A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (16 page)

Young noblemen tended to resent being bossed about by other young noblemen, however holy. Ceolfrith, Bede’s abbot at Monkwearmouth Jarrow, was forced to resign and withdraw from the abbey because of jealousies and violent criticism from some of the noble brethren on account of his strict discipline. According to Boniface there were English churchmen who dressed in garments embellished with ‘dragons’ (oriental silks?). On the other hand, life in the church could offer challenge and openings to intelligent and ambitious minds.

Cuthbert, the first of our nobleman clerics, was being recognized as the unofficial patron saint of the Northumbrians within a generation of his death in 687; in 1987 he was focus of a notable 1,300th anniversary celebration. He entered the monastery of Melrose on the River Tweed aged about fourteen; the fact that he made his arrival mounted on horseback, carrying a spear and attended by a servant backs the assumption that his family were members of the nobility. Tradition speaks of him guarding his lord’s sheep, but in a society where, witness Old English law codes, sheep rustling was rife (as, according to press reports, it is again today on England’s northern fells) this could as well have been the armed service of a retainer as the duty of a peasant shepherd. (The shepherds carved on the mysterious Franks Casket (see
page 86
) carry spears.) In fact, Cuthbert may first have considered the military way – an anonymous ‘Life’ speaks of the boy having served with an army ‘in the face of the enemy’. In the early 650s, before Winwaed, with the pagan forces of Mercia constantly probing the defences of Bernicia and with ‘noblemen from many a kingdom flocking to serve the bountiful Oswine of Deira’, a warrior’s career would have
been a natural choice for a young Christian aristocrat. After Winwaed, service in the
militia dei
, the ‘army of god’, would have made more sense. Cuthbert had easy relations with the royal family: he rose to be first prior and then bishop at the royal foundation of Lindisfarne; the gold and garnet pectoral cross, preserved as his in the treasury at Durham Cathedral, is a nobleman’s jewel. And yet St Cuthbert was, and is, honoured for his humble piety. Raised against his will to be bishop of Lindisfarne in 685, he ended his days as a hermit on the island of Inner Farne, the death of this ‘child of God’, Bede’s favourite name for him, ‘being signalled to his community on Lindisfarne by the waving of torches from the cliff top’.
¹²

Cuthbert is one of that select band of medieval personalities in England, like Julian of Norwich or Henry V, who still enjoy recognition status. Of greater importance in the story of Northumbria’s European Golden Age, Benedict Biscop (i.e. the bishop) was originally a prominent young courtier in the hall of King Oswiu. (In later life he would appoint a deputy for his religious duties precisely because he was so often called away to consult with kings.) In 652/3, when they were both about thirty, he left England for Rome in company with Wilfrid, another young noble. This was the first of numerous visits. In 666, returning from his second trip, Biscop stopped off at the monastery on the Iles Lérins, across the bay from Cannes, thus anticipating Lord Brougham’s preferred Riviera retreat – though, in contradistinction to his lordship, taking the tonsure as a monk. Only six years earlier the monks had adopted the monastic Rule of St Benedict; Baducing adopted Benedict as his new name in religion.

Benedict returned to Rome and there (as we saw in
chapter 2
) encountered Theodore of Tarsus, the newly appointed seventh archbishop of Canterbury. They journeyed together and Benedict was able to introduce Theodore at the court of King Ecgberht of Kent. For a time he served as abbot of the monastery of Canterbury
until Theodore’s assistant, Adrian, arrived. After yet another Rome visit Biscop returned for a time to Northumbria.

For twenty years he had been tracking the north–south route across the shifting frontiers of warring semi-barbarian Christian kingdoms, all the time buying books, assembling treasures and making useful contacts. It was now time to begin a project that was to feed back into Europe’s culture for generations to come. In the year 673, on a tract of land given to him by King Ecgfrith, he began the building of the monastery of St Peter at Monkwearmouth, with the help of stonemasons recruited in Gaul/Francia, and apparently following a Continental layout. In 678 he was in Rome again, this time with Ceolfrith, who would succeed him as abbot at Monkwearmouth, and returned with a cantor in church music. Back in Bernicia, he began building the monastery at Jarrow, some seven miles north of Wearmouth on the River Tyne. As at St Peter’s, archaeology has revealed that the main stone buildings were decorated with coloured paintings, sculptures and coloured window glass and plaster.

