Chapter XI
TERRITORIAL CHANGES--THE CONFERENCE AT WHITBY--THE GREAT PLAGUE.
The victory by the Winwaed left Oswy undoubtedly the mightiest king in Britain. It may be convenient to enumerate here the chief territorial changes during the latter half of the seventh century which can be discerned between the succession of bishops and the miracles of saints that form naturally the chief subject of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.
1. Northumbria, at any rate after Oswy’s victory, may have stretched along the eastern coast from Aberdeen or the Cromarty Firth nearly to the Wash. We are distinctly told that “he subdued the nation of the Picts or at least the largest part of them to the Anglian kingdom,” and it is generally agreed that this must refer to the Picts north of the Firth of Forth, which was at this time the ordinary Anglian boundary. Southward, the dominions of which Oswy was overlord probably now included the whole of Yorkshire. It seems, however, to have been an accepted principle that when the overlord was king in Bernicia there must be an under-king in Deira. For seven years, as we have seen, the comely and gracious Oswin, either as equal colleague or as such under-king, reigned in Deira (644–51). After his murder and the consequent extinction of the direct male line of the descendants of Aelle, Oswald’s son, Ethelwald, ruled over the southern kingdom. Did his dubious conduct on the battle-plain of the Winwaed fail to secure for him the favour of his victorious uncle? We cannot say, but it is an ominous circumstance that soon after that event he vanishes from the scene and is replaced by Alchfrid, son of Oswy by his first marriage. We have heard of this prince as assisting in the conversion of his brother-in-law, Peada, to Christianity; we have seen him fighting by his father’s side against his father-in-law, Penda; we shall find him taking a leading part in the discussions about the date of Easter and generally befriending the Roman party; but besides these facts we hear also of some action on his part, possibly in the way of overt rebellion, whereby he added to the “labours” of his father. Whatever the date of this rebellion, if such it were, after 664 we hear no more of Alchfrid.
The mystery, however, that hangs over the life and death of Alchfrid almost heightens the interest which is attached to a monument raised to his memory, the celebrated Bewcastle Cross. There in the midst of a wide and desolate moor, as desolate, perhaps, now as it was twelve hundred years ago, rises an obelisk fourteen and a half feet high, once surmounted by a cross which has now disappeared, bearing in Runic letters the sacred name “Gessus Christus” (so must our Anglian ancestors have spoken of the Saviour), and an inscription which, though not yet deciphered beyond dispute, certainly says that the stone was raised as a memorial of “Alchfrith, son of Oswy, and aforetime King”. Other runes give us the names of Alchfrid’s wife, Cyneburga, of her sister (?) Cyneswitha, and of her brother Wulfhere, King of Mercia. An inscription seems to record that it was reared in the first year of his brother Egfrid, that is in 670. This date gives additional interest to the quaint but not ungraceful specimens of Anglian art with which the obelisk is enriched, to the flowing tracery of vine-leaves and grape-clusters, the birds and dogs, the figures of John the Baptist and our Lord, and (in the lowest compartment of all) the standing figure of a man with a bird on his wrist, perhaps King Alchfrid himself with his falcon. Even should the reading of one line of the inscription, “Pray for his soul’s great sin,” prove too fanciful to be accepted by future students, we have in the other utterances of this monument enough to invest with a peculiar interest the name of Oswy’s son and Penda’s son-in-law.
After the death of this prince, two younger sons of Oswy are spoken of on somewhat doubtful authority as successively holding the position of Deiran under-kings. It seems clear that there was in the two provinces, Bernicia and Deira, a certain reluctance to coalesce, an unwillingness of each to submit to the king chosen by the other, which it is not difficult to understand. Whatever may have been its cause, this tendency to estrangement between its two great provinces had doubtless something to do with the early downfall of Northumbria.
The southern boundary of Oswy’s kingdom was at this time a somewhat uncertain one. In the first place, what is now the county of Lincoln, or, as it was then called, Lindissi, was for generations the regular prize of war between Northumbria and Mercia. It was added to his dominions by the victorious Edwin, and if lost through his defeat by Penda, it was recovered by Oswald, but, as we have seen, so little was his yoke beloved that the monks of Bardney in Lincolnshire at first refused to give shelter to his bones. Under Penda it was doubtless again annexed to Mercia, and probably shared the fortunes of that middle kingdom until, between 671 and 675, it was recovered from Wulfhere, son of Penda, by Oswy’s son and successor, Egfrid. It was once more regained for Mercia by Ethelred, probably about the year 679, and apparently never after owned the sway of a Northumbrian king.
2. After the victory of the Winwaed, Oswy seems to have been virtually master of Mercia. He continued his son-in-law, Peada, as under-king of Southern Mercia, that is the part of the kingdom south of the river Trent, but he apparently kept Northern Mercia in his own hands. In the spring of the following year, however, at the very time when the newly converted nation was celebrating the Easter festival, Peada was murdered, and dark suspicions prevailed that his young Christian wife was an accomplice in the crime. It is not hinted that Oswy himself had instigated the deed, but doubtless the horror of it added to the dislike with which the people of Mercia viewed the Northumbrian rule. Three years after old Penda’s death, three of his veteran generals successfully conspired against the Northerner, brought out of his hiding-place a young son of their late master, named Wulfhere, whom they had till then successfully concealed, expelled Oswy’s thanes, and restored the independence of the Mercian kingdom, apparently with its old boundaries. The new king Wulfhere was a zealous Christian--as indeed, strange to say, were all the children of Penda--and reigned for seventeen years well and gloriously (659–675). We hear of no attempt by Oswy to recover his supremacy over Mercia, although, as we have seen, his son did recover that shuttle-cock of battle, Lindsey. Wulfhere’s chief wars seem to have been with the Kings of Wessex, over whom he won several victories. The extent of his power is most clearly shown by the fact that having formed a friendship with Ethelwalh, King of the South Saxons, and persuaded him to be baptised, he handed over to him the Isle of Wight and the district occupied by the Meonwaras in the east of Hampshire, which he had wrested from the King of Wessex. The son of Penda officiated as godfather to the new convert, whose example in accepting the Christian faith was followed by many of his thanes and soldiers, but not as yet by the bulk of the South Saxon people.
3. Of political events in the kingdom of the East Angles in the period now under review, we find scarcely a trace. Shut off from the rest of England by the great fen-lands, which covered almost the whole of the modern counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon, East Anglia seems to have generally kept the even tenour of her own solitary way, which was at this time the way of holiness. If we may judge of the people from their rulers, we should be inclined to conjecture that, under the influence of the preaching of Felix and Fursa, this isolated district of England was passing through a phase of religious fervour like that which made its counties the stronghold of Lollardy in the fourteenth, and of Puritanism in the seventeenth centuries, sending at the latter period so many stern enthusiasts to fight in the new-modelled army of Cromwell. Of course, in the seventh century religious zeal took a direction which would have brought it into fierce collision with the Ironsides of Naseby and Marston Moor. All the fairest fruits of Christianity at this time were ripened in the cloister, and a monastic life seems to have had irresistible attractions for the ladies of the royal East Anglian race. King Anna, who, as we have seen, fell in battle against Penda in the year 654, left three daughters, two of whom were the wives of kings, but all of whom ended their lives as abbesses in a convent, and in the next generation two daughters of one of these saintly ladies (one of them also a queen consort) followed their mother’s example.
4. Very different at one time was the religious history of the kingdom of the East Saxons, represented by the two modern counties of Essex and Middlesex. When we last heard of the affairs of this little kingdom Mellitus had been contemptuously driven forth from his episcopal seat in London because he refused to administer the white bread of the communion to the heathen sons of King Saberct (617?). Since that time a generation had passed away, and Essex was still heathen. The king now reigning in London--one of the many Sigeberts who about this time perplex the student of Anglo-Saxon pedigrees--was, we are told, a friend and a frequent visitor to Oswy of Northumbria. In the halls of Bamburgh and Ad Murum the conversation often turned on religious subjects; and “How,” said the Northumbrian king, “can you think that these things are gods, which are made by the hands of men? You take a piece of wood or stone, and what is not needed for the purpose of idol-making you either burn in the fire or shape into some common household utensil which, when it is done with, is pitched out of doors and trodden under foot of men. How can these things be divine? We must think of the true God as incomprehensible, unseen, omnipotent, eternal, the righteous ruler of the world, who does not dwell in perishable substances but has His eternal seat on high. We can understand, too, that the beings whom He has created, if they will learn His will and do it, shall receive from Him eternal rewards.” Many dialogues of this kind at last produced an effect. The East Saxon king was baptised by Finan of Lindisfarne, Aidan’s successor, at the same royal villa of Ad Murum which had witnessed the baptism of Peada, the Mercian. Returning to his own kingdom he sought to bring his subjects over to his new faith and sent to Oswy for a missionary (653). Hereupon Cedd, one of a family of zealous Northumbrian converts who had been preaching Christianity in Mercia, was recalled from his work in the Midlands and sent to Essex, where he carried on a most successful mission, was consecrated as bishop, and, apparently for the first time, founded the church of London on a secure basis. Sigebert, however, was slain after a reign of some years by two noblemen of his kindred who were offended by his meek submission to the counsels of the bishop, and after one intervening reign,[71] two kings named Sighere and Sebbi reigned over the East Saxons jointly, but always in subjection to the overlordship of Wulfhere, King of Mercia, whose “sphere of influence” evidently included all the south of England with the doubtful exception of Wessex.
The accession of these two kings probably took place soon after 660, but dates as well as accurate pedigrees are grievously wanting for all this portion of history. In 664 a terrible pestilence, which ravaged Essex as well as all the rest of England, shook the newly-born faith of the people and divided their rulers. Sighere and all his subjects openly apostatised from the faith of Christ, sought out the old half-ruined heathen fanes, and began once more to worship the idols replaced therein. Sebbi, on the other hand, and the men under his sway remained steadfast in their profession of Christianity. Nor does the relapse into heathenism of the other half of the kingdom seem to have been of long continuance. The zeal of the overlord Wulfhere soon remedied that error. He sent his Mercian bishop, Jaruman, on a mission to the East Saxons, the third which had been despatched to that wavering people, and Jaruman, backed by the authority of his sovereign, without much difficulty overturned once more the idol-altars and brought back the recalcitrant East Saxons within the embraces of the Church. From this time onwards London, its bishops and its commerce become of ever-increasing importance in the pages of the historians.
5. The political history of Kent during this period offers little of interest. The king whose name figures most largely in the pages of Bede is Erconbert (640–64). He married Sexburh, daughter of Anna, one of the devout East Anglian family, and, partly perhaps owing to her influence, Church and State were more closely welded together in this than in any of the other kingdoms. “He was the first of all the English kings who by his princely authority ordered the idols throughout his kingdom to be abandoned and destroyed, and the fast of the forty days [of Lent] to be observed. And in order that these commands might be despised by none, he proclaimed fit and proper punishments against the transgressors.” Thus in Kent we have reached the second stage in the establishment of Christianity, which is now no longer merely tolerated or approved by the sovereign but dominant and in a certain sense persecuting.
6. The obscure history of the South Saxon kingdom has been already touched upon in connexion with that of Mercia. Suffice it to remind the reader that under the protecting hand of the great Midland king, who evidently wished to make of this kingdom a counterpoise to the power of Wessex, it included not only the modern county of Sussex but also the Isle of Wight and a good deal of the east of Hampshire; and that though its royal family were Christian the bulk of the people remained idolators. This religious isolation of the South Saxon people is generally attributed to the fact already alluded to, that they were separated from the rest of England by the mighty forest of the Andredeswald, that “dark impenetrable wood” which yielded in later ages to the axes of the charcoal-burners of Sussex and Kent, so that the country which we call the Weald is now left comparatively bare and treeless. It is hard for us who now know the chief town of the coast of Sussex as virtually a suburb of London, to imagine the time when Sussex, isolated in its heathen barbarism, remained virtually another world to the inhabitants of Essex and Middlesex.
7. The history of the West Saxon kingdom, for which such a brilliant future was reserved in the coming generations, is for the seventh century obscure and uninteresting. Partly, of course, this may be accounted for by the fact that our one transcendent authority for this period, Bede, is himself a most patriotic Northumbrian, and cares little for distant Wessex. But even after making allowance for this weighting of one of the scales, it is impossible not to recognise the fact that in the West Saxon line during the greater part of the seventh century we meet with no such powerful personalities as Edwin, Oswald, and Oswy, nor do we find there any symptoms which would have warranted a beholder in looking for the eventual appearance of the splendid figures of Alfred, Edward, and Athelstan.
As we have seen, the fortunes of Wessex in her conflict with Mercia were at this time generally unprosperous. In 628 there was the disastrous war with Mercia. Then came the preaching of Birinus, the baptism and death of Cynegils and his son, the accession of the still heathen Cenwalh and his expulsion by his enraged brother-in-law of Mercia. He returned, perhaps, on the invitation of his kinsman Cuthred, to whom he made an enormous grant of property (3,000 “lands” or hides) at Ashdown in Berkshire. Having embraced Christianity in his exile, he completed the conversion of Wessex to the new faith. Unsuccessful as he seems generally to have been in his wars with Mercia, he met with better fortune in his campaigns against the southern Britons. In 652 we are told that he fought--assuredly with the “Walas,” though this is not expressly stated--at Bradford-upon-Avon. He thus apparently completed the conquest of Wiltshire, and it may well have been within a generation after Cenwalh’s victory that Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, built that quaint little church, dedicated to St. Lawrence, which still stands overlooking the south-country Bradford, and which is nearly the best surviving monument of true Saxon architecture. Six years later (658) Cenwalh again fought with the Welsh at Peonnum (or the Pens, generally identified with Pensel Wood on the south-eastern border of Somerset), and this time we are distinctly told that he drove them as far as the river Parret. The larger half of the county of Somerset thus became definitively West Saxon, and the far-famed sanctuary of Glastonbury and the poetic valley of Avalon now owned the sway of a king who, though a Saxon, was also a Christian.
An important acquisition certainly: yet the very fact that it had still to be made, illustrates the extremely gradual character of the Saxon conquest of Britain. Two hundred years have now elapsed since the accepted date of the landing of Hengest, one hundred and seventy since Cerdic, one of the latest of the invaders, set foot on the shore of Southampton Water, and yet the West Saxons have only just crossed the Mendip Hills; nearly half of Somerset and the whole of Devonshire and Cornwall have yet to be won. The other records of the reign of Cenwalh relate to his battles, generally unsuccessful, with the Mercian kings. His fellow-Christian, young Wulfhere, ravaged what was left of West Saxon territory north of the Thames, as far as Ashdown. While the territory of Wessex had been in some degree growing towards the west, it was, as we have already seen, curtailed towards the east by the loss of the district of the Meonwaras and the Isle of Wight which were handed over by Wulfhere to Sussex. Altogether there was little in the fortunes of the West Saxon dynasty under Cenwalh, or under the obscure rulers who followed him, to betoken that the hegemony would one day be theirs. When towards the end of the century Caedwalla and Ine appear upon the scene, the prospect somewhat brightens, but the victories of the first and the laws of the second must be dealt with in a later chapter.
From this brief review of the relations of the various English kingdoms to one another towards the close of the seventh century, it will be abundantly evident how far we yet were from anything like national unity. There does not even seem to be any dawning feeling of fellowship of race. Angle wages with Angle and Saxon with Saxon a long and embittered warfare; and more than once a Mercian or West Saxon king avails himself of British help to win the victory over his kinsfolk. If Anglo-Saxon unity was at length obtained, and we know that it was not till far on in the tenth century that it was even approximately realised, this result was due undoubtedly to two great causes: the influence of the national Christian Church and the necessity of self-defence against the Scandinavian invaders. With the first of these causes alone we have here to deal. It cannot be doubted that zeal for their new-born Christian faith was already in some measure drawing the English kings together. When Oswald of Bernicia stood sponsor for West Saxon Cynegils, when his brother Oswy persuaded East Saxon Sigebert to forsake the follies of idolatry, a moral bond of union was formed, which might be developed into a political relationship. The consciousness of common interest in the Civitas Dei might well become, and eventually did become, a consciousness of fellow-citizenship in one great country.
In order however that the Church might exert this unifying influence on English politics it was essential that she should be of one mind herself; but at this time the unfortunate division between the Roman and the Celtic Churches on the utterly unimportant questions of the shape of the tonsure and the right calculation of Easter did much to prevent so desirable a consummation. Utterly unimportant they seem to us, and probably few ecclesiastics of any school of thought would now deny their triviality; but there is a well-known law of theological dynamics that the bitterness of feeling between rival Churches is in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the issues between them; and so it proved at this crisis. Owing to the different quarters from which the different English kingdoms had received their Christianity, the religious map of England was divided in the following manner. Kent and East Anglia were firm in their following of Rome. Wessex also, which had been won for Christianity by Birinus, was steadily, though perhaps not enthusiastically, Roman. Bernicia, till late in the reign of Oswy, clung firmly to the teachings of Iona. Deira seems to have been generally on the same side, though the remembrance of the teaching of Paulinus, kept alive, as it was, by the teaching of his follower James the Deacon, had probably modified the strength of its Celticism; and Alchfrid the king, influenced by the persuasions of his friend Cenwalh, King of Wessex, had embraced with fervour the party of Rome. Mercia and Essex, both of which had been evangelised by Northumbrian missionaries, seem to have been somewhat half-hearted in their adherence to the Celtic traditions.
Such being the condition of things, Oswy, in conjunction with his son and colleague, Alchfrid, convoked in the year 664 a synod at Streanæshalch to discuss the thorny question of the difference between the Churches. The place was well fitted to be the scene of a memorable meeting. Its Saxon name, which, according to Bede, signified lighthouse-bay, well indicates that conspicuous cliff on the Yorkshire coast which we now know so well by the more common-place name of Whitby, given to it some three centuries later by its Danish destroyers and rebuilders. Hither, to this wind-beaten rock, had the holy Hilda, great-niece of Edwin of Deira, removed her convent from the more northern Hartlepool; and here she dwelt, ruling her double monastery of monks and nuns in all gentleness and purity, while the little Elfleda, Oswy’s youngest daughter, whom he had vowed to God on the eve of his great battle with Penda, was growing up under her tuition into all the virtues of a perfect nun, and preparing to take her place one day as abbess of the convent. To the student of English literature Whitby monastery is for ever memorable as the home of the first English poet, Caedmon, who there, while sitting in the cow-byre, received the command from a heavenly visitor to sing “the beginning of things, the going forth out of Egypt, the suffering and the resurrection of the Lord”.
At this place, then, all that was eminent for holiness in the infant Church of Northumbria came together to discuss the then all-important question of the true date for the keeping of Easter. However uninteresting from a religious point of view this question may now appear, the practical inconvenience of its unsettled condition was clearly seen in the household of King Oswy. Here was he, following the Celtic usage, celebrating his Easter feast on the fourteenth day of the lunar month which included the vernal equinox, while his wife, Eanfled, daughter of Edwin and granddaughter of Ethelbert of Kent, refused to recognise as a possible Easter any Sunday earlier than the fifteenth of the same month. Hence it might possibly happen, nay, in the very next year after the council it actually would have happened, that in the very same palace the king would be celebrating Easter Sunday with all the feasting and the gladness which were considered the suitable accompaniments of the day of the Lord’s resurrection, while the queen and all the holy men and women of her party would be sitting in the sadness of Lent preparing to follow in imagination the Dolorous Way by which on the successive days of Passion week the Saviour would be led up to the crowning grief of Calvary. The difference, as the fair-minded Bede is careful to explain, was not the same as that which separated the so-called Quarto-decimans from the Western Church, and which was finally condemned at the Council of Nicæa. That party, adhering strictly to the Jewish usage, celebrated Easter at the same time as the old Passover on “the fourteenth day of the first month,” on whatever day of the week that day might happen to fall. Not so, however, with the sons of Iona. Columba, Aidan and all the saints of the old Celtic Church remembered the Crucifixion on a Friday and the Resurrection on a Sunday, whether those days fell on the fourteenth or sixteenth of the lunar month or not. Thus the correct date for the Christian seasons for both parties had to be arrived at by a compromise between the week reckoning and the month reckoning; the only question at issue being the form of that compromise and the limits of permitted deviation. The Celt contended that the pendulum must swing between the fourteenth and the twentieth days of the moon’s age; while the Roman ecclesiastic allowed it to swing only between the fifteenth and the twenty-first. A small difference truly to cause such long and heated arguments, yet, as we have seen, where a house was divided against itself on this question, it might occasion no little practical inconvenience.
There was much that was illogical and unscientific in the arguments on both sides of the controversy. The fathers from Iona were fond of appealing to the authority of the beloved Apostle John, which, so far as it proved anything, proved not their contention but that of the old, universally condemned Quarto-decimans. The supporters of the Roman usage loudly asserted the necessity of following St. Peter, who certainly cannot be proved, nor can with much probability be even conjectured, to have ever expressed an opinion on the point at issue between the Churches. Much stress did they also lay on the unchanging custom of the Roman Church, whereas that Church had in fact shown its good sense by modifying its calendar in some important particulars in deference to the calculations of the more scientific fathers of Alexandria. Doubtless the real arguments, appealing to the heart rather than to the head, were on the one side the remembrance of saintly Christian lives, such as those of Columba and Aidan, producing a natural reluctance to admit that such men had lived and died in grievous error; and on the other side a feeling of impatience that the inhabitants of a few rocky islands in the wild Atlantic should set their judgment against the richly endowed and stately Churches of Paris, Arles and Vienne, of Milan and of Rome.
On the Celtic side of the controversy were ranged the saintly Hilda herself, and Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who, after the short intervening episcopate of Finan, had succeeded to the dignity held by the universally venerated Aidan. It was probably hoped, too, that King Oswy would be a stout defender of the usages which he and his brothers had learned in their long boyish banishment at Iona. On the other side, eager for union with Canterbury and Rome, stood Eanfled, the queen, and her step-son, Alchfrid of Deira. There, too, was James the Deacon, the follower of Paulinus, who for thirty-one years had maintained the cause of Roman Christianity in Deira. Highest in ecclesiastical rank on this side was Agilbert the Frank, Bishop of Dorchester, a learned man who had studied for some years in Ireland--then a great centre of theological study--but had apparently not cared to add the knowledge of Anglo-Saxon to his other accomplishments, for we are told that Cenwalh, King of Wessex, once his friend and admirer, growing weary at length of his “barbarous” way of talking, planted down at Winchester a rival bishop who could talk with him in Saxon. This gave Agilbert such offence that he resigned his diminished see of Dorchester, and returned to Gaul, where he was appointed Bishop of Paris. That migration was, however, yet in the future, and it was still as Bishop of the West Saxons, though possibly of the divided see, that Agilbert appeared to support his sovereign’s friend, Alchfrid, in the great controversy. The hint about Agilbert’s “barbarous” Frankish language is especially interesting to the philologer as showing how widely the language of the Franks, probably from its admixture with degenerate Latin, was beginning to diverge from the kindred Anglo-Saxon. Two generations previously at the court of Ethelbert, the Kentish courtiers seem to have conversed without difficulty with the companions of their Frankish queen.
