Act 4

Anglo Saxon Yorkshire

410 CE to 866 CE

Ancestral Anglo-Saxon agriculturalist beside the Hodge Beck at Kirkdale

Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire and the birth of the English nation

Return to the Matrix

Gregorian Chant

As a scene setter, you might enjoy a burst of Gregorian Chant

A prologue

Kirkdale Minster, only five kilometres south of the place that would come to be called Farndale, and part of the same estate lands, was at the centre of a stable area for most of the Anglo-Saxon period. There is every reason to suppose that the agricultural lands around Kirkdale and Kirkbymoorside, were the lands of our ancestors for centuries. There was no minster at Kirkdale nor town at Kirkbymoorside as the Romans left Britain, but in our narrative, we call these lands Kirkdaleland.

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History describes the events of the fifth century until the mid sixth century CE in a very brief account[1]. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People is the primary source for the history of the following centuries, and itself relies on Gildas’ Ruin of Britain[2], probably written in the sixth century CE, more a sermon about the end of times than a history, whose approach may have also rubbed off on Bede. Bede’s work was intended to share his view of the rise of the church in English history and he adopted distinct views about the failures of the indigenous Britons and the inevitability of Roman Christianity, although he seems to have respected the Irish Christians. Bede nevertheless provides a historical narrative which is invaluable in being the only substantial written source. The much later Anglo Saxon Chronology[3], begun in the ninth century, is a later source which includes a chronology of the earlier period, and may have relied on other earlier sources not used by Bede. The limited written source material has been refined in recent decades by analysis of the archaeological record.

The Old English æ is known as ash, and represents the unrounded vowel sound in Scandinavian languages, pronounced as the a in cat. Æthel means noble, so Æthelstan means noble stone, Ælfred means Elven or supernatural counsel and Æthelfrith, somewhat ironically, means noble peace.

This is a story of a chaotic period after Roman withdrawal; the creation of fresh identity by warlords who evolved into early kings, the reintroduction of Christianity, and the imagination of a new English identity, first distilled in the lands of northern Yorkshire.

This Act is a story of the wider Kingdom of Northumbria and its early constituent parts of Deira and Bernicia which was the context of the world of those who lived in Kirkdaleland, which lay at its heart. The first two scenes will tell the Northumbrian story, and Scene 3 will focus on the particular lands of Kirkdaleland, which was an integral part of the wider story. The last scene concerns the end of this Northumbrian Golden Age.

Scene 1 – Order from Chaos

Kirkdaleland in the fifth century CE

From the fifth century CE, the Romano-British kingdom rapidly broke up into smaller kingdoms. There emerged a very large number of small kingdoms across Britain after the Roman withdrawal[4]. What happened to the Roman estates and populations around Kirkdale in the post Roman period is uncertain, but there was probably a degree of disrupted continuity.

Gildas depicted a chaotic post Roman world, when the barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea throws us back on the barbarians. Thus two modes of death await us. We are either drowned or slaughtered[5]. In 480 CE a Gallo Romano aristocratic poet, Sidonius Apollinarius, referred to the Saxon pirate, who deems it sport to furrow in British waters with hides, cleaving the blue sea in a stitched boat. He later added that the Saxon is the most ferocious of all foes. He comes upon you without warning; when you expect his attack he slips away. Resistance only moves him with contempt; a rash opponent is soon down. Shipwrecks are to him no terror but only so much training. His is no mere acquaintance with the perils of the sea; he knows them as he knows himself.[6]

There was a tendency of those who had most embraced Roman living to flee northward and westward, so that Wales and Cornwall became the land of the old Britons as the pagan cultures of the Anglo-Saxons and the Jutes were planted in the east.

The Roman Empire had both required and created surpluses. When the empire withdrew from Britain, its economy collapsed. There were no interlinked markets, no tax, no money, no mass production of goods. People were on the move. They often moved into the ruins of former Roman settlements, or to ancient hillforts haunted by the ghosts of ancestors. A community continued to live at Birdoswald, a second century fort on Hadrian’s Wall[7]. Roman soldiers had married local girls and local boys had been recruited to local defence. This hybrid community over time continued to live there and by c 470 CE they dismantled the old Roman walls and built new structures and in time an impressive timber hall. There emerged a series of small scale, politically independent, socially stratified little worlds[8].

As Britain was abandoned by the Roman army, the remaining population was subject to direct attacks from the barbarian lands. The threat came primarily from the Picts and Scots to the north and west, but also from Saxons who threatened southern and eastern Britain. The social chaos unleashed in the wake of the revolt, the hordes of displaced and vulnerable people, made the former province a perfect hunting ground for invaders in search of treasure, cattle or slaves[9].

Nevertheless, the evidence of Anglo-Saxon culture in the area around Kirkdale was slow to arrive. There is an absence of obviously culturally Anglo-Saxon grave goods in the early years of this new age. It seems likely that the population in the area remained largely indigenous, at least for a while, and was not immediately overwhelmed by the Anglo-Saxon incomers.

At nearby Beadlam, a large number of coins date to the later fourth century CE[10] and might reflect locally secure conditions that may have been sustained for a period after the Romans had left. The old Roman villa of Beadlam seems to have continued as an important supplier of grain, evidenced by the presence of a grain dryer from this time. Beadlam’s material culture suggests continued post Roman activity. It cannot be said with any certainty that Kirkdale had any association with Beadlam, but its proximity might suggest its continued importance during this opaque period.

It seems likely that there may have been some religious site at Kirkdale in the late Roman period, whether pagan or Christian or an amalgam of both. There is evidence of an early burial, including an infant, to the north east of the later church[11]. The first recognised structural phase of building at Kirkdale are some foundations to the north of the church, which used blocks which might have been dated to the Roman period, or might have been reused. This may have been part of a detached structure, such as a funerary building or mausoleum.

The Hodge Beck at Kirkdale dries up in times of hot weather, but continues to flow underground, to reappear downstream. The quietness, beauty and timelessness of the site, and its disappearing water trick, might explain its likely religious importance even before Christian times. Inspired by J G Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough[12], a local archaeologist felt that the unusual characteristics of Kirkdale make it a likely location for pre Christian ritual. It has been suggested that it might have been a Druid site and it may have been a place of Anglo-Saxon pagan influence for a while[13].

The spectacle of the waters of the Hodge Beck adjacent to the site of the later church, which are periodically lost to sight, provides a suitable location for pre Christian phenomenological experience. Underground openings might have been used to communicate, using discolouration by means of dyes, and meetings might have been timed to coincide with water flow changes.

The location of Kirkdale is accessible, whilst not obvious. It could be accessed by long distance routeways, but its location was aside and at the edge of the more populated vales. The folk who lived there were silent witnesses to the remarkable events that unfolded around them during the following centuries.

Anglo-Saxon incomers

In the immediate aftermath of the Roman departure, Bede’s narrative referred to a period of famine, raids from Irish pirates with the Picts being less active save occasional raids. He suggested that there was then a period of abundant corn, which abundance in time led to more crime. [14]

The Anglo Saxon Period 400 to 866 CE The Beowulf kings of Deira, Bernicia and Northumbria. The history of this period in chronological form.

Northumbria Genealogy The genealogy of the Deiran, Bernician and later Northumbrian Kings

Eboracum (York) was virtually deserted by the early fifth century, but the site over time became the capital of the British-Celtic kingdom of Ebrauc. The British kingdom faced increasing pressure and conflict from the Germanic invaders who began settling in the coastal regions in the early fifth century.

Yr Hen Ogledd (The Old North), c 550 to c 650

The British kingdom of Elmet was to the south west centred on Loidis (Leeds). Elmet continued as a separate kingdom for some time. The last known king of Elmet, Ceretic, was expelled by Edwin in 617 CE. These were the last British kingdoms of Hen Ogledd, the Old North.

