156

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium of inference rather than even near-contemporary acknowledgement. If the inference be accepted, then so also must be the assumption that the unusual scale of Raedwald’s ‘overkingship’ must thereafter have affected the parameters within which other kings would seek power and influence. A generation earlier, a king north of the Humber might have felt himself to be operating within a different political system to one in Wales, for example, in the south, or in the Midlands. Such systems interacted, of course, but they did so as neighbours and perhaps as rivals, and the mastery of one over the other was not necessarily an objective. The rise of TEthelfrith and the expansion of his power into central Britain had changed all this, polarising political authority into two camps represented by the Bernician and Kentish dynasties. TEthelberht’s death and Rasdwald’s destruction of TEthelfrith altered this again, with the inception of a new regime which recognised only one supreme hegemon, but incorporating a large subordinate ‘overkingship’ focused on Edwin north of the Humber. By 624, the distinctive¬ ness of the old northern and southern hegemonies had therefore become blurred and contemporaries had good reason to expect either a single supreme ‘overking’ to emerge in the wake of Rsedwald’s death, or at least a single political system within which overall power was shared by a southern and a northern king working together. As the East Anglian king’s closest ally and as a king of unusually extensive territories,64 Edwin was necessarily a participant in these events who could not be ignored by other kings and who had the power to influence, but not necessarily to dominate, events. It was this ongoing political crisis, as that unravelled over the next three years or so, which provided the context in which Edwin eventually decided to accept baptism at the hands of a Kentish/Italian bishop. It is his ever changing role within that crisis which offers our best chance to unravel his motives in so doing. The immediate threats to Edwin came from two directions: TEthelfrith’s eldest surviving son, Eanfrith, was still in exile beyond Edwin’s reach, among the Piets, and had probably by this date embed¬ ded himself sufficiently within the upper echelons of Christian, Pictish society to be confident of military aid in any attempt to restore the Bernician dynasty to its recent dominance among the northern Angles. There was, therefore, an adult pretender to Edwin’s crown ready and waiting to take advantage of any opportunity that the situation might offer, and a further two, young adult half-brothers, probably still 157

The convert kings among the Scots, should he fail. Edwin therefore had good reason to look over his shoulder towards the north; secondly there was the risk that Rsedwald’s supremacy over the south would fall to some Englsh king who was less sanguine than his East Anglian protector had been concerning Edwin’s position. If Edwin ruled only the Deirans and Bernicians - along with what¬ ever British territories 2Ethelfrith had conquered or subjugated to those kingships, then his position was threatening enough to a new, southern ‘overking’. If, as I have suggested elsewhere,63 he had more extensive influence than this, comprising a subordinate ‘overkingship’ encom¬ passing all of Wales and much of central England, then his position was fraught with danger unless he could engineer the mstatement of a hegemon in the south who was prepared to co-operate with himself. That he should become that superior king over the south as well as the north was the only other solution but that was not to be his immediate objective. Edwin was walking a tight-rope. The first sign of weakness on his part might lead to an invasion led by /Ethelfrith’s heirs from the north which might find support in Bernicia. Any southern king intend¬ ing to challenge him would have done well to agree both a strategy and a timetable with Eanfrith in the north. Edwin’s negotiation of a marriage with the Kentish royal family looks like his response to these difficulties, but the matter is complicated by recent debate concerning the date at which it occurred. If, as some recent commentators have suggested, the marriage should be placed several years earlier than Bede’s date of c. 625, then it cannot of neces¬ sity be interpreted in the context of Rsedwald’s death. Much of Bede’s account of these events is chronologically imprecise, particularly as regards the time-scale of the negotiations between Yorkshire and Kent, which he represents as involving at least two embassies (Bede used the terms proci, ‘wooers’ and nuntii, ‘messengers’) from Edwin to Eadbald before Princess 2Ethelburh and Bishop Paulinus were dispatched north. He was, however, quite specific in his discussion of these exchanges. It was Edwin whom Bede portrayed as having sought the alliance and Eadbald who placed conditions upon it. It was Edwin who conceded on the religious issues, making half-promises concerning his own conver¬ sion. It was, by implication at least, Eadbald who then sent 2Ethelburh and her retainers (both lay and clerical) north, along with Paulinus who was consecrated bishop to minister to this Christian community in their new lives among the pagan Deirans and to seek to baptise pagans there. According to Bede, Paulinus’s consecration occurred on 21 July 625 and

158

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium he accompanied /Ethelburh already as bishop, so yEthelburh arrived at Edwin’s court no earlier than the end of July or the very beginning of August of the same year. The first problem with this chronology is a general one which affects all Edwin’s regnal dates,66 but Bede’s dating has generally been vindi¬ cated.67 In this context, the date of Paulinus’s consecration looks secure: the event is likely to have occurred on a Sunday; 21 July was a Sunday in 625 but a Monday in 626 - the year which has sometimes been pre¬ ferred as an alternative, so adjustment of the year requires an additional change in the day. This seems unnecessarily complicated. If there is a discrepancy between Bede’s several comments on the dating of Paulinus’s episcopacy,68 it is more likely to lie in the counting of days than in the date of his consecration. The second problem stems from interpretation of the chronology of Eadbald’s renewed support for the Canterbury mission and interaction between this event and Edwin’s marriage. Assuming that Eadbald was brought back to the fold by Iustus, and not by Laurence (see discussion, p. 140 above), the chronology of these events can only depend on the letters of Boniface V, which must have been written before he died on 25 October 625. David Kirby’s most recent discussion of the issue proposes the following sequence of events:69 1

the conversion of Eadbald and sending of messengers to Rome;

2

papal letters dispatched to Edwin and yEthelburh immediately thereafter;

3

the receipt at Rome of a letter from Eadbald, followed quickly by

4

the dispatch of a papal letter and the pallium to Iustus, c. 624.

This sequence implies that the marriage of Edwin and /Ethelburh occurred before c. 624, in which case it was likely to have been con¬ tracted while Rasdwald was still alive - although his obit is of course unknown. David Kirby had previously argued that the marriage took place as early as c. 619,70 but that interpretation was dependent on acceptance of Bede’s story of Eadbald’s recovery for Christianity by Archbishop Laurence, which is no longer generally credited. There is not, therefore, any good reason to argue for a much earlier date for the marriage. Acceptance of this revised chronology would have important reper¬ cussions for the current analysis - in particular rendering any possible link between Edwin’s marriage and the crisis following Raedwald’s death implausible. There are, however, several difficulties with this solu159

The convert kings tion. First it requires that Bede was seriously misled as regards his description of Edwin’s marriage and its context, despite the internal consistency of his account. This is not impossible but it must count against this interpretation. Secondly, if Edwin’s marriage occurred while Eadbald was still actively non-Christian, then responsibility for the marriage negotiations and the guarantees concerning vTthelburh’s faith have necessarily to be transferred from Eadbald to the Canterbury clergy, and this seems entirely inappropriate to what was a character¬ istically royal transaction and it concedes to a comparatively marginal¬ ised priesthood far too much power in the affairs of a non-Christian king to be credible. This looks, therefore, like special pleading. Thirdly, the proposed chronology requires that Eadbald was restored to the church while Mellitus was still alive, whereas the letter to Iustus from Boniface seems to credit Iustus alone with Eadbald’s recent change of heart - as Kirby himself recognises71 - so this letter is most easily inter¬ preted as written when Iustus was archbishop. How should this conundrum be resolved? The problems are reduced if Eadbald was apostate rather than pagan (see above) after 616, and if throughout the period of his apostasy he retained an active and pro¬ tective interest in the Canterbury mission even while acting publicly as a non-Christian. This makes better sense of his behaviour, particularly as regards the period after Mellitus and Iustus had returned from Frankia, when Bede credited the king with the foundation of a church in the monastery of St Peter at Canterbury; this church was then con¬ secrated by Archbishop Mellitus (HE, n, 6), so in the period c. 619-624. It is not surprising that this has been seen, by Bede and later commen¬ tators, as evidence capable of fixing Eadbald’s ‘baptism’ either early in Mellitus’s tenure of the archdiocese or during that of Laurence - and this is surely one reason why the scourging miracle which Bede quoted came to be devised. This is, however, to view Eadbald through Christian eyes rather than his own. His non-Christian grandfather had made a church available at Canterbury for Bishop Liudhard; and 2Ethelberht himself, while still unbaptised, had granted Augustine and his companions a dwellingplace and use of the same church. Eadbald arguably received back the Roman bishops under pressure from his Frankish cousin, and the same Frankish connections guaranteed that he had access to masons. His foundation of a church within a cult centre which had already been endowed by his father and where 2Ethelberht himself was buried was hardly a public statement of commitment to Christianity — as would, 160

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium for example, have been the foundation of an entirely new church away from Canterbury. Rather it was a very muted comment which was prob¬ ably intentionally introspective. It concerned the dynasty as much as Christianity and Eadbald’s role therein in relation to his own father, but perhaps combined this with the need to appease the Frankish king. At the same time its localisation in east Kent was perhaps calculated to avoid affronting Raedwald, which was one risk attached to any attempt to restore Mellitus to London. Eadbald’s involvement in this project does not, therefore, require that his support for the mission was at this stage entirely clear-cut, although it does again demonstrate a circumspect commitment. The first clear sign that he felt able to throw off such circumspection was his dispatch of messengers to Rome, and that was still recent when Boniface wrote to Iustus in 624—5. It is important to note that it was Eadbald’s letters to which Boniface responded (see above). There is no evidence that the pope was in receipt of other correspondence dis¬ patched earlier by one of the English primates (for example) on this subject, despite Boniface’s earlier letters of encouragement to Mellitus and Iustus, which Bede probably had in front of him but did not repro¬ duce (HE, ii, 7). Rather, Eadbald and Iustus took upon themselves together the task of informing Rome of the changed situation. Oswiu did the same in 664 following the synod of Whitby. Eadbald’s letters have not of course survived, but the simplest solution is to suppose that these provided the first information which Boniface received concerning the breakthrough in Kent. They apparently conveyed news both of Eadbald’s own new commitment to Christianity and also his sister’s marriage. The Pope then sent enthusiastic letters of support to Archbishop Iustus, King Edwin, Queen TEthelburh and surely also to King Eadbald himself (although none such survive), most probably via Eadbald’s returning messengers who are likely to have been Canterbury-based clergy. The precise sequence of these events depends on whether it be con¬ sidered likely that Iustus

would have consecrated

Romanus to

Rochester and Paulinus to York before he had received the necessary authorisation from the papacy — which came in his letter from Boniface. If not, then Eadbald’s messengers left England in the spring, with the marriage agreed (so in English eyes achieved) but not yet solemnised, and the papal response came back by 21 July. However, the simpler solution is to assume that Iustus, like Paulinus just a couple of years later, saw no reason to await papal privileges to undertake the

161

The convert kings normal duties of a metropolitan, and that the events of July were fol¬ lowed, not preceded, by the departure of messengers to Rome. The details of Iustus’s own consecration are unknown but unless he trav¬ elled to the continent for the purpose he was uncanonically appointed by Mellitus, his predecessor, in which case he is even more likely to have of his own accord consecrated further bishops before receipt of papal authority. It is perfectly feasible, therefore, to suppose that all Eadbald’s initia¬ tives belong to the spring and summer of 625, and the likeliest order may be: 1

With Rsedwald dead (late in 624 or very early in 625), Eadbald was freed from the political constraints which had so far held him back and able to renew active and public patronage of his father’s novel religion. At this stage he publicly associated himself with Christian rituals;

2

He welcomed the advances of King Edwin and negotiated his sister’s marriage with various provisos concerning religion, then dispatched the wedding party north with Bishop Paulinus soon after 21 July 625;

3

With this important initiative achieved, he sent messengers to Rome to announce the developments which had occurred and to secure papal support and recognition;

4

Boniface responded by sending letters back to both Canterbury and Deira before his own death in October, although he may well have been dead before they arrived; At some stage Eadbald also con¬ tracted a Frankish marriage and this initiative may well also belong to 625.

This chronology has the advantage of simplicity, since it requires far less reconstruction of correspondence, for example, for which no evidence exists, than the alternative summarised above. It must be preferred on that account. Likewise, it vindicates the basic chronology of Bede’s account (excepting only his incorporation of the scourging miracle in HE, II, 6) and that too is a strength.72 It is worth stressing that his comments on the subject are the only surviving narrative of these events. That does not of course mean that it is an entirely accurate account but there is a real danger of ending up with a ‘pick-and-mix’ approach which denies the fundamental integrity and the interaction of the various parts of Bede’s story. Although there can be no certainty, the likelier case has

162

Differentiation: Edwin's imperium Edwin’s marriage occurring in the summer of 625 and Bishop Paulinus then accompanying /Ethelburh northwards. Edwin’s position thereafter was very similar to that of King yEthelberht as the non-Christian husband of the Christian, Frankish Bertha and the protector of Bishop Liudhard. The parallel with Eadbald’s very recent rule of Kent as a nonChristian king who still harboured and protected the Canterbury arch¬ diocese is slightly less apt but was the more immediate precedent. All concerned probably had these precedents in mind. Why did Edwin seek a Kentish alliance, and why was he prepared to accept the presence of a bishop at his own court? There is no direct evi¬ dence to enable us to reconstruct his thinking but we can identify some¬ thing of the political landscape which contextualised his responses. Edwin had grown up in an England increasing dominated by two great ‘overkingships’ ruled by 2Ethelfrith in the north and 2Ethelberht in the south. These two had been competitors — albeit that they never came directly to blows - but Raedwald’s subsequent reign had produced a peaceful solution to problems of friction between their two regional systems of hegemony, via Edwin’s own close political relationship with, and dependence on, the southern ‘overking’. Edwin still retained at his patron’s death his dominance over the north but he needed the active co¬ operation of a southern king with whom he could live harmoniously and share hegemony over England. Eadbald may have been thought to offer several advantages from a northern perspective. His own father had been ‘overking’ in the time of 2Ethelfrith, and Edwin may at that stage have considered him a figure worth cultivating (see above). Eadbald was the sole English king then associated with that same God who had protected 2Ethelberht from his enemies for almost twenty years, during a period when many others fell under yEthelfrith’s control - or worse - and these victims had of course included Edwin’s own immediate family. Eadbald was probably the only English figure who could claim kinship with the Merovingians and 2Ethelburh’s eventual dispatch of Edwin’s children and grandson to the protection of King Dagobert (HE, n, 20) underlines her strong sense of membership of the Frankish royal house, with all the status which that might have offered. This idea of ‘Frankishness’ had some capacity to offset the ‘Pictishness’ and ‘Irishness’ which Edwin’s dynastic enemies had cultivated. By taking in a Christian consort and bishop, Edwin might expect to neutralise any advantage that yEthelfrith’s sons enjoyed as Christians, so as potential recipients of God’s aid. He could not afford to ignore the threat posed by Eanfrith and his half-brothers and

163

The convert kings this strategy offered one means of counteracting that threat, particu¬ larly once he had been apprised of the judgemental views concerning Celtic Christianity which were then held at Canterbury. Eadbald is not known to have had a military reputation, so was perhaps less threat¬ ening for Edwin to deal with than others, such as the West Saxons, the East Saxons and perhaps even the East Angles.73 Lastly, affiliation with Christianity enabled Edwin to begin to differentiate his own regime from those of both TEthelfrith - his predecessor and enemy - and Raedwald, his erstwhile superior, and so reflects his new political auton¬ omy. A marital and political alliance between Edwin and Eadbald had some potential to make both secure and to divide hegemony over the English between them to their mutual benefit.

To convert or not to convert? Edwin, may, therefore, have had good reason to marry into the Kentish dynasty and accept a mission at his own court and it seems fair to con¬ clude that Christianity reached the Deiran court as part of the complex cocktail of political and dynastic manoeuvring by which he sought to underpin his own power. That is not, however, the same as being pre¬ pared to accept baptism - whether or not he had previously done so at the hands of a British priest. That Edwin long prevaricated on this issue is widely recognised, and his delay clearly did have a political context.74 However, there is no evidence that Edwin felt it necessary to remain pagan under pressure from Rsedwald’s East Anglian son and successor, Eorpwald, or from any other pagan king. The only external influences on Edwin between 625 and 627 which are unambiguous were Kentish and Roman and those clearly urged baptism.7'* Otherwise, he presum¬ ably had to take account of the continuing threat posed by Eanfrith in the north. The most powerful counter-argument to conversion surely came not from the claims of some pagan ‘overking’ — since none had established himself before 626 - but from the Northumbrian commu¬ nities themselves. Edwin’s kingship had hitherto been non-Christian, and had arguably drawn strength from that fact (see above). To both the Bernicians and Deirans, Christianity was the religion of their enemies - be they Dalriada Scots or Irish, Piets, Britons, or the recent southern ‘overkingship’ of /Ethelberht, and their famous successes under TEthelfrith’s leadership had arguably reinforced their commitment to non-Christian rites and deities. His death was not at Christian hands but at those of

164

Differentiation: Edwins imperium another, and even more ‘Woden-favoured’, king. On the contrary, 2Ethelfrith had consistently triumphed over Christian enemies through his conquests among the northern Britons, his victory over the Scots at Degsastan, and his slaughter of the Welsh and their clergy at Chester.76 With this ideological heritage, Edwin’s associates had little reason to look positively on the prospect of his conversion to Christianity as an instrument of policy, and they may well have looked askance on the bap¬ tisms of yEthelfrith’s sons. Conversion arguably carried significant risks of disaffection within the northern Anglian political elite. In this respect there may well have been important differences between Edwin’s more pluralist vision of his own kingship and destiny and the views of a political community which he had largely inherited from the salad days of the Bernician supremacy in the north. Paulinus entered Edwin’s court in 625 and was able, under his protec¬ tion, to set about seeking converts among the northern Angles — much as Liudhard had apparently done among the Kentings in the 580s — but to little avail. The elite community with which he was primarily in contact had no known history of regular interaction with Frankia or Kent, so no underlying respect for Germanic Christianity, and every reason to retain the world view and religious perceptions which were focal features of their own sense of ethnicity and community, as well as under pinning their military successes against their northern, Christian neighbours. Paulinus’s efforts found important support at Rome, and Boniface’s letters to Edwin and ^Ethelburh jointly constitute the earliest evidence of a papal input to the problem of persuading an English king to convert.77 The letter to Edwin has some similarities with that of Gregory to yEthelberht, albeit that that was sent to a baptised king.7s Boniface opened with a portrayal of the plenitude of majesty of the Christian God, His responsibility for creation and the role of man within the world, and His role as the protector and determiner of the great empires of the world. It was, therefore, a Christian vision of crea¬ tion and history which Boniface offered Edwin, the universality and macrocosmic grandeur of which had obvious attractions for his own kingship. Reference to Edwin’s new partner as ‘our glorious son Eadbald’ is followed by an exhortation: Shake off hated idols and their cult and despise the foolishnesses of shrines and the lying flatteries of auguries, believe in God the Father Almighty and His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, so that, believing, you may be freed

165

The convert kings from the bonds of the devil and by the power of the holy and undivided Trinity become a participant in the life eternal.

This is a very direct appeal to Edwin - albeit that Paulinus or some other clerk would have needed to translate it for him - which Boniface then reinforced by highlighting the illogicality of worshipping man-made idols, and the value within the conversion process of their destruction. With this letter he dispatched ‘the blessing of your protector, St Peter prince of the apostles, in the form of a shirt embellished with gold, and a garment from Ancyra’,79 which were perhaps intended to keep the king safe by miraculous means. Edwin may well have considered St Peter’s protection and possession of this ‘magic’ garment the most valu¬ able part of the entire correspondence, much of which was probably incomprehensible to him. Boniface’s exhortation has reverberations in another text. Belief in augury among the Deiri is a central feature of a story concerning a bird of omen which the anonymous author at Whitby of a Life of Gregory incorporated into his account of Edwin’s preparation for baptism (cap. xv). If this narrative has any basis in fact, it perhaps illustrates the gulf between the belief systems of the northern Angles and Paulinus in the mid-620s, and the difficulty he experienced in bridging that gap and challenging the high value which this community placed on augury. It may, however, be at least as much a story designed to carry a pastoral message c. 600, when it was textualised, as one which actually reflects events at court in the winter of 626-7. Boniface reinforced his letter to Edwin by another which he addressed to Queen TEthelburh, in which he called upon her to labour for her husband’s conversion, by prayer, by teaching and by persuasion. This letter even anticipated success and urged the Queen to send news as soon as possible of the baptism of her husband and his people so as to ease the concern which he felt for her.80 Eadbald’s letters had, therefore, apparently led Boniface to imagine that Edwin’s conversion was already close to accomplishment when the marriage occurred - suggesting that the Kentish king had described the marriage agreement more enthusi¬ astically than was perhaps warranted. To yEthelburh, too, Boniface sent St Peter’s blessing, along with gifts designed to appeal to the tastes of a barbarian queen - a silver mirror and gold-furbished ivory comb. Despite this impressive flow of rhetoric and Paulinus’s best efforts, however, Edwin did not accept baptism in 625 or 626. Bede shrouded the impotence of the Roman mission at this point by refocusing atten-

166

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium tion on the famous miracle story which centres on a vision seen by Edwin while still an exile at Rsedwald’s court in the dark days before TEthelfrith’s overthrow.81 This blatant piece of typology was clearly designed to foretell his eventual conversion and weave his career as a non-Christian prince in exile into the providential history of his race, as overseen by God (HE, n, 12). By so doing, Bede preserved the priestcentred vision of the conversion process which he himself preferred. He had already, however, made reference to the critical political and mili¬ tary events which contextualised Edwin’s decision-making in these years (HE, n, 9). At Easter 626, Edwin was holding court in his own hall near the (Yorkshire) River Derwent,82 when a pretended ambassador of the West Saxon king, Cuichelm, craved and was granted audience. This early instance of the ‘suicide bomber’ of modern times then attempted the king’s assassination, using a poisoned short sword for the purpose. Edwin was protected by the prompt action of his ‘dearest thegn’, Lilia, who was killed while acting as a human shield for his lord, but by the time the assassin was dead Edwin had lost yet another retainer — named as Forthhere - to the assassin’s weapon and had himself been wounded, even through his friend’s body. The graphic freshness of this scene and the retention of the names of relatively obscure participants are both features which could suggest that the story was textualised in some form at an early date, though whether as a piece of Christian histori¬ ography or as a vernacular epic is unclear.83 There is, however, no means of checking this detail and the frequency with which later saga litera¬ ture contains fictional or fictionalised characters requires that we accept Bede’s text only with due caution. If Edwin was wearing one of the ‘magic shirts’ which Boniface had sent him,84 his survival of this treacherous attack may well have enhanced his own respect for the powers of St Peter and of his repre¬ sentative, Paulinus, while at the same time enabling him to persuade his own followers of the same. It is unsurprising that his wife gave birth to their first child that same night: her husband’s wounding is precisely the sort of shock which could have precipitated labour. She was, however, probably close to full term,85 else the child is unlikely to have survived. Bede depicted Edwin at this date as still actively non-Christian, so giving thanks to his own gods for the birth of his daughter — and perhaps also for the survival of his politically important Kentish wife, although Bede does not mention this. It is interesting to note that he imagined Paulinus as actually present while this was going on, giving

167

The convert kings thanks to Christ and claiming responsibility on behalf of his own God for the successful delivery. The image which is conjured up might approximate to the temple of Rsedwald containing both Christian and pagan altars, but the scene may well have been far less formal and may, in any case, be more an eighth-century reconstruction than an accurate reflection of reality It was at this stage that Edwin was depicted as testing the efficacy of the Christian God: if He would grant him life - and he had been wounded that very day by a poisoned blade - and vengeance on the king responsible, then he would renounce his idols, gods and rites and accept baptism. The ultimate test was, therefore, of Christ and St Peter versus Woden and the pagan dieties, on trial to determine which was the more powerful as the protector of kings and the bestower of victory. When recovered from his wound, Edwin gathered his forces, marched against the West Saxons and comprehensively defeated them. By so doing, he demonstrated to the northern Angles - and whomever else was inter¬ ested - the potency of the Christian God as a god of war and as the deity with the greatest potential to protect and advance his own regime. This lesson cannot have been lost on them. Even so, that Edwin still forbore to accept baptism implies that he remained unsure of his capacity to carry with him the bulk of the warrior classes of Deira and Bernicia, even after such a famous victory as that which he achieved against the West Saxons in the summer of 626.86 His solution was to hold a conference with his principal associates and counsellors, so as to achieve a collective decision and render the act of baptism as collegiate as possible. Bede’s account implies a meeting in the winter of 626-7 in a royal hall in the heartland of Deira, chaired by the king. Not surprisingly, Bede placed the first and most forthright condemnation of pagan rites in the mouth of the leading Deiran pagan priest,87 Coifi, but this is as likely to have been a rhetorical ploy by a Christian writer as an accurate reflection of the actual debate. It might be argued that such priests were the most likely leaders of opposition to baptism - and resistance to Edwin’s Christianising policy there surely was, but this may be to impose unwarranted preconceptions on the reli¬ gious intelligentsia of conversion-period England. Studies in compar¬ able contexts have suggested that the priests of traditional religions have often proved to be that sector of society most open to religious change and keen to manage it (see above, p. 25). Even so, on balance, Christian historiography should perhaps be held accountable for a passage which has a senior pagan priest denouncing

168

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium the impotence of pagan deities to bring material benefit even to himself, others decrying the pagan ignorance of any other life than that of man on earth and unanimity among this assembly of Northumbrian pagans in favour of a Christianity of which they surely had almost no knowl¬ edge or understanding - despite Paulinus’s description of his religion to them on request in conference. This is too one-sided to reflect an accu¬ rate cross-section of the actual opinions expressed. The detail of the debate is, therefore, inaccessible. The result is not. Bede imagined that each of those attending was individually required to comment, so allowing Edwin to gauge the strength of feeling should he order baptism of the entire court. The result clearly satisfied him that he could carry the majority. If Bede is correct in this detail, Coifi thereafter broke several of the taboos surrounding his status as priest and then dese¬ crated and destroyed the pagan shrine at Godmunddingaham,88 although it would be comforting to have some other means to assess the willingness with which he undertook this. The conference therefore empowered Edwin to accept baptism by assuring him that he did so with the support of a sufficient cross-section of the political classes of the northern Angles to feel comfortable that his action did not play straight into the hands of Prince Eanfrith, TEthelfrith’s eldest son, who was still in exile and biding his time among the Piets. It was success in war under the protection of St Peter which had enabled him to reach this point and which ensured that Edwin was now an iwp^nwm-wielding king with influence across what had been Roman Britain.89 His rise in status as a warrior-king had obvious implications for the strength of his position at home since it over¬ shadowed the fame of King TEthelfrith’s conquests and gave him a mil¬ itary reputation of his own for the first time, such that even the Bernicians were forced to believe in the efficacy of his kingship. At the same time it promised his followers a flow of tribute and diplomatic gifts from a wider and richer hinterland even than that which the Bernician king had formally secured. It was arguably first and foremost their receipt of material reward on the back of Edwin’s political and military success in 626 — so loot and tribute — that encouraged his followers to associate themselves with his baptism in 627. The rise in Edwin’s for¬ tunes is perhaps reflected in the departure of TEthelfrith’s sons from Britain to Ireland, where they were engaged in warfare in 628.90 His regime was far less vulnerable than had been the case before his victory over the West Saxons in 626 and his power and prestige may well now have been such that his enemies were no longer secure inside Britain.

169

The convert kings A Christian king Edwin was baptised at Easter 627 (on 12 April), in a church hastily built of wood at York, which was of course the diocesan see for the north pre¬ scribed by Pope Gregory I. It was consecrated to the king’s personal pro¬ tector, St Peter (see above)

who underpinned Paulinus’s Roman

authority. Along with the king ‘all the nobles of his people and a great host of commoners’ entered into the mysteries of Christianity (HE, n, 14). Few of them can have had much knowledge of what they were undertaking

and

most

were

necessarily

entirely

ignorant

of

Christianity, the prescribed ritual of initiation and its intended signifi¬ cance from a Christian perspective. Edwin himself was described as a catechumen under instruction during the run-up to Easter, but Paulinus did not command the clerical manpower to spread information about Christianity far beyond the royal household in so short a time, and even therein it cannot have had much impact on Edwin’s decision to lead his people into conversion. Rather, it was the necessary process to which he submitted once his decision was made. The first mass-baptisms among the Northumbrians were, therefore, much like the mobilisation of the Kentings to accept conversion at Christmas 597 - ceremonies empty of spiritual significance for the individual but redolent of the commitment of the wider community to the ritual behaviour and religious affiliation of a successful king of their own people, on whom the gods (or God) could be seen to have smiled. Like yTthelberht, Edwin had the wealth to be an unusually sought-after patron. That a stone church was put in hand for Paulinus suggests that Edwin wished to emulate the Christian shrines developed by his wife’s family at Canterbury, with which several of those around him were familiar since their journey there in 625, but the new square edifice was to contain at its core the little timber chapel in which the king had himself been baptised and which had been built primarily for that purposed. The altar and covering structure which had comprised the physical focus of that royal ceremony were therefore to be treated exceptionally, and preserved rather than replaced. Paulinus was to gain a church but the king gained a church interior dominated by the physical reminders of his own baptism and to that extent his kingship was to dominate the cult practised in his new diocesan church. He also ensured that his new cult centre reflected his own greatness and wealth as an imperiumwielding king: the gold of the great cross and chalice with which Paulinus eventually fled south (HE, ii, 20) can only have come from his

170

Differentiation: Edwins imperium own hoard. Like Wilfrid at Ripon and Bishop Boniface in Germany a century later, Edwin and Paulinus were clearly conscious of the need to enrich their ritual and churches with exceptional manifestations of wealth so as to impress and draw in a non-Christian audience. The cer¬ emonial display of wealth was also an effective advertisement of the power and prestige of the king. Apparently following Frankish exemplars, TEthelberht had resourced a monastic church at Canterbury as his sepulchre. Edwin clearly intended that St Peter’s at York should be his own final place of rest and that of his family. Those of his children by zEthelburh who died in infancy were buried there during his lifetime and Bede later recorded that the King’s head was eventually deposited there (HE, n, 20), although British traditions had it brought back to Wales from Hatfield. The lost first English church at York was, therefore, Edwin’s new Eigenkirche — his ‘own church’ - and was developed as the principal ritual focus of his regime and of his dynasty. Edwin’s realignment with the Christian world provided him with other important resources. The principal of these was perhaps the avail¬ ability of literacy in the service of his government, and I have presented a case elsewhere to the effect that the original of the ‘Tribal Hidage’ was the work of Paulinus or some other clerk at Edwin’s court on two separ¬ ate occasions in the period 625-6.91 Whether or not this example be accepted, literacy did offer Edwin important opportunities which he is likely to have adopted, given the unusual size of his territories. His cor¬ respondence with Rome provides a certain example of his use of liter¬ acy in the business of government and his legates may also have carried letters addressed to Eadbald, TEthelburh or members of the clergy. Bede referred as well to ceremonial which may have reflected borrowings from the Roman or Frankish worlds (HE, ii, 16), for which Paulinus and his friends could well have been responsible; but much of this may have been rhetorical. The peace which putatively characterised Edwin’s reign may owe much to that of the emperor Augustine which contextualised the first coming of Christ, or that of the emperor Constantine which coincided with the conversion of the Roman empire. Additionally, there may be resonances of the Irish ‘Law of Innocents’, drawn up by Bede’s friend Adomnan and accepted at the Synod of Birr for the Irish, the Piets and perhaps even the northern Britons in 697. Bede’s statement that ‘a woman with new-born child could walk throughout the island from sea to sea with impunity’ is likely to be highly derivative. The universality of the power and knowledge claimed for the

171

The convert kings Christian God was also particularly appropriate to an ‘overking’ whose imperium was recognised by every ruler within Britain south of the southern uplands and perhaps even some way beyond. In contrast, the non-Christian, English cosmology was more appropriate to a political world in which ‘overkingship’, like kingship, was regionalised. In this respect, Edwin’s political triumph created conditions appropriate to the expansion or substitution of belief systems appropriate to a microcosmic world by others better suited to an increasingly macrocosmic and plural world - much as Robert Horton envisaged in colonial Africa (see above, p. 20) York’s topographical relationship with Edwin’s Deira differed from that of Canterbury’s within TEthelberht’s Kentish kingship, where it was already the principal focus. York was peripheral to Edwin’s Deira, much like Rochester’s position vis-a-vis west Kent, or London’s as a focus of the East Saxons. That the diocese should have been established here was probably to an extent inevitable, given Paulinus’s respect for Gregory’s dispositions (see above but recall the failure of London as a metropolitan see) but the site also reflects Edwin’s extensive powers outside his core Deiran stronghold and his role as king of all the north. This point is important, because it was arguably his position as the ruler of a complex melange of peoples and territories extending over a vast area of central and northern England and southern Scotland that first encouraged Edwin to harness the centralising powers of Christianity to his needs. Just the Bernicii and Deiri alone were spread over a territory which made face-to-face kingship problematic but Edwin exercised oversight of more numerous communities than just these, even if the most minimalist interpretation of his personal rule be preferred. Between the rivers Don and Wharfe was Elmet, still ruled by a British king in 616 and perhaps for a few years even thereafter,92 but it is a matter of record that Edwin evicted the last British king and he presum¬ ably then ruled this territory himself, or through clients. Beyond Elmet was Loidis - ‘Leeds’ - which was another district which had arguably been British-ruled but which fell to direct English control during the first half of the sixth century, and most probably in Edwin’s reign. There is a case for arguing that Bernicia - a new kingship which had barely existed for seventy years - already comprised a bundle of local com¬ munities and territories with different histories and different memories of incorporation into the greater whole. Many had probably been ruled by Britons until TEthelfrith’s kingship: some perhaps still were — and Lothian is an obvious possibility under this regime.

172

Differentiation: Edwins imperium Edwin was ruler, therefore, of a mass of disparate communities and regions many of which had sub-kings and aristocracies indigenous to the locality and which had nothing of the ancient organisation and focus which the smaller core of the Kentish kingdom displayed. His agglomerate kingships necessarily required that he travel frequently and show himself to various communities, and his regime would have been facilitated by the capacity to display a consistent ideological and cere¬ monial face throughout these transactions. Since his principal move¬ ments were on a north-south axis, his household had an obvious interest in moving its focus westwards to take advantage of the main lines of communication along the Roman roads which bisect central Yorkshire and carry traffic to Catterick, Bernicia amd Lothian to the north and to the Don, the Trent valley and Lindsey to the south. York made an appropriate metropolis of Edwin’s kingship since it was one of the northern hubs of the Roman road system, and a port capable of maintaining contact with Kent and Frankia (Figure 6). It was also a site with prominent architectural remnants of an imperial past. Paulinus at least must have known of its Roman origin and perhaps even of its status as a provincial capital and imperial city (associated with Constantine the Great) under the Empire. As a new focus of Edwin’s kingship, therefore, York could call upon an ancient, Christian and imperial authority which offered a means of legitimising his rule in the present, a means which had some potential as an alternative to the pre¬ vailing migration, settlement and conquest myths of his own people. The sites of the mass-baptisms which he oversaw reveal much about the geography of his rule. Bede believed that Paulinus joined the king and queen for thirty-six days of catechising and baptising at Yeavering in Bernicia, on the hills west of the Devil’s Causeway Roman road which carried the Antonine Itinerary route I from York to High Rochester. At Catterick (Roman Cataractoni) Paulinus baptised in the Swale, and this too lay on the same road, just south of a major intersection (Figure 6), and on the boundary between Deira and Bernicia. It was also another ruined Roman site. Edwin was reputed to have built a church on his royal villa at Campodonum, so this was presumably also a site where baptisms took place, but its location is a matter of debate. It has conventionally been identified with Cambodunum, a Roman fort in the vicinity of Dewsbury or Leeds,93 in which case it lay on the principal Roman road westwards via Manchester and Chester to Wales and the Marches, amid the minor, traditionally British territories of the Pennines. Alternatively, it has been suggested that Bede’s text requires it

173

The convert kings

Figure 6

King Edwin’s imperium: war, ecclesiastical patronage and mass-

baptism as political strategy. Roads are as Figure 1.

to have been elsewhere than the regio of Leeds, in which case it could be Doncaster (Roman Danum)94 If so, this palace was sited close to the Don crossings used by the main Roman road southwards out of Elmet and into Hatfield, towards Lincoln where lay the other church site asso¬ ciated with Edwin. This was again both a Roman site and one on a boundary.

Further

south

that same

174

road crossed

the

Trent

at

Differentiation: Edwins imperium Littleborough and Bede relayed an account of another mass-baptism by Paulinus

in

the

presence

of

the

King

which

took

place

at

Tiowulfingacaestir {HE, n, 16), which has generally been identified with this point. The suffix is certainly consistent with a Roman walled site such as this and Bede specified the Trent, but Littleborough lies on the Mercian bank. If it is the site which was meant (and there is some doubt, see p. 272, n.80), this is confirmation of Edwin’s superiority over Mercia itself, and its selection for mass-baptism on the borders of two king¬ doms has parallels with the choice of frontier locations already made at York, Catterick and Campodonum. These roads and the bridges and fords which they used were, there¬ fore, the main arteries of Edwin’s control of his peoples, by which he and his subordinates travelled from one region to another and from one palace to another. Despite some problems of identification, many of these sites were demonstrably close to pre-existing boundaries. The selection of frontier sites enabled Edwin to involve more than a single tribal community with himself at any particular point - which neces¬ sarily offered him economies as regards his own time. It also served to refocus traditional communities away from internal foci and towards ceremonial and systems of patronage conducted on their own bound¬ aries and in combination with neighbouring communities.