When all were seated, King Oswy arose and made a speech on the need for unity of practice between men who were all seeking the same heavenly kingdom. Let them inquire which was the true rule for the calculation of Easter, and all follow that. He then called on his own bishop, Colman, to set forth the reason for his rule. Colman replied with the usual reference to the holiness of his predecessors and to the authority of the beloved Apostle John. Bishop Agilbert being called upon to reply, acutely conscious of his inability to speak in the English tongue, prayed that the task of replying might be assigned to one of his disciples, named Wilfrid the presbyter, who fully shared all his opinions and could clearly set them forth in the king’s own language without the intervention of an interpreter.
Herewith there stepped on to the stage of English history an actor who was never to be long absent thence through more than forty troublous years. Wilfrid, who was now about thirty years of age, was the son of a Northumbrian thegn, a youth brought up in the rude luxury of a rich Anglian’s hall, with horses, armour and goodly raiment at his disposal; but at the age of fourteen a harsh step-mother in his home, and some instinct of aspiration after a holier life, sent him to Lindisfarne, where he learned much, but gradually became dissatisfied with the Celtic position of isolation from Rome. Queen Eanfled, encouraging his disaffection, assisted him to visit the court of her cousin, Erconbert of Kent, from whence in his twentieth year he set out for Rome. On his way through Gaul the bright and handsome Northumbrian had offers of worldly preferment and a rich marriage from the Archbishop of Lyons, but refusing all such worldly advantages, he pressed on to “the tombs of the apostles”. Though to the reader of the pontifical annals, Rome in the middle of the seventh century, with its Monotheletic controversy and its Lombard wars, may not seem a very inspiring theme, it is clear that the great world-city, with its stately ruins and statelier church-organisation, exerted a powerful fascination over the mind of the young Northumbrian, and during all the rest of his life we find him, like another Loyola, staunch in his resolve to live or die for the defence of the Holy See. He learned from a certain Archdeacon Boniface “the daily lessons from the four gospels, the reasonable mode of calculating Easter, and many other things relating to the discipline of the Church of which he had been ignorant in his own country,” and then returning through Gaul he again visited his friend, the Archbishop of Lyons, and received from him the monastic tonsure. The archbishop was still minded to make him his heir, and apparently with some such expectation Wilfrid remained for three years in attendance upon him. By one of those reverses of fortune to which the courtier-prelates of Merovingian Gaul were frequently subject, Wilfrid’s patron lost both office and life, and Wilfrid himself narrowly, and only on account of his foreign origin, escaped sharing his doom.[72] Returning at last (in 658), after long wanderings, to his native Deira, he there found Alchfrid reigning, a man like-minded with himself in his preference of Rome to Iona. He settled eventually in a monastery at Ripon, from which Eata, friend and pupil of Aidan, had been expelled on account of his adherence to the Celtic usages by the hotly partisan king. Here Wilfrid, a year before the convocation of the synod, had been ordained as priest by Bishop Agilbert and installed as abbot of the monastery, which seems to have been to the end of his days the most dearly loved of his homes.
Such was the man, already well versed in the Paschal controversy, and deeply tinged with the Roman and Gaulish contempt for the religion of the Hebrides, to whom the grateful task was assigned of demolishing the arguments of Colman. “The Easter which we observe,” said he, “is that which I myself have seen celebrated at Rome, home and burial-place of the two great apostles. Wheresoever I journeyed, intent on learning and on prayer, throughout Italy and Gaul I found this feast celebrated. This feast, Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, nay, and the whole Christian world through all its various nations and languages do observe, save only these two obstinate nations, the Picts and the Britons (inhabitants of the two furthest isles in the ocean and of only a part even of them), who do with stupid energy strive against the opinion of the whole world.” So spoke the haughty, foreign-fashioned ecclesiastic; and when we have heard this first tactless utterance of his, we are the better able to understand why all the forty years of his episcopate were more or less passed in strife. Colman plaintively asked if Wilfrid would call the blessed apostle John stupid. Wilfrid replied that St. John like St. Paul might do many things to conciliate Jewish prejudice, and that after all, his usage being that of the earlier Quarto-decimans, did not coincide with the Celtic Easter which must always fall on a Sunday. “No,” he ended, “you who shut out the 21st day of the moon from your calculation, agree neither with John nor with Peter, neither with the Law nor with the Gospel.”
The debate then drifted off into a discussion of “the cycle of Anatolius,”[73] and an appeal by Colman to the virtues of Columba and his successors who had kept the Celtic Easter. “Surely,” he pleaded, “the miracles which they had wrought showed that their teaching was acceptable in the sight of God.” “I do not deny,” answered Wilfrid, “that these men of whom you thus speak were God’s servants. I think that if any Catholic calculator had come to them and taught them the better way, they would have obeyed his monitions. And however holy your, or I would rather say our, Columba may have been, however mighty in signs and wonders, can you prefer his authority to that of the blessed Prince of the Apostles, to whom the Lord said, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven’?” As Wilfrid made this closing quotation the king turned to Colman and said: “Is it true that these words were spoken by the Lord to Peter?” “It is true, O king!” was the answer. “Can you produce any instance of a similar power conferred on your Columba?” “We have none,” answered Colman. Said the king: “Do both parties agree without controversy on this point, that these words were spoken pre-eminently to Peter and that to him the keys of heaven were granted by the Lord?” Both answered: “We do”. Thereupon the king thus announced his conclusion: “Then I say to you that this is the door-keeper whom I am loth to contradict, and whose ordinances I desire to obey to the utmost of my power, lest haply when I arrive at the doors of the kingdom there shall be none to open them unto me if I have lost the favour of him who keeps the keys thereof”.
The Bernician king evidently conceived of heaven as of a Northumbrian palace hall: and not unnaturally he, who knew his hands to be stained with the blood of his gracious kinsman Oswin, desired to enlist the sympathies of the most powerful patron possible on his side against the day when he should have to plead for entrance therein. Oswy’s decision was, of course, final. All over Northumberland the Roman customs as to Easter and the tonsure now prevailed. Bishop Colman, who could not reconcile himself to the new ways, abdicated his see and returned to Iona, accompanied by all the Irish monks from Lindisfarne and by thirty Anglian brethren who shared their opinions. From Iona he afterwards went to Ireland and founded a monastery on an island off the coast of Mayo, which had not a very successful career. Cedd, bishop of the East Saxons, who had acted as interpreter and to some extent as mediator between the two parties, accepted the decision of the synod, and returned to enforce it in London and the rest of his diocese. Everywhere now throughout Teutonic Britain unity with Rome was established, and little more than a century elapsed before all the Celtic communities in Iona, in Ireland, even in sturdy recalcitrant Wales, had adopted the Roman Easter and the coronal tonsure.[74]
The change was one which probably ought upon the whole to be considered beneficial. Unity was the thing now most needed, both politically and ecclesiastically, and unity had to be achieved by the State through the Church. It was, therefore, well that this pebble, which broke the full flow of the stream towards unity, should be removed out of the way by the synod of Whitby. It was well, also, that there should be no hindrance to free and full intercourse between the ecclesiastics of England and those of the continent. True, the civilisation of Italy and Gaul in the seventh century was nothing to boast of. To Cicero or to Marcus Aurelius it would have seemed like barbarism: but it was superior to the barbarism of the Saxon, perhaps in some respects superior even to the undoubtedly high civilisation, at this time, of Celtic Tara and Armagh. Still it was not all gain that resulted from the decision of the synod of Whitby and the rupture of the spiritual bond that had bound Lindisfarne to Iona. Even Bede, with all his loyalty to Rome and abhorrence of the Celtic Easter, seems to feel this fact; else why does he introduce just at this point an eloquent panegyric on the simple life of Colman and his predecessors, their genuine poverty and the faithfulness with which they at once handed to the poor any money which they received from the rich? “At that time the religious habit was held in great veneration, so that wheresoever cleric or monk appeared, he was joyfully welcomed by all as the servant of God; those who met him on the road with bent necks rejoiced to receive the blessing of his lips or of his extended hand: they listened eagerly to his words of exhortation. The priests and clerics of that day had no care for anything else but preaching, baptising, visiting the sick--in a word, for the salvation of souls. So utterly were they delivered from the poison of avarice, that no one of them would receive land or presents even for the building of monasteries, unless absolutely compelled to do so by secular rulers.” In these and similar sentences Bede hints at the degeneracy of his own times and seems to mourn that more of the spirit of Iona had not lingered in the Anglian Church. In Columba, Aidan, Colman and their disciples, as has been already said, we seem to see something of that absolute indifference to wealth, that kinship with Nature and her children, that almost passionate love for Poverty and the Poor which, six centuries later, was to shed a halo round the head of Francis of Assisi. These men were zealous missionaries, “humble and holy men of heart”: the men who were about to replace them in the organised and regularly affiliated Church, though by no means devoid of missionary zeal, nor of the spirit of self-denial, were before all, great ecclesiastics and lordly rulers of the Church.
The year 664 which witnessed the assembling of the synod at Whitby was, for other reasons, a sadly memorable one to the English nation. In that year, on May 1, there was a total eclipse of the sun, and this, to the unscientific minds of our ancestors, seemed to be in some mysterious way connected with a terrible visitation of pestilence which, apparently in the summer and autumn, swept over our island, beginning at the southern shore and from thence passing northward till it reached Northumbria, and crossed over into Ireland; everywhere carrying off multitudes of people. On July 14, Erconbert, King of Kent, and Deusdedit, archbishop, both died within a few hours of each other, apparently smitten by the pestilence. Later on, probably in the same year, Tuda, the new Bishop of Lindisfarne, and Cedd, the interpreter-bishop of the Whitby synod, fell victims to the same wide-wasting enemy. We have already had occasion to notice the effect which this terrible calamity had in causing many of the East Saxons to relapse for a time into idolatry. The stories concerning the plague with which Bede crowds his pages are generally of the edifying death-bed sayings uttered by its victims and the visions of supernal bliss vouchsafed to them before their departure. Intent on these spiritual aspects of the visitation, and not sparing his readers one of the miracles which he had heard of as marking its course, Bede has not recorded any of its physical symptoms as Thucydides has done in his memorable description of the Plague of Athens. We learn, however, from other sources[75] that it was intensely infectious, that one of the symptoms was inflamed swellings, and that the faces of the patients were tinged with a ghastly yellow colour. Probably, therefore, it belonged to the same type of disease as the yellow fever which is now so suddenly fatal in tropical countries. We perceive from Bede’s narrative that its force was not expended by the visitation of 664, but that it returned at intervals during the next twenty years, and that there was one outbreak of especial violence in the year 686 from which Bede’s own monastery of Jarrow suffered severely. The coadjutor-abbot Eosterwine of the sister convent of Wearmouth died of the plague in his thirty-seventh year; and at Jarrow the pestilence carried off all the monks who could read or preach or sing the antiphons, save only the abbot Ceolfrid and one little boy whom he had trained. The old man and the child kept up an abridged form of the daily service without the antiphons for one week. Then, as the tears of Ceolfrid had almost prevented him from taking part in this mutilated service, they summoned up courage to sing the whole psalter through, antiphons and all, till at last a full choir had been trained to help them to bear the burden. It is generally believed, though it cannot be proved, that the little boy who thus officiated with Ceolfrid was Bede.
In reading Bede’s Ecclesiastical History it is impossible not to be struck with the especial severity wherewith the plague raged in the monasteries both of men and women. At Lindisfarne, at Ely, at Wearmouth and Jarrow, at Carlisle, at Barking and at Lastingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the plague committed great ravages, often carrying off nearly all the inmates. The manager of a modern school or hospital will not be surprised at this, when he remembers that the monastic rule enjoined the use of woollen garments and prohibited linen; that the more ascetically disposed monks or nuns washed themselves only three or four times in the year; and that the monks lay down to rest in the same woollen garments and with the same unloosed shoes which they had worn and in which they had worked throughout the day. This self-denial, especially in the sons and daughters of princely houses, sprang from a noble motive: it had been perhaps originally ordained as a protest against the luxurious life of the young Roman nobility for whom
The Bath and Wine and Women made up life.
But it was none the less a calamity for Europe that an unnatural and unneeded divorce should have been made between Christianity and cleanliness. Sanitary science, during the long medieval centuries and even for some time after they had ended, had little chance of making its way in the world. Exactly one thousand years after the pestilence of 664 were felt the first foreboding symptoms of the Great Plague of London.
* * * * *
There is little else to record as to the reign of Oswy of Bernicia after the departure of the ecclesiastics from Whitby. In consequence of the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, the two Kings of Northumbria and Kent took counsel “concerning the state of the English Church” (this joint action of North and South in an ecclesiastical matter was itself an important event), and decided to send one of the late archbishop’s clergy named Wighard to Rome that he might there be consecrated as his successor. This step was taken probably in the year 667, and though at the time unsuccessful, for Wighard and nearly all his companions died of pestilence soon after their arrival in Rome, it led to important results.
Towards the end of his reign Oswy suffered from declining health. Like so many other kings and ecclesiastics of Anglo-Saxon stock, he desired to go to Rome and, if it might be, end his days there, and he would fain have had Wilfrid, now a consecrated bishop, as guide of his journey. With this view he offered large moneys to the young ecclesiastic--the very offer seems to show the difference between Wilfrid’s character and Aidan’s--but apparently the disease made too rapid progress for the fulfilment of his design. The journey to Rome had to be abandoned; Oswy died on February 15, 671,[76] and Egfrid his son, son of Eanfled and grandson of Edwin of Deira, reigned in his stead.
Chapter XII
KING EGFRID AND THREE GREAT CHURCHMEN: WILFRID THEODORE, CUTHBERT.
The purely political events of the reign of Egfrid, as far as we know them, are soon told. Coming to the throne, as we have seen, in the year 671, he reigned for fourteen years. At the very beginning of his reign he gained (says Wilfrid’s biographer) a great victory over “the bestial hordes of the Picts who, chafing at their subjection to the Saxons and hoping to throw off the yoke of servitude,” mustered “like a swarm of ants under the leadership of an audacious chieftain named Bernhaeth, but were attacked by Egfrid at the head of his cavalry and utterly routed. So great was the slaughter that two rivers were filled with the corpses of the slain, and the victorious Northumbrians passed dry-shod over them in pursuit of the foe.” About four years later, apparently, Egfrid fought Wulfhere, King of the Mercians, defeated him and put him to flight, and thus won back that debatable land, the province of Lindsey. In 679 he fought a great battle on the banks of the Trent with Ethelred, Wulfhere’s brother and successor, who had married his sister Osthryd. The victory in this battle perhaps remained doubtful, but it brought sore distress in its train, for in it fell Egfrid’s brother Alfwin, under-king of Deira, a youth eighteen years of age, who was, we are told, “much beloved by both provinces”. It seemed as though this calamity would cause the flame of war to burn more fiercely than ever between the Northumbrian and the Mercian kings, but the Archbishop Theodore interposed his peaceful counsels. The amount of wergeld to be paid as compensation for the death of Alfwin was arranged by him. Lindsey was probably handed back to Mercia, and a treaty of peace, which remained unbroken for many years, was concluded between the two kingdoms.
In the year 684, against the advice of St. Cuthbert and all his best counsellors, King Egfrid, for reasons which we can only conjecture, sent an army to Ireland and “miserably wasted that harmless nation which hath ever been most friendly to the nation of the English; so that not even churches and monasteries were spared by the hostile band”. The Irish defended themselves to the best of their ability, but had at last to take refuge in curses and prayers to heaven for vengeance, the answer to which, in the opinion of the English historian, was not long in coming. For in the next year Egfrid, again refusing to listen to Cuthbert’s counsels, rashly ventured on an expedition against the Picts dwelling north of the Firth of Forth. The enemy, feigning flight, drew him into the recesses of the mountainous country, then turned and fell upon him, cutting the greater part of his army to pieces and slaying the king himself. The scene of this battle, which was fought on May 20th, 685, is not mentioned by Bede, but is given by other authorities as Nechtansmere or Nechtan’s Fort (Dûin Nechtan), and is identified with Dunnichen, about five miles east of Forfar.
By the battle of Nechtansmere Northumbria’s fair prospects of permanently holding the hegemony of the English states were for ever destroyed. “From that time,” says Bede, “the hopes and the manhood of the Anglian [Northumbrian] kingdom began to dissolve and to fall into ruin. For the Picts recovered the lands once possessed by them, which the Angles had held; also the Scots [men of Dalriada] who were in Britain, and a considerable part of the Britons recovered their freedom. Many of the English nation were slain with the sword, or bound to slavery or else escaped by flight from the land of the Picts.” Among the latter was Trumwine, the Northumbrian Bishop of Abercorn on the Forth, who fled from his see and had to beg for an asylum for himself and his followers from the monks of Whitby. Apparently the result of this battle was the loss by Northumbria of all the territory north of the Cheviots and the Solway as well as of the southern part of the kingdom of Strathclyde. The Northumbrian kingdom survived indeed for some centuries and even recovered for a short time some part of its lost territories, but it survived for the most part in a maimed and enfeebled condition like the Athenian state after the battle of Aegospotami. The prestige of the kingdom was gone; no more did any great Bretwalda issue his commands to subject princes from his rock-built palace at Bamburgh; and soon anarchy and intestine feuds completed the ruin which had been begun on the fatal day of Nechtansmere.
Such, as has been here indicated, is the short and disastrous political history of Egfrid’s reign; but to understand its true significance we must devote some attention to the biography of three great churchmen whose lives were closely intertwined with that of the Northumbrian king. They are:--
Wilfrid, who lived from 634 to 709; Theodore, who lived from 602 to 690; and Cuthbert, who lived from 630 to 687.
After Bishop Colman, disheartened by the defeat of his party in the synod of Whitby, had left Northumbria and returned to Iona, an Irishman named Tuda, an advocate for the Roman Easter, was consecrated as his successor, but, as has been said, died almost immediately afterwards, a victim to the plague which was ravaging England. On his death there was a discussion between the Northumbrian kings and the Wise Men of the kingdoms who should be elected to the vacant see. The choice naturally fell on Wilfrid, the champion of the Roman cause, young, noble and victorious. At the same time it seems to have been generally agreed that the seat of the episcopate should be removed from sea-girdled Lindisfarne, too full perhaps of the memories of Iona, to York, the capital of Deira, the city whose walls and palaces, even in their ruin, testified to the greatness of that Rome with whom Northumbria was now entering into such full and perfect fellowship. Objecting, however, that it was difficult to find in Britain bishops to perform the act of consecration, who were not more or less tainted with what he called the heresy of the Quarto-decimans, Wilfrid begged that he might be sent to Gaul to receive consecration there from bishops in undoubted communion with the Roman see. The kings consented: a ship, a retinue of attendants and a large store of money were placed at Wilfrid’s disposal that so the new bishop (whose preference through life was always strongly marked for the gorgeous and the stately) “might arrive in very honourable style in the region of Gaul”. The journey was successfully performed: a great assembly of twelve bishops was convened at Compiègne (664); among them Agilbert, late bishop of Dorchester, now of Paris, Wilfrid’s ally at the Whitby synod, doubtless now rejoicing at finding himself once more among men to whom his speech was not strange. These men received Wilfrid in the presence of all the people with demonstrations of high honour: they made him sit on a golden chair which was then, according to their usual custom, lifted on high and borne by the hands of bishops alone into the oratory, while hymns and canticles sounded through the choir.
Were the stately ceremonies and the well-furnished episcopal dwellings of Merovingian Gaul too attractive to the æsthetic soul of Wilfrid, and was he loth to return to the rude wooden churches and the rough untrained psalmody of his fatherland? This can only be conjectured, but it seems certain that he committed one of the great errors of his life by lingering too long, certainly for more than a year, in Gaul, instead of returning at once to Northumbria and there beginning his episcopal career. At last, in the year 666, he set sail for England, accompanied, says his biographer, by 120 armed retainers besides his clerical followers. The clergy sang loud their psalms, to cheer the arms of the rowers, but in the midst of their psalmody a mighty tempest arose and drove them on the coast of Sussex. The inhabitants, still heathen and barbarous, flocked to the stranded vessel and began to strip it of its treasures and to divide its passengers among them as their slaves. Wilfrid offered them money and spoke words of peace and conciliation, but the natives proudly answered, “All is ours that the sea throws up on the shore”. Meanwhile, a priest of the Saxon idolatry, standing on a high mound near the shore, ceased not to curse the Christian strangers and sought by his magic arts to render vain their efforts for deliverance. At last one of Wilfrid’s companions flung a stone--“a stone,” says his biographer, “blessed by all the people of God”--which hit the high priest on the head and wounded him to the death. His fall discouraged the South Saxons; the 120 soldiers fought bravely with the much larger forces of their foes; Wilfrid and his clergy prayed like Moses, Aaron and Hur upon the mountain; the Saxons were thrice repulsed, and at length victory, cheaply earned by the loss of five of Wilfrid’s followers, crowned the exertions and the prayers of the Northumbrians. A miraculously early tide floated the vessel off the shore and she reached Sandwich without further misadventure.
But when at last Wilfrid reached his diocese, he found unpleasant tidings awaiting him there. Weary of his long delay, King Oswy had appointed Bishop Ceadda (famous in English hagiology as St. Chad) to the bishopric of York. The act was certainly irregular, and Wilfrid had good cause to complain, but with more meekness than might have been looked for, he accepted the rebuff and retired to his dearly loved monastery of Ripon, a place which more than all others, except perhaps Hexham, was enriched by his labours and preserves his memory. Moreover, at the request of Wulfhere of Mercia and Egbert of Kent he undertook some volunteer episcopal work in those two kingdoms, travelling about with his band of singers, masons, and teachers of every kind of art, and everywhere founding monasteries or reforming them according to the strict rule of St. Benedict which he had minutely studied at Canterbury.