Bede had contempt for the indigenous folk of Britain of this period. To other unspeakable crimes, which Gildas their own historian describes in doleful words, was added this crime, that they never preached the faith to the Saxons or the Angles who inhabited Britain with them[15]. Perhaps a little unfair on an indigenous population who had more immediate concerns for their survival.

Bede reported that there were three powerful tribes of Germanic origin who settled in Britain from the fifth century CE. They were the Saxons, Angles and the Jutes. His model suggested that the Jutes settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight; the Saxons in Wessex, Sussex, and Essex; and the Angles in East Anglia and Northumbria. There is some archaeological evidence for Bede’s summary as an approximate guide. However many artefacts do not conform to Bede’s analysis. Saxon brooches appear in Yorkshire. The idea of three separate tribes who carefully maintained their divisions during the period of settlement is not realistic. There was a steady flow of immigration from northern Europe and Scandinavia, including Saxons, Angles and Jutes, but also including Frisians, Swedes and Franks, mixing and forming more complex societies and cultures.

According to the legend, the Jutland brothers, Hengist and Horsa arrived in Britain around 449 CE at Ebbsfleet on the Isle of Thanet. The British king Vortigern, struggling with raids by Picts and Scots, engaged them as mercenaries to defend the indigenous folk against raiders and in return gave them land on Thanet. Hengest and Horsa decided that the previous deal with the Britons was not to their liking, or in Gildas’ telling, their demands became more and more onerous. The indigenous Britons were politically weak. The narrative passed down by Bede suggests the plea for help turned into a conquest by the Anglo-Saxon-Jute invaders of Britain. They invited more of their countrymen to join them and turned on their hosts, with a treacherous massacre of British nobles at a peace conference, the Night of the Long Knives, and the subsequent seizure of lands in the south-east of Britain. Hengist and Horsa have been credited with founding the Kingdom of Kent. It made a good story to tell around great fires in Kentish halls.

Bede dated these events to 449 CE. It is more likely that the first arrivals of Saxon mercenaries occurred by about 430 CE when the earliest archaeological records provide indications of Saxon settlement including burials, artefacts and buildings of a style unfamiliar in late Roman Britain. Their reneging on the deal, often called the Saxon Revolt, if there is some truth in the legend, may have occurred in about 441 CE when the Gallic Chronicle recorded that the Britons, up to now afflicted by various disasters and vicissitudes, were widely reduced to the rule of the Saxons.[16]

The traditional view of historians was that the Saxon immigrants replaced the indigenous population, perhaps following Gildas’ suggestion that the British folk were killed or enslaved. By the 1960s there were doubts about the scale of the Saxon migrations. An idea emerged that Britain was invaded by a few Saxons who were disproportionately powerful. An alternative interpretation of a more sizeable population of Germanic migrants to Britain rests on the adoption of English, a Germanic language and of Germanic cultural practices. Whilst the French weekdays derive from the names of Roman Gods, English days of the week are named after Germanic Gods, Tiw or Tyr, Woden, Thunor and Frig. It may just be however that Britain had been ravaged so badly leading to cultural collapse that there was little to preserve of their former culture. The elite transfer model suggests the adoption over time of the culture of large numbers of immigrants, so that archaeological excavations may be those of Britons who had adopted the incoming culture. It would have taken a lot of ships to land a sizeable Germanic population in Britain. Sidonius Apollinaris when writing of the Saxon pirates, spoke of single boats stitched together from animal skins rather than menacing fleets, where every man acted as both captain and crew. Yet over decades there may have been significant numbers of Germanic and Scandinavian immigrants settling along the east coast. The numbers are likely to have been large for the Germanic language English to have become the established tongue.[17]

So the story of eastern England during the fifth century CE was far more mixed than a sudden and devastating Germanic invasion. We know that Germanic people had served in the Roman army since at least 306 CE when they were amongst the soldiers who proclaimed Constantine I as emperor. The hoard at Traprain Law in East Lothian included Germanic buckles and strap ends which suggest that Germanic mercenaries were engaged by the Romans by about 367 CE. Germanic people had therefore been travelling to Britain over many decades by the early fifth century. Germanic folk seem to have been settling as mercenaries and perhaps for other purposes for over a hundred years. They were likely to have been part of the Roman units who were pulled out of Britain, and some were likely to have stayed on, and became natives of the British Isles themselves. The archaeological evidence does not suggest large scale attacks on the coastal signal stations or population centres. This doesn’t appear to have been a single seaborne invasion event, and although there were likely to have been seaborne landings by Germanic people on Britain’s shores, as there had been over previous centuries, the transformation probably took place over a long time.

Trade with the continent continued after the Roman withdrawal. A ship’s figurehead from the River Scheldt near Apels, Belgium, dating to the late fourth century features an animal head, attached to a long, lattice-worked stem, representing early Germanic or Roman-influenced maritime art[18]. Whilst no boat was found with it, the find suggests river trade and shipbuilding styles in the Low Countries, and Germanic maritime activity. It is now housed in the British Museum. The Nydam ship[19] is an important archaeological find from the Iron Age, which dates to c 310 CE, preserved in a Danish bog and considered the oldest known clinker-built[20] vessel from Northern Europe. Whilst there was no doubt violence and seizure of land during this period, there was also settlement and a transition of influence from Continental Europe.

We therefore have to temper the evidence of Gildas and Bede with the archaeological evidence, which suggests a more subtle transition.

The continental influence on eastern England was increasingly represented in the archaeological evidence as the fifth century progressed.

By the later fifth century the trickle of immigrants from northern Germany and Scandinavia had significantly increased. In eastern England a series of novel and non Roman burial practices started to prevail. Yet even within a single valley, there could be remarkable heterogeneity in these practices. Whilst it is tempting to see this as evidence that Germanic invaders drove out the indigenous population, this may have had as much to do with the collapse of the Roman state and the cessation of such industries as metalwork, pottery and masonry. It is consistent with increased interaction with Germanic settlers leading to a taste for Germanic metal work. Roman objects continued to appear in these burial sites. This was perhaps more a shift in Roman and British practices over time.

Cremations of the dead had not been practised by the Britons since the third century CE, but was practised by the Saxons. The body was burned on a pyre, often with animals, and the ashes buried in an urn. From 430 CE this practice appeared in Britain, including at Spong Hill, Norfolk[21]. British examples appeared generally to the north in the areas of the Wash and the Humber. The inclusion of grave goods was also practised in Saxony since about 400 CE and appeared in Britain a generation later. British examples appeared more widely, but brooches and decorated metalwork dominated to the north, whilst the Romano-British Quoit Brooch style continued in the south.

The Castle Eden glass claw beaker[22] from county Durham is a rare and exceptionally well-preserved Anglo-Saxon drinking vessel, likely produced in the Rhineland region of modern Germany during the fifth to seventh centuries CE. It is a highly significant object that indicates the high status of its original owner and the extensive trade networks of the time. The saucer form of brooches[23] dominated the southern parts of Britain and were associated with areas of modern Germany and the Rhineland. The cruciform style of brooch[24] dominated in eastern and northern Britain and is associated with northern German and modern Denmark (Anglia and Juteland) and coastal Scandinavia (Sweden and Norway).

Archaeologists tend to describe the new styles of decoration as geometric, adopting geometric shapes chipped into metal; and zoomorphic, reflecting the form of animals. These forms had been very popular in the Germanic part of the empire, perhaps from 200 CE onwards. Brooches, belt buckles, horse harness and other objects adopted these kinds of decorations. Such styles had been reflected in the Roman era hoard at Traprain Law. Their earliest origins were across the steppes of Asia during the Bronze Age and they swept in to the Germanic areas and Scandinavia. From late fifth and early sixth centuries, such decoration appeared in the Yorkshire region. Early Anglo-Saxon art is renowned for its intricate zoomorphic serpent and beast motifs[25]. These designs, often found on high-status metalwork, are characterised by elaborate interlace and stylised animal forms, such as those seen in the Sutton Hoo artefacts. Such forms were later adapted into Christian decoration.