The

‘Augustine’s Oak’ meetings under TEthelberht’s overall protection provide a valid comparison which displays the same set of hegemonal perceptions. So too do numerous later synods which were staged on marginal wasteland in frontier locations, probably for similar reasons. The effort to break down barriers and force local communities to take cognisance of a broader world was perhaps a feature of royal policy. Edwin ate his way around his realm. He also travelled to keep touch with disparate communities and client rulers, all of whom required at least occasional face-to-face access to royal patronage. He built his support for Christianity into his routine behaviour as king in such a way that it elucidates that behaviour. At the same time it tended to re-focus the ritual and political behaviour of local communities onto sites better suited to the plural world which the king himself occupied. The obvious victims of this process were existing cult sites. These are, however, difficult to identify in northern England. There is a noticeable lack of place-name evidence for the worship of non-Christian gods in the north: the most northerly name in weoh - ‘shrine’ - is Wyham in Lincolnshire and no hearg - ‘temple’, or similar - place-names have been

identified

north

of

Northamptonshire;

175

Wode^-names

are

The convert kings unknown north of Staffordshire and Derbyshire and Thunor- and Tiwnames are exclusive to southern and central western England.95 This absence of place nomenclature is perhaps indicative of the slow penetration of non-Christian cult into the north during the sixth century but it is unlikely to reflect the actual distribution of pagan rites in the immediate pre-conversion and conversion periods. If the swastika was a symbol specific to the worship of Thunor, then the evidence from cinerary urns certainly suggests that his cult was as common among the Deiri in this period as it was anywhere else in eastern England, but this may be to adopt too simplistic an interpretation.96 We are left, therefore, with the destruction of the Deiran shrine at Goodmanham, as described by Bede, and the conversion of the royal site at Yeavering to Christianity, as the only known examples of inter¬ action. The first of these comprises the only surviving account of the desecration of a major cult site which survives:97 the senior priest supposedly took it upon himself to break the several taboos surround¬ ing his own status by bearing arms and riding the king’s own stallion, then rode from the king’s halls to the shrine which he profaned by casting into it his spear, then ordered its destruction and firing. Details in this account - particularly the denial of masculinity via taboos, the ritual use of a spear for the purposes of desecration and the sacral qual¬ ities of horses - can be paralleled elsewhere and this account probably contains a considerable core of reliable information.98 If we accept that the principal cult site of the Deiri was destroyed as a consequence of Edwin’s conference, that occurred in the interests of Deiran solidarity behind Edwin’s regime and to make way for a new cult site - the Christian one at York just thirty kilometres (20 ml) away, which was to be the new focus of Deiran kingship and ritual. We can hypothesise about the thinking involved. It may be that the desecration of Goodmanham was viewed as an essential precursor of the shift of religious affiliation which the king wished to make. It was, however, by any standards a major test of Edwin’s standing within his core com¬ munity and of its willingness to take risks with the sacred in the belief that his political and military successes had demonstrated the superior potency of a non-traditional deity, worshipped through different ritual by different priests and at a different site. Its destruction by the princi¬ pal priest challenged the non-Christian gods. Their inability to make their anger felt in the short term may have been interpreted as a demonstration of their impotence. Edwin was, of course, putting into practice the advice which he had received from Pope Boniface, but it

176

Differentiation: Edwins imperium must have been seen by the Deirans as an extremely dangerous act which could prove disastrous. Indeed, if repercussions in the non-Christian interest be allowed the same sort of time-scale which Bede routinely allowed within his own Christian narrative, then Edwin’s death in battle in 633 only six years after his baptism may well have been interpreted by many contemporaries as the vengeance of the gods and idols whose shrine he had had desecrated in 627. In the pre-conversion period, Goodmanham was arguably a place dominated not by the kings but by priests. Its destruction had some potential to elevate the sacral role of King Edwin - whose initiative this was — and marginalise the non-Christian priesthood, who were almost certainly excluded from the Christian clerisy by the lengthy process of training which (theoretically at least) preceded ordination. The conver¬ sion of the Deirans also therefore involved an adjustment to the balance of power and authority within regional society to the immediate advan¬ tage of the king. Goodmanham’s replacement was a royal and ‘imper¬ ial’ site quite some distance away, even as the bird of ill omen flies. Coifi’s replacement was an Italian bishop who was entirely dependent on the king and queen. Edwin may have been less inclined to major change when dealing with the Bernicians. The mass-baptism carried out in the River Glen obviously respected the pre-existing geography of royal government, societal focus and cult activity which Edwin had taken over from TEthelfrith but redevelopment of Yeavering may have coincided with Edwin’s religious changes:99 far more imposing timber halls were con¬ structed to the east of the assembly bulding or ‘theatre’, that structure was approximately doubled in size and better-built, the massive, timber enclosure was rebuilt in a grand fashion and changes occurred on the ‘religious’ complex which may have involved the conversion of the pagan ‘temple’ into a Christian church, and the removal of the several massive posts which may conceivably have been pagan idols. Whatever the precise interpretation, it seems clear that Edwin was careful to impose himself on the site and to redevelop it in ways consistent with his changing ideological position, as well as an inflated vision of his own imperium, without undermining its focal role within Bernicia. There were probably other non-Christian cult sites in the north, albeit so far unidentified. If so, these had arguably been foci of local and regional identity which enjoyed a degree of independence from supraregional

kingship

so

had

some

potential

to

withstand

the

‘Northumbria-building’ tendencies of such kings as TEthelfrith and

177

The convert kings Edwin. Edwin substituted a priesthood who claimed monopolistic responsibility for new rites carried out at altars which were far more consistently sited on royal estates and close by ancient boundaries. This priesthood was organised hierarchically, of foreign origin and subject to an Italian bishop who was regularly present at court and who was far more dependent on the king’s protection and patronage than his nonChristian counterparts had been. Edwin’s conversion constituted, therefore, a significant step forward in the breaking down of social and political parochialism and the substitution of a single northern kingship and a supra-regional sense of identity, backed by a single deity. Edwin’s purposes may have benefited significantly from the continu¬ ing vitality of Christianity throughout those large parts of what was to become Northumbria which had received few if any non-Christian, Anglo-Saxon

incomers during the sixth century.

Pre-conversion,

English cemeteries have been found in considerable numbers only in the core territory of the Deiri. Elsewhere, a thin scatter has been identified in eastern Bernicia, with occasional outliers around Kirkby Stephen in eastern Cumbria, but many localities even here were arguably still free of non-Christian communities when Edwin came to the throne. Such had barely penetrated the Pennines or the western seaboard, or estab¬ lished themselves to the north in Lothian or the Solway Plain. Outside of Deira, therefore, most inhabitants of the northern Anglian-dominated territories were arguably still recognisably British and Christian and so too were most cult centres. These occasionally betray themselves through the survival of place-names in eccles, examples of which occur most densely in the West Riding but also in a thin scatter to the west and north. They also occur haphazardly in literary references. Most notice¬ able of the latter is the remark of Wilfrid’s hagiographer who, when describing the foundation gifts given to Ripon, made reference to a list of ‘consecrated places in diverse regions which the British clergy deserted, fleeing the sharp edge of the hostile sword in the hand of our race’.100 Most of these were arguably within territory dependent on King Edwin. Edwin’s patronage of a bishop had considerable potential to refocus these numerous Christian cult sites, their clergy and their congregations on his own regime. It seems likely that British bishops already existed in the region. The Augustine’s Oak evidence certainly sustains the view that the British church was episcopal in structure. However, such north¬ ern British bishops did not enjoy the protection of kings with the degree of political independence which had enabled the British clergy to resist

178

Differentiation: Edwins imperium Augustine’s demands a generation earlier (see above, p. 110). We might therefore hypothesise that the active alliance of King Edwin and Bishop Paulinus offered the Roman Church an opportunity to make progress in establishing the authority which Pope Gregory had promised Augustine over all the bishops in Britain. If so, then Edwin stood to profit to the extent that it established the authority of his bishop over all the numer¬ ous Christian cult centres under his direct rule and that of his various clients. The joint activities of king and bishop may, however, have caused considerable problems for the British clergy. Given that their repre¬ sentatives had decisively rejected the authority of Augustine within living memory, many may have now been unwilling to have Paulinus imposed upon them. Edwin’s expulsion of the British king of Elmet ren¬ dered the clergy there less capable of either resisting (or just ignoring) his bishop’s authority than they might otherwise have been, and many priests elsewhere probably experienced similar difficulties - as The Life of St Wilfrid implies. One result may well have been a flight of some British priests from the north, in which case many will necessarily have taken refuge in Wales, where the power and authority of the kings of Gwynedd and their neighbours offered some protection. If this process be accepted as plausible - albeit the evidence is not available to test it effectively - there may be some link with evidence that Edwin sub¬ sequently campaigned in Wales and expelled King Cadwallon of Gwynedd,101 some years before the latter’s successful rebellion against him in 633 - as featured in HE, n, 20. There is, therefore, a case for linking Edwin’s military objectives post-627 with his support for the authority of St Peter within insular Christendom. If Edwin saw himself as pursuing a divinely appointed path under the special protection of St Peter and the Christian God - as Pope Boniface had promised him - then he had found a powerful means whereby to legitimise the expansion of his own kingship at the expense of his various neighbours, whose conversion and/or subjugation he was divinely appointed to effect. Edwin, imperium and St Peter There is good reason to suppose that TEthelberht had hoped to combine patronage of the Canterbury mission with the expansion of his ‘over¬ kingship’ but found circumstances unfavourable to his ambitions. In par¬ ticular, the military successes of King TEthelfrith restrained his advance. For seven years after 626, Edwin was without serious rivals among the kings of Britain, so far less constrained than iTthelberht had been.

179

The convert kings During this period he apparently married his patronage of Paulinus and Roman Christian cult to his own political ambitions, to the benefit of both. This is most easily seen in his initiatives outside the north. Supposing that the expansion of his territories progressed outwards from Deira, then Elmet was probably his first acquisition. This small British kingship had arguably not been subject to TEthelfrith’s ‘overkingship’ when Hereric was murdered there (see above) and its inclusion among the Mercia-centred Midland kingships of the primary list of the Tribal Hidage may imply that it was then under the protection of King Cearl of Mercia.102 Whether or not, it was incorporated into Edwin’s realm at some stage early in the expansion of his kingship, and proba¬ bly before 627, and he had a church constructed somewhere among his new ‘British’ territories, either in the regio of Leeds or on Elmet’s south¬ ern borders at or near Doncaster (see above). The new church was pre¬ sumably staffed by one of Paulinus’s clergy, so controlled by a committed agent of the regime who was answerable to the bishop’s authority and capable of both reporting back to his patrons and repre¬ senting their authority within a client and largely Christian community. Beyond Elmet lay Hatfield and Lindsey, territories which were asso¬ ciated under one hidation in the primary list of the Tribal Hidage.103 Bede was aware that Paulinus had preached and baptised in Lindsey. At Lincoln, the first to accept baptism was one Blsecca, decribed as prcefectus (reeve) of the civitas, so a senior figure in royal administration of the site and perhaps even a sub-king. The construction of a church there once again enabled Edwin and Paulinus to place their own priest in post as an agent of the regime in this exposed, Southumbrian territory. Mass baptism took place on the very edge of Lindsey, in the Trent, in Edwin’s presence (see above), so some attempt was also made to associate the wider population of the region with the regime - and this ceremony may also have had some impact on neighbouring Mercia. It was at Lincoln that Paulinus consecrated Honorius as bishop of Canterbury to succeed Iustus. Bede recorded Iustus’s death as occurring on 10 November but the year is unknown, albeit that scholarly opinion favours 627.104 If it was this early, Paulinus probably consecrated Honorius within the next six months or so, and perhaps in the spring of 628 when travel would have been that much easier. Whenever pre¬ cisely, Paulinus was necessarily already active in Lindsey and had a church, or at least an altar, at Lincoln capable of providing an adequate venue for the event.105 It seems most unlikely that Lindsey was a traditional part of the

180

Differentiation: Edwin’s imperium Deiran kingship,106 or of the Bernician and Deiran kingships of yEthelfrith prior to the battle of Chester and 616. The kingship of Lindsey with Hatfield was, therefore, probably a new acquisition of Edwin’s, and one to which he was careful to export his new, imperial cult soon after his own baptism.107 The similarity of the process with that already effected in Bernicia and Elmet implies that Edwin and Paulinus were utilising a well-established package of measures devel¬ oped so as to maximise the regime’s ideological, social and political control of local society. The conversion of his local deputy and the construction and perhaps also staffing of a church at Lincoln were obvious mechanisms by which to reinforce his own rule in an area outside the traditional areas of influence of his own dynasty, and again had colonising potential. The central objective was to detach these ter¬ ritories from existing patterns of political dependency and attach them to Edwin’s regime. His usurpation of Lindsey brought Edwin’s influence to the northern edges of the Fens, so into close proximity with the East Anglian kingship. His relationship with that dynasty had arguably been the most important single factor affecting Edwin’s kingship while Rsedwald lived. Even with his own superiority acknowledged from 626 onwards, the Deiran king had still to pay special attention to King Eorpwald, one of Rsedwald’s several sons and his successor. Bede remarked (HE, n, 15) that Edwin ‘persuaded’ Eorpwald to ‘abandon the superstition of idolworship and receive the faith and sacraments of Christ with his provin¬ cial. Working back from the death of Bishop Felix of the East Angles c. 647, Eorpwald’s baptism arguably occurred in 627 - a fact which sug¬ gests that this initiative was given a very high priority by Edwin and Paulinus. This seems to be another instance of Edwin’s export of the ideology supportive of his own dynasty and his own imperium. His actions imply that Eorpwald was being treated as if of no greater status than Blsecca, the reeve of Lincoln in Lindsey, so as at best a sub-king of Edwin’s greater kingship. Such was ignominious treatment from the perspective of the great Rsedwald’s heir, many of whose own retainers could themselves presumably still recall Edwin as a poor refugee a decade or so previously.108 Eorpwald may have been constrained to accept a Christian priest, so a Deiran agent, at his court, but Bede did not specifically refer to such or to the construction of a church there. Even so, reference to the conversion of ‘his province’ may imply yet another mass-baptism, in which case Edwin and Paulinus may have travelled to the borders of East Anglia to oversee the event.

181

The convert kings Edwin’s treatment of Eorpwald therefore also had a colonial dimen¬ sion. The East Anglian king was pressurised into acceptance of an alien cult which made exclusive claims to legitimacy for a particular clerisy and within which authority rested outside his community, with Edwin’s own bishop. This reorientation was despite East Anglia’s location within the old southern ‘overkingship’, so in what observers must then have viewed as the remit of the southern archbishop. By acceding to the pressure exercised by the hegemon, Eorpwald acknowledged, and so reinforced, his own dependence on Edwin, and conceded a degree at least of his own sacral kingship to the superior king. If, as seems likely but is unrecorded, Edwin stood sponsor or godfather to Eorpwald, then that dependence was the greater.109 If Eorpwald also allowed the East Anges as a whole to be baptised, as Bede suggested, Edwin’s priests obtained direct access to his people, bypassing his own position as king and undermining the authority of existing cult centres. Eorpwald’s conversion was more ignominious, therefore, than that of Rsedwald under the imperium of King TEthelberht, and that ignominy was accentuated by the very different and unequal relationship previously existing between Edwin and the previous king. Edwin’s East Anglian initiative arguably constituted a deliberate assault on the traditions and group identity - and both current and future political aspirations - of the recently dominant East Angles. Their response was far more violent than had been that of Sasberht’s dissenting sons to TEthelberht’s Christianising policies among the East Saxons, for Eorpwald was killed ‘not long after’. Bede scapegoated a specific individual, a non-Christian called Ricberht, but the three years or so that East Anglia then remained under his rule even in despite of King Edwin implies that he had considerable support for his overthrow of the overly compliant Eorpwald and could count on widespread anger against his supine behaviour towards the ‘overking’. Ricberht’s name with its combination of ric - ‘ruler’ - and the Frankish or Kentish orig¬ inating -berht, certainly implies that he was of the East Anglian elite and perhaps even that he was a member of the royal family. Edwin’s attempts to coerce the East Angles into accepting baptism had, therefore, failed and, short of launching a punitive expedition, he was forced to adopt a subtler approach. Edwin may already by this date have been committed to war in the west, in which case he is unlikely to have welcomed a second front. The marriage of his great-niece, Hereswith, to a member of the East Anglian royal family (HE, iv, 23) is likely to have occurred during the period 627-33, and her son, Ealdwulf,

182

Differentiation: Edwins imperium eventually became king. That Edwin was prepared to use the hand of one of his very few adult, female, close relatives to ally himself with a member of the East Anglian royal dynasty may contain the seeds of a new initiative on his part but if so it came to very little in the short term, being overtaken by other events. Ricberht was displaced by Eorpwald’s brother, Sigibert,110 c. 630-1. Sigeberht had been in Frankia during Eorpwald’s reign (from c. 624/5 until 627), and had been baptised there. Precisely when thereafter he returned is unclear but he presumably came back towards the end of the period during which Ricberht was in control. Sigibert’s Christianity did not, however, derive from contact with Edwin and he does not look like a candidate foisted on the East Angles by the Deiran king. Yet Sigiberht’s path to kingship required powerful friends and considerable resources. It is difficult to imagine that his return from the continent was entirely divorced from Eadbald’s cross-Channel contacts with the court of his relative, King Dagobert, particularly given that Felix, the bishop who promptly joined Sigibert in converting the East Angles, came from that very same Burgundy from which many of the Canterbury clergy had hailed a generation previously.111 What is more, Felix’s purposes were conceived in Frankia, since he was consecrated there and then merely approved by Canterbury, whence Bishop Honorius sent him on to the East Angles. The entire process implies substantial co-operation between Canterbury and Frankia, to which Edwin may not have been privy. Sigiberht’s kingship did, however, prove stable and seems to have been accepted by the Deiran king. Edwin’s principal concession must have been the establishment of a bishop for the East Angles - so a member of the Christian hierarchy of status equal, in theory at least at this stage, to Paulinus at York. Felix’s independence of Edwin and Paulinus argu¬ ably rendered the prospect of conversion far less damaging to East Anglian sensibilities than had previously been the case, and there seems to have been little organised opposition to it. This pattern implies that it was not so much Christianity to which the East Angles had objected as domination by a Deiran king. There was certainly some advantage in the new arrangement for the southern archdiocese. Honorius had been consecrated bishop of Canterbury by Paulinus but the authority necessary for him to act as metropolitan and consecrate other bishops within his own synod depended at this date on the papacy. Although he probably took what¬ ever action prior to the event that seemed necessary, Archbishop Iustus

183

The convert kings had been sent ‘the privilege of consecrating bishops’ and a pallium by Pope Boniface (HE, n, 8). Honorius does not seem to have received equivalent privileges during the late 620s (see below), and the lack of heavyweight political support in Kent seems to have discouraged him from taking the initiative even of replacing Romanus, bishop of Rochester, who had drowned off the Italian coast while on embassy to Pope Honorius shortly before Iustus’s death c. 627. (HE, n, 20). The intervention of Edwin and Paulinus in East Anglia c. 627 consti¬ tuted an unwelcome intrusion into what was arguably seen at Canterbury as a traditional area of Kentish influence - both royal and archdiocesan. There must be a suspicion that Eadbald and Honorius were, c. 630, pursuing objectives which cut across those of Edwin and were designed to minimise his and Paulinus’s influence inside what had been 2Ethelberht’s imperium, while still attempting to spread Chris¬ tianity therein. Felix’s consecration in Frankia, well beyond Edwin’s reach, avoided Honorius taking responsibility for a new diocese which might be unpopular at Edwin’s court while at the same time enabling him to enthrone in East Anglia a properly consecrated bishop who recognised the authority of Canterbury. It should be stressed that the Canterbury diocese was the only one with an incumbent within the southern archdiocese between Iustus’s death and Felix’s appointment in c. 630—1, so his arrival doubled the number of bishops and brought the southern synod one step back from the brink of dependence on York. All this smacks of political manoeuvring of the most subtle kind, mas¬ terminded in Kent and intended to minimise Edwin’s intervention among the East Angles without totally alienating him. There are other signs that Eadbald exercised a degree of superior kingship over his immediate neighbours at some point. Most indicative is a single gold coin struck with his name and that of London,112 which may imply that at some unknown date between 616 and 640 the Kentish king had some degree of control at the erstwhile East Saxon diocesan centre. Another coin with the king’s name but without reference to London was deposited in Hampshire. Taken together, these suggest that Eadbald and his clergy did at some point experiment with the Frankish custom of coining, but this could easily post-date Edwin’s death. Edwin and Rome Pope Boniface died shortly after Edwin’s marriage, while Edwin was still unbaptised, but Bede quoted a letter from his successor, Pope Honorius (October 625-October 638), which praised Edwin fulsomely

184

Differentiation: Edwin 's imperium while still seeking to remind him of his dependence on God for his polit¬ ical power. Honorius was replying to messengers who had reached him from Edwin and who then carried back to him the response which Bede copied (HE, n, 17). What had led Edwin to dispatch an embassy to Rome was his desire for certain ‘arrangements for his bishops’, which Honorius was prepared to concede on account of the King’s ‘sincerity of faith’ — but unfortunately without specifying in any more detail just what Edwin had sought. Additionally - and this does not appear to have been the central feature of Edwin’s request - he sent two pallia for the two metropolitans, Honorius of Canterbury (since Iustus’s death, c. 627) and Paulinus at York. Those two bishops were necessarily the ones featured in Edwin’s letter to Rome. The Pope also signified his approval of the plan that each should henceforth be competent to consecrate a successor to the other. Given that it was only this last change to Gregory’s arrangements for the organisation of the English church that is spelled out in the letter, this may well be what prompted Edwin to write. Gregory’s missive to Augustine in 601 had proposed the establishment of two metropolitan sees for the English, at London and York, and specified that the bishop of London should in the future (that is after Augustine’s death) always be consecrated by his own synod and receive the pallium from Rome. Honorius had clearly not been consecrated by his own synod: there were no bishops among the southern English kingdoms following the deaths of Iustus and Romanus, so Gregory’s blueprint was clearly inoperable, but it must have suited King Edwin very well to have his own close asso¬ ciate and bishop consecrate the southern metropolitan at one of his own political centres. The ceremony offered a welcome opportunity to emphasise his superiority over Canterbury and King Eadbald. That Edwin had himself sent ambassadors to Rome spells out his political interest as the protector and patron not just of York but also of Canterbury; and the papal response acknowleges both as his bishops. The date of his embassy is unrecorded, although reference in Pope Honorius’s reply to both bishops as metropolitans makes it clear that it post-dates Honorius’s consecration.113 By sending pallia to both, Pope Honorius was tacitly at least sanctioning Honorius’s appointment and the role played by Paulinus therein, but this was obviously retrospective. On this basis, though, the letter to Edwin could be as early as 628, if Honorius was indeed consecrated as early as this. Pope Honorius also sent a letter to Archbishop Honorius. This began with encouragement to live in peace and mutual love and continue with

185

The convert kings the work of the mission, but the second paragraph returns to the issues which dominated the letter to Edwin:114 And so in acordance with your petition and that of our sons the kings, we grant you by these letters, in the name of the blessed Peter, prince of the apos¬ tles, that when God in His divine grace shall call one of you to His presence, he who remains may consecrate another bishop in place of the deceased. For this reason we have sent a pallium to each of you. This letter was dated 11 June 634. It was, therefore written after Edwin’s death, supposing Bede’s dating of that event to 12 October 633 be correct. If these two letters were exactly contemporary and carried by the same messengers, then the dating of that to Honorius lends substance to suggestions that Bede’s calculated dates for Edwin’s reign be moved forward by one year;115 but there is an alternative solution which is in some ways preferable. Archbishop Honorius’s petition and those of the kings (in the plural and unnamed) are referred to only in the letter he received. In contrast, the letter to Edwin makes no mention of any other petitioner. The bishops therein - so the two metropolitans - are ‘your bishops’, the requests which Honorius is conceding are the king’s (sin¬ gular) and it is Edwin alone - not Eadbald - whose praises have been sung to the pope by the bearers of ‘the present letters’. The first phase of this correspondence does, therefore, appear to have involved an embassy from Edwin to Rome which carried letters back to the king and the king alone, one of which Bede copied.116 That Eadbald and Honorius should, in 634, seek confirmation of the arrangement for the future consecration of the English metropolitans is entirely under¬ standable in the light of Edwin’s death in battle in the autumn of 633 and Paulinus’s subsequent flight from York to Kent. A separate embassy was therefore dispatched to Rome from Canterbury in the spring of 634, which carried letters from the Christian kings with an interest in these events, who could only be Eadbald of Kent and Sigiberht of the East Angles. Honorius’s letter to the southern metropolitan, as copied by Bede, was part at least of the papal response. Pope Honorius’s reference in it to ‘brotherly intercourse’ may be significant in this context if it reflects tensions existing between Archbishop Honorius and the recently arrived and so - recently prominent Archbishop Paulinus, who fled Yorkshire after his patron’s death and was thereafter settled by Honorius, in brotherly dependency and subject to his own metropoli¬ tan authority at Rochester. Paulinus’s demotion to the minor see of

186

Differentiation: Edwins imperium western Kent in subjection to the authority of a metropolitan whom he had himself single-handedly consecrated contained the seeds of poten¬ tial animosity between them. This does not much assist our attempts to establish the date of Edwin’s embassy, but recognition that it was separate from Pope Honorius’s letter to Canterbury does at least dispense with the chronological conundrum created by dating it to 634. Edwin’s embassy occurred after Honorius’s consecration to Canterbury (perhaps eariy in 628), but before Edwin’s death. One might further hypothesise that it could have been sent when Paulinus and Honorius were the only bishops recognised by the Roman church in England (627/8-630/1), but there is perhaps a stronger likelihood that it post-dated Felix’s appoint¬ ment from abroad. If Edwin viewed that event as a challenge to his own sponsorship of Christianity in England, he may well have been eager to seek papal recognition of his influence over both metropolitans and of the legitimacy of Paulinus’s consecration of Honorius. Edwin deliber¬ ately made contact with the papacy and his purposes in so doing prob¬ ably had a political dimension. A consequence of that contact was a pallium for each bishop, so papal approval of Honorius’s appointment. In addition, Honorius conceded that for the future the two metropoli¬ tans should take responsibility for appointing successors for one another. Such was very practical, given that the two synods were so short of bishops, but it gave Edwin, as patron of both archdioceses, a controlling influence over future appointments, and may have served as a timely reminder to Canterbury that his influence was paramount over the entirety of the English church. This is highly speculative, of course, but it may be that such contact between Edwin and Pope Honorius fits best the circumstances of the last year or two of the Deiran king’s life, in which case the appointment of Bishop Felix may have been one factor which prompted him to take action. Hitherto, a single bishop under his own direct patronage was probably sufficient to promote his imperium, with a bishop at Canterbury rendered comparatively impotent by his own political superiority over the Kentish king. Canterbury was arguably very poorly staffed by the 620s: with the apparent exception of Honorius himself, the original clergy of 597-601 were by this date dead or dying, and there is little evidence that incomers had been sufficiently numerous to main¬ tain numbers; it seems unlikely that Kent had yet made up the difference since the first homegrown bishop was only consecrated in or shortly after 644; the removal of Paulinus northwards and the vigour of his sub-

187

The convert kings sequent ministry necessarily drew clergy and other specialists away from Canterbury The presence of masons in the north is demonstrated by the ability of Edwin and Paulinus to commission stone churches, the expertise for which presumably came from Canterbury and reduced the capacity of Honorius and Eadbald to do the same. Felix’s establishment of a monastery and school in East Anglia may have further weakened the Canterbury mission, both by drawing off personnel and also by challenging its unique role as the centre of Christian education in south¬ ern England. There is one further letter of Pope Honorius which might conceivably owe something to Edwin’s embassy. Although Bede did not quote it he referred to a message to the Irish, the subject of which was their dating of Easter and their refusal to acknowledge the authority of Rome and the universal church on this matter {HE, n, 19). Laurence, Mellitus and Iustus had earlier sent such a letter to the Irish, of which Paulinus was presumably aware. It is possible that Edwin had asked Pope Honorius to lend his authority to another attempt to persuade them to adhere to Roman practices. If so, his motives were probably mixed: the papal letter had implications for the position of the British clergy, whose intransigence on this point might well have been undermined by an Irish decision to accept Roman customs - with considerable consequences for the authority of Paulinus over the Celtic clerisy. Furthermore, Edwin’s own dynastic opponents were still in refuge among the Irish and the Piets, and the papal letter could have been part of a diplomatic initiative by the English ‘overking’ aimed at them and their hosts. These are only possibilities, of course, but worthy of comment if we are to grasp the extent to which politics and religion were mixed up under Edwin’s patronage. The ending of Edwin s regime Edwin’s use of Christianity as a dynastic weapon and as a force for state creation and colonisation is most unlikely to have dissipated previous to his death. He deployed, of course, the traditional strategies of an English ‘overking’ - superior military power and wealth, tribute-taking and gift-giving, a reputation for victory in battle and divine favour, manipulation of client dynasties and territorial aggrandisement. Yet Edwin’s position differed from that of Rsedwald, for example, whose imperium preceded his own. Edwin’s influence over the two metropoli¬ tans and his close association with Paulinus, his construction of a novel network of royal and cult centres along the arterial roadways which

188

Differentiation: Edwins imperium formed the sinews of his rule, his active support for conversion as an instrument of control, his deployment of Christian priests in client communities where they could act as political agents, his use of literacy, his special relationship with St Peter — all these were fundamental fea¬ tures of the utility of Christianity to his rule. It was these developments as much as the unusual extent of his hegemony which had potential to convert his imperium into a dynastic state or proto-state - at least to the extent that Clovis had achieved over a century earlier in Frankia. Edwin’s manipulation of episcopal authority invites comparison with other Merovingian kings.117 zEthelberht seems to have recognised the potential for political control and expansion which was offered him by Christianity but been outfaced by the military reputation of a northern rival. Edwin was the first to find circumstances appropriate to its wider deployment, and did so with enthusiasm. Neither is likely to have been well-versed in its creed or rituals, even despite Pope Honorius’s exhortation of Edwin that he should frequently read the works of Gregory. The king is most unlikely to have been able to read or have mastered Latin. Even had he done so, the gulf between his conceptual system and that of his Italian clerisy would have remained. Both zEthelberht and Edwin were first and foremost ambitious dynasts seeking to reinforce and expand their own power under divine protection rather than believers in any particular spiritual message. As one might have predicted from their interconnection, it was argu¬ ably the combination of his religious and secular policies which led to Edwin’s death in battle in 633. His active patronage of the Church of St Peter throughout Britain was, implicitly at least, an assault on those Christians who had rejected the authority of Pope Gregory’s lieutenant at Augustine’s Oak. Honorius opened his letter to Edwin by praising the King’s zeal and the abundant fruit of his labours,118 and this perhaps reflects his championship of the Roman mission. Given Edwin’s expan¬ sion into Elmet and his putative expulsion of Cadwallon of Gwynedd, the signs are that he had indeed fought a series of campaigns which could be interpreted both as attempts to impose Roman orthodoxy on British clergy and to reinforce his own control of British territory. He was defeated and killed at Hatfield by Cadwallon, who therebyavenged himself on an English ‘overking’ whose ambitions and religious affiliation had led him to undertake a war of conquest in northern Wales. In this respect, the British king may well have posed as the cham¬ pion of British Christianity and its traditions, against the claims of

189

The convert kings Augustine and his followers. At the same time, Cadwallon’s initiative reflected the existence of a substantial regional community in Wales with its own well-established sense of ethnicity and a cultural integrity to which Christianity was central. The clash between Cadwallon’s Christian establishment and that which King Edwin had now fostered for the insular Angles under his own patronage proved to be his nemesis. The co-operation of disenchanted and non-Christian elements among the Mercians with Christian Cadwallon reinforces the sense in which this was also a reaction of other, regional communities, each of which already had a long history, to the universal dominance of the Deiran king. Mercia, its dynasty and its influence at the core of Britain, were all arguably victims of the ambitions first of yEthelfrith,119 then Edwin. Therein, a traditional and non-Christian religious stance was the obvious ideological foundation for the reconstruction of a separate Mercian kingship in defiance of his Christian and universal, but Deiracentred rule. Not only Edwin fell at the battle of Hatfield but also his adult son Osfrith, who had already by then made the king a grandfather. His other adult son, Eadfrith, was taken captive by Penda and later slain.120 His several offspring by ^Ethelburh and his grandson were all children, so incapable of asserting themselves in this crisis, and they were taken south by Paulinus and the dowager queen when they fled from Yorkshire to the comparative safety of Kent. Edwin’s death therefore brought the entire edifice of his kingship crashing down and both his dynasty and his religious policies were ruined by it. That Edwin’s God and St Peter had failed to protect him in extremis wounded the credibility of the cult which he had patronised beyond immediate recall, contaminating the status of its priests, its rites, its altars and its churches even within the Deiran core of his kingship. It is in this circumstance that Paulinus’s departure as the temporary guardian of Edwin’s dependants should be interpreted but if the bishop was familiar with the life story of St Benedict then he had a good precedent for removing himself from cir¬ cumstances in which he was unlikely to achieve anything for the Lord.121 Additionally, Paulinus may well have been godparent to some or all of the princes, in which case he had ongoing responsibilities as regards their Christian upbringing.122 In Edwin’s case, the Kandyan conversion to Buddhism offers partic¬ ularly useful parallels as regards the use of novel cult sites as a means of establishing an institutional presence in different provinces (p. 40). At his apogee, the great Deiran king faced exceptional problems which

190

Notes derived from the unusual scale of his ‘overkingship’. He chose to address those problems by forging a partnership with Bishop Paulinus and by exploiting ideas concerning authority and organisation embed¬ ded in the new religion to reinforce his own power as king. Edwin’s experimentation with an omnipotent deity in support of his universal imperium was not ultimately a success. Yet his experience of conversion and his Christian kingship could not be erased or undone, and his use of Christianity as an instrument of royal power provided an attractive precedent to which powerful English kings returned repeatedly over the next generation. In that sense, his experience had a profound effect on the process of conversion under Christian kingship over the next few decades. Contact with Christianity beyond a very limited point appears to have caused profound changes within traditional systems of belief that ’proved impossible thereafter to reverse - much as has been observed in other conversion episodes when small-scale societies have found their own values and social structures affected irretrievably by those of Christianity.123 More particularly, kings were alerted to the benefits that Christianity could bring to an expanding kingship and this gave the missionaries a decisive advantage in their attempts to persuade individ¬ ual rulers and their core communities to accept baptism, irrespective of their recognition of Christian perspectives on its spiritual significance.

Notes 1

HE, ii, 5.

2

D. P. Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian chronology’, English Historical

Review, lxxviii, 1963, p. 522; Bede: ecclesiastical history of the English people, edd. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1969, p. 151, footnote 5; E M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, 3rd edn 1971, p. 61; N. Brooks, The Early history of the church of Canterbury, Leicester, 1984, pp. 63-4; H. MayrHarting, The coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn, London, 1991, p. 64; D. P. Kirby, The earliest English kings, London, 1991, pp. 37-8. A. Angenendt, ‘The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons considered against the background of the early medieval mission’, Settimane di Studi SulTAlto Medioevo, xxxii (2), 1986, p. 750. 3

As in the translation of Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, p. 151.

4

Bede used the term perfidus in reference to apostate English kings in

HE, ill, 1, but note also its use for Penda’s head in ill, 24, wherein it clearly means ‘perfidious’ and was used of an unbaptised pagan. Perfidia was used in ill, 30 of pagan worship by apostates. Bede was clearly comfortable with use of the term

191

The convert kings in the context of paganism with or without apostasy, or of British Christianity (as HE, ii, 2). Apostasia is the more specific term. 5

So Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 37: ‘Eadbald led a pagan reaction’;

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 64: ‘A court party formed which was opposed to Christianity. After Ethelbert’s death Eadbald led a pagan reaction in Kent’. P. H. Blair, The world of Bede, London, 1970, p. 86, is more circum¬ spect: ‘Eadbald ...relapsed to paganism’. 6

HE, ii,3.

7

HE,

8

Compare HE, i, 26, but Bede may merely here be interpreting his source

5: ‘pagani perduraverunf.

ii,

material on the basis of the efforts of later Christian kings to establish religious conformity. 9

For Frankish parallels to the division of the East Saxon kingship, see I.

N. Wood, ‘Kings, kingdoms and consent’ in Early medieval kingship, edd. P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood, Leeds, 1977, pp. 6-29. 10

The last lines of HE, n, 5. Compare Bede’s contrivance of retribution

on the Britons in

ii,

2. For the notion of retribution, see G. W. Trompf, ‘Rufinus

and the logic of retribution in post-Eusebian church histories’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,

xliii,

1992, pp. 351-71. For a suggested date of c. 624 for

their defeat, see N. J. Higham, An English empire: Bede and the early AngloSaxon kings, Manchester, 1995, pp. 80-1. 11

HE,

15. Similarities may, however, owe more to the hostility of Bede

ii,

and his sources to these non-Christian rulers than to real parallels. 12

J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship in England and on the

continent, Oxford, 1981, p. 46. 13

HE

ii,

5. Mellitus had travelled to Rome as recently as c. 609, where he

attended a synod in February 610: HE,

ii,

4.

14

But see Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 40.

15

B.

S.

Bachrach,

Merovingian

military

organisation,

481-751,

Minneapolis, 1972, pp. 85-8. 16

N. Brooks, Early history, Leicester, 1984, p. 64, argues that Frankish

influence remained significant in Kent throughout this period. 17

Peter’s death was recorded in HE, i, 33. For comment, see J. Campbell,

‘The first century of Christianity in England’ in Essays in Anglo-Saxon history, ed. J. Campbell, London, 1986, p. 56; I. Wood, ‘The mission of Augustine of Canterbury to the English’, Speculum, 18

lxix,

1994, p. 7.