After three years this parenthesis in Wilfrid’s life came to an end, owing to the intervention of the new archbishop, Theodore, to whose history we now turn. We have seen that the Kings of Northumbria and Kent, taking counsel together after the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, sent Wighard to Rome as the bearer of their request that he might be consecrated archbishop, and that after their arrival in Rome Wighard and nearly all of his companions fell victims to the pestilence then raging in the Eternal City. Thereupon the Pope, Vitalian, whose courage and skill had already been displayed on the occasion of the unwelcome visit of the Emperor Constans to Rome, deliberated anxiously with his council on the question whom he should send as archbishop to Canterbury in place of the dead Englishman. After some hesitation and two refusals of the dignity, his choice fell upon Theodore, a learned Greek monk, who was at that time living in Rome and who had possibly come over to Italy in the train of the Emperor Constans. Theodore, who was, like the apostle Paul, a native of Tarsus in Cilicia, was now sixty-six years of age, and dreaded not so much the duties of the office as the hardships of the long journey to a remote and chilly island. However, the abbot, Hadrian, an African, who had himself refused the offered dignity and had recommended Theodore to the Pope, volunteered to accompany his friend, having already twice made the journey through Gaul; and Vitalian, who seems to have entertained some groundless fear as to the perfect orthodoxy of this Greek monk on the great question of the Monothelete controversy, gladly consented to this arrangement. But however free Theodore might be from Greek errors of doctrine, the fashion of his tonsure, which professed to be after the example of St. Paul, and which consisted in the shaving of the whole head, declared but too plainly to the world his Greek origin. He had therefore, after being ordained sub-deacon, to wait four months till his hair had grown sufficiently to enable him to receive the Roman tonsure, which made a crown of baldness on the top of the head. He was then consecrated archbishop by Vitalian, and set forth on May 27, 668, with his friend Hadrian for his distant diocese. His journey through Gaul seems to have been performed in a very leisurely manner, and we are expressly told that he tarried for a long time with Agilbert, by whom he was cordially received, and with whom he doubtless had much conversation concerning affairs on the other side of the channel. Meanwhile Egbert, King of Kent, being informed of the events which had happened at Rome, sent his “prefect” Radfrid to escort Theodore into his kingdom. But notwithstanding this special embassy, we are told--and the information throws a curious light on the European politics of the time--that Ebroin, the all-powerful mayor of the palace, would not permit Hadrian to accompany his friend, because he suspected that he was the bearer of some message from the Emperor to the kings of Britain, which might be adverse to the interests of the Frankish kingdom. It is with some surprise that we learn that a statesman of the seventh century contemplated the possibility of a combination of England and Constantinople against France. After a time Ebroin, having satisfied himself that no secret embassy such as he feared had ever formed part of Hadrian’s instructions, permitted him to follow Theodore, by whom he was made abbot of the great monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul at Canterbury, the Westminster Abbey of the Kentish kingdom.
Theodore of Tarsus arrived at Canterbury and was enthroned there on May 27, 669, thus commencing a memorable career, which lasted for more than twenty-one years. “Soon,” says Bede, “having traversed the whole island wherever the tribes of the English abode, and being heartily welcomed and listened to by all, he spread abroad the right way of living and the canonical rule for the celebration of Easter; Hadrian everywhere appearing as his companion and helper. For he was the first of the archbishops to whom the whole Church of the English agreed to give the hand of fellowship.” We see at once how great a step towards national unity, at least as far as the English people was concerned, was taken under the guidance of this Oriental stranger, who came from under the shadow of Mount Taurus. Unfortunately there is no evidence that he did anything to break down the middle wall of partition which the arrogance of Augustine had raised between the English and the Welsh Churches; while, to the yet unreconciled Celts of Ireland and the Hebrides his very appointment was in the nature of a challenge.
Bede proceeds to describe to us how Theodore’s copious stores of learning, both sacred and secular, were made available for the people. He tells us of the multitude of disciples who flocked to his daily lectures and those of his friend Hadrian; of the knowledge “of the metrical art, of astronomy and of ecclesiastical arithmetic,” which, along with the sacred Scriptures, they imparted to their hearers. “A proof hereof is,” says he, “that to this day there survive some of their disciples, who know the Latin and Greek tongues as well as that wherein they were born. Nor in fact were there ever happier times since the days when the English first landed in Britain, since now, under the leadership of most valiant and Christian kings, they were a terror to all the barbarous nations; the desires of men were strongly directed towards the new-found joys of the heavenly kingdom; and all who desired to be instructed in the sacred Scriptures had teachers near at hand, who could impart to them that knowledge.” There can be no doubt that Theodore possessed a genius for organisation such as had not been displayed by Augustine or any of the subsequent prelates, and that to him more than to any other single person is due the structure of the Anglo-Saxon Church, such as it remained till the Norman conquest. One change which he perceived to be necessary for the good of the Church, but which also inevitably tended towards the augmentation of his own power, was an increase in the number of bishoprics. Hitherto the tendency had been to have one bishopric only for each of the English kingdoms, an arrangement quite unlike that which had generally prevailed throughout the Roman empire, in some parts of which almost every town that was above the rank of a village had its own episcopal ruler. Such great unwieldy bishoprics as Northumbria, Mercia or Wessex, were not likely to be administered efficiently by a single bishop, while, on the other hand, their very magnitude suggested dangerous thoughts of rivalry with a primate whose immediate sway extended only over a part of Kent. Thus Theodore was impelled by every motive, public and private, to strive to break up the existing bishoprics into smaller portions. In that process the wise but masterful old man certainly did not show himself to any undue extent a respecter of persons.
One of the first cases in which Theodore had to exert his archiepiscopal authority was that of the bishopric of York. However aggrieved both king and people might have been by Wilfrid’s long-delayed return, there was no doubt that the intrusion of another bishop into a see already filled was entirely contrary to the canons; and, moreover, from the strict Roman point of view Ceadda’s consecration to the episcopate was not safe from attack, inasmuch as two “Quarto-deciman” bishops had taken part therein. When all these various objections were stated by Theodore to Ceadda, the simple-minded and unambitious old man at once declared his willingness at Theodore’s call to resign a dignity of which he had never deemed himself worthy. “No: not the episcopate,” was Theodore’s answer. “To that I will reordain you with all due formalities; but stand aside for the present from this see, which of right belongs to Wilfrid.” Thus Wilfrid, after three years of suspension, was once again bishop of the great diocese of York, extending from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, or even beyond. For Ceadda meanwhile a place was quickly found, the scarcely less important bishopric of Mercia; and Theodore’s regard for the saintly old man was shown by ordering him no longer to perform his long episcopal journeys on foot, but to ride through his diocese. When Ceadda hesitated, mindful of his beloved Aidan’s example, Theodore insisted, possibly himself provided him with a steed, at any rate with his own archiepiscopal hands lifted him into the saddle. Ceadda’s tenure of the Mercian episcopate was short, as he fell a victim to the plague in 672. He died, however, not only in the odour of sanctity, but, what is better, surrounded by the unfeigned love of his monastic brethren, and able to speak even of the Angel of the Pestilence as “that lovable guest who hath been wont of late to visit our brotherhood”.
All the ecclesiastical events which have been described in this chapter, save the last, took place in the reign of Oswy. In the year 671, as we have seen, a new monarch, Egfrid, ascended the Northumbrian throne. He had already been for some years the nominal husband of one of the saintly members of the East Anglian family, Etheldreda, a daughter of King Anna, but she, though Egfrid was her second husband, was at heart a devoted nun and insisted through life on keeping her virginity unstained. Here was already cause for trouble in the Northumbrian palace, trouble which was aggravated by the interference of Wilfrid, who, in defiance of apostolic precept and the Church’s law, made himself the champion of the cause of the disobedient wife, and at last (probably in the first or second year of Egfrid’s reign) with the hardly won consent of her husband arrayed her in the veil of a “sanctimonialis femina”. She retired first to the monastery of Coldingham, then ruled by Ebba, the aunt of Egfrid. After a year’s residence therein she became abbess of the great convent which she had herself founded in the Isle of Ely on lands devised to her by her first husband. There, after bearing rule for seven years, she died. The signal triumph of religious zeal over worldly ambition and luxury which her life displayed was celebrated in enthusiastic and acrostic verse by her admirer Bede. She was undoubtedly one of the most popular saints of the Anglo-Saxon epoch, and her name in the abbreviated form of Audrey still possesses a certain attraction for Englishmen.
The place which Etheldreda had vacated by the side of Egfrid was at once filled by a second wife named Ermenburga, who was persistently hostile to Wilfrid, and is accordingly likened to Jezebel by his enthusiastic biographer. There was, however, much in Wilfrid’s position at this, the most glorious period of his career, which might well rouse the jealousy of the secular rulers of the nation. Between 671 and 678 he was probably the foremost man in all Northumbria. He built great basilicas, the marvels of the age, at Hexham[77] and at Ripon.[78] At the dedication of the basilica at Ripon, Wilfrid stood before the altar, which was draped in purple and marvellously enriched with gold and silver, and there rehearsed, in the presence of the Northumbrian kings, the great gifts of landed property which the royal house had bestowed upon the Church, and also enumerated the places which had belonged in old time to the British Church and to which, though then desolate, it was evident that the English Church meant to assert her claim. When his sermon was ended a great feast was spread, to which the kings and all their followers were invited, and which lasted amid great rejoicings for three days and nights.
Of Wilfrid’s wonderful churches no trace now remains above ground. We are told that the church of Hexham was “supported by various columns” (perhaps taken from Roman temples) “and many porches, adorned with walls of wondrous length and height, and with variously winding passages, leading now up, now down, by stately staircases”. Both at Ripon and Hexham the crypt “carried deep down into the earth with marvellously smoothed stones” still remains; and at Hexham inscriptions, bas-reliefs and the shape of the stones employed show us all too plainly that the Roman camps along the line of the wall were the quarry from whence Wilfrid’s marvellously smoothed stones were obtained. But the great bishop was not giving all his time to his architectural labours. He rode from end to end of his diocese, ordaining priests and deacons in great numbers, and attracting to himself the love and devotion of the powerful abbots and abbesses, who very generally, either by present transfer or by testamentary disposition, arranged that he should become lord of the lands of their monasteries. Many Anglian nobles also sent their sons to be brought up in the bishop’s house, in order that they might either by his introduction enter the life of religion, or if they preferred the profession of arms, might by him be recommended to the king. In everything that Wilfrid touched the same note of sumptuous magnificence might be discerned. Thus, on the day of the dedication of the church at Ripon, he presented to it “the four illuminated Gospels traced in purest gold on purple parchment, which he had caused to be transcribed for the welfare of his soul, also a bookcase for these books, all made of the purest gold and adorned with the most precious jewels”. But all this pomp and splendour (though coupled with personal abstinence and the practice of monastic austerities) was rearing up for Wilfrid a host of lifelong enemies; at their head Queen Ermenburga, who ceased not to remind her husband of “all the worldly pomp of Bishop Wilfrid, his riches, the multitude of his abbeys, the grandeur of his buildings, and the numberless host of his followers adorned with royal raiment and equipped with arms”.
The jealousy which the royal pair felt at the greatness of the Bishop of York was powerfully aided by their alliance with Archbishop Theodore. For the formation of this alliance it is quite unnecessary to accept the biographer’s story of bribes out of ecclesiastical property offered by the king and accepted by the archbishop. On the contrary, it might almost have been foretold by any one who was acquainted with the two men, Wilfrid and Theodore, that they must necessarily sooner or later come into collision. They were both men of great intellectual stature, both devoted to the Roman obedience and intent on bringing the English Church fully into that obedience, but they would do it in different ways. Theodore, as Metropolitan of the whole land, would enforce Church order, subdivide the unwieldy dioceses, and make his strong hand felt by every bishop and abbot in every corner of the English kingdoms. Wilfrid had no thought of resigning any part of his power over his vast diocese, in which he was virtually independent. Nay more, faint as are the traces of such a scheme in history, it is difficult not to suppose that Wilfrid was cognisant of Gregory’s original plan for the establishment of two independent archbishoprics in Britain, one at London and the other at York, and hoped to convert--as was actually done half a century later--his bishopric into an archbishopric. Such an arrangement would be far more in accordance with ecclesiastical precedent throughout the Roman empire than that which actually prevailed, since the general usage had been to place the Metropolitan in the chief city of the province. All the venerable associations which now cluster round the name of Canterbury should not cause us to forget the fact that it is merely owing to a series of accidents (foremost among them the relapse of the East Saxons into idolatry) that the chief pastor of the English Church now bears the title of Archbishop of Canterbury. Either Londinium or Eburacum, pre-eminently the latter, had better right to give an archbishop to England than the little insignificant city of Durovernis.
Intent on his schemes of Church reform and full of the paramount authority symbolised by his archiepiscopal pallium, Theodore visited Northumbria and found there in the royal palace a ready acquiescence in his grand project for the division of the diocese. He at once, in Wilfrid’s absence, ordained three new bishops who were to divide among themselves a large part of his diocese, leaving him probably the city of York and a certain part of Deira as his portion.[79] It was a strong measure to adopt, certainly, not courteous nor perhaps canonically correct in the absence of the bishop whose diocese was thus invaded; and it is no wonder that Wilfrid sought an interview with the king and archbishop, and demanded by what right they, without any cause of offence alleged against him, thus defrauded him in robber-fashion of property given him by the king for God’s service. They answered, says his biographer, in the presence of all the people with the memorable words: “No accusation is made against thee of having done injury to any man, but the decision which we have come to in thy case we will not change”. Hereat Wilfrid signified his intention of appealing to Rome (678) against this unjust act of spoliation. The flatterers who surrounded the king laughed aloud at his words, but he turned round and rebuked them sternly, saying: “You laugh now, evidently rejoicing at my condemnation, but on the anniversary of this day bitterly shall ye weep to your own confusion”. And in fact men noted with awe that it was on the exact anniversary of Wilfrid’s interview with the king that the body of the beloved under-king, Alfwin, was brought back to York from the battlefield on the banks of the Trent, and was received by all the people with tears and rent garments and passionate lamentations.
And now began that long duel between prelate and king, with visits to Rome, confiscations, imprisonments, reconciliations, repentances, which lasted with some intermissions and some changes in the person of the royal disputant, for nearly thirty years, and which in some of its vicissitudes reminds us of the contention between Henry Plantagenet and Thomas Becket. It is a history with much intrinsic interest, and rendered additionally interesting to us by the fact that the Life of Wilfrid by Eddius, in which it is recorded, was written some years before the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, and is probably the earliest extant piece of Latin writing that has proceeded from an Anglo-Saxon pen. Skilfully escaping from the toils of his enemies (whose emissaries by a laughable mistake attacked and plundered a harmless bishop named Winfrid instead of him), Wilfrid landed in Friesland, made friends with the king of the Frisians, and began that career of missionary enterprise in Germany which was continued by his disciple, Willibrord, and in later years by the West Saxon, Boniface, with vast results on European history. He then travelled through Gaul, visiting King Dagobert II., whom, when an exile in Ireland, he had sped on his way to France, and thus had helped to recover his father’s throne. Dagobert’s gratitude now showed itself by assisting Wilfrid on his journey to Rome. In Italy he was befriended in a similar way by the Lombard King Perctarit, who had himself once led the life of a hunted fugitive, and refused to surrender him to his foes. Arriving at Rome, where he spent the winter of 679–80, he laid his complaint before the recently consecrated Pope, Agatho the Sicilian, and claimed his protection. A council was held in the Lateran basilica, where Theodore’s representative, a monk named Coenred, stated the case for Canterbury. Wilfrid’s petition was read, setting forth that he did not refuse to consent to the division of his bishopric, but claiming that he should be consulted as to the persons intruded upon him as colleagues; and the synod having listened to the representations of “the most holy Archbishop Theodore” and “the God-beloved Bishop Wilfrid” decided in favour of the latter.
Armed with this papal decree, and not doubting of the triumph which it would procure for him, Wilfrid presented himself at the Northumbrian court, but was at once accused of having obtained the decree by bribery, thrown into prison and despoiled of his personal possessions. One of the most precious of these, a reliquary, was appropriated by Ermenburga to her own use, and always carried about by her, whether she abode in her bedchamber or rode abroad in her chariot. Wilfrid’s first place of imprisonment was the royal city of Bromnis.[80] On the refusal of the governor, whose wife had fallen dangerously ill, to act any longer as jailer of so holy a man, Egfrid sent him to another of his cities named Dynbaer (Dunbar), another proof, if any were needed, how far northward at this time stretched the kingdom of Northumbria. At last after he had undergone a rigorous imprisonment for nine months, the dangerous illness of Ermenburga (which seemed to take the form of demoniac possession), and the entreaties and warnings of the saintly Ebba, brought about Wilfrid’s liberation from the dungeon, but not his restoration to his bishopric. He went forth as an exile into Mercia, where he was favourably entertained by a nephew of King Ethelred and received land for the foundation of a monastery. But as Ethelred was Egfrid’s brother-in-law, he soon ordered Wilfrid to quit his kingdom. He turned his steps to Wessex and there for a little space had rest, but soon was expelled thence also, King Centwine having married Ermenburga’s sister. It is easy to see how hard the lot of a fugitive from one of the English courts might be made by the matrimonial alliances that were so frequent between them.
Thus expelled from Christian England the hunted fugitive turned his thoughts to the land of the South Saxons: “a heathen province of our race” (says the biographer) “which for the multitude of its rocks and the density of its woods remained impregnable by all the other provinces”. Here Ethelwalh, himself a Christian, as we have seen,[81] was reigning over a still heathen people, and to him Wilfrid confided the whole story of his wrongs. The king made with him a covenant of peace so strong that, as he declared, no terror of the sword of any hostile warrior and no gifts however costly should avail to move him from the troth then plighted. In this inaccessible corner of the land which we now name Sussex, Wilfrid remained for five years, preaching the story of the creation of the world, its redemption, the day of judgment, the rewards and punishments to come, with such eloquence and fervour that he achieved the conversion of the entire people, thus ending in the year 686 the long spiritual campaign for the conversion of England which was begun in 597 by the arrival of Augustine. King Ethelwalh gave him his own villa of Selsey for his episcopal seat, adding to it a gift of land amounting to eighty-seven hides.
During Wilfrid’s sojourn in Sussex his unreconciled enemy King Egfrid died. The story of his death brings us into close relation with our third great churchman, Cuthbert, to whose life we now turn. Born somewhere about 630 in the region of the Lammermoor Hills, the young Cuthbert, when he was tending sheep by the River Leader, saw one night in a vision angels carrying a holy soul into heaven. He found afterwards that it was on the same night, August 31, 651, that the venerable saint, Aidan, had died. He waited not, however, for this confirmation of his faith, but at once transferred the sheep to their owners and descended into the valley of the Tweed to seek admission into the recently founded monastery of Melrose. After some years’ residence there, he went in the train of the Abbot Eata to Ripon; but on the arrival of Wilfrid at that place fresh from Rome, and with a grant from King Alchfrid in his hand, the whole party of Celtic-trained monks, Cuthbert among them, were forced to leave the pleasant valley of the Nidd and return to Melrose on the Tweed. There, however, ended his antagonism to the new teaching. Whether actually present or not at the synod of Whitby, he certainly accepted its decisions, and after some years was sent by his friend, Eata, to govern as prior the monastery at Lindisfarne. It was not altogether an easy task to rule the monks on Holy Island after the revolution which the decrees of the synod had caused, but more by gentleness than by sternness Cuthbert succeeded in enforcing discipline, all the more readily perhaps as in food, in vigils, in dress, he set an example of rigorous austerity. But after all, neither as prior nor afterwards as bishop did he ever care for the possession of power. In character he much more closely resembled Aidan than either Theodore or Wilfrid. He loved to be alone with Nature and with God, and was ever moving about among the country folk and “stirring them up” by his conversation rather than by set sermons “to seek after the heavenly crown”. There is still shown in a cleft of the basaltic range of low hills on the mainland overlooking the winding shore of Holy Island a cave, affording bare shelter from the rain and none from the wind, where the saint is said to have passed some months of his life. “Cuddy’s Hole” is to this day the name given to it by the neighbouring farmers.
Often, too, he seems to have retired to the little island which still bears his name and which lies at a short distance from the ruined abbey on Holy Island, being like Lindisfarne itself island or peninsula according to the state of the tide. There, while apparently still holding the office of prior, he “began to learn the rudiments of a solitary life,” and when his education was completed and his spirit braced for the great renunciation, he gave up his office of prior (676) and withdrew to the more utter seclusion which was afforded by one of the little group of Farne Islands, about five miles from Holy Island and two or three miles from the rock of Bamburgh. These rocky islets, some thirty or forty in number, are now furnished with two lighthouses; and the memory of Grace Darling, the courageous daughter of an old lighthouse keeper, rivals but does not eclipse the fame of St. Cuthbert. Countless flocks of sea-birds make these rocks their breeding place; and there are seen the eider ducks, bold in their gentleness, which calmly hatch their young within a few feet of the intruding wayfarer, and whose tameness, attributed to the miraculous working of the saint, has procured for them the name of “Saint Cuthbert’s Chickens”. Was it the loneliness of these weather-beaten rocks or the sad cry of the sea-birds that procured for them the evil reputation of being “unfit for human habitation by reason of the number of malign spirits by whom they were haunted”? Howsoever that may be, it is admitted that at the approach of the man of God the evil spirits departed and the place at his prayer became completely habitable. Here then Cuthbert built for himself a little round cell made of large unwrought stones and turf, and so constructed that he could see from it nothing of earth or sea, but was forced to keep his eyes ever fixed on the heaven above him. Here, after dismissing the few brethren who had helped him in his labours, Cuthbert lived absolutely alone for eight years, enjoying the heavenly visions, but also wrestling with the awful spiritual terrors, which have ever been the portion of the anchorite.
At length in 684, Tunberct, Bishop of Hexham, one of Theodore’s intruding prelates, having been for some reason deposed from his see, a synod was held at “Twyford” on the Alne (probably the modern Alnmouth) to consider the question of the appointment of his successor. In this synod, at which Theodore himself presided, the name of Cuthbert was suggested and received with unanimous approval. It was, however, no easy matter to induce the anchorite thus to return to the common abodes of men. At last a deputation of nobles and ecclesiastics, headed by King Egfrid himself and by Trumwine, Bishop of Pictland, accomplished the difficult task, and on March 26, 685, Cuthbert received at York the episcopal charge at the hands of Theodore and six other bishops. He still, however, remained so far faithful to the wind-swept shores of the North Sea that he chose Holy Island for his episcopal seat, persuading his old friend Eata to migrate from thence to the busier diocese of Hexham.
It must have been during the long negotiations which preceded the consecration of St. Cuthbert that he pressed upon the unwilling king his vain dissuasions against the barbarous Irish expedition. Equally vain, as we have seen, was his attempt to dissuade Egfrid from that disastrous expedition against the Picts, which was undertaken in the very first months of Cuthbert’s episcopate. At the time of Egfrid’s invasion of Scotland Cuthbert was abiding at the Roman city of Luguvallium (Carlisle), which had been bestowed upon him by the king at his consecration. There also was dwelling the queen, Ermenburga, Wilfrid’s enemy, who had gone for shelter during this warlike time to a convent ruled by her sister. While Cuthbert was going round the walls of the city on the afternoon of Saturday, May 20, escorted by the king’s reeve, Paga, and by a multitude of the citizens, he suddenly stood still, leaning on his staff. With downcast face he gazed upon the ground, then looked up at the darkening sky and said with a deep groan: “Perhaps even now the conflict is decided”. He would not more plainly impart his fears, even to his own clerical companions, but hastening to the convent warned the queen to be ready to depart on the Monday for York “lest haply the king should have fallen”. On Sunday he preached a sermon which hinted at some coming trouble. On Monday came the tidings of the fatal field of Nechtansmere, fought on the very day and hour when Cuthbert had his telepathic warning of the disaster.