Wilfrid, appellant to Rome

St Wilfrid of Ripon and York, the third of our networking clerics, is remembered (thanks to one of the finest biographies from the Middle Ages, written by his disciple Eddius) as the most brilliant and substantial figure in England in the seventh century and, so far as the records go, in Europe. As the son of a gentleman, the boy was expected to attend to the needs of the house guests, ‘whether they were kings’ companions or their slaves’, in the family home. But undefined trouble with a hostile stepmother led him to leave, about the year 648, aged fourteen. He evidently left without his father’s blessing since, his biographer tells us, he himself found the funds to ‘clothe, arm and mount both himself and his servants’.

Wilfrid would not win his sainthood through the Christian virtue of humility. Court politics was tied in to church politics. King Oswiu
followed the tradition of Iona, with Lindisfarne the kingdom’s senior episcopal see. Queen Eanflæd, baptized as a child at York by Bishop Paulinus and then exiled in Kent, adhered to the Roman tradition. Wilfrid became her protégé. About the year 652, after a brief time at Lindisfarne, he left Northumbria for Kent and the court at Canterbury, where the queen still had friends. From there, aged just twenty, a young aristocrat of substantial private means, he set out for his first sight of Rome in company with Biscop Baducing, some five years his senior and a very rich man. James Campbell has gone so far as to surmise that ‘had Biscop wished to provide his father with a really lavish, old fashioned burial – ship, . . . splendid personal adornments – the likelihood is that they would hardly have dented his resources.’
¹³
One pictures him and Wilfrid as a couple of eighteenth-century milords on the Grand Tour, rather than as pious eight-century pilgrims.

In Rome Wilfrid set himself to master the Roman method of the
computus
, the calculation for the date of Easter. On his return journey he strengthened his Continental allegiances, with a three-year stay at Lyon, where he also became a monk. Back in England in the early 660s, he was made abbot of Ripon. About 663 the Frankish churchman Agilbert, who for some years had been a bishop in Wessex, ordained Wilfrid priest at Ripon. Agilbert’s name, equivalent to Æthelberht, has led to the suggestion that he may have had ties with the royal house of Kent. The following year, 664, he led one of the factions at the historic Synod of Whitby (then called Streanæshalch) convened by King Oswiu at the abbey under the aegis of its abbess, Hild, to settle the Easter controversy.

Related to the royal house, she had been baptized by Bishop Paulinus at York in 627, aged thirteen, together with King Edwin. She was well into her thirties when she decided to become a nun, possibly with the idea of joining her sister at Chelles, near Paris (see
chapter 2
). In fact, she was installed by Aidan as abbess of the convent of Hartlepool, and then by King Oswiu at his new foundation at
Whitby. It was a ‘double’ foundation, that is for both men and women, with no fewer than five bishops among its alumni during Hild’s abbacy. Archaeology has revealed evidence of its Continental contacts. King Edwin’s relics were buried here, as were Hild’s, though later translated to Glastonbury.

The Synod of Whitby and after

The problem posed by the computation of Easter comes from the fact that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the anchor date for many major festivals in the Christian year, is related to the Jewish Passover, which in turn is related to the Jewish lunar year. And since the lunar calendar is moveable relative to the solar calendar, and since Christians celebrate Easter according to the lunar date, elaborate calculations are required to determine the date. The following of Rome on the matter of Easter, just as following Rome in the use of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate bible and the Gregorian chant of the musical rite, was a marker of Rome’s authority in western Christendom. So the decision at Whitby would not only be important to the Northumbrian court but also, through Northumbrian missionaries in the German territories and the Frankish church, in Europe. (The date of Christmas is no problem because it is fixed relative to the pagan Winter Solstice festival of the solar year.)

Oswiu favoured Iona over Rome, but one feels his real interest was a unified observance rather than the triumph of a doctrine. The lineup of the opposing parties was: for Iona, Abbess Hild and the bishops Colman of Lindisfarne and Cedd of the East Saxons; for Rome, Queen Eanflæd, Bishop Agilbert the Frank and Wilfrid, who acted as Oswiu’s English interpreter and spokesman. As the technical debate ploughed on, Wilfrid observed that his side was advocating the system ordained by the pope in Rome, the successor of St Peter, holder of the keys of heaven. Colman had to admit this was so. At this point the king smilingly intervened to rule that since St Peter must surely
know the answer, the Northumbrian church would follow the Roman way. (Bede reports the debate but in fact, after his death, Rome later came to adopt the
computus
proposed by Bede himself.)

