VI. THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST
With the departure of the Roman legions from Britain we enter upon a period of even denser darkness than those which we have been lately traversing, nor is the veil lifted till by the mission of St. Augustine (596) our island is again brought into the family of the Christian nations of Europe. The two centuries during which the voice of authentic history is thus silent, from 407 to 596, were the period of the fall of the Roman empire in the west and the establishment in its stead of the great Teutonic kingdoms, Frankish, Burgundian, Visigothic, from which the states of modern Europe are descended.
Owing to the extremely imperfect character of our information concerning the Anglo-Saxon conquest, which was for us the chief event of these two centuries, and the fact that scarcely any of it is contemporary, some of it obviously legendary and fabulous, it is impossible to speak with any confidence as to its details. Almost every date may be challenged: “probably” or “to the best of our knowledge” are qualifying clauses which should be prefixed to almost every statement. It may be well, however, first to set forth in broad outlines the main facts which are beyond the reach of controversy. No one doubts that about the middle of the fifth century, if not before, the Romano-Celtic inhabitants of Britain were invaded by Teutonic tribes from the shores of the German Ocean and the Baltic. The tribes chiefly concerned in the invasion were the Saxons and the Angles, but the smaller nation of the Jutes are said to have been the first to undertake a definite scheme of conquest, and it is asserted with much positiveness that they came at first as auxiliaries to help the Britons against the Picts of Caledonia and the Scots of Ireland, who were ravaging the undefended land. To the Jutes is attributed the foundation of the kingdom of Kent and a settlement in the Isle of Wight. The far more numerous Saxons who followed them established the two kingdoms of the South Saxons and East Saxons, which are represented by the modern counties of Sussex and Essex; and after the lapse of two generations the West Saxons, invading Hampshire, laid there the foundation of the great kingdom of Wessex, which gradually included almost all the country south of the Thames. Their kings eventually became lords of the whole of Britain, and were ancestors through females of the sovereign who now sits upon the throne. The Angles, who were apparently the latest comers of all, founded the kingdoms of East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk), Mercia (the midland counties), Deira (Yorkshire), and Bernicia (Durham, Northumberland, and East Scotland as far as the Firth of Forth).
A few words must be said as to the ethnological relations of these three tribes. It is not disputed that they all belonged to the great Low German family of nations, to which the Goths probably belonged and from which the Dutch and most of the inhabitants of northern Germany are descended. As to the little nation of the Jutes we require further information. They were once said to be identical with the Goths, and more recently they have been connected with the inhabitants of Jutland. The first identification is certainly wrong, the second, for philological reasons, is doubtful.[25] It seems that at present the question must be left in suspense.[26]
The Saxons were placed by the geographer, Ptolemy (who wrote early in the second century), in the country now known as Holstein, but in the fourth century the name seems to have been applied to a much wider range of people. The Saxons with whom Charlemagne waged his stubborn wars at the close of the eighth century, inhabited the whole of Westphalia, Hanover and Brunswick and other lands beside. From any part of that country our Saxon ancestors may have come.
Of the Angles, who in the first century after Christ were living on the right bank of the Elbe, near its mouth, Tacitus gives us an interesting account. He tells us that they, together with the kindred tribes between Elbe and Oder, worshipped the great goddess Nerthus, whose image, ordinarily kept in the dark recesses of a sacred island, at certain seasons paraded the lands of her votaries in a chariot drawn by kine. Wherever the image of the goddess came, mirth reigned and war ceased; but when her pilgrimage was ended, the image and the chariot, returning to the dark island, were washed in a sacred lake, beneath whose waters all the slaves who had taken part in the ceremony were at once engulfed, in order to ensure their silence as to the mysteries which they had beheld. A more interesting fact for us is the close relation which, according to Tacitus, existed between the Angli and the Longobardi, the tribe by whom, after long wanderings through central Europe, the conquest of Italy was at last achieved in 568, possibly at the very time when some of their old Anglian neighbours were beginning to fit out their barks for the invasion of England. This ethnological connexion is confirmed by the similarity of names to be found among the two nations, a similarity which is but slightly veiled by the changes which in the course of five centuries turned the Lombards from a people speaking Low German to one with a High German language. Thus the Adelperga of the Lombards corresponds to the Ethelberga of the Anglo-Saxons; Sisibert to Sigeberht, Alipert to Alberht, Rotopert to Rodberht, Adelbert to Ethelberht, and Audoin to Edwin. Moreover, the great historian of the Lombards, Paulus Diaconus, who wrote towards the end of the eighth century, tells us that their queen, Theodelinda, adorned her palace at Pavia with pictures representing the Lombard invaders of Italy in the very garb which they then wore, and which had become antiquated in the two centuries that had elapsed before his own time. “Their garments,” he says, “were loose and for the most part made of linen, such as the Anglo-Saxons are wont to wear, adorned with wide borders woven in various colours.” This is a valuable note of costume, for its own sake, and a striking confirmation of the close relationship once existing between the ancestors of two great nations now joined in friendly alliance.
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After this sketch of the antecedents of the three new actors on the stage of British history, it remains for us to examine the evidence--the slender evidence, as has been already said--as to their proceedings during the conquest. It will be well to consider this evidence under three heads:--
(1) The slight notices contained in the works of contemporary or nearly contemporary Latin authors.
(2) The story of the conquest as given to us by the descendants of the invaders, that is, especially by Bede and the authors of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
(3) The same story as told by the descendants of the conquered, that is, especially by Gildas and Nennius.
1. In the fifth century the writing of history in the Roman empire had practically dwindled down to the composition of short books of chronicles, generally by ecclesiastics. As literary compositions they have no merit: they are generally very short, giving only three or four lines to each year, and they have no sense of the proportionate importance of the events which they record. But they give us for the most part absolutely contemporary evidence, and the historian, therefore, accepts them gratefully, with all their defects. One such chronicle, by no means the best of its kind, is generally known by the name of Prosper Tiro (a friend and correspondent of St. Augustine), though it is certain that it was not written by him but by some ecclesiastic of the period, with semi-Pelagian views. This dull and second-rate writer gives us the two following precious entries, the only contemporary evidence that we possess as to the Saxon invasions: “The fifteenth year of Arcadius and Honorius [A.D. 409]: at this time the strength of the Romans was utterly wasted by sickness; and the provinces of Britain were laid waste by the incursion of the Saxons”. “The eighteenth year of Theodosius II. [A.D. 441]: the provinces of Britain which up to this time had been torn by various slaughters and disasters, are brought under the dominion of the Saxons.”
There are two points in these entries to which the reader’s attention should be particularly directed: the first, that the Saxon invasions are represented as beginning in 409, almost immediately after the departure of the usurper Constantine with the legions; the second, that the subjugation of Britain by the Saxons is assigned by the chronicler to 441, not 449, the date usually current on the authority of Bede. It should be remarked, in passing, that if the chronicler supposed that the whole of Roman Britain (which he calls Britanniæ, in the plural) came under the dominion of the Saxons (or Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) in that year, he was certainly mistaken. But some important stage in the conquest, if we may trust this, our only contemporary authority, was evidently reached in the year 441, and it was the climax of a series of aggressions which had apparently been going on for thirty-two years.
It should be mentioned that one other nearly contemporary authority, the Greek historian Zosimus, alludes to the collapse of Roman rule in Britain, which he attributes to a revolt of the natives, following on the departure of the usurper Constantine with the legions. His language, however, is obscure and even self-contradictory, and he throws little light on the situation.
The authority which we have next to consider is the Life of St. Germanus, written by the presbyter Constantius about the year 480. It will be seen that this document is not strictly contemporary, the writer being separated by an interval of about half a century from the chief events recorded by him: and, moreover, there is throughout the Life a tendency to glorify the saint by attributing to him various manifestations of a miraculous or semi-miraculous kind, which does not increase our confidence in his trustworthiness as a historian. But all students of early medieval history are accustomed to this kind of document, in which every remarkable event in the life of the subject of the biography is invested with a halo of thaumaturgic sanctity, and though they are not the sort of historic materials which we prefer, we must accept them (while making our own private reservations as to the amount of faith which we repose in all their details) or give up writing the story of the Middle Ages altogether.
In the case before us, the missionary Germanus, whose adventures in Britain are related by the biographer, was a great and well-known historical personage. He had held, under the empire, the high military dignity of duke of the Armorican shore (Normandy and Brittany), had been consecrated Bishop of Auxerre against his will, had thereupon said farewell to the delights of sportsmanship, and entered earnestly on the duties of his new calling. He had as a fellow-missionary, Lupus, who many years after, as Bishop of Troyes, earned great renown by dissuading the savage warrior, Attila, from an attack on his cathedral city. It is a striking testimony to the character of both men that their contemporary, Apollinaris Sidonius, when he wishes to celebrate the virtues of another eminent prelate, Anianus, Bishop of Orleans, can find no higher term of praise than this: “He was equal to Lupus and not unequal to Germanus”. Such were the two men who in the year 429 were sent at the bidding of Pope Celestine, and in conformity with the resolutions of a synod of Gaulish bishops, “to purge the minds of the people of Britain from the Pelagian heresy and bring them back to the Catholic faith,” that is, to the Augustinian teaching on free-will and the Divine grace. Their zealous preaching won over the multitude to their side, but the Pelagians, who seem to have been found chiefly among the wealthier Britons, challenged them to a public discussion, in which their simple earnestness prevailed over the elaborate rhetoric of the gaily clothed orators on the other side. A miracle followed: the restoration of sight to a little girl of ten years old, the daughter of “a certain man of tribunician rank”. After visiting the tomb of the martyred Saint Alban and exchanging relics with the keepers of the shrine, they resumed their journey, but, unfortunately, Germanus was for several days confined by a sprained ankle to a humble cottage in the country. The cottage itself and all the little hovels round it were thatched with reeds from the marsh, and fire having broken out in the little settlement, the saint’s life seemed to be in jeopardy, but he refused to stir, and his cottage alone remained unconsumed.
Then followed the celebrated incident of the Hallelujah battle which is the chief reason for referring to the mission. The scene of the encounter is not made known to us, but it evidently took place in a mountainous country, possibly in Wales.[27] The first sentence of the biographer, describing the campaign, is so important that it must be translated literally: “In the meanwhile the Saxons and the Picts, driven into one camp by the same necessity, with conjoined force undertook war against the Britons, and, when the latter deemed their strength unequal to the contest, they sought the aid of the holy bishops, who, hastening their arrival, brought with them such an accession of confidence as was equivalent to a mighty host”. The biographer then describes the baptism of the larger part of the army on Easter day; their eagerness for battle while they were still moist with the baptismal water; the choice of the battle-field by the veteran officer Germanus; that battle-field a valley surrounded by mountains; the placing of an ambuscade whose duty it was to signal to him the approach of the foe. At the signal given the bishops gave the word “Hallelujah,” which was repeated in a tremendous shout by the multitudes carefully posted out of sight, and was repeated from peak to peak of the surrounding mountains. Hereat the terror-stricken foes imagined not only rocks hurled down upon them, but the very artillery of heaven let loose for their destruction. Casting away their arms they fled in all directions, and the larger number of them were swallowed up in the river which they had just crossed; the Hallelujah victory was complete, a victory like that of Gideon over the Midianites, won by moral means alone.
This narrative when we remember its nearly contemporary character has an important bearing on the history of Britain in the fifth century. It seems to show that, twenty years after the withdrawal of the legions, the condition of the Britons was not absolutely desperate. There were still among them wealthy men and eloquent ecclesiastics dressed in costly garments, and the people were not too much engrossed by the mere struggle for existence to have leisure to listen to the elaborate arguments about original sin, free will and assisting grace which formed the staple of the Pelagian controversy. Moreover the union of the Saxons with the Picts in the hostile army is surely a point of no small importance. If we connect it with the previously quoted entry of Tiro, assigning to the year 409 the beginning of a series of Saxon devastations, we may suspect that the commonly received story which attributes the Teutonic invasions entirely to the folly of the Britons who called in the Saxons to help them against the Picts, is, if not altogether false, at any rate an exaggeration of one not very important incident in the contest.
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2. For the story told by the invaders, our chief authorities are Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. (a) It must be confessed that for this part of the history we do not get much assistance from the monk of Jarrow, the Venerable Bede. He was probably the most learned man of his time in Europe; his conception of the duty of a historian is a high and noble one, and when we reach the seventh century, the golden age of Northumbrian Christianity, we shall find his assistance invaluable; but, writing as he did in 731, he was separated by nearly three centuries from the great Saxon invasions, and it seems clear that he had little or nothing derived from the genuine traditions of his race to say concerning them. The first book of his Ecclesiastical History is therefore little more than a mosaic of passages from Orosius, Eutropius, and, pre-eminently, the Briton Gildas (hereafter to be described), from whom he derives almost the whole history of the Caledonian invasion, and of the calling in of the Saxons as defenders against the attacks of the Picts. It is, however, to Bede that we owe the first mention of the British king Vortigern as well as of the names of Hengest and Horsa. It must remain an unsolved question from what source Bede derived the name of Vortigern, the inviter of the Saxons into Britain. Gildas, who is his main authority for this part of the story, while hinting at the personality of Vortigern, hides his name. After describing the three invading nations, the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles, Bede continues: “Their generals” (according to strict grammatical construction this should refer not to the Jutes but to the Angles) “are said to have been two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, of whom Horsa was afterwards slain in war by the Britons. To this day a monument inscribed by his name exists in the eastern parts of Kent. These two were sons of Wictgils, the son of Witta, the son of Wecta, the son of Woden, from whose stock the royal families of many provinces derived their origin.” Bede then goes on to describe how the bands of the three nations already named began to pour into the island, how they made a treaty with the Picts whom they had previously conquered and driven far away, and how they then turned their arms against their British allies. From this point he merely copies Gildas, describing in lamentable tones the ravage wrought by his countrymen. It is pointed out by Bede’s latest editor, Plummer, that such information as the Northumbrian monk possessed concerning Kent would be naturally derived by him from his Kentish friends, Albinus, abbot of Canterbury, and Nothelm, priest of the church of London, to both of whom he expressly refers in his preface. But apparently even their traditions could not carry him very far. Save for such information as the conquered race could supply, Bede’s mind was little more than a blank as to events in England between the ages of Honorius and Gregory the Great.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the great historical monument of our race in its youthful days, and probably owes its original inception to the wise encouragement of Alfred. As that great prince ruled in the later years of the ninth century it is plain that the interval between the historian and the events recorded is even greater in the case of the Chronicle than in that of Bede. To a considerable extent the early annals in the Chronicle are founded upon Bede’s history, and so far we may safely neglect them since they add nothing to the evidence already before the court; but there is also a certain amount of information, especially relating to the kingdom of Wessex, to which we find nothing that corresponds in Bede; and this part of the Chronicle--whatever it may be worth--must of course be treated as a primary authority. What is the real historical value of the statements which we find in it concerning yet heathen England? There is evidently in them some admixture of the fabulous. When we find, as we shall do, a Saxon chieftain, Port, described as the founder of Portsmouth, the Portus Magnus of the Romans, and Wihtgar made the name-giver to the Isle of Wight, which had been known as Vectis for centuries before he was born, we feel that we are in the presence of traditions, not genuine but manufactured out of etymology. Moreover the dates so elaborately given by the Chronicle seem to have been arranged (as was pointed out by Lappenberg) on an artificial system with recurring periods of eight and four years; which looks like the work of men with slender materials trying to make the bricks of history without the straw of genuine chronology. There is a good deal of distrust of the earlier portions of the Chronicle in the minds of historical students, side by side with a high appreciation of its general fairness, and gratitude to the scribes who have preserved for us so much of the records of the past, even though their narrative is often somewhat arid. On the whole it seems the wisest, in fact the only possible course, to take thankfully the information which the Chronicle gives us as to these two mist-enshrouded centuries, not absolutely maintaining its accuracy in every particular, but yielding to it a provisional assent, until either by internal or external evidence it shall be proved to be legendary or impossible.
It may be as well to state here that there are various manuscripts of the Chronicle hailing from different ecclesiastical centres, the divergences of which in the later centuries of Anglo-Saxon history are sometimes of great importance. For the present, however, this question does not arise. Save for a few not very important Northumbrian interpolations, the manuscripts of the Chronicle may be considered as one, and their source of origin may be considered to have been Winchester, the focus of all West Saxon government and culture.
The allusions made in the Chronicle to the departure of the Romans from Britain are naturally very scanty: “In 409 the Goths broke up the city of Rome, and never after that did the Romans rule in Britain”. “In 418 the Romans gathered together all the gold-hoards that were in Britain and hid some in the earth, so that no man thenceforth should ever find them, and some they took with them into Gaul.” Let us proceed therefore to examine the evidence furnished from this source as to the foundation of the kingdoms of Kent, Sussex, Wessex, and Northumbria. As to the early history of East Anglia, Essex and Mercia the Chronicle is altogether silent.
Kent.--A.D. 449.[28] Wyrtgeorn [Vortigern] invites the Angles to Britain. They come over in three “keels” and land at Heopwines-fleet [Ebbs-fleet in the Isle of Thanet], and he gives them lands in the south-east of the country on condition of their fighting the Picts. This they do successfully, but they send home for more of their countrymen, telling them of the worthlessness of the Britons and the goodness of the land. Their generals were two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, sons of Wictgils with the pedigree as given by Bede.
A.D. 455. Hengest and Horsa fight with Vortigern at Aegeles-threp [Aylesford on the Medway]. Horsa is slain. Hengest assumes the title of king, and associates with himself his son Aesc.
A.D. 456. Hengest and Aesc fight with the Britons at Crecgan-ford [Crayford, about six miles south-east of Woolwich], and slay 4,000 of them. The Britons evacuate Kent and with much fear flee to London-borough.
A.D. 465. Hengest and Aesc fight with the “Welshmen” [Britons] near Wippedes-fleote, and there slay twelve Welsh nobles, themselves losing one thane, whose name was Wipped.
A.D. 473. Hengest and Aesc fight with the “Welshmen,” and take booty past counting. The Welsh flee “as a man fleeth fire”.
That is all the information vouchsafed us as to the conquest of Kent, which was evidently not an easy matter, taking as it did nearly thirty years to finish. Possibly ere the strife was ended the invaders somewhat modified their views as to the military worthlessness of the Britons. London, which is transiently mentioned here in the annal for 456 is not mentioned again in the Chronicle till 851. We hear of it, however, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in 604. The history of Kent is a blank from the year 473 till 565 when Ethelbert, who afterwards embraced Christianity, began his long reign of fifty-three years.
Sussex.--We know from other sources that, far on into the Middle Ages, Sussex was divided from Kent by the dense forest of the Andredesweald or Andredesleag, and accordingly the conquest of one country by no means necessitated the conquest of the other, which is assigned to a considerably later date than that given for the landing of Hengest and Horsa.
A.D. 477. Aelle with three sons and three keels come to the place called Cymenes ora. He slays many “Welshmen,” and drives others to take refuge in the wood that is called Andredesleag.
A.D. 485. He fights with “Welshmen” near Mearcredesburn.
A.D. 491. “Aelle and Cissa begirt Andredesceaster and slay all who dwell therein, nor was there for that reason one Briton left alive.”
This wholesale butchery of the British defenders of the Roman fortress of Anderida, overlooking Pevensey Bay, has naturally attracted much attention, and is constantly appealed to by those who maintain that the earlier stages of the Saxon conquest were an absolute war of extermination. It is to be observed that Aelle, who founded an exceptionally short-lived dynasty, is not credited with any long line of ancestors reaching back to the mythic Woden. Chichester, capital of the South Saxon kingdom, founded probably on the site of the Roman city of Regnum, is said to have derived its name from Cissa, son of Aelle.
Wessex.--As might naturally be expected in a chronicle having its birth-place in Winchester, the historical details as to Wessex are much fuller than for the other kingdoms; so full that it is possible to relinquish the mere annalistic form and to weave them into a continuous narrative. In 495 (more than half a century after Tiro’s date of the Saxon conquest) two chieftains, Cerdic and Cynric his son, came with five ships to a place called Cerdices ora, and on the very day of their landing fought a battle with the “Welshmen”. The scene of the landing was probably somewhere in the noble harbour of Southampton Water. The two chieftains were not as yet spoken of as kings, but bore the lower title of ealdormen. Of Cerdic, however, the Chronicle recites the usual half-legendary pedigree, reaching back through eight intervening links to Woden, from whom (of course under later Christian influences) the line is traced back to Noah and Adam. These pedigrees, or at least the genuine Teutonic portion of them, may very probably have been preserved in the songs of minstrels, and obviously belong to that element of the Chronicle which is independent of Bede. We may look upon the divine ancestor Woden as marking the limit of the minstrel’s memory or knowledge, and we shall therefore probably be justified in concluding that the West Saxon tribe possessed some sort of continuous historical tradition reaching back for eight generations behind Cerdic (himself a middle-aged man in 495), or about to the beginning of the third century. No wonder that kings whose very flatterers could not trace back their lineage to an earlier date than that of the Emperor Severus, felt their dynasties new and short-lived in presence of the immemorial antiquity of Rome.