Egfrid’s widow, Ermenburga, according to her enemy Eddius, “after the slaughter of the king, from a she-wolf became one of God’s lambs and was changed into a perfect abbess and a most excellent mother of her [monastic] family”. Apparently there was no issue of her marriage with Egfrid, who was succeeded by his half-brother or nephew Aldfrid, either a son or grandson of King Oswy. He had been for some years an exile in Ireland and the Hebrides, and had acquired a considerable store of learning in the Celtic monasteries, so that he was generally known as Aldfrid the Learned. The twenty years’ reign of Aldfrid (685–705) was marked by few striking events. Northumbria, as we have seen, was now shorn of her greatness and was no longer the leading power in Britain. It was probably as much as Aldfrid could do to preserve his weakened and diminished kingdom from conquest by its Pictish and Mercian neighbours. It will suffice briefly to indicate the further fortunes of the three great Churchmen whose lives had been of late so closely intertwined with that of Egfrid.
The newly consecrated bishop Cuthbert did not long sustain the weight of the uncongenial mitre. In 686 he made another journey to Carlisle, on which occasion he gave the nun’s veil to the widowed Ermenburga. Here also he received a visit from an old friend of his named Herbert, who like him led the life of an island-hermit but amid far different scenes from the stormy Farnes. Herbert dwelt on an island of “that very large lake from which the young waters of the Derwent issue forth”--in other words, on St. Herbert’s Isle in Derwent-water--and had been accustomed to pay a yearly visit to Cuthbert and to hear from him counsels concerning the life eternal. He now besought his friend, whose whole soul was filled with thoughts of his coming end, to pray that they might both die at the same time, a longing which was in fact fulfilled. Soon after Christmas Cuthbert returned to his lonely dwelling on the Farnes: at the end of February he was seized by his last illness. The monks of Holy Island prayed to be allowed to minister to him in his extreme weakness, but it was not till near the very end that he suffered them to enter his cell. In the morning of March 20, 687, after many faintly uttered words of advice and farewell, the great anchorite passed away. There was no English saint, till Thomas Becket was slain before the altar in Canterbury, who filled half as large a space in the memories of the English people, at any rate in the North of England, as Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. The strange migrations of his corpse in later centuries, the magnificence of its final resting-place, the wide domains and princely revenues of the Bishops of Durham, whose chief claim to lordship was derived from the fact that they were the guardians of his tomb--all these things fixed deep in the mind of the medieval Englishman the greatness and the glory of the shepherd of the Lammermoors. Eight centuries after his death we find the soldiers of “the bishopric” rejoicing over the fall of James IV. on the field of Flodden, and tracing therein the manifest workings of the anger of the saint, whom he had offended by the demolition of his castles at Ford and Norham.
We pass from the hermit to the archbishop. Of Theodore of Tarsus there is little more which need be related here save that soon after Egfrid’s death he became reconciled to Wilfrid; asked him to come to London to meet him, and (according to Eddius) made him a full apology for all the injustices which he had committed towards him, even expressing a desire that Wilfrid might succeed him in his archbishopric. He died on September 19, 690, in the eighty-eighth year of his age after an archiepiscopate of twenty-two years, and was laid to rest in the abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, along with many other primates and princes of Kent.
The long exiled Bishop Wilfrid was at last, soon after the death of Egfrid, permitted to return home and restored to some portion of his lost grandeur (686–87). The death of the hostile king, interpreted by Wilfrid’s partisans as the judgment of heaven on his despoiler, had probably something to do with this change of policy, to which also his reconciliation with the archbishop largely contributed. His restoration was not, however, by any means to all his old dignities, though he was once again in possession of his favourite abbeys of Hexham and Ripon. And even this restoration was only for a time. After five years of peace the eternal dispute broke out again on Wilfrid’s refusal to acknowledge the lawfulness of some of the acts of Theodore. He was banished from Northumbria and took refuge in Mercia, where he dwelt for ten years (692–702). Then came one more journey to Rome, undertaken by the brave old man in the sixty-ninth year of his age. His appeal succeeded, but, as before, the decree in his favour failed to change the purpose of the Northumbrian king. Aldfrid was still immutably fixed in his determination to modify nothing in that decision “which formerly the kings, my predecessors, and the archbishop with their councillors did form, and which afterwards we, with the archbishop sent us from the apostolic see and with almost all the [spiritual] rulers of our race in Britain, confirmed. That decision,” said he to Wilfrid’s messengers, “so long as I live I will never change for the writings which, as you say, you have received from the apostolic see.” Scarcely had this answer been returned when the Northumbrian king was stricken with mortal sickness, an event in which the partisans of Wilfrid not unnaturally thought that they could trace the vengeance of Heaven for his audacious contempt of the papal mandate. It was believed that on his death-bed he repented of his behaviour towards Wilfrid and expressed his intention of being reconciled with him in the event of his recovery, but he died in 705 after lying speechless for many days, and was unable to give effect to his intentions if such intentions ever existed.
On the death of Aldfrid a certain Eadulf, of whose relationship to the royal family nothing is known, usurped the throne. Aldfrid’s son Osred was a boy of eight years old, but the faithful friends of his father, headed by Berthfrid, who is described as “a noble next in dignity to the king,” gathered round him in the fortress-city of Bamburgh. To quote Berthfrid’s words, as related to us by Wilfrid’s biographer who, of course, views all events in relation to the fortunes of his hero: “When we were besieged in the city which is called Bebbanburg and everywhere girt round by the forces of the enemy, having only that narrow rock on which to dwell, we came to the conclusion amongst ourselves that if God would grant to our royal boy the kingdom of his father, we would promise God to fulfil those things which the apostolic authority had ordained concerning Bishop Wilfrid. No sooner had we made this vow than the hearts of our enemies were changed: with quickened steps they turned towards us swearing to be our friends; the doors were opened; we were freed from that narrow dwelling; our enemies fled and we recovered the kingdom.”
This is all the information that we possess concerning a domestic revolution which, probably on account of its extremely short duration, is unnoticed by Bede. It seems to be clear that during the two months of his usurped reign Eadulf absolutely refused to redress the grievances of Wilfrid, but that in the early months of Osred’s reign a great synod was held near the river Nidd in Yorkshire to settle finally the wearisome business. The boy-king presided: Bertwald of Canterbury was there with all the bishops and abbots in his obedience. There, too, was Elfleda, the daughter long ago vowed by Oswy to the service of God, now and for many years past sitting in the seat of the venerated Hilda as abbess of Whitby: “a most wise virgin,” says the biographer, “ever the best consoler and counsellor of the whole province”. She was a great friend of Cuthbert, and had probably at one time shared the general Northumbrian or, at least, Bernician dislike to the all-grasping Bishop of York; but the letter which the aged Theodore had written, almost from his death-bed, beseeching her to become reconciled to Wilfrid had perhaps changed her mind towards him, and she now strongly pressed his claims and vouched for the fact that her step-brother Aldfrid on his death-bed declared his intention of complying with all the demands made on his behalf by the apostolic see. The result of the deliberation which followed was that the king, his nobles and all the bishops swore to maintain peace and concord with Wilfrid, and on that same day gave him the kiss of peace and broke the bread of communion with him. At the same time the abbeys of Ripon and Hexham, with all their revenues, were restored to him, and the thirty years’ war was at an end. This result was after all a compromise, and, as has been well pointed out by Dr. Bright, a compromise less favourable to Wilfrid than that which had been made before. He had lost the bishopric of York and had to be content with the less important bishopric of Hexham, but he recovered possession of all his domains and monasteries in Northumbria and Mercia.
Wilfrid had now four years of peace at the end of his stormy life. Not long before his death he “invited two abbots and certain very faithful brethren, to the number of eight in all, to meet him at Ripon, and commanded the key-bearer to open his treasury, and to set forth in their sight all the gold and silver with the precious stones, and then ordered them to be divided into four parts according to his judgment”. He explained that it had been his intention to make yet another journey to Rome and offer one of these four portions at the shrines of the Virgin and the saints. Should death prevent him from carrying this design into effect, he charged them to send messengers to offer the gifts in his stead. Of the remaining portions one was to be given to the poor for the redemption of his soul; another was to be divided between the rulers of his two beloved abbeys Hexham and Ripon, “that they may be able by their gifts to win the friendship of kings and bishops”; the last was to be distributed among the friends and companions of his exile to whom he had not yet given landed possessions. From the minute account which the biographer gives of the whole scene, it seems probable that he was one of the six faithful brethren permitted to gaze on the opened treasury, and one of the companions of the exile who received a share in the bequest.
After some further arrangements about the future government of the abbey of Ripon, Wilfrid journeyed into Mercia, on an invitation from King Ceolred, reached the monastery of Oundle in Northamptonshire, and there, in 709, after a short sickness, ended his days, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. In the forty-six years of his episcopate he had dedicated churches and ordained bishops, priests and deacons past counting. His body was taken to Ripon and there interred with great solemnity. The abbots of his two chief monasteries believed that they had secured in the departed saint a heavenly intercessor of equal power with their apostolic patrons St. Peter and St. Andrew, and their faith was confirmed when, at a great meeting on the anniversary of his death, they beheld at night a white circle in the heavens reaching all round the sky and seeming to encompass the monastery of St. Peter at Ripon with its protecting glory.
The life of Wilfrid with all its strange vicissitudes of triumph and disgrace is confessedly one of the most difficult problems in early Anglo-Saxon history. The enthusiastic panegyric of Eddius, the conventional praise and strange reticence of Bede, leave us still greatly in the dark as to the real cause of the hostility of the leading men of Northumbria, both in Church and State, towards one who seemed made to be a victorious leader of men. The vast blanks in the history can now be supplied only by conjecture, and any such conjectural emendation would probably be unjust to one or other of the disputants, to Wilfrid, to Theodore or to Egfrid. Only this much may with confidence be asserted, that the dispute, bitter as it was, turned on no question of doctrine or of morals; hardly in the end on any question of Church government. It is the possession of the great monastic properties, both in Northumbria and Mercia, which seems to be the real bone of contention between Wilfrid and his foes, and when we read of the large possessions wherewith these were endowed, ten “families” to one monastery and thirty to another (domains probably equivalent to at least 1,200 and 3,400 acres), and when we see the well-filled treasury blazing with gold and jewels, which after all his reverses gladdens the aged eyes of Wilfrid at the close of his career, we are, perhaps, enabled to understand a little more clearly what was the unexpressed grievance in the mind of the Northumbrian kings and bishops against their greatest ecclesiastic. With justice he exclaimed again and again, “What are the crimes of which you accuse me?” They had, it would seem, no crimes to allege against him, but the king felt that the vast wealth which he had accumulated made him a dangerous subject, and the bishops thought that he had abused the great position which he had achieved by his victory at Whitby, to secure for himself an unfair share of the new riches of the Church. Whatever view may be taken of the struggle, the very fact of its existence and of the somewhat sordid interests at stake shows us how far we have already travelled in less than two generations from the days of Oswald and Aidan. The victory of the Roman Easter was not all pure gain to the churches of northern Britain.
XIII. THE LEGISLATION OF KING INE
We have now nearly reached the end of the seventh century of our era, and we may well take note of the fact that it was, not for England only, a century of great religious change. The world-famous Hegira of Mohammed happened in 622, when Edwin was reigning in Deira. Throughout the reigns of the great kings at Bamburgh the invincible armies of Islam were sweeping over Syria and Egypt, overthrowing the ancient kingdom of Persia and for seven long years laying siege, all-but successful siege, to Constantinople. It may be well for us children of the Saxon to be reminded that our profession of Christianity is not older than the Mussulman’s allegiance to the faith of the Prophet. Our ancestors were idolators at the same time as the ancestors of our Mohammedan fellow-subjects in the east; the same century saw both our own forefathers and theirs converted from polytheism to monotheism, from chaotic Nature-worships to “the religion of a book”.
A very noticeable figure in the south of England at the close of this century was Cadwalla, King of the West Saxons. The kingdom of Wessex had fallen after the death of Cenwalh in 672 into dire confusion and disorder. Cadwalla, who was descended in the fourth generation from the great fighter Ceawlin, was one of the many claimants for the throne. His first victories, however, were not won over any rival competitors for the West Saxon crown, but over his South Saxon neighbours. Between Wessex and Sussex there seems to have existed in these early centuries an enduring blood-feud. The enmity was not likely to be lessened by remembrance of the fact, already mentioned, that in 661 Wulfhere, King of Mercia, had wrested the Isle of Wight and part of Hampshire from the West Saxons and handed them over to his convert and godson, Ethelwalh of Sussex. Against Sussex, therefore, Cadwalla, “that most strenuous young man of the royal race of the Gewissas,” while still an exile, about 685, directed the arms of the followers whom he had gathered round him in the forests of Chiltern. He was at first successful, slaying King Ethelwalh and laying waste the land of Sussex with cruel and depopulating slaughter, but was repulsed by two ealdormen who acted as regents after the death of the king. Just at this time, however, Cadwalla seems to have made good his claim to the crown of Wessex, and with the forces of the whole West Saxon kingdom now at his back, he set himself to recover the lost provinces of Wight and the Meonwaras, and at the same time to extirpate the idolatry which still lingered in that conservative Jutish population. Herein he seems to have been abetted by the zealous Wilfrid, who notwithstanding his friendship for Ethelwalh was willing to work for the good of the Church with Ethelwalh’s destroyer, and who received from him as the reward of his co-operation one fourth of the 1,200 hides into which the Isle of Wight was divided.
King Cadwalla, though an apostle of Christianity, reflected, of course, some of the barbarism of his age. There were two lads of royal blood (brothers of the last king of Wight) who had escaped to the mainland, but whose hiding-place was unfortunately discovered. Cadwalla, who had been wounded in the wars and was resting for a time at a house not far distant, ordered that the youths should be slain; but a certain Cyniberct, abbot of the monastery of Redbridge, came to Cadwalla’s bedside and made earnest intercession, not for the lives of the hapless lads, but that before their execution “they might be imbued with the sacraments of the Christian faith”. The request was granted. The two young princes were converted and baptised, and when the executioner made his appearance “they joyfully submitted to the temporal death by which they doubted not that they should pass over into the everlasting life of the soul”.
The war of Wessex with Sussex continued and soon brought in Kent also, which came to the help of its southern neighbour. After two years’ ravaging of Kent, the king’s brother Mul, by some sudden turn of fortune, fell into the hands of the men of that land (687), and they in their rage and exasperation burned him and twelve of his followers alive, a savage deed, which was like to have made a truceless war between the West Saxons and the men of Kent. Strange to say, however, this work of revenge was not long engaged in by the brother of the victim. In the year 688, after little more than two years of bloody reign, Cadwalla, stricken with satiety or remorse, went on pilgrimage to Rome. He had two great desires: “to be baptised at the threshold of the apostles and to be speedily freed from the flesh that he might pass into eternal joy”. Both desires were granted. The devout Syrian Pope, Sergius I., baptised him by the name of Peter on April 10, 689, and on the 20th, while yet wearing the white robes of a catechumen, he died of Roman fever. He was buried in the great church of St. Peter, and a Latin epitaph in twelve elegiacs was carved over his tomb. The meteoric career of “the most strenuous Cadwalla” who reigns and ravages for two years and a half, and at thirty dies “in Christ’s garments” at Rome, and is buried at St. Peter’s, forms one of the strangest pages in Anglo-Saxon history.
Cadwalla’s successor, a remote kinsman named Ine, descended from Cerdic, but not from Ceawlin, reigned for thirty-seven years (688–726) over the West Saxons. In the sixth year of his kingship the blood-feud with Kent was ended by a treaty under which the men of Kent bound themselves to pay 30,000 coins of some kind (the denomination is not clearly stated) for the murder of Mul. The West Saxon king seems to have had but little difficulty in holding down Sussex, which before the end of the eighth century altogether disappears from the list of the kingdoms. He probably established some sort of protectorate over Essex, since (apparently about 693) he calls Erconwald, Bishop of London, “my bishop”. In 715 he fought with Ceolred, King of Mercia, at Wodensburh.[82] As the result of the battle is not stated we may, perhaps, infer that the victory was doubtful. The chief operations of the West Saxon king seem, however, to have been on his Western borders which were notably extended by him. In 710 he and his kinsman Nun, king of the South Saxons, fought against Geraint, king of the West Welshmen, and it was probably to mark and to secure the increase of territory thus won that Ine built the fortress of Taunton in the valley of the Tone.
On the other hand there were, as so often happened in the disorganised West Saxon house, troubles with the king’s own kinsfolk. In 721 it is said “Ine slew Cynewulf the Etheling”. In the next year, Ine’s own queen, Ethelburga, appears as the demolisher of the newly raised fortress of Taunton. Apparently, however, she was warring for, not against her husband, and we may, perhaps, safely connect this entry with those which immediately follow it: “Ealdbert went into banishment into Surrey and Sussex, and Ine fought with the South Saxons,” and (725) “Ine fought with the South Saxons and there slew Ealdbert the Etheling whom he had before expelled from his kingdom”. If we are not erroneously combining these scanty notices, Ealdbert an Etheling of the royal house rebelled against his kinsman, seized the new fort of Taunton, was besieged therein by the martial consort of Ine, and on the storming of that stronghold fled into Sussex, where, three years after, he was defeated and slain by the West Saxon king.
In 726, sated apparently with rule and strife and victory, the elderly Ine followed the example of his predecessor, resigned the crown to a kinsman--apparently a remote kinsman--named Ethelheard, and performed the great pilgrimage to Rome, “desiring in this life to wander round the neighbourhood of the holy places, that he might win a kinder reception from the holy ones in heaven”. According to William of Malmesbury[83] the king’s wavering and procrastinating temper was definitely turned towards the Roman pilgrimage by the exhortations of his wife Ethelburga who acted the following parable in order to give weight to her words. It happened upon a day that the king and his court left a certain tun in which they had been dwelling with a profusion of regal luxury. By Ethelburga’s orders the steward filled the rooms of the royal abode with rubbish, allowed cattle to wander through it, defiling its floors, and placed a sow which had just littered, in the royal couch. Persuading the king, on some pretext or other, to go back to the tun, she turned his natural surprise at the hideous change into an argument for relinquishing the world. “Where, lord husband, are now the pomps and delights of yesterday? Like a river hastening to the sea is all the glory of man. As hath been the delight of our life here so shall be our torments hereafter.” With these words and with the sight of the squalid habitation, she persuaded him at once to perform the great renunciation for which she had so long vainly laboured. The death of Ine was apparently not so sudden or so dramatic as that of his predecessor, but there can be no doubt that he died in Rome and never returned to his native land.
The especial interest, for us, of the reign of Ine lies in the fact that he was the first King of Wessex who published written laws for the guidance of his subjects. Till his time such legislative activity as existed among our ancestors had been confined to the kingdom of Kent, where it had evidently been called into being by the organising and civilising influence of the Roman ecclesiastics. “These are the dooms which Ethelbert the king gave forth in Augustine’s days”: so runs the title of the document which now stands first in the collection of Anglo-Saxon laws. This document is little more than a schedule of the fines to be paid for various offences committed. Though later legislators are a little less dry and curt in their utterances, the general character of their work is not greatly different. As with most of the barbarian codes the repression of crime and the redress of injuries is their first care. They say little about rights, much about wrongs. The rules which guided the devolution of property, and the various customs which made up “folkright” were, no doubt, deeply engraved on the minds and hearts of the people, and it is not from any formal enactment of a royal legislator, only from casual allusions to them, that we have to learn their nature and their history.
After the death of Ethelbert, law-making activity seems to have slumbered for two generations. Then about the year 680, Hlothere and Eadric, who were apparently joint kings of Kent, put forth a small collection of “dooms” adding some items to Ethelbert’s list of offences and penalties. Eadric’s son, Wihtred, in the year 696, issued another set of laws, dealing more with offences against morality and religion--with adultery, Sabbath-breaking, the worship of devils, the eating of flesh in Lent, and so forth. The strong ecclesiastical influence under which Wihtred’s laws were framed is evidenced by the preface which is to this effect: “When Wihtred the most gracious king of Kent was ruling, in the fifth year of his reign (696), ... the 6th day of October, in the place which is called Berkhamstead, there was gathered together for counsel an assembly of great men. There was Berwald, archbishop of the Britons, also Gybmund, bishop of Rochester: and every rank of the churches of the land spake in concord with the obedient people. Then did the great men with the consent of all men ‘find’ these dooms and added them to the law-customs of Kent, as is hereafter said and spoken.”
The expressions used in this and many similar prefaces in the collection of Anglo-Saxon laws indicate that which is probably incapable of definition, the sort of share which the leading men of Church and State had in the royal legislation. Laws are passed in the name and by the authority of the king, but he is no uncontrolled autocrat, and for any important change in the “law-customs” of the people, the great men of the realm must share the responsibility.
We may now turn from the rather obscure and elliptical “dooms” of the Kentish kings to the much fuller and more interesting laws of Ine of Wessex which seem to have been promulgated about 693, a year or two before those of Wihtred. Like the latter they were framed “with the counsel and consent of my two bishops, Hedde of Winchester and Erconwald of London, and of all mine ealdormen and the oldest witan of my people and also of a great assembly of the servants of God”. “My father Cenred” is also named among the royal advisers, thereby raising a difficult question as to Ine’s accession to the throne while his father was still living. The preface ends, “And let no ealdorman nor any of our subjects after this seek to turn aside any of these our dooms”.
As it is impossible to give here anything like a complete digest of the Anglo-Saxon laws, we may leave unnoticed the ordinances for the repression of crime--especially the crime of theft--which constitute the larger part of the document before us, and may confine our attention to those paragraphs which deal with the tenure of land and with the ranks and orders in the West Saxon state.
In all the earlier stages of a nation’s life, before the people have begun to flock into great cities, there is no subject of more vital importance than the relation of the Folk to the Land. In the seventh century in England this was doubtless governed chiefly by old unwritten customs which needed not to be formally enunciated because they were universally understood. Two precious sentences, however, in Ine’s laws give us a glimpse of the agricultural life of that day, and, combined with information drawn from other sources, enable us in some measure to reconstruct the rural community as it then existed. “A ceorl’s homestead[84] should be fenced in, winter and summer. If he be unfenced and his neighbour’s beast rush in by the opening which he has left, he shall receive nothing on account of [the damage done by] that beast, but must drive it out and bear the loss” (§ 40). “If ceorls have a common meadow[85] or other divided land[86] to fence, and some have fenced their portion, others not, and [stray beasts[87]] eat their common arable or pasture, then those who are responsible for the opening shall pay the others who have fenced their portion for the injury that is done and take such compensation as is due from the [owners of the intruding] cattle” (§ 42).
