A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (17 page)

The waning of the kingdom

King Osred must have had some redeeming qualities since Wilfrid had adopted him as his spiritual son. For Boniface his principal offence seems to have been his abuse of the network of wealthy minsters that had sprung up within the ‘rhythms of elite secular life’. Often built in the precincts of Roman fortress or ‘city’ complexes, always richly endowed, usually centres of artistic output as well as meditation, they could be the private bailiwicks of noble or royal families, often with the ‘aspects of a special kind of nobleman’s club’. Remembering the duties of monastic hospitality, the convention of the itinerant court, and the fact that minsters comprised female as well as male establishments, one can appreciate that when Boniface referred to King Osred on a fornicating rampage through the kingdom’s nunneries he was almost certainly not speaking metaphorically.
¹⁴

Political rivalry and in-fighting made Northumbrian society increasingly lawless and the rewards for successful violence and oath breaking ever more tempting. Towards the end of his
History
Bede
recounts the tale of a pious local man called Dryhthelm, who warned his family of the dangers of hell awaiting those who fell for such temptations – revealed to him in what, today, we would call an ‘out of body experience’. He had died and a man in a shining garment had guided him through the realms of the afterlife (rather as Virgil would lead Dante through Hell). They pass through three zones of sinners in various degrees of discomfort awaiting paradise until the final glimpse through a dazzling haze of the perfect in thought, word and deed, who have entered paradise immediately after their death.

In some ways the passage anticipates the evolving concept of Purgatory, to which this Anglo-Saxon perception seems to have contributed. But the notion of an ‘interim paradise’ has been called ‘a necessary, influential and ideologically charged concept . . . within Anglo-Saxon England’.
¹⁵
Such an idea of an afterlife abode with various levels would seem also to chime with the Norse Asgard, the home of the gods, where are to be found twelve ‘mansions’. The chief of these was Valhalla, the hall of Odin and the destiny of warriors slain in earthly battle. Anonymous Old English religious poems tell of heaven (‘
heofon
’) as a treasure-filled hall (echoes of the booty-filled mead hall of the heathen warrior world), of its entrance through a huge door ‘bound with precious treasure and wrapped with wonderful fastenings’ and of warriors thronging in ‘the heavenly kingdom where the Trinity rules the glorious mansions’.
¹⁶
As in the Franks Casket, discussed below, the heroic tradition has parallels with Christian imagery (see
page 86
).

In fact, eighth-century Northumbria, which saw Bede’s dedication of his
History
to King Ceolwulf, the European prestige of the cathedral school at York and its library, and the glory days of Hexham, was often on the edge of political anarchy. Sixteen kings in a hundred years: murders, depositions, abdications, usurpations, nobles contesting with the royal kin. Ceolwulf was briefly deposed in a nine-year reign before abdicating to retire into a monastery.
For some twenty-odd years King Eadberht (735–58) reigned in relative stability represented by more or less regular coinage issues. For Alcuin (born about 740), given as a child into the care of Archbishop Ecgberht, brother to the king, these were happy years for the kingdom, ‘ruled over in harmony by the one wearing upon his shoulders the pallium sent by the pope, the other wearing on his head his ancestors’ ancient crown’. Eadberht abdicated to become a monk at the urgings of the patrician Æthelwold Moll. Murdered by palace servants after the briefest of reigns, Eadberht’s son was in fact succeeded by Æthelwold Moll. His six-year reign (759–65) brought a degree of stability to the proceedings. Of high noble standing, though not of royal blood, his claim may have been no worse, if no better, than that of Eadberht. As to him, David Rollason thinks it ‘notable’ that he accepted only after his brother had achieved the influential position of archbishop and states flatly ‘That the Northumbrian church was also involved in the dynastic disputes is beyond doubt.’
¹⁷
There are indications that Alcuin himself had kinship links with the patrician king.