In 508, the two chiefs slew a British king named Natanleod and 5,000 men with him. Evidently by this time they must have been at the head of a large number of followers. We are told that “the land”--apparently the scene of the battle--was named after the slain king; and it is generally supposed that this gives us the origin of the name Netley, well known for its ruined abbey and its military hospital. Eleven years later (in 519) they assumed the title of kings, being no longer contented with the humbler designation of ealdormen, and fought the Britons at Cerdicesford, a place identified with Charford on the Avon, about six miles south of Salisbury. Meanwhile, however, there had been other Saxon invasions of the same region. In 501 is placed the visit of the legendary Port with his two sons to Portsmouth, and the death of a young Briton of very high birth who vainly tried to defend his land from their invasion. In 514 certain West Saxon reinforcements are represented as arriving (perhaps in the Isle of Wight) under the leadership of another eponymous hero, Wihtgar, and his brother Stuf, nephews of Cerdic; and, probably with their help, in 530 Cerdic and Cynric took possession of the Isle of Wight, after slaying many Britons at Wihtgaræsbyrg or Carisbrooke. The statements in the Chronicle about the conquest of the Isle of Wight, obscure and confused in themselves, become yet more so when we compare them with an earlier passage interpolated from Bede, in which the Jutes, not the West Saxons, are represented as the conquerors of the Isle of Wight. Of course two tides of Teutonic conquest may have passed over the island, but it is difficult to bring the two lines of tradition into their proper relation to one another.
In 534, Cerdic, who must now have been an old man, ended his life and his near forty years of British warfare, and Cynric his son reigned alone. We may sum up the total of Cerdic’s achievements by saying that he seems to have completed the conquest of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and that he probably fixed his royal residence at the Romano-British city of Venta Belgarum, thereafter to be known as Winchester. The fact that it required the labour of a lifetime to achieve the conquest of a moderate-sized English county, sufficiently shows that the Britons were not the mere Nithings (men of naught) whom Hengest and some of Hengest’s Teutonic countrymen have represented them to have been.
Of the reign of Cynric, which, according to the Chronicle, lasted from 534 to 560, we have but little told us in that work. We hear of a battle at Old Sarum in 552 and of another four years later at Beranbyrig which is identified with Barbury in the north of Wiltshire. Apparently the achievement of his reign was the addition of the greater part of Wiltshire to the West Saxon kingdom. We may so far anticipate the evidence of the British writers as to say that the twenty-six years of Cynric probably coincide with part of the forty-four years of comparative peace which they describe as following the British victory of Mount Badon.
Far fuller of decisive events was the memorable reign of Ceawlin, son of Cynric, which is assigned to the years between 560 and 592. He was the eldest of a gallant band of brothers whose mutually resembling names, Cutha and Cuthwine and Ceol and Ceolric, have given no small trouble to the genealogists. The eighth year of his reign was signalised by an event, unprecedented as far as we know in the history of Anglo-Saxon England, namely, war between the invaders themselves. The object of the West Saxon attack in 568 was Kent, whose young king Ethelbert, after but three years of kingship, saw his land invaded by Ceawlin and his brother Cutha. The battle-place was Wibbandune, possibly Wimbledon in Surrey, and there two of Ethelbert’s ealdormen were slain and himself put to flight. What terms he may have made with the victors we know not, but he was not permanently dethroned, since twenty-eight years afterwards we find him welcoming to his palace in Canterbury the missionaries from Rome.
Three years later (571) a vigorous attack was made by Cutha on the Britons, north of the Thames. A battle was fought at Bedford in which Cutha himself was slain, but victory crowned the Saxon arms in the general campaign, and four towns in Oxfordshire and Bucks (of which Aylesbury alone has retained its importance till the present day) were added to the kingdom of Wessex. The year 577 was of immense importance in the history of the Saxon progress. In that year a great battle was fought at Deorham, in Gloucestershire, about ten miles east of Bristol. There were arrayed on the one side Ceawlin and his brother Cuthwine, on the other three British kings, Coinmail and Condidan and Farinmail, all of whom were slain. Three great cities of Roman foundation (“ceastra” as the Chronicle calls them) were the price of victory: they were Gloucester, Cirencester and Bathanceaster or Bath. All historians are agreed as to the importance of this victory, which not only added Gloucester and (probably) part of Somerset to the West-Saxon kingdom, but by cutting off the Cymry of “West Wales” (Devon and Cornwall) from their brethren north of the Bristol Channel practically ensured their eventual if slow submission.
“In 584 Ceawlin and Cutha fought with the Britons in the place that is called Fethan-lea,[29] and Cutha was slain, and Ceawlin took many ‘towns’ and innumerable quantities of booty and departed in anger to his own land.” The chronicler seems to be here telling us of a Saxon reverse. Though Ceawlin captured many towns and took vast heaps of spoil he lost his son in the great battle and departed in wrath, assuredly in effect defeated, to his own land. After defeat came apparently domestic treason and civil broils. The entries for 591 to 593 show us the proclamation of a certain Ceolric, brother or nephew of Ceawlin, and a battle in 592 evidently not with the Britons, but between Saxon and Saxon, fought at Wodnesbeorge,[30] which resulted in the “driving out” of Ceawlin. Next year (593) Ceawlin with two others, probably princes of his house, named Cuichelm and Crida “perished”.[31] The wording of the annal shows pretty plainly that they all died a violent death, whether on the battlefield or by assassination, whether as friends or foes, it is impossible to say; but there can be no doubt that the sun of Ceawlin’s fortunes, which had at one time shone so splendidly, set in clouds and storms.
In 597 (apparently on the death of Ceolric) Ceolwulf, nephew of Ceawlin, “began to reign over the West Saxons, and he fought continually and successfully either with Englishmen or with Welshmen or with Picts or with Scots”. He was, however, reigning at the time of Augustine’s mission, and with that event the historical interest which has been slightly stirred by the story of the West Saxons’ advance is transferred to another quarter. Throughout the seventh century Kent and Mercia and pre-eminently Northumbria claim our attention so absorbingly that we cannot spare much thought for the obscure annals of Wessex.
Concerning the two Northumbrian kingdoms, Deira and Bernicia, we have no information in the Chronicle for the first hundred years after the landing of Hengest and Horsa. We are then under the year told that Ida (descended in the ninth generation from Woden) was the founder of the royal line of Northumbria; that he built Bebbanburh (Bamburgh) and that this celebrated fortress was in the first instance surrounded with a fence and afterwards with a wall. The chronicler then tells us that in 560, on the death of Ida, Aelle (eleventh in descent from Woden) began to reign over Northumbria and reigned for [nearly] thirty years. The chronicler here either wilfully or inadvertently has suppressed something of the truth. From his language one might have conjectured that Aelle was of the lineage of Ida, and had succeeded peaceably to his ancestor. Instead of this peaceable succession, however, we know from other sources that we have here to deal with two rival kingly lines, whose feuds and reconciliations make an important chapter in Northumbrian history. The true situation was this: essentially the kings of Ida’s line were rulers of Bernicia, while Aelle and his descendants ruled Deira. That is to say: from their steep rock-palace of Bamburgh the sons of Ida reigned by ancestral right over all the eastern portion of the lands between Tyne and Forth, between the wall of Hadrian and the wall of Antoninus. Similarly Aelle and his sons, firmly settled in the great Roman city of Eburacum, governed the country between Tyne and Humber; but each king ever aspired to extend his sway over the other kingdom and often succeeded for a while in doing so. Thus we have constant vicissitudes but a general tendency towards the union of the two kingdoms into one Northumbria, which obeys now an “Iding,” now an “Aelling” ruler. What strifes and commotions may have attended the transition from one line to another we can only in part discern. We are only obscurely told that in 588 Aelle’s line was ousted, and that Ethelric the son, and after him Ethelfrith the grandson of Ida reigned over all Northumbria.
* * * * *
3. We now come to the British version of the conquest. Though a nation is naturally reluctant to tell the story of its own defeat, we might have expected to receive from a comparatively civilised and Christianised people, such as the Romano-Britons of the fifth century, some intelligible literary history of so important an event as the Teutonic conquest of their island. This expectation, however, is dismally disappointed. We have practically nothing from the vanquished people, but the lamentations of the sixth century author Gildas, and the obviously fable-tainted narratives of the puzzle-headed Nennius of the eighth century.
Gildas, who obtained from after ages the surname of “the Wise,” seems to have been a native of Scottish Strathclyde and was born early in the sixth century; he became a monk and at the age of forty-four wrote what Bede truly calls “a tearful discourse concerning the ruin of Britain”. His object in this discourse was to rebuke the ungodliness of his countrymen and to remind them of the tokens of the Divine wrath which they had already received. He is consequently, for our purpose, a most disappointing writer. We go to him for history and we get a sermon, but we ought in fairness to remember that he never proposed to give us anything else. A large part of his treatise consists of reproductions of the denunciatory passages of the old Hebrew prophets: a more interesting section, but one outside our present purpose, consists of fierce invectives against five wicked, or at least unfriendly, kings of Wales. But there are a few chapters, the only ones that now concern us, in which, in pathetic tones, he tells us something as to the circumstances of the invasion of his country. He harks back to the departure from Britain of the usurper Maximus (383), to which, rather than to the later usurpation of Constantine, he traces her defenceless condition. Stripped of the multitude of brave young men who followed the fortunes of Maximus and never returned, and being themselves ignorant of war, the Britons were “trampled under foot by two savage nations from beyond seas, namely the Scots from the north-west and the Picts from the north”. The description of the invaders as coming from beyond the seas is important. The term “Scots” at this time and for four centuries afterwards means primarily the inhabitants of the north of Ireland, and only secondarily the offshoot from that race who settled in Argyll and the Isles. These invaders, of course, were as Gildas calls them “transmarini”: but it is possible that the Picts also, some of whom we know to have been settled in Wigtonshire, came across the shallow land-girdled waters of Solway Firth, instead of attacking the yet undemolished wall, and thus that they too seemed to the dwellers in North-west Britain to be coming from “beyond the seas”.
According to Gildas the Britons sent an embassy to Rome, piteously imploring help against the invaders. The Romans came, drove out the barbarians and exhorted the inhabitants to build a wall between the two seas, which they accordingly did, from Forth to Clyde, building it only of turf. A fresh invasion followed, a second embassy, again utter rout and slaughter of the enemy, but, alas! there came also a solemn warning from the Romans that they could not wear out their strength in these constant expeditions for the deliverance of Britain, and that its inhabitants must henceforth look to their own right arms for safety; but nevertheless before they abandoned them they would help them to build a wall, this time of stone not of turf, on the line between Tyne and Solway. Moreover, they built a line of towers along the coast right down to the southern shore where their ships were wont to be stationed, and then they said farewell to their allies, as men who expected never to see them again.
All this part of Gildas’s story is quite untrustworthy. No one who has carefully studied the architecture of the two walls and the inscriptions along their course will attribute their origin or even any important restorations of them, to those troublous years of dying Rome, the years between 390 and 440. Gildas is here evidently retailing the legend which had sprung up among an ignorant and half-barbarised people as to the great works of the foreigner in their land, and he has not only in this matter “darkened counsel by words without knowledge,” but he has grievously misled his worthy follower Bede, who is brought into hopeless perplexity by his attempt to reconcile his own more correct information about the Roman walls with the unsound Welsh traditions or conjectures which he found in Gildas. The tearful narrative proceeds: There is more misery in Britain: civil war is added to barbarian invasion, and food, save such as can be procured by hunting, vanishes out of the land. In 446 the poor remnants of the Britons send their celebrated letter to that Roman general whose name was at the time most famous among men: the letter which began, “To Aetius,[32] thrice consul, the groans of the Britons,” and went on to say, “The barbarians drive us to the sea: the sea drives us back on the barbarians: we have but a choice between two modes of dying, either to have our throats cut or to be drowned”. But not even this piteous request brought help, for Aetius was too busily occupied with his wars against Attila and the Huns to be able to spare thought or men for the defence of Britain. However, pressed by the pangs of hunger, the Britons grew bolder and even achieved some small measure of success against their enemies. The impudent Hibernian robbers returned to their homes; the Picts at their end of the island remained quiet for a time, though both nations soon began again their plundering forays. But with success came luxury, drunkenness, envy, quarrelsomeness, falsehood, all the signs of a demoralised people. And then for the punishment of the nation came first a pestilence so terrible that the living scarcely sufficed to bury the dead, and then, direst plague of all, the fatal resolution to call in foreign aid.
“A rumour was spread that their inveterate enemies were moving for their utter extermination. A council was called to consider the best means of repelling their fatal and oft-repeated invasions and ravages. Then all the councillors, together with the proud tyrant,[33] with blinded souls, devised this defence (say rather ruin) for their country, that those most ferocious and ill-famed Saxons--a race hateful to God and man--should be invited into the island (as one might ‘invite’ a wolf into the sheepfold) in order to beat back the northern natives. Never was a step taken more ruinous or more bitter than this. Oh, the depth of these men’s blindness! Oh, the desperate and foolish dulness of their minds! ‘Foolish are the princes of Zoan, giving unto Pharaoh senseless counsel.’[34] Then that horde of cubs burst forth from the den of their mother, the lioness, in three cyuls (keels), as their language calls them, or as we should say, ‘long-ships’. They relied on favourable omens and on a certain prophecy which had been made to them, in which it was predicted that for 300 years they should occupy the land towards which their prows were pointed, and for half of that time they should lay it waste by frequent ravages. Thus, at the bidding of that unlucky tyrant did they first fix their terrible claws into the eastern part of the island, pretending that they were going to fight for the deliverance of the country, but in truth intending to capture it for themselves. Then the aforesaid mother-lioness, learning how the first brood had prospered, sent another and more numerous array of her cubs, who, borne hither in barks, joined themselves to these treacherous allies.”
Space fails us to repeat in his own words the whole of the author’s pitiful story. Somewhat condensed it amounts to this: The strangers claimed that liberal rations should be given them in consideration of the great dangers which they ran. The request was granted and “shut the dog’s mouth” for a time. But soon they began to complain of the insufficiency of these rations: they invented all sorts of grievances against their hosts, and used these as a justification for breaking their covenant with the British king, and roaming with ravage all over the island. “The flame kindled by that sacrilegious band spread desolation over nearly all the land till at last its red and savage tongue licked the coasts of the western sea.” The towns [coloniæ] were levelled to the ground with battering rams; the farmers [coloni], with the rulers of the Church, with the priests and people, were laid low by the flashing swords of the barbarians or perished in the devouring flames. Coping-stone and battlement, altars and columns, fragments of corpses covered with clots of gore, were all piled together in the middle of the ruined towns, as in a horrible wine-press. Burial there was none, save under the ruins of the houses or in the maw of some beast of prey or ravenous bird. Some of the miserable remnant who had escaped to the mountains were caught there and slain in heaps. Others, pressed by hunger, submitted and became slaves of the conquerors; others fled beyond the sea. A very few who had fled to the mountains, there on the tops of precipitous cliffs or in the depths of impenetrable forests succeeded in dragging out a life, precarious truly and full of terrors, but still a life in their fatherland.
At last the tide turned. Some of the invaders returned to their own homes, and the unsubdued mountaineers saw the remnant of their countrymen flocking to them from every quarter and beseeching them to save them from extermination. A little band of patriots was thus formed, under the leadership of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man of modest temper but of high descent, and in fact the only Roman sprung from the wearers of the purple who had survived the storm of the invasion. Under this leader the patriots dared to challenge the invaders to a pitched battle, which, by the favour of the Lord, resulted in their victory. From that time the struggle went on with varying fortune, now the citizens, now the enemy triumphing, till the year of the siege of Mount Badon, which was also the year of the birth of Gildas, and from which forty-four years had elapsed to the time of his present writing. That was the last and greatest slaughter of “the scoundrels”. From that time onwards external war had ceased, and for a space the hearts of all men, delivered from despair and chastened by adversity, turned to the Lord, and all men, whether kings or private persons, whether bishops or simple ecclesiastics, kept their proper ranks and orders in the state. Of late, however, on the decease of the men of that generation, morals had again declined, anarchy had begun to prevail, and owing to the frequent occurrence of civil wars, the cities were no longer inhabited as securely as of old.
Gildas then proceeds to describe further the demoralisation of his countrymen, and especially the outrageous vices of the five contemporary British kings, Constantine, Caninus, Vortipor, Cuneglas, and Maglocunus (or Maelgwn), upon all of whom he pours forth the vials of his righteous indignation; but into this part of his discourse there is no need for us to follow him. However little to our taste may be the somewhat inflated rhetoric of this author, it is important always to remember that he lived about two centuries nearer to the Saxon conquest than our next authority on the subject, Bede, and we must gratefully acknowledge that he does give us a few valuable facts of which we should otherwise be ignorant. His description of the horrors of the invasion, though highly coloured, is sufficiently paralleled by the well-attested events of the later Danish conquest to be not altogether improbable. His mention of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the modest descendant of emperors (perhaps of Maximus or the usurper Constantine), and the brave leader of revolt against the invaders, looks like historical fact, and the story of the British triumph at Mount Badon is not made a whit less probable by the patriotic silence of the Chronicle concerning a Saxon disaster. Both the place and the date of that great battle have been the subjects of long debate. Mons Badonicus used to be thought to represent Bath, and after a good deal of discussion this identification seems again to be coming into favour.
The sentence in which Gildas appears to connect the date of the battle with his own birth is almost hopelessly obscure and the text is probably corrupt; but on the whole it seems most probable that he meant to say, as above suggested: “The battle of Mount Badon was fought forty-four years ago, and in that year I was born”. The Annales Cambriæ (a compilation of the tenth century) give 516 for the year of the battle, a date which would fix the composition of the tearful discourse to 560. Mommsen prefers 500 for the date of the birth of Gildas. In any event there is a strong inducement to connect at least a part of the long period of comparative peace which, according to Gildas, followed the battle of Mount Badon with the confessedly uneventful reign of Cynric, the West Saxon.
* * * * *
We now pass on to the other writer of British origin who dealt with the history of the Anglo-Saxon conquest--namely, Nennius. If one has to speak in rather severe terms of the literary quality of this writer’s work and of the value of his testimony as a historian, it must be remembered in extenuation of his many faults that he lived at a time and in a nation in which literary excellence and the acquisition of accurate knowledge of the past were made well-nigh impossible by the hard pressure of daily life, brutalised and barbarised as it was by perpetual wars both from without and from within. We shall have again to notice the same phenomenon of the utter decay of the historical and literary faculty in a highly cultured people when the Danes ravaged the monasteries of Northumbria, and it is but justice to these poor stammerers of a vanished age to remember how much more easily a nation might then be deprived of its whole literary heritage than can ever now be the case since the invention of printing.
There have been long and sharp discussions as to the age, the country, and even the personality of the author who is generally known as Nennius. The following pages represent the chief conclusions arrived at by a German student of Celtic literature, Professor Zimmer, who in his book, Nennius Vindicatus, has surely vindicated his client’s right to exist, though he admits as fully as any one that client’s terrible deficiencies as a historian. We may now, then, venture to assert that Nennius, the author of the Historia Brittonum, was born about the middle of the eighth century, that he lived in South-East Wales, probably near the borders of Brecon and Radnor, that he wrote his book in or about the year 796, and that it was subjected, about 810, to a very early revision by a scribe who calls himself Samuel, and who lived in North Wales. For some reason or other the book had considerable popularity both in England and on the continent, especially in Brittany, but it suffered much at the hands of ignorant transcribers, and a narrative, not originally very lucid, has in some places been made almost unintelligible, owing to the transposition of some of the leaves of manuscript which have fallen out and been replaced in a wrong order. The restoration of these wrongly sorted chapters to their proper place in the book is one of Professor Zimmer’s greatest achievements. The work of an ill-informed and uncritical scribe such as Nennius evidently was,[35] subject also to all these adversities in the course of its transmission to us, and originally written three centuries and a half after the events recorded, might be considered so poor an authority as to be unworthy of our further notice. But, in the first place, we have practically no other British authority save Gildas for the events which interest us so deeply; and, secondly, the author has at one point incorporated in his work a document much earlier and much more valuable than his own. This is the so-called “Genealogies of the Kings,” which occupy sections 57 to 65 of the Historia Brittonum, and which, though they consist chiefly of strings of names, the ancestors of Anglian kings, are of a comparatively early date, since they bring the history down only to 679 (being thus slightly earlier even than Bede), and have this especial interest for us that we have here, imbedded in a passionately Celtic work, information otherwise lacking as to the rulers of the Anglian kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia in the sixth century.