This law shows clearly that we are here in presence of an institution, the existence of which is proved by sentences of Tacitus, by charters of Anglo-Saxon kings, by manor-rolls of many succeeding generations down to the very last century, the so-called Open Field System. This system was not socialistic nor what we understand by the word communistic, and yet it may truly be described in terms drawn from the life of to-day as a system which formed “a community of shareholders”.[88] Such a community was settled, by what means, peaceful or warlike, we need not inquire, on some land cleared, perhaps, from the forest where they founded what we should call a village, but what they called a tun or a ham,[89] to which they gave the name of their own little tribe or kinship. The memory of the Yslings may have quite died out from suburban Islington, and Birmingham is no longer the little Mercian ham where once the Beormings clustered, but there seems no sufficient reason to doubt that from some such settlements as these sprang the numerous tons and hams which dot the map of England and have given their names to a stalwart progeny in America and at the Antipodes.[90]
In the village settlements thus formed, of course, the main business of the inhabitants was agriculture, and this appears to have been conducted mainly on the Three Field System in which the land that was not reserved for pasture was put one year under wheat sown in the winter, the next year under oats or barley sown in the spring, and the third year lay fallow. Now the peculiarity of the Open Field System is this, that instead of each owner having his own bit of land separate from the rest, in which he could practise this rotation of crops by himself, the community as a whole had three large districts undergoing that rotation, and in each of these districts the ceorl (as the Anglo-Saxon village shareholder was called) had a number of separate strips of land, as a rule not adjacent to one another, assigned to him, and in the cultivation of these strips he was probably for ever helping or being helped by the owners of the strips adjoining. The system appears to us inconceivably complicated and absurd: it can hardly be even understood without reference to a map[91] in which we see the strips of varying width, but generally a furlong in length, lying side by side for a while, and then in another group starting off at right angles to their former direction, but always preserving this strip-like formation. Looking on such a map we can better understand what King Ine meant when he talked of the gedal-land or divided land which it was the duty of the ceorl owner to fence; since, obviously, if the end of his strip abutted on the forest or on the pasture in which the cows of the community were feeding, his carelessness in leaving it unfenced would work annoyance and loss to many others besides himself.
The causes and the origin of this remarkable system are lost in prehistoric darkness. It has been well said[92] that “it is the more remarkable, because with all its inconveniences of communication, all its backwardness in regard to improvements, all its trammels on individual enterprise and thrift, all its awkward dependence of the individual on the behaviour of his neighbours, it repeats itself over and over again for centuries, not only over the whole of England but over a great part of Europe”. One thinks that some idea of future repartitions, some desire to prevent any one individual or family from getting too strong a grip of the land, must have been at work here as with the Germans in the first Christian century, of whom Tacitus wrote: “They change their fields year by year, and there is still land left over”.[93] To continue the previous quotation: “the system was particularly adapted to the requirements of a community of shareholders who were closely joined together in the performance of their work, the assertion of their rights, the fulfilment of their duties and the payment of their dues”.
If we now inquire what was the extent of the land thus strangely divided which was generally owned in the seventh century by the Anglo-Saxon ceorl, we shall find that the determining factor is his ability to grapple with the necessary cultivation of the soil; or, in other words, the size of his estate is expressed in terms of his ploughing power. The normal English plough-team consisted of eight oxen yoked two and two together; and the land which it was possible to plough by such an ox-team was called in English a hide, in the Latin of the later lawyers a carucate.[94] The extent of a hide was not always precisely the same even in the earliest times,[95] and in later times there are puzzling differences in its dimensions, but as a rule it seems safe to estimate it at 120 acres.
If a husbandman had only two oxen (in which case he would generally have to rely on co-operation with his neighbours to get his land tilled) he could only hope to cultivate the fourth part of a hide. This was called a yard-land in Old English, or a virgate[96] in legal Latin. An even smaller division was the ox-gang or bovate (the eighth of a hide), which belonged to the husbandman who had but one ox to contribute to the common ploughing.[97]
The question now arises, “What was the ordinary holding of the Anglo-Saxon ceorl during the first ages after his settlement in the land, and what was his social position?” The answer, of course, must be mainly conjectural, but especially when we consider the language of Bede, and his Anglo-Saxon translators, who use “family” as the equivalent of “hide,” it seems probable that the hide, whatever its dimensions may have been, was the normal holding of the ceorl in his day, and all the indications derived from the history of the seventh century seem to point to the conclusion that the ceorl was a free man, proprietor of the land which he cultivated, liable to service in the fyrd or national army, and to certain ecclesiastical payments, but in every other relation independent. Metaphors are dangerous things, but we may probably with safety characterise the numerous and sturdy class of ceorls as the backbone of the Anglo-Saxon community.
On the other hand, whatever the normal property of the ceorl might be, it is certain that in the course of time holdings would be split up and the size of proprietorships would vary. While some ceorls--as we shall see later on--might become owners of as many as five hides and thus “attain unto thegn-right,” many more would see their holdings dwindle into virgates and bovates; perhaps even[98] the virgate or yard-land would become the typical holding of the descendant of the original ceorl-settlers. The owner of 15 acres or even of 30 acres in those days when “intensive” cultivation was unknown, would not be able to do much more than provide food for himself and his family, and in a rough, undemocratic age would be deemed a person of little account in comparison with the great thegn or the abbot of a wealthy monastery who sat in the king’s council and affixed his cross to the king’s charters. Thus we can easily understand how the status of some, by no means of all the ceorls might already towards the close of the seventh century be slowly changing from absolute independence into ill-defined subjection or payment of rent to some great neighbouring land-owner whom he was learning to call his hlaford, or lord.[99]
Owing to the peculiar mode of its division the arable land of the tun has attracted the largest share of our attention. It is not to be forgotten, however, that surrounding the three great open fields which at one time or another came under the plough, there was also a large meadow in which there was “common of pasture” for the cattle belonging to the members of the tun. Surrounding this, again, and disparting one tun or ham from its neighbour, there would generally be found a belt of forest-land, as to which we have some interesting utterances from the mouth of the West Saxon legislator. The great economic use of the forest, in addition to the provision of fuel, was its supply of “mast” for the swine, whose flesh was an important part of the food of the people. In the forty-fourth of Ine’s laws it is ordained that if any one cut down a tree under which thirty swine could take shelter he shall pay a fine of thirty shillings. In the twentieth law we are introduced to “a foreigner or other stranger”--probably in most cases a Welshman--pushing towards us through a trackless forest. “Comest thou peaceably?” is evidently the question that rises to the lips of the Saxon ceorl as he sees the figure in outlandish garb dimly moving through the trees. If the stranger would dispel suspicion he must either wind his horn or shout at frequent intervals; otherwise the West Saxon may assume that he is a thief and either slay him or capture and hold him to ransom. In the former alternative, however, he must at once make the matter known and swear that he took the dead man for a thief; otherwise he will be liable to judicial process at the hands of the dead man’s kinsmen. Again,[100] if a man burns a single tree in a forest, and is afterwards convicted, he shall pay the full fine of sixty shillings, for “Fire,” says the law-giver, “is a thief,” a secret, furtive creature that may do much mischief. But if a man goes boldly into the forest and cuts down trees for his own use, he shall be fined thirty shillings for the first tree so felled and so on up to ninety shillings, but no more, however extensive may have been his depredations, for “The axe is a tell-tale”. He could not have wielded it so long in the forest without a ringing sound which should have arrested the attention of the forester.
Of course there was an exception to the general law of the mutability of holdings in the case of the house of the ceorl with the little bit of land surrounding it. This, which we should call a homestead, was called in Anglo-Saxon a weorthig, and the fortieth law (already quoted) warned the ceorl that this must be kept always well fenced winter and summer, and that if any gaps were left in the hedge surrounding it he would have no claim against a neighbour for any damage that might be done by that neighbour’s beast rushing in through the opening.
The whole of the labour on the land of a ceorl who had the normal holding of a hide would certainly not be performed by himself and his family. We have frequent references in the laws to a servile class, generally known as theows, but sometimes--chiefly in the laws of the Kentish kings--as esnes. We may conjecture that this class was originally formed for the most part out of vanquished Britons spared by their conquerors; probably also from among the descendants of yet earlier strata of population, enslaved by the Britons themselves. It was certainly recruited by the so-called wite-theows, men probably originally of the class of ceorls, who having committed some crime and being unable to pay the pecuniary penalty for their offence were condemned to penal servitude, and in such a case generally forfeited the freedom of their descendants as well as their own. Probably the larger number of theows were in bondage to land-owners of higher rank than the ceorl, but one of the laws of Ethelbert of Kent[101] shows that at any rate the possession of a slave by a ceorl was not a thing altogether unknown. Our information as to this servile class is, however, very imperfect, and relates chiefly to the floggings to which they may be subjected for various offences.[102]
Though the position of the great body of the ceorls, if it has been rightly stated here, was that of partners in a free and independent agricultural community, it must be admitted, as previously said, that we have already in the laws of Ine traces of another, probably an increasing class of gafol gelders or rent-payers. Land in these cases was held by free men under a lord, to whom payments had to be made in kind whenever the lord visited the tenant. In Saxon Britain, as in Frankish Gaul, the king and his chief nobles lived on the produce of their estates, not by drawing half-yearly rents and converting them into money, to be spent in their own distant palaces, but by moving about from tun to tun, from vill to vill, and calling upon their tenants for supplies of food which were consumed upon the spot by themselves and their retainers, doubtless with much wassail and jollity. From an estate of ten hides the lord was entitled to claim ten vessels of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh ale, thirty ambers of clear ale, two full-grown oxen or ten rams, ten geese, twenty hens, ten cheeses, a full amber of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds weight of fodder, and a hundred eels.[103]
From the consideration of the middle and lower classes of Anglo-Saxon society we ascend to consider the rather difficult questions connected with the higher ranks of that society, the thegns, the eorls, the ealdormen, about whom the Laws and the Chronicles inform us. In this examination we should be left in almost hopeless darkness were it not for two institutions both well known in all the collections of primitive Teutonic law, and both very repugnant to our modern ideas of justice, wergild and (so-called) compurgation.
The essential principle of the wergild was compensation in money to the kindred of a murdered man, in order to induce them to abstain from righting or avenging themselves by force. Far back in the dimmest ages of the Teutonic foreworld the historical student discerns a period when all wrongs were avenged by the stroke of the broad-sword. The right, and more than the right, the sacred duty, of vengeance was handed on from father to son, and the circle widened from kinsman to kinsman, till the terrible blood-feud was like to destroy a tribe or even a nation. Then at some period far back in the ages, the idea was conceived of exorcising the spirit of revenge by the wand of pecuniary compensation. Let the relatives of a murdered man receive a wer, a payment in money, proportioned to his rank and position in the tribe, and, the family honour being thus satisfied, let them forego the right to revenge. If the injury were something less than death--if it were maiming, mutilation, the abduction of a wife, unprovoked words of insult--a proportionate payment in the nature of wer was made to the sufferer himself. The wer was purposely fixed high according to the value of money in those days, and if the offender were unable to pay it, he and sometimes his family with him became the bondslaves of the injured party. There was thus an element of prevention as well as of compensation in the punishment inflicted. But in all this we do not find any thought of punishment inflicted by the state to avenge the injured majesty of the law; nothing of that feeling which now makes the murder of the most degraded outcast a matter which must be inquired into with the utmost diligence by the police and punished by the hands of the executioner. This thought was indeed in some degree expressed by the wite or fine for murder, breach of the peace and so on, which was paid to the king or to one of his officers, but this fine was generally less in amount and always less in importance than the venerable wergild payable to the kindred.
The amount of wergild was elaborately proportioned to the station in society of the injured party--twice as high for the nobleman as for the squire, three times as high for the squire as for the yeoman (if one may be permitted to use as a very rough approximation the terms current in modern society); but it is important to remember that obligation in this system of law went hand in hand with privilege. If the wer for an injured thegn was high, it was on the level of that wer that he would have to atone to the king for offences committed by him against the law of the land.[104] The wergild tariff, however, though frequently referred to, is not regularly set forth in the laws either of Ethelbert or of Ine, an omission common to it with many of the other Teutonic codes, especially that of the Lombards. Probably the amount of wer payable in each case was so well known through long usage that the legislator deemed it needless to set it forth anew, but it is possible also that there was a variable element left, in some cases, to be the subject of bargaining between the two kins of the injurer and the injured. Some broad lines of demarcation, however, may be clearly traced. We know that the ceorl was called a twy-hynd man, because the ordinary compensation for his violent death was 200 shillings. A Welshman, however, who owned that single hide of land which seems to have been the normal property of the well-to-do ceorl, was entitled to a wergild of only 120 shillings, but if he so prospered as to become the owner of five hides of English soil then his wergild rose to the proportionate amount of 600 shillings.
The class next above the ceorl, the class corresponding with the gentry of modern times, the large land-holders who do not happen to hold any official position at the king’s court, were in the ninth century spoken of as thegns; and that word may, for convenience, be used here, though it is perhaps doubtful whether it was yet used as the simple designation of a class. In the word thegn the thought of soldiership and of service to the king seem almost inseparably blended. In the poem of Beowulf thegns seems to be equivalent to warriors.; while in the charters of Anglo-Saxon kings the Latin equivalent of thegn is almost invariably minister. In the laws of Ine these men seem to be generally spoken of as gesithcund, men who by birth were entitled to be comrades and attendants of the king; and it is almost certain that they are identical with the twelf-hyndemen, their wergild being fixed at 1,200 shillings. Higher than this these laws do not enable us to go, but the tenor of later legislation supports the conjecture that the wergild for an ealdorman or for a bishop was 4,800 shillings, for an archbishop or etheling (member of the royal house), 9,000 shillings, and for the king himself, 18,000 shillings.[105]
It will be seen that the Ealdorman is here put on a level with the Bishop. At the point of West Saxon history which we have now reached, there seems to have been one ealdorman to every shire. He commanded the fyrd of his shire in battle, he presided along with the bishop and the reeve in the shire-gemot, of which later laws than Ine’s inform us: and altogether his position may perhaps be best imagined by comparing it with that of a modern lord-lieutenant of a county.
* * * * *
Some further light on the ranks and orders in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is shown by the rather copious ordinances on the subject of that judicial process which is generally called compurgation. This name is not technically correct, as it is of ecclesiastical origin and belongs to later times than those with which we are now dealing; but we have not yet naturalised “oath-helping” as the Germans have naturalised eid-hilfe, and the word ath-fultum, occasionally used in the Anglo-Saxon laws, has not yet attained the same degree of currency as wergild. With the word “compurgation,” therefore, we must for the present rest satisfied.
We first meet with this custom in the fourteenth law of King Ine, who says, “If any one be accused of brigandage he shall clear himself by 120 hides or pay accordingly”. We naturally inquire what is meant by “clearing oneself by 14,400 acres,” and we receive further light on the question when we come to law 19 which tells us that “a king’s retainer (geneat) if his wer is 1,200 shillings may swear for 60 hides if he be a communicant,” on which the later Latin translator adds the gloss, “for 60 hides, that is for six men”.
We now see more plainly the meaning of “swearing by 120 hides”. A man accused of such a grave crime against society as brigandage must, in order to prove his innocence, procure the attestation of at least two king’s tenants (each presumably holding sixty hides of land) or twelve land-owners (each owner of ten hides), and they must swear that they believe him innocent. This is “oath-helping” or “compurgation”. This swearing process is, as has been often pointed out, not in the least like our modern examination of sworn witnesses to fact, nor does it contain the promise of our modern trial by jury. It is much more akin to the privilege allowed to the defendant of “calling witnesses to character,” a privilege which, where the evidence is only circumstantial, often has an important influence on the verdict. It must be admitted that even with us the force of such evidence frequently depends in some measure on the social status of the witness-bearers, but we should shrink from making the bald statement that a man accused of murder must produce two persons paying income-tax on £10,000 a year, or twenty persons at £1,000 a year, to declare their belief in his innocence.
The amount of “swearing power,” if it may be so called, belonging to each class of men is not very clearly stated. From the passage quoted above, with its Latin gloss, one is inclined to suppose that the ordinary ceorl swore for ten hides. It has been recently argued[106] that he swore only for five or perhaps six hides. There is, however, evidently something factitious in the ownership of land thus theoretically assigned to him. We may say, certainly, that the ordinary ceorl did not possess five, much less ten hides of land; nor were all thegns, who had probably the same swearing power as the king’s geneat, possessed of sixty hides, say 7,200 acres. We may therefore rather look upon the number of hides for which ceorl, thegn and king’s thegn were entitled to swear as a conventional mode of stating for the guidance of the judge, the weight that was to be attached to their testimony when they gave it on behalf of a man accused of crime. Perhaps also there was in this curious tariff of credibility an attempt to ascertain the extent to which the belief of the vicinage could be relied on in the prisoner’s behalf. The ordinary ceorl, cultivating perhaps only one hide, but mingling with a certain number of his fellow ceorls in the exercise of his daily toil, might vouch for the opinion of the owners of ten hides; while the king’s retainer, from his wider field of observation, could vouch for the belief of a district six times as large.
From a consideration of the laws of Ine and other nearly contemporary sources, we may, perhaps, safely arrive at the following general conclusions as to the nature of the social edifice in the eighth century. At the summit of that edifice we find, of course, the king. He is king as yet of only a few English shires, a monarch of far less importance than the Frankish kings before they sank into inefficiency, yet a much greater man than many who had borne the same title in preceding centuries. In the early history and charters of the Anglo-Saxons we are struck with the large number of persons who bear the title of cyning or rex. Edwin slays five kings when fighting against the Saxons. Four kings were reigning at the same time in Sussex, three in Essex. There were kings of the Hwiccas (Worcestershire and Warwickshire) and a separate kingdom of the Middle Angles and of Lindsey, all of which vanished leaving no trace in the so-called “Heptarchy” of later historians.[107]
All this, though partly accounted for by the tendency to treat the kingdom as a family estate and to divide it up at the king’s death among his surviving sons, shows also that there must have been a strong movement in the opposite direction, a tendency towards unity and consolidation to produce the three comparatively large and powerful kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, which are practically all that are of historic importance in the eighth century.
It may have been partly on account of the increasing majesty of the royal name that the nobility (if we may thus speak of the classes reaching from the throne down to the lowest stratum of thegn-hood) became, what perhaps they had not been originally, a class of ministri and milites, servants to the king in peace and in war. Writers on the early constitution of the Germanic states are accustomed to dwell on the distinction between the primeval “nobility by birth” and its successor, “nobility by service”. Without denying the probability that nobles of the first kind existed among the invaders of England, we must admit that in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as we know them it is the second species, “nobility by service,” in the king’s court with which we find ourselves chiefly brought in contact. When the king takes counsel with his witan it is with the archbishop and bishops, with the ealdormen, the king’s thegns and the “exalted councillors” (gethungenan witan) in their various degrees that he deliberates, with their concurrence that he makes laws for the welfare of the realm, and by their cross-made signatures that his charters granting land are attested. We do not appear to have any accurate information as to the time of meeting of the witan (witenagemot). Nor was the place of meeting by any means always the same even for each Saxon kingdom, though Winchester, Kingston, and in later times London, were frequent homes of the West Saxon witenagemot.
The functions of this great council of the wise men of the realm, the degree to which they shared or controlled the royal power in matters of legislation, of finance, of the defence of the country, are better learned by watching the course of national history than from any attempt to frame a definition of that which was essentially vague, fluctuating and incoherent. The relation between the witenagemot and the medieval parliaments of the Plantagenets must be felt to be only one of rather faint analogy. In some respects the contemporary ecclesiastical councils of Visigothic Spain, at any rate in their later phases, present a much closer correspondence of type. It certainly seems, from the language of the Chronicle, that the English witan, like those councils, had a powerful voice in the election of the king, though, unlike the Spanish councillors, the Wise Men of Wessex were, in their choice, for the greater part of the time confined to one royal line, the men “whose descent goeth unto Cerdic”.[108]
NOTE ON ANGLO-SAXON MONEY.
To understand properly the information about wergilds supplied to us by the Anglo-Saxon laws, we must devote a little attention to the Anglo-Saxon currency. Our ancestors a thousand years ago used for the most part the same pecuniary language that we use to-day. They generally spoke of pounds, shillings and pence; and the clerkly ecclesiastics who had to translate these words into Latin employed the Libra, Solidus and Denarius, which have given us the well-known symbols £ s. d. This translation, however, into the terms of Roman currency has done nothing but confuse our own monetary history. Libra as the translation of pound is unobjectionable, but solidus--the only coin of that name that obtained wide currency, the solidus aureus of Constantinople--was a gold coin of which 72 went to the pound of gold, and was in intrinsic value equal to about thirteen shillings of our present money. No scilling that any Anglo-Saxon legislator ever dealt with had any such intrinsic value as this. Similarly the denarius, the true denarius of the republic and of the early empire, was a silver coin intrinsically worth about eightpence of our present currency. No penny in any Anglo-Saxon coinage ever approached this value; and the translation of denarius by penny has introduced confusion even into some well-known passages of the English Bible. Let us, therefore, for the sake of clearness, wholly disregard the pretended Roman equivalents, and confine our attention to the true, long-enduring Saxon denominations, the pund, the scilling and the penig.
1. The pund meant a pound’s weight of silver. It was purely a “money of account,” as no coin representing this value was ever struck by any Anglo-Saxon king. According to the present value of metals, it would be worth intrinsically somewhat less than £2 sterling.
2. The scilling was also only a money of account, represented by no actual coin. Its derivation (from scylan, to divide) seems to point to the fact that it was originally a portion of a silver ornament, probably a torque or an armlet broken off and cast into the scale, for payment by weight of the trader’s demand. Even so, as we may remember, St. Oswald ordered his beautiful silver dish to be broken up and distributed to the starving crowd, who would take these scyllingas into the market and exchange them there for the needed food. At a later time the scilling acquired a definite value, which, however, varied much in the different English kingdoms. The Kentish scilling was one-twelfth of a pound; the Wessex scilling, one-forty-eighth; and the Mercian, one-sixtieth.