I Samuel, in, 4—18; Epistles, xxii; Gregory, Dialoges, edd. A. de Vogue

and P. Antin, Paris, 1979, ii, pp. 137-9, has St Benedict involved in a form of selfflagellation. 19

Adomnan’s life of Columba, edd. A.O. and M. O. Anderson, London,

1961, ill, v. The Vita Wilfridi incorporates a scourging miracle in xxxix, but this was of the queen rather than the bishop and is depicted as chastisement. 20

HE,

ii,

8, 10, 11. Kirby, Earliest English kings, pp. 40-1; Bede: ecclesi-

192

Notes astical history of the English people, edd. J. McClure and R. Collins, Oxford, 1994, p. 378, note 83. 21

As Bede stated: HE,

22

The name appears to be a scribal error in the original, substituting the

ii,

7.

name of a Lombard king for Eadbald: McClure and Collins, Bede, p. 378, but see also Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, p. 161, footnote 2; Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian chronology’, p. 522; and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bedes ecclesi¬ astical history of the English people: a historical commentary, Oxford, 1988, p. 69. 23

Depending on the dating of the events recalled at the close of HE,

West Saxon ambitions are revealed in HE,

ii,

ii,

6.

9. It seems quite likely that

Eadbald and Edwin initially envisaged that Eadbald would be the senior partner, much as Rasdwald had been: Higham, English empire, p. 81, but an equal partnership is equally feasible, looking back to the two independent ‘overkingships’ of yEthelberht and yEthelfrith which had dominated England during the youth of both kings. 24

N. Brooks, The early history of the church of Canterbury, Leicester,

1984, p. 64. For recent identification of Eadberht’s Frankish bride with the daughter of Erchinoald, mayor of the palace of Neustria, see K. Werner, ‘Les rouages de l’administration’, in La Neustrie: les pays au nord de la Loire de Dagobert a Charles le Chauve (vii—ix siecles, edd. R Perin and L. C. Feffer, Creteuil, 1985, p. 42. Note that Chlothar II was by this date far more powerful than Chilperic had been when yEthelberht’s marriage was contracted, and this may help explain the dynastic obscurity and lower status of this new bride, whose connection with the Merovingians was via Dagobert’s mother. 25

Higham, English empire, p. 81.

26

Bede remarked on Rsedwald’s victory over TEthelfrith in HE,

ii,

12, but

did all he could to minimise his credit therefrom: Higham, English empire, pp. 197-8. 27

HE,

28

The earliest life of Gregory the Great by an anonymous monk of

ii,

5, 9-18, 20.

Whitby, ed. B. Colgrave, Lawrence, Kansas, 1968,

xn, xiv-xix.

The original

was written within five years of 600. 29

B. N. Eagles, The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Humberside, British

Archaeological Reports, British Series 68, Oxford, 1979, i, pp. 11-16, 24-6, for a review of the geography and early history; D. Dumville, ‘The origins of Northumbria: some aspects of the British background’, in The origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett, Leicester, 1989, pp. 213-22, passim-, N. J. Higham, The kingdom of Northumbria: AD 350—1100, Stroud, Glos., 1993, pp. 66—71. 30

D. Dumville, ‘The Anglian collection of royal genealogies and regnal

lists’, Anglo-Saxon England, v, 1976, pp. 30, 32, 35; early lists are reproduced in Higham, Northumbria, p. 78.

193

The convert kings 31

Hild was reputed to have been born c. 614: HE, iv, 23 (21), but the two

halves of her life are suspiciously well-balanced and adopt a figure of Christian significance. For discussion, see N. J. Higham, ‘King Cearl, the battle of Chester and the origins of the Mercian “overkingship”, Midland History, xvii, 1992, p. 3. 32

HE, ii, 14.

33

HE, i, 34, dated in v, 24, but the date may have been a matter of deduc¬

tion rather than fact. 34

yElle was recorded by Bede as ruling part of the northern Angles when

Augustine arrived: Chronica Maiora, wrongly dated to 595, and referred to also by the anonyomous author of The life of Gregory Great, xiii, but see Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian Chronology’, pp. 525-7 for a discussion of the obscurity of Deiran kingship in the 590s. 35

HE, in, 6.

36

Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian chronology’, pp. 525-7; Uuscfrea

occurs in the Anglian lists: Dumville, ‘The Anglian collection’, pp. 30, 32, 35; HE, iv, 23. 37

Higham,

English

empire,

p.

144,

contra

Stenton,

Anglo-Saxon

England, p. 80. See also Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 72. 38

Based on HB, lxiii. See also HE, v, 24 for Ida’s twelve years. I will here

follow Bede’s dates throughout but see the suggested amendments of Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian chronology’, passim. 39 40

hi, 9. Ibid., hi, 6: HE,

‘By the industry of this king the provinces of the Deiri

and Bernicii, which had long been at strife one with another, were peacefully united and became one people. For he [Oswald] was the nephew of King Edwin by his sister Acha, and it was appropriate that so great a predecessor should have such an heir of his own kin for both the religion and the realm.’ Deiran perceptions of the matter are unlikely to have been as sanguine at this date. See T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Bede, the Irish and the Britons’, Celtica, xv, 1983, p. 50. 41

HB, lxi.

42

B.

Hope-Taylor,

Yeavering:

an

Anglo-British

centre

of

early

Northumbria, London, 1977, pp. 2-14. 43

Ibid., pp. 282-3: the temple could also possibly predate TEthelfrith.

44

A. F. Harding, ‘Excavations in the prehistoric ritual complex near

Milfield, Northumberland’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society,

xlvii,

1981,

pp. 87-135. For the manufacture of continuity, see R. Bradley, ‘Time regained: the creation of continuity’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, cxl,

1987, pp. 1-17, whose comments have a very real relevance to Yeavering.

45

Hope-Taylor, Yeavering, phases ii-mab: pp. 158-61.

There has been some recent doubt cast on interpretation of the ‘temple’: see e.g. I. Wood, ‘Pagan religion and superstition east of the Rhine from the fifth to

194

Notes the ninth century’ in After Empire, ed. G. Ausenda, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1995, p. 256, and in the following discussion, p. 271. 46

D. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, London, 1994, pp. 44—8; J. Blair,

‘Anglo-Saxon pagan shrines and their prototypes’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, vm, 1995, pp. 5-20. 47

Hope-Taylor, Yeavering, pp. 168-9, 279-80, but note that he consid¬

ered the ‘theatre’ secondary as a focal structure to the ‘great enclosure’ and the early ritual focus of post BX; N. K. Chadwick, ‘Bretwalda. Gweldig. Vortigern.’ Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xix, 1960-2, p. 226; J. Morris, The age of Arthur, London, 1973, pp. 320-1; B. Yorke, Kings and kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon England, London, 1990, p. 19. 48

For example, TEthelberht’s new monastery was intended as his own

sepulchre. For Frankish parallels, see E. James, ‘Royal burials among the Franks’ in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed. M. Carver, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992, pp. 243-54. 49

HE,

ii,

14.

50

HE,

ii,

12.

51

Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. R. Bromwich, Cardiff, 2nd edn 1978, pp.

47-8, 294; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 80; R. G. Gruffydd, ‘Canu Cadwallon ap Cadfan’ in Studies in Old Welsh poetry, edd. R. Bromwich and R. Brinley Jones, Cardiff, 1978, pp. 27-43; Kirby, Earliest kings, pp. 85-7; J. Rowland, Early Welsh saga poetry: a study and edition of the Englynion, Cambridge, Suffolk, 1990, pp. 169-73, 446-7, 613-16. 52

HB,

lxiii,

named the priest who baptised Edwin as Rhun son of Urien,

who is generally assumed to be that Urien who had been king of Rheged. 53

For a more positive interpretation, see N. K. Chadwick, ‘The conver¬

sion of Northumbria’ in Celt and Saxon: studies in the early British border, ed. N. K. Chadwick, Cambridge, 1963, pp. 155-66. 54

N. K. Chadwick, ‘The battle of Chester: a study of sources’ in Celt and

Saxon, ed. Chadwick pp. 167—85; Kirby, Earliest kings, p. 72: ‘His victory at Chester confirms the impression of him [TEthelfrith] as the dominant figure in the early seventh century among the northern Angles over a very wide territory indeed’; see also J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The long haired kings, London, 1962, p. 6, who compared his ‘vitality’ as a war leader to that of Clovis and described him as ‘terrifying’ and as ‘the ravening wolf’; J. Morris, The age of Arthur, London, 1973, p. 301, considered there to be a real prospect of universal imperium arising out of a clash of the ‘overkingships’ of TEthelfrith and TEthelberht. 55

Bede (HE,

ii,

5) says of Raedwald: qui etiam vivente Aedilbercto eidem

suae genti ducatum praebebat. I prefer the translation: ‘who even while TEthelberht was alive conceded to him the military leadership of his own people’ to alternatives which have been offered: English empire, pp. 57-8, but see notes 44—8, p. 71, therein for the wider discussion.

195

The convert kings 56

As, for example, tentatively suggested by Kirby, Earliest kings, pp. 72-3.

57

HE,

58

For example Yorke, Kings and kingdoms, p. 84; Kirby, Earliest kings, p.

ii,

12.

154. 59

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 66-7.

60

HE,

61

J. Bannerman, Studies in the history of Dalriada, Edinburgh and

ii,

14.

London, 1974, pp. 93—4. Talorgen’s kingship among the Piets coincided with the apogee of King Oswiu, his father’s half-brother, and was probably conditional on it. 62

See above, note 55.

63

The problem is outlined in Higham, English empire, pp. 64-5, 80—1. A

more cautious approach is that of Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 80. 64

HE,

65

Higham, Northumbria, pp. 113-18; English empire, p. 80.

66

Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian chronology’, pp. 518, 522-3.

67

S. Wood, ‘Bede’s Northumbrian dates again’, English Historical

ii,

9.

Review, xcvm, 1983, pp. 280-96. 68

HE,

ii,

9; in, 14. See Kirby, Earliest kings, p. 107, note 2 for the most

recent comment. 69

The critical discussion is ibid., pp. 40-1.

70

Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian chronology’, p. 522.

71

Kirby, Earliest kings, p. 40.

72

McClure and Collins, Bede, p. 379.

73

That Eorpwald still exercised some influence outside East Anglia after

Rsedwald’s death is suggested by Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 66-7, but the case is not convincing. 74

Based on Bede’s account: HE,

ii,

9-14; see Mayr-Harting, Coming of

Christianity, pp. 66-7. 75

As in Pope Boniface’s letter: HE,

ii,

10, 11. Bede placed these letters in

his narrative late in 626 or early in 627, so was apparently unaware of Boniface’s date of death. For the potential of close kin such as a marriage partner to act as a conduit for information leading to entry to a cult, see D. A. Snow and R. Machalek, ‘The sociology of conversion’, Annual Review of Sociology, x, 1984, p. 182. Edwin’s queen is more likely than /Ethelberht’s to have sought her husband’s baptism. 76

HE, i,

34; 11,

2. It should be noted that the Annals of Ulster had

TEthelfrith defeated by Aedan, but the Annals ofTigernach give a fuller descrip¬ tion which acknowledges Aedan’s defeat: J. Bannerman, Studies in the history of Dalriada, Edinburgh, 1974, pp. 10-11. 77

See note 75 above. For comment on the authenticity and date of these

letters, see Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s ecclesiastical history, pp. 68-9. 78

See above, pp. 98-101.

196

Notes 79

Camisia, which I have here rendered as ‘shirt’, variously means ‘under¬

garment’ or ‘shirt’, suggesting that it was a type of clothing worn close to the skin. This lends significance to Boniface’s impregnation of it with the blessing of the Prince of the Apostles. 80

His urgency may reflect the closeness of Boniface’s death when he

wrote this, so help to sustain the view that the pope wrote to Edwin and TEthelburh only after their marriage in the late summer of 625. That, however, remains speculative. 81

There is no obvious need to suppose that Edwin’s vision has any his¬

torical validity beyond the basic geographical and political setting, but see Blair, World of Bede, p. 95; Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 67. Another version of this story occurs in The life of Gregory the Great, xvi, wherein the visionary being is reputed to have been Paulinus but this reads as an inter¬ pretative addition to the basic story and has no real claim to historicity, despite its credence by several historians (see p. 130, note 171). A comparable angelic visitation occurs as a prelude to the religious life in Bede’s Vita Cuthberti, n and Muirchu’s vita of Patrick offers similar visions in vii: B. Colgrave (ed.), Two lives of St Cuthbert, Cambridge, 1940; A. B. E. Hood, St Patrick: his writings and Muirchu’s life, Chichester, 1978. Such episodes descend ultimately from angelic interventions in the New Testament (e.g., Matthew, i, 20; xxvm, 2-4) and Christ’s advice to his disciples following the resurrection (e.g. Mark, xvi, 12-18). 82

Edwin’s hall was perhaps in the region of Sancton:

Higham,

Northumbria, p. 118, although the site has traditionally been equated with Malton or its near vicinity, and Morris, Age of Arthur, p. 321, offered Goodmanham itself. 83

Bede’s vision of these events is less coloured by overtly hagiographical

traditions than is that offered by The life of Gregory the Great,

xiii,

xiv,

wherein Edwin’s decision to accept baptism is indistinguishable from the general tide of divine providence. 84

Which seems quite likely at such a formal, royal ceremony as this, with

the representative of a powerful distant prince in attendance, but the suggestion necessarily remains entirely hypothetical. 85

This is another detail which is consistent with a marriage consum¬

mated in late July or early August, 625.

86

N. K. Chadwick, ‘Conversion of Northumbria’, p. 164, described

Edwin’s delay as ‘somewhat inexplicable procrastination’, and see MayrHarting’s discussion in Coming of Christianity, p. 66. I have elsewhere described Edwin as portrayed by Bede as ‘an indecisive man of weak character’: Northumbria, p. 115. 87

HE,

II,

13: primus pontificum, ‘first of the priests’. This may imply that

Bede imagined other priests to have been present. Mages pontifces occur in an East Saxon context in

II, 6.

Bede was apparently attempting to use terminology

familiar from his reading in the Bible and Roman histories.

197

The convert kings 88

The place-name Godmunddingaham is interpreted by A. H. Smith,

The place-names of the East Riding of Yorkshire and York, Cambridge, 1937, pp. 230-1, as the ‘Home of Godmund and his people’, and attention is drawn to place-names elsewhere incorporating the same personal name. God is also, however, ‘god’ (as a noun) and is a common prefix within OE compounds. It may not be entirely accidental that this important religious site has this prefix, in which case an alternative meaning might be preferred. For recent comment on Coifi and continental parallels, see Wood, ‘Pagan Religion’, pp. 257-9. 89

I discussed this in detail in English empire, pp. 82, 84-94.

90

H. Moisl, ‘The Bernician royal dynasty and the Irish in the seventh

century’, Peritia,

ii,

1983, pp. 105-12.

91

Higham, English empire, pp. 77-99.

92

HB,

lxiii.;

M. L. Faull, ‘British survival in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria’,

in Celtic Survival, ed. L. Laing, British Archaeological Reports, British Series, 37, Oxford, 1977, pp. 1-56; Higham, Northumbria, pp. 84—7; J. Stevenson, ‘Christianity in sixth- and seventh-century Southumbria’ in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed. Carver, p. 177. See discussion of the date of Edwin’s takeover in Higham, English empire, pp. 77, 82-3. 93

A. L. F. Rivet and C. Smith, The place-names of Roman Britain,

London, 1979, pp. 292-3; Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s ecclesiastical history, p. 75. 94

Higham, Northumbria, pp. 121-2. For a wider discussion of the types

of location chosen for baptism, see R. Morris, ‘Baptismal places, 600-800’ in People and places in Northern Europe, 500-1600, edd. I. Wood and N. Lund, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1991, pp. 15-24. 95

D. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, London, 1994, p. 9.

96

D. Brown, ‘Swastika patterns’ in Angles, Saxons and Jutes, ed. V.

Evison, Oxford, 1981, pp. 227-40, and see Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, fig, 3, p. 18. For further discussion of the symbolism involved with burial, see H. Harke, “‘Warrior Graves”? The background of the Anglo-Saxon weapon burial rite’, Past and Present, cxxvi, 1990, pp. 22-43; J. D. Richards, ‘Anglo-Saxon symbolism’ in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed, Carver, pp. 131-47 97

HE,

98

W. A. Chaney, The cult of kingship in Anglo-Saxon England,

ii,

13.

Manchester, 1970, p. 40; Wilson, Anglo-Saxon paganism, p. 31; Wood, ‘Pagan Religion’, pp. 257-9. 99

Hope-Taylor, Yeavering, phase me, summarised and dated, pp. 161—4.

100

The life of St Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. B. Colgrave, Cambridge,

1927,

xvii.

Blair, World of Bede, p. 94, particularly emphasised the British and

Christian potential of Edwin’s realms. 101

See above, note 51.

102

Higham, English empire, pp. 82-3, 86—9 but this depends on wider

views regarding this document. 103

D. Dumville, ‘The Tribal Hidage: an introduction to its texts’ in The

198

Notes origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett, Leicester, 1989, appendices, unpaginated. 104

Blair, World of Bede, p. 96; Brooks, Early church, p. 66.

105

St Paul-in-the-Baile is one possibility but is arguably too early: P.

Stafford, The East Midlands in the early Middle Ages, Leicester, pp. 97-8; K. Leahy, ‘The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lindsey’ in Pre-Viking Lindsey, ed. A. Vince, Lincoln, 1993, p. 36. The site is illustrated in the same volume by M. Jones on p. 26, in Stafford, East Midlands, p. 88 and see M. Jones, ‘St Paul-inthe-Baile, Lincoln: Britain in Europe?’, in Churches made in antiquity: recent work in Britain and the eastern Mediterranean, ed. K. S. Painter, London, forth¬ coming. 106

Contra J. N. L. Myres, The English settlements, Oxford, 1986, pp.

174-7. 107

For the post-Roman survival of Christianity at Lincoln, see M. Jones,

‘The latter days of Roman Lincoln’ in Pre-Viking Lindsey, ed. Vince, pp. 25-7, but there is little evidence by 600. 108

For the political context of this conversion, see Mayr-Harting, Coming

of Christianity, p. 67; Yorke, Kings and kingdoms, p. 67; Higham, English empire, pp. 91-2. For Bede’s likely sources, see Wallace-Hadrill, Bedes ecclesi¬ astical history, pp. 75—6. 109

For the political potential of such baptisms, see p. 102 and note 170, pp.

129-30. 110

The Merovingian King Sigibert was father to Childebert II and

husband of Queen Brunhild, so the name could have been utilised in East Anglia in the mid-590s out of deference to Frankia direct or to yEthelberht of Kent when he was engaging with Childebert’s regime: Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s eccle¬ siastical history, p. 77. For Sigibert’s relationship to Rsedwald, see Higham, English empire, p. 191. For Bede’s narrative, see HE, n, 15. A valuable study of Sigibert and Felix is offered by I. Wood, ‘The Franks and Sutton Hoo’ in People and places in Northern Europe, edd. Wood and Lund, pp. 3-7. 111

The connection is made by I. Wood, ‘The mission of Augustine of

Canterbury to the English’, Speculum,

lxix,

1994, p.

8,

who notes that Felix

probably originated near Autun, but Luxueil has also been proposed and there was a Bishop Felix at Chalons in 626/7, who could conceivably have been the same man: McClure and Collins, Bede, p. 381; see also Brooks, Early history, p. 65, who suggests that Sigibert’s contact with Dagobert I may have initiated Felix’s mission. Wood, ‘The Franks and Sutton Hoo’, passim, notes Felix’s connection with Columbanus’s disciple Amandus, a close associate of King Dagobert, p. 9. There has been some speculation that Sigibert’s Frankish exile could be connected with the Sutton Hoo treasure: I. Wood, The Merovingian North Sea, Alingsas, 1983, p. 14, and ‘The Franks and Sutton Hoo’, p. 11. 112

H. Sutherland, Anglo-Saxon gold coinage in the light of the Crondall

hoard, Oxford, 1940, coin no. 77, plate iv, no. 22.

199

The convert kings 113

Bede placed it rather inappropriately in HE, n, 17, but mentioned

Iustus’s death and Honorius’s appointment in his place in n, 18, in his preface to Pope Honorius’s letter to Archbishop Honorius. 114

HE,

115

Kirby, ‘Bede and Northumbrian chronology’, p. 523.

116

Its survival perhaps depended on Paulinus’s custody of it and its later

ii,

18.

deposition in one of Canterbury or Rochester: HE,

ii,

20. A copy of Archbishop

Honorius’s letter was presumably available to Bede via Abbot Albinus. 117

Cf. R. Collins, ‘Theodobert I’ in Ideal and reality, ed. P. Wormald,

Oxford, 1983, pp. 7-33. For the parallel with Clovis, see pp. 123-4, note 54. 118

HE,

119

Kirby, Earliest kings, pp. 72-3; Higham, Northumbria, pp. 112-15.

120

HE,

121

See the Dialogues of Pope Gregory,

122

J. H. Lynch, Godparents and kinship in early medieval Europe,

ii,

ii,

17. 20.

Princeton, New Jersey, 1986, p. 136. 123

See above, pp. 34—6.

200

ii,

iii, pp. 148-9.

4

Dynasty and cult: Bernician kings and the protection of God

Crisis and opportunity The sudden and unexpected death of King Edwin in battle in October 633 was followed by an invasion of the north by King Cadwallon of Gwynedd (HE, n, 20), perhaps in the following spring. Edwin’s victory under the protection of the Christian God over the non-Christian West Saxons in 626 had been a powerful inducement to his people to accept the Christian God and St Peter in 627. The success of his regime and of his novel cult had thereafter been inextricably linked and each had served to reinforce the other. In 633, just six short years after his own baptism, neither Edwin’s God nor his patron saint saved him or his adult sons from their enemies. His failure necessarily also encompassed the divine agencies which had hitherto protected him. As in other conversion situations, the adhesion of the Deirans to Christianity was conditional on it serving their wider poitical interests (see p. 36). Nor did Edwin’s Christian cult save his people from the vengeance of the Welsh. Bede claimed that Cadwallon paid no respect to the new Christian religion of the Northumbrians and there is some evidence in his text that the British king sought to destroy Edwin’s residences and also his new churches. That at Campodonum, for example, was burnt down along with the rest of the palace complex by ‘the pagani by whom King Edwin was killed’ (HE, n, 14). This has generally been assumed to refer to the pagan Mercians and this may well be, but the prime responsibility for Edwin’s death lay with Cadwallon, despite Penda’s involvement in the initial campaign. That it was the Welsh king and his army to whom Bede was here referring is quite possible given the other pejorative language which he adopted. Cadwallon was, for example, a ‘tyrant’, ‘abominable’, ‘most savage’ and ‘barbarous’. He was portrayed

201

The convert kings by Bede as the very apotheosis of Satan, over against Edwin’s and then Oswald’s divinely sanctioned kingships, so reference to his forces as pagani is perhaps sustainable. In the summer of 634, Cadwallon was besieged in what Bede described as oppidum municipium - ‘fortified town’ - and this is more likely than not to refer to York,1 in which case he had occupied the metropolis of Edwin’s regime where stood his new, but still roofless, diocesan church (HE, n, 14). At Yeavering, the entirety of the architec¬ ture attributed to Edwin was destroyed in a massive and deliberate firing of the site.2 Whether or not he was responsible for the destruction of Campodonum and its church, therefore, Cadwallon certainly attacked Edwin’s shrines. The Welsh king was avenging himself upon the Deiran overlord, who had neglected obligations to the court of Gwynedd accu¬ mulated during his youth in exile, and had driven him from Britain. Destruction of the cult sites which Edwin had sponsored, and used to reinforce his kingship was an entirely rational feature of Cadwallon’s response. Leadership of the Deiri was then taken up by Edwin’s cousin Osric who had previously been ‘imbued with the sacraments of the faith by the preaching of Paulinus’, so was a convert. We cannot reconstruct his purposes with any confidence but his actions imply that his attempts to rally support, defend his people and establish his own credibility required that he distance himself from Edwin’s regime and cult. King Osric therefore revived the pre-existing, non-Christian cults of the Deiri,3 presumably in the hope that the ancient gods of the Angles would confer on him the good luck which other English kings — such as yEthelfrith - had formerly enjoyed in battle against the Britons. It was that good fortune which Edwin had forfeited. Not all the Roman clergy departed. Bede recalled that James the Deacon was left to look after communicants at York and still held prop¬ erty in the vicinity of Catterrick. His continued presence was presum¬ ably at least tolerated by King Osric, in which case the new king perhaps shared

the

willingness

already

shown

by

yEthelberht,

Eadbald,

Sseberht’s sons and Edwin while non-Christian to accommodate an alien, Christian priest and his cult site, even while participating in nonChristian rituals. Once again, the English viewpoint contrasted with the exclusivity in matters of ritual and worship that Christian priests demanded of converts. Osric’s strategy seems initially to have worked: that he besieged Cadwallon clearly implies that he had raised significant forces and was

202

Dynasty and cult proving himself a vigorous leader. Then renewed disaster struck the Deiran regime. Osric was killed along with his warriors when the Welsh broke out from their defences and surprised him. This proved the final blow to the dynasty in this generation, a blow which left it with no cred¬ ible candidate to take up the kingship. In the minds of men this may perhaps have marked it down as an unlucky lineage on which all the gods without exception now sought vengeance, or from whom all had at least withdrawn their aid. Such was the immediate consequence for his own kin of of the failure of Edwin’s experimentation with cult and ritual to the exclusion of the traditional deities and rituals which had long protected the Angles and brought them reward and success. Some elements of the royal house (exclusive of Edwin’s own widow and young children) perhaps still thereafter saw their ultimate destiny as under the protection of nonChristian deities. At some stage King Osric’s young son, Oswine, fled south and found sanctuary among the West Saxons - Edwin’s old enemies and still in 634 non-Christians. Oswine could presumably have joined his cousins in Kent. The choice of Wessex by the son of a royal apostate may have implications for his attitudes at this point to the different cults which his family had patronised over the last decade or so. It may also reflect concern to differentiate any future claim to the throne that he might make from those of Edwin’s sons and grandson, whose deaths in childhood, in exile, could not then have been antici¬ pated. Bede’s description of events in 633—4 is chronologically imprecise but he suggests that yEthelfrith’s sons did not wait for Osric to establish himself but themselves returned from exile to their father’s Bernicia as soon as news reached them of Edwin’s fall. Eanfrith, the eldest and best connected of them (see above, p. 153),4 now claimed his father’s royal inheritance. To Bede’s disgust, he also renounced the Christianity which he had accepted during his seventeen years or so in the far north and revived the traditional religious practices of his people. His reasoning is unrecorded but, like that of Osric, may at least be guessed at. Eanfrith needed to distance himself from the regime of the Deiran Christian King Edwin - the great enemy of his house - and from the military dis¬ aster in which that had foundered. He could only benefit from an ideo¬ logical volte face which recalled the glory days of yEthelfrith’s reign and the dominant role which the Bernicians had played therein. The Bernicians had been peripheral to Edwin’s kingship and his Deirancentred cult had been imposed upon them from outside, so rejection of

203

The convert kings Edwin’s cult was an essential feature of a reversal of the balance of power in favour of his own dynasty and people. The revival of traditional cult practices in 633^4 arguably had some potential to raise morale and secure support for Eanfrith’s new and untried leadership. Among the Bernicians at this date non-Christian religion offered the opportunity to bind the warrior class to its native dynasty and may well have seemed the appropriate route by which to revive the days of military victory and royal generosity to the Bernicians which had ended so dramatically c. 616. There are significant parallels between the decisions made by Sseberht’s heirs among the East Saxons (see above, p. 135) and Eanfrith in Bernicia, albeit his ancestry offered more impressive precedents than theirs. Eanfrith came to make peace with Cadwallon, ‘accompanied by only twelve chosen warriors’. The number is perhaps apocryphal given its Christian overtones but the deed is not. This was presumably to be a face-to-face conference to settle their differences and establish a peace¬ ful, if not equal, relationship for the future. Bede, with all the benefits of hindsight, considered Eanfrith’s action imprudent, since he was then taken and ‘condemned’ - implicitly to death (HE, hi, 1). Note the use here of damnare, which alludes back to the apostasy for which he was ‘damned’ by God. Cadwallon’s action perhaps reflected strong feelings within his own forces, some of whom may well have sought vengeance on Eanfrith for kin killed by dEthelfrith, his father, at the battle of Chester barely one generation before.5 Furthermore, Cadwallon may have had grandiose designs for the reconstruction of British kingship and the British church in the north,6 such that required not only Deira’s destruction but also that of the relatively new but hitherto vigorous and expansionist Bernician kingship. That the meeting actually occurred does, however, imply that Cadwallon had given guarantees of Eanfrith’s safety on which he then reneged. Eanfrith’s judgement was probably not so very poor. He could be for¬ given for imagining that his interests overlapped with those of the Welsh king sufficiently for an accommodation to be feasible: both had good reason to hate - and seek vengeance on - King Edwin and his kin, and to overturn the entirety of the Deira- and Church-centred power struc¬ tures which he and Paulinus had put in place; Cadwallon had a history of co-operation with the non-Christian, Anglian Penda of the Mercians, while Eanfrith had long experience of dealing with Celtic Christians; both had recently been in Ireland and may have had Irish connections in common, although this need not have been much

204

Dynasty and cult recommendation; lastly, Eanfrith is unlikely to have considered himself the equal of a king who had overthrown the great Edwin, hitherto ‘overking’ of all Britain, and then defeated and killed his cousin and heir. At this stage, Cadwallon was surely seen as a powerful ‘overking’ across much of Britain,7 in which case it was very much in Eanfrith’s interest and that of his people to seek an accommodation. The Bernician king was, therefore, more probably the victim of duplicity on Cadwallon’s part than poorly advised. Eanfrith’s liquidation confined him, however, to the footnotes of history, much to the satisfaction of Bede and that of the late seventh- and early eighth-century Christian authors of regnal lists which he consulted. All saw the hand of divine providence in the early deaths of both Edwin’s successors and were at one in conferring the single regnal year of the two apostates on the glorious, most Christian, King Oswald. Even at the time, their violent deaths had some potential to under¬ mine non-Christian cult in the north — after, that is, the earlier erosion of its credibility for which Edwin and Paulinus were already responsi¬ ble. A providential vision of human affairs was not the unique property of the Christian community. Rather, the English had long expected their kings to enjoy a portfolio of divine assistance and good fortune. If con¬ temporaries supposed that the supernatural had played some part in Edwin’s downfall, then non-Christian gods were the likeliest agents, striking down a king who had denied them their proper dues and who had diverted his people from public rites of propitiation. All who still credited the traditional deities with power presumably expected them to protect the two apostate kings who restored their cults; but they did not.8 This fact had the potential to sow considerable self-doubt: were the gods still angered by members of both dynasties on account of their recent and lengthy withholding of sacrifice? Was their protection and potency in war now so impaired that it could not prevail over the Christian God of a British king - as it had done as recently as the battle of Chester? There was considerable potential for the reputation of Celtic Christianity to gain from Cadwallon’s several victories, while the credibility of the traditional gods of the northern English was arguably damaged still further. The northern Anglian peoples were left without divine protection, with both their traditional deities and Edwin’s novel cult discredited. With both kings dead, Cadwallon and the Welsh remained active, ravaging and destroying even north of the Tyne. By so doing the British king threw the need for effective protection of the northern Angles into

205

The convert kings stark relief. A major issue therein was contemporary calculation of the willingness of any of several divine agents to protect the community and its leaders. Consequent on that were decisions concerning the rites of propitiation appropriate to whichever protective deity was consid¬ ered to offer the greater potential. It was in this context that Oswald staked his claim to the Bernician kingship of his father. According to Bede, all 2Ethelfrith’s sons had returned to Bernicia on Edwin’s death, so in the winter of 633-4. 633 was the last regnal year attributable to Edwin. 634 should have been attributed to Eanfrith and Osric but the latter’s death occurred in that summer. Thereafter, Bede imagined that Cadwallon occupied the north for an entire year (annus integrus) before murdering Eanfrith. Despite his death in 642 after a reign of nine years - within which Bede attributed only one year to the activities of Cadwallon and his apostate opponents {HE, n, 9) - the opening chapter of the second book of Bede’s Historia does seem to suggest that Oswald established himself as king only in 635,9 but the text is internally incon¬ sistent. In whichever year it occurred, it fell to Oswald to revive the for¬ tunes of his dynasty and find security for the Bernicians once his half-brother had been slain; and this was both a duty and an opportu¬ nity to advance his own interests. Following Eanfrith’s entrapment and death, there was little prospect of further negotiations. There was, therefore, very little alternative to war. Bede offered a simple and glorified account of the outcome, in terms which were necessarily culled ultimately from the Bible:10 ‘Oswald, a man chosen by God, ...who, after the death of [his] brother Eanfrith, came with an army which was small, but strengthened in the faith of Christ, destroyed the abominable general of the Britons with those immense forces which he had been wont to boast could not be resisted’. On the eve of the battle, Bede famously relates that Oswald set up a wooden cross and led his whole army in a prayer which claimed justice for their cause and sought God’s protection against their enemies. The direct speech which Bede here used underlines the retrospective and hagiographical imperatives of what is essentially a miracle story. Bede’s familiarity with the Book of Samuel provided the necessary imagery. He clearly reconstructed the detail surrounding the battle for present, dialectical purposes. So too did Adomnan, whose Life of St Columba included reference to Oswald’s victory but claimed the credit for Iona’s chief saint, claiming for him both success in battle and the universal imperium which derived therefrom.11 Neither author was interested in other than a small part of the ideo-

206

Dynasty and cult logical context of Oswald’s battle, but Oswald and his advisers are likely to have taken account of a much wider range of factors before deciding on their recourse to the Irish Christian God of Iona and St Columba, as the recipient of some at least of their prayers. Oswald and his brother Oswiu had been exposed at a much earlier age than either Edwin or Eanfrith to Christianity, and - supposing that they had stayed on Iona - can hardly have escaped an education of sorts therein. Both were fluent speakers of Irish,12 as we must suppose were also those young warriors who had accompanied them into exile half a generation earlier (HE, hi, 3), so the barriers to their adjusting their conceptual systems to Christianity at Iona were less than those confronting many other English convert kings.