Later that year Oswiu nominated Wilfrid bishop of York. He crossed the Channel to be consecrated at Compiègne, where, with ceremonial pomp exceeding anything to be seen in England, he was borne into the oratory, by nine bishops seated upon a golden throne. But, then, everything to do with Wilfrid would appear to have been more than life-size. For St Peter’s, Ripon, he commissioned a copy of the Gospels in lettering of purest gold done on purpled parchment and bound in a gold case studded with costly gems. According to his biographer, Wilfrid’s church at Hexham, with its columns and side aisles, grand proportions, winding passages and spiral staircases, was unequalled by any structure north of the Alps; it was, need one add, designed by Wilfrid himself. Both here and at Ripon he built crypts as if to imitate that feature in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Because of Wilfrid ’s two-year absence on the Continent, the king made Chad bishop in his place. Canterbury intervened to depose Chad and restore Wilfrid, but when, in 677, Theodore went on to divide the diocese of York its bishop made his way to Rome to appeal to the pope. (On his way, this being Saint Wilfrid, he took time off to make the first conversion of the Frisians, having with him relics of St Oswald; see
chapter 5
). It was the first such appeal to the papal see and was a welcome boost to its authority at a time when it was in protracted controversy with the emperors at Constantinople over which was the ultimate authority in the universal church. Rome accepted the division of the York diocese but ordered the restoration of Wilfrid and authorized him to appoint the new bishops. But Rome also provided that the numerous monasteries (‘the kingdom of monasteries’) owing allegiance to Wilfrid be exempt from visitation by other bishops and be subject direct to Rome – a further accretion of papal influence.

Two kings and a bishop

In May 670, six years after Whitby, Oswiu died. He was followed by his son Ecgfrith, who checked the resurgent power of Mercia with a victory over its king, Wulfhere. But Bishop Wilfrid at York remained the dominant figure on the northern scene. Thanks to his persuasion the king’s wife, a virgin for twelve years of marriage, took vows as a nun. But King Ecgfrith rejected the papal settlement regarding York and, with the concurrence of Theodore of Canterbury, in 678 Wilfrid was forced into exile. No doubt there was political calculation behind the king’s decision: from Stamford (in modern Lincolnshire) to Perth in Scotland Wilfrid had spiritual rule of a ‘kingdom of churches’ of his own foundation to match the king’s secular realm.

Naturally Wilfrid took his case to Rome again and meanwhile stayed for a time in Sussex, where, as we have seen, he converted the kingdom and founded the see of Selsey. Next he was given a bishopric by the king of Wessex, who also endowed him with extensive lands on the Isle of Wight.

Ecgfrith continued Northumbria’s expansionist war-making with raids into Ireland and Pictland, where on 20 May 685 he was killed at the battle of Nechtansmere. He was succeeded by his halfbrother Aldfrith, called ‘the Learned’ (d. 705). An exile during the previous reign, he had found refuge among the Irish and had acquired a mastery of the language. Theodore, the ageing archbishop of Canterbury, brokered an agreement between Wilfrid and the king and for a time peace reigned. But, with his once great diocese divided and his influence reduced, Wilfrid took himself to Mercia, where he lived for a decade under the protection of King Æthelred and fostered the mission to Frisia. Where once he had ruled as a ‘clerical emperor’ in England, now he was principally confined to the foreign mission field of Frisia. In 703, however, the new archbishop of Canterbury decreed Wilfrid suspended from
episcopal powers. Again Wilfrid went to Rome; again he won a partly favourable judgement. He and the archbishop were reconciled in 705. In the same year King Aldfrith died and was succeeded by Osred. For St Boniface, writing years later, his reign (706–16) marked the onset of Northumbrian decline. As to Wilfrid he lived three years into the new reign and died aged seventy-five, at Oundle in the territory of the Middle Angles, part of the kingdom of Mercia where he had been very active in the later part of his life. He left a will in the aristocratic mode, designating his successor as abbot at Ripon and bequeathing his extensive wealth between his following, the poor and two important churches in Rome. A great prince of the church had died; at Ripon he was immediately acclaimed a saint. His feast day is 12 October.