The square headed brooch from West Heslerton[26], ten kilometres to the west of Malton, dating to the late fifth century; the sixth century bow brooches from Maltby in Cleveland[27]; and the seventh century gold sleeve fastener with its garnet inlay from Boldon, Tyne and Wear in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne, evidence a new ornate Germanic influence.

The archaeology suggests new settlements were focused primarily along the course of old Roman roads. They tended to be clustered around, but not within, old Roman towns. The new population distrusted the old Roman centres and began to live in rectangular wooden houses. These new settlements were more focused towards the east. The immigrants sought farming land. Hoards of this period may have simply reflected the consequences of sudden economic collapse, than the sudden invasion of Saxons.[28] As more incomers came to settle, new ways of life started to predominate. Eventually this assimilated into a dominant culture.

All the evidence points to continuity in the landscape: there was no wholesale disruption, such as one might expect if the entire population of what was shortly to become South and East England had in fact changed. Most towns and cities were indeed abandoned, but this was a process that had begun long before, in a remarkably sudden and coordinated fashion shortly after AD 300 - a full century prior to the Roman departure. The distinguished scholar of Roman Britain, Richard Reece, has suggested that this was because towns in Roman Britain were an idea ahead of their time, and that their grip on the population was at best tenuous - and soon slipped. Whatever the explanation, and I find Reece very convincing, Romano-British town life effectively ceased in the early 4th century and there was a consequent rise in rural prosperity, which included the construction or enlargement of many elaborate country houses, known to everybody today as Roman villas. The Anglo-Saxon invasion was more a spread of ideas.[29]

There has been a tendency to distinguish native from Germanic culture, such as burial forms, but the institutions of Bernicia were really a hybrid. The population, if one wants to play the ethnicity card, were similarly hybrid with a very strong genetic bias towards indigenous Britons and a balancing bias towards Germanic language and mythology. The patronage of Anglian warlords ensured the supremacy of a cultural elite. Kings generally took Germanic names. Northumbria, like most of the Anglo Saxon Kingdoms, was a blend of sophisticated, self-confident native institutions and people with an invigorating German self-consciousness and vision of which the Idings are perhaps epitomes. If the Britons described by Gildas as fleeing westwards were real, they were probably the noble families with horses, servants and sufficient portable wealth to survive exile in Britain. The reality of the DNA mix of Northumbria is much more interesting.[30]

Those who still wished to cling to the vestiges of the Roman past, and in particular to Christianity, would have to head west. Here, in what is now Wales and Cornwall, were the hills and forests that Gildas said had offered the Britons refuge. These lands remained literate and amphoras of imported wine and olive oil from the fifth and early sixth century were found at Tintagel. Yet only a few got to indulge in the pretence that they were still part of the Roman elite. King Arthur was the fiction of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. He first appeared in the ninth century as a dux bellorum, leader of battles. The Battle of Badon Hill, said to have been fought by Arthur, may have been an early sixth century encounter between Britons and Saxons.[31] The Battle of Badon was a decisive, though historically murky, late fifth to early sixth century victory for the Romano-Britons against invading Anglo-Saxons, halting their expansion for decades and ushering in a period of peace often linked to the legend of King Arthur, possibly against Saxon forces led by figures like Cerdic or Ælle.

There is a parallel narrative that a leader of the Britons emerged, Ambrosius Aurelianus, who was credited with organising and leading the native British resistance against the invading Anglo-Saxons. He emerged in culture in the transition from Roman Britain to the post-Roman era and is considered by many scholars to be a primary inspiration for the legendary King Arthur.

The Angles

This diverse population of the incomers, perhaps focused on immigration from the regions around Friesland and the mouth of the Elbe[32], introduced the ancestor of the English language which would, in time, become the dominant world language.

The Angles were Germanic people who originated in a region of northern Europe called Angeln, located in what is now northern Germany and southern Denmark (Jutland). Tacitus, writing in about 100 CE, referred to a people called the Anglii living in that region[33]. Archaeological findings, such as those at the Thorsberg Moor near Süderbrarup in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, revealed a peat bog in which the Angles deposited votive offerings for about four centuries[34], indicate a significant Germanic presence from the first to the fifth centuries. Even if the purist approach of Bede to the division of the groups who arrived in Britain is inaccurate, nevertheless the northern Anglian zone of Britain seems to have adopted a common group identity by the end of the fifth century and started to define itself as of Anglian origin.

DNA evidence indicates a significant impact of Anglo-Saxon settlers on Yorkshire, with some studies indicating the region has the most Anglo-Saxon ancestry in the United Kingdom[35]. This is supported by archaeological and genetic studies of sites like West Heslerton North Yorkshire, close to Kirkdaleland, together suggesting the large scale migration and integration of Anglo-Saxons with the existing population. Environmental archaeology is particularly revealing.

DNA and the Anglo Saxon Migration

Duncan Sayer discusses the DNA evidence for the continental influence on the British Isles

Kirkdaleland at the Periphery

The archaeology thus suggests an evolution of medieval settlements from waves of Germanic farmer-settlers, rather than a physical removal of the indigenous population by invaders, reflecting a mixing with the local British population, adopting the language and customs of a smaller number of immigrants. These were a people susceptible to cultural influences, but not overrun. Perhaps the wealthier Romano-Britons, with material wealth to preserve, may have been amongst those who migrated westwards. However the model suggested by the archaeology is of a reversion to regionalism during the tensions of the fourth and fifth centuries, when the world shrank inwards.

Much of the Vale of Pickering remained agriculturally active, even though the low lying land became waterlogged. Bede described his homeland as an area rich in grain, cattle and draught animals[36]. Although there were no functioning towns, the population were settled in proto villages, clusters of buildings devoted to cereal producing and crafts. The indigenous population gained access to Rhineland quern technology, ivory and cowrie shells, and traded at beach markets along the Yorkshire coast. The sense of continuity is reflected in the coincidence of Bronze and Iron Age boundaries with medieval parishes north of the Wolds. Although the climate changed a little to cooler and wetter conditions, the human landscape did not much change between the Roman emperor Constantine and the Northumbrian King Edwin. Markets were temporary, perhaps opportunistic. Gatherings were seasonal and customary. Armies were maintained by personal loyalty. Bridges were maintained where they were crucial, but often fell into disrepair. Justice was exercised through customary law. [37]

North of the Yorkshire Wolds, excavations at West Heslerton, the Anglian Village, northeast of Malton, in the Vale of Pickering, between 1987 to 1996 have revealed houses, workshops, storage huts and other buildings spanning a period of 200 years from the end of Roman Britain to Anglian Northumbria. The extensive archaeology evidences change from round houses to Germanic grubbenhausen. [38] The settlement at West Heslerton was not initially of significant size, but developed into a 150 building settlement by the sixth century. This was an area of fertile soil adjacent to a navigable river, with rich supplies of fish. The river provided a means of communication and trade. The settlement became zoned over time with a residential area; an area for agricultural processing; and an area for the work of craftsmen. There is no evidence of violence, no shallow graves, no suggestion of violence to skeletal remains. The archaeology does not indicate slaughter, violence nor Germanic conquest, but rather a gradual, natural, and peaceful change in customs over long period of time. The settlement was probably never very Roman in the first place. West Heslerton is only twenty kilometres to the southeast of Kirkdaleland, and may be representative of rural locations in the area at the periphery of the main centres.

The archaeological evidence at Staxton in the Vale of Pickering also suggests hybrid communities and cultural adaptation. The site suggests continuity where descendants of fourth century proprietors of the land lived in the same place without a break.

Cottam is a productive site in the Yorkshire Wolds[39] which may have been part of a royal estate which, after the Scandinavian settlement, developed into an independent manor[40].