Probably the most valuable piece of information conveyed to us by Nennius, relating, it is true, rather to the history of Wales than to that of England, is derived from these same Genealogiæ Regum. It is to the effect that Maelgwn, King of Gwynedd (North Wales), was descended in the fifth degree from a certain Cunedag, who with eight sons marched southward from Manau Guotodin (which is identified with the district of Lothian), and drove “the Scots” from the region of Gwynedd, to which they never returned. This southward march took place, he says, 146 years before Maelgwn reigned. Now, Maelgwn, who was one of the five kings so fiercely denounced by Gildas, is a historical personage who certainly reigned in North Wales and whose death is dated in 547. He is also a link in the chain of Welsh kings who continued to reign so long as Wales had any independent rulers. The statement, therefore, amounts to this, that a little before 400, say in 380, or about the date of the usurpation of Maximus, a chieftain named Cunedag with his eight sons, and, doubtless, a large army, marched right across Britain from the Firth of Forth to the Menai Straits, drove out the “Scots,” that is the Irish invaders who were in possession of the country, and established a dynasty which endured for nine centuries (380–1283), till Llewelyn and David, the last royal descendants of Cunedag, were slain by the order of Edward Plantagenet. This is a fact unrelated to any other that has been handed down to us, but which suggests the reflection how many great movements of population, all memory of which has perished, may have been going forward in our island during these mist-covered fifth and sixth centuries of our era. Moreover, the fact that we have here apparently an instance of a Pictish king conducting a campaign of extermination against the “Scots,” though these Scots were in Wales, throws some doubt on the conventional theory that all the calamities of undefended Britain were due to a war in which the Picts and the Scots were acting in concert.
As to the actual events of the Anglo-Saxon conquest Nennius leads us into a perfect jungle-growth of legend and fable, but adds very little to our real information. He repeats the name of the unhappy Vortigern and blackens it with all sorts of foul crimes, such as murder and incest. He blends his narrative with alleged scandals, not only untrue but historically impossible, against the saintly Germanus. He hints that there was rivalry and discord between Vortigern and Ambrosius; and here we can neither confirm nor refute his statement, though certainly the story as told by Gildas does not give us the impression that they were contemporaries. He tells us that when Hengest sent for the second draft of his followers they came over in sixteen keels, and that in one of those keels was “a girl fair of face and very stately in person, the daughter of Hengest” (the name Rowena is not mentioned till a much later age). The damsel serves the king with strong drink. “Satan enters into the heart of Vortigern, and through an interpreter whose name was Ceretic [this little detail looks like genuine tradition] he asks for the maiden in marriage, promising to give half his kingdom in exchange, and he does in fact give her the district of Kent, though a prince named Guoyrancgon was then reigning there and knew not that he was being thus handed over into the power of the pagans.” Hengest then proceeded to give his new son-in-law fatherly advice, which he assured him would effectually secure his kingdom: “I will invite my son and his nephew, for they are warlike men, that they may fight against the Scots, and do thou give unto them those regions which are in the north, next to the wall which is called Guaul”. Obeying this recommendation, Vortigern invited them and they came, “to wit Octha and Ebissa with forty keels; but whilst they were sailing round the Picts they laid waste the Orkney islands, and came and occupied many countries beyond the Frisian Sea [the Firth of Forth?] as far as the boundary of the Picts”. A dark and difficult passage truly; but there is some reason to think that there may be in it a germ of historical truth, and that there was really a Jutish settlement in Scotland.
After this the story relapses into mere romance. We hear of enchanted towers, of a wonder-working child who was afterwards known as the enchanter Merlin, and who apparently calls up the spirit of the dead Ambrosius. Then we are introduced to Vortimer, the brave son of Vortigern, who defeats the barbarians in four great battles; but, dying soon after, he desires to be buried on a hill above the place where they had first landed, since he has a prophetic intimation that they shall not dwell in the land for ever, but shall one day be driven forth; a prophecy the fulfilment of which still lingers. Discouraged by the victories of Vortimer, Hengest now resorts to stratagem, and calls for a conference to which both Britons and Saxons are to come unarmed, and at which they shall establish a league of lasting friendship. Privately, however, he orders his followers to hide each man a small knife under his foot in the middle of his boot, and when he calls out “Eu Saxones nimmath tha saxas” (Ye Saxons grasp the daggers), out flash the deadly weapons; the 300 senators of Vortigern are slain, and he himself is taken prisoner and loaded with chains till he consents to give Hengest Essex and Sussex for his ransom. The story ends with the death of Vortigern. “Some say that he died a broken-hearted wanderer, hated by all his people, and others that the earth opened and swallowed him up on the night on which the enchanted citadel was burned.”
The traitorous conference and Hengest’s cry to his followers seem to have about them a slight savour of probability, but it will probably be the opinion of any one who carefully peruses the chapters of Nennius of which a slight outline has here been traced, that they are for the most part of as much historical value as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. But the elements of which this strange work is composed are of various value. After a sketch of the life of St. Patrick which is taken from a well-known source and which need not here detain us, Nennius gives an important paragraph which seems to be taken from his earlier Northumbrian authority, and, if so, is entitled to more respectful attention: “On the death of Hengest, his son Octha crossed from the northern region of Britain to the kingdom of Kent. From him are descended the present kings of that country. Then did Arthur fight against the Saxons in those days along with the leaders of the Britons, but he himself was leader in the wars.”[36] The author then proceeds to give us the sites of twelve great battles fought by Arthur. Of the eighth, he says it was “in the castle of Guinnion, whereat Arthur carried on his shoulders the image of the holy Mary, ever a Virgin, and the pagans were turned to flight in that day, and a great slaughter was made among them by the power of Christ and his Virgin Mother. The ninth battle was fought in the city of the legion (Castra Legionis).[37]... The twelfth was fought at Mount Badon, at which 960 men fell in one day at one onslaught by Arthur, and no one felled them but he alone, and in all the wars he stood forth as conqueror.”
The scenes of the twelve battles fought by Arthur have been variously identified, some authors placing them in South Wales and some in the Scottish lowlands. Except as regards Castra Legionis and Mons Badonis, there is something to be said for the latter set of identifications, which seem to agree with the Northumbrian origin of the document quoted by Nennius.
Is there any historical truth in the personality of Arthur, or is he a mere creature of romance? The answer to that much-debated question depends on the degree of credit which, upon a review of the whole case, we may consider ourselves at liberty to attach to these few sentences of Nennius. All the rest that has been said concerning him, whether by pseudo-historians, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, by avowed romancers like Sir Thomas Malory, or by poets like Tennyson, is confessedly but the product of imagination, some of it very beautiful, some of it rather foolish; but Nennius, and he alone, can answer for us the question whether Arthur ever really was.
It is believed that the reader has now been introduced to all the authentic information which has been handed down to us concerning the great revolution or rather series of revolutions which changed Britannia into Engla-land. The chroniclers of the twelfth century, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Florence of Worcester, for the most part honourable and truth-seeking men, have dealt with these historical materials, each after his own fashion, seeking to weave them into a connected and harmonious narrative; but it is generally agreed by those who have carefully studied their works that they knew no more than we as to the events of the fifth and sixth centuries, and that historical science can gain little or nothing, for this part of the history of England, from a study of their chronicles. Much less, of course, does it behove us to give any attention to the mere romances which Geoffrey of Monmouth and the storytellers of his school imagined about the fictitious kings of England, from Brut to Lud. Already in the seventeenth century these sports of fancy were beginning to be appraised at their true value by scholars like Milton, who rehearsed but evidently did not believe them. Now, happily, no English historian thinks it necessary to waste his time and the time of his readers by proving their utter unreality. Still, no doubt the mind of every historical student longs for a continuous and rightly co-ordinated narrative of events, and dislikes to see the evidence presented in such disjointed fashion as that in which it has been here submitted to the reader. This however appears to be for the present a disagreeable necessity. Great danger seems to attend every attempt to make one plain story out of the various materials supplied to us by Bede, the Chronicle, Gildas and Nennius. It may be that the labours of future investigators may enable them to achieve this result; but the time is not yet.
One or two great landmarks may perhaps be accurately discerned through the mist. The united testimony of Prosper Tiro and the biographer of Germanus seems to justify us in asserting that the Saxon assaults upon Britain were contemporaneous with those of the Picts, and never really ceased throughout the first half of the fifth century. The allusion in the Chronicle to a burial of treasure and flight of the Romans in 418 perhaps refers to some otherwise unrecorded invasion of the Saxons and to a consequent emigration of the Romanised Britons to Gaul. That such an emigration on a large scale must have taken place somewhat early in the century seems to follow as a necessary consequence from the fact that the Armorican peninsula received then that name of Britannia, Bretagne or Brittany which in one shape or other it has ever since retained, and that already in 469 we find Apollinaris Sidonius speaking, as a matter of course, of the inhabitants of that region as Britons.[38]
There was probably an invasion of Kent in 441 by a Teutonic tribe, whom we may perhaps call Jutes, and this invasion was less of a mere piratical raid and more of an abiding conquest than the previous expeditions. We notice the same difference three centuries later in the Danish invasions. Vortigern is probably an historical character, and his marriage with the daughter of the Teutonic chief was the sort of event which might well strike the minds of contemporaries and linger long in the songs of later generations. Probably, however, he was not a “king”--Roman institutions would hardly have allowed of the formation so early of a regal dynasty--but a great and powerful landowner who armed his dependants and wielded practically something like kingly power. His invocation of Jutish aid to repel a Pictish invasion may be historically true, but far too much has doubtless been made of the whole affair by British fabulists, anxious to excuse the failure of their countrymen and determined to make the luckless Vortigern the scapegoat of their nation. “We were betrayed!” is the natural exclamation of every vanquished people.
Ambrosius Aurelianus, the descendant of Roman wearers of the purple, is almost certainly a historical personage, though it is impossible to fix the time and place of his operations. So, too, with a shade less of probability is Arthur, or Artorius, whom we may fairly credit with having stayed for a time the torrent of the Saxon advance by the great victory of the Mons Badonicus won at some time between 500 and 516. In both these British champions, however, we ought probably to see not Cymric kings, but Romano-British generals, wielding a power like that of the Roman duces and comites, and perhaps even commanding bodies of men trained in some of the traditions of the Roman legion. Most important, on this view of the case, are the words of Nennius himself: “Arthur fought against the Saxons along with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was Dux Bellorum”.
The short and business-like entries of the Chronicle as to the successive victories which marked the extension of the West Saxon kingdom seem in the main worthy of belief, though we cannot rely with much confidence on the dates attached to every entry. It does not surprise us to find no record of the Saxon defeat at the Mons Badonicus, nor, as has been said, does such silence lessen the probability of its having actually occurred. Ceawlin, the hero of the West Saxons, is undoubtedly a real figure in history, and we may in the main accept with confidence the history of his battles, especially of his crowning victory at Deorham, which undid the work of Mount Badon, and, by giving the command of the Severn Valley and the Bristol Channel to the Saxons, finally separated “West Wales” from Wales. The domestic strife which disastrously ended his career and hurled him from his throne is pretty clearly hinted at in the Chronicle, and we may be allowed to conjecture that it was the continuance of this internal discord which prevented for a long while the further development of Wessex; which made the rising power of Mercia instead of the West Saxon state the protagonist in the conflict with Wales; and which struck the annals of the latter kingdom in the seventh century with barrenness. When Ceawlin died, in 593, already the great pope who was to reunite Britain to Christian Europe was presiding over the Roman Church, and we may be said now at last to see land, the terra firma of authentic and continuous history.
On reviewing the whole course of the Teutonic conquest of our island we cannot fail to be struck by the different rates of speed at which that conquest proceeded at different times. By about the middle of the sixth century the invaders seem to have possessed themselves of nearly all the country lying to the east of a line drawn from Berwick-on-Tweed through Lichfield to Salisbury. After that period, however, their advance, never very rapid, becomes extremely slow. Wales the Saxons never conquered. “West Wales,” as Devon and Cornwall were called, were not subdued till the ninth century. Cumberland, which formed part of the Celtic kingdom of Strathclyde, does not seem to have become English till the close of the seventh century, and even then was very loosely joined to the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. It is to be hoped that we may one day obtain some clearer light on the reason for this great difference in the rate of conquest between the eastern and western halves of the island; how far it may have been due to the different resisting powers of two Celtic races, the “Brythonic” and “Goidelic”; whether earlier Saxon settlements along the shore of the German Ocean facilitated the work of the new invaders; or whether the flat alluvial lands of the east, more easily overrun by mounted bands of freebooters than the rough mountainous country of the west, were the chief factors in the problem.
A question which has been often and fiercely discussed and on which probably the last word has not yet been said is: “How far did the great movements of invasion which we have been discussing amount to an actual replacement of one population by another?” or, in other words: “Are the Englishmen of to-day pure Saxons and Angles or partly Celts?” In considering this question two factors have to be considered: (1) the amount of new population imported into the country; and (2) the degree to which the invaders carried the process of extermination of the older inhabitants. As to the first point we are furnished with extremely scanty information by all our authorities. The mythical “three keels” and “five keels,” which the chroniclers speak of as containing the whole forces of the invaders, point only to a scanty number of warriors, accompanied probably by their horses, but certainly not by their wives and children. The story of the legendary Rowena, on the other hand, suggests--what is doubtless the truth--that the invaders, once established in the land, sent speedily for the wives and daughters whom they had left by the Elbe or the Baltic. One late authority speaks of the Saxons as inviting over so many of their kith and kin that an island which they had previously inhabited was left almost void of people. Undoubtedly every indication of language and of later social state points to the conclusion that the invasions were not mere raids of freebooting warriors, but great national migrations such as were the fashion in the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ, such as Claudian describes as headed by Alaric and such as Ennodius paints in his laudation of Theodoric.
Moreover, even for such a great national displacement we may find a sufficient cause in the condition of central Europe between 432 and 452. During all these years the fear of the mighty Hunnish war-lord Attila lay like a nightmare upon Europe; not upon the Romanised men of the southern cities only, but quite as much upon the Teuton in his forests, for the Teuton loathed the very smell of the Hun, and, when forced to submit to him for a time, chafed under his yoke and as soon as possible escaped from his abhorred neighbourhood. Now when we find it stated by the Roman ambassadors to his court[39] that Attila had by the year 448 made “all the islands in the ocean” subject to him, we who know that the coasts of the Baltic, of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula were all looked upon as islands by the classical geographers, may not improbably conjecture that the pressure of the Hun was felt by the Angle and the Saxon as it had been felt before by his kinsmen the Goth and the Burgundian. We have every reason therefore to conjecture, if we cannot hold it for proved, that there was an immense transference of Teutonic family life from the lands bordering on the Elbe to the banks of the Thames, the Humber and the Tyne.
But it is on the second factor of the equation, on the extent of denudation of the older, the Celtic stratum of the people, that the controversy chiefly turns. The theory of the virtual extermination of the Britons from at least the eastern half of the island is thus stated by its most illustrious champion, Freeman: “Though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of these parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be”. In support of this theory Freeman appeals to the absolutely Teutonic type of the language spoken by Englishmen before the Norman conquest, to the Teutonic character of their institutions and to the terrible entry in the Chronicle concerning the capture of Anderida: “491. Now Aella and Cissa encompassed Andredes-ceaster and slew off all that dwelt therein: nor was there afterward a single Briton left there.”
It cannot be said that the tendency of recent inquirers is in favour of so strong an assertion as this of the entire obliteration of the British element in any part of our island. Physiological investigations, the measurement of skulls and the examination of graves, do not confirm the hypothesis of the absolute disappearance anywhere of the pre-Saxon races. The study of institutions does not confirm it: the more closely these are examined the more does the conviction grow that some Roman or Celtic elements are imbedded in the generally Teutonic character of the Anglo-Saxon state. And even the celebrated passage concerning the slaughter at Anderida is not, perhaps, so conclusive an argument as it appears at first sight. Nothing is said there which necessarily implies a determination to destroy a whole people. We may see in it only the cruel action of assailants maddened by the stubborn defence of a fortress which may have long held the Saxons at bay; and even the fact of the emphatic mention in the Chronicle of this one bloody deed seems to imply that it was not the usual accompaniment of Saxon conquest.
When we examine carefully the pleadings on both sides we see that the disputants are not so far apart as they suppose themselves to be. No one denies that the general framework of society in Anglo-Saxon Britain, like the language, was Teutonic, or that the masters of the land were English and looked upon the Romanised Celts whom they called Wealas as an alien and inferior race. But, on the other hand, Freeman himself admits, though reluctantly, that the majority of the British women would be spared to be the wives or concubines of the invaders, and nearly all the slaves to be their thralls. This admission is fatal to the claim of the ordinary Englishman of to-day, after all the upheavings and down-sinkings of the various social strata, to be a pure-blooded Teuton. The evidence of language tends in the same direction. It is certainly surprising--and the advocates of the extirpation-theory have a right to point triumphantly to the fact--how small a number of Romano-Celtic words crept into the language spoken here before the Norman Conquest. But the words which did thus survive are, for the most part, such words as women would use in connexion with the affairs of the household, words like rasher and rug. When we thus review the circumstances of the Saxon conquest, and especially when we remember the immense influx of Celtic blood which we have received in later centuries from the Gael and the Erse folk, we may perhaps conclude that we should accept and glory in the term Anglo-Celt, rather than Anglo-Saxon, as the fitting designation of our race.
VII. THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE
During the two centuries in which Britain had been forgotten by the rest of Europe, great events, most of them disastrous events, had been happening in the world. The imperial city, Rome, had been four times captured and plundered by barbarian armies. After the third of these captures (that by Totila in 546), we are told that the mighty city remained for six weeks absolutely empty of inhabitants, neither man nor beast being left therein. During these two centuries the vast empire of Attila the Hun which seemed likely at one time to be a universal monarchy had risen into greatness and had fallen into ruin; so, too, had risen and fallen the fair fabric raised in Italy by the converted barbarian Theodoric; Clovis the Frank had become, from chief of a petty principality, lord of a mighty realm, which under his sons had spread over the greater part of the two countries which we now call France and Germany; Justinian had framed his imperishable code, and the Bishop of Rome had become the unquestioned patriarch of the west.
Two references to our island made by the greatest historian of the period serve to emphasise its utter seclusion from the world of civilisation and culture. Procopius in his immortal history of the Gothic siege of Rome,[40] tells us that at a certain period of the blockade (537) when the Gothic leaders began to despair of taking the city they opened negotiations with Belisarius, the imperial general, and endeavoured to persuade him to retire from Italy on condition of receiving a formal cession of the island of Sicily. The absurdity of the suggestion consisted in this, that Sicily, which was the natural prize of the greatest sea power in the Mediterranean, was already hopelessly lost to the Gothic kingdom; and this fact gave point to the sarcastic reply of Belisarius: “And we, too, will allow the Goths to possess the whole island of Britain which is much larger than Sicily and which once belonged to the Romans, as Sicily once belonged to you. For when any one has received a favour it is fitting that he should repay it in kind.” So utterly had Britain fallen out of the orbit of the empire that a heroic Roman general could even afford to joke over its disappearance.