Oswald’s personal commitment to

Christianity may, therefore, have been significant, and he may have grasped more of its spiritual messages than earlier English rulers. Even so, the precedent of politic apostasy had been established by Eanfrith, his half-brother, after spending precisely the same period in exile among Christians. Eadbald’s career had followed a similar pattern in this respect. Osric of the Deirans had similarly rejected Christian rites after conversion and Rsedwald had likewise apostatised. Given such apposite precedents, too much emphasis should not be placed on Oswald’s per¬ sonal beliefs in interpreting his decision-making in 634/5. Eanfrith’s apostasy was probably significant to Oswald’s decision in other ways. If his death at the hands of his enemies discredited the nonChristian cults he had once again begun to favour, then Oswald needed to distance himself from those deities and invoke alternative super¬ natural support. The obvious option was the Christian God of the Scotti, whose rites and whose saints were familiar to him and his nearest supporters from their years in exile. What is more, northern Irish Christianity had several advantages: Eanfrith’s death could be por¬ trayed as a consequence of his having incurred the wrath of the Christian God by his restoration of non-Christian rites - as Bede later claimed - in which case the Christian God was proven stronger than non-Christian alternatives; secondly, Cadwallon was Christian. The British victory over Edwin had resolved for the moment the struggle for authority and legitimacy within insular Christianity, which Gregory had initiated, and that resolution was to the advantage of Celtic Christianity and its saints. The record of the Welsh king at this stage surpassed those of all other warrior-kings known to us prior to Penda’s victories in the 640s and surely invited the conclusion that he was pro¬ tected by the most potent metaphysical forces available. By proclaiming

207

The convert kings his adherence to Christianity — of the same brand as Cadwallon’s and with the same views concerning the authority of St Peter and Canterbury - Oswald was invoking the aid of the God of the Christians via that part of His peoples whom He had recently blessed with victory. He was also recalling the old rivalry for influence in England between his own father and Kent, but arming the Bernician monarchy with Irish Christian weapons and authority. That his Deiran uncle and rival had harnessed Rome’s priesthood to his own political ambitions must be rel¬ evant to Oswald’s recourse to the alternative authority of Iona. The Bernician king fought in an entirely legitimate effort to avenge his half-brother and the damage wrought by a cruel enemy to his own people. His cause could therefore be portrayed as just, within the moral code of the day. His treatment of Eanfrith had probably placed Cadwallon in a far weaker moral position. Oswald was, therefore, chal¬ lenging Cadwallon’s ostensibly unique place in divine favour and seeking to entice away Cadwallon’s God on the grounds of his own virtues and the greater justice of his case. To set against this was the non-Christian religion of the bulk of the Bernicians,13 whom Bede portrayed as barely touched by Edwin’s earlier efforts to spread baptism and untutored in Christianity. In this sense, Oswald’s army is most unlikely to have behaved much as Bede imagined, since it was primarily a force made up of non-Christians, albeit led by a baptised king and a small coterie of former exiles whose task it was to set the ideological agenda for the majority. Their campaign compares in this respect with that of Edwin against the West Saxons, which was also conducted as a test of the favours of the Christian God by an army which was predominately (perhaps totally, if Britons be excluded) nonChristian. Edwin was then himself also unbaptised, yet already had a bishop at his side as an adviser and a proxy via whom to propitiate the Christian God. Oswald, in contrast, seems to have had no senior churchman to call upon until after his victory (see below) and, unless either he or Eanfrith had brought at least a priest back from exile, he may not even have been a communicant in the Christian rites between his return to Bernicia c. 633 and his victory in 634-5. Such possibilities underline the political factors, as opposed to the spiritual considera¬ tions, influencing Oswald in this crisis. The outcome too compares with that of Edwin’s campaign in 626. Oswald triumphed in war under the protection of his chosen deity. The magnitude of his deed in overcoming and killing the most feared warrior-king of the age gave him in turn a military reputation beyond

208

Dynasty and cult that of any of his contemporaries.14 His protection was sought there¬ fore, or his superiority at least grudgingly acknowledged, by kings throughout Britain, both Celtic and English,15 catapulting him into the role of a universal ‘overking’. Oswald’s success also justified his choice of divine protector and he naturally then became an enthusiastic patron of northern Irish Christianity, importing that cult to play a central role within and beside his own kingship. Lindisfarne Bede was probably mistaken when he noted that ‘as far as we know, no sign of the Christian faith, neither church nor altar, had been erected throughout the entire people of the Bernicians’, up to the time when Oswald reputedly put up his great cross on the eve of battle against Cadwallon.16 Even so, with Yeavering (and perhaps other royal com¬ plexes) burnt to the ground by the enemy, there can have been very little remaining of the physical manifestations of Edwin’s cult among either of the northern Anglian peoples. Nor would Oswald’s interests have been well served had he sought to build on the Christian cult of the Deiran king. Rather, he contrived to differentiate his religious patron¬ age from that of his illustrious forebear. The contrast between southern/Roman and northern/Irish founts of authority is central to this process of differentiation. Edwin

had

had

an Italian bishop; Oswald sent to Iona for an Irish bishop. The new Bernician king needed altars, priests, churches, manuscripts, training for the ministry and relics to sustain a mission and establish Christianity at the very core of his regime. Iona was the obvious source available to him, being a church and monastic community of the highest status and with numerous daughter-houses among the Scots and Piets.17 It already had a wide experience of ecclesiastical colonisation and had developed the necessary mechanisms and the self-confidence to sustain control of an extensive family of dependencies. It had already devel¬ oped its own distinctive cache of relics and its own ‘family’ of saints, among whom the founding figure of St Columba was distinctive and capable of providing an effective counterweight to St Peter. The connec¬ tions of Columba, and his successors as abbots, with the hegemony of the O’Neills in Ireland had also provided them with considerable polit¬ ical experience at this date and had apparently enabled them to remain independent of King Edwin. Oswald had benefited from that inde¬ pendence. The mission to Bernicia was not, however, a Scottish initiative but a

209

The convert kings Bernician one, under the aegis of a triumphant warrior-king who had returned from the Celtic world to take a commanding position within Britain.18 Iona responded to his request and sought to address the future needs of those of its monks and clergy who accepted Oswald’s invita¬ tion to go among the English. The mission depended heavily on Oswald’s support in making progress among the English. When, in 664, Oswiu repudiated the authority of Iona, the exercise in eccesiastical colonisation begun by his brother c. 635 came to an abrupt end. In this respect, the Bernician adoption of Ionan Christianity was first and fore¬ most a political strategy designed to assist the re-foundation of a dynasty long in exile by establishing a cult of proven utility to Oswald himself. Oswald provided his new bishop with Lindisfarne - henceforth Holy Island, which was arguably as near a clone of Iona as could be found within Bernician territory. The tidal island had existing royal connec¬ tions: on Lindisfarne, King Theoderic of the Bernicians (probably Oswald’s great-uncle) had found sanctuary and stood at bay against the British retinues marshalled by King Urien two generations earlier than Cadwallon’s own (HB,

lxiii),

and such was probably a well-known

story in 634-5. It has additionally been suggested that Lindisfarne was the normal base of the Northumbrian royal war fleet,19 but this supposition may not be based on very solid foundations.20 Holy Island’s close proximity to Bamburgh - already arguably royal and a powerful talisman of the Bernician dynasty since King Ida (see above, p. 146) - was probably equally significant. When Oswald was killed and dismembered, his brother and successor, Oswiu, had the sword-wielding hands and arms which had protected his people deposited at Bamburgh, but his head - which would have been assumed to contain his soul — was buried by the Irish clergy in the cemetery at Holy Island (HE, n, 12). Thereby King Oswiu both recognised and rein¬ forced the mutually supportive functions of these two sites at the very core of his brother’s erstwhile regime. It was Oswald who associated both with Christianity, but earlier non-Christian kings had already made them central to Bernician society and kingship. Just as kEthelberht and Edwin had founded churches and established dioceses at royal centres, so did Oswald now combine the particular requirements of Ionan Christianity with his own need to establish his incoming bishop as a member of his own court, whose seat was under his own watchful eye and protection. Bede depicted Aidan as a frequent member of the royal court, and even in attendance at the king’s feasts.21

210

Dynasty and cult Although

it

would

be

misleading

to

represent

him

as

a

courtier-bishop,22 his relationship with the king was close and mutually supportive, and this necessitated that his ecclesiastical ‘capital’ be accessible and that he regularly use royal villae in his peregrinations and as the basis of his ministry. That Lindisfarne was focal to the political geography of the new Bernician kingship is incontrovertible. Its function was surely to sustain Oswald’s regime and sustain too the favour already shown him by God, so bringing him continuing victory and divine protection. To achieve this the king seems to have attempted to capture the benevolence of St Columba and his God wholesale by effectively duplicating Iona off the North Sea coast. Hence the choice of a site with such strong physical similarities with Iona, the establishment there of a monastic commu¬ nity after the fashion of the mother-house, with sufficient texts to form a library and to stimulate a scriptorium. He also founded a bishopric, albeit that the first incumbent proved so unimpressed by the immensity of his task as to require a swift replacement (HE, in, 5). Oswald reput¬ edly gave further estates to the church to enable daughter-houses to be established, and in this respect, too, Lindisfarne was clearly intended to ape Iona, although it is little more than guesswork which houses were established at this stage. It is almost as if Oswald was making sure that his new focal church was sufficiently like Iona as to make its God and its saints feel at home in new surroundings after their transfer there. Oswald’s own vision of his God may well have differed dramatically from that of his new, Scottish clergy, for all his later reputation for piety. Again like Edwin before him, Oswald considered that his realignment of the Bernician dynasty with the God of the Scots required the much wider dissemination of baptism. Sacrifice to his own God should there¬ fore be universal among his own core peoples (he became, ab initio, king of both the Bernicians and Deirans). It should also be exclusive of other rites, since that was one of the most pressing demands made by Christian missionaries. To concur was to reduce the risk of giving offence to God such that might detract from His support of the king. The risks were considerable, since Christians taught that other gods were devils which were inimical to the one true God - but still capable of exercising power over the affairs of men. Demons were as real a part of Scottish hagiography as English and they featured widely in the Life of St Columba. Oswald enjoyed certain other advantages which were unavailable to either 2Ethelberht or Edwin. Firstly, he was one of the very few north211

The convert kings ern Angles with the fluency in Gaelic to enable him to translate for his Scottish clerics and Bede made much of the image of Oswald relaying the words of Aidan to his court (HE, in, 3). In this sense, until Aidan and his associates became sufficiently fluent as to enable them to preach without an interpreter, it was the king himself who preached the word of God to his people. The combination of king and priest had consid¬ erable potential to reinforce Oswald’s position. Secondly, he had not previously reigned as a non-Christian king, as had both 2Ethelberht and Edwin, so had fewer of the ‘mid-term’ problems of passage from one cult to another and one set of priests and advisers to another. Rather, he inherited a situation of ideological as well as military crisis in 634/5, within which all the several alternatives to his own religion had suffered severe blows to their credibility. Major traditional cult sites within the north

had

lost

influence

and

even

ceased

operating

(as

had

Goodmanham) during Edwin’s reign and most of the political classes (at least) had apparently been baptised, irrespective of what that may have amounted to in their own eyes. Oswald’s Christianity was less revolutionary, therefore, than that of his predecessors for being less novel and he seems to have had little difficulty in persuading his people to accept baptism. It was, after all, their delivery from a foe who was active in their own land that had demonstrated the efficacy of his divine protector, and this arguably had a far more immediate impact than Edwin’s distant victory over the West .Saxons. Oswald’s regime could, therefore, use its exceptional kudos at the very outset to establish a system of ideological and spiritual authority which was focused in Bernician, not Deiran, territory and which had some potential for re¬ focusing the entire population of the north of Britain behind a single centralised kingship and bishopric. The foundation of Holy Island marked the demotion of the Christian cult centre at York from the position of authority it had hitherto enjoyed. Otherwise, Edwin’s churches were incorporated into the new ecclesiastical structure. Oswald was reputed to have completed the stone church at York which had still been unfinished when Edwin died (HE, ii, 20), in which case Edwin’s church was reorientated onto a new authority, rather than suppressed. There is certainly no evidence that Oswald persecuted such clergy as had formally assisted Paulinus and there is a reasonable probability that he did not. However, such men were henceforth uninfluential, probably few in number and incapable of replacing themselves with freshly trained Roman clergy. They were probably confined entirely to Oswald’s territories south of the Tees. By

212

Dynasty and cult placing them under the authority of Lindisfarne, Oswald was effectively taking command of the remnants of Edwin’s priesthood and diverting their organisational and symbolic potential to himself. Oswald’s brand of Christianity had the capacity to capitalise on Edwin’s failure, by tapping the apparent triumph of the Celtic clergy and their saints in their contest with Augustine and Paulinus. Bede used the battle of Chester as proof of divine support for Augustine and the damnation of the Britons {HE, n, 2) but this line of reasoning was not his sole preserve. If Cadwallon’s victory over Edwin revealed any ideo¬ logical truths to his contemporaries (see above), it was surely God’s preference for Celtic customs and methods of determining the date of Easter, against those of St Peter, Canterbury and York. Many commu¬ nities within northern England were arguably still at this date both Christian and British and Oswald’s sponsorship of Irish clergy had considerably greater potential for the wholesale integration of regional societies behind his regime than had Edwin’s patronage of Paulinus. There were at least no differences of custom or timing to stop the British clergy recognising the authority of Oswald’s bishop.23 On this subject, Bede’s eagerness to distinguish Oswald’s Irish church from the Britons leaves us shorn of even near-contemporary comment. This discussion has progressed in very general terms and has been characterised by hypothesis. That is owing to the very little that is actu¬ ally known about King Oswald and the Lindisfarne-centred church which he fostered.24 Bede’s treatment of both Oswald and Aidan is very largely post mortem, consisting of a succession of rather standardised and conventional miracles which tell us nothing about either as living figures but a great deal about perceptions of their spirituality a century later. Much has been made of the exceptional virtues of Aidan and his followers, whose profession of poverty, humility and charity were so much lauded by later writers. However, this is largely a matter of per¬ ception and of subjective writing by Bede and some others of his generation, whose purposes were less historical than pastoral and con¬ temporary.25 To argue that the Irish were intrinsically more likely than the Romans to engage the religious sensibilities of pagan Anglo-Saxons may not be an entirely sound conclusion, despite its occasional formulation.26 Rather, this view is over-dependent on a vision of the conversion process which is fostered by Bede, as a mission-centred phenomenon. In reality, early seventh-century Anglo-Saxons are far more likely to have accepted baptism from the Irish because Kings Oswald and Oswiu prescribed

213

The convert kings such a course than because they were exercising a personal preference. Between 633 and 664, Roman Christianity had to subsist among the English without the patronage of powerful kings, yet it gained consid¬ erable hold in Kent and East Anglia. Individuals were rarely in a posi¬ tion to choose between the several Christian clerisies on offer. Religious colonialism under Oswald's imperium Lindisfarne and its bishop were necessarily instruments of power, util¬ ised and sustained by a king eager to hold on to a shaky supremacy in Britain that was otherwise dependent on a reputation for victory con¬ sequent upon a single battle. That supremacy is unlikely to have found much enthusiasm in Kent, where Edwin’s ambitious brother-in-law and associate in Roman Christianity still ruled. Oswald’s long exile and his father’s death at the hands of Edwin’s patron and protector suggest that Edwin’s associates would necessarily have been considered potential rivals at his court and Canterbury’s ecclesiastical authority was clearly the principal Christian rival to that of Aidan. The point has often been made that 2Ethelburh’s dispatch of her young charges from Kent to France and Merovingian protection, demonstrates that Oswald’s influ¬ ence stretched as far as Kent (HE, n, 20). Her brother’s power to protect his sister’s family from Oswald was limited, therefore, but this does not make him a supporter of Bernician hegemony. Indeed, the presence of Bishop Paulinus at Rochester under Eadbald’s continuing protection must have been a constant reminder of the underlying commitment of the Kentish king to Roman Christianity and his own metropolitan. Nor could Oswald expect enthusiasm for his position among the East Angles. His father’s death at their hands and King Rsedwald’s loss in the same battle of his son Rasgenhere - either brother or half-brother of the current King Sigiberht - provided fertile ground for feuds between the two dynasties. Furthermore, the establishment of a Burgundian bishop in East Anglia just a few years before Oswald’s triumph left little more scope for religious colonialisation there than in Kent. Yet there may be some trace in Bede’s account of Oswald’s attempts to achieve just that. Fursa, an Irish monk, bishop and pilgrim, arrived in East Anglia during Sigiberht’s reign and was granted a site for the establishment of a monastery by the king. The date of his arrival is unknown but his later departure for Frankia did not post-date Oswald’s death in 642 by very much,27 and could conceivably have been a reaction to it. There is a strong likelihood that he arrived in East Anglia during Oswald’s supremacy, so it is just possible that his presence there had been facili-

214

Dynasty and cult tated by the Bernician king. Edwin had previously sought to achieve control of East Anglia and impose his own cult there so Oswald might have been encouraged to attempt the same. Too much should not be made of this possible connection, of course, particularly since the Burgundian Felix was necessarily familiar with Irish monasticism from his homeland and may have welcomed the Celtic peregrine, yet Fursa’s status as a bishop may imply that he had at some stage been intended to fulfil a more significant role among the East Angles. King Sigiberht himself abdicated his kingship of the East Angles in favour of a kinsman, Ecgric, and entered ‘a monastery which he himself had founded’. This may have owed something to Sigiberht’s experiences of monasticism in Frankia as an exile,28 but the political context is unlikely to have been irrelevant, particularly given the nature of the mil¬ itary crisis which later brought about his forced return to public life from retirement and his death in battle at Penda’s hands.29 Sigibert’s resignation in favour of a relative who did not share his experience in exile among the Roman and Frankish churches could have been intended to mollify Oswald’s suspicions concerning the dynasty. It is quite possible, therefore, that Fursa’s presence in East Anglia, his receipt there of royal patronage, and Sigibert’s own abdication all reflect local attempts to accommodate the political and religious colonialism of the Bernician king. The matter is beyond proof. Oswald’s dealings with the South Saxons are almost beyond recogni¬ tion. In an entirely different context, Bede made passing reference to the fact he had ‘once presided over this very people’ (HE, iv, 14), so his ‘overkingship’ at least seems to have stretched even to the south side of the Weald, or was later assumed so to have done. This reference belongs to the 680s, at earliest, but an Irish mission had already then been estab¬ lished at Bosham under the leadership of the otherwise unknown Dicuill (HE, iv, 13). This is, however, as likely to reflect sponsorship of Christianity among the South Saxons by King Wulfhere of the Mercians (post-658) than some earlier, Bernician initiative. It could alternatively have been an Irish initiative which was entirely unrelated to English pol¬ itics. This is the common assumption, of course, but a more politicised intepretation linked with Oswald has some potential and should not be dismissed out of hand. It is only when dealing with Wessex that we are on firmer ground. Bede referred to the arrival there of one Birinus, who had come to England on the advice of Pope Honorius (so before his death in 638) and had been consecrated bishop before his departure from Italy by the

215

The convert kings archbishop of Milan (HE, hi, 7). His origins are unknown, although his name could be Frankish. That identification is made the more likely by his eventual replacement as bishop to the West Saxons by the Frankish Agilbert, in which case his arrival has some parallels with that of the Burgundian Felix who was similarly consecrated outside England. Birinus’s mission may have owed something to Pope Honorius’s concern to strengthen the very fragile English church and his own authority within it, following the disastrous death of King Edwin of which his correspondence with Canterbury in 634 suggests that he was aware.30 However, it is interesting to note that he made no apparent effort to channel this new initiative through Canterbury and this may imply that the political marginalisation of Canterbury under Oswald’s ‘overkingship’ was appreciated even at Rome. The West Saxons were hitherto non-Christian but had received an extremely harsh lesson in the efficacy of the Christian deity as a wargod at the hands of King Edwin in 626. To have sought conversion from him and his clergy between 627 and 633 would have further emphasised the supremacy of the Deiran king and their own humiliation at his hands. This context may help to explain the silence which surrounds Wessex at this stage. With Edwin dead, however, and his dynasty over¬ turned, West Saxon kings were free to experiment with cult to their own political and military advantage. Like many other English kings, they ruled over a culturally diverse group of communities among whom were many British Christians, a network of putative monasteries and perhaps even an organised ecclesiastical hierarchy, particularly in the west.31 To accept Christian cult from the local Britons might, however, be to establish political debts and patterns of authority that would be both unwanted and a potential embarrassment. The arrival of Birinus arguably provided the West Saxon court with the opportunity it needed. His foreignness meant that acceptance of baptism carried with it no connotations of subservience to other insular dynasties.32 His papal and Frankish/Italian credentials and his failure to defer to Canterbury enabled the king of the Gewisse to patronise a mission of his own which was effectively as independent of any author¬ ity among the English as were those of Eadbald and Oswald. Bede’s description of events implies that Birinus fortuitously just happened on the West Saxons at this moment, but it is more likely that his arrival reflected cross-Channel diplomacy. Whether or not, King Cynigils (or Cynigisl) seems to have been eager to accept baptism at the hands of his new bishop and did so ‘with all his people’, in the approved style -

216

Dynasty and cult implying that mass-baptisms again occurred. He then conferred on him the site of Dorchester-on-Thames for a church, which was then in the very heartland of the West Saxon kingship. This, too, was to be a royal Eigenkirche. Bede’s account of events suggests that King Oswald ‘happened then to be present’ and stood godfather to the West Saxon king, associated himself with the grant of Dorchester and then married Cynigils’s daughter {HE, in, 7). Like so much of Bede’s treatment of Oswald, this is improbably naive and there has been much debate as to the Bernician king’s role in these events. It would be too much to suggest that Oswald was in any real sense responsible for Cynigils’s baptism,33 since the mission from which he accepted Christianity was clearly external to his own power and had some potential to challenge it. Yet Oswald’s role as godfather was one which carried important connotations of superior¬ ity and authority which had probably been utilised previously by English Christian ‘overkings’ and was arguably a well-established mech¬ anism by which to underline unequal relationships between kings.34 Oswald apparently did everything he could to associate himself with Cynigils’s conversion and to extract from the situation as much polit¬ ical advantage as possible. That his presence so far from his political heartland was fortuitous is obviously implausible, and the likelihood is that the Bernician king was present specifically so as to reinforce the mutually supportive relationship which he was seeking to develop between the two dynasties. His role as Cynigils’s godfather neatly bal¬ anced his own marriage to the West Saxon king’s daughter, so his recognition of him as father-in-law. To maintain at least the semblance of superiority therefore required a high-profile role in the ceremony of baptism and his association with the grant of a church-site looks very much like orchestration and reinforcement of his technical ‘overking¬ ship’. We know that the early West Saxon church had some links with Ireland, most particularly at Malmesbury. It is, of course, just possible that Oswald had some responsibility for this connection but free-stand¬ ing links via south-western British Christianity are perhaps more plau¬ sible.35 Oswald’s determination to sustain his precarious authority in Wessex and ally himself with its newly Christianising ruling house underlines the political difficulties by which he was confronted. Put simply, his imperium was overly dependent on a military reputation won in a single battle and sustained by the enthusiastic commitment only of the Bermcians. The establishment of Lindisfarne gave his regime an ideo-

217

The convert kings logical centre but Scottish Christianity did not immediately provide him with the administrative structures of a Roman metropolitan, which might have enabled him to establish new dioceses in client kingships and undermine the sacrality of other dynasties. Furthermore, pre-existing Christian cult among the English was headed by a clerisy with a sub¬ stantial interest in resisting the authority of Holy Island. Aidan’s see was co-extensive with Oswald’s kingship — so embraced the Deirans and Lindsey - but was not as effective a vehicle for more extensive colonisa¬ tion as Gregory’s plan for two metropolitans had offered. Bede suggests that Aidan, the bishop of the Scotti, had the respect of the southern, Roman bishops but he had no formal authority over them. Indeed, Oswald had no means of binding the southern bishops who were already established to his cause, nor the kings who protected them, and any attempt to do so risked causing an adverse reaction. yEthelburh’s actions in Kent and possibly also Sigiberht’s in East Anglia underline Oswald’s ability to inspire fear but they do not suggest that his ‘overk¬ ingship’ was welcomed in either kingdom and he had no kin there excepting only his Deiran relatives via his mother Acha. In Wessex, Oswald took advantage of the new arrival of another papal mission and the opportunities offered by the West Saxon conversion. He made the best he could of the situation but he does not seem to have initiated that event and could only react to it and seek to shape it to his own purposes. Behind the Roman bishops of the south of England, and far beyond Oswald’s reach, was Rome, its authority and its role as the custodian of Christian orthodoxy. In or about 640, while Oswald was still the super¬ ior king throughout southern Britain, pope-elect John IV wrote once more to the Irish clergy on the subject of the dating of Easter and con¬ cerning Pelagianism (HE, n, 19). Those addressed were headed by the bishop of Armagh. The abbot of Iona was the second to last, as listed by Bede. This may reflect the ordering of the signatures on the corre¬ spondence earlier sent to Rome from an Irish synod but all in all the status of Iona - so of its daughter-house on Holy Island - found little support in these exchanges. Whether or not Oswald knew of, or inter¬ ested himself in, this correspondence, Aidan cannot have been entirely ignorant of it and it carried an implicit threat to the authority and legit¬ imacy of Oswald’s church vis-a-vis Canterbury. Oswald’s central political problem was the inimical attitudes towards himself of the Mercians, whose capacity to control central England and so cut him off from any southern allies he may have acquired — meant that his management of them was crucial. Penda had assisted

218

Dynasty and cult Cadwallon’s campaign in 633 and may have thereafter shared in the looting of the north. Whether or not - and on balance he probably had more pressing objectives within Mercia — he was not present at Cadwallon’s downfall so was then probably in the Midlands and con¬ solidating his position there.36 Penda presumably acknowledged the ‘overkingship’ of Oswald immediately after his victory at Heavenfield, and he may have murdered King Edwin’s son, Eadfrith, under pressure from Oswald.37 Indeed, Penda need not even have been king during the 630s and Oswald may have succeeded in establishing a regime friendly to himself among the Hwicce,38 a province which had formerly been within the hegemony of TEthelberht of Kent and which offered Oswald a client in the strategically important area between the southern Welsh, Wessex and Mercia. If so, he had made some progress towards rein¬ forcing his authority as ‘overking’ in the south-west Midlands. Oswald may, therefore, have dominated Mercia, but the few facts which are available are capable of a very different interpretation, with Penda already in situ in 635 as a regional ‘overking’ and biding his time - even stalking Oswald - before the inevitable trial of strength with the Bernicians at a date and on a field of his own choice.39 One factor which sustains a maximalist interpretation of Penda’s role during Oswald’s ‘overkingship’ is the apparent failure of Bernician Christianity to penetrate the central Midlands. If the Mercian court long anticipated a collision with Oswald, it was fundamental to their preparations that they excluded the Bernician cult, with its capacity to reinforce subordination to Oswald and undermine their own sacral kingship. The contest, when it came, was primarily one of nonChristian against Christian, Mercian against Bernician, and perhaps Woden against Christ, albeit that Penda had the support of Christian Powys when he brought Oswald to battle in 642. Had Oswald’s control of Mercia been as complete as has been suggested by some modern commentators, he might have been expected to have established Scottish clerics there. That he did not is the obvious interpretation to be placed on Bede’s treatment of his reign - provided, that is, that he was sufficiently knowledgable in that respect and adequately objective in his account. Both are, of course, important caveats, and ones which also apply to relations between Edwin and the Mercians (see above, p. 175), concerning which Bede was probably guilty of a degree of understate¬ ment at least. Oswald also faced hostility in Wales. He had himself killed Cadwallon of Gwynedd, following his murder of the Bernician king’s

219

The convert kings own half-brother. King yEthelfrith had previously killed Selyf ap Cynan, king of Powys, and other members of the warrior classes, at the battle of Chester. Oswald had, therefore, every reason to be in a state of feud with the two leading dynasties of northern Wales; and this hostil¬ ity arguably lost him any support which British kings and British Christianity might have been expected to yield him south of the Mersey and at the same time guaranteed Welsh support for Penda when he finally did battle with the Bernicians in 642. Oswald may have attempted to remedy the situation by replacing Cadwallon’s kin with an alternative dynasty,40 but this is no more than inference and just one of several possible interpretations of the little available evidence.

Crisis and continuity Oswald was killed at Maserfelth by the combined forces of Mercia and Powys on 5 August 642 (HE, hi, 9).41 In the ultimate test, his sponsor¬ ship of Aidan and the rituals appropriate to his God did not save Oswald and the result of the battle must have been a blow as much for Lindisfarne and its reputation as for the dynasty. This was the first time since 626 that the Christian God had been tested as a god of war against the non-Christian deities of the English, and His perceived failure nec¬ essarily lent considerable credibility to the alternatives. Oswald’s religious predilections were shared by his successor, his brother Oswiu, who remained Christian. This fact is worth stressing since it was a unique event among the English kingships at this date. The only other Christian English king who had hitherto been killed in battle was Edwin and his successor chose to revert to traditional cults and ideologies in response to the crisis. All other Christian ‘overkings’ and most kings had been succeeded by apostates or pagans - excepting only Sigeberht’s heir following his own early resignation (see above) and the Christian Eorcenberht of Kent, who was unique at this date for being a third-generation Christian king. He had recently succeeded King Eadbald (in 640: see below). That Oswiu did not apostatise may be due to several factors. Firstly, the new king was himself probably baptised as a child during a lengthy exile, so had far less reason than an adult convert to respect the potency of the traditional gods of his people. This may have retained some valid¬ ity even when the protection of that Godhead had been shown to be less effective than hitherto, but this was not necessarily a decisive factor, given the frequency of royal apostasy in England. Secondly, Aidan was

220

Dynasty and cult still in post and by now arguably an elder statesman as well as the ideo¬ logical strongman of the Bernician court. Thirdly, Oswiu was far closer in kinship to Oswald than was Osric to Edwin, for example, and owned a greater investment in his brother’s regime than had Osric in his cousin’s. Even so, Oswiu’s succession may not then have been so simple a matter as it now appears and the support of his brother’s clerics may well have been crucial to him, not least in setting aside the claims of Oswald’s young son, (Ethelwald. Following the latter’s birth, Oswald may well have hoped to leave the Bernician throne to his own lineal descendant, as Oswiu eventually contrived to do himself. If so, relations between Oswald and Oswiu may have been strained during much of the former’s reign. The recent suggestion that Oswiu spent part at least of it in exile in Ireland lends some credence to the notion,42 but other explanations of his paternity of Aldfrith are of course entirely feasible and it should be remembered that he produced other children during these same years (see below). Suffice it to say, therefore, that we should not assume that Oswiu was necessarily Oswald’s choice as heir and he may have had to force his way in against the wishes of his brother’s household to achieve the succession. From Oswiu’s perspective, 642 was an opportunity. The Lindisfarne community may well have been central to the process of legitimising his kingship and persuading the survivors from his brother’s regime to accept it. Aidan required protection for his mission and an adult king had more to offer in that respect than Oswald’s

young

son.

Oswiu’s

continuing

patronage

of

Ionan

Christianity may, therefore, have been the quid pro quo of their support for his candidacy in the crisis of 642. There may well have been a dis¬ tinctly conditional flavour to the relationship between Oswiu and Holy Island from the beginning. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, responsibility for Oswald’s death lay first and foremost with the heathen Penda. The Mercian king had probably already associated himself so closely with non-Christian English cult that any ruler intending to oppose him was all but forced to align himself with the alternative powers of protection offered by one brand or another of Christianity. Oswiu therefore had little option but to continue his brother’s patronage of Holy Island and the Irish mission. He had cause, however, to avoid exposing himself to the risks involved in battle against Penda, in case the fragility of the protection which Holy Island had offered Oswald should bring about his own downfall as well. This was to remain an issue for the next thirteen years,

221

The convert kings during which Oswiu seems to have consistently avoided military confrontation while Penda emphasised the efficacy of his gods by successful campaigns against each and every one of his Christian neigh¬ bours. It was Penda therefore who acquired a pre-eminent reputation as a god-protected, warrior-king of the kind which Gregory had dangled before 2Ethelberht as an inducement to convert (p. 98). Bede’s provi¬ dential vision of history required that God’s plan for His people accom¬ modate the undoubted setback of Oswald’s death, and his attempt to work through this problem probably underlies the profusion of mira¬ cles by which he overlaid and to a large extent discounted the Mercian triumph in battle (HE, ill, 9-13). Bede did not, however, invent St Oswald, whose cult was already well-established when he took up his quill. The sanctity of Oswald was obviously given a head start by the cir¬ cumstances in which he first demonstrated the efficacy of his God through victory in battle in the heartland of his own kingdom against a brutal aggressor. Whatever the reality of it, the story of a cross erected at ‘Heavenfield’ before the battle and the later certainty that it existed, and was well-frequented (and vandalised) by pilgrims, created a signif¬ icant popular foundation for the cult. Any similarity between this cross and the standing wooden pillars or posts of traditional Anglian cult centres can only have assisted in the transition of his people from pagan to Christian.43 So too did the sacral kingship of pagan England have some capacity to translate into the sanctity of the Christian era,44 albeit that there are numerous other, and more Christian, precedents to draw upon than sacral kingship, when seeking precedents for the cults of royal saints in early England. Oswald’s early popularity has been convincingly associated with his death in battle against non-Christians (notwithstanding the presence of numerous British Christians opposing him), and his subsequent dis¬ memberment, both of which have some potential for interpretation as martyrdom.45 Yet it must be stressed that Bede did not make this claim explicit on Oswald’s behalf, perhaps because this too would have high¬ lighted the power of non-Christians over Christians. Rather, the mira¬ cles which he detailed as proof of Oswald’s sanctity are healing miracles featuring people of modest status and of varying cultures.46 Admittedly, these may be predominately late stories, stemming from comparatively recent events at the time of writing, so relevant to the cult in the early eighth century rather than the mid-seventh, but the several intimations of both non-Christian and characteristically British religious ideas -

222

Dynasty and cult such as the horse in HE, hi, 9, and the close association of Oswald’s cult with wells — perhaps imply a conversion-period milieu in which pre¬ conversion world-pictures (both English and British) still prevailed.47 The Bernician community had been encouraged by successive Christianising kings to doubt the efficacy of the traditional rituals which had brought divine protection to their fathers. With those cults undermined, therefore, yet still disengaged from Christian belief systems, they may well have welcomed the notion of heroic power for good vested posthumously in their famous imperium-wielding king, whose memory many would have wished to preserve in whatever idiom. Such power was necessarily in defiance of the Mercian armies which had killed him and were still ravaging their land. In this sense, a popular cult of Oswald may have had some of the bi-cultural qualities often found in other theatres where Christianity and other religions collided under a Christianising leader.48 The result in popular terms may have been a complex amalgam of ancestor veneration, ‘heroisation’ and the deification of a recently potent, sacral king. Such would not have been a phenomenon which the Irish church would have recognised as a saint’s cult, yet it could be - and almost certainly was - used as a vehicle for Christianisation over the next few generations. Oswiu and Oswine Even so, Oswald’s cult received its earliest known impetus not from its popular appeal but from its promotion by his brother, who retrieved his head and arms from the battle field and deposited them at Lindisfarne and Bamburgh (see above). As Alan Thacker has recently suggested, the deposition of his head at Lindisfarne may have offended all sorts of sensibilities among the Irish clergy there, aware as they must have been of the importance of the human head in non-Christian rites.49 The crucial initiative came not from them but from Oswiu, and we are jus¬ tified in interpreting his foray to regain his brother’s remains from among his enemies, and his subsequent enshrinement of them as cult objects, as redolent with meaning for the foundation and legitimation of his own kingship. He was, therefore, serving his own needs and those of his people and not those of the Irish mission. His treatment of his brother’s remains marks Oswiu out as a imagi¬ native leader capable of borrowing from a variety of cultures to produce a complex response to his own particular political and ideological dif¬ ficulties. He was, indeed, unusually well-acquainted with several differ¬ ent visions of the world, by virtue of his long exile among the Irish and

223

The convert kings his subsequent place in his brother’s Bernician court - if such place he did actually have. Oswiu produced a half-Irish son in Aldfrith, so was intimately acquainted with at least one high-born Irish lady,50 and was reputed also to have married a British princess, Rieinmellt the grand¬ daughter of Rhun of Rheged (HB, lvii), apparently before himself attaining the Bernician throne (see below). Like Edwin and Oswald, therefore, Oswiu had an unusually wide breadth of cultural experience by the age of about thirty, when he succeeded his brother. The sub¬ sequent and rapid growth of St Oswald’s cult certainly suggests that Oswiu’s handling of the affair in his early years as king was inspira¬ tional. His presentation of it combined the Christian with the tradi¬ tional in a way that made it accessible and attractive to individuals of all religious traditions and with very different world views. It underlined too the centrality of both Bamburgh and Lindisfarne to the regime and so reinforced Bernician adhesion to himself. The cult was, therefore, a powerful unifying force within Bernicia in the 640s and that fact must go far to explaining its early and rapid rise to prominence.51 At this stage, Oswiu arguably needed all the assistance he could find. His brother’s death in battle destroyed his more general imperium over southern Britain and enabled Penda to detach Wessex, his only signifi¬ cant ally in the south, where Cynigils died c. 643 and was succeeded by Cenwealh, a non-Christian son who was married to Penda’s sister {HE, in, 7). The Mercian king then proceeded to impose himself by war on his neighbours. Bernicia was by no means immune to his attacks and these provided Bede and his informants with the backdrop to several of the miracles attributed to Aidan during the period 643-51 (HE, in, 16, 17). Although he may have retained his brother’s ‘overkingship’ of Dalriada, Oswiu was in danger of being isolated by Penda’s military and political achievements and being overwhelmed by an army aug¬ mented by the warriors of his brother’s erstwhile southern clients. At the same time he and the Bernicians dare not confront the Mercians in the years folowing Oswald’s death at Penda’s hands for fear that the Mercian’s gods were stronger in battle than the God of the Ionan church. The promotion of a dynastic cult of St Oswald was not Oswiu’s only early initiative. Oswald had arguably failed very largely because he had been unable to rally the southern Christian kings to his cause. The prob¬ lems were geographical - since Mercia had clearly the advantage of a central position - but also diplomatic. Oswiu could do nothing about the geography of the English kingdoms but he did seek to improve upon

224

Dynasty and cult his brother’s poor relations with others. He sent one of Aidan’s priests named Utta to Kent to seek the hand of Eanflsed in marriage, very early in his reign.32 Eanflasd was that eldest daughter of King Edwin by his marriage

to

the

Kentish

2Ethelburh,

who

had

been

the

first

Northumbrian to have been baptised in the year of her birth (626: HE, ii, 9; v, 24). As such, she may have been seen even as late as the 640s as a living symbol of Edwin’s Christianising initiatives. Had she been born a generation later, then she would most likely have been a nun from early childhood. As it was, she was in Kent under the protection of her cousin, King Eorcenberht, who had thrown his weight enthusiastically behind the Christianity of Canterbury and Archbishop Honorius,53 perhaps hopeful that divine support might enable him to revive the imperium of his grandfather out of the wreck of Oswald’s ‘overking¬ ship’ in 642. Oswiu’s urgent request for her hand signifies, therefore, a desire for reconciliation and alliance with a Kentish dynasty which was the only other royal family to have under its immediate protection one of the two principal Christian centres and authorities within England. It also implies that he sought to heal the feud between his own house and the descendants of King Edwin. By so doing, he might expect to reinforce the legitimacy of his claim to be king of the Deirans as well as the Bernicians. There can be no real doubt that Oswald, like his father, had ruled the Deirans as an outsider despite his Deiran maternity. vTthelfrith had married into the Deiran royal house in an effort to gain legitimacy and so reinforce his rule there. His youngest son now fol¬ lowed suit and arguably also hoped to profit by the combination of Eanflasd’s symbolic representation of Edwin’s Christianity with his own patronage of Lindisfarne. This was as much an alliance of the two Christian English cult centres as a marriage between two dynasties. Oswiu’s offer was accepted in Kent and the marriage took place. The acquiescence of the Kentish court suggests that, there too, the need was recognised for the Christian kings to draw together against the threat from Mercia. The Kentish regime could perhaps still recall its experi¬ ences under Raedwald’s imperium two decades previously. The decision was probably made easier by the recent death of King Eadbald, and Paulinus’s decline into old age — he died in 644 having come to England as an adult in 601. The passing of the old guard in both kingdoms argu¬ ably, therefore, assisted the task of reconciliation which Oswiu had put in train. This marriage had other important consequences for the clerisy.