A hybrid of influence

The Germanic settlers were probably primarily small family groups without much social hierarchy who settled next to indigenous communities and intermarried. The Romano British descendants in eastern England over time experimented with Germanic material culture. Over a few generations, neighbours talked, helped each other, and married. Identity was not created in a simple or unitary way. Each person had a unique identity and over time community identities evolved.[41] The Germanic immigrants brought barley, oats and bread wheat, but communities continued to grow the Roman staple, spelt.

Germanic place names appeared, but these are not explained by the loss of the indigenous population. Communities tended to prefer topographical names, and over time they seem to have adopted descriptive names brought by Germanic immigrants.

Inequality

It seems that the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlers had set themselves up as free, independent farmers. The freemen or ceorls were supported by unfree dependants, who were not free and often slaves. By the mid sixth century elite classes were seeking to advertise their superiority.[42]

This was also a period when social inequalities hardened. The move from a ranked society to a hierarchical society must in some ways have been a by product of migration. Over decades the first immigrant families did favours to help later incomers. Favours and gratitude led to obligation. In time a few people had more wealth. Funerary practices evidenced these inequalities. Frankish objects in Kentish graves reveal a close association with the Franks, the dominant political group in Gaul, that in time would morph to Francia and later France. Wearing exotic objects and being buried with them allowed privileged families to focus their hierarchical claims and bolster networks of friendship and exchange.[43]

Identity

In time elite identities stimulated the evolution of regional identities. The myth of a neat Anglo-Saxon-Jute conquest claimed later by Bede became a reality through the collective imagination. This identity emerged in costumes. Kentish women adopted Frankish imports, but nevertheless augmented this with Scandinavian items and pioneered a uniquely Kentish costume. Regional dress styles emerged, so that elite households from the same regions found people who dressed like themselves. At the same time they probably adopted common songs, ritual observances, myths and legends.

These elite practices were imitated by the non elite classes. When elite and ordinary folk met at feasts, held when animals were slaughtered and produced a surplus of food which could not be preserved by refrigeration or even by imported salt, the more humble folk observed elite habits, dress and language.[44]

Even if it is not quite right that the Angles neatly carved out the north eastern lands, over time that was the narrative that took hold. By the ninth century there would emerge a concept of an English people, gens anglorum (Latin) or Anglecynn (Anglo Saxon) describing an amalgam of the Germanic folk with the indigenous population and promoted by Bede in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.

Dynasty

As more time passed, the elite families started to territorialise their authority and make it heritable. A feature of this process was an obsession with the past. In order to assert that their control over labour and services was legitimate, they sought to assert that their dynastic claims were traditional, natural and heritable establishing an ideology of the permanence of privilege. This is reflected in the regular legends of three ships founding new lines of dynasty, of associations with Romulus and Remus, of stories of Horsa and Hengist. This was a reimagining of Britain’s settlement by Germanic warlords and the creation of elaborate genealogies. Leading families exaggerated the longevity of their dynasties.

Part of this process was the co-option of the past. Bronze Age barrows were appropriated to strengthen rights over farmlands. There were lavish royal burials, such as at Sutton Hoo. The royal centre of Ad Gefrin at Yeavering was erected in a straight line between a stone circle and a barrow suggesting the layout of the seventh century villa regalis was determined by ancient and enigmatic monuments.

Territories were dominated and organised by elites exemplified by place names ending -ingas, -ing or -ham, ‘the people of *’ or ‘the place of *’. Examples include Pickering (the people of Picer), and Hovingham (containing both ing and ham). It now seems likely that the first examples of -ing and -ingham names date to the late sixth century; the same moment we see signs of rapidly rising elites.[45] This was a period far from benign settlements, where elites were dominating their landscapes. The folk of separate regions became third class rustics, whose labour and agricultural surplus could be exploited.

Stories such as Beowulf came to symbolise the new order. There was large scale entertainment at Ad Gefrin, with large halls and elaborate ritual practices. These became sites of the consumption of production. Whilst the lords stayed only so long as the food lasted, small populations of slaves and reeves stayed through the years. Permanently settled slaves were referred to by the Old English word wealas, meaning foreigner, and later used to describe the Welsh, the now alienated Britons of the old world. This supported a growing myth of conquest and historical difference from the people who were owned. Reeves were free and over saw the slave labourers. The Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer[46] is another elegy in the voice of an old sailor who reflects on a life of hardship at sea. Despite the misery of cold, loneliness, and danger, the speaker is drawn to the sea, contrasting its harsh reality with the comforts of life on land.

The competitive nature of relations between royal elites was explored by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski[47] whose principle of reciprocity suggested that all gift giving had a motive and that lavish gifts were not so much generous donations as expressions of power. His research on the Trobriand Islanders revealed that exchange was driven by a calculated give and take, where giving a gift created an implicit expectation of a future return, making reciprocity a core part of the gift economy and ensuring social cohesion.

Alongside the tribute centres, hamlet style communities emerged, such as Thirlings, only three kilometres from Ad Gefrin, a collection of small houses, workshops and grain storage buildings. Significant centres such as Ad Gefrin sat at the top of a hierarchy of settlements.

Beowulf The Anglo-Saxon saga that transports us to the lives of the post Roman folk of England

Ad Gefrin at Yeavering The sixth century royal tribute centre of the Bernician Kings

Renders grew more complex, providing not only meat and wheat, but cheese, fodder and honey. This gave rise to a landscape of obligation, choreographed to be provided at particular times of the year. This reinforced identifies around local lords.[48]

Royal families

By the second half of the sixth century CE, the elite families had started to adopt royal titles. They transferred their former tribute centres into royal vills or villa regalis.

When kings took residence in their royal vills, the estate centre teemed with people. The halls were polyglot places with Irish, British and English speakers. Northumbrian exiles were found in Mercian and East Anglian courts. Imported goods came from royal Frankish estates, found as far as Dunadd in Dál Riata. However these households had now adopted a cultural English identity. Welsh, Irish and English Britain was very similar, but competition drove ideological difference.

The derivation of king is the Old English cyning, which means son of the kin. This was however an unstable world where big kingdoms gobbled up little ones, and daughters of victorious kings found themselves sleeping in the beds of old antagonists. The princes were brought up by nurses and by late adolescence they were racing horses, feasting, storytelling and drinking.

The early history of county development might go back as far as the late fifth century. In the early twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon, in his History of the English, listed 7 kingdoms (Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria)[49]. Early historians of the period lazily referred to the heptarchy. The reality was far more fluid. Bede also referred to administrative units called regiones or regions. Andrew Reynolds[50] felt these regiones were the boundaries of smaller late sixth to seventh century sub-territories. By about 600 CE there were a relatively small number of elite royal families. Bede identified thirteen. In reality these Kingdoms were still in a state of flux. In 600 CE Æthelbert of Kent appears to have been the more powerful monarch, able to exercise some authority over other kings. By the 620s, his power was waning and the kings of East Anglia and later Northumbria came to dominate. Around 640 CE Mercia was in the ascendency for a while.[51]

The period 536 to 545 CE was the coldest decade in 2,000 years[52] following an Icelandic volcanic eruption which caused crops to fail and famine to spread. Bubonic plague spread from Constantinople to Ireland in 544 CE and probably reached Britain. The dual impact of famine and plague must have produced a desperate and violent society. This may have been an environment in which desperate people were willing to sacrifice their independence for protection. The word lord derives from the Old English hlaford, or bread giver. This was a world where individuals could emerge as elite leaders. The earliest records seem to suggest that the earliest Kings were in southern Britain, perhaps Ælle of the South Saxons; Ceawlin of the West Saxons (later Wessex); and later Æthelberht of Kent. Kent was heavily influenced by its close ties to the Franks. Æthelberht’s father Eormenric had a Frankish name. Æthelberht married Bertha, as Frankish princess who practiced Christianity. Bertha was provided with a church in the ruins of a Roman city, Durovernum, which had come to be known as cantwaraburh, the stronghold of the Kentish people. An ancient Roman theatre seems to have been reused for royal ceremonial purposes. Augustine would make use of Berta’s church of St Martin at cantwaraburh, when he arrived in 597 CE.