Again, towards the end of his history,[41] Procopius, who evidently wishes to follow the example of Herodotus in supplying his readers with the best information in his power about strange and savage lands, gives a detailed description of Britain. “It is divided into two parts by a wall built by ‘the men of old’. On the eastern side of that wall all is fresh and fair; neither heat nor cold excessive; fruits, harvests, men abound; a fertile soil is blessed with abundance of water. But on the western side things are altogether different, so that no man can live there even for half an hour. Numberless vipers and serpents and other venomous beasts abound there, and so pestilent is the air that the moment a man crosses the wall he dies.” Furthermore, a strange story was told concerning this island, for the truth of which Procopius does not vouch, but which he repeats lest he should be thought to be ignorant of a matter of common notoriety. “On the shore of the Channel opposite to Britain are many villages inhabited by fishermen who are exempt from the usual tribute ‘payable to the Kings of the Franks’ on condition of their undertaking in rotation the duty of rowing over to Britain the spirits of the dead. The boatman whose turn it is to undertake this duty lies down at nightfall to snatch a brief slumber. At dead of night a knock is heard at the door of his hut and a muffled voice calls him and his fellows forth to their duty. They see ships, not their own, anchored in the harbour. Embarking on these they seize the oars and push off from land; at once the ships, though apparently empty, are pressed down to the water’s edge by an unseen cargo. When they reach the shore of Britain a disembarkation as invisible as the embarkation takes place. They see no man; only a voice proclaims the names of the invisible passengers, the offices they held in life, the husbands of the dead wives, if any such should be among the number. Quickly do they return to the Gaulish shore, and now the ship is not sunk deeper than her keel.” Gladly would we learn in whose interest and at what period of the great struggle this wild story was put in circulation concerning a country which had been for at least three centuries in the full prosaic daylight of Roman civilisation.
It was probably about the year 553 that Procopius of Cæsarea wrote this strange story, worthy of the age of Orpheus and the Argonauts, concerning our ghostly island. Some twenty years later, the celebrated scene between Gregory and the fair-haired Yorkshire lads was enacted in the Roman forum.[42] We cannot avoid listening once more to the thousand times quoted words of Bede:--[43]
“I may not pass by in silence the event which according to the tradition of the elders was the cause of Gregory’s abiding interest in the salvation of our people. They say that on a certain day the news of the arrival of some merchants caused a concourse of intending purchasers to assemble in the forum where their goods were displayed. Among the rest came Gregory who saw there, beside the other market wares, certain boys set up for sale, with fair skins and beautiful faces, noticeable for their golden hair and comely shapes. When he beheld them, he asked from what part of the world they came. The merchant told him that they came from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants all presented the same appearance. Again he asked whether they were Christians, or still involved in the errors of Paganism. ‘They are Pagans,’ was the reply. Hereupon he heaved a sigh from his inmost heart, and said: ‘Alas! the pity of it! that the Prince of Darkness should own as his subjects men of such shining countenance, and that such grace of outward form should veil minds destitute of heavenly grace within’. Again he asked what was the name of that nation. The merchant answered: ‘They are called Angles’. ‘Well named,’ said he, ‘for they have angelic faces and ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven. What is the name of that province from which they have been brought?’ ‘The inhabitants of that province are called Deiri.’ ‘Well again: rescued de ira and called out of wrath into the mercy of Christ. How is their king named?’ ‘Aelle.’ Playing on the name he said: ‘Alleluia. It must needs be that the praises of God the Creator resound in those regions.’”
It has been conjectured that the lads who stood on that fateful morning for sale in the Roman forum had lost their liberty owing to the wars waged between their lord, Aelle of Deira, and Ethelfrith of Bernicia. The grave and reverend ecclesiastic who spoke to them in that historic forum which still doubtless showed the senate-house and rostra of the republic, and was overlooked by the palaces of the empire, was a man who himself was sprung of a senatorial family and had worn the purple of the prefect of the city. A year or two, however, before the dialogue in the forum, about 575, he had laid aside that splendid robe and donned the coarse scapular of a Benedictine monk. His stately palace on the Cælian he had turned into a monastery, which still exists and bears his name, though originally dedicated to St. Andrew. Such was the man who, intensely Roman at heart as well as Christian, brought Britain once again within the attraction of Rome.
In the first fervour of his missionary zeal, Gregory himself started on the northward road, but was recalled by the command of the pope.[44] Then came the years which he spent as papal nuncio (apocrisiarius) at the splendid but not altogether friendly court of Constantinople; his return to Rome; his rule as abbot in his monastery; and lastly his election in 590 by the enthusiastic and unanimous voices of the people to the office of pope, vacant by the death of Pelagius II. Still the vision of the conversion of Britain remained dear to his heart; but in the distracted state of Italy, living, as he said, “between the swords of the Lombards,”[45] he was for some time unable to take any steps towards its fulfilment. In September, 595, he wrote to the steward of the papal estates in Gaul, directing him to buy as many English slaves as he could, of the age of seventeen or eighteen, that they might be distributed to various monasteries and there taught the elements of the Christian faith. The terms of this commission give us a strong impression of the regularity of the export of slaves from Britain to Gaul. And where such a regular slave-trade exists we may generally infer the prevalence of a chronic state of war.
At last, in 596, he sent forth his friend Augustine, prior of his monastery of St. Andrew’s, with a company of monks, upon the great enterprise. Augustine himself, a somewhat timorous and small-souled man, who lacked the great qualities of his patron, when he had reached the south of Gaul and heard from the bishops of that province dire stories of Saxon barbarism, turned faint-hearted, and conversation with his companions increased rather than allayed his fears. At last they came to the inglorious conclusion “that it would be safer to return home than to visit a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation, of whose very language they were ignorant”. Augustine himself started on the return journey, bearer of the unanimous request that they might be excused from undertaking so perilous and laborious a mission, and one of such doubtful issue. Probably he had not reached Rome when he received a letter (dated July 23, 596) in which the pope informed the whole company that it would have been better never to have begun a good work than to turn back disheartened from its accomplishment. He exhorted them not to be daunted by the difficulties of the journey, nor discouraged by the words of evil-speaking men, but to press on with zeal to finish the work which God had given them to do; knowing that the greater the labour the richer would be the eternal recompense of reward. At the same time a letter of commendation to Etherius, Archbishop of Arles, probably smoothed their labours and did something to allay their fears.
In truth the mission upon which the trembling monks were despatched, though of immense importance, was one of no great danger, and it would probably be safe to say that the missionaries of all the Christian Churches have in the last two centuries cheerfully faced greater perils and undergone greater hardships in the service of the Gospel of Christ, than were the portion of Augustine and his friends. Ethelbert, the king of Kent, whose court was the objective of their campaign, was far the most powerful of the English kings, and in his reign, which had now lasted more than thirty years, he had, we are told, “stretched the bounds of his empire as far as the river Humber”.[46] His wife, Bertha, daughter of Charibert, king of the Franks, and grand-daughter of Clovis, was allowed to worship after the Christian manner without let or hindrance, having her own private chaplain, Bishop Liudhard, and we may fairly suppose that the messengers who came to preach the same faith, bringing introductions from Frankish kings and prelates as well as from the great Bishop of Rome, were safe from insult or molestation in the wide region included in the over-lordship of her husband, the limits of which they probably never overstepped.
At last after long and leisurely journeyings, visits to the courts of Frankish kings, and the formation of a staff of interpreters, Augustine and his companions, forty in number, landed, apparently in the spring of 597, on the shores of Britain. Their landing-place was in that extreme north-eastern corner of Kent which still bears the name of the Isle of Thanet, though it has lost its insular character. In the seventh century the little stream of the Stour, which flows round this region and which then emptied itself into the channel called the Wantsum, was a considerable river, probably tidal, 600 yards broad and fordable only in two places. Thus Thanet was then a genuine island, and here Augustine and his little band took up their temporary quarters. Sending some of their Frankish interpreters to Ethelbert they informed him that they had come from Rome, the bearers of the best of all good news, and that if he would hearken to their counsels they could without any doubt promise him eternal happiness in heaven and a future kingdom without end in the presence of the living and true God. The king replied with words courteous but cautious: “Remain in that island in which you now are, while I consider what I shall do with you. Meanwhile I will supply you with the necessaries of life.” After certain days Ethelbert crossed the Wantsum and held a conference with the strangers. The place of meeting was fixed in the open air, for the old king, notwithstanding his life-long intercourse with Christians, feared that he should be fascinated by magical arts if he met the missionaries within doors. Soon Augustine and his forty companions were seen to approach, bearing on high a silver cross by way of banner and a painted picture of the Saviour, and chanting litanies, in which they prayed the Lord to grant eternal life to themselves and to those for whose sake they had come from far. At the king’s command they took their seats, and then one of their number, probably Augustine himself, through the medium of an interpreter, set forth to the king “how the mild-hearted Saviour by His own throes of suffering redeemed this guilty world and opened the kingdom of heaven to believing men”. The king replied: “Fair are the words which you speak and the promises which you make to me, but since they are new and vague I cannot give my assent to them, nor leave those rites which I, together with the whole English nation, have so long practised. But since you have come from so far, and, as I perceive, desire to share with us that which you hold to be best and truest, we will not be grievous unto you, but rather receive you with friendly hospitality and make it our business to supply you with needful food; nor will we forbid you to attach to yourselves all whom you can, by your preaching, win over to your faith.”
Herewith, permitting them to leave the Isle of Thanet, he assigned them quarters in the capital of his kingdom. This was the once insignificant town of Durovernis, situated at the point where the Roman road to Richborough diverged from the road between London and Dover. As the capital of the Jutish kingdom this roadside station had already attained to some importance under the name of Cantwaraburh, but showed little promise of the world-wide fame which it was to achieve under its more modern name of Canterbury. As the missionary band approached their destined home they raised aloft the silver crucifix and the picture, chanting with one accord a litany which may be thus translated:--
From this city, Lord! we pray May Thy wrath be turned away. We have sinned: but let Thy pity Spare Thy house in yonder city. Alleluia! Alleluia!
This litany was one which had been sung for more than a century on Rogation days in the churches of Gaul, and we must not, therefore, seek in its words for any special application to the little Saxon city towards which the missionaries were gazing. As it happened, however, there was already in that city a Christian church, erected probably in the very last years of the Roman occupation of Britain,[47] and dedicated to St. Martin of Tours. Here Ethelbert’s queen had since her marriage been allowed to attend a Christian service, celebrated by her Frankish chaplain, Liudhard. It was the opinion of Pope Gregory that the Frankish ecclesiastics of Gaul had been somewhat neglectful of their duties in reference to their heathen neighbours of Britain, and probably the court chaplain Liudhard was not altogether exempt from this reproach. However this may be, the church of St. Martin, now handed over to the Roman mission, became a centre of religious activity. The preaching and the prayers, the vigils and the fasts of the white-robed strangers, their patient and self-denying life, their professed willingness to suffer death itself on behalf of the Christian faith, produced a great impression on the minds of the men of Kent, rough doubtless and barbarous, but able to appreciate that which they beheld of noble and godlike. They began to flock to the church and crave the administration of baptism; and at last even the king presented himself at the sacred font and received baptism at the hands of Augustine. From that day the process of conversion went on rapidly, but we are assured that no pressure was put by the king on his subjects to compel them to follow his example, “since he had learned from his teachers that the service of Christ must be a voluntary matter and not a thing of compulsion”. He at once, however, provided the missionaries with a residence in Canterbury suitable to their dignity, and notwithstanding their life of abstinence and renunciation he made to them grants of lands in various districts, thus beginning that series of donations to the Church by Anglo-Saxon kings which was continued by them for near five centuries with splendid liberality, and the carefully preserved records of which constitute one of our most valuable sources of information on the social condition of England before the Norman conquest.
The mission having thus far met with such marvellous success Augustine felt that the time was come for him to assume a regular ecclesiastical position, and accordingly he journeyed to Arles, where the archbishop of that see, in accordance with orders received from Gregory, consecrated him as archbishop of the English nation.[48] Divers doubts and questionings having occurred to the soul of the new metropolitan he despatched, about 600, two of his brethren, Laurentius and Peter, to lay his difficulties before his Roman patron. The questions asked are of an extraordinary kind, and startle us by their strange juxtaposition of things momentous and things indifferent. Thus a question whether it is permissible for two brothers to marry two sisters, to whom they themselves stand in no kind of relationship, is followed by another, whether a man may be permitted to many his father’s widow. It is difficult to believe that the framer of such a question can have even read St. Paul’s letters to the Christians of Corinth. However, if the archbishop’s questions seem to us rather surprising, the pope’s answers are noble and statesmanlike. Especially memorable is his answer to the inquiry: “The faith being one, what can I say as to the diverse customs of the Churches, as, for instance, where the mass is celebrated in one way in the Holy Roman Church and in another way in the Churches of Gaul?” Pope Gregory replied, “You, my brother, know well the custom of the Roman Church in which you were reared. But my pleasure is that you should anxiously select whatever custom you may find, whether in the Roman or in the Gaulish or any other Church, which is pleasing to Almighty God, and teach the customs which you have thus gathered from many Churches to the Church of the Angles, which is yet new to the faith. For things are not to be prized according to the places from which they originate, but places are to be loved according to the good things to which they give birth.”
The letter containing these answers was carried, not by the returning messengers of Augustine, but by a fresh mission from Rome, consisting of Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus, and Rufinianus. They brought with them also a woollen pallium for Augustine, the symbol of his archiepiscopal dignity, many relics of saints and ornaments for the churches and the precious gift of a large number of manuscripts. While entrusting Augustine with the precious pallium, a gift which he was somewhat chary of bestowing, Pope Gregory at the same time provided for the erection of an archiepiscopal see at Eburacum. In future, after Augustine’s own death, the archiepiscopate of the south was to be placed at Lundonia; and thereafter London and York, the two archiepiscopal centres of their respective provinces, were to have equal power, priority of dignity being assigned to whichever prelate might happen to have been first ordained. The messengers brought also letters specially directed to the King and Queen of Kent. In the letter to Ethelbert, Gregory struck a note which was often heard in his correspondence: “Moreover, we wish your Glory to know that, as we are assured in Holy Scripture by the words of Almighty God, the end of this present world is nigh at hand and the unending reign of the Saints is about to begin. Before that day comes many things must come to pass such as have not yet been seen: changes in the air, terrors in the sky, tempests out of season, wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes. All these things, it is true, will not happen in our own day, but after our days they will follow.” In the letter to Bertha, the pope, while gently hinting that one so well grounded in the true faith ought long ago to have effected the conversion of her husband, praises her for what she has done in protecting and befriending the missionaries; exhorts her to use all her influence in order to keep her husband steadfast in the faith. He assures her that her memory will be revered like that of Helena who turned her son Constantine to Christianity, and that the fame of her great work has reached not only to Rome but even to Constantinople (delightful thought for the daughter of barbarian kings), and that its completion will bring joy to the angels in heaven.
In a letter addressed to the messenger Mellitus, containing some thoughts which had come into the pope’s mind during his long musings after the departure of his legation, Gregory desires him to direct Augustine on no account to destroy the temples of the idols, but to sprinkle them with holy water, construct altars and enrich them with relics. The old pagan sacrifices of animals to their false gods are, of course, to cease, but as a sort of concession to the festive propensities of the converts, on the day of the dedication of the church or on the birthday of the martyr whose relics were there deposited, the people were to be encouraged to make little huts of boughs all round the newly consecrated church, and therein, after slaying animals for feasting, not for sacrifice, to express with joy and gladness of heart their gratitude to the Giver of every good gift. A remembrance of the Jewish feast of tabernacles seems to cross the mind of the pontiff as he thus ordains the conversion of pagan sacrifices into Christian festivities.
The story of the conversion of the English nation to Christianity is an interesting one, and if at this point of our narrative religious topics seem to claim too large a share of our attention, it must be remembered that our chief, almost our only authority for this period is the Historia Ecclesiastica of Bede, a splendid piece of historical work, but still one which, by the law of its being, concerns itself rather with the Church than with the State. Church affairs, however, sometimes throw an important light on political changes. We should be in entire ignorance as to the time and manner of the conquest of London by the invaders but for Bede’s information that: “Augustine ordained Mellitus as bishop (604), and sent him to preach in the province of the East Saxons, who are separated from Kent by the river Thames and are close to the eastern sea. Their metropolis is the city of Lundonia, situated on the banks of the aforesaid river and itself the mart of many nations flocking thither by land and sea: over which people [the East Saxons] at that time Saberct reigned, nephew of Ethelbert through his sister Ricula. He was, however, in a subordinate position to Ethelbert, who, as has been already said, ruled all the races of the English up to the river Humber. When, therefore, that province [Essex] had received the word of truth from the preaching of Mellitus, Ethelbert built in the city of Lundonia a church to the holy apostle Paul, in which was fixed the episcopal seat of Mellitus and his successors.”
At the same time Augustine consecrated Justus, who, as we have seen, was a colleague of Mellitus in the Roman legation, Bishop of Dorubrevi, “which from an old chieftain of theirs named Hrof the English nation calls Hrofaescaestre” (Rochester). These two bishoprics, Canterbury and Rochester, both founded in the one kingdom of Kent, seem to represent a certain political duality in that region,[49] as if it were the normal state of affairs that East and West Kent should have separate rulers. However this may be, it is well for us to bear in mind that the title of king was one of rather vague significance. Besides the great and powerful kings of the eight chief provinces there was many a cluster of petty princes dignified with the name of kings, of whom the national history can take no notice, but whose names figure royally in charters and testamentary documents.
It was probably soon after the arrival of the messengers from Rome, and to some extent in compliance with Gregory’s wishes, that some important but, unhappily, resultless overtures were made by Augustine to the rulers of the Welsh Church. Using the powerful advocacy of Ethelbert, he invited the doctors and bishops of the British province to meet him about the year 602 at a place in the west of England which was known long after as “Augustine’s oak”. There Augustine addressed the Welsh ecclesiastics and besought them to enter into the Catholic peace, and undertake with him a common labour for the conversion of the heathen. The chief point on which he insisted was the necessity of their conforming to the Roman practice in the calculation of Easter, a wearisome matter of debate as to which we shall hear more than enough in the century of Anglian history that now lies before us. When argument failed, the Roman advocate proposed to have recourse to miracle: “Let some sick man be brought into our midst, and the party whose prayers avail to heal him shall be deemed to be the advocates of the cause approved by God”. Unwillingly the Britons consented. A blind Englishman was introduced into the assembly. The prayers of the Welshmen failed to restore him to sight, but the prayers of Augustine, we are told, succeeded. Then, it is said, the Britons professed to be convinced that the course recommended by Augustine was the way of righteousness, but declared that they could not, without the consent of their countrymen, abandon their ancient customs. They therefore pleaded for a second conference, which was to be held at some place which is not named, and was to be attended by a much larger body of clergy.
To this second conference came seven bishops from Wales, possibly including some from Cornwall, and a whole troop of learned doctors, most of whom hailed from the great and noble monastery of Bangor.[50] On their way to the council they turned aside to ask the advice of a certain holy hermit, whether they should hold fast their old traditions or accept the teaching of Augustine. “If he is a man of God,” said he, “of course you must follow him.” “But how can we prove whether he be or no?” The answer showed a rare insight into the true spirit of Christianity: “The Lord said: Take my yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. If, therefore, this Augustine is meek and lowly of heart, it is probable that he bears the yoke of Christ himself and offers it to you to share it with him. But if he is proud and discourteous, he is not of God and we need not care for his words.... Arrange therefore, that he shall first reach the place of meeting, and if, when you draw near, he rises to receive you, be assured that he is a servant of Christ and listen to him with deference, but if he despises you and does not choose to rise to you who are the larger party, then let him be despised by you.” So it came to pass. The Britons when they arrived found Augustine seated on a chair of state, and he made no motion to arise therefrom. His demeanour may have been the result of shyness or absence of mind, but they set it down to pride, and being filled with wrath they made a point of contradicting everything that he said. Soon doubtless the dispute waxed warm, and cries of “Quarto-deciman,” “The last quarter of the waning moon,” “The cycle of eighty-four years,” “The cycle of eighteen years,” “The blessed apostle John,” “The prince of the apostles, Peter,” with every variety of intonation, from the sharp notes of the Italian cleric to the gruff voices of the Celtic mountaineer, resounded through the air. Augustine seems to have done his best, too late, to calm the ruffled spirits of his hearers. “Ye do many things,” he said, “contrary to our custom: nay, contrary to the custom of the universal Church, but if on three points ye will hearken to me we will patiently bear your divergence on all others. These three points are, that ye shall celebrate Easter at its own right time: that ye shall administer baptism according to the usage of the Apostolical Roman Church,[51] and that ye shall join with us in preaching the word of the Lord to the English nation.” The Cambrians, however, refused to comply with any of these conditions or to accept Augustine as their archbishop, muttering one to another: “He would not even rise to receive us when we were strangers: if we once submit ourselves to his authority he will treat us as the dust under his feet”. Before the disputants parted from one another, Augustine raised his voice in threatening prophecy: “If you will not accept peace with your brethren, you will have to accept war with your enemies: and if you will not preach the way of life to the English nation, you shall suffer from their hands the requital of death”. A prophecy which Bede considered to have afterwards received its fulfilment in the bloody battle of Chester.