225

The convert kings Edwin’s church had survived to this point, largely through the deter¬ mined work of James the Deacon, behind whom one must suspect the committed patronage of sections of the Deiran aristocracy, but it had been marginalised by Oswald’s commitment to Lindisfarne, to which York was presumably made subject. Once Oswiu regained control of Deira (see below), his marriage to Edwin’s daughter necessarily had some potential to restore the Roman ministry there to the political mainstream. Her household maintained Roman customs and had its own, Canterbury-derived chaplain, aptly named Romanus although he was almost certainly not one of Augustine’s missionaries since he was still alive in 664. He may have been a Northumbrian associate of Paulinus who had been an adherent of the family in exile since 633. Oswiu may, therefore, have been keen to clothe his regime in the robes of Oswald’s military reputation and in the protection of St Columba but he rapidly reversed his brother’s behaviour towards the oldest corner of Christian England and adopted an approach which owed more to Edwin’s policies than Oswald’s. Indeed, it may be fair to say that the rehabilitation of Edwin was begun by Oswiu as an act of polit¬ ical expediency at the very beginning of his reign. There is also the matter of Oswine. This young son of King Osric of the Deirans seems to have spent part at least of Oswald’s reign by the Thames, under the protection - or perhaps the benevolent detention of Oswald’s West Saxon father-in-law. Deiran aspirations for self-deter¬ mination necessarily focused on him once Edwin’s male descendants were all dead, and he returned as king following Oswald’s death in battle. The political context of his restoration is, however, obscure. Penda’s new-found influence in Wessex might suggest that Oswine came back to Deira as a Mercian puppet but Bede is reticent on the subject and this interpretation has received little modern support.54 Penda’s close ally, Cadwallon, had killed King Osric. Penda himself had already slain Oswine’s cousin, King Edwin’s son Eadfrith (HE, n, 20), with or without Oswald’s complicity. Although Eadfrith’s survival to 642 might otherwise have posed a serious challenge to Oswine’s succession, this remains a murder for which English sensibilities required vengeance. Given the bad blood which existed between them, therefore, Penda might well have had qualms about supporting another member of the dynasty, and the notion of Oswine as a Mercian puppet is probably best put aside. Oswine’s regnal dates are somewhat confused: Bede described him as Oswiu’s partner in kingship ‘in the first period of his reign’ (HE, in, 14)

226

Dynasty and cult and fixed his date of death as 20 August 651 (HE, v, 24), but also remarked that ‘he ruled the provincia of the Deiri for seven years in the greatest prosperity’. These seven years are likely to be full regnal years, in which case 642 belongs to Oswald, but a discrepancy still remains. One explanation may be that Bede assumed that some part of his reign was characterised by warfare, so was less than prosperous. Either the first year - when Penda may well have ravaged Yorkshire - or the last — when Oswiu and Oswine were both in arms - could have been intended. Whichever, it seems probable that Bede considered that Oswine obtained the kingship of the Deirans c. 642-4, so still within the initial phase of crisis which characterised Oswiu’s accession, and that he did so without significant external support. Oswine was, therefore, perhaps the Deiran choice as their own king. As such he was presumably expected to champion the Deirans versus the Bernicians and even revive the Deira-centred regimes of Osric and Edwin. Oswiu’s marriage to Edwin’s daughter should be viewed in this context as an attempt to end the feud between his own family and the immediate kin of Edwin (and also the Kentish royal family), so as to reinforce his own claim to the kingship of the Deirans by posing as heir to Kings Edwin and TElle. It was arguably, therefore, a direct challenge to Oswine’s kingship and the succession of a candidate sprung from a different line of the Deiran royal house. We are entirely dependent on Bede for a portrait of Oswine and his career. His account is curious (HE, in, 14), most particularly because he so obviously favoured the Deiran king over the Bernician brother of, and successor to, King Oswald. Put simply, Oswine was represented by Bede as the moral heir of Oswald and as the next patron of Bishop Aidan. Given Bede’s Bernicia-centred vision of history, the treatment of this episode is exceptional. He may have felt obliged to paint a favourable picture of Oswine on account of the infamy of his murder by Oswiu, which was clearly well-remembered still in the 730s, yet Bede seems to go beyond what this might have required in extolling the king’s virtues. Perhaps he was influenced by the biblical narrative of Saul’s relationship with David,55 but even so his characterisation requires some explana¬ tion. Bede accentuated the effect of his narrative by placing this passage at the very beginning of his treatment of Oswiu’s kingship, so largely out of chronological context - but at a point where his audience might have expected recognition of Oswiu’s virtues, not publication of his murder some eight years later of a kinsman who was portrayed as the ideal

227

The convert kings Christian prince. It is possible that Bede’s treatment of the two kings reflects later clerical opinions of both lineages after the reintegration of the

Deiran

royal

house

to

political

respectability

in

a

united

Northumbria. Even so, there are grounds here for suspicion that Bede was acquainted with a tradition which was hostile to Oswiu but favoured Oswine. If so, that perhaps descended from Aidan himself and circulated within Bernicia even down to Bede’s adult life (see below). Oswine was portrayed by Bede as a patron and close associate of Bishop Aidan. Oswine’s father, Osric, had been converted during Edwin’s reign, then apostatised at the start of his own. Oswine, proba¬ bly himself a convert before 633 then perhaps pagan once more along¬ side his father in 633-4, had taken refuge among the non-Christian West Saxons, but perhaps there witnessed their flirtation with conversion during the 630s. He had, therefore, an extremely mixed religious back¬ ground and a wide experience of the political utility of cult. That he returned to Deira in c. 643 as a Christian says much for his perception of the ideologies and rituals then on offer and his own political advan¬ tage. Mercia’s commitment to the non-Christian gods of the English presumably rendered them unpalatable to a northern king keen to emulate Edwin’s glorious past supremacy. Most of a generation of Christian missionaries of one sort or another had perhaps by this stage begun to impact on the northern Anglian elites to the extent that they now identified themselves more closely with Christian than nonChristian cult. Yet the closeness of Oswine’s association with Aidan is remarkable. One might, perhaps, have expected the Deiran king to have wished to revive the see of York and so have re-established in the north St Peter’s ministry, which had been so crucial a feature of Deiran imperium in the past. This did not, however, occur. Oswiu’s realignment with Kent (above) may have denied the Deiran king this option, since the southern metropolitan was the only figure competent to make an appointment to the York diocese under the arrangements made by Pope Honorius (see above, p. 185). With Penda’s star in the ascendant, King Eorcenberht is unlikely to have felt it opportune to alienate the Bernician king who had so recently sought and gained his own friendship via marriage. Faced by the choice of an alliance with Oswiu or with Oswine, the Kentish king seems to have opted for the dynasty which had more recently exer¬ cised the greater power. The future of York may even have been one consideration in Oswiu’s mind when he sent to Canterbury to negotiate the marriage.

228

Dynasty and cult Oswine may, therefore, have had little option but to compete with Oswiu for influence with the existing bishop of both Bernicia and Deira. Bede’s text suggests that Oswine did this to good effect, becom¬ ing much beloved by the Scottish bishop for his many virtues as a Christian king. This competition has an obvious dynastic and political context. At this date, diocese, provincia and kingship were overlapping concepts and the notion of two, rival dynasts heading different peoples but sharing a single bishop and cult centre was entirely anomalous. Looking at this from Oswiu’s perspective, he had good reason to anticipate that his dynasty’s special relationship with Holy Island and his brother’s Eigenkirche there should have been sufficient to ensure that Aidan upheld Oswiu’s own interests. If he was responsible for it, then Oswiu’s defence of Holy Island’s authority in Oswine’s Yorkshire might have been expected to have reinforced the mutuality of that relationship between king and bishop and given Oswiu a significant advantage in dealing with Oswine. Aidan’s assertion of the authority of Holy Island over Oswine’s Yorkshire would have been understood as an extension of Bernician hegemony, and Oswiu probably anticipated that result. Instead, Oswiu found his rival cultivating a special relationship with Aidan and luring him towards Deira. Indeed, there is no evidence of cordiality between Oswiu and Aidan in Bede’s account, or even of their proximity. Oswiu was, therefore, in danger not just of losing the oppor¬ tunity to impose his own hegemony on Oswine but also of finding his bishop ranged against him, with all the potential advantage which that might give his rival for influence, even in Bernicia.56 What was ultimately at stake, therefore, was royal power throughout the north - which had by 642 been in the hands of a single king for all but one or two of the last thirty-eight years. Aidan and his mission had been established in the era of Oswald’s undisputed power and the uni¬ versality of his remit survived Oswald’s death. In the 640s, influence with the figurehead of that extensive diocese was critical to both the dynasts who sought to profit by Oswald’s fall. Oswine urgently culti¬ vated Aidan and took into his service numerous warriors drawn from many nations. Both kings wished, therefore, to reinstate the wider kingships of their own illustrious ancestors in their own interest. Once Oswiu had lost the struggle for Aidan’s ear, war was his only option. Murder became necessary only because Oswine declined to confront the supposedly larger, Bernician army. He had hitherto won the competition for power. Oswiu’s murder of Oswine was the more heinous because of the

229

The convert kings kinship which existed between the two kings. This was a complex issue, since both Oswiu and his queen were related to Oswine. Oswine was the greatgrandson of Yffi, yElle’s reputed father, while Queen Eanflsed was his greatgrandaughter. Oswiu descended via his mother the same distance from the same figure. All shared, therefore, a common ances¬ tor at the third remove, which was a relationship which had a signifi¬ cance in terms of vengeance and wergild. Hence arose the problem of a crime within the kin, which conventional English custom had no means of compensating.57 The matter was resolved by the queen’s foundation of a monastic church at Gilling, where the murder had occurred, for the redemption of the souls of both kings. The new community was placed under the care of Trumhere, whom Bede described as trained by the Irish but kin to Queen Eanflsed and a near relative of Oswine (HE, hi, 14, 24). Cult, therefore, provided a solution to the intractable moral, social and judicial problem which Oswine’s murder had created and enabled compensation to be paid to Oswine’s close kin via a wellendowed abbacy. But that crime may well have caused Aidan finally to despair of his mission: he died just twelve days after Oswine, on 31 August 651. What had caused the earlier coolness between Oswiu and Aidan? Bede retained an eloquent silence on the matter so the answer is neces¬ sarily only a matter of inference. One issue was perhaps Oswiu’s mar¬ riage to Eanflaed. This occurred after the coming together of Oswiu and Holy Island at the outset of his reign - so too late to affect clerical support for Oswiu at that initial stage - but very soon thereafter. There are two potential difficulties: firstly Oswiu’s mother was either sister or half-sister to Eanflasd’s father, making them first cousins, and this was well within the prohibited degrees of relationship specified by even the most relaxed church laws concerning consanguinity at this period;58 secondly, it is by no means certain that both Oswiu’s previous partners were dead c. 643 and Aidan is likely to have been in a position to know. Bede passed over the issue with characteristic reticence (HE, iv, 26), but left his audience with some doubt as to the paternity of Aldfrith, Oswiu’s Irish son, and this may well be relevant given later doubts con¬ cerning the paternity

and legitimacy of

Columbanus

critical

was

so

of

the

other royal

marital

claimants.

practices

of

the

Merovingians that he found it necessary to leave Burgundy just one generation earlier. Aidan had as good reason to consider Oswiu’s mar¬ riage to Edwin’s daughter to be unlawful and his children bastards. He may additionally have considered Oswiu a bigamist, but that is beyond

230

Dynasty and cult proof. If he reacted by throwing his weight behind Oswine, then this was highly inflammatory of the underlying rivalry between the two northern kings. If this was the cause of friction between Oswiu and Aidan - and it may not of course have been the only one - it neatly illustrates Oswiu’s pragmatism. His marriage to Eanflsed brought him a series of desirable political objectives vis-a-vis the Deiran kingship, amity with Kent and even some influence over the vacant York diocese. He was not the man to allow a little matter of church canon to stand in his way. Nor is he likely to have appreciated the strength of clerical feeling on this issue, since no such prohibitions existed in pagan England - although they will have done among the Scots. His cavalier treatment of the Church at a later date (see below) may, therefore, have a precedent in his mar¬ riage to Eanflsed. Cult, conflict and colonialism: Bernician religious policies, 651—5 Despite the opprobrium which undoubtedly attached to him, Oswiu came out of the crisis of 651 with his position much strengthened and with far more room for manoeuvre than he had previously enjoyed. Oswine’s death brought an end to the Deiran dynasty as a serious rival to his own, so closed the competition between the two families for influ¬ ence with the Irish mission. Aidan’s death removed the powerful founder of Holy Island, whose independence had perhaps threatened Oswiu’s very survival. Aidan’s replacement, Finan (651-61), owed his appointment to Oswiu’s continuing support for Lindisfarne and Finan was perhaps more wary of the conditional nature of that support than his predecessor. He had necessarily to find his feet as bishop of the northern Angles and could not play one king off against another. He was, therefore, in a far weaker position vis-a-vis Oswiu than Aidan had been since Oswald’s death. Despite his reputation for a fiery temper,59 he seems to have served Oswiu well and ignored whatever difficulties the king’s marriage had created. After 651, therefore, Oswiu’s influence over Holy Island was restored and his Irish bishop reintegrated into his regime. With Oswine dead, Oswiu set about extending his own influence in the wider political world. The 640s had witnessed substantial Mercian raids into the heartland of Bernicia which Oswiu had felt unable to intercept, and such were to continue - intermittently at least - in the early 650s.60 There is no evidence that Oswiu responded in kind. He is unlikely to have felt either strong enough or sufficiently confident of

231

The convert kings divine protection to have invaded Penda’s Mercia, particularly since he had at this date no military reputation of his own to inspire confidence in a conflict with his oft-victorious neighbour. The marriage of his son Alhfrith to Penda’s daughter Cyneburh may have been an attempt to negotiate a peace which would give him a degree of security from attack. The date is unknown but both parties are likely to have been born during the 630s - so of marrigeable age about now - and a Mercian-Bernician marriage had some potential to give Oswiu a free hand in Deira. There is a deafening silence regarding the religious prac¬ tices of Cyneburh which may disguise her continuing paganism, at least until her father’s death and the discrediting of non-Christian cult (fol¬ lowing Penda’s death in battle against a Christian king) in 655. This marriage was not, however, Oswiu’s only contact with his south¬ ern neighbours. Rather, he sought to promote his own interests via the spread of his cult into southern England, and this must be seen as much a political challenge to Penda as a simple desire to further the faith. To take these initiatives in the order in which Bede presented them, Peada was the first important convert in the Midlands. He was one of Penda’s several sons and perhaps the eldest of them. Penda had rolled up the numerous but obscure small kingships and peoples of the south-east Midlands and given them to Peada as a sub-kingship (making him a princeps) of the Middle Angles (HE, hi, 21). This provided Peada with a power base and a degree of independence from his father but his con¬ sequent absence from the Mercian court may have threatened his wider interests in relation to his several brothers or half-brothers. Penda’s marital affairs are beyond recall but the examples of Ida and 2Ethelfrith make it likely that this long-lived pagan would have had several part¬ ners, whose children are likely to have competed for the inheritance. Penda was an active warleader already in 633. By 653 the Mercian succession was probably a live issue within the royal house and this may have had repercussions far beyond Mercia. Whether or not this was his reasoning, Peada approached Oswiu for the hand of his daughter Alhflsed in marriage and agreed in return to accept his own and his followers’ baptism and a mission of northern clergy to the Middle Angles. The ceremony occurred at one of Oswiu’s estates near the Roman Wall with Bishop Finan officiating. Although Bede forbore to mention it, Oswiu is likely to have been intimately involved in the ceremony and may well have stood godfather to the Mercian prince (see p. 216). When the young couple returned home, they took with them one

232

Dynasty and cult Irish priest and three English ones who had been trained by the Irish. At least three of them were either themselves in receipt of royal patronage or close kin to others who were: Cedd was soon to become a bishop and the founder of Lastingham, and regularly returned to Northumbria thereafter (see below); Adda was the brother of Utta, who had been Oswiu’s ambassador to Kent to negotiate his marriage and had been rewarded with the abbacy of Gateshead; Diuma was soon after to become bishop of the Middle Angles and Mercians under Oswiu’s patronage (in 655). Only Betti is otherwise unknown. Given the poverty of our information, this is an impressive record which suggests that these clergy had been hand-picked for their loyalty. Such men could be relied upon to act as Oswiu’s agents in Middle Anglia and further his political interests on the south-eastern edges of Mercia. That Peada sought baptism among the northern Angles rather than at Canterbury is important but this is unlikely to reflect deep and long¬ standing cultural affinities.61 Rather, it was probably the marriage which Peada wanted, which gave him kinship with King Oswiu and the support of the second most powerful king in England. His initiative was rewarded two years later but arguably far less generously than he would have wished: following Oswiu’s overthrow of Penda in 655, Peada became ruler of the southern Mercians for the remainder of his (admit¬ tedly short) life (HE, hi, 24). Oswiu arguably gained far more than Peada from their association and, like the political pragmatist that he was, he seized his opportunity when Penda’s son presented it to him. For the first time a Bernician king had been enabled to inject reverence for his cult and clerics into the orbit of the Mercian kingship. Their presence under royal protection among the Middle Angles much improved Oswiu’s contacts with potential allies in East Anglia and with the court of his kin by marriage in Kent - although neither need have welcomed Bernician interest in the region at this point. His newly established kinship with the Middle Anglian court and his role as protector of the Christian clergy and converts much enhanced Oswiu’s prestige vis-a-vis Peada’s kin. Middle Anglia had been formed by Penda in the Mercian interest. His son’s marriage and conversion threatened to detach it from Mercia in favour of Bernicia and all without a blow struck in anger. This was not, however, the whole story. Bede stressed the role of Alhfrith, Oswiu’s son and already by 653 Peada’s brother-in-law, in per¬ suading Peada to accept baptism. This young man was probably the eldest of the children of Oswiu then within Northumbria (so excluding

233

The convert kings Aldfrith) and was certainly adult in 655, when he was a combatant at the battle at the Winwced.61 Thereafter he was made sub-king of the Deirans. He is not, therefore, likely to have been the son of Queen Eanflsed, none of whose children can have been born before c. 644 at the very earliest. Neither was Peada’s bride, Alhflaed, who must have been of an age to marry in 653 and the prefix of whose name perhaps implies that she shared a mother with Alhfrith. Whether or not these were the children of Oswiu by a British princess,63 both had good reason to feel threatened by the prospect of their father’s younger offspring (by the influential and well-connected Queen Eanflsed) coming to maturity before his death and then contesting the succession. Prince Ecgfrith was at this date about eight years old. An alliance cemented by marriage between the eldest son of Oswiu and an elder son of Penda therefore had some potential to enhance the chances of both to succeed their fathers. Peada may well have viewed his shift of religious affiliation in 653 very much in these terms, with spiritual considerations very much subordinate to dynastic ones. It was arguably Peada’s religious and diplomatic volte face which facilitated the conversion of King Sigeberht of the East Saxons (HE, hi, 22), who was his south-eastern neighbour. Bede claimed that this occurred ‘at the instance of King Oswiu’ and portrayed Sigeberht as a friend of the Bernician king and a frequent visitor to the north. Oswiu was visualised as using the same sort of arguments against idol worship as those propounded by Pope Boniface to the pagan King Edwin64 but this reported speech is obviously bibilical in inspiration and is as likely as not to have originated with Bede himself.65 More importantly, Sigeberht’s presence on a royal estate north of the Tyne and his baptism there by Bishop Finan arguably reflects an unequal relationship between Sigeberht and Oswiu, by now (supposing that Bede’s narrative sequence is correct) the father-in-law of Peada, his neighbour in Middle Anglia and the sponsor of Irish Christianity there. Sigeberht’s request to Oswiu for priests and the latter’s recall of Cedd from Middle Anglia and dis¬ patch to the East Saxons are all redolent of an opportunistic Bernician colonisation of the region.66 The similarities between these two conver¬ sion episodes suggest that Sigeberht’s conversion occurred late in 653 or early in 654, that is before Penda’s attack on East Anglia in 654 restored his influence throughout the region. Thereafter, Penda’s defeat and death in 655 allowed Oswiu to sponsor a very different system of eccle¬ siastical organisation in central England (Figure 8). Cedd’s success as a missionary was rewarded by Finan, on one of his

234

Dynasty and cult

Figure 7

The organisation of the Anglo-Irish church c. 654: the Northumbrian

clerisy launched missions to the Middle Angles and East Saxons under Oswiu’s protection.

many journeys back to Holy Island, by his consecration as bishop. This promotion was the first of an Englishman at Irish hands to episcopal rank and it was also the first rift in the monumental unity of the Bernician church under a single religious head. Cedd’s promotion was described by Bede as if an entirely clerical act,67 yet his role as a mission¬ ary who was first dispatched, then recalled, then once more dispatched,

235

The convert kings

Figure 8

The organisation of the Anglo-Irish church c. 655: following the

battle by the Winwced, Oswiu organised his new Mercian kingship as a large diocese which dominated central England.

by the king makes it clear that his promotion was an act of royal policy. To offer the parallel of the Roman church, this appointment bestowed on Lindisfarne a quasi-metropolitan status, although there is little evi¬ dence other than a single and arguably apocryphal comment concern¬ ing Colman in the Vita Wilfridi that such was ever openly claimed or acknowledged before 664.68 This does, however, mark the first impor-

236

Dynasty and cult

tant step in the elevation of Lindisfarne to an authority closer to that of Iona or Canterbury. Given the good pastoral reasons for sub-divison of Lindisfarne’s responsibilities, the foundation of more dioceses looks to have been seriously overdue. Reluctance up to this date probably reflected Oswiu’s preference for a centralised system of patronage within the Bernician Church in tandem with his own kingship. Cedd’s appointment revived the East Saxon diocese, which Mellitus had abandoned some time after 616, but re-ordered and re-focused it on the Bernician and Irish church. It may even have been an attempt by Oswiu to re-establish the see of London, and claim for it the metropol¬ itan status which Gregory had granted it in 601, but Oswiu is not likely to have been aware of that plan in any detail (see below, p. 263) and this thesis

is

not

sustained

by

Cedd’s

activities

thereafter.

The

Northumbrian bishop is identified by Bede not with London itself but with coastal or estuarine monastic sites such as Bradwell-on-Sea and Tilbury.69 The idea of Iona and Lindisfarne — sea-islands and monaster¬ ies both - was far removed from the shell of Roman London which Mellitus had occupied; and a search for sites which fulfilled the func¬ tions of a monastery (as that was perceived within the Irish Church) probably conditioned the geography and constitution of Cedd’s min¬ istry (Ligure 7). His was to be, therefore, a thoroughly Irish church for the East Saxons and not just a reconstitution of the Romanist see. The appointment of a bishop reflects Oswiu’s confidence in the amity of his friend, but that bishop would still be a northern Angle, whose first loyalty was to Bernicia. The foundation of this diocese constituted an act of politico-ecclesi¬ astical colonialism which challenged the authority of Canterbury in the very heartland of the southern archdiocese. If Cedd’s consecration occurred in 654, then it coincided with a lengthy interregnum at Canterbury: Honorius, the last of the Italian archbishops, died on 30 September 653 and was not succeeded by the West Saxon Deusdedit until the spring of 655.70 Since all metropolitans up to this point had been Italians, there were no suitable candidates remaining in 653 and Canterbury both felt, and was, forgotten by a papacy which had turned its back on the Gregorian initiative. An atmosphere of isolation and neglect was exacerbated by the comparative powerlessness of the Kentish king to further the interests of his clergy outside his own immediate kingdom or in opposition to the Anglo-Irish church. The only bishop at this date certainly loyal to Canterbury but outside Kent was Berhtgisl (otherwise Boniface) of the East Angles, appointed by

237

The convert kings Honorius in 652 so only newly in post at this date and incapable of pro¬ viding real leadership from within a kingship which was being severely battered by the Mercians. Canterbury was, therefore, in an unprece¬ dented state of crisis in 654. York had been subordinated to Lindisfarne. It may well have seemed possible to Oswiu that the Canterbury church could likewise be induced to abandon Rome and acknowledge the authority of Lindisfarne and Iona. That Cedd’s appointment apparently coincided with an interregnum in the southern archdiocese is unlikely to be coincidental. Oswiu may well have thought to exploit the situation to make himself the principal patron of Christianity in Britain, and his Irish bishop of Holy Island the principal religious authority. Deusdedit’s appointment to Canterbury in 655 followed Penda’s brutal re-establishment of his own authority as the southern hegemon in East Anglia. That fact must have reverberated around the south-east and the south-east Midlands, and been intended so to do. Peada can have had little option but to abandon his initiatives. King Sigeberht was isolated from his Bernician protector and marginalised. At Canterbury, expectation that the ever-victorious Mercian king would next move against Oswiu and his Irish church revived King Eorcenberht’s freedom of manoeuvre and Deusdedit’s appointment may reflect his determina¬ tion to sustain the independent authority in Britain of the church of Canterbury.

Deusdedit

was

consecrated

by

Ithamar,

bishop

of

Rochester. It is a salutary reminder of the interdependence of ecclesias¬ tical and political policy that it was arguably the military reputation of pagan Penda and expectation of his victory over Oswiu that created cir¬ cumstances favourable for this to occur. That they chose a West Saxon as the first English bishop of Canterbury may imply that Cenwealh, king of the West Saxons, involved himself in the appointment as co¬ sponsor with Eorcenberht.71 CEthelwald Oswald’s son, CEthelwald, became sub-king of the Deirans, probably soon after Oswine’s death in 651. The reason for his preferment is obscure, given that Oswiu’s own son Alhfrith was probably of roughly the same age and is very likely to have wanted this role for himself. Two factors suggest themselves but there may well have been others: as the great Oswald’s son, CEthelwald may have enjoyed considerable support among the Bernicians, so have been the diplomatic choice for a major sub-kingship; secondly, it may have seemed wise to Oswiu to distance himself and his immediate family from the Deirans, given the nature of

238

Dynasty and cult Oswine’s death. Whatever the cause, therefore, CEthelwald emerged as king of the Deirans between 651 and 655,72 and probably saw this appointment as a step towards his father’s kingship of both the two northern Anglian peoples as successor to Oswiu himself. CEthelwald also seems to have had his own religious policy. He was the Christian son of a Christian father and had every reason to be an enthusiastic patron of Lindisfarne and Oswald’s cult. Initially he patronised Cedd’s brother, Caelin, but through him made contact with the newly appointed bishop and secured his close co-operation. What CEthelwald apparently sought was Cedd’s authority as a bishop and the stature deriving from his reputation in founding his own Eigenkircbe in Deira ‘where he might pray and hear the word and where he might [eventually] be buried’ (HE, in, 23). Cedd’s was, after all, only the second bishopric to be established by the Irish mission and the only one of which the incumbent was probably frequently in Deira. Given that he fell from power in 655, CEthelwald must have instigated this relation¬ ship very soon after Cedd’s consecration in 653-4. His gift of estates to resource a monastery was arguably intended to be a defining moment for his own regime and he was clearly displeased when Cedd chose a site which was inconvenient to himself. That he accepted the bishop’s choice implies that he considered the association important. By engaging Cedd in this enterprise the Deiran king was perhaps seeking a special relation¬ ship with the newer, more junior and more southerly bishop of the Bernician-centred church, one who may have seemed the natural ally of his own newer, more junior and more southerly kingship. He may even have sought by this means to associate Sigeberht of the East Saxons with his own interest in opposition to Alhfrith and Peada.

Crisis and victory It may be, therefore, that the religious policies pursued by the Bernician leadership were more diverse, more complex, more immediate and more dynastic in purpose than has generally been recognised. Each of the senior secular figures seems to have pursued his own objectives - and those objectives continually changed with circumstances. The measures they adopted could involve the clergy in dynastic politics and such mea¬ sures exploited cult for their own purposes. The royal family certainly saw priests and sacerdotal authority as weapons to be deployed in their own struggles both inside and outside the dynasty, in pursuit of objec¬ tives which were personal, fundamentally secular and very immediate.

239

The convert kings The result could be the foundation of a diocese or a well-resourced monastery which might then long outlast the short-term context which conditioned foundation. Yet over all throughout these years lay the rivalry of Oswiu and Penda, of Bermcia and Mercia, and of Christian bishop and nonChristian priest. Neither the Bernician nor the Mercian elite were unified by this overreaching contest yet the principals were consistently inclined to enhance their own positions at the expense of the others. Oswiu’s methods were less direct than those of Penda and he seems to have sought to avoid armed confrontation. However, his religious colonialism in the early 650s provoked the Mercian king to war. The Mercian invasion of East Anglia is undated but arguably occurred in 654. Penda then destroyed King Anna and his forces. With the East Angles brought to heel as clients and his flank secure, Penda invaded the north once again in 655. Oswiu had won the peace but it remained to be seen whether or not he could survive the resulting invasion by a large army led by the greatest warrior-king of the day. Penda led a force comprising Welsh, Mercians and East Angles on a great raid into Northumbria, where he was joined by sub-king (Ethelwald of the Deirans who seems to have pinned his hopes on the expected Mercian victory delivering him the northern kingship. The allies pursued Oswiu to the northern limits of his realms (HB, lxv) where he attempted to buy peace at the cost of a vast treasure and apparently surrendered his son Ecgfrith to the Mercians as a hostage (HE, iii,24). When negotiations broke down, war became inevitable. Oswiu had long avoided fighting Penda and must have resolved to do so at this junc¬ ture with great trepidation and only as a last resort. He went to great lengths to conciliate his own God and enlist his protection. First he swore to give the vast ransom he had offered Penda instead to God. When Oswiu finally came to fulfil his vows, he gave the Church twelve estates, each of ten hides, to establish the obligatory twelve monaster¬ ies, and this was probably intended to be equivalent to the great trea¬ sure he had promised. Furthermore, Oswiu borrowed something from the strategies adopted by Edwin in 626 and which had then produced the required outcome as regards divine aid: Edwin had offered God the baptism of Eanflasd, now Oswiu’s queen, and twelve retainers; Oswiu made a conditional promise of his own virgin daughter as a nun and this too was later fulfilled. By these vows Oswiu sought to so propitiate God that He would

240

Dynasty and cult protect him in this his first battle and give him victory over the hitherto unconquerable Penda. His promises betray his anxiety but they also offer a rare insight into the pragmatism of a conversion-period king in search of protection in extremis. Having raised his own morale and that of his forces by these tactics, Oswiu attacked his enemy on the banks of the River Winwced and destroyed Penda and those of his warriors who awaited the onslaught - for the Welsh and CEthelwald did not. Penda was killed and decapitated in the late autumn of 655 and his destruction sounded the death-knell of English paganism as a political ideology and public religion.73 Their patronage of Ionan Christianity had long given the Bernicians significant organisational advantages in the competition, for power and influence, which they had waged with Penda. The strategic use of baptism had enabled both royal brothers to reinforce marital alliances and ‘overkingship’ via complex ceremonies in which they and their priests took a leading role. Oswiu had success¬ fully introduced priests who owed allegiance to his own regime - and even a bishop - deep into southern England, where they were protected by his clients and kin by marriage and could act as his agents. There they tended, and had arguably been intended, to encroach on the authority of the only alternative fount of Christian authority among the English capable of resisting Lindisfarne. Oswiu’s deployment of a highly regu¬ lated cult and a priesthood with clear paths of authority and patronage disguised the fragility of his military power. The traditional rituals and deities which sustained and legitimised King Penda offered few of these advantages, for all his divine ancestry. The Mercian king had experimented with the creation of client kingships for his own close kin — Middle Anglia is the only certain example but the Magonscete of the Herefordshire region may be another, 4 - but this strategy was equally available to a Christian king and was used by Oswiu in Deira. Penda’s ultimate failure owed much to his inability to centralise political and sacral power, leaving him over-dependent on military might to achieve his ends. In 655 Penda’s luck finally ran out when his polyglot army fell apart before the crucial battle. By contem¬ porary standards, his gods failed him in the ensuing conflict but it is arguably more significant that they had failed him during the previous years of comparative peace. His enemies’ Christian cult provided far more versatile strategies by which to further their political interests, and Oswiu especially achieved much without recourse to war and from a position of comparative military weakness. Penda’s own reportedly benign attitude towards Christianity (HE, ill,

241

The convert kings 21) was characteristic of the open cosmology of non-Christian AngloSaxons, pre-conversion. Bede remarked that he did not actively ban Christian teaching from his own Mercia. Rather he expected the lives of converts to reflect their faith. Bede imagined, therefore, that Penda objected not to genuine and well-informed initiates but to the innumer¬ able adherents of the period, whose conversions were superficial and whose lives changed not at all from the traditional mores of the pagan English. Such were recognised by Bede in 2Ethelberht’s Kent (HE, n, 5) and they were the norm in every mass-conversion throughout the first half of the century; but the entire issue returns us to the problem of dis¬ tinguishing ‘adhesion’ from ‘conversion’, as outlined in chapter 1. The baptism of Penda’s son Peada and his immediate associates, for what were transparently political reasons, introduced such ill-informed converts to the highest echelons of Mercian society. Whether or not any priest actively proselytised among the Mercian elite (as opposed to the Middle Anglian court of Peada) while Penda yet lived is less clear from Bede’s text than some modern writers have thought,75 but there is only a two-year period for consideration. For that reason as much as any other, it seems unlikely that much if any missionary activity occurred among the Mercians in the absence of the royal protection and encour¬ agement which was so important a condition everywhere else in England. If some brave priest did accompany Peada on a visit to his father’s court and there attempted to convert the Mercians, it seems unlikely that many took advantage of the opportunity while Penda was alive. Such priests were, after all, either Irish or Northumbrian and under the ultimate patronage of King Oswiu. Such was no passport to influence among the Mercian elite at this date. The rise and fall of Oswiu s imperium: religious colonialism 655-64 In 655, Oswiu won a resounding victory over the greatest warrior-king of his generation. By so doing, he demonstrated to contemporaries the efficacy of his Christian God as a war god - which was something pre¬ viously but only partially revealed in c. 634/5 when Oswald destroyed the equally Christian Cadwallon. For earlier proof of the Christian God’s efficacy versus the traditional deities of the English, it is neces¬ sary to return to 626 and Edwin’s victory over the West Saxons. Oswiu had arguably lived in the shadow of the victories won by his brother and father-in-law in the intervening years and of Penda’s even greater, and ever-growing, reputation. Now he had added a brilliant military success to his already well-developed political skills, and proved himself the

242

Dynasty and cult mightiest of all. Just for a little while, the world as he knew it was at his feet and he could push out his influence both north and south, to be acknowledged as king and ‘overking’ by more communities than even Edwin before him.76 In Bede’s opinion, it was Oswiu who ‘converted the people of the Mercians and the provinces around them to the grace of the Christian faith’,77 in the aftermath of his victory over Penda. The mechanism for this initiative was a new bishopric to which Diuma, the Irish mission¬ ary among Peada’s Middle Angles since 653, was now consecrated by Finan. His promotion replicated, and depended on, Oswiu’s own, for in the aftermath of victory the Bernician king made himself king of the northern and larger part of Mercia, in partnership with his son-in-law Peada to whom he gave the lesser kingship of the Mercians south of the Trent. This may have been little more than his previous Middle Anglia.78 Oswiu also made himself king of Lindsey and Hatfield by reason of his victory over Penda. Oswiu was to be king of numerous peoples but they were organised in two great congeries focusing on the Mercians and Bernicians. Beneath him were to be two principal sub-kings attached to his own dynasty, his son Alhfrith over the Deirans and his son-in-law, Peada of the South Mercians. With their support, Oswiu would himself wield imperium over all the kings of Britain. A significant feature of his power was partnership with ecclesiastical authority. The see of Lindisfarne retained its oversight of Oswiu’s Bernicia and Alhfrith’s Deira. The new Mercian see had comparable authority throughout Oswiu’s Midland kingship and Peada’s sub-kingship. The new circumstances of 655 over¬ took Oswiu’s promotion of Cedd to a more limited southern bishopric for the Irish Church the year before. Then Oswiu took the opportunity to establish a diocese under the protection of his friend and client, the king of the East Saxons. Now, the focus had to be on Oswiu’s newly acquired Mercia. Cedd’s ministry continued, but Oswiu needed the spiritual stature peculiar to an Irishman for his new initiative, to match Finan’s see based on Holy Island and also perhaps to underline the absence of a foreign appointee at Canterbury. Bede explained Diuma’s vast new diocese by reference to a shortage of bishops but Finan could of course have consecrated more had he - and Oswiu - wished. There was surely no shortage of candidates available, but the decision was for just one new appointment. The Mercian see was a matter of design rather than accident. Lindsey and its existing churches, and more particularly the churches in and

243

The convert kings around Lincoln itself,79 may have provided Diuma with a base for his efforts. The Irish mission had initially been established in the very heartland of Bernicia, close to royal Bamburgh and on neighbouring and perhaps equally royal Lindisfarne (see above, p. 210). Oswiu seems to have had that precedent in mind when establishing Bishop Diuma, providing him with a regional base which already had a long, if dis¬ continuous, history of association with northern Christian kingship and its ‘imperial’ pretensions. In this respect, it was primarily his fatherin-law, King Edwin, who provided the better known precedents, with his prefect’s church at Lincoln and mass-baptisms at Tiowulfingaccestir.80 However, Oswald too had been a Christian king of Lindsey and under his patronage at least one early foundation of Irish monks may have prospered, although such need not have survived his fall. Bardney was in many respects the obvious candidate, since it was already established before Osthryth and 2Ethelrsed patronised it in the last quarter of the seventh century (HE, in, 11), but the hostility felt by its brethren to Oswald’s remains suggests that this foundation did not predate the «

Mercian reclamation of Lindsey. Partney is another possibility but earlier monasteries with which Diuma may have been associated could have been obscured by the later unpopularity of the Bernician crown in the region. Wherever precisely he was based, Diuma probably focused his activities on royal sites in Lindsey and perhaps also Hatfield, travel¬ ling out to preach and baptise at equally royal estates in Mercia, which Oswiu and Peada had secured once Penda was dead. Oswiu therefore had two great congeries of kingship, one based on Bernicia and one on northern Mercia and Lindsey. Each grouping encompassed sub-kingships held by close relatives, each of whom held the second most powerful kingship and was focused to the south of his own. Each congeries formed a single diocese of the Anglo-Irish church, and each had an Irishman as bishop (Figure 8). The symmetry of these political and ecclesiastical systems implies that they were conceived as a whole in 655. The organisation is reminiscent of the Gregorian vision of an English church based on two metropolitan sees, one in the south and one in the north, to whom all other clergy would be subordinate under the benign patronage of King 2Ethelberht. Later Edwin’s imperium had been associated with two Italian metropolitans. What Oswiu constructed was his own version of this same vision, under his own direct patronage rather than that of the Kentish or Deiran kings and drawing its episcopal authority not from Rome but from Iona. Oswiu secured Irishmen to head his two great sees. It seems quite pos-

244

Dynasty and cult sible the broad outlines of the earlier ordering of the Roman church of the English had a bearing on Oswiu’s new blueprint. Diuma did not, however, survive long to reap the harvest of souls which the supremacy of Oswiu offered him, but died among Peada’s Middle Angles soon after his appointment (HE, hi, 21), only to be replaced by Ceollach, another Irishman. Nor did Oswiu retain control of the new bishopric for much longer. Peada was murdered at Easter 656 (see p. 252), depriving Oswiu of his best chance of reconciling the Mercians to his kingship through a member of their own dynasty. Dis¬ affected Mercian duces (perhaps ‘ealdormen’) then overthrew Oswiu’s remaining principes (‘client rulers’) in 658 and raised Penda’s son Wulfhere to his father’s throne - at a moment when the death of Oswiu’s nephew Talorgen, king of the Piets, may have encouraged the Bernician king to commit himself to a forward policy in the far north.81 Ceollach, like Aidan’s predecessor among the Bernicians, may have decided against preaching the gospel to so ‘intractable, obstinate and uncivilised’ a people as the Mercians, and so himself taken responsibil¬ ity for withdrawal.82 However, the timing does imply that it was the wreck of his sponsor’s kingship in the Midlands which led Ceollach to depart, returning - so Bede assured his audience - to Iona. The same implication (of political change) may be found in the person of his suc¬ cessor (see below), who was as well-connected and potentially as worldly a prelate as Ceollach was unconnected and unworldly. The possibility must be taken seriously that Ceollach was effectively sacked by Oswiu when he himself lost control of Mercia, to enable him to put into the region a very different type of bishop to serve his purposes in the new circumstances pertaining after 658. The ensuing description of the Christianisation of the Mercians under Wulfhere is, however, a model of naivety in Bede’s text. Put simply, why, having just regained their liberty from the tyrannous rule of a conqueror and reinstated their own native dynasty should the Mercians have accepted Oswiu’s cult? Bede’s comment is in accord with the logic of providential history and deterministic assumptions about religious evolution - but to the modern historian this is woefully inad¬ equate as an explanation. In 658 Wulfhere recovered his father’s Mercian kingdom but, apart from chasing out Oswiu’s lieutenants, there is no evidence of renewed war between the two dynasties. After the disaster which had befallen Penda at the Winwced, the Mercians can be forgiven if they were less than eager to do battle with the patron of Holy Island, whose God had so recently demonstrated his potency in

245

The convert kings war. Their stance appears to have been defiant, therefore, but not openly confrontational. Oswiu also had good reason to exercise caution, since his pre-eminence had made him few friends, he may not have been entirely confident of the unity of his own dynasty and he had commit¬ ments elsewhere.83 Whatever the precise thinking, it seems fairly clear that Oswiu and Wulfhere came to a political accord which enabled them to coexist without open warfare - and indeed there was to be no war between the two sides right up until Oswiu’s death in 670. This putative accord is unrecorded but is capable of some hypothetical reconstruction. Wulfhere obtained his father’s kingship, so Mercia itself, Lindsey and Middle Anglia. He obtained, therefore, the entirety of the new Mercian diocese. Although Wulfhere has been represented as already at this stage Christian,84 he may have been unbaptised, since Oswiu was represented by Bede as unaware of his existence (or at least his whereabouts) up to the rebellion of 658. He was surely not the leader of some Christian party within the royal family which had been covertly present even before 655. It might be argued that his marriage to a Kentish princess (below) necessitated his baptism, but another Kentish king had nego¬ tiated the marriage of his own sister to the unbaptised Edwin only thirty years before, and we cannot be absolutely sure that the same thing did not now recur. Baptised or not, Wulfhere was, however, accepting the presence of a bishop and the obligation to protect and resource him. He was to that extent a convert. That bishop would be appointed from Holy Island and be ultimately responsible to both Oswiu and Bishop Finan. Oswiu’s southern diocese therefore survived, and that must be what he gained through this putative settlement with the Mercians. The man whom Bede named as Wulfhere’s first bishop was Trumhere, a Deiran member of the royal kin and formerly abbot of the queen’s foundation at Gilling (see above), who was distantly related to the Mercian royal house through the marriages of Peada and Alhfrith. He was a very different type of figure from Diuma or Ceollach and was probably hand-picked to fill a quite different role: unlike his Irish pre¬ decessors, Oswiu’s new bishop to the Mercians was a native Englishspeaker; he was a Deiran, so from the region between Bernicia and Mercia, and already a proven politician who had served in one of the most sensitive senior positions created by the Northumbrian regime during the 650s. He clearly, therefore, enjoyed Oswiu’s confidence; his august connections and his own royal birth gave him substantial status.