Northumbrian Ground Zero

In north eastern England, the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira gradually emerged, perhaps of Anglian origin, and eroded Ebrauc territory.

Ida was the first known king of Bernicia[53]. His family are generally referred to as the Idings. He arrived at Bamburgh in about 547 CE[54]. Ida began a sea borne settlement of the coast, and is reputed to have established a royal vill at Bamburgh. This is the first record of a significant Germanic settlement in northern Britain.

First Contact – Fifth Century Anglo-Saxon settlement referred to in the primary written sources

Bamburgh was Ground Zero for post Roman Northumbria. The record doesn’t suggest that this was an invasion. Ida may have been born in Northumbria. Ynys Medcaut, Inis Metcaud or Lindisfarne was a place of Romano British significance. Brynaich was the established British name for the region in the immediate post Roman era of the Old North. Ida seems to have established a small settlement in and around Bamburgh, which in time would evolve into the Kingdom of Bernicia.

Bamburgh's original name was the Brittonic Din Guaroy, an old Celtic fort. It was later renamed Bebbanburh by King Æthelfrith after his wife, Queen Bebba, which eventually evolved into Bamburgh.

By the 570s, the Bernicians were expanding into other territories, such as Rhegged. The last British king of Ebrauc, Gwrgant Gwron, was forced to flee in around 580 CE.

Deira

To the north of the expanding territory of the Idings there were the lands of the Gododdin which stretched up to the Firth.

To the south of Deira, by about 560 CE the area of north eastern Yorkshire was also subsumed by a single political group. The name the Angles gave to the territory was Dewyr, or Deira, pronounced day-era. Early rulers of Deira extended the territory north to the River Wear and King Aella ruled Deira from about 569 to 599 CE.

Deira was the land of the people of the Derwent, derived in turn from the Brythonic word for oak, the river which seemed to flow the wrong way to the sea. To its east and south, the Yorkshire Wolds had been densely occupied from Neolithic times.

Anglo Saxon Northumbria, c 540

The Deira

The people who dominated our ancestral lands

These boundaries were fluid and Bernicia sometimes stretched into the Goddodin lands and control over the Bernician and Deiran lands switched over time from Deiran to Bernician control. Over time all these lands came to be recognised as a single large kingdom, which adopted the Old English name Norþanhymbre meaning the people north of the Humber. Northumbria started to consolidate into one kingdom in the early seventh century, when Deira and Bernicia became dynastically united.

The territory of Deira comprised the ancestral lands of the Farndale family story, but from time to time those lands were controlled by the Bernician Kings, or later merged into Northumbria.

Yffi or Yffa was the first known king of Deira in the area around York, south of the moors. His family are generally referred to as the Yffings. Ælla Yffing, son of Yffi, was King of Deira from 569 to 588 CE. The Yffings appear to have established a power base initially in the Yorkshire wolds. As with Ida, there is no reason to suppose the Yffings were recent arrivals, but they also evolved into a distinct line in the sixth to seventh centuries.

These legendary founders were not more than the leaders of warbands who Bede referred to simply as duces. Indeed the legendary Arthur was referred to be Ninnina as dux bellorum, a leader in battle. The idea of a king started to emerge in the seventh century; sometimes a tribal chief, the senior aristocrat of a senior clan; or an overlord, able to subdue and conquer. Only in the late seventh century, with the emergence of kings like Oswiu, did Kings become heads of state who introduced a concept of statehood and kingship that might be recognised today.[55] The idea of kingship started to emerge in Northumbria when Ida’s grandson, Æthelfrith Iding, began to assert his authority with significant success. At this time Æthelfrith, a very brave king and most eager for glory, was ruling over the Kingdom of Northumbria wrote Bede, who wrote of the pagan Æthelfrith's significant success over the Britons. He conquered more territories from the Britons, either making them tributary, or driving the inhabitants clean out, and planting English in their places, than any other king or tribune.

By this time there were four broad cultures across Britain – the vestigial Britons clinging on in the west and southwest; the Dál Riata Gaelic people spread from Ireland, the Hebrides to western Scotland; the loose confederation of Pictish people across the rest of Scotland; and the pagan Anglo-Saxon-Jutish people spread from Kent to Bernicia. The Saxon chiefs and kings had a hankering to possess what had gone before them, the old Roman ideal of the regnum Britanniae, the kingdom of the Britons, and they often built settlements on the ruined remains of the old Romano-British towns, but in no other respect did they remotely resemble that culture. Their political power rested on the spoils of war and on the unwritten custom of the clan.[56]

Æthelfrith

Æthelfrith gained control of Deira in about 604 CE temporarily ending a period of internecine struggle between the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia.

The young Edwin was the son of Ælla of Deira and he fled into exile initially to Gyynedd, and eventually to Mercia, where he married a daughter of King Cearl. Then, he took refuge in East Anglia with King Rædwald, perhaps of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, in about 616 CE.

Bede tells of the pagan Æthelfrith's significant success over the Britons. He ravaged the Britons more than all the great men of the English, insomuch that he might be compared to Saul, once king of the Israelites, excepting only this, that he was ignorant of the true religion. For he conquered more territories from the Britons, either making them tributary, or driving the inhabitants clean out, and planting English in their places, than any other king or tribune.

Campaigns of Æthelfrith and his successors

Æthelfrith fought against the Scots of Dál Riata, the Gododdin people of the Forth and of Gwynedd and King Urien of Rhegged. It may have been Æthelfrith who destroyed an army of Britons at the Battle of Catræth (Catterick) in about 600 CE[57], described in an early poem Y Gododdin, an oral lament for the last great expedition by the northern Britons against the Angles[58].

The men went to Catræth; they were renowned; wine and mead from golden cups was their beverage; that year was to them of exalted solemnity.

Three warriors and three score and three hundred, wearing the golden torques.

Of those who hurried forth after the excesses of revelling, but three escaped by the prowess of the gnashing sword, the two war dogs of Aeron, and Cenon the dauntless, and myself from the spilling of my blood, the reward of my sacred song.

We know that the Roman fort of Cataractonium continued in relatively unscathed operation after the Roman withdrawal and it may have been the site of a new settlement under another warlord.

Æthelfrith began to expand the Bernician domain from its original small heart around Bamburgh to the Tweed and the Swale.

In the late sixth and early seventh centuries, the army would have comprised a number of warbands, totalling between perhaps 200 to 600 strong. Perhaps at some of the more significant battles numbers might have approached a few thousand, but the evidence of army sizes is limited.

In 603 CE Æthelfrith raided far to the north. Áedán mac Gabráin, the king of Dál Riata, far northwest of Bernicia, was alarmed by Æthelfrith's successes, and in 603 CE he led an immense and mighty army against him, but Æthelfrith, who commanded an inferior force, won a crushing victory at Degsastan. Dál Riata became tributary to Northumbria. The English triumph at Degsastan enabled Æthelfrith, finally, to consolidate his position as overlord of northern Britain[59]. Warrior kings like Æthelfrith gained as much materially as politically. He probably seized a substantial hoard from the field of battle.

In about 604, Æthelfrith was strong enough to attempt to reclaim the kingdom lost or given up by his father and unite all the English beyond the Humber. He accomplished this by a judicious combination of battle and marriage. The battle was waged on him by an external aggressor, King Áedán mac Gabráin, the king of Dál Riata[60]. Æthelfrith Iding became King of Bernicia and Deira. He gained control of Deira in about 604 CE temporarily ending internecine struggle between the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia. The details are not known but he probably conquered Deira since Edwin, son of the former King Ælla, was exiled. It is though possible that this was the formalisation of some existing relationship between the two Kingdoms.