Moll’s son Æthelred was driven from the throne after having ordered the killing of three courtiers in 779. His successor, Ælfwold, was murdered following a conspiracy by the ‘patrician’ Osred II (788–90), who was himself forcibly tonsured and exiled on the Isle of Man. Osred was deserted by his ‘soldiers’ while attempting a comeback in 792 and murdered by order of Æthelred, who had regained power. Then came another ‘patrician’, Osbald, king for a reign of twenty-seven days in 796. Alcuin knew about all this and in a letter speaks of the ‘blood of kings, princes and people shed through you and your family’. The turmoil continued. In 806 King Eardwulf was driven from the kingdom; he found sanctuary, according to a Frankish source, with Emperor Charles the Great who ordered his restoration. Whatever the role of great churchmen in dynastic disputes they seem to have brought the kingdom another problem, through evolving the concept of chartered
bocland
to secure landed
endowments in perpetuity. Unscrupulous laymen realized that by founding a family monastery they could convert land into an hereditable possession by such a book or charter. The number of private monastic foundations rose and the stock of loan land available to the king in his capacity as gift-giver, and so his ability to recruit warriors to his service, went down. The defence of the kingdom suffered.

The ninth century would see the continuing decline of Northumbria. The sack of Lindisfarne in 793, which seems such a marker to us, was probably less significant for the Northumbrians than the rise of Ecgberht of Wessex, who was claimed to have ravaged the northern kingdom and forced tribute. In 867 the Great Heathen army took York and the kingdoms of the Northumbrians were a thing of the past. But the glories of their golden age live on.

Carvings and calligraphy

When he came to the throne King Aldfrith was a man in his early fifties. Educated at Iona, he was fluent in Irish and in Bede’s opinion of ‘great learning’ (
doctissimus).
He was reputed to have offered Benedict Biscop land equivalent to eight peasant farms for a Mediterranean manuscript on cosmography: a man of culture.

The mysterious carved box known as the Franks Casket (after the benefactor who bought and donated it to the British Museum) has teased people ever since its discovery in the early 1800s in a private house in the French village of Auzon, Haute Loire. It is Anglo-Saxon work of unknown provenance and is presumed to have been taken to the continent in the eighth or ninth century. It would have found an admiring audience of educated nobles and learned clerics at Aldfrith’s court. Oblong in shape, it comprises two side panels, two end panels and a lid, carved from whalebone ivory (a whale –
the
whale? – features among the carvings).

Three pairs of scenes are depicted, each of which seems to oppose a pagan episode with a theme of Christian thought. It seems the
designer must have had access to variant biblical readings and commentaries, variants that were to be found in books in Northumbrian libraries.
¹⁸
The themes of kingship and empire, recurrent in the pages of Bede and
Beowulf;
of exile, a common experience of royals and nobles; of salvation and the afterlife, all seem present in the casket’s riddling interplay of words and images. The scene depicting the legendary Weland the Smith of pagan mythology is typical of the kind of cross-cultural fusion of Christian and English aristocratic culture that led one commentator to suggest that a churchman might have commissioned the piece. (One scholar has even proposed that
Beowulf
itself, a work using aristocratic secular stories in an essentially Christian context, may have been produced in a monastery or community of clergy.)

T. D. Kendrick, in his classic work on Anglo-Saxon art, considered that, in the sixty years between the arrival of Theodore as Archbishop of Canterbury and the death of Bede in 735, learning and the arts ‘in the remote [Church] province of England . . . achieved a position that without exaggeration may be described as supreme in western civilization’.
¹⁹
Today, majestic carved stone crosses from southern Scotland and northern England tell some of the story.

When he was about three the future Northumbrian saint, Willibald, whom as a baby his parents had adored as a ‘loveable little creature’, was suddenly attacked by a contraction of his limbs. The illness made it almost impossible for him to breathe. Fearful that he was going to die, they offered their little boy up at the foot of the ‘Holy Cross of our Lord and Saviour’ – one of the crosses, ‘held in great reverence’, that it was the custom of ‘nobles and good men of the Saxon race’ to erect in a prominent spot on their estates so that their neighbours or travellers could make their daily prayers.
²⁰
Probably it was one of the many, more modest, wooden crosses, put up on their lands by prosperous gentry. Even so, the stone Bewcastle Cross has an Old English inscription in runic characters, now much
defaced, that seems to commemorate some aristocratic patron. At all events Willibald recovered and went on to a missionary career in Germany, where the cathedral at Eichstätt in Bavaria is named after him (and which is about twenty miles from the birthplace of the opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck).