246

Dynasty and cult Trumhere was the first true prince-bishop of the English. His appoint¬ ment looks like an attempt by Oswiu to establish an effective political agent in Mercia, one who could be relied upon to retain influence there for his royal master. Put simply, if Oswiu could not himself be king of the Mercians then the appointment — to the new southern see of the Irish church — of his tried and tested kinsman was from his viewpoint the next best thing, even if it was necessary to remove a competent but unworldly Irishman to achieve this. What he conceded in terms of kingship he therefore sought to retain by means of the episcopacy — and all of Mercia, Middle Anglia and Lindsey were still thereby to be within his remit as much as Wulfhere’s (HE, iv, 3, 12). It is not clear whether or not Oswiu thereafter retained control of the Mercian see throughout all the remainder of his long life. Trumhere was eventually succeeded by the otherwise unknown Jaruman, who was pre¬ sumably Irish-trained (so a member of the Bernician church). The only indication of his origins lies in Bede’s personal acquaintance with one of his priests and helpers (HE, hi, 30), who vouched for the bishop’s good name and was presumably himself Northumbrian - but it may be that Wulfhere successfully seduced him by the generosity of his own patronage. However, Oswiu regained influence over the see when Jaruman

died,

when

Cedd’s

brother

Chad

was

translated

Archbishop Theodore from Northumbria to the Midlands

by and

Lichfield.85 Chad had succeeded his brother as abbot of royal Lastingham and this, and his membership of the best-known clerical kinship within the Bernician church in this generation, implies that he was a close associate of King Oswiu. Oswiu’s continuing interest in the appointment to the Mercian see, and his attempts to establish men committed to his own regime, can only be understood as evidence of his continuing influence in the region. This does not mean that competition between the two kings did not occur - it certainly did and was probably unremitting from 658/9 onwards. Rather, that competition found less confrontational outlets than open warfare, and much of it was played out as rivalry for victory¬ giving divine favour within a proto-Christian milieu between two convert kings. Wulfhere probably continued to recognise Oswiu’s titular superiority until the old king finally died — he then fought his heir King Ecgfrith, but was worsted and temporarily lost control of Lindsey.86 The practical impact of Bernician supremacy gradually waned as the Mercian king extended his own influence across the kingships and clergy of southern Britain.

247

The convert kings The Mercian elite began to accept baptism, therefore, during the 650s. Peada was the earliest of the royal house to break ranks and his motives were transparently dynastic and political. That Wulfhere pro¬ jected himself as a Christian king was probably inevitable under the political circumstances prevalent in 658 and was the only means to avoid all-out war with Oswiu. Again, his decision was first and foremost a political and dynastic one. Acceptance of one of Oswiu’s clergy as bishop of the Mercians was thereafter something which he had to accommodate.

It is significant that the new Mercian king himself

became an enthusiastic patron of Christianity. His stance was probably to some extent necessitated by the terminal blow which non-Christian religion had suffered at the Winwced. If the non-Christian gods were inadequate as protectors in battle, then their value to kings was limited indeed - and the Mercian dynasty at last accepted proof of this fact. Wulfhere and his advisers had presumably witnessed the use to which Oswiu had put his Christian cult over the previous decade and they cannot but have been impressed by the potential it offered for political aggrandisement, the reinforcement of status and the consolidation of superiority within both internal and inter-tribal relationships. Oswiu’s successful manipulation of a centralised cult to his own political ends is likely to have encouraged Wulfhere’s commitment to Christianity. Henceforth, the Mercian king would also avail himself of the advan¬ tages conferred by patronage of Christian priests, and compete with the Bernician court on as near level terms as possible. Like Oswiu, Wulfhere married into the Kentish dynasty. His bride was Eormenhild, daughter of that same Eorcenberht who had approved Oswiu’s marriage to Eanflasd. The date is unknown but her brother, Egberht, succeeded in 664 and was by then probably adult. Both were arguably born in the 640s and the marriage is likely to have occurred in 658-9 or only shortly thereafter. This connected Wulfhere with the principal alternative fount of clerical authority in England - alternative to Lindisfarne, that is - and it had some potential to build bridges between his court and those of the southern Roman Christian kings, in opposition to the southward march of the Bernician-Irish church which was

indivisible

from

Oswiu’s

authority

as

hegemon.

The

new

Kentish-Mercian accord threatened Oswiu’s influence in the south and east. The willingness of Eorcenberht now to ally his house with Wulfhere was probably a reaction to the Bernician ecclesiastical coloni¬ alism implicit in Cedd’s appointment among the East Saxons and Trumhere’s among the Mercians.

248

Dynasty and cult Oswiu’s growing weakness in the south-east was exploited by the kings of the East Angles, Kent and Mercia. The loser was Oswiu’s friend, King Sigeberht of the East Saxons. Bede tells the story of his murder (in HE, ill, 22) as a moral tale supportive of obedience to the episcopacy; but it also had a political and ideological context. He was killed ostensibly because his Christianity got in the way of his kingship,87 but his assassination followed Oswiu’s expulsion from Mercia. He was succeeded by one Swithhelm, son of Seaxbald, who was bap¬ tised by Bishop Cedd, but not in Northumbria and not with Oswiu as sponsor. Rather, this occurred at Rendlesham where King 2Ethelwold of the East Angles acted as sponsor and this at least implies East Anglian influence among the East Saxons at this date.88 /Ethelwold was brother of King Anna, whom Penda had killed c. 654, and also of his successor, King yEthelhere, who died in battle against Oswiu at the Winwced in 655. Cedd’s authority as bishop of the East Saxons had been respected but Oswiu’s influence now counted for little. The course of events which were set off by the demise of King Sigeberht reflects, therefore, the decline in Oswiu’s power in the south-east c. 660. Although local dynasties made short-term gains at Oswiu’s expense, it was Wulfhere who stood to gain most. The Mercian king intervened at some stage south of the Thames, securing the submission, active co¬ operation and baptism of 2Ethelwalh of the South Saxons, and grant¬ ing him the more easterly West Saxon territories and Wight so as to enhance his power. What Sigiberht of the East Saxons was to Oswiu in 653, vEthelwalh was to Wulfhere, but his activities on this front may have occurred up to a decade or so later.89 During the 660s however, Wulfhere was represented by Bede as the ‘overking’ of the East Saxons, and responsible for Bishop Jaruman’s intervention there to recall King Sigehere and his part of that people from apostasy, consequent on the outbreak of a great plague - which was probably that of 664.90 Although Jaruman was apparently an appointee of Oswiu’s, Bede was clear that his presence among the East Saxons was Wulfhere’s responsibility and gave him the credit. Yet this was an overtly political initiative which denied a local king his own choice of cult and rein¬ forced the authority of a clerisy appointed from outside. What is more, it exploited the absence of Bishop Cedd from his see. Cedd was the principal interpreter at the great synod of Whitby which his royal master convened in 664 (see below), then returned to the East Saxons but died of plague soon after at his own foundation at Lastingham, in Yorkshire, while making one of his frequent visits to Northumbria.91

249

The convert kings With the East Saxon diocese temporarily without an incumbent and his own bishop the more southerly of the two remaining Irish-trained bishops among the English, Wulfhere was able to extend the authority of his own church outwards into a territory previously presided over by one of Oswiu’s inner circle. Despite Jaruman’s northern connections, the entire episode can only have tightened the Mercian king’s own control of the region and increased his status and influence at Oswiu’s expense. By 664 Oswiu had apparently lost control of Jaruman and with it any real influence in southern Britain. Under Wulfhere’s patronage, the Mercian see had become a significant rival to Lindisfarne within the Anglo-Irish church and the absence of formal metropolitan status for Holy Island made this a matter of some concern. Oswiu had survived a challenge to his overall control of that church in 651 but a new threat had now emerged from within the second great diocese which he had himself brought into being. The combination of dynastic alliances, political influence, military strength and the deployment of a bishop at the head of a phalanx of clergy now characterised Wulfhere’s position as much as his own. Wulfhere proved himself, therefore, an apt student of Oswiu in the art of exploiting cult for political purposes. By the early 660s Bernicia was without significant allies among the southern kings and its influence was dependent on Oswiu’s prestige as the victor of Winwced and ruler of all northern Britain. At the same time, he was ageing and the political horizon was filling up with younger men. It must have seemed, c. 660, that the future belonged not to Oswiu but to the next generation and among such men Wulfhere was the likeliest figure to dominate England. Whitby and King Oswiu In fulfilment of his oath on the eve of the battle by the River Winwced, Oswiu consigned his infant daughter zEfflaed to perpetual virginity under the tutelage of Abbess Hild at Hartlepool, and gave twelve estates each of ten hides for the foundation of monasteries, of which half were in each of his two core kingdoms. Hild was the great-granddaughter of King zElle, so a cousin of both Oswiu (on the maternal side) and Eanflsed. She had apparently intended to enter the religious life in France,92 but had been recalled from East Anglia by Bishop Aidan and installed on a small estate by the River Wear in the late 640s (HE, iv, 23). Hild became a staunch supporter of Irish customs and she attracted considerable royal patronage during the 650s, culminating in her

250

Dynasty and cult appointment as abbess of Whitby in 657, whither she took the princess, yEfflaed (HE, in, 24). Whitby is likely to have been one of the six monasteries founded by Oswiu in Deira, although Bede never quite commits himself to that opinion. Whether or not, it clearly had an exceptional place in the world of ideas which Oswiu inhabited.93 Not only was it headed by the prin¬ cipal and oldest wise woman of his kin but it contained also the infant daughter whose virginity had been sacrificed in the effort to cajole victory over the Mercians out of the Christian God. Oswiu was himself later buried there, and probably already intended to be so by the late 650s. So too was his last wife, Eanflsed, and Hild herself, along with many other nobiles unspecified. There too was reinterred what was thought to be the trunk of the body of King Edwin sometime between 680 and c. 704,94 when his daughter, the Dowager Queen Eanflsed, was abbess and ruling jointly with his granddaughter, TEfflaed. The treat¬ ment each of these two had received as infants singled them out for a special role within the northern Church and it is significant that they became successive rulers of this monastery. Whitby quickly became the foremost training centre for clergy in England, producing a total of five bishops within a single generation, which suggests that Oswiu transferred some of the more learned of his clergy and many of the available manuscripts to his new foundation. This concentration of

resources was necessarily detrimental to

Lindisfarne, which had hitherto been the principal centre of learning and clerical training within the Anglo-Irish church, in partnership with Iona. Canterbury was overshadowed until the arrival of Theodore. Whitby has, therefore, all the hallmarks of a new Eigenkirche, estab¬ lished by Oswiu at the height of his power while he still retained the kingship of the Mercians, and sited in the southern and more recently acquired reaches of the older of his two great territories. It was not a bishopric and never seems to have aspired to be one, so Holy Island could rest content on that account. Bishops were, however, often infe¬ rior in status to the rulers of great Irish monasteries and that fact may be relevant to the relationship between Holy Island and Whitby. Whitby’s status does reflect the fact that Oswiu was now the patron of two great Irish dioceses in England and far less tied than hitherto to the great island monastery founded by his brother. To this point Oswiu had arguably depended heavily on the memory of the prowess of his brother and had fostered his sanctity so as to cap¬ italise on this asset. The events of 655 at long last established his own

251

The convert kings military reputation and standing as a favourite of God, and this perhaps rendered him less dependent on the cult of St Oswald. King (Ethelwald disappears from history after 655 and was hopelessly compromised by his misjudgement in backing Penda. It is possible that both Lindisfarne and his father’s cult at Bamburgh were adversely affected by his fall. At the very least, Oswiu’s investment in Whitby represents a significant statement about his own regime, its reorientation geographically, its emphasis on his own immediate family, the rehabilitation of the Deiran royal house into which he had married and the marginalisation of his brother’s son, whose prospects of the succession had been destroyed. The dedication of Whitby was to St Peter, King Edwin’s patron saint and the dedication of both York and Canterbury. So too was that of the church at Bamburgh where Oswiu had had his brother’s arms deposited as miracle-working relics. Such reminders of St Peter may reflect early attempts to rehabilitate the Roman Christianity of his wife’s family and other of Mercia’s neighbours in the south and east — and offer the first hint of Oswiu’s eventual rejection of Lindisfarne’s Irish-originating customs and authority. That Oswiu’s power had been undermined south of the Humber must have become ever more obvious to the king and his advisers after 658 - and obvious too to King Alhfrith, Oswiu’s son and the sub-king of the Deirans, in whose immediate charge lay Whitby. Alhfrith had already emerged as a political force by 653 (see above), when he estab¬ lished an alliance of sorts with Peada, and he benefited from his own resolution and loyalty in the crisis of 655.95 CEthelwald’s kingship of the Deirans was his reward and with it some expectation of the succession. With Peada established in Mercia as his father’s sub-king and himself married to Peada’s sister, his star looked bright. The new arrangements made by Oswiu in Mercia, however, brought Alhfrith’s own long-term interests into conflict with those of his brother-in-law and erstwhile ally. Peada had good reason to hope to succeed to Penda’s kingships intact but Oswiu’s appropriation of the lion’s share gave his son Alhfrith too an interest in the Mercian inheritance. Alhfrith’s marriage to Penda’s daughter Cyneburh can only have enhanced his expectations. The potential prize was enormous. Peada’s assassination at Easter 656 was reputedly instigated by his own wife, who was arguably Alhfrith’s full sister;96 and Alhfrith’s concern to remove a potential rival for the succession is the most plausible hypothesis available by which to explain this event. The alliance that the two princes had conceived in 653 may, therefore, have broken down in the very different circumstances pre-

252

Dynasty and cult vailing after 655. Thereafter, Alhfrith could do little more than sit back and watch the collapse of his father’s southern kingship in 658 and rue the consequences for his own future inheritance. To this point, Alhfrith was clearly and unexceptionally a supporter of the Irish Christianity of his dynasty and we find him active as a patron. At an unknown date in the mid- to late 580s he granted a thirtyhide estate at Ripon (in Deira) to Abbot Eata of Melrose, which was one of the most prestigious of Lindisfarne’s daughter-houses. A party of Irish-trained monks (including St Cuthbert) was established.97 He may, by this very substantial grant, have been establishing an Eigenkirche for himself and his immediate family in Deira to rival and even displace Lastingham, whose founder and patron had been his now disgraced rival, CEthelwald. At the same time, Alhfrith was casting about for a new ally to replace the dead Peada and he found one in King Cenwealh of the West Saxons. Cenwealh was the son and heir of Oswald’s father-in-law, Cynigils (see above), but had married into the Mercian royal family and still been unbaptised c. 640. This Christian/non-Christian balancing act by the West Saxon king and his heir was arguably designed to avoid the mili¬ tary intervention of either of the great kingdoms and also had some potential to sustain divine protection of the dynasty at a time when a choice of cults was on offer. With Oswald dead, however, Cenwealh rejected his Mercian marriage, so presumably sought to dispense with Mercian influence also; but Penda had expelled him and he took refuge for three years at Anna’s East Anglian court, probably during the late 640s.98 Thereafter Cenwealh returned home, regained his kingdom and reverted to the Christianity of his father. He now established Agilbert, a Gaulish bishop who had been long in Ireland, as bishop of the West Saxons, following the death of Birinus." Cenwealh may have intervened at Canterbury in the spring of 655 (see above) but he remained in some danger from Mercia until Penda’s destruction later in the same year. Even then, from a West Saxon per¬ spective, the Mercian menace which had previously confronted him had been replaced by the even more potent Oswiu, from 655 ruler of both the Bernicians and Mercians and now the greatest king of the age. Cenwealh may have been relieved when the Mercians evicted Oswiu and tensions between the north and the Midlands revived, since that offered his own regime greater room for manoeuvre. Even so, he lost out to a resurgent Mercia. About 660, Dorchester was ceded to Wulfhere and Agilbert dis¬ possessed, presumably in the interest of the Mercian king’s own Irish-

253

The convert kings trained bishop. Cenwealh responded by establishing a new see for a Frankish-consecrated English bishop named Wine at Winchester. By this date, Cenwealh and Alhfrith were ‘faithful friends’,100 which in the terminology of the day can only mean political allies, brought together presumably by the threat posed to both by the rise of Wulfhere. Without guidance from Bede it is impossible to judge whether Wulfhere struck at northern Wessex because of an alliance between Cenwealh and Alhfrith, or that friendship was subsequent to and consequent upon the Mercian attack. Oswald had earlier sought alliance with Wessex as a counterweight to the hostility of the Mercians and of the Kentish dynasty. As Oswiu’s domination of the Mercians turned to dust in 658, King Alhfrith - the successor of Oswald’s son in Deira - had good reason to form a comparable alliance with Oswald’s brother-inlaw, who had his own reasons to fear the Mercians and their new-found Kentish allies. Cenwealh had by now followed his father’s lead as a patron of Frankish and Frankish-trained missionaries. The friendship of the two princes brought Alhfrith into contact with West Saxon legates, some of whom are likely to have been priests. Just a few years before, Alhfrith may himself have been a candidate for the Mercian succession, so Wulfhere’s successes and his proactive religious policy were particularly resented at the Deiran court. Alhfrith’s opportunity came with the arrival back in Deira of a young churchman of noble, Northumbrian (probably Deiran) origins, who had been trained at Lindisfarne at the instance of Queen Eanflsed but had thence journeyed to Frankia and Rome, and been tonsured accord¬ ing to Roman custom at Lyons. This was, of course, Wilfrid, who was about twenty-four in 660, and at least as Frankish as regards his Christianity as was Bishop Wine.101 Indeed, his vita implies that his return journey was known to Cenwealh, whose advice reached Alhfrith before Wilfrid. If this version of events was not entirely apocryphal, then Wilfrid, Agilbert and Wine may have been closely connected, for all his biographer’s later hostility towards the bishop of Winchester. Alhfrith initially gave Wilfrid an estate at Stamford,102 but then estab¬ lished him as abbot of Ripon, whence the pre-existing, Irish-trained monks departed rather than acknowledge his Roman authority and accept his alien customs. Alhfrith’s resumption and reallocation of his well-endowed new monastery at Ripon had the potential to cause enormous offence to Melrose, Lindisfarne and Iona, and so also to King Oswiu as the patron and protector of Irish Christianity. At the very time when the old king’s

254

Dynasty and cult authority over kings and bishops south of the Humber was weakening, therefore, he was confronted by the challenge of a very different reli¬ gious policy being pursued by his own eldest son in Deira, which had wider repercussions. Alhfrith had gone beyond the levels of diplomatic activity normally expected of a sub-king but he was Oswiu’s son and co-king, and also probably the person whom Oswiu thought of at this date as his heir. The old king had long experience of political manoeu¬ vring and was nothing if not pragmatic. The matter had to be resolved, and quickly if the Bernician establishment was to close ranks. In the early 660s, Bishop Agilbert arrived in the north. Bede was aware of Cenwealh’s patronage of Wine at Winchester and he inter¬ preted Agilbert’s departure from his West Saxon see as an angry response (HE, ill, 7); but Bishop Daniel’s comments to him on this point 'may have been defective since he drew very different information from the Vita Wilfridi, and later recognised Agilbert’s presence at Whitby in 664 (HE, in, 25). Bede was probably wrong to imagine that the Frankish bishop departed from Wessex for Frankia in high dudgeon against Cenwealh, although he may well have been angry with the Mercian king who had effectively evicted him from his see. He did not depart immedi¬ ately for Gaul but remained in England and eventually visited Oswiu and Alhfrith.103 This visit is undated, but it had already brought Agilbert north before the synod was called into being in 664 and he could have then been there for some time. Why did such a senior cleric, attended by his priest Agatho, traverse England from Wessex to visit the Bernician kings, when his ultimate destination was Frankia? The answer is unknowable; but it is a fact that his journey lay along known lines of communication and friendship between Cenwealh and Alhfrith so is likely to have been serving that relationship in some way. The West Saxon king may have been con¬ cerned at the growing rift between Oswiu and Alhfrith, which had implications for his own security. The bishop’s journey is not likely to have been random and it is possible that he was charged with reconcil¬ ing the two northern kings one with another, and both with Cenwealh, in an alliance aimed at containing the Mercians. The hypothetical nature of this suggestion must, however, be stressed. Oswiu received Agilbert. The solution which he then adopted, to the rifts now appearing within the dynasty, was to convene a synod of the Northumbrian church at Whitby. This has been the subject of much modern discussion, most of which has followed the Vita Wilfridi and Bede in focusing on the ecclesiastical issues under discussion.104 Bede

255

The convert kings attempted to contextualise the debate by reference to pre-existing ten¬ sions between different methods of dating of Easter, in particular drawing on Ronan’s earlier arguments with Bishop Finan and Queen Eanflaed’s long commitment to Roman customs. Yet there is a hollow¬ ness to this issue at least as regards the timing and location of the synod and, of course, its outcome. For one thing, Oswiu and Eanflsed had by now been married for over twenty years, so were well used to managing the celebration of Easter at their court. Furthermore, Eanflsed was a patroness of Holy Island itself, whither she had, for example, dispatched Wilfrid c. 648. Lindisfarne had been established in the knowledge that its customs dif¬ fered in various ways from those of Rome, Frankia and even southern Ireland. Indeed, that had arguably been one of its strengths in the eyes of patrons who required that their new ecclesiastical authority should be quite separate from Gregory’s Rome, TEthelberht’s Canterbury and Edwin’s York. At the same time, the Ionan dating of Easter was clearly not considered an insuperable problem at Canterbury, whence a royal bride had recently departed to the Mercian court of Wulfhere and-his Anglo-Irish bishop. It is extremely difficult to imagine that the Easter controversy had of itself become so urgent in the year 664 to require a synod to resolve the issue under the immediate oversight of King Oswiu, of whom it cannot be said that he suffered from excessive religiosity.105 It was not, therefore, the Easter controversy which required prompt attention but the ever changing political situation. The resurrection of Mercian power since 658 was the principal underlying factor, since it was that which had lost Oswiu control of half of his newly expanded, Anglo-Irish church, and it was that which had conditioned also the rapprochement of Alhfrith and Cenwealh of the West Saxons. Another factor was Oswiu’s dominant position in the far north, where he may have had some success in establishing himself as king of the Piets fol¬ lowing Talorgen’s death in 657. When a new Pictish king did emerge c. 665-6, he was arguably Oswiu’s client and deputy.106 Oswiu may, there¬ fore, have believed himself capable of imposing a different ecclesiasti¬ cal authority even on the Ionan family of monasteries. What Oswiu was considering in 664 was not so much the rival, but very technical and probably (to him) incomprehensible, claims of the Irish and Roman churches as regards Easter but his own short-term political interests as a king, a patron of churchmen, an ideologue and as the ruler or ‘overking’ of half of Britain. Oswiu needed to either

256

Dynasty and cult accommodate or control his son’s initiatives.107 He also needed to make some response to Agilbert. In the most immediate sense, it was perhaps Bishop Agilbert’s arrival from the West Saxon court that set the synod of Whitby in tram. Beyond this was Oswiu’s desire to re-establish his influence over the Mercian diocese, but apparent unwillingness to go to war. For the old king, therefore, ecclesiastical authority and his own capacity to manipulate it was far more of an issue than the Easter con¬ troversy, however much that had engaged the minds of a few churchmen in recent years. The synod was about power, and that fact should be acknowledged.108 The Whitby meeting was a high-level affair. Both the northern kings were present and Bishop Colman, who had been appointed to Holy Island from Iona on Finan’s death in 661. Behind him was a substantial Irish party, which could count on the support of Hild and the Whitby community. The Irish-trained Bishop Cedd was also present, but his role as interpreter perhaps betrays an awareness on the part of the more politically adept of Oswiu’s two bishops of the likely outcome. Bishop Jaruman is not known to have been present and was probably not invited. The sense of balance betwen the two sides which comes over in both surviving accounts is illusory. Without Agilbert, the opponents of the Irish party would have lacked any heavyweight representation, since there were only the Queen’s long-serving chaplain, Romanus and the aged James the Deacon, who was the principal (perhaps the only) sur¬ vivor of Paulinus’s ministry, to oppose the massed ranks of the Irish party.109 Agilbert at least gave the Romanists a figure of equivalent status to Colman, who was similarly foreign and with a broad knowl¬ edge of the issues under discussion, but he and his priest seem to have made up forty per cent of the entire Roman party present and a great deal rested on his shoulders. That Agilbert chose not to address the assembly himself was explained by his concern for the poverty of his English, but it was he whom Oswiu reportedly invited to speak for the Roman party. Instead, he

deputed

the

task

to

Wilfrid,

the

young,

Frankish-tonsured

Northumbrian abbot now established in Deira under Alhfrith’s patron¬ age, at whose consecration Agilbert had himself recently officiated. Wilfrid was described by Bede as Agilbert’s ‘disciple’ and the descrip¬ tion neatly sums up their relationship at this juncture. The debate was, therefore, between the senior Irish churchman and a proxy for the senior Frankish churchman.

257

The convert kings Location of the meeting at his own, new and well-resourced abbey of Whitby, where his royal kinswoman Hild presided and his daughter was a novice, reflects Oswiu’s determination to control the outcome. Had it been his intention merely to bring Alhfrith to heel, a synod on Holy Island would have offered greater advantages and allowed Bishop Colman the home advantage. As it was, the Irish contingent was forced to travel and accept guest status. That alone implies that Oswiu had already decided before the event that he would come down against Lindisfarne. So too does his overbearing role in the synod himself, in which both sides were required to accept not just his chairmanship and opening remarks but also his unilateral decision without appeal in a matter which was ostensibly of clerical rather than secular interest. So too does the course of discussion, which consisted, in the earliest reconstruction of it which survives, of Bishop Colman stating the Irish view on the dating of Easter and the authority on which that view rested, and then Wilfrid demolishing his case and substituting his own.110 The ultimate test of authority which Oswiu reportedly then posed was entirely loaded in favour of the Romanists and could have produced no decision other than that which Oswiu then dictated to the assembly. The synod of Whitby was, therefore, not a forum for open debate but one at which the senior Bernician king unveiled a fundamental change of direction as regards his clerical policies.111 In short, Oswiu had decided to revoke his support for the authority of Iona in favour of Canterbury and Rome, which his son and the West Saxon king already supported; and he used this venue as a means of carrying with him as many as possible of the Irish and Irish-trained clergy who had for over a generation staffed the Bernician church. Oswiu knew that this involved a shift concerning Easter, but his later treatment of the north¬ ern Church suggests that he had very little knowledge of the several other issues — and particularly those concerning episcopal consecration - which were then dividing the two Churches.112 The king’s decision was not, therefore, that of a well-informed or knowledgeable man as regards the matter ostensibly under discussion, but one whose wider purposes and dynastic policies favoured a specific outcome. Unsurprisingly in the circumstances, Oswiu did not persuade all his clergy to abandon the Irish customs in which they had been trained, and Colman led a significant group of both Irish and English clergy back to northern Ireland.113 Their stand was one of principle, but Colman seems to have understood Oswiu’s position and appreciated the pres-

258

Dynasty and cult sures he was under. King and bishop parted, therefore, as friends, and Oswiu granted Colman’s final petition for the preferment of Eata, abbot of Melrose, to the abbacy of Holy Island. It seems likely that far more of Oswiu’s clerics chose to stay than to depart, accustomed as they were to obedience to an English king whose instincts were profoundly imperial. Departees were largely senior men or monks at Holy Island, who left significant gaps in the higher echelons of the Bernician church. Some of those who remained may have been influenced by the prospect of advancement and high office, notwithstanding the fabled humility and poverty of their church. Those who successfully about-turned on the Easter issue and retained high office included Cedd, but he was one of many who fell victim to the great plague later that year. They also included Cuthbert, Eata’s disciple at Melrose, who had been one of those who had so recently rejected Wilfrid’s authority at Ripon. Much of his subsequent spectacular rise to high office was due to the depar¬ ture of Colman and most of the Irish, who surely in 664 held the moral high ground. Iona rejected Oswiu’s about-turn on the Easter question. Abbot Cummene’s reaction was to produce the first known vita of Iona’s founder, St Columba, and so reinforce the authority of his house; and there is likely to have been much sympathy for his stance among those of the Scottish and Pictish elite who resented Oswiu’s domination of the region. Even so, that political leadership survived into the next reign. Events post-664 were reported very differently by the Vita Wilfridi and Bede. The former presented Wilfrid (in cap. xi) as the agreed candidate of both kings as bishop of all the Northumbrians, but this looks very like special pleading designed to justify his later, over-arching diocese as bishop of York,114 and Bede’s rather more complex version of events should probably be preferred. According to him, Oswiu seems to have intended that as little as possible should change. Colman was replaced by Tuda. His name implies a Celtic origin but he had been trained and consecrated in southern Ireland and so was politically correct as regards Easter, yet had already served under Colman. Otherwise, the Melrose leadership accepted the changes stipulated at Whitby and was trans¬ lated to Lindisfarne. At the same time, King Alhfrith sponsored the elevation of the young abbot of his own Romanist monastery to the position of bishop of the Deirans and sent Wilfrid back to Frankia to be consecrated by Bishop Agilbert. Alhfrith’s initiative had presumably been approved by Oswiu, who must have been aware that a Romanist diocese had once existed at

259

The convert kings York and who was probably content for Alhfrith to appoint his own candidate to a see the authority of which would naturally mirror his own. That is at least a minimalist interpretation of the story offered by Wilfrid’s vita. Wilfrid’s candidacy offered Alhfrith a bishop on whom he could rely completely and whose career-path matched that of Wine, the West Saxon bishop, with some precision. Yet Wilfrid delayed his return from Frankia until c. 666. There are several possible reasons, any or all of which might have influenced him. He may well have enjoyed returning to Frankia, renewing acquaintances there and enjoying his new-found status. He may have known of the severe outbreak of plague in England and decided to await its end before returning. However, it seems very likely that he was apprised of the political storm which awaited him in Northumbria and wisely tempor¬ ised until Oswiu’s temper had cooled a little. Whatever the reason for his long delay (of about two years), he returned to a political landscape which had changed dramatically in the interim. Alhfrith disappears from both accounts at this stage. The only clue which suggests that his loss was not merely a consequence of natural causes — and this was a time of numerous plague deaths — is Bede’s enig¬ matic mention of him when listing the hurdles which King Oswiu had had to overcome:115 these were headed by the attacks of the heathen Mercians, of course, but also included the aggression of his son Alhfrith and nephew CEthelwald. Bede’s narrative thereafter fixed his contest with the Mercians and with CEthelwald within a credible narrative context, but he left Alhfrith’s attack on his father in what was perhaps deliberate obscurity. Alhfrith was still a figure of influence at the synod and capable of ini¬ tiating the consecration of a bishop for the Deirans, probably later that year. Thereafter he attacked his father but failed to gain power, declin¬ ing thence into a political obscurity as opaque as that of CEthelwald in 655.116 The immediate cause of their controversy is unrecorded. What may have lain behind it was Alhfrith’s growing impatience regarding the succession. Oswiu had by now been in power for over twenty years and yet showed no signs of retirement - to Whitby perhaps -to allow his eldest son to succeed. Alhfrith’s eldest half-brother, Ecgfrith, was by this date adult and building up a party ready to contest the succession. The queen, Ecgfrith’s mother was clearly a lady of some influence and is likely to have favoured her own children over her stepson. Ecgfrith perhaps had connections among the Mercians, where he had been a hostage, and at some stage before 666 married yEthelthryth, daughter

260

Dynasty and cult of the now long-deceased King Anna of the East Angles but a neice of the current East Anglian king and widow of a senior figure among the Middle Angles.in Oswiu was, therefore, deploying his younger son’s hand in marriage as a part of his efforts to contain Wulfhere’s influence over Middle Anglia and East Anglia.118 By so doing, however, he was also launching Ecgfrith onto the wider political stage, encouraging his ambitions and furnishing him with potential allies should he contest the succession. Alhfrith had been a king for c. nine years by 664 but the sands of time were arguably now running against his prospects of suc¬ ceeding peacefully to the senior Northumbrian throne. If so, then he was, in 664—5, a young man in a hurry. Tensions between Oswiu and Alhfrith were already considerable in the run-up to the synod and it may well have been Alhfrith’s promotion of Wilfrid that provoked the final conflict. There has been some doubt as to the intended extent of Wilfrid’s diocese in 664,119 owing to the very different versions of events offered by Bede and the Vita Wilfridi, and this ambiguity probably reflects the different intentions of the two parties concerned. Oswiu presumably accepted that recognition of papal authority required the revival of the see of York but he expected Wilfrid then to operate alongside a bishop of Lindisfarne, since he had Tuda appointed to that vacant see in the same year. The bishop of Holy Island had been the senior ecclesiast in the north throughout his own political life and Oswiu may have expected that to continue despite the synod. The senior king and senior bishop would, then, remain in Bernicia, while Deira was ruled by a sub-king and a second bishop selected by him. Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury was one of the many plague deaths of the summer of 664.120 King Eorcenberht of Kent died on the same day (HE, iv, 1). The newly orthodox Oswiu seized the opportu¬ nity, which God had so opportunely dropped in his lap, to negate Mercian influence at the Kentish court and exercise control over the succession to Canterbury. He joined the young Egberht, Eorcenberht’s heir, with himself in dispatching Wigheard, one of Deusdedit’s clerics, to Rome for consecration, carrying rich presents to the Pope, ‘so that, when he had accepted the rank of archbishop, he could consecrate catholic bishops to the churches of the English throughout the whole of Britain’. Deusdedit had been West Saxon, so the elevation of one of his clergy was arguably at least acceptable to the West Saxon king who was Northumbria’s ally - and Oswiu had no candidate for the metropolitan see of his own.