Æthelfrith’s appetite for lebensraum was not quashed.

Æthelfrith married Acha Yffing, uniting the Iding and Yffing families. She was the mother of six sons (including Oswiu and Oswald), a daughter (Aebbe, the later abbess of Coldingham) and a stepson. Acha was the daughter of Ælla Yffing and was born in about 585 CE probably in the Deiran royal estates on the Yorkshire wolds. The seventh century is outstanding for the number of women who played active, sometimes decisive roles in the fortunes of kingdoms, both earthly and spiritual. They are not to be underestimated. They had their own queenly agendas, engineering lines of patronage for their families, acting as brakes on hot headed husbands, as brokers of deals, as pacifiers and landowners in their own right[61].

Acha was the sister of Edwin, but he had been exiled when Æthelfrith became king and they barely knew each other. Acha’s husband sought excessively to have Acha’s brother killed.

It was in about 604 CE that Æthelfrith's son Oswald was born.

By 604 CE there were three archbishops in England, Augustine in Canterbury, Justus in Rochester also in Kent, and Mellitus in London.

Early Warrior Bands

There were three principal classes of warrior in these early Anglo-Saxon warbands. The Gedriht were elite, oath-bound, personal followers and bodyguards of the warlord who were constantly at his side, always following him into battle. They were the king’s core of usually young men. They were generally well armed, particularly with the Gar, a 2.5 metre long spear with an ash shaft, perhaps an adaptation of the Roman pilum. There would have been a small number of Gedriht in the King’s warband. The Geoguth were also young warriors who would have formed the bulk of the warband, equipped more crudely with a shield, spear and seax, a single edged dagger or short sword. They would have learnt from the more elite Gedriht. The Duguth were the old guard, equipped similarly to the Geoguth, but also with long slashing swords and sometimes helmets, of a Sutton Hoo type style. They were veterans. There may also have been fast moving skirmishers, armed with a bow and arrow or a sling.

These bands probably didn’t use the shield wall in the earlier days, but were rather equipped with smaller shields. They probably fought in open order. As the shield enlarged to about a metre width, they fought in close order, requiring greater discipline and training.

The evidence of the use of horses is less clear and perhaps horses were restricted to the elite Gedriht. The Aberlemno 2 Stone from Angus[62] may evidence Northumbrian cavalry under Egfrith, Deiran Sub-King from 664, then King of Northumbria from 670 until his death in 685, fighting the Picts at the battle of Dunnichen in 685 CE.

Bamburgh

Æthelfrith gave the town of Din Guaire to his wife Bebba, after whom it was said to have been named Bamburgh[63]. The city of Bebba is extremely well fortified, but by no means large, containing about the space of two or three fields, having one hallowed entrance ascending in a wonderful manner by steps. It has, on the summit of the hill, a church of very beautiful architecture, in which is a fair and costly shrine. In this, wrapped in a pall, lies the uncorrupted right hand of St Oswald, king, as Bede the historian of the nation relates. There is on the west and highest point of this citadel, a well, excavated with extraordinary labour, sweet to drink and very pure to the sight. The entrance on the north west corner called St Oswald’s Gate, survives.

By the mid seventh century Bamburgh was a township as well as a fortification with many steadings and a proliferation of English placenames nearby.

Ad Gefrin

Only some 20 kilometres inland and to the west of Bamburgh, Ad Gefrin, the Hill of the Goat at Yeavering was a royal Anglo Saxon settlement.

Ad Gefrin

A royal Anglo-Saxon settlement

In about 614 CE, Æthelfrith's son Oswiu was born. Later in his reign, Æthelfrith attacked the Kingdom of Powys and defeated its army in a battle at Chester. He also massacred the monks of Bangor-Is-Coed who were assembled to aid the Britons by their prayers, later dismissed by Bede as justified by their failure to agree to terms with Augustine at the oak tree.

Æthelfrith Iding was killed at the Battle of the River Idle[64] in 616 CE by Rædwald, King of East Anglia, under whose protection Edwin the Exile remained. The location was probably at the Roman town of Bawtry in marshy wetland between Lincoln and Doncaster, on the western boundary of Lindsey. Rædwald lost his son during the battle. While presented by Bede as being fought over Edwin’s rights to Deira, the war between East Anglia and Northumbria was probably a territorial struggle.

After 616 CE, with her husband dead, Acha may have wondered about Edwin’s intentions towards her and her sons.

Each villa regalis north of the Humber came to submit to the new King who approached York, which retained some of its Roman grandeur, but was not a functioning political unit, with no judicial, military nor administrative function. It may have been abandoned during Æthelfrith’s reign. The high ground of the old legionary fortress and principia was built on high ground surrounded by flood plains. Edwin though may have already had ambitions to revive its fortunes, the city of Constantine the Great’s declaration of his emperorship. At some point York (Eboracum, Caer Ebrauc, now called Eoforwic, Boar Town) became the capital, though there was still superstitious reluctance to reinhabit the old fortress: the Anglian town was built right on its edge, near Fishergate[65].

Scene 2 – Becoming English

Religion before the conversions in eastern England

There is very little textual evidence of religious practice in eastern England before the late sixth century.

Western Britain continued to embrace Christianity. They were represented by a large number of early saints such as Alban, the first recorded British martyr. By the fifth century the British Church was hierarchical with deacons, priests and bishops. However by the Sixth century, the driving force was monastic and British monks and intellectuals took on an ascetic bent. They adopted a tradition of private penance, the renunciation of homeland, avoidance of bodily excess such as gluttony, and adopted vegetarianism and celibacy.

It is difficult to differentiate archaeological evidence in pagan eastern Britain between the practice of a handful of local folk from a wider practice. Bede was a prejudiced witness. When he recorded the famous conference of 627 CE he unconvincingly reflected the pagan priest as easily and swiftly abandoning the old ways. Burial sites reflect varying practices involving cremation and inhumation or burial. Aspects of Roman influence, romanitas, may have continued.

The Irish influence

Christianity had arrived in Ireland in the fifth century CE through the mission of a Gaulish bishop, Palladius. Its origins were therefore in the Roman church. However Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, and was a more scattered rural society, without urban centres.

Towards the end of the fifth century a new form of organised Christianity began to flourish in the west of the British Isles. Monasticism had taken hold in the Egyptian desert in the third century CE when Christians had retreated into wilderness lands in a new form of ascetic isolation. These hermits were referred to by the Greek monos. In time, groups of hermits started to form small communities around a father figure, an abbas, Aramaic for father. This new practice reached Gaul by the late fourth century CE and then reached the British Isles where it sat most comfortably with the rural population in Ireland. Ireland was also suitable for isolation as a place of many small islands, such as Sceilg Mhichíl[66].

At the same time that monasticism was taking hold in Ireland, the Irish Kings were colonising the western islands and coastal areas of Scotland, creating the Kingdom of Dál Riata stretching from northeast Ireland to western Scotland.[67] From Fergus Mór mac Eirc, King of Dál Riata, would descend a long line of Scottish Kings, and over time Dál Riata came to be referred to as Alba or Albanach, though to the Latin speaking world, the lands came to be known by their Irish origins as Scotia, the land of the Scoti. To the north in Shetland and to the east on the mainland, north of the Forth, were the Gaelic speaking Picts.[68]

Patrick a Romano-British aristocrat had escaped from slavery probably to Brittany and spent many years in places where Christianity had its deepest roots in Gaul, particularly at the cathedral city of Auxerre. By about 460 CE Patrick was a missionary wanderer in Ireland and the western isles. Rather than adopt the rigid organisation of the Roman church, Patrick adopted an independent course, with obedience to local bishops. He adopted a religion of monastic retreat from his travels in Gaul, which was adopted by the Dál Riata kings.