3. But however much the scilling might vary, the penny (pending, pening or penig) seems in all the English kingdoms to have ever borne the same proportion to the pound which it bears at present, namely, as 1 to 240. This enables us to state the varying values of the scilling in the following manner:--
The scilling of Kent = 20 peningas. Do. Wessex = 5[109] „ Do. Mercia = 4 „
Here at last, in this lowest and humblest denomination, we get something which is not a mere “money of account”. The silver pennies of the Anglo-Saxon kings, which reach from the middle of the eighth century right down to the Norman conquest, and whose successors formed practically the only money of the country until the reign of Edward III., are the glory of the numismatic collector, but suggest strange thoughts as to the stage of civilisation reached by a country whose only coin was a little bit of silver, one-twentieth of an ounce in weight.
A few words must be said (1) as to the intrinsic value, and (2) as to the purchasing power of these moneys.
(1) As to the first question we are met by the practical difficulty of deciding what is the present value of silver. Not thirty years ago silver was worth fully 4s. 6d. an ounce, or £2 14s. a pound; now it fetches about half that price. But if we take, for convenience, the larger quotation, representing the old-fashioned ratio between gold and silver of 15½ to 1, we get roughly the following results:--
The pund = £2 14s. in intrinsic value.
Scilling of Kent = 1/12 of a pound = 4s. 6d. in intrinsic value. Do. Wessex = 1/48 „ = 1s. 1½d. „ Do. Mercia = 1/60 „ = 10⅘ pence „ The penig = about two pence and three farthings „
(2) The “purchasing power” of money in those days is of course a different and a far more difficult question. As every one knows, since the discovery of America and the opening up of enormous fresh sources of supply of the precious metals, prices have been altogether revolutionised, and the “purchasing power” of an ounce of gold or silver has been enormously lessened.
The following are a few indications given us by the laws of Ine and some of his successors as to the prices prevalent in his time:--
1. An ewe with one lamb, 1 scilling (= 1s. 1½d.). Present value, £2 10s. Ratio 1 to 44.
2. Maintenance of a peasant’s child, 6 scillings (6s. 9d.) per annum plus a cow in summer and an ox in winter. Equivalent to our time to about £6. Ratio 1 to 17.
3. A peasant’s blouse was worth 6 peningas (1s. 4d.). This was probably a rather elaborate affair, and if hand-worked might be worth at the present time £1 10s. Ratio 1 to 22.
4. A sheep’s fleece, 2 peningas (5½d.). Present price, 7s. Ratio 1 to 15.
From the laws of Athelstan:--
5. A good horse, 24 scillings (£1 7s.). Present price, £40. Ratio 1 to 30 nearly.
6. A sheep, 1 scilling (1s. 1½d.). Present price, £2. Ratio 1 to 35.
From the law concerning the Dunsaete (Welsh mountaineers) (tenth century):--
7. A mare, 20 scillings (£1 2s. 6d.). Present price, £25. Ratio 1 to 22.
8. A “swine,” 1⅗ scilling (1s. 10d.). Present price, £1 10s. Ratio 1 to 16.
9. A sheep, 1 scilling (1s. 1½d.). Present price, £2. Ratio 1 to 35.
10. A goat, ⅖ of a scilling (5½d.). Present price, 15s. Ratio 1 to 33.
It will be seen from the above rough calculations how impossible it is to get any fixed proportion between the purchasing power of money in Anglo-Saxon times and in our own. As to one very important element, the price of grain, we have no satisfactory information; but from the records of later centuries (from the thirteenth onwards) it seems probable that, with frequent and violent fluctuations, it generally ruled relatively higher than the price of cattle.
On the whole, for historical purposes, if the reader mentally translates the scilling of Wessex into the pound sterling of our own day he will probably not go far wrong.
It may be well to add a few other monetary terms belonging chiefly to the later centuries of Anglo-Saxon history.
1. The Mancus was one-eighth of a pund: or 30 penings. The name is said to be derived from the Arabic. The Mancus in the time of Athelstan was the standard price of an ox.
2. The Thrymsa of Mercia was originally a gold coin (derived from the Roman tremissis), but afterwards the word was used to denote a unit of value, the equivalent of 3 penings.
3. The Sceatt was very nearly equivalent to the pening; but 250 not 240 went to the pund.
4. The Mark, a Danish word, denotes the equivalent of half a pound.
5. The Ora was the eighth part of a mark. It was held to be equivalent to 2½ scillings of Wessex, but there is some difficulty in the equation of these Danish and Saxon currencies. According to Domesday Book the Ore contained 20 pence, and accordingly the Mark would be equal not to 120 but to 160 pence. On the other hand, Ethelred’s laws, iv., 9, say that the pound contained 15 ores. This would make the Mark if it was half a pound equivalent to 7½ ores.
(See Chadwick, l.c., chapter i., for a discussion of this perplexing question.)
XIV. THE EIGHTH CENTURY
The eighth century was in many ways a memorable one for Europe and Asia. In the east it was the period of the greatest splendour of the Caliphs of Baghdad; at Constantinople it saw the rule of the strong, stern iconoclastic emperors who set the spiritual authority of the popes at defiance; in Italy it beheld the downfall of Lombard rule, in Spain the subjection of nine-tenths of the country to the domination of the Moors.
Even more important than any of these events were the changes which were going forward in the wide regions subject to the dominion of the Franks. Here the star of the great Austrasian house, which was represented by Charles Martel, Pippin and Charlemagne, was steadily rising. In this century they shouldered aside the last feeble representative of the Merovingian race, and seated themselves visibly on that Frankish throne behind which they and their sires had stood so long as mayors of the palace; and in the end, aspiring yet higher, at the very end of the century the greatest of the race received the imperial crown and was hailed as Carolus Augustus by the people of Rome in the city of the Cæsars.
In this last series of events, as it happened, Englishmen self-exiled from their country took a prominent part. Willibrord, the apostle of the Frisians, baptised Pippin and foretold the exaltation of his house. Wynfrith, otherwise known as Boniface, following in his footsteps, persuaded or compelled Frisians, Thuringians and Hessians to embrace that religion which his own forefathers had accepted only three generations before, and with the religion induced them to accept also the ecclesiastical discipline of Rome. In his later missionary operations, gentle or forcible, he was strongly supported by the Austrasian Pippin, whom he repaid for that support by crowning him King of the Franks just half-way through the century. Moreover, it was another Englishman, the Northumbrian Alcuin, head of the great school for ecclesiastics attached to the church of York, who towards the close of the century accepted Charlemagne’s invitation to take up his abode at the Frankish court; became, so to speak, his literary prime minister, and being full himself of the memories of classical Rome, had no inconsiderable share in persuading his patron to revive the glories of the great world-empire, to pass from the condition of a mere King of the Franks into that of Roman Emperor.
Thus, in this eighth century the Anglo-Saxon race was in various ways making its mark on Europe; and in our own island its literary history during this period is not without interest; but politically the century is one of the most sterile in all our annals. It was an age of little men, of decaying faith, of slumberous inaction, or else of sanguinary and chaotic strife. Northumbria especially, during this period, was falling fast and far from her former high estate. Mercia and Wessex were engaged in perpetual objectless war, not ennobled by any great names or chivalrous deeds. Yet possibly even this dreary time was looked back upon in the next century as a golden age, for it was, almost till its close, unmarked by foreign invasion. In the year 793 a new and more disastrous chapter was opened by the appearance on the horizon of the ships of the Vikings.
The unsatisfactory character of this portion of English history is no doubt partly due to the fact that at an early stage we lose the guidance of that great writer to whom we are indebted for almost all that gives freshness and life to the preceding narratives. Bede, the father of English history, finished his great work in 731, and died four years later, in 735. Hitherto he has been speaking to us about the lives of other men; it is now time to listen to what his disciples have told us concerning his own. Born about the year 672, soon after the death of Oswy, Bede was taken as a child of seven years old to the newly founded monastery of Monkwearmouth, and there or in the sister monastery of Jarrow he passed the rest of his life. He was thus not only the child of the convent but in a pre-eminent degree the spiritual heir of Benedict Biscop, the nobly born and cultured Northumbrian, who had founded these two monasteries, had built in their precincts two stately stone churches “after the manner of the Romans which he always loved” (far superior doubtless to the uncouth wooden churches which satisfied most of the Anglo-Saxon builders), had enriched their libraries with precious manuscripts and pictures--the trophies of five journeys to Rome--and had imported artisans from Gaul to teach the Anglo-Saxon the hitherto unknown mystery of the manufacture of glass. It is an interesting fact that of both these two foundations of Benedict Biscop some vestiges still remain, almost unique specimens of early Anglo-Saxon art. In the porch of the parish church of Monkwearmouth are some cylindrical “baluster-shafts,” and some slabs covered with beautiful Anglo-Saxon knot-work. In the parish church of Jarrow, surrounded as it now is by smoking furnaces and clanging steam-hammers, there are portions of a wall undoubtedly anterior to the Norman conquest, and possibly belonging to the very fabric which, as an inscription tells us, was dedicated in the fifteenth year of king Egfrid and the fourth year of abbot Ceolfrid (probably 685). Under this abbot, who ruled Wearmouth as well as Jarrow, Bede spent more than thirty years of his life, the years of boyhood, youth and early middle age. With him, according to the pathetic story already related, he probably sustained as a boy of fourteen the whole burden of chanting the antiphones, when all the rest of the choir were laid low by the terrible pestilence. By him doubtless his studies were directed in later life, when as a studious youth he entered the convent library and began to pore over the manuscripts, sacred and profane, the splendid copies of the Vulgate, the treatises of the Fathers, the poems of Lucretius, Horace, Ovid and Virgil, wherewith the literary enthusiasm of Benedict had enriched his monastery.
In 716 the abbot Ceolfrid, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, resigned his office and started on a pilgrimage to Rome. He travelled slowly, and had only reached the city of Langres in Champagne, when the weakness of age conquered him, and he lay down and died. His attempted pilgrimage has, however, a special interest for us, since it has recently been discovered that one of the manuscripts which he took with him on his journey as an offering to the Holy Father was none other than the celebrated Codex Amiatinus, now preserved in the Laurentian Library, at Florence and, by the admission of all scholars, the chief authority for the text of Jerome’s great translation of the Scriptures.
Bede survived his old preceptor nearly twenty years, following up with patient industry the literary career upon which Ceolfrid had started him. In 731 he completed the great work on The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which has made his name immortal; but besides this he wrote a vast number of treatises: on The Interpretation of Scripture, on The Nature of Things, on Grammar and on Astronomy, and two chronological works entitled De Temporibus and De Temporum Ratione. His books show an especial interest in the computation of time, the natural result of his study of the great Easter controversy, the echoes of which must have been still resounding in the days of his childhood. He was unquestionably the most learned man of his age, perhaps one might safely say the most learned man of the early Middle Ages. He was--what even the great Pope Gregory was not--a Greek scholar; and his Latin style, formed doubtless on a careful study of the classical authors in the library of the convent, is eminently pure, and free from turgidity and affectation. His history, in fact, comes as a delightful surprise to the student who has had to struggle with the barbarous Latinity of papal epistles, or the astounding grammatical blunders of Bede’s Frankish counterpart, Gregory of Tours. All this intellectual attainment on the part of the monk of Jarrow is the more surprising when we remember how short was the interval which separated him from actual barbarism. Bede’s father possibly, his grandfather almost certainly, were rude illiterate pagans; yet we find their near descendant writing Latin which might almost have passed muster at the court of Augustus, and by his saintly life and happy death illustrating the noblest qualities of the Christian character.
Bede’s life ended on May 9, 735. Though the story of his death is one of the best known in English history, it may hardly be omitted here. For some months before the end he had suffered much from difficulty of breathing. The long and weary night watches were gladdened with psalmody; sometimes with the repetition of his own Anglo-Saxon verses, one of which may be thus translated:--
Let not man take thought too deeply Ere his last and lonely journey. Ponder as he may, he knows not What of good and what of evil Shall befall his parting spirit.
He wept with his weeping disciples; then he changed to rejoicing and gave thanks to God for all, even for his chastisements. “As Ambrose said, so can I say, too, ‘I have not so lived that I need be ashamed to abide longer with you; yet neither do I fear to die, for we have a good Lord’.” In the intervals of sacred song he continued his literary labours, dictating to a youth by his bedside a translation of the early chapters of John’s gospel, together with some extracts from a treatise by Isidore of Seville. This latter was probably one of the Spanish bishop’s scientific works, for Bede said: “I do not want my lads to read that which is false, nor that after my death they should spend fruitless labour on this thing”. The amanuensis said, “There is yet one chapter of the book which thou art dictating, but I think it too hard work for thee”; but Bede answered, “No, it is easy; take thy pen and write speedily”. When the dictation was all-but ended, he distributed his little treasures, spices, napkins and incense, among his friends in the monastery. Then said the scribe, “There is yet one more sentence not written down”. This was dictated. The scribe said, “It is done”. “Thou hast said truly,” answered Bede. “It is finished. Help me to sit in yonder place where I have been wont to pray, that sitting there I may call upon the name of the Father.” And thus, seated on the pavement of his cell and chanting with laboured breath the Gloria Patri, the father of English history passed away.
In connexion with the name of Bede, allusion must be made to one or two of his contemporaries who made this period illustrious in the history of English literature. The herdsman-poet Caedmon has already been mentioned in connexion with the conference at Whitby. The date of his death is not recorded, but it probably occurred before the close of the seventh century. Though recent criticism has thrown some doubt on his authorship of the poems which were formerly attributed to him, there can be no doubt that his was a great name in the young literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, and if Bede, though writing in Latin, may be considered as standing by the fountain-head of English prose, Caedmon must be allowed to hold the same place in relation to English poetry.
Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and first bishop of Sherborne, was probably considered by his contemporaries the greatest scholar of his age. Like so many of the great ecclesiastics of this period, Aldhelm was of noble birth, a kinsman, said some, of King Ine himself. Trained in the monastic school of Hadrian at Canterbury he imbibed from his Italian instructors a large amount of classical learning, but not that purity of taste which caused his younger contemporary Bede to use his learning with discretion. Whatever may have been his literary failings, there was a fascination about his personal presence and an earnestness in his religious character which won for him a large number of loyal disciples, enabled him to develop the little community gathered by an Irish saint into the famous monastery of Malmesbury, and made him the literary apostle of Wessex. According to his great panegyrist, William of Malmesbury, he combined in his style the excellencies of various nations. Some fastidious readers in the twelfth century found his works heavy reading. “Unreasonable judges are they,” said William, “who do not know that every nation has its own different style of writing. For the Greeks write in an involved style, the Latins in a guarded one, the Gauls write with splendour, the English with pomp.... But if you will carefully read Aldhelm’s writings you will think him a Greek by the acuteness of his intellect, a Roman by his brilliancy, and an Englishman by his pomp.” The “pomposity,” or in other words, the turgidity of his style has been found quite intolerable by later scholars, but was probably considered an enviable gift by his countrymen, only just emerged from barbarism. At any rate even to the pompous and somewhat pedantic churchman much may be pardoned in consideration of the charming anecdote, related on the authority of King Alfred, that Aldhelm in his younger days seeing the “semi-barbarous” people accustomed, as soon as Mass was finished, to stream away to their houses without listening to the words of the preacher, took his station on the bridge by which they needs must pass and there sang merry ballads of his own composition, till he had gained the ear of the hurrying crowd, after which he changed his tune, gradually interwove with his song the words of Scripture, began to speak to them of serious things, and, in short, won back to sanity and devotion the citizens whom he might vainly have endeavoured to coerce by the terrors of excommunication. Aldhelm was chosen Bishop of Sherborne in 705 and died in 709.
The names just mentioned are those of men of a somewhat earlier generation than Bede, and belong, in fact, rather to the seventh century than to the eighth. Not so with the last upon our list, Cynewulf, who was born not many years before the death of Bede and whose literary activity was displayed in the latter half of the eighth century. We have in this poet a remarkable instance of a man whose very existence had been forgotten by his countrymen, and whose name, till a few years ago, was absent from the most carefully written histories of our literature. In the year 1857, however, a German professor[110] discovered Cynewulf’s name in a charade prefixed to a collection of Anglo-Saxon riddles. The clue thus followed led to other discoveries, and now by the general consent of scholars many poems formerly attributed to Caedmon are reclaimed for his fellow-Northumbrian Cynewulf. The Riddles which are sometimes attributed to this poet are considered by those who have studied them to show, amid much misplaced ingenuity, considerable sensitiveness to the beauties of Nature, and some power of description of the battle and the banquet. It is interesting to observe how rapidly in these early Middle Ages a literary fashion spread from country to country over the whole west of Europe. Almost at the same time when the Northumbrian poet was composing his curious poetical riddles, Paul the Lombard and Peter of Pisa were discharging at one another acrostic riddles and enigmatic charades at the court of Charlemagne.
The most important of all the poems which have been conjecturally assigned to this author is the beautiful “Vision of the Holy Rood,” some lines of which are carved upon the Ruthwell Cross still existing in Dumfriesshire. In this poem the author describes the appearance to him in a dream of the holy wood which had once been a tree in the forest, and was then cut down and fashioned into a cross for the punishment of criminals, but received with awe upon its arms the sacred body of the Lord of mankind. The Rood speaks:--
Then the young hero, who was mightiest God, Strong and with steadfast mind, Up to the cross with steps unfaltering trod There to redeem mankind. I trembled, but I durst not fail, I on my shoulders bare the glorious King. They pierce my sides with many a darksome nail, And on us both their cruel curses fling.
The death, the burial and the resurrection of the Lord are related in a similar strain of reverent compassion for the Almighty Sufferer, and the Rood finally charges the poet to reveal the vision to all men, inasmuch as the day is coming when Christ will ask who there is that for His name will taste of bitter death as He did on the cross.
There is something which must needs move our sympathy when we see the passion of pitying love with which these simple-hearted sons of warriors received the story of the suffering Saviour. But, as has been already said, the tide of religious emotion which had flowed so freely in the seventh was already beginning to ebb in the eighth century. This decay of religious life in England, or at any rate in Northumbria, is vouched for in the memorable letter which Bede wrote shortly before his death to his friend Egbert, who had just been consecrated bishop and was shortly to become Archbishop of York. The letter itself is a model of wise exhortation, boldly but respectfully tendered by an aged saint to a man, his junior in years but his superior in ecclesiastical rank. Bede is evidently sure of the goodness of his pupil’s intentions, but anxious lest he should not have sufficient force of character to make head against the corruption of the times. Ever since the death of King Aldfrid, which happened thirty years before (705), the decline in morals had gone on at a rapid pace. He holds the bishops largely responsible for this degeneracy. They have insisted on retaining dioceses larger than any one man could possibly administer. They have, for filthy lucre, given their consent to all sorts of grants which should never have been made. They and their clergy have clutched eagerly at the shepherd’s hire, leaving the flock unfed. “There are, as we hear, many farms and villages on lonely mountains or in brambly wildernesses, in which for many years the face of a priest has never been seen, and neither baptisms nor confirmations are ever performed, and yet not one of the dwellers in such places is ever allowed to escape from the payment of church-dues.”
But the greatest scandal of all in Bede’s day seems to have been the foundation of pseudo-monasteries by noble and wealthy laymen, who intended anything rather than the leading of a life of religious austerity. Intent apparently on securing the creature-comforts which a well-endowed monastery afforded; intent also on escaping under the pretence of a religious life the duties of military service for their king and country, these pseudo-abbots would obtain a large grant of land from the king, and would there rear their unholy convents, in which, freed from all laws, human or divine, they would live their lives of licentious ease, waited on by troops of menial monks, who had generally been themselves expelled from genuine monasteries, by reason of their irregular lives. Nay, sometimes these impostors would go even further, and persuade a foolish king to grant them a piece of land adjoining the first donation, and would there erect a nunnery in which their wives might, without taking any regular vows, pretend to be the guides and rulers of maidens vowed to Christ.
These abuses had gone so far that the service of the state was seriously impaired thereby. The lavish grants of land, both to the genuine and the sham monasteries, had so impoverished the king that he had no reserve land, from which to reward the sons of his thegns or poor soldiers who had served him well in war. Hence these young men either sped across the seas to countries which held out the hope of a better career, or, being unable to marry, abandoned themselves to illicit love and sank down into the lowest depths of sloth and immorality. Bede’s recommendation was that as there were so many of these places which were profitable neither to God nor man, with no true service to God performed in them, and quite useless for the defence of the realm, they, or at any rate one of them, should be seized and converted into the seat of a new and much-needed bishopric. Such a deed, far from being blamable as sacrilege, would deserve the praise due to a most virtuous action. Subjection of all monasteries to some external supervision and control; the suppression of as many as possible of those nests of hypocrisy and vice, the sham monasteries; and the formation of many new bishoprics--these were the remedial measures which lay nearest to the heart of Bede. Whether Archbishop Egbert, a noble and pure-minded man, friend of one king (Ceolwulf) and brother of another (Eadbert), was able to carry into effect any of Bede’s reforms it is impossible to say; but the subsequent course of Anglo-Saxon history seems to point to a negative conclusion. It was, perhaps, partly in these paradises of sin, in the pseudo-monasteries of England, that the virility of the nation was sapped and the way prepared for so many a miserable surrender to the Danish invaders.
In the general decline of morals during the eighth century NORTHUMBRIA was especially conspicuous, if we may draw any conclusion from its political history. In the course of that century fifteen kings swayed the sceptre, and of these, five were deposed, five murdered, two voluntarily abdicated the throne. It is no wonder that Northumbria, once so glorious, now became the basest of the kingdoms; that Charlemagne, on hearing of one of these murders, called the Northumbrian Angles “a perfidious and perverse nation, worse than the pagans, murderers of their lords”; or that the northern kingdom was found utterly unable to cope with the storm of Danish invasion when it beat upon its shores. It would serve no good purpose to give the names and dates of accession of all these kings, most of whom are to us mere names in an arid chronicle, but we may single out for special notice two who reigned in the first half of the century, Ceolwulf and Eadbert.
Ceolwulf, a descendant of Ida but not of Oswald’s line, in the words of William of Malmesbury “mounted the trembling summit of the kingdom” in the year 729. He is memorable for us as the friend of Bede and the sovereign to whom he showed and dedicated his Ecclesiastical History; and for his liberality to the Church he was looked upon with much favour by ecclesiastics. But the throne did not cease to tremble when he ascended it. In 731 he was taken prisoner, no doubt, by some of his rebellious subjects, was forcibly tonsured and consigned to a monastery. He was, however, soon restored to his kingdom and reigned, it would seem, with comparative tranquillity for six years, during which time he must have received and may have read the Ecclesiastical History. In 737 “thinking it contrary to the gravity of the Christian character to be immersed in worldly affairs,” he abdicated the kingdom and became a monk at Lindisfarne. The abdication and the monastic profession were this time probably voluntary. The rare sanctity which he displayed in the convent procured for him the honour of burial near the tomb of St. Cuthbert and miracles were believed to be wrought at his grave.