261

The convert kings This represented a major new initiative on the part of the English Church, since there had been no known contact with Rome since Honorius’s own correspondence with his papal namesake in 634 (see above, pp. 185-6) and the rank of metropolitan had probably lapsed since 653. Oswiu was, therefore, exploiting the situation to announce his own reconciliation with the Church at Rome and secure support for his position from a grateful papacy. His dispatch of rich gifts suggests that Oswiu was seeking an effective alliance. What the Bernician king needed was a metropolitan under his own influence, whose authority would be superior to that of all other bishops in England, including even that of the vast Mercian diocese which he had himself created but of which he had since lost control. With a pliant archbishop, Oswiu could recoup much of the ground which he had lost to Wulfhere since 658 and regain a degree of control over the south. Oswiu was rewarded by a letter from Pope Vitalian which was highly supportive of his position and which indicates that it was Oswiu, rather than Egberht, with whom the papacy felt it necessary to deal, much as it had dealt with Edwin rather than Eadbald a generation earlier. Vitalian was careful to encourage his commitment to the Roman cause. He sent also relics of SS Peter and Paul, the holy martyrs Laurence, John and Paul, plus Gregory and Pancras, to reinforce Romanist authority in the churches under Oswiu’s patronage, where very few relics can have existed which would have been recognised as such at this date at Rome. Eanflaed also received ‘a cross with a gold key, made from the holy chains of the apostles, SS Peter and Paul’. These relics represented a sub¬ stantial injection into Oswiu’s regime of cult objects of considerable potency, in a gesture of the kind which the seventh-century papacy had particularly made its own but which it characteristically reserved for dealing with the secular elite. By so doing in this instance, Pope Vitalian was announcing his own commitment to Oswiu as king of the English and the means he used had far more than symbolic meaning. The result was a significant reinforcement of Oswiu’s political position as the English king with the especial favour of God and His most senior repre¬ sentative on earth. This letter gave Oswiu much of what he needed, therefore, and went a considerable distance towards justifying his volte face in 664. For the future he could count on committed papal support in bringing the entirety of his people (meaning the entire population of Britain) into conformity with Christ, so he could expect that the authority of the Canterbury metropolitan would henceforth weigh in his favour. The

262

Dynasty and cult largest single group of non-compliant Christians among the English in 664—5 was undoubtedly the Mercians under Wulfhere.

Oswiu’s

manoeuvre had brilliantly wrong-footed his dynastic opponent just when the Mercians seemed on the verge of undisputed influence over southern Britain. Wulfhere was left as the sole significant patron of an Irish-consecrated bishop and church which was now cut off from its sources of authority far to the north, and effectively bankrupted as an ideological alternative to Canterbury by the abandonment of its founder’s kin. From a position of near-equality with Oswiu, Wulfhere’s status as patron was put in doubt, the consecration of his bishop dis¬ credited and the legitimacy of his clergy compromised. From the Mercian viewpoint, the very coinage of conversion was devalued and the divine favour which Wulfhere had been building up for himself was undermined. Nor did Wulfhere retain the option of himself taking over patronage of the Irish church among the English. Diuma had been consecrated by Bishop Finan of Holy Island (HE, ill, 21), and his successors to the Mercian see were probably similarly appointed. If Lindisfarne acknowl¬ edged the greater authority of Rome, so too did its daughter-houses and satellites, and the Mercian churches were among them, despite all Wulfhere’s ambitions. It is not known who thought up the manoeuvre of Oswiu’s reconciliation with Canterbury and the Roman Church. Agilbert might be one candidate, but none can have forecast Deusdedit’s death in the same year. However, Oswiu’s candidate as archbishop, Wigheard, died at Rome.121 Canterbury’s vacancy was not, therefore, filled as rapidly as Oswiu had expected, so no moves could be made against the Mercian Church for several years. It is possible that Oswiu’s dealings with Kent during the late summer and autumn of 664 had an important secondary outcome. It was there that his clerical ambassadors are most likely to have discovered that York had had metropolitan status under the Gregorian plan and had even briefly achieved that in the person of Paulinus, relics of whose min¬ istry were still on show at Canterbury.122 Alhfrith’s appointee as the new bishop of York was a figure who had his own reasons to dispute the con¬ tinuing influence of Oswiu’s Irish-trained clerics. His return as the sole bishop of the Northumbrians would have had serious implications for the Bernician king’s authority over the Church and threatened the posi¬ tions of every one of his clerical friends, none of whose careers was canonically sound. That he was destined under Gregory’s blueprint to outrank all other bishops in northern England is likely to have come as

263

The convert kings a profound shock to King Oswiu. On the other hand, it seems very likely that both Wilfrid and Alhfrith were fully apprised of the potential status of York,123 which James the Deacon for one would certainly have known. If they had concealed the implications of Wilfrid’s appointment from Oswiu, then a final reckoning between the two kings is almost pre¬ dictable. Oswiu reacted promptly by sending Chad south to obtain consecra¬ tion to the see of York before Wilfrid should return. Bede explained this merely in terms of Wilfrid’s lengthy delay abroad and made much of the excellent qualities of the candidate but it must be relevant that Chad was the new abbot of royal Lastingham in succession to his brother, Bishop Cedd, so a member of Oswiu’s most favoured clerical family. Lastingham monastery was the principal rival in Deira to Ripon, so its abbot may have seemed the obvious candidate for Oswiu to support against Wilfrid. The Bernician king may have been used by this date to hiring and firing bishops: he may have acted high-handedly as regards the Mercian diocese in 658 (see above) and he effectively fired Colman in 664, or at least placed him in a position where he had no real alter¬ native but to resign. Now he had the power, if not the authority, to do the same at York, and he had plentiful reason. He may have anticipated that the imminent appointment by the papacy of a pliant metropolitan to Canterbury would make up for any deficencies as regards his author¬ ity, for he had probably not heard by this date of Wigheard’s death, and Wilfrid had the good sense to absent himself abroad. Oswiu sent Chad to Kent, accompanied by his own priest, Eadhsed, presumably in anticipation of Wigheard’s return with a papal licence to consecrate (despite Bede’s slight confusion concerning the relative chronology) but they found the see still unoccupied. From there Chad and Eadhasd journeyed westwards to the southern ally of their patron in Wessex. Chad was consecrated by Cenwealh’s bishop, Wine of Winchester, and since no other Roman bishops were available, two British bishops were co-opted to assist him (HE, iii, 28). It was a prag¬ matic solution to the problems posed by Oswiu’s brief, which they ful¬ filled within an existing matrix of royal connections. None of those involved seems to have been concerned at the canonical problems. Nor, perhaps, need they have been had Wigheard returned as metropolitan, given his debt to Oswiu. Thereafter, Chad returned north and took up his office as bishop of the Northumbrians, after the example of his own teacher Aidan. In all but his recognition of Rome’s authority and the matter of the date of Easter, Oswiu’s new bishop remained a member

264

Dynasty and cult of the Irish Church. Chad was ensconced before Wilfrid’s return, c. 666 and he held the see until c. 669. If there was a single act to which Alhfrith is likely to have reacted vio¬ lently, it was the appointment of Chad as bishop of York. He himself lost influence and power thereby and did so very visibly, so suffered a damaging loss of face. There is time for him to have revolted against King Oswiu and been defeated long before Wilfrid returned. When the long-absent but canonically sound bishop came back, he quietly aban¬ doned all pretensions to the episcopacy and took up his abbacy at Ripon. When he did practise his new role as bishop it was outside Northumbria. King Egberht invited him to ordain priests in Kent, where the interregnum continued until May 669 and Archbishop Theodore’s arrival at Canterbury.124 More alarming to King Oswiu must have been Wulfhere’s courtship of Wilfrid, and Wilfrid’s willing¬ ness to bring his new-found authority to the Mercian court,125 where his possession of extensive estates by 669 demonstrates that he was wellrewarded. His readiness to avail himself of Wulfhere’s patronage guar¬ anteed Oswiu’s distrust. Theodore’s arrival in May 669 and his early journey northwards to meet Oswiu necessarily brought about Wilfrid’s reinstatement to the Northumbrian see,126 and Chad’s demotion. Given the contrast between the two acts of consecration, Theodore had no option but to sustain the canonically sound preferment of Wilfrid over against Chad. What is more instructive is Theodore’s treatment of Chad, who could easily have been demoted back to Lastingham at this point. Instead he was immediately ordained and consecrated by Theodore and Wilfrid through every clerical order and restored to episcopal rank, then dis¬ patched as Jaruman’s replacement to Mercia, where Wilfrid made avail¬ able Lichfield as his caput. Wilfrid’s biographer claimed responsibility for his own hero for this appointment, but Wilfrid was not generally charitable to his enemies throughout his long and frequently acrimoni¬ ous career. Rather, this looks like a political settlement negotiated by Theodore with the grand old king who had made his status as metro¬ politan over all England possible. It was surely Oswiu’s advocacy which brought Chad his new office. Jaruman had recently died (c. 667). Bede relates that Wulfhere requested a new bishop from Theodore,127 and he probably did so as soon as he was aware of the archbishop’s arrival. Had Theodore con¬ ceded

this

apparently

reasonable

request,

Wulfhere

could

have

expected to receive a southern English or perhaps even a continental

265

The convert kings bishop, who would have been entirely independent of Oswiu and answerable only to Canterbury and its new Greek primate. He received instead a core member of Oswiu’s regime whom he had already once promoted to the northern see but whose reputation for personal integrity was matched by the unorthodoxy of his previous career in the church: Chad had required root and branch re-ordination to make him palatable to the Romanists. His appointment arguably signalled Oswiu’s reclamation of control of the great Mercian diocese which he had himself created in the heady days of 655 as king of the Mercians. With Chad in post, Oswiu’s influence over Mercia was in part recouped and his decision at Whitby began to pay real dividends. Vitalian did not entirely share Oswiu’s perspective on English affairs or his agenda and took the opportunity of Wigheard’s death to appoint his own man as metropolitan, yet he must have urged on Theodore a recognition of his debt to the Bernician king.

Theodore had conversed

with the

Northumbrian Benedict Biscop on his journey, and stayed with Bishop Agilbert at Paris en route to England. He had then travelled north to consult Oswiu and agree on policies of mutual interest. Chad’s improbable preferment to the Mercian diocese was the Bernician king’s principal reward. For all his political significance in 669, Wulfhere probably found Chad a bishop of the kind he was used to and Oswiu’s death in February 670 may have loosened his ties with the Bernician royal family. Wulfhere granted him a massive fifty hides for the construction of a monastery at Barrow in Lindsey,128 in the vicinity of the diocese’s earliest known churches and where the convert king, Wulfhere, may himself have thought to be buried. With generosity on this scale, he certainly had every chance of suborning the bishop to his own interest. It may have been on the occasion of his first visit to Northumbria that Theodore reconsecrated the church on Holy Island to St Peter. The cults of Aldan, Coiumba and Oswald had probably been the most influential there up to 664. and even then Colman had taken only part of the founder’s relics when he departed back to Ireland. Perhaps he hoped to return. His church must have seemed incongruous to the monk from Tarsus, having been constructed by Finan ‘after Irish custom, not of stone but all composed of hewn oak and thatched with reeds’ (HE, hi, 25). The reconsecration confirmed Rome’s authority in the very heart¬ land of the Anglo-Irish church, and was probably a ceremony of great solemnity, attended by many Northumbrians both clerical and lay, and with very mixed feelings. Whether or not the king was present is

266

Notes unknown, but his responsibility should not be doubted. The moment which brought to fruition Oswiu’s decision that Roman authority should be recognsed on Lindisfarne provides a fitting end to a discus¬ sion of the political utility of religious affiliation by the northern English kings during the period 633-70.

Notes 1

B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (eds), Bede: ecclesiastical history of

the English people, Oxford, 1969, p. 213, n. 2; R. G. Gruffydd, ‘Canu Cadwallon ap Cadfan’, Astudiaethau Ar Yr Hengardd, p. 27. 2

B.

Hope-Taylor,

Yeavering:

an

Anglo-British

centre

of

early

Northumbria, London, 1977, p. Til. 3

HE, in, 1: ‘each restored the ancient filths of idolatry’.

4

That TEthelfrith’s sons enjoyed Scottish and/or Pictish military support

is entirely possible: D. P. Kirby, The earliest English kings, London, 1991, p. 87; C. Stancliffe, ‘Oswald: “most holy and victorious king of the Northumbrians’”, in Oswald: Northumbrian king and European saint, edd. C. Stancliffe and E. Cambridge, Stamford, Lines., 1995, p. 48. Whether or not, they had retinues. However, Stancliffe’s suggestion that Cadwallon ‘permitted’ their return is not required by the Latin: it was surely the death of their enemy Edwin which ‘enabled’ them to return. 5

Men of Powys were at Meigen and had taken the brunt of the defeat at

Chester: J. Rowland, Early Welsh saga poetry: a study and edition of the Englynion, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 128-9. 6

N. J. Higham, ‘Medieval “overkingship” in Wales: the earliest evi¬

dence’, Welsh History Review, xvi, 1992, pp. 150-2. 7

And was treated as such in the Moliant Cadwallon which was arguably

contemporary: D. P. Kirby, ‘Welsh bards and the Welsh border’ in Mercian Studies, ed. A. Dornier, Leicester, 1977, p. 34. 8

The papacy advised English kings that pagan gods were devils and not

powerless, so all concerned, Christian and non-Christian, will have retained belief in the potency of traditional deities: as Pope Boniface to Edwin quoting Psalm 96, HE, 9

ii,

10.

As opposed to the traditional date of the battle in 634. For the most

recent discussion of Hefenfelth and Oswald’s reign, see Stancliffe, ‘Oswald’, passim. 10 The obvious parallel is with David and Goliath: David was similarly chosen by God in i Samuel, xvi, 12—13, and thereafter slew the boastful Goliath, confident in the protection of God: Ibid., xvm, 45-54. Bede’s version of events in Oswald’s reign has parallels with the conversion of Denmark under King Harald Bluetooth: Rimbert, Vita Anskari, vn, trans. in C. H. Robertson, Anskar, the Apostle of the North, London, 1921.

267

The convert kings 11

Adomnans life of St Columba, edd. A. O. and M. O. Anderson,

London, 1961, 8a-9b, pp. 198-203. Note herein the concept of a particular time which was considered to be propitious for Oswald’s battle, which was a concept intrinsic to Germanic divination, as Tacitus, Germania, x, ed. M. Hutton, London,1914. 12

HE,

hi,

3, refers to Oswald’s proficiency in Irish; Oswiu’s half-Irish son

and his lengthy sojourn in exile imply that he was similarly bilingual. 13 HE,

hi,

14

The Berricians’ religious practice at this point is apparent from, e.g., 3. Only TEthelfrith compares to Cadwallon to this point and he had been

dead about seventeen years. Thereafter, Penda’s achievements rank alongside his but stretch across two decades. 15

Oswald’s ‘overkingship’ was clearly extensive: HE,

ii,

5;

hi,

6. For recent

interpretation, see Stancliffe, ‘Oswald’, pp. 46-61. 16

Bede’s formula recognised that he might be mistaken but he had

obvious dialectical reasons to wipe the slate clean for Oswald’s sponsorship of Christianity. For the most plausible exception, see Edwin’s possible conversion of the ‘temple’ at Yeavering to a church, above, p. 177. See comment of Blair, World of Bede, p. 102. 17

HE,

hi,

4. For discussion, see K. Hughes, Church and society in Ireland

A.D. 400-1200, London, 1987, i, 18-20; ix, 31. For a wider survey of early Irish Christianity, see H. Mytum, The origins of early Christian Ireland, London, 1992. 18

A point emphasised by H. Mayr-Harting, The coming of Christianity

to Anglo-Saxon England, London, 3rd edn 1991, p. 93. 19

For example D. W. Rollason, Saints and relics in Anglo-Saxon England,

Oxford, 1989, p. 115. 20

The

notion

derives

largely

from

the

assumption

that

Edwin’s

supremacy over Man and Anglesey required that he deployed a fleet. Even if it did, and this is far from certain, he is most unlikely to have used a war fleet in the Irish Sea which was normally based in the North Sea. Nor was a Deiran king likely to have normally stationed his fleet off Bernicia. In the confused circum¬ stances of 634-5, it seems most unlikely that any such force existed. Dalriada certainly had a substantial fleet: see the Senchus Fer nAlban in J. Bannerman, Studies in the history of Dalriada, Edinburgh, 1974, pp. 41-9, 71, but its mobil¬ isation depended on the realisation of the obligations of the several septs so it is unlikely to have normally been amassed at one place. 21

For example HE,

22

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 98. There is a contrast

iii,

6.

between Augustine and Aidan here. Augustine came from an urban background wherein his monastery was set, so a church site immediately adjacent to TEthelberht’s metropolis was acceptable. Aidan’s monastic culture required a ‘desert’ location for his church which the Ionan community readily interpreted

268

Notes in terms of an island in the sea or a site located in extensive uncultivated land as at Lastingham. 23

Stanclife, ‘Oswald’, pp. 76-8, but note that southern Ireland was just at

this stage conforming to the Roman Easter: Hughes, Church and society, xm, 311. 24

For example C. W. Jones, Saints' lives and chronicles in early England,

New York, 1947, p. 59. 25

For example Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 44, 94—7; A.

Thacker, ‘Monks, preaching and pastoral care in early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Pastoral care before the parish, edd. J. Blair and R. Sharpe, Leicester, 1992, p. 146. 26

R H. Blair, An introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge, 2nd

edn, 1977, p. 126; Stancliffe, ‘Oswald’, p. 82, quoting unpublished arguments of P. Wormald. Irish monks were, however, more committed travellers than the Romans: Hughes, Church and society, xiv, 144—6. For recent comment, see P. Brown, The rise of western Christendom, Cambridge, Mass., 1996, pp. 198-215. 27

HE, in, 19; Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, p. 276, n. 1. Fursa later

founded Lagny near Paris, c. 644. I. Wood, ‘The Franks and Sutton Hoo’, p. 9, suggests that the departure of Fursa (or Fursey) should be associated with the death of his East Anglian patrons at Mercian hands: in People and places in * Northern Europe, edd. I. Wood and N. Lund, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1991. 28

Stancliffe, ‘Oswald’, p. 169.

29

Sigeberht was apparently expected to bring divine protection to his

people in battle against Penda and took the field himself depending on nothing more than God’s favour, eschewing conventional weapons and armour in favour of a staff: HE, ill, 18. 30

See above, p. 186.

31

P.H. Hase, ‘The church in the Wessex heartlands’ in The Medieval land¬

scape of Wessex, edd. M. Aston and C. Lewis, Oxford, 1994, pp. 47-82, par¬ ticularly pp. 49-52. B. Yorke, Wessex in the early middle ages, Leicester, 1995, pp. 155-65, provides an up-to-date summary. Note the availability of British bishops to participate in a ceremony of consecration at Winchester c. 665: HE, in, 28. 32

See the discussion of baptism and unequal political relationships by J.

Campbell, ‘Observations on the conversion of England’, in Essays in AngloSaxon history, London, 1986, pp. 75-7. See also, p. 129, note 170. 33

Following the case argued by Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity,

p. 99. 34

See above, note 32 and p. 102. For further recent comment, see A.

Angenendt, ‘Taufe und Politik im friihen Mittelalter’, Fruhmittelalterliche Studien, vii, 1973, pp. 143-68; N. J. Higham, An English empire, Manchester, 1995, pp. 64, 167; Stancliffe, ‘Oswald’, p. 45; Yorke, Wessex, p. 171.

269

The convert kings 35

For recent comment, see ibid.., p. 162.

36

Higham, English empire, p. 147; Stancliffe, ‘Oswald’, p. 53.

37

Ibid., pp. 54, 71-5, although Stancliffe retains a healthy scepticism.

38

As postulated by N. Brooks, ‘The formation of the Mercian kingdom’

in The origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, ed. S. Bassett, Leicester, 1989, pp. 164—8. Bede wrote nothing about a Hwiccan conversion, which had occurred before 660 and could conceivably have been initiated by Oswald. The names of Hwiccan royalty in the 660s - such as Eanfrith - may imply a Bernician connec¬ tion. 39

That was my conclusion in English empire, pp. 147-8.

40

Ibid., pp. 138-9.

41

The location of the battle of Maserfelth has recently been much

debated: D. Kenyon, The origins of Lancashire, Manchester, 1991, p. 77 favoured Lancashire; C. Stancliffe, ‘Where was Oswald killed?’ in Oswald, pp. 84-96, reinforced the traditional identification with Oswestry; while both Higham, English empire, pp. 220—1, and A. Thacker, ‘Membra Disjecta: the division of the body and diffusion of the cult’ in Oswald, edd. Stancliffe and Cambridge,

p.

99,

suggest

the

site

is

unlocated

but

along

the

Mercian-Northumbrian borders, perhaps in the north-east Midlands. In the last resort, it remains lost. 42

C. Ireland, ‘Aldfrith of Northumbria and the Irish genealogies’,

Celtica, xxii, 1991, pp. 64—78, particularly pp. 77-8. However, Oswald arguably maintained good relations with Dalriada and her allies and his influence there was probably considerable, so Oswiu’s presence among them during the period 635-42 does not require that he was in exile. 43

Thacker, ‘Membra Disjecta’, pp. 98-9.

44

W. Chaney, The cult of kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester,

1970, pp. 115-20, but see the rejection of this view by S. J. Ridyard, The royal saints of Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge, 1988, p. 234. 45

Ibid., p. 243; Thacker, ‘Membra Disjecta’, p. 97.

46

Ibid., p. 98. For an interesting parallel, see F. S. Paxton, ‘Power and the

power to heal: the cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy’, Early Medieval Europe, ii, 1993, pp. 97ff. 47

Thacker, ‘Membra Disjecta’, pp. 98-100.

48

There are parallels with the posthumous treatment of Constantine and

Clovis. Although neither was sanctified, both became Christian heroes and role models and the former’s mother was sanctified. See P. Perin, ‘The undiscovered grave of King Clovis I’ in The age of Sutton Hoo, ed. M. Carver, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1992, pp. 255—64. Royal saints were a particular feature of conversionperiod England, as Edwin, Oswald, Oswine and the semi-legendary group descended from Penda attest. 49

Thacker, ‘Membra Disjecta’, pp. 102-4. Near-contemporary Welsh lit¬

erature similarly claims that Edwin’s head had been taken to Anglesey, although

270

Notes Bede recorded that it had been deposited at York. Penda was decapitated in 655. Head-taking was clearly a not unusual feature of contemporary warfare. 50

For whom, see H. Moisl, ‘The Bernician royal dynasty and the Irish in

the seventh century’, Peritia, n, 1983, pp. 122-3. Bede registered some doubts concerning Aldfrith’s paternity: HE, iv, 26 (24). 51

S. Ridyard, Royal saints, p. 246, viewed Oswald’s relics as an ‘important

symbol of Northumbrian identity and prestige’ but they should at this stage be viewed as specifically pertinent to the Bernician dynasty. For the more general, political context of royal saints, see D. W. Rollason, ‘The cults of murdered royal saints in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, xi, 1983, pp. 1-22. 52

The date is unknown but Ecgfrith was reportedly in his fortieth year in

685: HE, iv, 26, and need not have been Eanflsed’s eldest child. The marriage probably occurred in 443-4. 53

He was reputed the first English king to legislate in support of

Christian ritual and impose its exclusivity: HE, ill, 8. 54

See discussion in B. Yorke, Kings and kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon

England, London, 1990, pp. 78-9; D. P. Kirby, The Earliest English kings, London, 1991, p. 92. 55

As proposed by J. McClure, ‘Bede’s Old Testament Kings’ in Ideal and

reality, ed. P. Wormald, Oxford, 1983, p. 86. See also J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship, Oxford, 1971, pp. 85-6. 56

Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 92.

57

See, e.g., K. F. Drew, ‘Another look at the origins of the Middle Ages: a

reassessment of the role of the Germanic kingdoms’, Speculum,

lxii,

1987, pp.

804-7. 58

Bede’s text of the Libellus prohibits marriage at twice removed but this

was arguably a late interpolation: HE, I, 27, and see p. 50, n. 78. Irish canon is unclear at this date: the canons attributed to St Patrick are arguably a later compilation but specify four degrees as the minimum; the Penitentials of Theodore, xii, 26, specify prohibition at the fifth degree, but only the fourth if already married. A marriage between those related at the third degree was to be terminated. See J. T. McNeill and H. M. Gamer, Medieval handbooks of penance, New York, 1965, pp. 85—6, 210. 59

HE,

60

HE, in, 17, 24.

61

As hesitantly proposed by David Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 94.

62

HE, in, 24.

63

As suggested by A. Williams, A. P. Smyth and D. P. Kirby, A bibliograph¬

hi,

25.

ical dictionary of Dark Age Britain, London, 1991, pp. xxvii, 43-4. The name Alhfrith means ‘protector of all’ and both elements had already occurred in the late sixth century in the Bernician royal line so there is no compelling reason other than the reputed marriage of Oswiu to Rieinmellt to make this connection. 64

HE,

ii,

10, quoting Psalm 113 (115).

271

The convert kings 65

See Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, p. 282, nn. 1, 2.

66

As recognised by David Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 94. A fuller dis¬

cussion of the process occurs in A. Angenendt, ‘The conversion of the AngloSaxons considered against the background of the early medieval mission’, Settimane di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, 67

xxxii

(2), 1986, pp. 767-8, 775.

And has been accepted as such by many moderns, for example, F. M.

Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, 3rd edn, 1971, p. 121; Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 100—1. 68

Cap. x, describing Colman as bishop of York and metropolitan.

69

See discussion of Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 121; Mayr-

Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp. 100-1. For parallels see D. Stocker, ‘The early church in Lincolnshire’, in Pre-Viking Lindsey, ed. A. Vince, Lincoln, 1993, pp. 105-6. 70

HE, hi, 20. For an assessment, see Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England,

pp. 121-2; Brooks, Early church, pp. 66-7. 71

Ibid., p. 68.

72

See discussion, Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 92.

73

Reference to his decapitation necessarily revives memories of Edwin

and Oswald and was probably of some ritual significance, but that need not have been strictly religious. See above, n. 49. 74

R Sims-Williams, Religion and literature in western England 600—800,

Cambridge, 1990, pp. 55-6. 75

Ibid., p. 56.

76

HE, ii, 5; in, 24. Oswald may also have enjoyed a hegemonal role among

the Piets and Scots but only Oswiu’s supremacy coincided with a member of his close kin reigning in Pictland and he may well have enabled this to have occurred. Talorgen ruled in Pictland between 653 and his death in 657. See dis¬ cussion in A. P. Smyth, Warlords and holy men, London, 1984, p. 62. 77

HE, in, 24.

78

The most recent discussion of Middle Anglia is that of D. Dumville,

‘Essex, Middle Anglia and the expansion of Mercia in the south-east Midlands’, in Origins, ed. Bassett, pp. 123-40, particularly 130-3. 79

Stocker, ‘Early church’, pp. 117-18. Lindsey had been ruled by Penda

between 642 and 655 and churches may well have been abandoned in conse¬ quence. 80

HE,

ii,

16.

For

doubts

concerning

the

identification

of

Tiowulfingaccestir with Littleborough, see Stocker, ‘Early Church’, p. 116, but Edwin was also king of Hatfield and may have been in control of ‘original Mercia’ so a frontier location between Lindsey and its western neighbours has important parallels with York, Catterick and perhaps Doncaster, all of which are very near internal frontiers between his kingships: see above, p. 175. 81

Smyth, Warlords, pp. 62, 120.

82

As suggested by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede’s ecclesiastical history of

111

Notes the English people, Oxford, 1988, p. 123. The quotation is from HE, ill, 5, as translated by R. A. B. Mynors in Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, p. 229. 83

Oswiu was surely aware of his own unpopularity in much of the south¬

east at this date. (Ethelwald need not have been dead but the chances are that he was and this may have caused considerable unease among the Bernician warrior classes. Peada had been murdered in the previous year. Additionally, his nephew Talorgen died in 657 and Oswiu may have been heavily committed in Pictland. 84

For example Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 117.

85

HE,

86

HE, iv, 12; Vita Wilfridi, xv.

87

C. Stancliffe, ‘Kings who opted out’ in Ideal and reality, ed. Wormald,

hi,

24; iv, 3. Vita Wilfridi, xv, and see below, p. 265.

pp. 174-5, but this may well be as partial a view of events by Bede as his treat¬ ment of Oswine of the Deirans. 88

Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 97. Kirby also reviews evidence of

Kentish clerical influence among the East Saxons at this date. For the political significance of sponsorship see p. 102. 89

Higham, English empire, pp. 121-2, for discussion.

90

HE,

91

If Cedd died of the plague it seems unlikely that he retired to

hi,

30.

Lastingham for the purpose, as Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 121. 92

But see the comments of T. Charles-Edwards in Wallace-Hadrill, Bede,

addenda, p. 232. 93

See the seminal paper by P. H. Blair, ‘Whitby as a centre of learning in

the seventh century’ in Learning and literature in Anglo-Saxon England: studies presented to Peter Clemoes, edd. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 3-32, for a detailed discussion of the ecclesiastical impact of Whitby. 94

The earliest life of Gregory the Great by an anonymous monk of

Whitby, ed. B. Colgrave, Lawrence, Kansas, 1968, pp. 18-19; Thacker, ‘Membra Disjecta’, p. 105.

hi, 24.

95

HE,

96

Ibid..

97

Bede, Life of Cuthbert, in Two lives of St Cuthbert, ed. B. Colgrave,

Cambridge, 1940, 98

HE,

iii,

vii.

7. See discussion in Kirby, Earliest English kings, pp. 151-2.

Yorke, Wessex, p. 172, dates this period of exile c. 645-8 but it could have been marginally later. 99

Yorke, Wessex, p. 172, notes the ASC date of Birinus’s death as 649/50

but this very late source contains West Saxon material which has been exten¬ sively reconstructed, so the date may not be accurate. For Agilbert’s back¬ ground, see J. Campbell, ‘Bede F and ‘The first century of English Christianity’, both in Essays in Anglo-Saxon history, London, 1986, p. 25, n. 89 and p. 58, respectively.

273

The convert kings 100

Vita Wilfridi, vn.

101

Ibid.,

iv-vi.

For the nature of Wilfrid’s Christianity see W. Trent Foley,

Images of sanctity in Eddius Stephanuss life of Bishop Wilfrid, Lampeter, Dyfed, 1992. 102

Perhaps Stamford Bridge: see The life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius

Stephanus, ed. B. Colgrave, Cambridge, 1927, pp. 155-6, for problems of identification, but all Lincolnshire options should be discounted since Lindsey was ruled by Wulfhere. 103

Vita Wilfridi, ix.

104

M. Deanesley, A history of the medieval church 590-1500, London, 9th

edn 1969, pp. 47-8; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 123-4; J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxons, Oxford, 1982, p. 102; C. Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon church councils c. 650-850, Leicester, 1995, p. 5, sees Whitby as ‘strongly ecclesiastical in charac¬ ter’ but p. 6 characterises it as a ‘royal council with an important religious dimension’; see also p. 289. For an exposition of the dating of Easter, see K. Harrison, The framework of Anglo-Saxon history to AD 900, Cambridge, 1976, pp. 30-51. 105

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 108.

106

Smyth, Warlords, p. 62.

107

For example Yorke, Kings and kingdoms, p. 79.

108

Smyth argued on pp. 119, 121 of Warlords that the central issue at

Whitby was political and ecclesiastical control. 109

Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 108.

110

Vita Wilfridi, x, is the earlier and shorter by far of the two surviving

accounts. It was used by Bede, HE, in, 25, who developed a far more elaborate debate that reveals more his mastery of the subject than what was actually said. 111

The interpretation of Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, pp.

107-12, is not dissimilar and see note 108 above. 112

The point is well-made by Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 102.

113

HE, in, 26. The English exiles were established at Mayo and their

foundation became very successful within the Irish context, as Bede recognised, but this was a far cry from near-control of English Christendom. For comment, see Hughes, Church and society, xvi, 51-3. 114

As of c. 669, when Theodore established Wilfrid as bishop of the

Northumbrians at York. 115

HE, in, 26.

116

But see Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 108, for a rather,

different vision of his fate. 117

HE, iv, 19 (17). The dating depends on recognition that the marriage

lasted twelve years and that Ecgfrith had remarried by c. 678. 118

Higham, English empire, p. 124.

119 Mayr-Harting, Coming of Christianity, p. 130; Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 102.

274

Notes 120

HE, ill, 28: Deusdedit died on 14 July 664.

121

It is not entirely clear that Wigheard had been Oswiu’s messenger. If

not, then the letter quoted by Bede could be a piece of slightly later correspon¬ dence subsequent to Oswiu’s learning of Wigheard’s death. An alternative inter¬ pretation is offered by Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, p. 322, n. 1; but see also Wallace-Hadrill, Bede, pp. 133-4. 122

HE, ii, 20.

123

Kirby, Earliest English kings, p. 102.

124

HE, iv, 1.

125

Vita Wilfridi, xiv.

126

Ibid., xv.

127

HE, iv, 3.

128

Ibid.. For recent discussion, see Stocker, ‘Early church’, p. 114; the date

of foundation lies between 669 and March 672.

275

Epilogue

It was with his immediate political objectives largely realised that Oswiu died after a reign of almost three decades in February 670. Bede reported (in HE, iv, 5) that his intention had been to go, with Wilfrid as his guide, as a pilgrim to Rome and to die there, had he recovered from his last illness. In this, Casdwalla of the West Saxons succeeded where Oswiu had failed, travelling to Rome in 688, being baptised and then dying there in 689.1 Caedwalla’s career had been characterised by extra¬ ordinary violence. He too was a first-generation Christian and belat¬ edly baptised at that. Oswiu’s longer career had been no more bloody than Csedwalla’s but contained one certain and several probable instances of violence towards his own close kin such that his conscience is likely to have been deeply troubled as he neared his end. Oswiu had shown himself to be the most opportunistic and success¬ ful of the convert kings to date, demonstrating repeatedly a capacity to react imaginatively to the changing world by which he was confronted and to exploit a broad range of strategies. He was the foremost polit¬ ical pragmatist among the English of his generation and either outlived or outfaced most of his opponents. His tools were many. Some - such as patronage and reward, the creation of sub-kingships and marital alliances - were equally accessible to non-Christian kings. In his manipulation of the Christian church for political and dynastic objec¬ tives Oswiu built on the initiatives of both TEthelberht and Edwin but even then broke new ground. The list is a long one, stretching from his innovative sponsorship of the cult of his dead brother c. 643 to his abandonment of the Scottish Church in 664 and reconciliation with Rome and Canterbury. Oswiu invested heavily in Christianity and expected commensurate returns. In very general terms, what he sought was divine support for

276

Epilogue his kingship and his ambitions. At one moment of great danger (in 655), he gave of his riches and his progeny in expectation that gift-giving and a pseudo-marital alliance with God would require the Lord to recipro¬ cate with the good fortune in battle which he desperately needed at that moment. Such reveals much about his world-picture. At other times, Oswiu’s religious policies were characterised by dynastic, colonial and political imperatives. His concern was far less with what he could do for Christianity than with what Christianity could do for him. For all the convert kings, the patronage of Christian clerisies offered new ways of reinforcing or expanding political power. Modern scholar¬ ship has very properly objected to the notion that the formation of the unitary state of England was already pre-ordained before the Viking Age;2 but the fact remains that power became focused on a rapidly diminishing number of dynasties during the seventh century, all of which acquired some at least of the characteristics of the state. Christianity offered a hierarchical model in which authority was relent¬ lessly top-down and which legitimised the influence which kings exer¬ cised

over

others.