It certainly must raise our opinion of the absolute honesty of Bede as a historian to find him, whose sympathies are all on the side of Roman as against British Christianity, thus faithfully describing a scene in which his hero Augustine certainly plays an unattractive part. The Welshmen may have erred in attributing his conduct to pride, but his most ardent champions must admit that he showed a grievous want of tact in this important interview. It was a golden opportunity that was offered for the reconciliation of two great hostile races at the feet of one Saviour, and that opportunity once lost never returned. The wound which the Saxon invasions had caused, still comparatively fresh, might possibly have been then healed by first intention. Unhealed then, it went festering on for centuries; and more than once or twice since the days of Augustine, Christianity, which ought to be the great reconciler of men, has proved itself the great divider between Celt and Saxon. Soon probably after this fatal interview, Augustine died (May 26, 605?), and was succeeded in his archiepiscopal see by his friend Laurentius, a companion of his labours from the beginning, and the man whom he had himself in his lifetime ordained to be his successor.
The death of Ethelbert of Kent, which occurred in February 24, 616, about eleven years after that of Augustine, serves as the occasion to our one most trusted authority for giving us some valuable information as to the political condition of our island. It will be well therefore to translate in full a few sentences from the Ecclesiastical History.
“In the year of our Lord’s Incarnation, 616, Aedilberct [Ethelbert], King of the Cantwaras, after a glorious reign on earth of fifty-six years, entered the eternal joys of the heavenly kingdom. He was the third among the kings of the English nation who ruled over all their southern provinces which are separated from the northern ones by the river Humber, and the boundaries adjoining: but he was the first of all to mount to the Kingdom of Heaven. [He came, as I have said, third in the other list.] For the first to wield dominion of this kind was Aelle, King of the South Saxons; the second Caelin, King of the West Saxons, who was called Ceawlin in their language; the third, as we have said, Aedilberct, King of the Cantwaras; the fourth who possessed it was Redwald, King of the East Angles, who even in the lifetime of Aedilberct won the leadership for that same nation of his.” Bede then proceeds to give us the names of three more leader-kings--names which will figure largely in the following chapters of this history--Aeduini (Edwin), Oswald and Oswiu (Oswy), all kings of Northumbria.
The Chronicle when it has to speak of Egbert the West Saxon and his acquisition of supreme power over the English people, remarks that “he was the eighth king that was Bretwalda” (or according to a better attested reading Brytenwealda), and then repeats the above list as given by Bede, adding Egbert’s name at its close. On the strength of this passage historians have concluded, no doubt rightly, that Bretwalda or some similar word was the title given to these exceptionally powerful English kings whom we find from time to time during the period of the so-called Heptarchy wielding practically the whole power of English Britain, and this idea of a “Britain-wielder” seems to be now generally accepted as explanatory of the name. There has been much discussion as to the attributes of this Bretwalda sovereignty of Britain, but it cannot be said that any very definite conclusion has yet been arrived at. It was probably what the Greeks called a “hegemony,” rather than a formal and constituted sovereignty: a leadership and preponderating influence such as the King of Prussia possessed in Germany even before he was formally proclaimed emperor. It will be observed that during Ethelbert’s reign his nephew, the East Anglian Redwald, won the leadership from him. Evidently there were some unrecorded vicissitudes in the life of Ethelbert.
The death of Ethelbert (who had married a second wife after the decease of Frankish Bertha) seems to have been shortly followed by that of his nephew, Saberct the East Saxon. Now was it too plainly seen how slight a hold the new religion, promoted as it had been by royal favour and the fashion of a court, had upon the hearts of the people. The hegemony of Kent, sapped as it had apparently been in the lifetime of Ethelbert, entirely disappeared at his death. Moreover his son Eadbald, who had set his heart on wedding his widowed stepmother, and who could by no means induce Archbishop Laurentius to sanction such an incestuous union, openly revolted from the Church and went back to paganism. In the frequent fits of insanity by which he was afterwards afflicted, the faithful saw the work of unclean spirits and the permitted chastisement of his sin.
Nor did affairs go better for Christianity in the neighbouring kingdom of Essex. King Saberct had left three sons, joint-successors to his kingdom, who during their father’s lifetime had yielded a sort of fitful adherence to Christianity, but had not submitted to the rite of baptism and remained apparently pagans at heart. Their quarrel with Mellitus, Bishop of London, arose out of his refusal to permit them to partake of the communion. They saw the bishop standing at the altar administering the eucharist to the people; and “Why,” demanded they in angry tones, “do you not give us some of that pure white bread which you used to give to our father, and which we see you still handing forth to the people?” Mellitus explained that it was not permitted to give the bread except to those who had undergone the rite of baptism; but they persisted that they had no need of baptismal purification, yet meant to have a share of the consecrated bread. When Mellitus still refused they said: “If you will not gratify us in so small a matter you shall not stay in our province,” and drove him forth from their kingdom. Mellitus, arriving in Kent, conferred with his brethren, Laurentius and Justus, as to what should be done in the face of the gathering storm-clouds. They unanimously came to the conclusion that the better course was to return to their own country, and there serve God with unharassed minds, rather than abide in that barbarous land and carry on their fruitless labours among a population rebellious to the faith. Mellitus and Justus accordingly left their respective sees and betook themselves to Gaul, meaning there to abide till the hourly expected end of the world, of which Gregory had so often warned them, should be revealed. Shortly after their departure the three arrogant East Saxon kings who had expelled Mellitus fell in battle against the Gewissas or men of Wessex. But though the idolatrous rulers were gone, their influence upon the people remained, and it was long before the city of London could be persuaded to tolerate in its midst the votaries of the new faith.
Thus it seemed that the seed sown by Augustine, which had sprung up so quickly, having no deepness of earth, was about to wither away as quickly before the parching blasts of persecution. A dream, or a trance, or a mysterious mental struggle through which Archbishop Laurentius passed, prevented the utter abandonment of the great enterprise. In the night before his intended departure from Britain, having laid him down to rest in a chamber of the monastery dedicated by Augustine to St. Peter and St. Paul, Laurentius saw in a vision the Apostle Peter who indignantly rebuked him for his faint-hearted desertion of the flock committed to his care. With every sentence came a blow from the apostolic scourge on the shoulders of the faint-hearted archbishop, and this chastisement endured through many hours of the secret and solitary night. In the morning Laurentius found that his back was covered with wales from St. Peter’s lash, and going straight to the palace he showed his wounds to the king. Eadbald asked in wrath who had dared thus to chastise so eminent a man, and being told that it was the long dead apostle of Christ, he was stricken with fear, abandoned his idolatrous rites, put away his forbidden wife, received baptism, and thenceforward promoted to the utmost of his power the cause of the new religion.[52]
Thus then Laurentius did not take his hand from the plough. His brethren, Mellitus and Justus, were recalled by Eadbald from Gaul, but the newly converted king, less powerful than his father, availed not to persuade the stubborn Londoners to receive Mellitus into their midst. Not long after (February 2, 619) Laurentius himself died, and was succeeded in the archiepiscopal see by Mellitus. He too died (April 24, 624) after a five years’ tenure of office, and was succeeded by Justus. Thus, one after another, Pope Gregory’s missionaries were passing away, and their bodies were laid in the portico which, like the great atrium of the church of St. Ambrose at Milan, stood in front of the slowly reared church of St. Peter and St. Paul. But the Christianity of the Saxons in the south was still but a sickly and shallow-rooted plant. It was left for the Angles of Northumbria to show a genuine, hearty, popular conversion to the new faith, and to produce that splendid series of saintly kings, bishops and princesses who have made the seventh century for ever memorable in the history of English Christianity.
VIII. EDWIN OF DEIRA
As our attention in dealing with the history of the seventh century will now be fixed chiefly on Northumbria, that being the region where Christianity won its most glorious victories and as it was at this time undoubtedly the predominant state in Britain, it is necessary at the cost of a little repetition to describe the course of the English settlements in that northern land. And first, a word as to its geographical limits. The district which was popularly called Northhymbraland, and which consisted politically of the two kingdoms of Beornice (Bernicia) and Dearnerice (Deira), stretched from the Firth of Forth to the river Humber. It is important to remember that we have here no concern with the medieval and modern boundary between England and Scotland, in which Tweed and Cheviot are the principal factors. St. Cuthbert, born on the slopes of the Lammermoor Hills, was no Scot but an Englishman; and Edinburgh, which is to us the very type and symbol of Scotticism, was in all probability founded by the English prince whose name stands at the head of this chapter. Between these two great natural frontiers, the Forth and the Humber, the bounding lines ran--as they still do, more than is generally recognised--north and south rather than east and west. The western half of the lowlands of Scotland, together with Westmorland and the greater part of Cumberland, formed the British kingdom of Strathclyde, and was--with the exception of some intervals of subjection to its Anglian neighbours--under the rule of kings of Celtic race, whose capital was the strong rock-fortress of Alclyde or Dumbarton. South of the kingdom of Strathclyde the high land which now sunders Yorkshire from Lancashire probably formed for some generations the boundary between the Angles and the Britons; yet not even up to that boundary was the Anglian dominion pushed in the first invasion, for we hear indistinctly of a British kingdom of Elmet, otherwise called Loidis, which probably included at any rate the upper part of the valleys of the Wharfe, the Aire and the Calder, all Yorkshire streams. As to the boundary between the two Anglian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira we cannot speak with absolute certainty, but we are told on trustworthy authority[53] that it was the River Tees. The fact that both kingdoms were so often united under one sovereign perhaps made the assignment of precise boundaries less needful. Thus, to recapitulate these facts in terms of modern geography, Bernicia included probably all the three Lothians, the counties of Berwick, Peebles and Roxburgh, the eastern half of Northumberland and the county of Durham; while Deira claimed the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire.
Surveying the ethnological condition of this region during the fifth and sixth centuries we can dimly discern a few important changes. There are some indications of a settlement of Frisians in that which we now call the Border country, and it is thought that they gave their name to the town of Dumfries. The time of their migration, however, is altogether uncertain, and as they were a Low German tribe, nearly allied in blood to both Angles and Saxons, we may conjecture that in the course of generations they so melted into the great Anglian population by which Bernicia was overrun as to be indistinguishable therefrom. Another national movement, about which we have more certain information, was that migration of the Pictic chief Cunedag from Lothian to Anglesey, about 380, to which attention has already been called, and which gave to Wales a line of sovereigns that endured for nine centuries. Then followed, about the middle of the fifth century, that settlement of the Jutes on the east coast of Scotland to which reference was made in our sixth chapter, and of which Hengest’s son and nephew, Octha and Ebissa, were leaders. This settlement is mentioned only by Nennius, but as we meet with it in that part of his history which is borrowed from an earlier Northumbrian annalist, we may probably accept it as historic fact that the Jutes thus bore a part in the migrations which Teutonised the eastern half of Caledonia as well as Britannia. Octha is spoken of in a later chapter of Nennius as having passed over from the northern part of Britain into Kent on the death of his father Hengest, and become the ancestor of the kings of Kent who were reigning in the historian’s lifetime.
In the shadowy traditions of the Welsh bards we hear of a certain Ossa Cyllelawr or Ossa the Knife-man, who is spoken of as a great antagonist of Arthur, and who appears to be a genuine progenitor of the Bernician kings. It is apparently his son Eobba who bears the terrible title, “The Great Burner of Towns,” which is generally given to the next link in the pedigree, Ida, King of Bernicia. Here, at last, we are on firmer historical ground, for this is that Ida of whom we read in the Chronicle (here quoting Bede) that “he began to reign in 547, and that from him sprang the royal line of Northumbria,” that “he reigned twelve years, and that he built Bebbanburh [Bamburgh], which was at first surrounded by a hedge and thereafter with a wall”.[54] Notwithstanding the comparative shortness of his reign, Bernician Ida from his rock-fortress of Bamburgh evidently wielded a mighty power, and we are probably right in attributing to him the first great extension and consolidation of the Anglian power between the Tees and the Firth of Forth. He had twelve sons, six of whom followed him in rather quick succession during the last half of the sixth century. We have no hint of civil war or domestic treason, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that many of these warlike kings fell in battle with their Celtic neighbours in the west. This is indeed hinted by the scanty notices in Nennius’s history.
We appear to be justified in speaking of Ida as king of Northumbria, though that may not have been the title given to him by his contemporaries, for it seems to be the outcome of the very confused notices in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum that Deira as well as Bernicia was subject to his sway. But on the death of Ida (560), if we may trust the Chronicle, a prince of another line claiming descent from Woden through eleven generations of mortal men, Aelle or Ella, began to reign over the southern kingdom, Deira, and reigned for twenty-eight years. Were the relations between the two dissevered kingdoms friendly or hostile? It is impossible to say. The presence of the Deiran slave boys in the Roman forum suggests the latter hypothesis; the fact that Acha, the daughter of Aelle, was married to Ethelfrid of Bernicia suggests the former. Possibly a war between the two Anglian kingdoms had been followed by peace and a matrimonial alliance. However this may be, on the death of Aelle in 588, Ethelric of Bernicia, son of Ida, succeeded--assuredly not peaceably--to the throne of Deira, which, after five years of reigning, he handed on together with his ancestral kingdom to his son Ethelfrid.
The reign of Ethelfrid which lasted for twenty-four years, from 593 to 617, was undoubtedly an important period in the history of Northumbria. We are apt to think of him only in connexion with that relentless persecution of his young brother-in-law, Edwin, which we shall soon have to consider; but he was certainly a powerful ruler, this fierce pagan sovereign of Northumbria. Read what Bede the Northumbrian, who had often heard his name mentioned with reluctant admiration in the cloisters of Jarrow and Wearmouth, says concerning him: “In these days the kingdom of the Northumbrians was governed by Ethelfrid, a most valiant king and most covetous of glory, who, more than all the chiefs of the Angles, harassed the nation of the Britons, so that it would seem fitting to compare him to Saul, King of Israel, except for this one point that he was ignorant of the Divine religion. For no ealdorman or king made wider tracts of land, after destroying or subduing their inhabitants, either tributary to the English nation or open to their occupation, than this king. So that the blessing which the patriarch, anticipating the deeds of Saul, bestowed on his own son might fittingly be applied to Ethelfrid: ‘Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf. In the morning he shall devour the prey: in the evening he shall divide the spoils.’”
In the year 603, when Ethelfrid had been ten years on the throne, “Aidan, King of the Scots who inhabit Britain,”[55] resenting the Anglian king’s encroachments, prepared to invade Bernicia. Here at last we have the word Scots clearly used not of our western but of our northern neighbours. For these are the Scots who crossed over the straits between Ulster and Cantyre and founded in Argyll and the Isles that kingdom of Dalriada which was one day to give a monarch, Kenneth MacAlpine, to the whole of North Britain and impose on Caledonia the name of Scotland. It is important also to observe that by this time all the dwellers in what we now call Scotland professed the Christian faith, the great mission of St. Columba to the Northern Picts and his settlement in Iona having taken place in 565, thirty-eight years before the events with which we are now concerned. The invasion of King Aidan, the friend and in a certain sense the nominee of St. Columba, though made by him at the head of a huge host, proved unsuccessful. He was met (says the patriotic Englishman Bede) by Ethelfrid with but few men. The two armies joined battle at Degsastan, probably the high moorland which forms the watershed between Liddesdale and Upper Tynedale, and which by one little stream, the Dawston Burn, still preserves the name of that old battlefield of the nations. Ethelfrid’s brother, Theodbald, with all the division of the army which he commanded, fell before the Scottish onslaught, but in another part of the field Aidan suffered so severe a defeat that he was forced to fly ignominiously from the bleak moorland, covered with the corpses of his followers. The battle of Dawston Rig seems to have been in truth the Flodden of the seventh century. Bede, writing 128 years afterwards, says: “Never from that day to this, hath any king of the Scots dared to join battle in Britain with the nation of the Angles”.
Some years after this victory over the Scots, Ethelfrid won another of equal importance over the Cambrian Britons (613?). The Archbishop Augustine, as we have seen, in his last conference with the Welsh ecclesiastics, warned them that if they were unwilling to preach the way of life to the English nation they should suffer a bloody requital at their hands.[56] And now Ethelfrid, having all the hosts of Deira and Bernicia at his disposal, collecting a large army, marched, probably by a branch of the Watling Street,[57] from York across Yorkshire to Manchester, and appeared full of the menace of battle before the walls of the city on the Dee, which, once known as Deva, now, 200 years after the last Roman soldiers had quitted Britain, still bore the name of the Camp of the Legions. In later times this name--Caerlegion in Welsh, Legacaestir in the English tongue--has been shortened to Chester, and thus this picturesque old city, which still keeps its medieval walls and is crowded with interesting relics both of Roman and of Norman domination, claims not unworthily the right to be the Chester among all the many Chesters in our land, the representative of all the cities which have arisen on the site of the camps of the legions.
On the eve of the battle, Ethelfrid descried a number of men clad in priestly garb who occupied what they deemed to be a place of safe shelter at a little distance from the British army. They were in fact a large deputation from the monastery of Bangor (which contained not fewer than 2,100 inmates), and they had come, sanctified by a three days’ fast, to aid the British king Brochmail by their prayers. “Who are those men?” cried Ethelfrid, “and what do they there?” Learning the reason of their presence, he exclaimed, “If they are calling on their God against us, they also are fighting against us, though it be not with arms but with curses,” and he directed the first movements of his army against them. This unexpected opening of the game seems to have confounded Brochmail, who is accused by Bede of having in cowardly panic forsaken the holy men whom he was especially bound to protect. However this may be, 1,200 of the Bangor monks were slain and only fifty escaped. The British king and his men fled in disgraceful rout; Ethelfrid’s victory was complete; the city of the legions was taken and sacked and remained apparently “a waste Chester” for near 300 years.
Thus for more than twenty years had Ethelfrid of Bamburgh marched from victory to victory. Meanwhile his foe and brother-in-law, Edwin, son of Ella, the rightful heir of Deira, was leading the life of a hunted fugitive, “an ascender of the stairs of other men,” hearing perchance of the victories of the enemy of his house, as Charles Stuart in his places of refuge in Holland or France heard of the triumphant campaigns of Cromwell. There is, indeed, a tradition that Edwin, when a boy, had sought shelter at the court of Cadvan, the British king of North-West Wales, and that this was the cause of Ethelfrid’s vigorous assault on the British confederacy; but this story seems hardly consistent with the pagan character of Edwin’s upbringing. For some time he seems to have sought shelter with a sovereign of the new and rising state of Mercia, whose daughter he married; but probably on her death he wandered forth again into exile. And thus after long and various experiences of the sad life of a fugitive in different kingdoms of the land, he found his way to the court of Redwald, King of the East Angles, and received a promise of protection from that powerful monarch. When Ethelfrid, however, heard that his hated rival was harboured at the East Anglian court, he sent messenger upon messenger to Redwald, offering him large bribes to take the life of his youthful guest. Long did Redwald refuse to do anything that would bring so dark a stain upon his kingly honour, but at last the third messenger, who brought not only more magnificent bribes, but the threat of war in the event of refusal, prevailed. In the first watch of the night an East Anglian noble, friendly to Edwin, entered the fugitive’s bedroom, called him forth outside the palace, told him his danger, counselled him to flee, and promised to lead him to a safe hiding-place, where neither Redwald nor Ethelfrid would be able to find him. Edwin thanked him for his warning, but refused to be the first to break covenant with his host by showing a doubt of his protection, and wearily exclaimed: “If I must die let me die here, rather than begin again that life of a fugitive which I have already led for so many years in every province of Britain”. His friend left him and he remained alone with his sad thoughts in the darkening night.