The chosen successor of Ceolwulf was his cousin Eadbert (737–58), a strong and strenuous ruler who once more pushed the Northumbrian border far into Scotland, adding a part of Ayrshire to his dominions, and so impressing the surrounding states with the terror of his name that the Angles of Mercia, the Picts, the Scots and the Britons of Strathclyde, all remained at peace with him during the greater part of his reign and delighted to do him honour. By a combination of circumstances, probably unique in English history, the brother of this powerful king was Egbert, archbishop of York (734–66), the prelate to whom Bede addressed the letter of counsel just quoted. Egbert’s tenure of the see was in itself memorable. He was the first occupant of that see after Paulinus to hold the rank of archbishop and to receive his pallium from the pope. He did for the church library at York what Benedict had done for Jarrow and Wearmouth, obtaining for it large stores of precious manuscripts and laying the foundation of that great ecclesiastical school the glory of which culminated in Alcuin. As for his brother, King Eadbert, his fame spread far and wide, and in him the glory of Oswald and of Oswy seemed about to be revived. But towards the close of his reign his fortune changed. In the year 756, when he had been nineteen years on the throne, he, in alliance with the King of the Picts, led an army against the strong city of Alclyde, the modern Dumbarton, which was the capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde. The allied operations were at first successful. Alcuith surrendered on August 1, but only nine days later almost the whole of Eadbert’s army perished in its march through Perthshire. We have no hint of the cause of the disaster, but we may, if we like, imagine a well-planned ambuscade in some Perthshire glen, an anticipation by nearly a thousand years of the battle of Killiecrankie.
Was it depression of spirits at this lamentable change in his fortunes, or was it merely that weariness of reigning which overcame so many Anglian kings, that drove Eadbert into the monastery? In the twenty-first year of his reign, notwithstanding the earnest dissuasion of his neighbour-kings, some of whom, we are told, offered to add part of their realms to his if he would continue to reign, Eadbert, “for the love of God, and desiring to take the heavenly country by storm, received on his head St. Peter’s tonsure,” and handed over his kingdom to his son Oswulf. He continued in his religious seclusion for ten years till his death in 768, and was buried at York in the same porticus of the church which held his brother, the archbishop, who had died two years before him. There is some reason to suppose that after the unfortunate issue of Eadbert’s campaign in 756, the border of Bernicia being withdrawn a long way to the south, the capital of that kingdom was transferred from Bamburgh to Corbridge in the valley of the Tyne, some seventy miles south-west of Bamburgh. Corbridge was the Corstopitum of the Romans, a station on the northern Watling Street, and still shows some interesting relics of Roman occupation. About the same time we find indications that Cataractonium, now Catterick, the most northerly Roman station within the limits of Yorkshire, became a royal residence, perhaps as a supplemental palace to that at Eburacum. Thus we see that even four centuries after the departure of the legions the charm of Roman civilisation still lingered round the places where they had dwelt, though these are represented in our own day by villages whose very names are obscure except to antiquaries.
In the latter half of the century the lawful line of Northumbrian kings, the sons of Ida, was frequently broken by usurpers of unknown lineage, chief among whom were a certain Ethelwald Moll and his son Ethelred. The latter, an impiissimus rex, in the language of the chronicler, reigned from 774 to 779, was expelled in the latter year, and returned in 790 to wreak vengeance on the princes of the lawful line. The two sons of his predecessor, when apparently little more than children, were lured from their sanctuary in the cathedral at York by promises of safety and protection, and were drowned in Windermere by order of the usurper. Their cousin Osred, who had for a short time worn the crown, was similarly enticed from the Isle of Man, captured and slain. Ethelred sought to strengthen himself by an alliance with Offa, the powerful King of Mercia, whose daughter Elfleda he married at Catterick in 792, the year of Osred’s murder. But for all his precautions he could not escape the usual fate of Northumbrian kings. In 796 he was slain “by his own people” at Corbridge.
The man who sat upon “the trembling throne” at the end of the century was a certain ealdorman named Eardulf, who six years before his accession had had a narrow and, as some men thought, miraculous escape from death. The tyrant Ethelred, whose anger he had somehow incurred, ordered him to be executed outside the gates of the monastery of Ripon. The monks with solemn chants bore his body to the church for burial and left it for the night at the lych-gate. There soon after midnight some faithful follower found him still alive and helped him to escape. His resurrection seems to have been concealed from Ethelred, and, as has been said, the year 800 found him reigning as king over Northumbria.
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From Northumbria we turn to the central kingdom of MERCIA. The eighth century was the time of the greatest glory of that kingdom, and for many years it seemed as if from that quarter rather than from Wessex would come the needed consolidation of England; as if Lichfield, rather than Winchester or even London, might be the destined capital of the country. It was chiefly under two kings, Ethelbald and Offa, whose united reigns occupied eighty years (from 716 to 796), that Mercia attained this high position. Penda’s grandson, Ceolred, King of Mercia, died insane in 716, being thus punished, according to St. Boniface, for the sins which he had committed in defrauding the Church of her possessions and making the vowed virgins of her convents minister to his lusts. He was succeeded by a remote relation, Ethelbald, who was not a lineal descendant of Penda, and whom, jealous of his great qualities, Ceolred had driven forth from his court. In his fugitive wanderings Ethelbald had visited more than once the far-famed sanctuary of Crowland,[111] where amidst the vast fens of Lincoln and Cambridgeshire, dotted over with desolate forest-islands, the holy man Guthlac, the Cuthbert of Mercia, had made for himself a hermit’s retreat, and, with only two servants for his companions in that infinite loneliness, had practised austerities surpassing those of the hermits of the Thebaid. Guthlac had the usual experiences of the fever-stricken solitary, being assailed at night by demons with great heads, hideous faces, long horse-like teeth and horrible harsh voices, which croaked forth temptation, in the language not of the Angle but of the Briton. This sorely buffeted but eminently holy man, who died in 714 at the age of forty-one, and whose life in the wilderness lasted only fifteen years, had during that term acquired great renown as a saint. His fame spread far and wide through Mercia, and people of all ranks flocked to him for healing or for counsel. Among these was the outcast Ethelbald, to whom Guthlac predicted that he should soon without strife possess the Mercian throne, a prophecy which was shortly fulfilled when his cousin and enemy was stricken with madness, while sitting at the banquet with his gesiths all round him.
Ethelbald swayed the sceptre of Mercia for forty-one years (716–57). He was evidently a strong and strenuous, if somewhat unscrupulous ruler. In the early part of his reign he had so completely cowed Wessex and conquered the other four southern kingdoms, that Bede, writing the concluding paragraphs of his history in 731, could say: “All the southern provinces up to the boundary of the Humber, with their respective kings, are subject to Ethelbald, King of the Mercians”. In 733 we find him capturing Somerton, the chief town of the Sumorsaetas; in 740 he turns his arms northwards and takes advantage of Eadbert’s absence on his Pictish campaign to ravage Northumbria. But in his last years fortune frowned upon him. In 750 Cuthred II., King of Wessex, apparently an active and valiant man, rose in rebellion, and in 752 won a great victory over Ethelbald at Burford on the slopes of the Cotswolds, putting him to ignominious flight. Never apparently did Mercia recover the supremacy over Wessex which she lost on that battlefield, and in 757 Ethelbald, who must have been an unpopular master of his household, perished by a night attack of his own guards. Notwithstanding his early friendship for St. Guthlac, Ethelbald was not a pious nor even a moral king. There is preserved a remarkable letter addressed to him by St. Boniface,[112] in which the apostle of Germany, while praising the vigour and justice of his government, rebukes him for his outrageous profligacy, and expresses his fear that some great national judgment, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, will fall upon the kings and peoples of England for their luxury and immorality--a remarkable prophecy, as it must have seemed to later generations, of the Danish ravages.
After a short interval of unrest the Mercian throne was filled by Offa, a distant relation of Ethelbald, who reigned for nearly forty years (757–96), and who in some ways seems to deserve the title of the greatest of Mercian kings. The everlasting contest with Wessex was renewed, and Offa’s victory at Bensington in Oxfordshire (779) did something towards obliterating the disgrace of Burford and probably gave what is now the county of Oxford to the middle kingdom. From various causes Offa had now acquired so great a predominance that he was able to carry into effect a change in the ecclesiastical geography of England which was little less than a revolution. This was the creation of a new archbishopric for the Midlands. We may imagine that he reasoned in this wise: “Northumbria has now its archbishopric at York. The archbishop of Canterbury is too much overshadowed by the greatness of my rival of Wessex. Why should not I, the most powerful king in Britain, have an archbishop of my own here in Mercia?” This reasoning prevailed. In 787 a synod, ever after known as “the contentious synod,” was held at Chelsea, and thereat, we are told, seven out of the twelve dioceses of the southern province were placed under the archbishop of Lichfield, being rent away from their dependence on Canterbury. The meaning of this change is obvious. There were now three great English kingdoms: Northumbria, Wessex and Mercia, and three corresponding archbishoprics, York, Lichfield and Canterbury. The Thames was the boundary between the central and southern provinces, except that Essex with Middlesex was included in the latter. East Anglia was evidently, in ecclesiastical matters as well as in things political, subject to Mercia, a fact which accounts for the abrupt entry in the Chronicle for 792[113] (794): “Offa, King of the Mercians, ordered the head of Ethelbert, King [of the East Angles], to be struck off”. The new ecclesiastical arrangement lasted for only sixteen years. In 803 Offa’s successor Cenwulf voluntarily restored all the metropolitan rights of the see of Canterbury.
There is one still existing memorial by which the name of Offa yet survives in the mouths of men. This is Offa’s Dyke (called by the Welsh Clawdd Offa), a great earthen rampart flanked by a ditch, which ran from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Wye, a distance of some 130 miles, and divided the territories of the Mercians from those of the Welsh. For a considerable portion of its course this rampart is still visible, in some places only as a low bank but in others showing a height of 30 feet to the summit of the mound from the bottom of the ditch on its western side. It nearly corresponds with the present boundary between England and Wales, except that it cuts off from England a portion of Hereford and the whole of Monmouth. In part of its course it is duplicated by another embankment called Wat’s Dyke, about three miles to the east of it, and this work also, in the belief of some antiquaries, belongs to the age of Offa. Though we are distinctly told, on good authority, that the object of this huge work was military defence, it is probable that, like the Vallum in Northumberland and the Pfahlgraben in Germany, it was also a geographical boundary, and served a useful purpose in time of peace, as marking the limit of two rival jurisdictions and clearly indicating to which of them pertained the duty of punishing robbery or murder committed on either side of the border. This dyke probably commemorates the result of the “Devastation of the southern Britons wrought by Offa” which is noted by the Cambrian Annals under the years 778 and 784; and the effect of these campaigns seems to have been to push back the Welsh frontier from the Severn to the Wye--no unimportant augmentation of the Mercian kingdom.
The diplomatic correspondence of the period shows us how large loomed the figure of Offa in the eyes of his contemporaries. Pope Hadrian I. in writing to Charlemagne calls him absolutely “rex Anglorum,” and at the same time earnestly expresses his disbelief in a rumour which had reached his ears that the two kings of the Franks and the Angles were plotting his own deposition from the papacy, and the appointment of a Frankish ecclesiastic in his place. This, however, was probably an idle rumour, set afloat by some of Hadrian’s enemies in order to work upon the fears of the elderly pontiff. Offa, himself, seems to have received the legates of the Holy See with reverence and to have availed himself of their help in regulating the affairs of his new archbishopric. Moreover, he ordained, probably as a thank-offering for the papal assistance in this matter, that his kingdom should send a yearly offering of 365 mancuses (about £130), one for each day in the year, to the holy see.
There were, however, some difficulties connected with the frequent English pilgrimages to Rome; too frequent according to Alcuin for the good repute of the Anglo-Saxon dames who engaged in them; and too frequent, as the tax collectors of Charles the Great considered, by reason of the number of merchants who, under the guise of holiness, transacted a profitable business in the transport of specie and merchandise. These difficulties were, however, set right by a friendly letter from Charles to the effect that true pilgrims should receive all due protection from him, but that merchants masquerading as pilgrims must pay the regular customs dues. This letter, written in 796, was accompanied by the present of a belt, a Hunnish sword and two silken vestments, part of the huge spoil taken in the previous year from the robber hold of the Avars. It seems to have healed an old estrangement between the two kings dating from 789, the result of the failure of matrimonial negotiations between them. Charles had solicited the hand of Offa’s daughter for his son and namesake, and Offa had been willing to consent, on condition that Charles’s daughter, Bertha, should become the bride of his son, Ecgferth. On this point, however, the negotiations broke down, owing to Charles’s well-known reluctance to part with any of his daughters. For a short time the relations between the two kingdoms were sorely strained, and decrees forbidding the entrance of merchants were issued by either angry sovereign, but gradually the dispute died down, perhaps partly owing to the mediation of Alcuin, who was English by birth and loyal to his English friends, but Frank by adoption and a true subject to Charles. At last, as we have seen, all wounds were healed by the application of an Avar baldric, a sword and two mantles.
Offa died in 796, and his son and successor Ecgferth followed him to the grave in four months. This untimely death of a young and hopeful prince was, according to monastic writers, a punishment for the many crimes of his father, especially for the execution of the East Anglian Ethelbert. Cenwulf, who succeeded to the Mercian throne, was not of Offa’s line, though like him a collateral descendant of Penda. Of his reign, which lasted well on into the ninth century (796–821), nothing need here be said, save that in its third year he invaded Kent, which had revolted from his rule and set up a rival king named Edbert Pren, possibly a descendant of the old Kentish line. Edbert was defeated and taken prisoner by the soldiers of Offa, who, after cutting out his tongue and chopping off his hands, sent him as a prisoner into Mercia. With all its vaunted prosperity, the central kingdom does not seem to have made great progress in civilisation since the days of Penda.
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Save for some conflicts with Wales, in which the Cymri appear generally to have been worsted, the history of the WEST SAXON kingdom in the eighth century consisted chiefly of that protracted struggle with Mercia which has been briefly sketched in the foregoing pages. But the story of the death of Cynewulf in 786 is told in the Chronicle with such vividness and in such detail that an attempt must be made to reproduce it here. Cynewulf, a kinsman of the victorious Cuthred, had expelled that king’s successor, Sigebert, and driven him into exile. After thirty years of reigning, Cynewulf had to meet the face of the avenger, Sigebert’s brother, Cyneheard, who is called in the Chronicle “the Etheling”. Learning that the king, slenderly guarded, was visiting a woman at Merton, Cyneheard with a band of his gesiths surrounded the house and rode through the gate of the great courtyard to the door of the lady’s bower. Surprised and unable to summon his guards, the king rushed to the door, and in the narrow entrance defended himself bravely and with success till he caught sight of the Etheling. Then with a sudden burst of rage he dashed forward, sorely wounded his enemy, but was himself surrounded and slain by Cyneheard’s men. Meantime the lady’s cries aroused the king’s thegns who were in the great hall, ignorant of what had happened, and they hastened to the scene of tumult, each running as fast as he could. The Etheling, who had no quarrel with them, offered them quarter and money in return for peace, but they refused his terms and continued fighting, outnumbered as they were, till they were all slain but one man, “and he,” says the chronicler apologetically, “was [only] a Welshman, a hostage and already sorely wounded”.
Next morning, when the main body of the king’s thegns, whom he had left behind when he rode to Merton, heard what had happened, they galloped to the house, headed by the Ealdorman Osric, but found the Etheling in possession and the gate of the courtyard closed against them. A parley was called, and Cyneheard offered the new-comers their own terms in money and land if they would join his party and win for him the kingdom, adding with uncomprehended irony: “There are kinsmen of yours now with me in the house, and they, I know, will never leave me”. “No kinsman,” answered the thegns, “can be dearer to us than our lord, and we will never follow his murderer.” The offer of quarter which they in turn made to the Etheling’s gesiths was rejected with equal scorn. “We care no more for your offer,” said they, “than did your comrades for ours, and they”--now at last the truth came out--“were all slain with the king.” Then followed fierce fighting round the gates, till at last the king’s thegns, who were the stronger party, forced their way in and slew the Etheling and all the men with him, save one who had already received many wounds and was godson to Ealdorman Osric by whom his life was preserved. Once again we note the unshakable fidelity of the “comrades” to their lord.
On the death of Cynewulf, Beorhtric (786–802), a distant kinsman, succeeded to the West Saxon throne. Royal genealogies were by this time in much confusion, and all that the chronicler could say concerning his descent was that “his right father’s kin goeth unto Cerdic”. Beorhtric’s reign, in itself unimportant, is chiefly interesting to us by reason of a certain competitor, for the time an unsuccessful competitor, for the crown. This was none other than a young man named Egbert, who, it was said, could trace his line back through a brother of King Ine to Ceawlin and so to Cerdic. His father, Ealhmund, had been under-king of Kent, whether under Mercia or Wessex it would be difficult to say; indeed the whole of Egbert’s early career is veiled in obscurity. All that seems to be certain is that he had pretensions of some kind to the kingship of Wessex, which made him obnoxious to Beorhtric and forced him to seek shelter at the Mercian court. Thence, however, he was driven in 789 when Beorhtric obtained in marriage the hand of Offa’s daughter, Eadburh. Ethelred of Northumbria having soon after married another daughter of the same house, there was evidently no safe resting-place in England for the fugitive prince, who betook himself to the court of Charles the Great and there abode for thirteen years till the death of his rival. In 802, Beorhtric died, and Egbert, returning to England, seems to have been without opposition raised to the West Saxon throne.
According to Asser, the biographer of Alfred the Great, the death of Beorhtric was due to his wife. That daughter of Offa, if Asser may be trusted, as soon as she had established her influence in the West Saxon palace, “began in her father’s manner to act tyrannically”. She undermined to the utmost of her power the king’s best counsellors by slandering them to her husband, and those whom she could not thus displace she removed by poison. A draught of poison which she had thus prepared for a young man greatly beloved by Beorhtric was inadvertently tasted by the king and caused his death, which of course involved Eadburh’s downfall. Carrying with her great hoards of treasure, she sought the Frankish court where her husband’s rival, Egbert, had so lately been sheltered. As she stood in the hall of audience and offered rich presents to the emperor, Charles said to her, perhaps in jest: “Choose, Eadburh, which you will have, me or my son who stands here with me under the dais”. She thoughtlessly answered: “If I may really have my choice, I choose your son, inasmuch as he is the younger of the two”. Whereupon Charles answered with a smile: “If you had chosen me, you should have had my son, but now since you have chosen him you shall have neither”. An improbable story truly, but one which shows the sort of legend which already ere the end of the ninth century was springing up around the name of Charlemagne. Eadburh, however, received from the emperor the gift of a great abbey which she ruled for some time. Then, being convicted of unchastity, she was expelled from the convent, wandered over Europe, begging her daily bread, and died at last in misery at Pavia. Such was the end of the daughter of the mighty Offa. So detestable, says Asser, was the memory of Eadburh’s crimes that for generations the West Saxons would not allow the wife of one of their kings to be called queen, but would only allow her the title of consort.
XV. EARLY DANISH INVASIONS--EGBERT AND ETHELWULF
Two entries which strictly belong to the eighth century have been reserved for this place, because they are rather foreshadowings of what was to befal in the years after 800, than characteristic of what was happening in the years preceding it. At some unnamed date in the reign of Beorhtric, King of Wessex, but probably about the year 790, the Chronicle tells us that “first came three ships of Northmen.[114] And then the reeve rode thereto and would fain drive them to the king’s vill, for he knew not what [manner of men] they were and there they slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of the English race.” This short but ominous entry is a tocsin ringing in 300 years of strife. The words of the Chronicle and of its copyist Ethelweard seem to suggest that the ships’ crews came with peaceful intent; that the king’s reeve--a man whose office was something like that of steward or bailiff--tried to exact some payment from them, and for that purpose to force them to enter some royal settlement, but found to his cost that these were no sheep that would stand quiet for his shearing, but fierce war-wolves, capable of turning upon him with hungry teeth and rending him in pieces.
This first affray with the Danes evidently took place in Wessex; and, if we may believe the historian Ethelweard, the royal vill where the reeve resided was Dorchester. But the Scandinavians having seen, as the Saxons did before them, “the nothingness of the natives,” of course came again, and this time (793) to Northumbria. Dire presentiments had already cowed the hearts of the people; hurricanes blew and lightnings flashed, and (if we like to trust the chronicler) fiery flying serpents hurtled through the air. Then came a great famine, and then (June 8) “the heathen men” [Danes] “miserably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne with rapine and slaughter”. The desecration of so holy a place shed horror through western Christendom. “It is now,” wrote Alcuin to the Northumbrian King Ethelred, “about 350 years that we and our fathers have dwelt in this most beautiful country, and never before has such a terrible thing befallen Britain as that which we have now suffered from the pagans. Nor was it, in fact, thought possible that a voyage of that kind could ever have been made”--a strange illustration of the lost seamanship of the Anglo-Saxons. “Lo now the church of St. Cuthbert is stained with the blood of the priests of God. It is despoiled of all its ornaments. The most venerable place in Britain has been given to pagan nations for a prey.”
The ninth century, upon which we now enter, too truly verified the forebodings of the prophets of evil. It began indeed in glory, with Charles the Frank acclaimed at Rome as Augustus, and meditating the revival of the old Roman empire in all its splendour, the protection of the widow and the fatherless, the humbling of all lawless power, the foundation of St. Augustine’s City of God. But the new empire had scarcely been founded when it began to crumble; all through the middle years of the century it sank lower and lower into the morass. With the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887 and his death in 888 the last Carolingian emperor vanished from the scene. Saracen pirates ravaged the shores of the Mediterranean, besieged Rome (846), rifled the tombs of the apostles and hurled their lances at the mosaic picture of Christ in the apse of St. Peter’s. Ere the century was ended, Hungarian Arpad was renewing in Central Europe the ravages of Attila. Everywhere there was “distress of nations with perplexity”--perplexity made all the more terrible by the fact that the popes themselves, the men to whom Europe looked for counsel and for cheer, were throughout this century for the most part men of poor and feeble character. It was the age which saw the posthumous condemnation of Pope Formosus, the age in which the malevolent credulity of a later generation placed the fable of Pope Joan.
But greater than all the other calamities which befel Europe during this period was unquestionably the misery caused by the raids of Scandinavian free-booters. A well-known story describes how Charles the Great saw the ships of the Northmen approaching the city in Provence where he then dwelt. As soon as the pirates perceived that they would have to deal with the great emperor himself, they sheered off in well-advised caution, but Charles stood at the eastern window of his palace gazing at their departing sails, and as he gazed he wept. None of his courtiers durst ask him the reason of his tears, but he himself deigned thus to explain them: “I weep for sorrow that they should have dared in my lifetime to approach this coast, and because I foresee how much misery they will cause to those who come after me”. Whatever may be the truth of this story, there is no doubt that Charles’s alleged prophecy was fatally verified. Engrossed as we generally are by the story of Danish ravages in England, we are apt to forget that, at least in the ninth century, France and Germany suffered nearly as much from the same calamity. All round the coast from Denmark to Spain, wherever a broad estuary invited their presence, there the Danish pirates entered and ravaged. The Elbe, the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne were all furrowed by their keels. Hamburg, Paris, Rouen, Bordeaux, Marseilles and countless other cities were sacked by them; some, especially Paris, more than once.