The

authority

of

bishops

(and

particularly

metropolitan bishops) offered ambitious kings the means to export priests and subordinate bishops into the courts of their clients, so effec¬ tively make clones of them and subvert separatist local identities. In some instances, the opportunity was taken to reshape the political geog¬ raphy of entire provinces to the benefit of external authority - and TEthelberht’s activities at London and Rochester are examples of this in action. So too are Edwin’s several border foundations of churches and the Bernicians’ later establishment of Abercorn as a diocesan centre for the Piets. Even among a specific people, royal patronage of the church had the capability to reorientate ceremony and ritual onto sites of the king’s own choosing, which were normally palace complexes, and away from pre-existing ritual sites and shrines. Christian clergy also provided kings with valuable staff. Their special skills in matters such as literacy and their experience of law and record had obvious advantages to rulers, but so too had their capacity to direct divine favour on behalf of a patron and to man a network of cult sites scattered across the king’s territories and those of his sub¬ ordinates. Priests and monks were also prominent at an early date as legates, messengers and ambassadors, travelling both inside and outside England. Oswiu arguably obtained considerable benefit from the clergy he had dispatched to Middle Anglia and Essex in terms of the information they regularly brought back and the opportunities they

277

The convert kings provided to influence royal courts in the region. By such means, both kingship and ‘overkingship’ became far more proactive as a conse¬ quence of conversion. A range of Christian ceremonies provided similar opportunities. Royal baptism was a case in point and every major ‘overking’ among the convert kings persuaded some at least of his client rulers to submit to this rite. Such rituals had significant implications for the status of each, and these could be accentuated where the superior king stood sponsor or godparent to the inferior - a fact which was recalled by King Alfred and his descendants. Such ceremonies were the seventh-century equiva¬ lent to the modern photo-opportunity so beloved of public figures, and arguably made a deep impression on those involved. So too did new and different types of building such as stone churches and the great rituals by which they were consecrated and then used during festivals and on feast days. Christianity offered an impressive array of spectacle which English kings were careful to augment from their hoards and which gained also from the foreignness of many missionaries. The religious affiliation of a great king should, therefore, be seen as integral to his wider political and dynastic objectives. Bishop Daniel might belittle the notion that men should seek material benefits from their gods (see p. 33) but the convert kings did so despite such opinions and were even encouraged so to do by Gregory and his successors. Royal behaviour in the seventh century is veiled for us by the missioncentred assumptions of the few available literary sources and the pow¬ erful

prejudices

of

their

authors,

whose

purposes

differed

so

substantially from our own. Yet kings were first and foremost politicans and dynasts, patrons and leaders of men. They belonged to a world that conferred sacrality on royalty and a milieu which viewed the role of the divine very largely as part and parcel of kingship and prosperity - so also of fecundity and fertility. Bede and his contemporaries looked back on the period and imposed their own absolutes upon it: men were Christian or non-Christian, good or bad, British or English, Irish or Roman. Ever since the Historia Ecclesiastica, the conversion of the English people has cast a long shadow over the writing of seventhcentury history. Even when attempts have been made to write secular history,3 the principal sources have perforce been a clerical literature dominated by hagiography and providential history, so that the pur¬ poses of those authors have already imposed themselves on the avail¬ able evidence.4 The attempt in this volume to explore the motives of the various convert kings regularly runs foul of those purposes and the

278

Epilogue result has been a great deal of hypothesis, based on current estimation of the motives of kings when only their deeds have been recorded. It is as if they were actors in a play of which the speeches are lost and only their movements across the stage remembered. Yet mime is capable of conferring meaning. Excessive hypothesising does of course weaken the suggestions made but it should be preferred to ignoring the questions altogether. For justification of many of the explanations offered in detail in Chapters 2 to 4, the reader is invited to return to the wider discussion of conversion studies which opens this volume. As in many other epi¬ sodes, the available literature points to a mission-centred vision of the English conversion (p. 19). In practice, it is generally the case that the pre-existing world-picture of recipient communities conditions the pace and depth of conversion (p. 28). Kingship and kinship were the princi¬ pal features of pre-conversion Anglo-Saxon society as that is now understood, and this volume has sought to explore just one of those areas in rather greater depth, seeking to expose the thought-world and motivation of the first generation of Christian kings in England. Despite the distinct slant of the literature, conversion did not domi¬ nate the world in which men like Oswiu lived. Nor was Christianity monumental or absolute. For these kings, the sacred was part of a greater world-picture and a more complex vision in which the Christian God had yet to establish his supremacy. The fine details of different rituals were inconsequential to such men and the Latin in which most Christian ceremony was conducted was incomprehensible. Considerable choice became available to English kings between different and competing rituals and religious authorities only during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. All such authorities were ulti¬ mately anchored outside Anglo-Saxon England. There was the tradi¬ tional non-Christian religion of the Anglo-Saxons, which still looked to some extent to the continental homelands at this date. There was Frankia and its powerful Christian kings, with behind it the authority of Rome, whence continental missionaries entered the orbit of Kentish kings. There was British Christianity, which was the most trenchantly hostile to the English but the most accessible. Lastly there was the great monastic empire of Iona in Ireland and northern Britain, which only rose to prominence in the last decades of the sixth century. The timing was therefore to an extent dictated by factors outside England but the choices which the greater kings made were never so circumscribed. Different religious affiliation was not a complete bar to political co-

279

The convert kings operation or marriage but it could be a barrier. The inclusiveness of non-Christian religion meant that pagans experienced least difficulty in this respect and they continued to marry and ally themselves with a variety of parties. Roman priests found the accommodation of Christians who were answerable to alternative authorities increasingly difficult but the Kentish court formed alliances and marriages with other groups throughout the period under discussion. About 650, the Bernician court seems to have experienced little difficulty in marrying its own Christian members into the non-Christian Mercian royal house. The barriers were not, therefore, so great that they could not be over¬ come at need, and Christian and non-Christian were far less polarised than has sometimes been imagined. The incestuousness of the relationship between dynastic politics and ritual behaviour in the seventh century has not always been adequately appreciated and too often the attempt has been made to write a history of one without the other. The challenge for historians today is to inter¬ pret not just the dynastic and/or territorial history of the period, and not just the conversion history but the two combined. That was how they were experienced by contemporaries, for whom ritual behaviour and the selection of cult were integral to, and charged by, the conflict¬ ing and ever shifting aspirations of dynasts. One last example might perhaps sum up this point. Had Oswiu lived in 670 and travelled to Rome to die,5 he would have left his eldest son by Eanflasd, Ecgfrith, to reign in Northumbria and taken with him Bishop Wilfrid. Since the previous year, the bishop had been presiding over a see as extensive as Oswiu’s own kingship. He was, however, probably still suspect in the eyes of the old king and his heir, both in consequence of his past preferment by the disgraced Alhfrith and his more recent ten¬ dency to hearken to the siren voices of the Mercians. The old king may well have considered Wilfrid’s company on the long trip would have constituted penance enough to earn his entry to heaven but that is not to suggest that he did not have his uses. Wilfrid did, of course, know his way around Gaul and had traversed the Alps to Rome so he would have been useful as a guide but this is unlikely to have been his only motive. Wilfrid’s absence from England in the crucial half-year or so while Ecgfrith established himself and his authority over the northern church would have been an inestimable boon to Oswiu’s heir and one to which Wilfrid could hardly openly object. Oswiu was, therefore, exhibiting his normal political astuteness even alongside the anxiety natural to a Christian convert on his death-bed, and Wilfrid had every reason to let

280

Notes out his own sigh of relief as Oswiu breathed his last, still in Northumbria. Oswiu would perhaps have considered the elevated position he had sometimes enjoyed, and had in part passed on to his son and heir, and his monumental Eigenkirche at Whitby, as his most significant achieve¬ ments; but he would perhaps have most liked to have been recalled by future generations as the hero warrior-king who killed the dreaded Penda at the Winwced. He is remembered for his culminating presence in Bede’s enigmatic list of imperium-wielding kings,6 but more so for his presidency of the synod of Whitby and his unification of the English Church. He had undoubedly sought imperium but the other distinc¬ tions are unlikely to have featured amongst his objectives. Rather, they were strategies associated with quite different purposes, the common denominator of which was the pursuit of power. His death did, however, signal an end to the foundation period of English Christianity. Oswiu, like yEthelberht, Edwin and Oswald, had been born into a non-Christian household. When he died, his heir and the next kings of most other major kingships (Csedwalla of Wessex excepted) had been born to Christian parents and most probably expe¬ rienced infant baptism. Oswiu died too with Archbishop Theodore in post and his great overhaul of the English dioceses about to begin. The era of tribal sees reflective of kingships and peoples was passing — or at least under active review - and although future kings would exploit their role as patrons and protectors of Christianity, none in the future would have the same extraordinary freedom of action vis-a-vis the developing institutions of insular Christianity which Oswiu had enjoyed. Apart perhaps from Offa of the Mercians, he was the last king capable of contesting the authority and perhaps even the very existence of the Church of Canterbury and the last king capable of making a diocese the size of half England to accord with his own new kingship by conquest of Mercia. In that sense he was indeed a king of the heroic age, who lived to see its waning. With that epitaph he might well have been content.

Notes 1

HE, v, 7.

2

For a brief and recent summary, see P. Wormald, ‘The making of

England’, History Today, 3

xlv

(2), 1995, pp. 26-32.

S. Bassett (ed.), The origins of English kingdoms, Leicester, 1989;

281

The convert kings B. Yorke, Kings and kingdoms of early Anglo-Saxon England, London, 1990, and D. P. Kirby, The earliest English kings, London, 1991, are the most recent in a long tradition of studies which focus primarily on secular history. 4

There are relevant parallels discussed by I. Wood, ‘Christians and pagans

in ninth-century Scandinavia’, in The Christianization of Scandinavia, edd. B. Sawyer, P. Sawyer and I. Wood, Alingsas, Sweden, 1987, pp. 39-42. 5

HE, iv, 5.

6

HE, ii, 5.

282

Index

Abercorn, 277 Adomnan, bishop, 8, 140, 171, 206 yElfwine, Bernician prince, 42 TEthelberht, of Kent, 41, 53-118, 164, 171,211,242, 244, 254 accession of, 66, 82 achievements of, 114—19, 276-7 baptism of, 43, 53-62, 91-2, 117, 157, 170 connections with Frankia, 71, 78, 81,86-92, 97, 103, 116-17, 139 cult of, 56, 251 death of, 57, 82, 104, 118-19, 133, 156 early career of, 71, 82, 86-8, 138, 163 as law-maker, 117 marriage of, 59—60, 66-7, 70, 82, 86-7 ‘overkingship’ of, 57, 62, 88, 95, 102-3, 107, 109-11, 116,134, 141, 143, 150, 179, 182, 184, 242 political agenda of, 92, 95-101, 107-19, 134-5,146, 149,189 religious policies of, 29, 39-40, 53, 62, 89, 97, 104,112,114, 135, 142, 149, 210 reputation of, 155 treatment of by Bede, 55-62, 66, 135 i^thelburh, Kentish queen of

Deirans, 141, 158—63, 165-7, 171, 190,214,218, 225 TEthelfrith, of Bernicians, 114—15, 145, 150,167, 172, 177,180-1, 190, 203,206,232 dates of, 145 death of, 136, 151, 154, 156 develops Yeavering, 146-8 image of in HE, 56, 106 marriage of, 145, 225 policies of, 146, 164 successes of, 41, 110, 112, 150, 202-4, 220 yEthelraed, of Mercians, 244 dEthelthryth, queen, 260-1 dEthelwalh, of South Saxons, 29-31, 249 dEthelwold, of East Angles, 249 African conversion, 20-4 Agilbert, bishop, 259, 263, 266 in the north, 255-8 in Wessex, 216, 253 at Whitby, 257-8 Aidan, bishop, 210-14, 218, 245, 250, 264 attitude towards Oswine and Oswiu, 227-31 cult of, 266 death of, 230 importance at Oswald’s death, 220-1,229 miracles attributed to, 213, 224 royal connections of, 211

283

Index Albinus, abbot, 59, 104, 107, 139 Aldfrith, of Northumbria, 221, 224, 230, 234 Alhflaed, Northumbrian queen of Middle Angles, 232, 234 Alhfrith, Bernician king of Deirans, 238, 243, 252, 258 eclipse of, 259, 265 marriage of, 232, 246 political objectives of, 238, 252-4, 260-1 relations with Cenwealh, 253—6 relations with Peada, 232^4, 239, 252 relations with Wilfrid, 42, 259 religious policy of, 253—5, 263 Andelot, treaty of, 72, 88 Anna, of East Angles, 240, 249, 253, 261 apostasy, 3, 23, 31-2, 38, 100, 113-14, 202-3, 220, 228, 229 archaeology, 5, 8, 67, 82-3, 144, 148 Arles, 72, 77, 108 augury, 22, 32, 35, 165-6 Augustine, archbishop, 25, 43, 54, 57, 113 achievements of, 97, 106-9, 118-19 arrival of, 59-60, 145, 160 consecration of, 77-8 cult of, 59 discussions with British clergy, 103-12, 213 journey from Rome, 62, 75 as miracle-worker, 58, 61, 91, 105,

111 as missionary, 32-3, 39, 64, 79, 92, 108 promotion of to metropolitan, 94 relations of with Frankish clergy, 79-80, 90, 108 return of to Rome, 75-6 status of, 58-9, 76-7, 94, 108, 179 Augustine’s Oak conferences, 103-12, 175, 178, 189 Bede’s account of, 60, 103-7 British attitudes to, 104—5 dating of, 108 historicity of, 104-7

political context of, 109-12, 114, 150 Bamburgh, 96, 146, 210, 223—4, 244, 252 baptism, 158, 211-12; see also

individual names attitudes towards, 23-4, 32, 212 en masse, 18, 29-30, 39, 41, 170-5, 180-1,217, 244 at frontier sites, 172-5, 180 meaning of, 18, 53, 170 perceptions of, 23, 30—3, 36, 39 political utility of, 30, 53, 102—3, 154-6, 173-5, 232, 234, 241, 278 preparation for, 17-18, 166, 170,

212 sponsorship of, 39, 102, 217, 232, 249; see also godparent Bardney, monastery of, 28, 244 Bede, 15, 53, 143, 149, 151, 159, 186, 213, 247, 249, 254 on ^Ethelberht, 55-62, 73, 82, 91-2, 102-3,119,156,162,171 on apostasy, 133—4, 137-8, 204—5 on conversion, 10, 55, 104, 167-9, 184—5, 213, 217, 234, 242, 245 on Irish, 213, 218, 224 on Northumbrian kings, 151, 153, 201-5, 208, 226-31 on Oswald, 153, 202, 206-7, 212-13, 217, 222-3 on Oswine, 226-31 on Oswiu, 153, 226, 276 on Penda, 242 on Wilfrid, 257, 259, 261, 264; see

also Historia Ecclesiastica Bernicia, 43, 145-7, 151-2, 164—5, 168-9, 173, 178, 181,203-4, 208, 243,250 Bertha, Frankish queen of Kent, 57, 66-7, 73,78-9, 118 attitude towards Augustine, 79,

101 birth of, 66 marriage of, 59, 66-7, 70-1, 86-7 Birinus, bishop, 215, 253

284

Index Boniface, bishop to the Germans, 33, 37, 107, 112, 171 Boniface, pope, 161—2 letters to: yEthelburh, 161-2, 165 Edwin, 32, 161-2, 165-6, 179, 234 Iustus, 140-1, 159—62, 184 presents to Edwin, 166-7 Bradwell-on-Sea, 257 Bretons, 70—1, 89 Britons, 85, 88, 107-8, 114, 118, 150, 201,206,210,224 Christianity of, 63, 105, 109, 150, 178, 189-90, 204, 208, 216,

222 in Historia Ecclesiastica, 105-8, 201-2, 213 role in baptism of Edwin, 149-50 role in consecration of Chad, 264; see also Augustine’s Oak conferences Brunhild, Visigothic queen of the Franks, 65, 72-4, 78, 80, 86, 90 Buddhism, 40, 190 Burgundy, 59, 63, 183, 214, 216 burial, 9; see also individual names pagan, 25, 176, 178 Cadwallon, of Gwynedd, 201-8, 220, 226 death of, 206, 219, 242 exile of, 179 in Northumbria, 201-5 victory over Edwin, 41, 189-90, 201,213,219 Caedwalla, of West Saxons, 29, 276 Campodonum, 173, 175, 201 Candidus, priest, 65-6, 72 Gregory’s instructions to, 65-6 Canterbury, 56, 59, 62, 70, 73, 83, 87, 91,95-6, 117-18, 136-7, 147-8, 150, 160, 164, 170, 183-7, 208,213,216,218, 225-6, 233, 251, 254, 263, 276 archdiocese of, 102, 137-8, 184, 237-8, 258, 262

churches at, 60, 73, 87-8, 160 as a royal centre, 60, 147 Cearl, of Mercians, 114, 145, 149, 180 Cedd, bishop, 233-5, 243, 248-9 death of, 259 relations with CEthelwald, 239 role at Whitby, 249, 257, 259 Cenwealh, of West Saxons, 264 links with Canterbury, 238, 253 relations with Alhfrith, 253-4 religious policy of, 253, 255 succession of, 224 Ceollach, bishop, 245-6 ceremony, political utility of, 40-2, 241, 278; see also cult; ritual Chad, bishop, 247, 264—5 Charibert, of Franks, 66, 68, 70, 86 Chester, 147, 173 battle of, 105-6, 115, 150, 181, 204-5, 213, 220 synod of, 105-6, 108, 114, 150 Childebert II, of Franks, 65-6, 69-70, 88-9, 115, 117 death of, 75, 90 majority of, 72 minority of, 69, 71 Chilperic, of Franks, 86 attitudes towards episcopacy, 73 career, 68 death of, 70-1 imperial pretensions, 70, 81 Chlothar I, of Franks, 70 death of, 68 Chlothar II, of Franks, 66, 78-80,

102 birth of, 70 competition with Childebert II, 70, 72-6, 89 defeat of (in 600), 70 minority of, 71, 88 supremacy of, 116, 139, 142 Christianity, definitions of, 14-20 exclusivity of, 202, 211 language of, 3, 17—18 literature of, 2, 8-9 perceptions of, 23, 168-9

285

Index political utility of, 2, 138, 172, 225, 241 as warrior religion, 41, 168, 216, 220, 224, 240-2 Chronica Maiora, 57 church foundation, 41, 140, 160—1; see also individual churches church councils in Frankia, at Chalus, 113 at Paris, 116 Clovis, of Franks, 64, 70, 189 Coifi, pagan priest, 168-9, 176 Colman, bishop, 236, 257-9, 266 colonialism, in Africa, 20—1, 24 Bernician, 28, 210-11, 214-20, 234, 237, 240, 242, 246-7 of Edwin, 180-4 Kentish, 54, 134—5 Columba, abbot, 148, 207, 209, 226 cult of, 266 Life of St Columba, 206, 211, 259; see also Adomnan Columbanus, Irish abbot in Frankia, 63, 230 Constantine, emperor, 41, 99-100, 171, 173 conversion, behavioural aspects of, 34—6, 40 in colonial context, 12, 20—5, 102-9, 134-5, 180-4 definitions of, 7-9, 13—43, 242 indicators of, 14—16, 33 literature of, 10—11, 19, 245 meaning of, 11, 36, 170 methods of, 30-3 as negotiation, 28 opposition to, 28 political utility of, 10, 25-8, 40-1, 117-19, 138, 153, 164, 170, 177, 180-91,234, 248 rationality of, 5, 13, 17-19 sources for, 4, 7-9 theories of, 11-28 Cuichelm, of West Saxons, 143, 167 cult, 41 of St Augustine, 59 of St Columba, 209

of St Gregory, 59 of St Oswald, 213, 222-4, 252 pagan, 26, 35, 117-18, 165, 175, 205, 212, 222 of St Peter, 166-70, 189-90, 201, 208-9, 213, 228, 252, 262, 266 political utility of, 176-7, 228-33, 248, 276-8; see also individual kings of saints, 38, 59, 262, 265 transitional, 37, 223 Cuthbert, bishop, 253, 259 Cynigils, of West Saxons, 224, 253 baptism of, 216-17 Dagobert, of Franks, 139, 163, 183 Dalriada, 224; see also Scots, Scottish church Daniel, bishop, 33, 255 Deira, see Deiri Deiri, 114, 142, 152, 164, 166-8, 176, 178, 181, 183,202,212, 226, 229, 260 ethnicity of, 144-5 kings of, 144-5, 201-3, 238-9; see also Edwin; Osric; Oswine political geography of, 144, 149 self-determination of, 226-7 Deusdedit, archbishop, 32 consecration of, 237-8 death of, 261, 263 Dinoot, abbot, 105 Diuma, bishop, 233, 243-6, 263 Dorchester-on-Thames, 217, 253 Durkheim, Emile, 7, 12, 14 Eadbald, of Kent, 137-43, 184, 214, 216, 220, 225 accession of, 133 ambitions of, 141-3, 163-4 as apostate, 133—4, 138, 141, 159 baptism of, 60, 133, 140-1, 159-60 as church founder, 140, 160-1 contacts with Frankia, 139, 141 contacts with Rome, 141-2, 159, 161, 165, 186, 262 dates of, 158-62

286

Index dealings of with Edwin, 141-3, 158-64, 184-6 gold coinage of, 184 initiative of in East Anglia, 183-4 marriages of, 134, 138, 141 as protector of mission, 138, 214 religious affiliation of, 133-43 Eanflsed, queen and abbess, 230, 234, 250-1,256, 262 baptism of, 57, 225 marriage of, 225 Eanfrith, of Bernicians, 157, 206 apostasy of, 203-4 baptism of, 153, 165 death of, 204—6, 208 in exile, 151, 154, 164, 169 marriage of, 153 East Angles, 54, 102-3, 136, 181-4, 214,218, 233-4, 237, 240, 249, 253,261 Easter, dating of, 105, 213, 218, 256, 258,264 East Saxons, 54, 85, 95, 117, 141-3, 237, 243, 248, 277 pagan reactions among, 37-8, 134 religious attitudes of, 135-7 self-determination of, 134—5 Eata, abbot, 253, 259 Ecgberht, of Kent, 261-2 Ecgfrith, of Northumbria, 42 as candidate for succession, 234, 260 competition with Mercians, 247 as hostage, 240 marriage of, 260-1 Edwin, of Deirans, 35, 104, 119, 202-5, 208-11, 224-7 accession of, 151-3 achievements of, 188-91, 276 assassination attempt on, 143, 167 baptism of, 18-19, 33, 43, 56, 104, 149, 164-6 as client king, 151-7 contacts with Kent, 141, 158-9, 164, 171, 185-8 contacts with Rome, 32, 162, 165-6, 171, 184-7,189,262 cult of, 226

death of, 144, 186, 201, 205, 216, 220-1 in exile, 114, 149, 154 influence on Bernician rivals, 153-6, 225 marriages of, 149, 154, 158—63, 246 as ‘overking’, 169, 172-3, 179-84, 188-91,209,216 as pagan,151-3, 167 political world of, 144—91 relations of with Rsedwald, 115, 150-1,163,167,181 sources for, 143-4 state-building initiatives of, 174-84, 188-91 threats to, 157-8, 163—4 treatment of: East Anglia, 102 Elmet, 172, 179 Lindsey, 180-1 Wales, 179, 189-90 West Saxons, 167-8 utility of Christianity to, 29, 35, 39, 149,164, 170-91,201 warfare of, 41, 143, 168, 186, 201, 212, 240, 242 at York, 56, 95, 170-1 Egberht, archbishop, 38, 56 Egberht, of Kent, 248, 261-2, 265 Elmet, 110, 145, 172, 174, 179-80, 189 Eorcenberht, of Kent, 220, 225, 228, 238, 248 death of, 261 laws of, 34 policies of, 228 Eormenric, of Kent, 70, 85, 142 Eorpwald, of East Angles, 164, 181-2 conversion of, 102, 181 death of, 182 Essex, see East Saxons ethnicity, 28, 82-5, 164 Felix, bishop, 181, 187 consecration of, 183-4, 216 festivals, 26, 34, 40-1, 117, 119, 147

287

Index Vergilius, 93-4 cult of at Canterbury, 59 knowledge of the English, 63-6, 73, 80-2, 93-5 on miracles, 61 motives of, 62-4, 74 perceptions of, 55-119 policies of, 63—6, 72—5, 78, 96, 117 reputation of, 64, 256 writings of, 72 Guntram, of Franks, 68-72, 88-9 Gwynedd, 114, 150, 179, 189, 201—2

Finan, bishop, 232, 234, 256, 259, 263, 266 appointment of, 231 utility to Oswiu, 232, 243 Frankia, 2, 147, 155, 165, 184, 189, 214-15, 259 Frankish clergy in England, 59, 78- 80, 90; see also individual missionaries; missions Frankish influence in England, 70-1, 81-2, 85, 116, 139, 163, 183, 216-17, 254 Frankish politics, 62, 64-80, 115-17 Fredegund, queen, 69-71, 76, 90, 92 Fursa, bishop, 214 Gaul, see Frankia Gewisse, see West Saxons, Gilling, 230, 246 godparent, 102, 190, 217, 232, 241, 278; see also individual names-, baptism, sponsorship Goodmanham, 148, 156, 169, 176-7,

212 Gregory, bishop of Tours, 66, 69, 82 Gregory I, pope, 8, 23 blueprint for English church, 94—7, 141, 170, 185,218,244-5 conversion strategies of, 32-3, 63, 93, 98-101, 118-19 correspondence with: TEthelberht, 30, 32, 57-8, 62, 93, 98-101,116 Arigius, 75 Augustine, 60-1, 91, 93, 96, 107, 112-13, 179 Bertha, 58-9, 78,93, 101, 117 Brunhild, 65,72-81, 101 Candidus, 65-6 Childibert II, 65, 72-4, 82 Chlothar II, 72, 75, 90 Columbanus, 63 Eulogius, 58, 60, 64, 77, 79 Mellitus, 93, 108, 118-19 Protasius, 75 Stephen, 75 Theuderic and Theudebert, 76, 79- 81

Hatfield, 174, 181,244 battle of, 189-90 Heavenfield, 206-7, 222 Hengest, 85 Hereric, Deiran prince, 144—5, 149, 180 Hexham, 59 Hereswith, Deiran princess, 145, 182 Hild, abbess, 250-1 parentage of, 145, 250 at synod of Whitby, 257-8 Historia Ecclesiastica {HE), 113, 143 historicity of, 60, 63, 94 northern perspective of, 104, 119, 143 purposes of, 10 sources for, 10, 59—60, 63, 104—7, 255 treatment of Britons, 104-6 Holy Island, 221, 229, 231, 235, 245, 251,258-9, 261,263,266 as clone of Iona, 211 as focal place, 96, 210, 212 role of under Oswald, 210-20; see also Lindisfarne Honorius, archbishop, 183, 187-8, 225,238 consecration of, 180, 183, 185 , death of, 96, 237 pallium for, 185 papal letter to, 185-6, 262 Honorius, pope, 184, 215-16, 228 correspondence with: Edwin, 184-7, 189

288

Index as messenger, 93 as miracle-worker, 60, 140 laws, 34, 117, 138,230 Libellus Responsionum, 93-4, 113, 138 Lichfield, 265 Lincoln, 174, 180-1,244 Lindisfarne, 59, 210, 214, 217, 220, 223-5, 231, 236, 239, 243-4, 251-2, 254, 259, 263; see also Holy Island Lindsey, 173, 180, 244, 247 Liudhard, bishop, 59-60, 74—5, 78, 80-1, 138, 160 as missionary, 57, 165 as political agent, 73 utility of to ./Ethelberht, 87-8, 138 Liudhard ‘medalet’, 73, 87 Loidis (Leeds), 172-3, 180 Lombards, 64, 89, 115, 139, 147 London, 94—6, 110, 114—18, 161, 172, 277 diocese of, 95, 149, 237 as royal centre, 96 synod of, 107, 112-13

archbishop Honorius, 185-7, 262 Irish, 188 Horton, Robert, 20-5, 27-8 Hwicce, 108, 110, 112 Ida, of Bernicians, 146, 232 idolatry, 37, 137, 234 idols, 9, 32—4, 99, 165-6, 168, 177 Iona, 207,210, 251,254, 259 authority of, 208-9, 211, 218, 224, 237, 241, 244, 258-9 Bernician exiles at, 154 foundation of, 148 resistance to synod of Whitby, 259 Ireland, 169, 204, 209, 253, 258 Irish Christianity, 63, 163, 171, 218, 237, 242, 244, 259, 265; see also Scottish church Iustus, archbishop, 113, 140, 159, 184 as bishop, 94, 116, 138-9 in exile, 138 consecration of, 161-2 James the Deacon, 202, 226, 257 Jaruman, bishop, 247, 257, 265, among the East Saxons, 249-50 John IV, pope, 218 Jutes, 82-3

magic, 12, 91; see also miracles marriage, 34, 230-3, 241, 280; see also individual names Maserfelth, battle of, 220

Kent, 64, 82-7, 97, 110-17, 135, 139, 148, 158, 165, 172, 184, 190, 208, 214, 218, 220, 233, 249, 264 pagan reaction in, 134 structure of, 173; see also Kentish kings and clerics by name-,

Canterbury; Rochester kingship, growth of, 118 ideological role of, 39, 54, 58, 103, 177,182, 202, 205, 219, 222-3; see also individual kings

Lastingham, 233, 249, 253, 264—5 Laurence, archbishop, 113, 115, 137-8, 140

Mellitus, archbishop, 113, 137, 140, 160, 162 as bishop, 94, 135-8, 161, 237 exile of, 136—9 as leader of mission, 93—9 as miracle-worker, 60 at Rome, 115 Melrose, 37, 254, 259 Mercians, 41, 104, 110, 190, 201, 204, 215,218-25, 231,238, 246, 253, 260, 265 conversion of, 180, 233, 243-4, 248 Middle Angles, 232-4, 243, 261, 277 millenarianism, 29-30 miracles, utility of, 60—1, 111, 140, 167, 206, 222-4 missions, 191 Anglo-Irish, 233, 235-7, 242

289

Index Frankish, 56, 181-7, 254 Irish, 209-59 impact of, 18, 33-4 Roman, 40, 93-96 strategies of, 29, 40; see also individuals

monasteries, foundation of, 39, 239^10, 253, 266; see also by name

Northumbria, see individual kings; Bernicia; Deiri Nothelm, priest (later archbishop), 59 CEthelwald, Bernician king of Deirans, 221, 238-9, 252-3 alliance of with Penda, 240—1, 252 Osric, of Deirans, 202-3, 206, 221, 226-8 Oswald, of Bernicians, 226 accession of, 206, 242 Bede’s vision of, 56, 146, 202, 206- 7, 212-13, 217, 222 colonialism of, 28, 210-11, 214—20 conversion of, 153, 206-7 cult of, 210, 213, 222-4, 239, 252, 266, 276 death of, 220-2, 226 in exile, 154, 207 ‘overkingship’ of, 209, 214, 216-19, 223-5 political objectives, 212-20 problems facing, 214, 217-20, 224 regnal years of, 145, 206 relations with: East Angles, 214—15 Hwicce, 219 Kent, 214 Lindsey, 28 Mercians, 218-20, South Saxons, 215 Welsh, 206-9 West Saxons, 215-17, 224, 253 religious policies of, 40, 102, 207- 17, 226 reputation of, 208-9, 217, 226, 242,251

Oswine, of Deirans, 226-31 exile of, 203, 226, 228 murder of, 229-30, 239 political objectives of, 228-30 regnal dates of, 226-7 religious policy of, 228-9, 239 Oswiu, of Northumbrians, accession of, 220-2 colonialism of, 234, 237, 240, 242, 246- 7 conversion of, 153, 207, 220 death of, 4, 246, 276, 280-1 as exile, 154 as king of the Mercians, 242-5, 253, 266 marriage of, 57, 225, 230-1, 233 as ‘overking’ 242-67 as patron of Whitby, 36, 210, 225, 255-9 political skills of, 223—6, 231, 242, 247- 8, 255-9, 261, 276 promotion of Oswald’s cult by, 210, 223-4, 226, 276 relations with: Agilbert, 255-7 Aidan, 221, 229 Alhfrith, 254-5, 260-1,265 Holy Island, 210, 221, 229, 251-2 Kent, 225, 228, 238, 261, 263 Oswald, 221, 251-2 Oswine, 226-30 Peada, 232-3, 243-4 Penda, 224, 240 Piets, 245, 256 Rome, 161, 261-2 Sigeberht, 234, 249 Theodore, 265—6 Wilfrid, 259-60, 263^1 Wulfhere, 245-57, 262-3 utility of Christianity to, 36, 102, 221, 232-67 warfare of, 41, 240-2 ‘overkingship’, 41, 43, 96, 142-3, 209, 217, 241,278 extent of, 156 regional examples of, 157, 163; see also individual kings

290

Index paganism (non-Christian religion), abstruseness of, 2-3, 9, 16-17, 91 attitudes towards Christianity, 135-6, 202, 241-2 characteristics of, 22, 91, 242 credibility of, 33, 165-6, 205, 221-2, 224, 241 evidence for, 25 impact of Christianity upon, 17-20, 35 mutability of, 21, 25-6, 35 rituals of, 26, 38, 135, 147 social and political imperatives of, 135, 202-3, 219, 221, 224 viewed via Christian texts, 7-9, 22-3 papacy, 8, 218, 262; see individual popes-, Rome papal patrimony, in Gaul, 65 Paris, 68, 70-1, 76, 90 Partney, 244 Paulinus, bishop, 119, 167, 187-8, 204-5, 212-13, 226 authority of, 179, 263 consecration of, 158-9, 161-3 flight of, 186, 190 in Lindsey, 180-1 as missionary, 32-3, 39, 56, 153, 157, 165-6 pallium for, 185 at Rochester, 186-7, 214, 225 utility to Edwin, 171, 180-4 Peada, of Middle Angles, 234, 238, 243, 245 baptism of, 232, 242, 248 marriage of, 232-3, 246 murder of, 245, 252 objectives of, 232-3 Penda, of Mercians, 190, 201, 204, 221-2 attitude of towards Christianity, 241-2 death of, 241-5 relations with: Cadwallon, 190 East Angles, 215, 238, 240 Oswald, 218-20

Oswiu, 224, 240 West Saxons, 224, 226 religious affiliation of, 27, 221-2 reputation of, 221-2, 232, 238, 241 wars of, 41, 207, 222, 232, 234, 240-1 Peter, abbot, as ambassador, 93, 116, 139 death of, 139 place-names, as evidence of British churches, 88, 178 as evidence of pagan cult sites, 8, 175-6 plague, 38 priesthood, 12-13, 35 Christian, 91-2, 176-7, 190, 209, 233 pagan, 26, 37, 91, 168-9, 176-7, 240 political utility of, 88-90, 180-91, 209, 233, 241, 277-8 propitiation, 240-1 providential history, 62, 99, 101, 105, 109, 133, 205, 222, 245 Raedwald, of East Angles, 95, 115, 118, 149-50, 155, 167-8 baptism of, 92, 102-3, 107-8, 110, 112-13,182 death of, 141, 156, 214 as ‘overking’, 136-9, 142, 151-2, 156, 161,225 religious affiliation of, 36, 103, 136, 138, 152, 155 reputation of, 152 Reccared, of Visigoths, 64, 86, 100 relics, 34, 38, 96, 100, 209, 262 religion, definitions of, 4, 7, 14—16 role of belief within, 16-17; see also Christianity; conversion; paganism religious change, models of, 12—28 Rhun, 149, 224 Ricberht, of East Angles, 182-3 Rieinmellt, British princess, 224

291

Index Ripon, 264 consecration of, 41—2, 171 grant to Melrose, 253 grant to Wilfrid, 254, 259 ritual, 206 Christian, 39-42, 117, 136, 171, 190, 208, 278; see also baptism pagan, 30, 39, 103, 135, 137, 147, 156, 164, 167, 205, 222-3, 241 Rochester, diocese of, 116—18, 172, 214, 238, 277 Romanus, bishop, 161, 184 Romanus, priest, 226, 257 Rome, 115, 256, 258, 261-2, 266, 276; see also popes by name; papacy Saeberht, of East Saxons, 92, 95, 108, 134, 143, 149 death of, 86, 104, 137 sons of, 134—7, 182 Saxons, in Normandy, 70-1 Scots, 114, 154, 165, 209; see also Iona; Ireland Scottish church, 2, 149, 209, 223, 276 accessibility to Britons, 213 as instrument of colonialism, 43, 209, 212-20; see also Irish Christianity shrines, see temples Sigeberht, of East Angles, 183, 186, 214,218,220 abdication of, 215 Sigiberht, of East Saxons, 234, 238-9 baptism of, 234 murder of, 249 Sigibert, of Franks, 68-71, 86 Sigehere, of East Saxons, 38, 249 St Sixtus, cult of, 88 social anthropology, 3-5, 11, 13 sociology, 11, 15 Soissons, 68, 70, 76, 79, 88, 90 South Saxons, 29-31, 215 swastika, 176 synods, at Birr, 171 in Frankia, see church councils

at Hatfield, 17 at London,112-13 role of king at, 41 of Whitby, 255-8 Talorgen, of Piets, 153, 245 temples, 8, 25, 99, 103, 147-8, 169, 176-7 conversion to churches, 103, 119 Thanet, 92 Theodore, archbishop, 17, 37, 251, 265-6 Theudebert, of Franks, 76-9, 81, 90, 97,102,113,115-16 Theuderic, of Franks, 76-9, 81, 90, 97, 102, 113, 115-16 Tilbury, 237 ‘traditional’ religions, 7, 13, 20-1 Trumhere, bishop, 246-8 as abbot, 230 Tuda, bishop, 259, 261 Utta, priest, 225, 233 Venantius Fortunatus, 70, 86 Vergilius, archbishop, 72 Visigoths, 64, 86 Vitalian, pope, 262, 265 Vita Wilfndi (Life of Wilfrid), 29-31, 91, 179, 236, 255, 25961, 265 Weber, Max, 13 Welsh, 189-90, 201-3, 219-20, 241; see also Britons Wessex, see West Saxons West Saxons, 41, 108, 110, 112, 136, 141, 143, 167-9, 201,203, 208, 212, 215-19, 224-8 conversion of, 216-18 Whitby, 54, 56, 59, 143 foundation of, 251 Oswiu’s involvement with, 210, 225, 251-2 synod of, 36, 161, 255-8 Wigheard, priest, 261-4 Wilfrid, bishop, 259 early career of, 254

292

Index in Frankia, 254, 259—60, 264 in Frisia, 91 at Ripon, 41-2, 171, 178, 259, 265 among South Saxons, 29-30, 91 at synod of Whitby, 257-8 Winchester, 95, 254 Wine, bishop, 254, 259, 264 Winwced, battle of, 234, 240—1, 248-50 Woden, 7, 115, 144, 165,219 women, role of, 35-6 ‘world’ religions, 13, 21 writing, 24, 117 Wulfhere, of Mercians, 245 conversion of, 246, 248, 263 marriage of, 248 political career of, 24, 249-50, 254 relations with: Chad,247, 265-6

Kent, 248 Oswiu, 245-57, 262-3 West Saxons, 253 Wilfrid, 265 religious patronage of, 247, 250, 265 Yeavering, development of, 146-8, 176-7 destruction of, 202 mass baptism at, 173 as a political centre, 95, 147-8, 153 York, 147, 176, 202, 213, 226, 256 church of, 170—1, 212 as communication centre, 172-3 diocese of, 94, 96-7, 141, 149, 184, 212, 228, 259-61, 263-5 Edwin’s baptism at, 56, 170, 175

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