Suddenly a man whose face and garb were alike unknown to him, stood before him and asked him why he sat there so mournfully on his seat of stone, while all within the palace were wrapped in sleep. “What is it to thee,” said the weary exile, “where I choose to spend the night?” “But I know,” answered the stranger, “both why thou art here, and why thou art so sad and what thou fearest. Now what wouldst thou give to any one who should free thee from thy anxieties and persuade Redwald not to deliver thee into the hands of thy enemies?” “All that I possess,” said Edwin. “And what if he assured thee that thou shouldst overcome thine enemies and become a king greater than any English king before thee?” “I would give the gratitude which he deserved to any one who could confer on me such benefits.” “And how, if he could point out to thee a new way of life and salvation better than any that thy fathers have known? Wouldst thou hearken to his voice and obey his counsels?” “Assuredly I would,” said Edwin. The stranger put his hand upon his head and said: “When next thou shalt receive this sign, remember what thou hast promised and fulfil it.” With that the stranger, whether he were living man or spirit, zealous missionary or martyred apostle, vanished into the darkness. A little cheered by the vision but still melancholy and anxious, Edwin was sitting yet before the palace when lo! his friend the courtier returned to him with joy in his countenance and said: “Arise, dismiss thy cares, go to thy couch and slumber with a quiet mind. The danger is past. The queen, to whom in secret Redwald disclosed his purpose, persuaded him not for any of Ethelfrid’s gold to sell his far more precious kingly honour, or sacrifice the friend who had sought his protection in extremity.” When day dawned it was seen that Edwin’s friend had spoken truly. The king dismissed Ethelfrid’s messengers with a final refusal, and knowing now that he would have to face that king’s anger, resolved to anticipate the blow and to restore the fugitive to his kingdom. Hastily collecting his army he came upon the surprised and imperfectly prepared Ethelfrid on the banks of the Idle, a little river of Nottinghamshire, and there won a decisive victory. It was true that Redwald’s own son, Regenheri, perished in the fight, but Ethelfrid himself was also slain, and the power of Bernicia for a season annihilated. It was a memorable day for the dwellers in the fens by the Humber, and six centuries later the historian, Henry of Huntingdon, still heard the proverb: “As when the Idle river grew foul with Anglian blood.”
This great battle which for the time overthrew the Bernician dynasty and gave the dominion of all Northumbria to Edwin of Deira was fought probably in the year 617. Edwin, who was born in 585, and whose life since he was a child of three years old had been passed in exile, was therefore a man thirty-two years of age when he thus recovered his father’s kingdom. The sons of Ethelfrid fled to the Celts of Scotland, and at least one of them sought the friendly shelter of Iona. Edwin no doubt fixed his capital at York, that great and important city which under its Anglian name of Eoforwac carried on the traditions of Roman Eburacum. The fact that the Roman name subsisted still with so little change in the language of the conquerors makes it probable that there was here no such utter destruction and desolation as at Anderida and Chester, but that there was a continuous civic life from the departure of the last Roman soldier to the enthronement of the first Anglian king. How gladly would we exchange much of the scanty knowledge of the invasion that we do possess for the details of the capture of the Roman capital of the north;[58] but over this conquest, as well as over that of the sister city of Londinium, there hangs a pall of impenetrable darkness. The lines of the Roman city may still be traced with considerable precision; the noble ruin of the multangular tower clearly marks its western corner, but we have not yet recovered, possibly shall never recover, the site of the once stately edifice where the Roman Dux Britanniarum dwelt aforetime, and where in all probability the Anglian kings of Deira held their court. There, however, we may safely imagine Edwin enthroned; from thence his armies marched forth along one or other of the great network of Roman roads which centred at Eburacum. One of his earliest conquests was probably that of the British kingdom of Elmet or Loidis which still lingered on in the dales of the West Riding, but seems to have come to an end about this time. Having consolidated his power over Northumbria, Edwin became the mightiest of all the English kings. The title of Bretwalda was recognised as rightfully belonging to him, and all the other kings of Britain, Anglian, Saxon, Celtic, for a time at least acknowledged him as in a certain sense their superior. Even the islands of Man and Anglesey were added by him to his dominions, the latter island probably deriving from this conquest by the Angles the name which it still bears. Only Jutish Kent still maintained its independence, and with its king Edwin before long formed a close tie of alliance. An unexplained phenomenon in these first ten years of Edwin’s reign, during which, still heathen, he seems to have been pursuing a career of unbroken success, is the disappearance of East Anglia from the scene. It was the might of Redwald the East Anglian which broke the power of Ethelfrid on the great day of the battle at the river Idle, and yet we hear of Edwin, still apparently in the lifetime of his benefactor, establishing his supremacy over all the kings of the Angles and Britons, including therefore among his subject allies even Redwald himself.
It was probably about the year 624 when Edwin was in full middle life, and his sons, by his first Mercian wife, were growing up towards manhood, that he made proposals of marriage to the Kentish princess, Ethelburga. She, like himself, must have been middle-aged. Her father, Ethelbert, had been for some years dead, and her brother, Eadbald, had the disposal of her hand. Mindful of the stripes and the warnings of Laurentius, Eadbald was now loyal in his adherence to Christianity, and replied to Edwin’s messengers “that it was not lawful to give a Christian maiden in marriage to a pagan, lest the faith and sacrament of the heavenly King should be profaned by intercourse with an earthly king who was ignorant of the worship of the true God”. To this objection (a remarkable one as coming from the offspring of the union between the Christian Bertha and the pagan Ethelbert) Edwin replied that he would do nothing contrary to the Christian faith of the princess if she became his bride; that she might bring with her as many ministers of that faith as she pleased, whether male or female, and should have full liberty of worship along with them; and, moreover, he held out hopes that he himself might become a convert to Christianity if on examination by the wise men of his kingdom it should be found more holy and worthier of the Most High than the religion which it offered to supersede. After this reassuring statement, Eadbald’s objections were withdrawn. Ethelburga was sent northwards to meet her bridegroom, and in her train came Paulinus, who was now consecrated on July 21, 625, by Archbishop Justus, bishop of York, which was virtually equivalent to bishop of Northumbria.
Paulinus, who is certainly the noblest figure in the Roman mission to England, was constant in preaching the Christian faith in season and out of season to the men of Northumbria. He met at first with but little success, but a year after his arrival, in April 20, 626, a foully attempted crime brought him in a strange way nearer to his goal. The history of Wessex for some generations after the dethronement of Ceawlin in 592 is obscure and inglorious. Her once powerful kings seem to have accepted without a murmur the supremacy first of Kent and then of East Anglia, and if now they resented the rapidly extended dominion of Northumbria they sought to overthrow it not in fair fight but by the dastardly hand of the conspirator. The kings of the West Saxons at this time were Cynegils and Cwichelm, the latter of whom, perhaps in concert with his colleague, sent an assassin named Eomer, armed with a poisoned dagger, to the court of Edwin. The king was then dwelling in a royal villa near the Yorkshire Derwent (one of the many English rivers bearing that name), and there Eomer presented himself with a pretended message from his master. While Edwin listened intently to his words he drew the deadly weapon from its sheath and made a sudden onslaught upon the king. A faithful thegn named Lilia, who dearly loved his lord, having no shield ready to hand, rushed in between and broke the force of the blow, but not even the sacrifice of his life saved the monarch from a wound; and before Eomer was hewn down by the swords of the surrounding soldiers he had succeeded in stabbing one of them named Fordheri with his fatal weapon. That very night--it was the night of Easter Sunday, 626--Edwin’s queen was delivered of a daughter, to whom was given the name of Eanfled. Touched by the mingled congratulations and exhortations of Paulinus, Edwin gladly consented that his infant daughter, along with eleven members of his household, should receive baptism on the eve of the following Whitsunday. For himself, though he was inclined to listen to the advice of Paulinus, all other matters had to be postponed to the great campaign of vengeance which, as soon as he had recovered from his wound, he undertook against the vile West Saxon murderers. In this campaign he was completely successful. Having slain five kings and much people, and returned victorious from the war, he at once abandoned the worship of idols and began seriously to consider the question of making a formal profession of Christianity.
It was apparently during this religious interregnum that the King and Queen of Northumbria received each a letter from Pope Boniface V. The letters, verbose and unpersuasive in style, can hardly have had much influence on the fresh and vigorous intellect of the Northumbrian king, but no doubt the fact that they should have been written at all by the father of western Christendom was felt as a compliment to Edwin’s greatness. Still, however, the king hesitated before making a final breach with the traditions of his fathers and accepting Christ instead of his ancestral Woden. Unable to dismiss the subject from his thoughts he sat much apart in solitary places and there mused upon the parting of the ways. While he thus sat one day, Paulinus came unbidden into his presence, laid his hand upon his head and said: “Rememberest thou this sign?” With that the scene outside the East Anglian palace came back vividly into Edwin’s memory. He was about to fall at the feet of Paulinus, but the bishop lifting him up said in a gentle voice: “Behold thou hast escaped by the Divine favour the snares of thine enemies: thou hast received the kingdom which was promised thee: delay not to stretch out thy hand and grasp the third blessing, even eternal life”.[59]
Thus admonished Edwin determined to delay no longer his profession of Christianity, but wisely resolved to associate as many as possible of his counsellors with him, and to make the great change the act of the nation rather than of the king alone. Then followed the memorable and well-known scene in the Witenagemot, or meeting of the wise men, perhaps at York, perhaps at the royal villa by the Derwent. When the subject of the proposed change of faith was mooted in the assembly of the elders, its first and most strenuous advocate was found to be the chief priest Coifi, who complained that his past years spent in zealous service of the gods had brought him no proportionate share of the royal favour. To this sordid calculator of the worldly advantages to be derived from this or that form of faith, succeeded an unnamed ealdorman who, in words as well fitted to the twentieth century as to the seventh, painted the short, perplexing and precarious life of man “like a sparrow flitting through your hall, O king! when we are seated round the fire at supper-time, while the winds are howling and the snow is drifting without. It passes swiftly in at one door and out at another, feeling for the moment the warmth and shelter of your palace, but it flies from winter to winter and swiftly escapes from our sight. Even such is our life here, and if any one can tell us certainly what lies beyond it, we shall do wisely to follow his teaching.” Moved by these and similar arguments the elders and counsellors of the king, unanimously as it would seem, voted for the proposed religious revolution.
After Paulinus had expounded to the assembly the doctrines of Christianity, Coifi exclaimed: “Long ago had I suspected that the things which we were worshipping were naught, for the more earnestly I sought for truth in that worship the less did I find it. Now I openly profess that in this new preaching alone is the way of eternal life to be found. O king! let us at once give over to the flames the temples and altars which we have consecrated so vainly.” The king gladly consented, but asked who should deal the death-blow. “I,” said Coifi. “Who more fitting than I to destroy, in the new wisdom which is given me, the idols which I worshipped in my folly?” He besought the king to give him arms and a war-horse, and though the multitude, who knew that it was forbidden to one of their priests to bear arms or to ride on anything but a mare, deemed him to be insane, he mounted the charger, rode to a great temple in the neighbourhood, hurled his lance into its sacred precincts and called upon his companions to give to the flames the shrine itself and all the enclosures by which it was surrounded from the gaze of the multitude. A hundred years afterwards men still showed at Goodmanham on the Derwent, east of York, the ruins of this great iconoclasm.
The overthrow of the old faith was followed by the visible triumph of the new. On Easter eve, 627, just a year after his escape from the dagger of the man of Wessex, Edwin was baptised by Paulinus in the new wooden church of St. Peter at York, a church which he was shortly to replace by a more elaborate edifice in stone. His sons by the Mercian princess before long followed his example: his young children, the offspring of Ethelburga, and even a little grandson Yffi, son of Osfrid, together with a great number of the nobles of the court, were all solemnly received into the Christian Church. The preaching of Paulinus, so long resultless, now seemed to be bearing abundant fruit. Up in remote Bernicia, where the royal villa of Yeavering nestled under a hill, an outlying sentinel of the Cheviots which still bears the name of Yeavering Bell, Paulinus was engaged for twenty-six consecutive days catechising and baptising in the river Glen the multitudes who flocked to him. Returning to Deira, to the Roman station of Cataractonium, he there baptised many converts in the river Swale, no church or oratory having yet been erected for Christian worship. In his zeal he overpassed the strict limits of Northumbria: he crossed the Humber, preached the Gospel in Lindsey, converted the “prefect” of the city of Lincoln, and baptised a multitude of people at noon-day in the river Trent, King Edwin himself honouring the ceremony by his presence. One of the many converts who went down on that day into the river with Paulinus described the scene to a youth who when an abbot, in his reverend old age, passed the tradition on to Bede, telling him that the great missionary was a man of tall stature, slightly stooping, with black hair, thin face, aquiline but slender nose, in his general aspect at once venerable and awe-inspiring. His constant attendant was a certain deacon James, a courageous and energetic man, who also lived to be a contemporary of the historian.
In after years of turbulence and discord men looked back on the reign of Edwin as a sort of golden age. They said that then a woman with her new-born babe might cross Britain from sea to sea unharmed by any man. In many a place where he saw a clear fountain bubbling up beside the public way he would order stakes to be erected, upon which brazen pots were hung, and none dared to touch them save the thirsty travellers for whose use they were designed. His state was indeed kingly. Not only in war was his standard displayed; but in peace also, as he was journeying from villa to villa and from province to province, attended by a long and brilliant train of servants, a banner with a tuft of feathers, called by the Romans tufa and by the English thuuf and hinting perhaps at something like imperial dignity, was borne before the mighty king of Northumbria.
But this splendour of regal power was early overshadowed. It was not, after all, from Eburacum that the word of power was to go forth which was to bind the various Teutonic races of England into one nation. The Anglian power was not thoroughly established over Wales, and already the destined rival of Northumbria, the Mercian kingdom, was rising into baleful pre-eminence. Singularly enough, it was from these two powers which are said to have sheltered Edwin in the time of his evil fortunes that his ruin came. Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, descended from that Maelgwn whom Gildas vituperated under the name of “The Great Dragon of the Island,” was son of Cadvan, at whose court, it is said, Edwin had passed his boyhood. Doubtless Cadwallon keenly resented the position of inferiority to which his nation had been reduced by Ethelfrid’s great victory of Chester, which shut them off from Strathclyde, as Ceawlin’s victory of Deorham had shut them off from Devon and Cornwall. When Edwin, once Cadvan’s humble guest, had become the mightiest prince in Britain, Cadwallon, unwilling to accept his yoke, had taken refuge--so say the Welsh annals--in Ireland. He had now returned and was determined to strike one more blow for independence and for liberty of passage to Strathclyde. With this intent he formed an alliance with the ruler of Mercia, Penda, who became king in 626, a year before Edwin’s baptism; who was still pagan; and who in his dull ferocity was as typical a specimen of the old faith as Edwin of the new. The alliance of the Welsh Christian and the English pagan for the overthrow of the newly born Christianity of Northumbria was scarcely felt to be unnatural, so intense was the bitterness engendered by the Paschal controversy and the varying fashions of ecclesiastical tonsure.
The armies met at Heathfield, which is identified with Hatfield Chase on the north-east of Doncaster, on October 12, 633. We have no details of the encounter: we only know that Edwin was defeated, that he and his eldest son Osfrid were slain, and that Cadwallon and his ally roamed in savage wrath over the plains of Yorkshire and Northumberland. The Christian, even more ferocious than the pagan, spared neither sex nor age, recognised no claim to mercy drawn from the profession of one common faith, and vowed (this surely when out of hearing of his ally) that he would root out the whole brood of Angles from the land of Britain.[60]
Edwin’s second son fled for refuge to the court of the Mercian king, and was afterwards slain by him, in violation of his sworn promise of protection. The widowed Ethelburga fled to the court of her brother, the King of Kent, under the escort of Paulinus. The royal infants--such was the terror of the times--were separated from their mother, and it was left for a brave soldier named Bass, one of Edwin’s thegns, to bring to the Kentish court the girl Eanfled, her brother Wuscfrea, and their little nephew Yffi, the orphaned son of Osfrid. The widowed queen afterwards sent the boys to the court of her cousin, Frankish Dagobert, that they might be safe from the new rulers of Bernicia, but both died in infancy in that foreign land. As for Paulinus he seems to have bowed his head to the storm of the recrudescent paganism of Northumbria. He vacated his Yorkish see, and was appointed Bishop of Rochester, in succession to Romanus, who had been drowned in the Mediterranean when sent on a mission to Rome. He died in 644. The ill-starred union of Mercian paganism and British fanaticism seemed to have accomplished its purpose. Northumberland was a wilderness and Northumbrian Christianity a vanished dream.
IX. OSWALD OF BERNICIA
When the cause of Christianity and, as connected with it, the hope of eventually building in the new England a civilised and well-ordered state seemed at its darkest, light arose from an island in the Hebrides; it spread to a rough storm-beaten rock on the Northumbrian coast; it illumined one of the noblest and loveliest pages in the history of our nation, the reign of Oswald of Bernicia.
The conversion of the southern Picts to Christianity is believed to have taken place more than two centuries before the date that we have now reached. Near the close of the fourth century when the Roman empire had already begun to crumble into ruin, St. Ninian, a Briton educated at Rome, filled with veneration for the soldier-saint, Martin of Tours, came to the region between the Roman Wall and the Grampians, preached Christianity with much success to the Picts who dwelt in that country, and built a monastic church dedicated to St. Martin, on one of the promontories of Galloway which project south into the Irish sea. This church, built of stone, and thereby differing from the humbler wooden churches of the period, was called Candida Casa (a name represented in its modern successor Whithern), and it is said to have been still in course of erection when Ninian heard of the death of the holy man in whose name he dedicated his beautiful “white house”. Nearly two centuries passed away. There was much intercourse of various kinds between the dwellers in the Hebrides and their neighbours the Scots of Ireland. The Dalriadic kingdom, Scottish (that is Erse) by race and Christian by religious profession, was set up in Argyll and the adjacent islands; but the Picts north of the Grampians whose relations to Dalriada were generally hostile, remained obstinately heathen. All this was changed by an event which took place about the year 563--the arrival of St. Columba from Ireland. Whatever accretions of superstitious legend may have grown up around the name of this saint, the historic importance of the great apostle of the Picts cannot be denied, and can hardly be over-stated.
Born in Donegal, in the year 521, a scion of the princely clan of the Hy Neill, descended from Irish kings both on his father’s and his mother’s side, the young Irishman in his boyish days showed such zeal in his attendance at church that his baptismal name of Colum was changed to Colum-cille or Columba of the church. He was ordained priest, but the bent of his religious temper like that of most of his Irish contemporaries was all towards the monastic profession. During his early middle life he was busily engaged in founding monasteries, the first in point of date being that of Derry, and the most famous that of Durrow in the diocese of Meath. But in his fortieth year, 561, he became entangled in one of the ever-recurring civil wars of his distressful country. A great battle was fought at Cuildremhne, in Connaught, near the boundary between that province and Ulster. Columba’s kinsfolk, the northern Hy Neill, prevailed and the King of Ireland, commanding the clans of the southern Hy Neill, was defeated. Though his friends’ cause triumphed, the battle appears in some unexplained manner to have injured Columba’s religious position in his native country. He seems to have been excommunicated by some of his brethren, possibly on account of his alleged responsibility for the strife. At any rate he now resolved to quit his country and, perhaps as a penance for his sins, to take up his abode in some place from which he could not even see the shores of his beloved Ireland. Such a place, after some wandering, he found in the then little known island of Hy, famous to after ages under the name of Iona; where, as tradition tells, he ascended a hill which still bears the name of Cul-ri-Erin (back turned to Erin), and when he found that no line of the Irish coast, however dimly seen, could thence be discerned on the horizon, amid all the cluster of surrounding islands, he determined to make that little spot his dwelling-place. Iona is separated from the much larger island of Mull by a channel about one mile broad. It is only three miles long, and from a mile to a mile and a half in breadth; yet in this little space there is considerable variety of scenery; hills, the highest of which attains to an elevation of 320 feet, “retired dells, long reaches of sand on shores indented with quiet bays, little coves between bare and striking rocks, and on the west wild barren cliffs and high rocky islets opposed to the sweep of the Atlantic”.[61] As Bede says: “it is not large but computed as containing five families according to English reckoning”. (The word “families” is rendered “hides” in the English Chronicle, and this is an important passage as showing what were the average dimensions of a “hide of land” in early Saxon times.) The ruins now visible on the island are those of a Benedictine abbey of the thirteenth century. No traces remain of the buildings, probably wooden, raised by St. Columba, but there are many interesting natural features which may be recognised in the nearly contemporary life of the saint written by the ninth abbot of Iona, Adamnan.
