David Starkey - Crown and Country - A History of England through the Monarchy

The outstanding contemporary of Redwald was Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria. Æthelfrith was a great warrior, and, thanks to his victories over the Scots under Aedan in 603 and the Britons of Powys in 613, he was the real founder of Northumbrian power. He was also a pagan. But this did not stop Bede from seeing him as the instrument of God’s vengeance against the Celts, who were not only (Bede thought) of the wrong race but had also espoused the wrong sort of Christianity. Æthelfrith was another Benjamin, Bede enthused, and, like the Old Testament hero, ‘[he] shall ravin as a wolf; in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil’.

It was a verse that might have been the motto of any successful Anglo-Saxon king.

But in this dog-eats-dog world, even Æthelfrith got his comeuppance. It was administered by Redwald, who had given refuge to Edwin, a rival claimant to the Northumbrian throne. Æthelfrith demanded Edwin’s surrender. But Redwald, deciding that attack was the best form of defence, launched a surprise campaign and defeated and killed Æthelfrith in battle in 616. Edwin succeeded to Northumbria while Redwald became unchallenged bretwalda . A decade later, Redwald died in c. 627 and Edwin emerged as bretwalda in turn. One of Edwin’s first steps was to seek the hand of Æthelbert’s daughter, Æthelberg, who arrived in Northumbria with Augustine’s disciple, Paulinus, as her spiritual adviser. After the marriage, Edwin converted and Paulinus became archbishop of York. But when Edwin went the same way as most early Anglo-Saxon kings and was overcome in battle and killed in 633, Paulinus fled south, to become successively bishop of Rochester and archbishop of Canterbury.

The new king of Northumbria, Oswald, was also a Christian. But he drew his inspiration from the very different tradition of the Celtic Christianity of the Scotto-Irish world, where he had spent many years of exile. This is seen in the case of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Lindisfarne monastery on Holy Island, off the Northumbrian coast, had been founded by St Aidan, an Irish monk from Iona, as a base for his missionary activity under Oswald. The splendid decoration of the Gospels, produced in the late seventh century, testifies to the rich mixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Roman elements in Northumbrian Christianity.

Under Oswald’s younger brother and successor, Oswy, the tensions between the two strands of Christianity, the Celtic and the Roman, became acute: it even divided the king and the queen, who took different sides on the matter. To settle the dispute, Oswy summoned a Council at Whitby in 664. Both sides argued their case with passion, particularly over the vexed issue of the dating of Easter. But the king declared that the Catholics had been victorious. He did so on simple grounds of authority. If he had to decide, the king said, between St Columba, the apostle of the Scots, and St Peter, the disciple to whom Jesus had given the Key of Heaven, he would choose St Peter.

In the wake of his decision, the Celtic leaders of the Northumbrian church withdrew and returned to Scotland. But much of their influence lingered on to contribute its share to the astonishing efflorescence of Northumbrian culture in the century and a half from c. 650– c. 800. Monasteries were richly endowed with lands and books and relics and became outposts of sophisticated Mediterranean civilization in the north. They copied and illuminated magnificent manuscripts; sent out missionaries to convert their former homeland in Germany, and in Bede produced the greatest European polymath of the day. The intellectual centre of the world, it seemed, had moved from the banks of the Tiber to the Tyne.

But it was not to last.

Very different was the rival kingdom of Mercia. Here King Penda ( c . 626–55) held out as an unrepentant pagan. Moreover, in an alliance of convenience with the Britons, he enjoyed a series of crushing victories over the Christian Northumbrians, defeating and killing King Edwin in 633 and King Oswald in 642. The struggle was crucial to the future of England, and the largest, richest and most important Anglo-Saxon archaeological discovery of the last fifty years may be a product of it.

The Staffordshire Hoard was discovered in 2009 in a field near Lichfield, then in the heart of Mercia. It consists of over 1,500 objects made of gold and silver and decorated with precious stones. The silver weighs about 1.3 kilograms and the gold an astonishing 5 kilograms. Only the Sutton Hoo treasure can compare with it. But the two are very different. The Sutton Hoo burial is a careful ritual deposit; the Staffordshire Hoard seems to have been quickly thrown together and hastily buried. Moreover, it consists of fragments: 86 pommel caps from swords; 135 hilt plates from swords and the decorative pieces of at least one Sutton Hoo-style helmet. All are items of male adornment; there is no female jewellery. There are also the crumpled remains of four or five Christian crosses, including one inscribed with the warlike verses from Psalm 68: Surge domine , ‘Rise up, O Lord, and may Thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate Thee be driven from Thy face’.

Was this a processional cross, carried by the losing side in one of Penda’s victories over the Christians of 633 or 642? And were the fragments of male adornment – the warrior bling of the day – torn from the bodies and weapons of the fallen Northumbrian warriors?

It seems very possible. But, alas, we are most unlikely ever to know for certain.

But, finally, Penda succumbed in turn, being defeated and killed by the Christian Oswy of Northumbria in 655. The previous year, in a temporary lull in the hostilities, Penda’s son had married Oswy’s daughter, who, as usual, arrived with Christian missionaries. This gave Christianity a toehold in Mercia even before Penda’s death and it made rapid strides afterwards. One of the old pagan’s sons even retired to an English monastery, while a grandson abdicated to become a monk in Rome. Soon after, Penda’s direct line died out and the succession passed to his great-great-nephew, Æthelbald, who at last proved equal to his formidable ancestor.

The kingdom Æthelbald acquired was already extensive. Its base lay in the Tame valley north of Birmingham, with Tamworth and Lichfield as its main centres. Thence, the power of the kings of Mercia reached out in every direction along the two great Roman roads, Watling Street and the Fosse Way, which intersected in its heartland: north-east towards Lincoln; north-west into the borders of Wales, south-west to Bath and, above all, south-east to London, which, then as now, was the commercial heart of Britain.

Accurately, but prosaically, the Mercian kings have been called Lords of the A5.

Æthelbald was a man shrewd enough, and ruthless enough, to exploit this inheritance to the utmost. He also enjoyed, as all successful politicians must, good luck in the shape of the relative weakness of his most obvious rivals, the kings of Northumbria and Wessex. The result was that he quickly became dominant in the whole of southern Britain. Moreover, he maintained his sway throughout an unprecedentedly long reign of forty years (716–57).

But did that make him a true king of England, rather than a mere overlord? Many, then and now, have thought so. Indeed, a charter of 736 heaps titles on him: he is ‘king not only of the Mercians, but also of all the provinciae which are called by the general name “South English”’; rex Suutanglorum (‘king of the South English’) or even rex Britanniae (‘king of Britain’). But this was courtly hyperbole. Long-established kingdoms, such as Wessex and East Anglia, kept their separate identities and at least some freedom of action. Moreover, Æthelbald’s dominance came at a price. His private life was denounced as wicked by St Boniface; he was also reviled as a ‘tyrant’ once he was safely dead.