A student of Scandinavian history may well inquire, not why the raids of the Northmen were terrible in the ninth and two following centuries, but why they had not begun long before. Here was a poor and hardy population, inhabiting a country so deeply indented by the sea that it was impossible for its sons to be mere landsmen; in fact a population which for more than a thousand years has been more enthusiastically seafaring than any other in the world. Within a few days’ sail of their homes were the shores of Britain and of Gaul, countries peopled by races which had lost their old love of the sea, and were for the most part sunk in swinish pleasures; rich countries, too, according to the estimate of that day, everywhere studded with convents in which pious women or unwarlike men were hoarding up gold and silver and jewels for the glory of the White Christ. There was yet no settled order in any of the Northmen’s own lands. The history of Denmark, Sweden and Norway in the seventh and eighth centuries is mere chaos. The title of king was easily earned and easily lost. In the sagas of the Heimskringla piracy is treated as the normal occupation of every young Northman of noble birth. “Eric’s sons warred much in the eastern lands, but sometimes they harried in Norway.” “There harried Olaf and slew many men, and burned some out of house and home, and took much wealth.” Entries such as these (though of a rather later date than we have yet reached) occur on almost every other page of the great Icelandic epic, and give us the impression that the young Scandinavian gathered ships together and “harried” the Baltic lands or the shores of the German or Atlantic Ocean, in the same way in which the young Englishman went the grand tour in the eighteenth century, or in the nineteenth became owner of a ranch.
The ships of the vikings, if we may judge from the few specimens preserved in the museums of Denmark and Norway, though well built of their kind, were not much better than large open boats, undecked, averaging about seventy feet long, and drawing not more than four feet of water. They had only one mast with a square sail, and they trusted rather to rowing than to sailing for their progress. Except on the largest ships, about fifteen or sixteen men at a time, with a like number relieving them, and sixty or seventy fighting men, or a hundred in all, may have been the complement of a viking ship. There was no difference between prow and stern, and the vessel could be worked in either direction, the steering being managed by an oar at the side. The high-pointed prow at either end was often fashioned into the likeness of some animal, generally a dragon or a serpent. It is evident that such a craft as these, however well adapted for navigation in the long sheltered fiords of Norway, would not be very safe in an Atlantic storm.[115] It is probable, therefore, that the Northmen would be careful observers of the weather, and would generally choose a season of calm weather for slipping across the German Ocean. Once arrived at the English or Irish coast, they would choose some island near to the mainland and make it their lair, from whence they might issue forth to plunder and destroy. Especially convenient for their purpose, as for that of their Saxon predecessors, were such islands as Sheppey and Thanet, separated from fertile Kent only by narrow channels in which the dragon-ships could lie sheltered from winds and waves. Dear also to the heart of the Northman buccaneer were the estuaries of great rivers, Humber, Severn, Thames, Seine and Loire. Here they could collect their ships, scattered perchance in the course of their passage over the ocean, could watch the movements of the militia gathering for the defence of the country, and then at the right moment could row rapidly up the broad stream, capture and sack some unsuspecting city, and gather great store of gold and jewels from some rich cathedral. This, the collection of treasures from the more civilised lands of the south, was, after all, the chief incentive to the early vikings in their wild sea-rovings. Herein they were like the first generation of Elizabethan adventurers in the Spanish main, to whom the plunder of the Plate-fleet seemed the supreme object of desire, though with the viking, as with the buccaneer, thoughts of settlement and of conquest came later, and they who had come to ravage remained to rule.
The Here,[116] the great Danish armament which appears and reappears so often in the pages of the Chronicle--one imagines the studious monk in his scriptorium trembling as he writes the very word--seems to have been generally composed of foot soldiers hewing with swords or wielding their great two-handed battle-axes, armed with strong round shields and with byrnies or coats-of-mail, and beginning the fight by sending a cloud of javelins at their foes. Gradually, however, they learned the advantage of possessing a force of cavalry; and one of their first exploits on landing was to scour the country for horses, by means of which they could ravage the land far and wide where their ships could not carry them. They were, however, in strictness mounted infantry rather than cavalry. Their horses bore them swiftly to the battle-field. When they had reached it they dismounted and fought on foot.
Not even the Icelandic Sagas with all their poetic fire can win us to unmixed admiration of the lives of these freebooters. They had some noble qualities, but notwithstanding these they were still barbarians. They were ancestors of the most chivalrous nations of Europe, and they possessed some of the qualities inherent in chivalry, such as courage, endurance, loyalty, honour to the women of their tribe. But on the other hand--if any reliance is to be placed on the statements of the Chronicle--they would often swear most solemnly to a treaty and then ride away and break it. They often tortured their captives; their hands were heavy on the weak, on little children and on women. This is the less to be wondered at, since owing to the poverty of their country they often left their own new-born children to perish. Their blows fell with especial ferocity on the churches and monasteries of Britain: a fact which may probably be accounted for by the fact that these were the chief treasure-houses of the invaded lands.
The assaults of the Danes upon the Saxons, like those of the Saxons upon the Romanised Britons, fall naturally into three periods,[117] the first of robbery, the second of settlement, and the third of conquest. The chronological limits of these three periods may be approximately fixed as follows: pillage, from 790 to 851; settlement, from 851 to 897; conquest (after a pause of nearly a century), from 980 to 1016.
Terrible as were the ravages of the Scandinavian invaders, it is generally admitted that on the whole the benefit which resulted therefrom was greater than the suffering. That benefit was the consolidation of Anglo-Saxon England into one kingdom. In the thirty-seven years of the reign of Egbert of Wessex he attained, by steps which we are about to trace, to a supremacy which was probably wider than that of any of the Bretwaldas who had preceded him, and which in some degree justifies the popular conception of his position as founder of the English monarchy, though the unity of England was not in truth realised till a century later. But other Bretwaldas had been nearly as powerful as Egbert, and their overlordship in the hands of feeble descendants had melted away, while the “particularism” of the several lesser kingdoms had again successfully asserted itself. It may be doubted whether Egbert’s supremacy would not have gone the way of all the previous supremacies, but for that terrible series of Scandinavian invasions which seemed at the time to threaten not merely the prosperity but the very life of Anglo-Saxon peoples. For a century the terrible struggle continued and then ended for a time, to be renewed indeed with almost equal fury after an interval of rest; but the effect of that first fierce discipline was greatly to weaken if not altogether to destroy the spirit of particularism in the Anglo-Saxon states. After Athelstan’s death in 940 there was scarcely any serious thought of reestablishing Mercia or Northumbria as a separate kingdom from Wessex. Hard and cruel were the blows stricken by the hammer of Thor, but they had the effect of welding Angles, Saxons and Jutes into one people.
The upward career of EGBERT of Wessex (802–839) must now be briefly described. As has been said, he returned from exile on the death of his foe, Beorhtric, and apparently without a contest was raised to the West Saxon throne. On the very day of his accession there was a great fight between the Mercians, commanded by the Ealdorman of the Hwiccas and the West Saxons under the generalship of the Ealdorman of Wilts. Both Ealdormen were slain, but victory is said to have rested with the men of Wiltshire. With this exception, the first thirteen years of Egbert’s reign passed in peace. Cenwulf of Mercia, whose dominions, including, as they did, Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex, wrapped Wessex all round to the east, was too powerful to be lightly assailed. When Egbert’s old patron, Charlemagne, died in 814, there was nothing to betoken that the exile whom he had befriended would achieve anything more than a petty and precarious West Saxon royalty. In the following year, however, the long-interrupted movement westward was once more resumed. Egbert “harried West Wales from east to west”; in other words, he overran Cornwall from the Tamar to the Land’s End. Though the process of subjugation was not yet complete, this was the beginning of the end of Cornish independence.
In 821 Cenwulf, the powerful King of Mercia, died, and there were troubles in the palace at Lichfield. After the murder of his son, a child of seven years old, and the deposition of his brother, an usurper named Beornwulf obtained the crown. The discords thus caused gave Egbert the opportunity for which he had probably long waited. He declared war on Beornwulf, met him in battle at Ellandune, probably in the north of Wiltshire, and after a most bloody fight completely defeated him. Intent on gathering at once the most important fruits of victory, Egbert sent his son Ethelwulf to the region of Kent, where his own father had once held sway. Baldred, King of Kent, the vassal of Mercia, was expelled; the three south-eastern counties and Essex, which included the city of London, gladly accepted the rule of Egbert, who was represented by his son Ethelwulf as under-king, and the long struggle between Mercia and Wessex for the possession of that corner of England was at an end. East Anglia, with her bitter memories of Mercian perfidy, to which her King Ethelbert had fallen a victim thirty years before, now rose in rebellion, relying on the protection of Egbert, and succeeded in defeating and slaying the Mercian king (826?). After Beornwulf’s death Mercia could no longer offer any effectual resistance. Egbert was soon acknowledged as overlord, and thus by about the year 829 he had brought under his supremacy, though not under his personal rule, the whole of England south of the Humber, and acquired the mysterious title of Bretwalda, which (if the Saxon Chronicle may be trusted) had been borne by no other sovereign since the death of Oswy, a century and a half before.
The conqueror next moved against Northumbria, whose king Eanred did not dare to accept the offer of battle. At Dore, among the hills of North Derbyshire, not far from Sheffield, “the Northumbrians met him and offered him obedience and peace, and with that they separated the one from the other”. This transaction undoubtedly meant the acceptance of Egbert as overlord, and his supremacy was thus at last assured over the whole English portion of the island. Nor did he rest content herewith, for in the next year “he led an army against the men of North Wales and reduced them to humble” (though not permanent) “obedience”.
The last four years of Egbert’s life were disturbed by the raids of the Danish invaders. For forty-one years after the raids in which the Northumbrian sanctuaries were pillaged, the Northmen seem to have left England unmolested, but during this time they had been sailing round the north of Scotland, occupying the Hebrides and grievously harrying, all but conquering, Ireland. Now in 835 Egbert, already a man advanced in years, heard the grievous tidings that “heathen men were ravaging the Isle of Sheppey”. Thus the Danes, like the Jutes four centuries earlier, began their hostile operations with one of those curious semi-islands which clustered round the coast of Kent. Sheppey, however, was higher up the estuary of the Thames than Hengest’s Isle of Thanet. Next year the Danes appeared on the coast of West Dorset. The crews of thirty-five ships appeared off Charmouth, not far from Lyme Regis. Egbert himself led his men to battle; there was a terrible slaughter, in which two bishops and two ealdormen fell, and--ominous confession of the West Saxon chronicler--“the Danes held the place of slaughter”. Still, however, we have no hint of permanent occupation.
Two years later, in 838, there was a perilous combination of Northman and Celt. “A mighty fleet” [evidently Danish] “came to West Wales and they” [Danes and Cornishmen] “made an alliance to fight against Egbert. When he heard that, he went forth and fought with them at Hengestdune, and there he put to flight both Welshmen [Cornishmen] and Danes.” At Hingston Down, a high moorland overlooking the Tamar, about four miles north of the place where the great Saltash bridge now spans the creek, this important victory was won. It was the last piece of work that the old warrior accomplished. In 839 he “fared forth,” surely not without some dark forebodings of the hard struggle that lay before his descendants; and ETHELWULF his son reigned in his stead. The new king seems to have ruled in person only over the ancestral Wessex, forming the recently acquired kingdoms in the south-east of the island into a dependency, of which his brother Athelstan was made under-king.
The teacher to whom the education of Ethelwulf when a boy had been entrusted by his father, and who retained considerable influence over him in manhood, was an ecclesiastic of noble birth named Swithun, who is chiefly now remembered on account of the meteorological phenomena connected with the day devoted to him in the calendar (July 15, 971).[118] The gentle and devout character of Ethelwulf seems to have retained through life the impress of the teaching of the unworldly St. Swithun, but he had also another counsellor by whom he was often braced to the performance of the difficult work of reigning. This was Ealhstan, a stirring warrior-prelate, who in 848 won a great and bloody victory over the Danes, at the mouth of the Parret, in Bridgwater Bay, fighting side by side with the ealdormen of Somerset and Dorset. Ealhstan was bishop of the great diocese of Sherborne (including the counties of Somerset and Devon), while Swithun in 852, towards the end of Ethelwulf’s reign, was enthroned in the more dignified see of Winchester.
The influence, in some respects the diverging influence, of these two counsellors of the king is probably described with truth by the twelfth century historian, William of Malmesbury. “These two eminent bishops, seeing the king to be of somewhat dull and lethargic temperament, stirred him up by frequent admonitions to the performance of his kingly duties. Swithun, who looked on worldly things with disgust, moulded the mind of his lord to the love of things heavenly. Ealhstan, who thought that secular matters also should not be neglected, animated him to the war against the Danes, himself often furnishing money to the royal treasury, himself setting the battle in array. Any one who reads our annals will find that many such affairs were resolutely begun and gloriously ended by him.” The historian, however, remarks that he cannot give Ealhstan the unmingled praise which he would willingly offer, because of his unjust encroachments on the rights of the monastery of Malmesbury.
Almost every year of Ethelwulf’s reign has its annal in the Chronicle, telling of Danish ravages. The storm beat most persistently on Wessex. Southampton (840), Portland (840), Charmouth (843), the mouth of the Parret (848), Wembury (?) (854), were all scenes of battle with the Danes, generally, but not always, disastrous for the English. The other parts of the country did not escape unharmed. In 841 Lindsey, East Anglia and Kent saw widespread slaughter. In 844 Redwulf, King of Northumbria, met his death at the hands of the invaders. In 851, three hundred and fifty ships came to the mouth of the Thames; their crews took Canterbury and London by storm, and put to flight the king of the Mercians who had advanced to meet them. There, however, their success ended. Crossing the Thames into Surrey, they were met by Ethelwulf and his eldest son Ethelbald leading the West Saxon fyrd. Battle was joined at Ockley, on the edge of the chalk downs which look into the adjoining county of Sussex, and there the West Saxon king in the words of the Chronicle, “made the greatest slaughter among the heathen army that we have heard of till this present day, and there gained the victory”.
However complete the victory of Ockley might be, its importance is much diminished by the entry which precedes it in the Chronicle: “And the heathen men for the first time took up their quarters over winter in Thanet”. We thus enter on the second of the above-mentioned periods--the stage of settlement, that in which the Danes came to England, not merely to plunder and then depart, but to fix their abode permanently in the country. This choice of Thanet as their winter quarters must, to the men of Kent who knew anything of the history of their ancestors, have seemed an ominous recurrence to the strategy of Hengest and Horsa four centuries previously. There was trouble also from an older enemy. The men of Wales were now governed by one of the greatest of their early kings, Rhodri Mawr (Roderick the Great, 844–77); and it seems that the distress of the Saxons under the Danish attacks gave the Welsh courage to rise against the traditional enemies of their race. In 853 Burhred, King of Mercia, acting by the advice of his witan, made formal application to Ethelwulf for help against “the men of North Wales”. The very fact that such an application was needed, and that it came from the king and council of the Mercian realm, shows how far England was from having yet attained to that complete unity which has been incorrectly associated with the name of Egbert. However, the expedition which Ethelwulf now undertook against the Cymri, in alliance with Mercia, seems to have been successful, and the marriage of Burhred to Ethelwulf’s daughter, celebrated at Easter-tide, doubtless cemented the alliance and may have been a step towards federation.
Again in this year 853 there was fighting both by land and sea against the heathen in Thanet. Many men on both sides were slain and drowned. The two ealdormen who led the forces of Kent and Surrey were at first victorious, but--as often happened--let victory slip from their unskilful hands, and both fell on the field of battle. This and many similar entries bring vividly before us the typical Saxon ealdorman, leading the fyrd or militia of his shire to battle, displaying plenty of courage and risking his life freely in the service of his country, but showing little skill in organising a campaign or even in grasping its fruits when they fell into his lap. On the other side we see the men of the Scandinavian islands and long fiords, children of the sea, equally ready to fight on it or on the land--artful, ruthless, courageous, and with a splendid ignorance of defeat. Such were the ravens who were now fixing their talons deep in our exhausted England. Our next entry is: “In this year” [855] “heathen men first remained over winter in Sheppey”.
It might have been supposed that the West Saxon king would need all his energies to put his kingdom in an adequate state of defence and to organise all round the coast an efficient system of resistance to the all-penetrating Northmen. Instead of this we find him, with some surprise, in this very year 855, “going to Rome with much pomp,” remaining there for a twelve-month, visiting the Frankish court on his way back, and returning, elderly widower that he was, with a bride thirteen years old. This strange episode of the pilgrimage was the fulfilment of a long-cherished design, and may have been partly due to the pious counsels of St. Swithun, but certainly does not raise our opinion of the king’s wisdom, while the marriage adventure looks like mere fatuity. Before Ethelwulf’s departure he made that celebrated donation to the Church which used to be considered as the introduction of the tithe-system into England, but which was really “the devotion of a tenth part of his private property to ecclesiastical purposes”.[119] He took with him his youngest and favourite son Alfred, who though still but a little child had already, two years before, made the same pilgrimage. Travelling through France he was received with royal honours by Charles the Bald, king of that country, and escorted by him to the boundary of his kingdom. He perhaps arrived in Rome in time to see the pontiff Leo IV., who on Alfred’s previous visit had laid his hands in benediction on the head of the child. On July 17, however (855), the old pope died, and Ethelwulf and his boy must have witnessed the tumultuous proceedings which followed, and the state of practical civil war between the Lateran and St. Peter’s which filled the streets of Rome with clamour, till at last about the end of September the iconoclast anti-pope Anastasius was finally overthrown and Benedict III. took his seat on the chair of St. Peter. It is a curious fact, but probably a mere coincidence, that precisely at this point of papal history the romancing chroniclers of the Middle Ages have inserted the fable of “Pope Joan,” the learned and eloquent Englishwoman who, as they averred, came to Rome in male attire, habited as an ecclesiastic, was unanimously chosen pope and wore the tiara for some months or even years, till her sex was unfortunately disclosed in the midst of a public procession. If any further proof were needed of the absurdity of this story (which is no Protestant invention but passed current through many medieval centuries), it might be furnished by the absolute silence of the English chroniclers, some of whom may well have conversed with members of the retinue of the West Saxon king.
Ethelwulf’s devout liberality is recorded by the contemporary papal biographer, though his Italian ear has failed to catch or to retain his barbarous name: “At this time a king of the Saxons named ... leaving his goods and his own kingdom, came for prayer with a multitude of followers to the thresholds of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome. And he gave to St. Peter a crown of pure gold weighing four pounds; vessels of pure gold weighing two pounds; a sword bound with pure gold; two smaller images of pure gold; a paten of silver gilt, Saxon work, four pounds; a vestment of purple with a golden border; a white surplice all of silk, embroidered and gold bordered; two large curtains of gold tapestry.[120] Then the Saxon king, on Pope Benedict’s request that he would employ the gold and silver [which he had brought with him] in giving largesse to the people in St. Peter’s church, dispensed gold to the bishops, presbyters, deacons and all the rest of the clergy and chief men of Rome, but he gave small silver coins to the common people.”[121]
A more obviously useful exercise of Ethelwulf’s liberality was connected with the Schola Saxonum, which is said to have been founded by his predecessor, Ine, or by the Mercian Offa. In this schola (something probably between a convent and an academic hostel) young Anglo-Saxons destined for the ecclesiastical profession probably dwelt for months or years, learning the Latin of the missal and the tones of Gregorian plain-song. Its memory even yet lingers in Rome, for the Church of the Holy Spirit in “the Leonine city” having been placed near the school of the Saxons still bears the name of “San Spirito in Sassia”. The schola had, however, been unfortunately destroyed by fire in the year before Ethelwulf’s visit, and patriotism as well as piety prompted him to spend on its restoration some part of the treasure which he had brought from England.[122]
After a year’s residence in Rome, Ethelwulf returned to England, visiting on the way the court of his much younger contemporary, Charles the Bald,[123] whose daughter Judith, a young girl of thirteen, he brought home with him as his wife, much to the astonishment, doubtless, of his subjects and to the annoyance of his sons by his first marriage. Though it is nowhere distinctly so stated, it seems probable that this extraordinary second marriage of Ethelwulf had some connexion with an event which clouded the last years of his life, the rebellion of his eldest son Ethelbald. This young man had probably exercised some of the functions of a regent during his father’s absence, and now stood arrayed in arms to repel him from his kingdom. The fact that he was abetted by the energetic Bishop Ealhstan and by the ealdorman of Somerset, who had helped Ealhstan to win his great victory over the Danes in Bridgwater Bay, suggests the possibility that this rebellion may not have been due merely to the ambition of an undutiful son, but may have been prompted by a patriotic desire to wrest the helm of the state from the hands of an inefficient pilot. Happily, though Ethelwulf had many partisans, shocked by what they deemed the unnatural conduct of Ethelbald, civil war was avoided. The gentle old man agreed without much difficulty to an arrangement whereby the western portion of the kingdom, the richer and fairer part, was handed over to his son, he himself retaining the eastern portion. The young Queen Judith, who had been crowned before her departure from France, now took her place on the royal throne side by side with her husband, notwithstanding the “infamous custom” of Wessex which, as has been said, on account of the evil example of the daughter of Offa, forbade the consorts of West Saxon kings to sit on the throne or to bear the name of queen.
Less than two years after his return from Rome, on January 13, 858, Ethelwulf died. His will was much talked of and was considered by his biographers a model for all future generations. After directing how his kingdom and his property should be divided between his sons, he ordained that throughout his dominions one man in ten, whether a native or a foreigner, should be supplied with meat, drink and clothing by his successors until the Day of Judgment, always supposing “that there should still be men and cattle in the land and that the country should not have become quite desolate,” a striking evidence of the anxieties caused by the Danish invasions. True to the last to his affection for Rome, he left a hundred mancuses (twelve and a half pounds of silver) to buy oil for the lights of St. Peter’s, the same sum for the lights of St. Paul’s (outside the city), and another hundred for the apostolic pontiff’s own private use. It does not seem possible to accept the theories of some recent writers who would fain represent Ethelwulf as a wise and capable statesman, the deviser of large continental alliances for defence against the Northmen. On the contrary, he was probably a man of slender intellect and feeble will, but devout, unworldly and affectionate, by no means the least lovable of Anglo-Saxon sovereigns.