The objects which Columba set before himself after his migration to Iona were political as well as religious. His kinsmen, the Scots of Dalriada, were harassed and oppressed by the pagan Picts in the east of the island, whose king, Brude, had in the year 560 inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scottish king, Gabhran. Columba would fain convert the Pictish conqueror to Christianity, and at the same time obtain more generous treatment for his beaten countrymen; and by the magic of his personality he achieved a striking success in both directions. King Brude in 565 embraced Christianity, and relations of peace and friendship were established between him and the man whom, in 574, Columba succeeded in placing on the throne of Dalriada, Aidan, Prince of Strathclyde. The thirty-four years of Columba’s life, after his great migration, were spent in establishing monasteries in the land of the northern Picts, in the Hebrides and in his native Ireland, to which he paid several visits, and where the once excommunicated partisan was now an honoured, almost worshipped guest. These Columban monasteries, “the family of Iona” as they were called, were of a distinctly different type from that of the monasteries of the Benedictine rule. Like all the Irish monastic establishments they partook largely of the tribal character. The tribe gave the land, contributed to the support of the monks, had a right to receive, apparently without special charge, their religious ministrations, and in certain circumstances had also a right to nominate one of its members as abbot, though the first claim upon this coveted office resided in the family of the founder. It was thus that the first nine abbots of Iona were all descended from the same family, the northern Hy Neill, from which St. Columba himself had sprung. This tribal character of the monasteries suited the genius of the Celtic populations, and was one reason of the success of the missionaries in converting them to Christianity. It has been truly said[62] that “these large monasteries, as in their external aspect they appeared to be, were in reality Christian colonies into which converts, after being tonsured, were brought under the name of monks”.
The large part thus played by the monasteries in the work of conversion impressed in its turn a peculiar character on the churches of Ireland and Hebridean Scotland, rendering them more exclusively monastic and less purely episcopal than the churches of Italy and Gaul. This divergence resulted in part from the nature of things, and was due to the differences of place and time in which the conversion of the several countries was respectively effected. The Bishops of Lyons and Vienne, of Toledo and Seville began their work while the Roman Empire was still standing, were to some extent moulded by its form, shared the prosperity and the influence of its great towns and were essentially magnates of cities. Columba, his comrades and his pupils, came into a much ruder and more primitive state of society. The rough tribal rulers whom they converted had scarcely any cities worthy of the name. The new missionaries planted their monasteries in such rural places as promised them the supply of their simple wants, or even only safety from the attacks of a midnight foe--often on an island in a lake or surrounded by the ocean--and there, not so much by eloquent preaching as by mere rightness and simplicity of living, succeeded in converting whole populations to the religion of Christ. The conversions thus obtained seem to have been for the most part more genuine and more durable than those which were first effected in the large cities of the old Roman world and from thence radiated outwards into the country.
It has seemed necessary to emphasise this distinction between the two types of ecclesiastical organisation (the fourth century Gaulish and the sixth century Irish Churches) because the difference reappears in our own history. The Roman mission under Augustine and his successors, and especially under Paulinus in Northumbria, seems to have gone on the old urban and episcopal lines, while the far more successful mission from Iona, with which we have now to deal, was monastic, many-centred and rural. In the year 597, the very year of Augustine’s arrival in England, St. Columba died. He is one of the most vividly seen personalities of the early Middle Ages: a man of somewhat hot temper in youth, softened and controlled in later life, with a stately beauty of feature which seemed to correspond with his princely descent, and with a kind of magnetic power of attracting to himself the devotion of his followers, a lover of animals and beloved by them. One of his natural gifts was an extraordinarily strong and resonant voice which, when he sang the psalms of the church, could be heard distinctly for more than a mile. A great open-air preacher, an organiser and a poet--he eagerly championed the cause of his brother bards before an Irish synod--he might, perhaps, not unfittingly, be called the John Wesley of the sixth century.
In 615, about eighteen years after the death of Columba, when his fellow-tribesman Fergna was ruling, fourth in the series of abbots, at Iona, a party of refugees from the south crossed the little channel and landed on the shore of the island, craving shelter and sanctuary. They were some of the attendants of Ethelfrid, the late King of Bernicia, who had been slain “when the river Idle ran foul with Anglian blood,” and they brought, besides other noble youths, Oswald, that king’s second son, and implored the brethren to protect him from the avenging might of Edwin. There was no shadow of a claim for this young Anglian, son of an obstinate pagan, on the hospitality of the Irish monks, but the request was willingly granted. Oswald and the young nobles his companions were kindly received, were soon baptised, and instructed in the doctrines of Christianity, and growing up to manhood on the sequestered Hebridean isle, probably looked forward to no other sort of life than that which was led by the simple-hearted monks their entertainers.
All this was changed, in 633, by the great and unlooked-for catastrophe of Heathfield. The two Northumbrian kingdoms, united under the strong rule of Ethelfrid and Edwin, fell once more apart. Osric, cousin of Edwin, son of his uncle Elfric, ruled in Deira, and Eanfrid, eldest son of Ethelfrid, in Bernicia. These two young princes, each of whom had made profession of the Christian faith, both apostatised and returned to paganism. Possibly the sordid calculations by which Coifi had justified his renunciation of the faith of his fathers weighed with them now in the opposite scale, and they felt themselves justified in deserting the Christians’ God, who had abandoned their land to the tender mercies of Penda and Cadwallon. But the triumph of paganism was short. Osric, who with inadequate forces besieged Cadwallon while holding the “municipium” of York, was killed and his whole army cut to pieces by a sudden sally of the Welsh king. This happened in the summer of the year which followed the battle of Heathfield, and, apparently in the following autumn, Bernician Eanfrid, coming with twelve chosen warriors to treat of peace with Cadwallon, was treacherously slain by his orders. So full of gloomy memories was this year, 634, that the monkish chroniclers, who afterwards drew up a scheme of Anglian chronology, decided that it should not come into the number of the years, and silently included it in the glorious reign of him who succeeded the apostates.
This successor was Oswald, who came from Iona evidently determined to play the part of a Christian hero-king, and who endured to his life’s end steadfast in that decision. By one bold stroke he delivered his nation, Bernicia, from the Cambrian ravagers. “When he arrived after the death of his brother Eanfrid with a small army, and fortified by the faith of Christ, the wicked general of the Britons with the immense forces which, as he boasted, nothing could resist, was slain by him at the place which is called in the English tongue Denisesburn,’ that is, the stream of Denis.” So runs the first simple statement of Bede as to this important encounter which for ever settled the question whether the Celt or the Teuton was to be supreme in Northern Britain. From Bede himself, as a kind of afterthought, and from Adamnan, the biographer of St. Columba, we get some additional particulars which enable us to see more clearly if not the strategic features of the battle at least what was passing in the minds of the combatants. It seems that the battle itself was fought not at “Denisesburn” but at Heavenfield, a little on the north of the Roman wall, which probably was an important element in the problem that the Anglian king, with his great inferiority of forces, had to solve.[63] The great Roman work, striding across the country in its uncompromising way, here traverses a high moorland which separates the main stream of the Tyne from its northern affluent, and in this portion of its career it is from 700 to 800 feet above the level of the sea. Though none of its stones are here remaining, we can yet trace the high mounds and deep fosses of its companion, the line of fortification on the south, which is known by the name of the vallum. Between these two lines, that of stone and that of earth, ran the Roman road, still probably in Edwin’s day capable of being traversed, notwithstanding 230 years of neglect. Along this road Cadwallon may have marched, and by it he may have encamped for the night, while somewhere, behind either wall or vallum, Oswald may have placed in ambush his father’s veterans. He himself was in a mood of religious and patriotic exaltation. On the day before the battle he had in his sleep a vision of the blessed Columba, whom he had never seen with the eyes of the flesh. The saint’s beautiful face shone with angelic brightness: his figure rose majestic till it seemed to touch the clouds: he spread his mantle over the Anglian camp. Addressing Oswald in the words which Moses spake to Joshua he told him to be strong and of a good courage, for the Lord would be with him. Let him march out on the following night to battle: his foes should be all scattered in flight, and the Welsh king should be delivered into his hands.
Awaking, Oswald assembled his council, told them his dream and received the unanimous promise of the army that if they won the victory they would make profession of the Christian faith. He then caused a large wooden cross to be prepared and a hole to be dug, in which it was firmly planted, he himself holding it erect with both hands while his soldiers filled in the soil. When this was done he cried to the host with a loud voice: “Let us all bend our knees and together call upon God Almighty, the Living and the True, that He in His pity will defend us from our proud and cruel foe: for He knoweth that this is a just war that we have undertaken for the deliverance of our people”. All obeyed his command and prayed to the God of the Christians. That night, just before dawn, they moved out of camp, attacked the probably unsuspecting Britons, and inflicted upon them a crushing defeat. Many of the enemy must have perished on the wide moorland; some who probably fled southwards with Cadwallon, their king, were whelmed in the deep waters of the Tyne. Cadwallon himself met his death (how we know not) on the banks of the little Rowley Burn, some five miles south of the Tyne and ten miles from the field of battle. Such was the event which ruined the British hopes of a reconquest of the island, which confirmed the endangered work of Ethelfrid, ratified the victory of Chester, cut off the Britons of the south from their kinsmen in Strathclyde, and confined the former to that mountainous rectangle of territory which we know as Wales. The son of the slain king, “Cadwallader the Blessed,” perhaps strove for a time to maintain the high, almost imperial pretensions of his father, but his long reign seems to have been on the whole disastrous, and when he died a pilgrim at Rome in the year 681, the Welsh chronicler himself admits that “thenceforth the Britons lost the crown of the kingdom and the Saxons gained it”.[64] The two centuries which followed the battle of Heavenfield are the darkest and dreariest in the history of Wales.
Returning in triumph, as Columba in vision had promised him, Oswald proceeded to his father’s wooden palace at Bamburgh, and from thence, apparently with little difficulty, extended his rule over all Northumbria. In Bernicia he would, of course, as the son of Ethelfrid, find many loyal hearts ready to greet him; and even Deira, now that Edwin and his progeny were off the stage, had possibly a welcome for the man who was not only the deliverer from British oppression, but also on his mother’s side descended from the old line. For it will be remembered that Acha, wife of Ethelfrid, was daughter of Aelle of Deira.
Thus, then, did Bamburgh, which is now a lonely village by the German Ocean, become “the royal city,” the most strongly fortified abode of the most powerful king in Britain,[65] the centre of a realm which stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, and apparently, through the rest of the seventh century, the destined capital of England, if England should ever attain to unity. The traveller who now visits this dethroned queen of Northumbria will see much that, however noble and picturesque, must be eliminated by an effort of the imagination if he would picture to himself the Bamburgh of King Oswald. The massive keep that “stands four-square to every wind that blows,” dates from the reign of Henry II.; the great hall of the castle now ingeniously restored by a modern architect, was originally of the time of Edward I.; some of the still existing buildings were reared by a benevolent ecclesiastic in the reign of George III.; but the natural features of the place are unchangeable and unchanged, and in looking upon them we know that we behold the same scenes that met the eye of the conqueror of Cadwallon. Such is the rock itself, an upheaved mass of basalt upon whose black sides the tooth of time seems to gnaw in vain; such are the long sandy dunes which gather round its base; such the Inner and Outer Farne Islands, fragments of basalt rising out of the ocean at distances ranging from three to six miles from the castle; such the far-off peninsula, which when the tide flows, becomes Holy Island; such the long range of Cheviot on the western horizon, snow-covered for many months of the year. Such, we might almost say, is the fierce wind which, from one quarter or another, seems for ever attacking the lonely fortress, and which assuredly battered the “timbered” palace of Oswald as it now batters the time-worn fortress of the Plantagenet.
Scarcely had Oswald seated himself on the Northumbrian throne when he began to labour for the conversion of his new subjects to Christianity, a Christianity, however, not altogether after the fashion which Paulinus had taught to Edwin of Deira, but rather according to that which he himself had learned of his friends, the monks of Iona. The abbot Seghine paid him a visit, probably soon after his accession, and heard from his own lips the marvellous story of his vision of Columba and the victory of Heavenfield; and one of his monastic family was despatched to teach the Northumbrians the religion of Christ. This missionary was a man of narrow intellect and austere temper, who soon returned to Iona with the unwelcome tidings that it was but lost labour to try to teach a nation so barbarous and untamable. At the council whereat this report was rendered sat a man, probably in early middle life, the monk Aidan. “It seems to me, my brother,” said he, “that thou hast been somewhat too hard on these poor unlearned folk, and hast scarcely remembered the apostolic precept to give milk to babes till such time as they may be able to understand and to keep the more sublime commands of God.” The eyes of all in the council were turned upon the speaker who had so opportunely spoken words of wisdom. “Aidan shall be bishop,” “Aidan shall be ordained to preach to the Northumbrians,” was the unanimous decision of the assembly. He accordingly went southward, and for the next sixteen years (635–51) was the great missionary bishop of Northumbria.
It must have seemed to Aidan when he visited the palace of the king, his patron, as if it was a special act of Providence that had fixed that palace where he found it. For here on the storm-beaten Northumbrian coast, within six miles from the royal dwelling, lay an island whereupon he could establish his monastery, and wherein he could be out of the world yet within reach of the world like his prototype Columba in Iona. This island which was given him by the king for his possession, bore then and has borne intermittently ever since the name of Lindisfarne; but even at this day for once that its legal designation of Lindisfarne is mentioned, you shall hear it a thousand times called by the endearing appellation of Holy Island, given to it probably twelve centuries ago when it first received the imprint of Aidan’s sandals. The island is but a small one, only about 1,000 acres in extent, with three fair-sized farms, and a population of about 800 persons, chiefly engaged in fishing, and in winter often hard pressed for subsistence. The beautiful ruins of the Benedictine abbey, the parish church, the castle, built in the Commonwealth period, all belong to ages long posterior to the time when it first became “Holy Island”; but here, as at Bamburgh, the natural features of the landscape are so unchanged that it requires but little effort of the imagination to enable the beholder to travel backward through the centuries to see Cuthbert praying among the sea-gulls, or Aidan slowly pacing the long spit of sand which lay between him and the palace of the king. It will be seen that it is spoken of as an island, and such for all practical purposes it has ever been; for though on the north it stretches out a long sandy arm to the mainland, and at dead low water travellers may reach it from thence all-but dry shod, still their path, traversing three miles of wet sand and leading them through the waste of waters on either hand, seems to sever them from the mainland rather than to unite them thereto, and the inhabitants are at this day islanders in heart and feeling.
Here then dwelt the Celtic apostle of Northumbria, and from hence did he diffuse that influence which accomplished the lasting conversion of the northern Angles to Christianity. In this work he was powerfully aided by King Oswald. In all the history of Christian Church and state during eighteen centuries there are few fairer chapters than that which deals with the intercourse between Oswald and Aidan. There was evidently something in the character of the Celtic bishop which won for him more than the veneration, the love, of the Anglian king. Aidan was a man of absolute simplicity of character, intent on one purpose alone, that of spreading the Christian faith in the kingdom of Northumbria, utterly indifferent to wealth, and fame, and power, and yet without that harshness and austerity which the men of one idea so often display, and which made many of the noblest of medieval saints unloveable. Herein, and in his genuine, not feigned, contempt of riches we trace a certain resemblance between the saint of Lindisfarne and the saint of Assisi. Bede describes the character of Aidan with an enthusiasm all the more trustworthy, because he regretfully observes that “his zeal for God was not according to knowledge, since he kept the day of the Lord’s Pascha according to the manner of his race, that is from the fourteenth day to the twentieth”. He says of him, however, that “herein did he chiefly commend his doctrine to others in that he taught none otherwise than as he lived among his friends”; words which remind us of Chaucer’s often quoted description of the “Poure Persoun of a Toun”:--
But Criste’s loore and his Apostles twelve He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.
It was a strange, but, as Bede says, a most beautiful sight, when the missionary who as yet had not fully mastered our English tongue would preach to the people; when Oswald, whose boyhood passed at Iona had made him master of the difficult Gaelic tongue, stood forth as interpreter, and translated to his own grim warriors and to the servants of his palace “the words of the heavenly life” as they fell from the lips of Aidan. Occasionally, but not too often, for he dreaded the fascinations of a court, Aidan would accept the royal invitation and appear with one or two of his clergy in the great hall at Bamburgh. Even then after a short and hurried repast he would go forth speedily with his friends to read the Scriptures, to chant the Psalter, or to pray. But the scene enacted at one such courtly festival lingered for generations in the memory of men. It was Easter day (the heterodox Easter, as it may be feared), and the king and the bishop had just sat down to the mid-day meal. The bishop was on the point of stretching forth his hand to bless the royal dainties which were served in a splendid silver dish, when the king’s almoner abruptly entered and told his master that a multitude of poor persons gathered from all quarters had arrived, and were sitting in the streets and in the courtyard of the palace, plaintively demanding alms from the king. Thereupon Oswald at once ordered the victuals to be distributed among the beggars, and the dish itself to be broken up into fragments, one of which should be given to each of them. Aidan, who was himself a most generous benefactor of the poor, was so delighted with the deed that he clasped the king’s right hand and exclaimed, “May this hand never see corruption!”
Devoted as Oswald was to the Christianisation of his people he was no pious roi fainéant, but a strong and successful monarch who made his power felt at least from the Firth of Forth to the Bristol Channel. Bede tells us, perhaps with some unconscious exaggeration of the glory of his native Northumbria, that “he received under his sway all the nations and provinces of Britain, which are divided into four languages, those of the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and the Angles”. As he evidently here uses “Angles” as equivalent to Angles and Saxons, this sentence represents Oswald as accomplishing more than Egbert was to achieve two centuries later, and as practically the lord of our whole island. Consistently herewith he represents him as the sixth of the Bretwaldas; and Adamnan, who at first calls him merely “regnator Saxonicus,” says that after the victory of Heavenfield he was “ordained by God emperor of the whole of Britain”. But all these statements must be taken with considerable reservation. Oswald wielded evidently during the seven years of his reign the predominant power in the island, but we are not to think of him as interfering with any of the details of administration in Wessex or East Anglia, still less in Wales or among the Scots of Dalriada. With Wessex, indeed, we are expressly told that he formed ties both of relationship and of religion. When Cynegils, King of the West Saxons, who had been converted to Christianity by the preaching of Birinus, was baptised, his godfather, the man who, according to ecclesiastical phrase, “received him emerging from the sacred laver,” was Oswald of Bernicia, who also became his son-in-law, accepting from the old West Saxon king the hand of his daughter in marriage.
From the character of our one chief authority, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, it naturally but unfortunately follows that we are left in almost total ignorance of the political events in Oswald’s reign. Gladly would we know, for instance, whether the fierce Mercian, Penda, bowed his head even for a time under the yoke of Northumbrian supremacy, but on this point we are left without information. There are hints of earlier wars and fightings between the two states, but all that we can certainly say is that on August 5, 642, Oswald and Penda met in battle at a place called Maserfield,[66] and that though Penda’s brother fell in the fight the Mercian king “was victorious by diabolic art,” and Oswald lay dead on the battlefield. He died praying: when he saw himself girt round by the Mercian host and knew that his death was inevitable, he cried aloud: “Lord, have mercy on the souls of my army,” and the remembrance of this prayer passed into a proverb: “‘Lord, pity their souls,’ as Oswald said when he was falling to the ground”.
Oswald was in his thirty-eighth year when he died, the second Northumbrian prince in the prime and vigour of his days, who had fallen before the elderly barbarian, Penda. The brutal heathen had his head and hands severed from the body and fixed on stakes; but before long, at a turn of the wheel of fortune, these relics, now deemed to be endowed with miraculous power, were carried to distant sites where they met with more honourable treatment. The head was deposited in the monastery at Holy Island, and in after years shared the migrations of the relics of St. Cuthbert: the hand, “the uncorrupted hand” which Aidan had blessed, was enshrined at Bamburgh: the body, by the order of Oswald’s niece, Osthryd, now Queen of the Mercians, was reverently laid in the monastery of Bardney in the centre of Lincolnshire. In his lifetime Oswald had, with some display of force, extended his dominion over this South-Humbrian land, mindful of which fact the patriotic monks were loth to receive the body of their conqueror, but a pillar of fire hovering at night over the coffin showed them that the corpse to which they were refusing admittance would be a precious and wonder-working relic, and turned their aversion into eagerness for its possession. Numerous in fact were the miracles alleged to be wrought by the dissevered fragments of the kingly body, and even by the dust of the battlefield on which he had fallen. The day of his martyrdom, August 5, was appropriated to the cult of Saint Oswald, and the fame of the new saint and his wonder-working relics spread rapidly not only in England but in Ireland and on the Continent.