A century later Colm Cille, the holy dove, later known as Columba, an Irish prince, was exiled from Ulster and landed in Iona. He was about 41 years old when he sailed from Tir Conaill, County Donegal to Iona. He was eligible for kingship of the Ui Neill of Antrim, but Irish society was tribal and competitive.

Stained Glass Windows at Helmsley Parish Church

He was charismatic and the reasons given for his exile vary from a battle for the high kingship of Ireland to the illegal copying of a book. He sailed in a curragh with twelve companions. The ideal for an Irish monk was a devotional journey or peregrination, leaving his homeland and his wealth and family. Colle Cille was said to have landed on the southernmost point of Iona, but it is likely that he travelled first to meet the King of Dál Riata, Conall mac Comgaill (558 to 574 CE) who probably granted him the island.

Colm Cille founded the monastery at Iona in 565 CE. The original monastery was built within a vallum or bank, roughly on the site of the present monastery and the monks cultivated the machair on the west of the island and probably kept sheep, with access to resources from Mull and the mainland.

In time Iona became a mother house to monasteries on Tiree and Jura. He may have returned to Ireland to found monasteries at Derry and made an expedition to the Great Glen to convert the Picts.

Roman Christianity

The populations of the east from East Anglia to Yorkshire were pagani. At the time of Augustine’s arrival in 597 CE most people in eastern Britain would have been entirely innocent of the religion in Rome.

Bede’s narrative began in Kent, known to the Romans as Cantium. East Kent was divided into lathes rather than shires as elsewhere. It had a natural wealth as the garden of England and its importance was enhanced by its geographical proximity to Frankia. Most exotic goods from the Continent arrived through Kent and particularly through a number of ports or wics. When Kings controlled and taxed them, providing royal protection and patronage, the wics developed into emporia. Early emporia included Gipeswic (Ipswich), Dommoc (Dunwich), Lundenwic (the survival of Roman Londinium) and perhaps Eoforwic (York).[69] East Kent was the earliest English Kingdom. The Kentish kings saw themselves as inheritors of the late Roman state, evidenced by coins minted at Canterbury in the seventh century.

The four hundred years between 600 and 1000 are now seen to have been a period of economic renewal following two centuries when northern Europe was searching for new identities and direction following the demise of the Roman Empire in the west. The new economic order was arranged around a series of major commercial centres, known as emporia in Latin and wics in Anglo-Saxon or Early English. Finds from the emporia in Britain and on the Continent are characterised by their richness and range. More importantly they provide clear and unambiguous evidence for long distance trade. They began as seasonally occupied trading centres (referred to by archaeologists as productive sites) operated independently by merchants, but soon came under the control of elites. The emporium system was essentially elite driven; it was all about power, prestige and display in the highest echelons of society. It was part of an integrated trading system connected by the sea, but also by the ancient Roman road system that had never been completely abandoned. These productive sites were something different from what had come before, key points in a larger network of settlement.[70]

The adoption of Christianity from a pagan tradition in the east of Britain was very different. Christianity was likely to have been adopted by the new English kings as a status enhancing move. The Kentish King was open to Augustine’s overtures in 597 CE for its new status enhancing possibilities.[71]

The Deiran Slaves

The historian Procopius (500 to 565 CE) described the people of Brittia as Angiloi to Pope Gregory the Great. Pope Gregory saw fair haired slaves in the market and he asked about them. He was told that these slaves were Angles from the Kingdom of Deira, the lands between the Humber and Tees, the realm of King Aelli. Gregory was in a humorous mood that day, and he made three famous puns. He mused that they were not Angles, but angels, worthy of conversion, defining a distinct nation that would one day be called England. He amused himself that the Deirans were de ira, or of anger, and that they were to be saved from wrath. And he directed that Allelujah, a pun on the Deiran King’s name, Aelli, should be sung in those parts.

His puns are sometimes taken to define the origin of the English nation and Gregory continued to class the Kingdoms of Britain as a single people. The story represents the origin myth of the English nation.

Bede told the full story in his Historia Ecclesia. Nor must we pass by in silence the story of the blessed Gregory, handed down to us by the tradition of our ancestors, which explains his earnest care for the salvation of our nation. It is said that one day, when some merchants had lately arrived at Rome, many things were exposed for sale in the market place, and much people resorted thither to buy: Gregory himself went with the rest, and saw among other wares some boys put up for sale, of fair complexion, with pleasing countenances, and very beautiful hair. When he beheld them, he asked, it is said, from what region or country they were brought? and was told, from the island of Britain, and that the inhabitants were like that in appearance. He again inquired whether those islanders were Christians, or still involved in the errors of paganism, and was informed that they were pagans. Then fetching a deep sigh from the bottom of his heart, “Alas! what pity,” said he, “that the author of darkness should own men of such fair countenances; and that with such grace of outward form, their minds should be void of inward grace.” He therefore again asked, what was the name of that nation? and was answered, that they were called Angles. “Right,” said he, “for they have an angelic face, and it is meet that such should be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven. What is the name of the province from which they are brought?” It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. “Truly are they De ira,” said he, “saved from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?” They told him his name was Aelli; and he, playing upon the name, said, “Allelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts.”[72]

The idea of Englishness thus had its foundation in the lands of the Deira, which stretched from York to the lands which included Kirkdaleland, with their heartlands south of the moors. Kirkdale, which lay at the centre of Deiran lands, found itself firmly within the ambit of England’s origin story, and the place where soon afterwards a church was built and dedicated to Pope Gregory.

In 597 CE Gregory followed up on his direction at the slave market when he sent Augustine to convert the Angli. Augustine, Prior of a Roman monastery, initially travelled to Kent on an ambassadorial and religious mission, and he was welcomed by King Aethelberht. Pope Gregory, encouraged by the early successes of Augustine’s mission in Kent, sent letters of support to Augustine and to Æthelberht of Kent. He sent gifts and a select group of priests carrying the pallium, a band of white cloth worn across the shoulders. He was now interested in the Christianisation of the other Anglo Saxon kingdoms.

At first Gregory advised Augustine to suppress and destroy pagan shrines and idols, but a month later he changed his mind. I have decided after long deliberation about the English people that the idol temples of that race should by no means be destroyed but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place relics in them. They were not to ban heathen practices but to adopt them and realign heathen festivals to Christian. Gregory’s liberal pragmatism contrasted with Augustine’s more rigid style.

By 601 CE Augustine had gained the trust and support of the political elite in Kent.

Gregory died on 12 March 604. He had been the bishop of Rome from 3 September 590 to his death. The mission which he dispatched under Augustine was the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome, the Gregorian mission, to convert the then largely pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Gregory is also well known for his writings, which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as pope. Gregory was more inclined to remain retired into the monastic lifestyle of contemplation. The mainstream form of Western plainchant, standardised in the late 9th century, was attributed to Pope Gregory I and so took the name of Gregorian chant.

English identity began in a religious ambition. The English church would come to own a quarter of cultivated land in England and reintroduce literacy at least amongst the Church. Over the next few centuries, there grew a single and distinct English church. After 663 CE, this church adopted Roman practices in its dogma and liturgy, but it venerated English saints and developed its own character. The evolution of Christianity across Britain in this period is integral to the historical narrative of these lands.

Yet when Augustine met British bishops under Augustine’s Oak at Bancornaburg, probably Bangor on Dee, the British bishops remained stubborn in their refusal to accept Rome’s authority. The core issues were the date of Easter and the cut of the tonsure. It was an issue which would not go away.