The carvings on the cross at Ruthwell, Mediterranean in style, were no doubt brightly painted but their iconography is deeply sophisticated. They may have served a liturgical purpose or had a propaganda function to promote the Roman Catholic orthodoxy; certainly they are closely related to theological Roman developments in the late seventh century. An example is the panels depicting the ‘Lamb of God’ (‘
Agnus Dei
’), imagery expressing the chant of that name introduced into the service of the mass at that time. At Ruthwell passages from the Old English poem
The Dream of the Rood
, in which the Cross (‘Rood’) tells the story of the Crucifixion and laments its own fearsome implication in the killing of God’s son, is inscribed in runic letters on the edges of the cross. It also speaks of Jesus accepting the Cross by an act of his human will and so combats the heresy of monotheletism. Abstruse and irrelevant to our generation, it was, we have seen, highly topical in the 680s. This controversy between the Eastern and Western churches, the emperors and the popes had reverberated across Roman Christian Europe as far as Theodore’s Canterbury and up to the frontiers with the Irish/British tradition (see
chapter 2
).

Ruthwell also has a scene of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, which was coming into the Roman liturgy from the East at this time. Was such a monument on the boundary between Northumbrian and the British kingdoms to the west erected as a triumphalist statement of Roman Christianity: an aping of the obelisks and triumphal columns of ancient Rome, consciously ‘appropriated [by Northumbria] . . . to its own imperial project’? On the other hand, Ruthwell also has important Irish non-Roman elements. It is part of a Bernician group of crosses, at Bewcastle, Ruthwell,
Rothebury and Hoddom, that have certain similarities of detail – treatment of the vine scroll decoration, for example – which suggest a common centre of production and a common vocabulary. Painted in bright colours and possibly further embellished with glass and metal decorations, these monuments in the landscape would have been ‘highly visible’ and, to modern eyes, garish intrusions on the countryside.
²¹
To contemporaries they and their inscriptions would have been religious statements to complement the superb manuscripts created in the monastic scriptoria.

The art of calligraphy has been honoured in many cultures. In imperial China, a sample of the emperor’s own hand was treated with almost religious reverence; among the most valued treasures of Istanbul’s Topkap
1
Museum is a remarkable series of Korans in the exquisite calligraphies of the sultans; in the Jewish tradition, the scrolls of the Holy Torah have been inscribed by calligraphers of artistic genius. In the mid-twentieth century the ‘white writing’ canvases of the Wisconsin-born US Baha’i artist Mark Tobey introduced a calligraphic-based style into easel painting.

In Western Christendom from at least the fourth century the books of the Latin Bible, and above all the Gospels and the New Testament, were lovingly transcribed in monastery scriptoria on parchment or vellum in manuscript hands of immense beauty, clarity and, often, opulence of ornament. None outshine and few equal the work of the Northumbrian school of the seventh and eighth centuries with its crowning jewel the Lindisfarne Gospels, ‘. . . one of the world’s great books – a breathtaking artwork and symbol of faith’.
²²
Clearly modelled on an Italian model, indeed one scholar has called it ‘a complete sixth-century Italian Gospel Book in disguise’,
²³
it is as clearly in execution and invention a northern masterpiece.

Remarkably for an artwork of its time, thanks to a note written into the manuscript some two centuries later (see
chapter 9
), we know the name of the individual who created it – Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne (d. 721). Working between 715 and 720 this artist–calligrapher of genius wrote the entire text and created the staggeringly inventive and intricate ornamental capitals and ‘carpet’ pages that embellish the book. The rich binding adorned with precious metals and gemstones was plundered centuries ago.