X. OSWY AND PENDA
The Mercian victory of the Maserfield was doubtless followed by a ravaging expedition into Northumbria. When the waters of the flood subside we find that country again split into the two kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. In the former reigned Oswy (or Oswiu), brother of the martyred Oswald; in the latter, Oswin, son of that Osric, Edwin’s cousin, whose one year’s reign preceded the accession of Oswald. For seven years (644–651) these two kings reigned side by side in the northern land, but before their further career is described it is necessary to turn back and consider more closely the history of that midland kingdom which was running so even a race with Northumbria for the supremacy in Britain.
The causes and the stages of the development of the Mercian power, and even the origin of the Mercian state, are alike hidden from us. All that can be said is that in the early part of the seventh century we find the Mercians, an Anglian tribe, manifesting themselves in force in Staffordshire and Shropshire along the Welsh March from which they perhaps derived their name. As the century proceeds, they conquer or ally with themselves the Middle Anglians, who seem to have inhabited Leicestershire and some of the country adjacent thereto; as well as the South Angles in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and Hertfordshire, who sooner or later became incorporated in the new state. The agent in these great changes was probably Penda himself, the strong-willed pagan who, in 626, at the age of fifty, ascended the Mercian throne, which he occupied for nearly thirty years. Of his alliance with Cadwallon of Wales, and his successful wars with the Northumbrian kings, Edwin and Oswald, enough has already been said in previous chapters; but his dealings with Wessex and East Anglia require some further notice.
In the year 628, as we learn from the Chronicle, Cynegils and Cwichelm fought with Penda at Cirencester and made a treaty there. These are the two Kings of Wessex, apparently reigning together as father and son, who sent the assassin to deal that murderous blow at the life of Edwin which was foiled only by the self-devotion of the loyal thegn, Lilla. That event and the retaliatory campaign of Edwin against Wessex no doubt preceded by some years this war of 628 between Wessex and Mercia. Of the details of the treaty by which the war was ended we know nothing, but it has been conjectured with some probability[67] that it included a cession of the north-western conquests of Ceawlin to Mercia, and the acceptance by Wessex of the line of the Thames as her northern boundary.[68]
Penda’s next intervention in the affairs of his southern neighbours took place in 645, three years after his overthrow of Oswald. Wessex had in the meantime become Christian, chiefly through the preaching of a certain Birinus, who had received his commission from Pope Honorius on his assurance “that he would scatter the seeds of the holy faith in the innermost parts of England whither no teacher had preceded him”. The orthodoxy of Pope Honorius has been sorely attacked on account of his unfortunate vacillations on the subject of the Monothelete heresy, but his evident interest in the conversion of our remote island should be allowed to plead on his behalf as at least one who was zealous for the Christian faith. Birinus discharged the commission entrusted to him with energy and success. We have but little authentic information as to his life, but it seems clear that in respect of the conversion of the kingdoms he held the same relation towards Wessex that Augustine had held to Kent, Paulinus to Deira, and Aidan to Bernicia. The influence of Northumbrian Christianity aided the zealous missionary, and, as we have seen, Oswald of Bernicia stood sponsor for his future father-in-law when in the year 635 Cynegils, the aged King of Wessex, received the sign of baptism. Cwichelm, son of Cynegils and partner of his throne, the chief actor apparently in the murderous attempt upon Edwin of Deira, followed his father’s example in the following year, but died soon after, and when old Cynegils died (641) five years later, he was succeeded by another son, named Cenwalh, who still persisted in heathenism. Soon, however, as Bede remarks, he who refused the offer of the heavenly kingdom, lost his earthly crown. Growing tired of his wife, who was a daughter of Penda, he divorced her, and this repudiation naturally brought upon him the wrath of the Mercian king. Expelled from his kingdom (645) by the victorious arms of Penda, Cenwalh took refuge in East Anglia, at that time the most enthusiastically Christian of all the English kingdoms, with the possible exception of Kent. The persuasions of the East Anglian king, Anna, induced him to make profession of Christianity, and when, after three years’ exile (648), he succeeded in recovering his ancestral kingdom, Cenwalh continued faithful to his new creed, and for the remaining twenty-eight years of his reign he ruled as a Christian king. Thus Wessex, before the seventh century was half way through, accepted the faith of Christ.
The place which witnessed the baptisms of these West Saxon kings, and in which Birinus fixed his episcopal seat, deserves a passing notice. The Dorchester of Oxfordshire (which must on no account be confounded with the county-town of Dorset) is now a pleasant but obscure village on the left bank of the Thames about twelve miles south-east of Oxford. It is in a country full of archæological interest. High on a hill to the west rises what has been truly called “the mighty camp of Sinodun,” a relic apparently of pre-Roman times; and nearer may be traced the so-called “dykes” of the Thames, the work probably of Roman engineers. In the village itself is a fine old abbey church with architecture of various ages, a church which might yet serve on occasion as a cathedral. There is also a great charm in the antique appearance of the place with its picturesque houses, some of them dating from the seventeenth century. Brought thus in contact with the spirit of the past, and freed from the importunate clamours of the industrial present, the traveller finds it not hard to re-create the scenes of the yet more distant past, to imagine Birinus preaching in his little wooden church, or Cynegils and his thegns riding through the swollen river. But for all this, it is hard to bring home to oneself the truth that this village was an ecclesiastical, and almost a literary centre, while Oxford, if it existed at all, was an obscure cluster of cottages; that she was the ecclesiastical metropolis, first of Wessex and then of Mercia, and that royal Winchester and stately Lincoln are both in a certain sense the daughters of Dorchester.
The shelter which King Anna gave to the fugitive Cenwalh was an act of generous courage in the ruler of a country which had already suffered much and was to suffer more at the hands of the terrible Penda. It will be remembered that Redwald, King of East Anglia, who had shown hospitality to Edwin, died a heathen, though more than tolerant of Christianity; but his successor, Earpwald (617–28), yielding to the persuasions of the Northumbrian king, allowed himself to be baptised. After a short reign Earpwald was assassinated by a worshipper of the old gods.[69] Heathenism and anarchy then prevailed in East Anglia for three years, at the end of which time Sigebert the Learned, brother or half-brother of Earpwald, returned from Gaul, in which country he had spent some years, having incurred for some reason the hatred of Redwald. In Gaul he had become a Christian and had pursued those studies which had procured for him his surname “the Learned”. When raised to the East Anglian throne, he successfully attempted the reconversion of the country to Christianity, from which it never afterwards relapsed. He also--a noteworthy fact--“established a school in which boys might be instructed in letters,” following herein the example set him by the King of Kent, and bringing his school teachers from Canterbury. In all his works, scholastic and religious, he was zealously aided by Felix, a missionary-bishop from Burgundy, who had fixed the seat of his episcopate at Dunwich, a city on the coast of Suffolk, long since swallowed up by the ocean. While the trained ecclesiastic, Felix, supplied the organising and educating influences needed by the infant Church of East Anglia, an enthusiastic energy was imparted to it by an Irish monk named Fursa, a man of vivid imagination, full of his marvellous revelations of the world of spirits, one whom, when we read the story of his visions as it is told us by Bede, we are almost persuaded to call the unlettered Dante of the seventh century. As men in Florence said when they saw the poet pass, “That man has been in hell,” so the awe-struck Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk noted on the cheek and shoulder of Fursa the scars of the burning inflicted upon him for a slight offence by the foul fiends whom he had seen in one of his visions; and they remembered how in the depths of winter, and though he was thinly clad, the sweat streamed down his face while he rehearsed the terrible story.
Thus then, in the fourth decade of the seventh century, East Anglia became Christian: and already in her history was manifested that extraordinary desire of men in high places to save their own souls at the cost of leaving their duties to their fellows unfulfilled, which was, it may be said, the glory and the shame of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. After two or three years of reigning, Sigebert abdicated in 634, received the tonsure, and retired to a monastery. He was succeeded by his cousin Egric, but ere the new king had been long on the throne, the terrible Penda (probably crossing the fens which separated the two kingdoms) invaded East Anglia (637?). Some remembrance of Sigebert’s capacity and valour in war seems to have dwelt in the minds of his late subjects, who saw themselves out-numbered by the Mercian hosts. They surrounded the monastery, and when their clamorous cries for Sigebert failed to draw him from his retirement, they pulled him out by main force and compelled him to place himself at their head. But he, mindful of his vow, refused to arm himself with any other weapon than a rod, and remained passive through all the tumult of the battle. He was slain and Egric with him; the East Anglian army was cut to pieces, and Penda, as usual, triumphed.
It will be observed, however, that in these inter-Anglian contests annexation scarcely ever follows victory. The conquered people choose another king, over whom the conqueror no doubt asserts some sort of supremacy, and all goes on as before. So was it now. Anna, the son of Eni, of the royal East Anglian stock, but how nearly related to Sigebert we are not informed, succeeded his kinsman and reigned for some seventeen or eighteen years (637–654). During this time, as we have seen, he gave shelter to the fugitive King of Wessex, Cenwalh, and converted him to Christianity. He is chiefly noted for his “saintly progeny” of daughters and granddaughters, some of whom married into the royal houses of Kent and Mercia, carrying thither their enthusiastic zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith, and nearly all of whom became eventually abbesses in Britain or Gaul. The reign of this excellent king came to an end about 654. It is scarcely necessary to state the cause of his death. He was slain, probably slain in battle, by the nearly octogenarian Penda. Thus had three kings of East Anglia as well as two kings of Northumbria fallen before the all-conquering Mercian. But the tale of his victories was well-nigh told. Let us turn back to consider what had been happening in Northumbria during the twelve years that had elapsed since the death of Oswald.
Two kings, as has been said, with perplexingly similar names, had been, perhaps by some tumultuary vote of their countrymen, raised to the two now separate Northumbrian thrones: Oswy, son of Ethelfrid, to reign in his great grandfather Ida’s palace at Bamburgh, as king of Bernicia; Oswin, collateral descendant of Aelle and Edwin, to reign at York over Deira. Soon after his accession Oswy, who though only about thirty years of age, was a widower with at least two nearly grown-up children, sent a priest named Utta, “a man of much gravity and truth, and for that reason held in high honour even by princes,” to solicit from the king of Kent the hand of his niece Eanfled, the exiled daughter of Edwin of Deira. It was arranged that Utta should travel to Kent by land, but--perhaps from fear of robbers--he was to return with the maiden by sea. Before his departure the priest sought Aidan’s blessing and prayers for his safe journey. The saint foretold that he would meet with contrary winds, rising to a tempest, but gave him a bottle of holy oil to cast upon the raging waters. All happened as Aidan had foretold. The ship in which Utta and his precious charge were embarked was assailed by a tremendous storm: no anchors would hold; the sailors, finding the ship beginning to fill with water from the waves that swept over her, gave themselves up for lost. Then the priest, remembering Aidan’s gift, poured oil from his flask upon the waters and the sea ceased from its raging. Probably the violence of the storm has been somewhat exaggerated by the narrators; but it is interesting to note that modern seamanship does not disdain to use an expedient which in the seventh century was deemed miraculous. One object in Oswy’s matrimonial alliance was doubtless that of strengthening his claim on the men of Deira by his union with Edwin’s daughter. Another result which he perhaps did not foresee was the revival in an acuter form of the strife between the Roman and Celtic Churches for the possession of Northumbria, since Eanfled represented the Roman Christianity of Augustine and Paulinus, while Oswy, like Oswald, had learned in his youth the Christianity of the Hebrides which was represented by his friend the saintly Aidan.
It was probably more or less the aim of every Northumbrian king to reunite the two kingdoms over which Edwin and Oswald had ruled as one realm. Thus Oswy may from the beginning have seen with impatience the rival power of Oswin of Deira. The latter was a man dear alike to martial thane and to devout Churchman: “fair of face, tall of stature, pleasant of speech, courteous in manner, and open-handed both to the noble and to the base-born. This truly royal dignity of his, displayed both in his looks and in his actions, won for him the love of all, so that from nearly all the [other] provinces [of the land] men of noblest birth flocked to do him service.”
To this kingly soul was conjoined the virtue, rare in kings, of humility, to illustrate which Bede tells a well-known story. It appears that Aidan, from his island home in Lindisfarne, now often extended his missionary journeys far and wide through Deira, and, though he made a point of travelling on foot, had accepted from Oswin the present of a horse to enable him to cross the manifold rivers of Yorkshire. Meeting one day a poor man who asked of him an alms, and having apparently no money in his scrip, he gave to the astonished beggar the horse with all its royal trappings, “for he was very pitiful, a nourisher of the poor and, so to speak, a father of the miserable”. When the king heard this he very naturally asked the bishop the reason of his strange procedure. “I had specially chosen that horse for your use, and if it was a question of giving horses to beggars at all, I had others, much cheaper ones, in my stable which would have served your purpose as well.” Hardly with justice Aidan answered: “What art thou saying, O King? Is my steed, the offspring of a mare, dearer to thee than that poor man, a son of God?” And thereupon they went into the palace to dine. The bishop sat apart in his own place; the king who had just come in from hunting stood at the fire with his courtiers warming himself. Suddenly the reproving words of the bishop darted into his soul. He ungirded himself of his sword, which he handed to a courtier, and hastening to the bishop fell at his feet and asked forgiveness, “for never henceforward will I cavil at any act of thine in giving from my treasures what thou wilt to the children of God”. The bishop assured him of his forgiveness and bade him sit down joyfully to the feast. Oswin obeyed, and his merry laugh soon resounded through the hall, but the mantle of his late sadness fell upon Aidan who began to weep. “Why these tears, my father?” said a priestly companion in the Celtic speech which the men of Deira could not understand. “I know,” answered the bishop, “that this king will not live long. I never saw so humble a prince, and this people is not worthy to have such a ruler.”
Too soon were Aidan’s forebodings justified. In the seventh year of Oswin’s reign the disputes between the two Northumbrian kingdoms reached a head, and their armies met in the field near Catterick, in Yorkshire. Finding himself hopelessly out-numbered, Oswin dismissed his soldiers to their homes and fled to the house of one of his followers named Hunwald whom he believed to be a loyal friend. Unfortunately Hunwald betrayed him to Oswy, whose officer Ethelwin was admitted into the house by the treacherous host and slew Oswin, together with his faithful henchman, Tondheri, who had shared his flight. This deed, which was evidently considered no fair act of war, but a foul and detestable murder, took place at Gilling (near Richmond in Yorkshire), on August 20, 651. At the request of Queen Eanfled, Oswin’s near kinswoman, a monastery was erected on the spot by Oswy as a sort of expiation of his crime. Prayers in that monastery were daily offered for the souls of the two kings, the murderer and the murdered, but the blot on Oswy’s memory remained. Twelve days after the death of his royal friend and disciple (Aug. 31, 651), Aidan also died after having for seventeen years held the see of Lindisfarne. The shortness of the interval after Oswin’s death, and the close connexion with that event in which it is mentioned by Bede, seem to authorise the conjecture that grief at this treacherous murder of a Christian prince by his professed brother in the faith may have hastened the death of the toil-worn prelate. He died, not at Lindisfarne, but at a certain villa regia “not far from the city,” says Bede, “of which I have already spoken”. It is generally assumed, perhaps too hastily, that this royal villa was on the site of the modern village of Bamburgh, close to the foot of the rock on the top of which stood undoubtedly both the palace and the town of Bebbanburh. A tent was spread for the dying saint contiguous to the church on its western side. He died leaning against a buttress of the church, and the lovers of miracles noticed that when the village and the church were wrapped in flames in the course of one of Penda’s ravaging expeditions, this buttress against which the dying saint had leaned his head was the only part of the fabric which survived the conflagration.
The Northumbrian ravages of Penda may possibly have been of frequent occurrence. Besides that just mentioned there was at least one more in the lifetime of the saint, possibly soon after the death of Oswald. In this expedition also he sought by the aid of fire to achieve the conquest of the fortress which, in fact, remained impregnable till the invention of gunpowder. Destroying all the hamlets in the immediate neighbourhood of the royal city, he collected their ruins together, an immense mass of wooden beams, brushwood, straw-thatch and other inflammable materials, and piling them up against the lowest end of the cliff, waited for a favourable breeze to kindle his fire. It happened that at this time Aidan had retired from monastic Lindisfarne to the yet more solitary Farne Islands, where, but for the myriads of sea-fowl which resort thither in the breeding season, he could be alone with his Creator. Looking across the two miles of sea which separated him from Bamburgh, the saint saw clouds of smoke arising and balls of fire flying high over the castle walls. With hands and eyes uplifted towards heaven he cried: “See, O Lord, what ills Penda worketh”. Thereat, says the legend, the wind changed, the flames beaten back from the fortress were driven upon the besiegers, who, with some of their number badly burned and all utterly affrighted, at once desisted from the siege of the city.
But there must have been peaceful intervals in the long duel between Mercia and Northumbria. In one of these intervals, Alchfrid, Oswy’s son, sought and obtained the hand of Penda’s daughter, Cyneburga, in marriage. This led to a similar request from Penda’s son, Peada, King of the Middle Angles, for the hand of Alchfleda, daughter of Oswy. He was told that the only terms on which his suit could be successful were that he and all his people should receive the Christian faith. His brother-in-law, Alchfrid, strongly urged him to the same conclusion, and he consented to listen to the teaching of the Christian priests. When he heard of the promise of a heavenly kingdom, the hope of a resurrection and of future immortality, he declared that he would gladly accept such a religion as that, even though no virgin-bride was to be the prize of his conversion. He came in 653 with a long train of thegns, soldiers and servants, and was baptised by Finan, Aidan’s successor, at a royal villa called Ad Murum, close to the Roman wall, and twelve miles from the sea. The conversion of Peada was followed by the mission of four priests to the Middle Angles, that is the inhabitants of Leicestershire. The preaching of these men, seconded by the royal influence, was most successful, and practically the whole of that tribe came over to the new faith. Mercia, properly so called, on the west of the country of the Middle Angles, was still heathen, but even there Penda did not prohibit the preaching of Christianity. He does not seem to have had any deep-rooted objection to the doctrine of the Nazarene, though it was not for him, the descendant of Woden, to worship a deity so unlike the gods of his fathers. He did not, however, conceal his hatred and contempt of those men who, professing the faith of Christ, did not bring forth works according thereto, saying that they were poor and despicable wretches who did not obey the God in whom they professed to believe.
At last when the old king was close upon his eightieth year, the ever-smouldering quarrel with Northumbria broke out again into flame. Oswy felt that the repeated raids of Penda must by some means be brought to an end. He offered quantities of costly royal ornaments as the price of peace, but in vain. Penda would give no promise to cease from ravaging. “Then,” said he, “if the barbarian will not be mollified by our gifts, let us offer them to the Lord God as the price of victory.” His daughter dedicated to sacred virginity; twelve estates given for the foundation of as many monasteries; these were his vows to the Most High, and having made these promises he moved forward with confidence to the war, though his army was much smaller than that of the enemy; though his young son, Egfrid, was a hostage in Penda’s hands; though his nephew, Ethelwald, Oswald’s son, who had been elected King of Deira, was apparently on the side of the enemy; and though Ethelhere, brother of the martyred Anna, now marched to battle in the host of the terrible pagan who had bound East Anglia to his chariot-wheels.[70] Alchfrid, son of Oswy, fought by his father’s side, notwithstanding his affinity with Penda. If we may trust the fitful light of Nennius’s history, Penda was again in this attack on Northumbria allied with the Britons, and Catgabail, King of Gwyneth, went with him to the war, but by a stealthy night march evaded the necessity of fighting.
The armies met on the banks of the Winwaed, possibly the Went, a stream in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The exaggerated traditions of a later day assigned to the Mercian king thirty regiments, each as large as the little army of Oswy, under the command of as many noble generals. Evidently, however, there was no little treachery in Penda’s camp. The Welsh king, as we have seen, deserted on the night before the action. Ethelwald, in the hour of conflict, drew off his troops, and from a safe distance watched the event of the battle. Possibly there were others in the Mercian army who at heart sympathised with the Christian king. At any rate, Oswy won a signal victory (November 15, 655). Nearly all the thirty Mercian generals, including the East Anglian Ethelhere, were killed. Multitudes of fugitives were drowned in the waters of the Winwaed, swollen with autumnal rain. Most important of all, the octogenarian Penda, the slayer of five kings, perished in the fight, and with him fell the last hopes of English heathendom.