The Return of Edwin

Following Æthelfrith's death, having fought beside Rædwald, Edwin became King of Deira and Bernicia from April 616 and reigned until 12 October 633 CE. He had regained his family’s inheritance, with Rædwald’s support, though he was probably effectively a client King at least for a while. The victory over Æthelfrith Iding would have given Rædwald a claim to the prestigious title of Bretwalda, ‘broad ruler’ or overlord of Anglo Saxon Kingdoms. According to Bede, Rædwald was regarded as the coming man in southern Britain even during the supremacy of Æthelberht, the fabulously wealthy king of Kent[73].

Edwin’s first task was to secure his borders. He initially turned his attention to the threat from the Kingdom of Elmet, which he added to the portfolio of Northumbria.

The Roman mission in Kent faced further crisis when Æthelberht died in 616 CE. King Eadbald of Kent married his stepmother and to appease an illness that followed, he converted to Christianity, perhaps with pressure from the Merovingian court. The Axis between Kent and Rome was restored. Negotiations followed between Eadbald of Kent and Edwin of Northumbria.

Exile in Dál Riata

It was a tradition for the family of the defeated kings of Northumbria to flee into exile. After their father’s defeat in 616 CE Æthelfrith's sons Eanfrith, Oswald, and Oswy fled northwards to the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata where they converted to Christianity on the Irish model. It was House Bernicia’s turn to flee into exile.

For all the dangers of shipwreck and piracy, travel in the seventh century was generally faster and more secure by water. Britain’s coast and hundreds of islands were connected by the sea. Indeed since Roman times the road system linked ports as much as towns and villages. Any overland journey was impacted as much by geographic obstructions as by politics. Passage through lands of different political units had to be negotiated.

By land and sea Æthelfrith's family arrived at the court of King Eochaid Buide of Dál Riata, with its ceremonial seat at Dunadd near modern Kilmartin, on the Kintyre Peninsula in Argyll. The royal house of Cenel Gabrain was Christian, linked to the northern Irish[74]. Although Æthelfrith had defeated Áedán mac Gabráin, the king of Dál Riata, at Degsastan in 603 CE, Acha could seek protection for her sons because they were her kin.

The exiles would have been expected to reinforce bonds in battle and perhaps to marry daughters. They were trained in the skills of a warrior. In warrior society there was a great cattle raiding expedition, at least annually, aimed at an opportunity for plunder; the training of young soldiers; and demonstration of horsemanship and weapon skills. Oswald Iding attained the Irish nickname Lamnguin or Whiteblade, during his exile.

The Kingdom of Dál Riata was divided into three kin branches. Cenél Loairn comprised north Argyll and Mull, Iona, Loch Awe, with its capital at Oban, comprising 420 or tech, or houses. Cenél n OEngusa comprised Islay and Colonsay, with 430 techs. Cenél nGabrain comprised Kintyre and Cowal, with its stronghold at Dunadd, and 560 techs. Dál Riatan kings summoned their kinsmen to defend against invaders, guard the borders and attack rebellious enemies. These tribes could raise about 1,500 fighting men and about 75 seven bench boats, reflecting the maritime interests of the Kingdom. The web of obligations originated in the Iron Age.

Æthelfrith's sons were likely to have won fame and fortune through the booty of war during their exile. It seems though that during his 16 years of exile, Oswald did not try to raise an army to retake his family seat from Edwin.

Although this was a generation after the death of Colm Cille, the favour of his community at Iona gave legitimacy to aspiring kings.

The Iding athelings were exposed to the monks of Iona for conversion and baptism. As they arrived in 617 CE, the abbot of Iona was Fergno Brit, the fourth abbot. He died in 623 CE and succeeded by Ségéne, a kinsman of Colm Cille. The community of Iona seems to have taken on a fostering role of the royal youths, with an educational aspect, but also a political dimension. A relationship blossomed, an opportunity for Iona to expand the influence and interests of the church to fulfil the Columban ideal by spreading it to all the English.

Edwin’s new Christian Kingdom

Yet back in Northumbria, by the early 620s Edwin felt strong enough to consider a more expansionist strategy. He incorporated the Isle of Man and the lands of Gwynedd, of which Cadwallon was overlord, in North Wales into his Kingdom. He brought the islands of Anglesey and Man under his power. He clearly possessed a fleet allowing his operations in the Irish Sea. He plundered treasure which he could distribute to his supporters. However Edwin’s failure to finish off Cadwallon would prove fatal to him.

Like none of the Angles before him, he held under his sway the whole of Britain, both the Anglian kingdoms and those of the Britons as well[75]. Such rulers were referred to by later writers as bretwaldas, ‘rulers of Britain’, though there was no such institutional concept at this stage. This was still a period when compulsion and success in battle drove the changing status of the various rulers.

Eoforwic (York)

Deirian and Northumbrian York, a political, cultural and educational Hub on the European stage

By the early seventh century CE, there was an incipient state structure under King Edwin of Deira’s peripatetic government, which held gatherings on estates where food renderings were consumed. Eoforwic was at its centre.

Subservience to rule still took the form of tribute, in currencies such as gold or cattle. Cows and Oxen were driven to royal collection centres and could be kept there until it was time to kill them. Traditionally animals tended to be slaughtered in winter to reduce the stock needing to be fed over winter. The Anglo-Saxon word for November was Blodmonath. Cattle were of primary economic importance, for meat but also for leather (boots, purses, flasks, saddles, straps, tents etc) and hides. Indeed it was the need for the byproducts of cattle that drove a practice of feasting at the scale depicted in Beowulf. The King’s hall, as a throne room, but also a venue for such feasting, came to symbolise royal power[76].

Edwin married Æthelburh, a Christian Princess from Kent, in 625 CE. She was the sister of Eadbald of Kent who required as a condition of the marriage that Edwin converted to Christianity. The marriage which linked him with Frankia, was advantageous to Edwin. The marriage of Eadbald's Merovingian mother Bertha had resulted in the conversion of Kent and Æthelburh's would do the same in Northumbria. Æthelburh was accompanied by Paulinus, a member of the Gregorian mission to Northumbria. Pope Boniface V gave Æthelburh a silver mirror and ivory comb and encouraged her Illustrious daughter, persevere with all your might to soften his hard heart[77].

On 21 July 625 CE Paulinus was consecrated bishop in York and began to construct the first Christian church there, a tiny wooden oratory. However Edwin bade his time to convert himself.

King Rædwald of East Anglia died in about 625 CE and was perhaps the king buried at Sutton Hoo[78], laid out in a 27 metre long ship, with a helmet, sword and shield. This was the height of lavish royal burial. In neighbouring Essex the Prittlewell burial included splendid grave goods, including two small gold foil crosses[79]. In about 650 CE a Saxon princess was laid to rest at the place now called Street House near Loftus and Carlin How in Cleveland during the period of transition from paganism to Christianity. The location would have been just within the northern border of Deira. The cemetery was superimposed on an old prehistoric monument and there lay a high ranking woman on a bed surrounded by 109 graves. The royal princess watched over Carlin How, the hill of witches, for thirteen centuries until she was excavated in 2005. In Victorian times, the Craggs line of Farndales would make Craggs Farm at Carlin How, their home, in this place of Saxon ghosts.

Carlin How and Saxon Witches The burial ground of a Saxon princess who lay for thirteenth centuries overlooking the Hill of Witches where the Craggs line of Farndales would later make their home

At Easter 626 CE Cwichelm, king of the Gewisse, the West Saxons of the upper Thanes Valley, sent an envoy to Edwin’s court who attempted to assassinate Edwin with a short sword. The attempt was prevented by Edwin’s aide, a freeborn thane or Gedriht called Lilla who may have been buried in honour of his deed at the prehistoric barrow, Lilla’s Howe on Goathland Moor. Edwin and Æthelburh had their first daughter, Eanflæd, born shortly after the assassination attempt. She was baptised by Paulinus. There followed a campaign by Edwin against Cwichelm which demonstrated him as the powerful warlord of the English, able to strike over large distances.

Edwin continued to delay his baptism, perhaps due to doubts, or to extract the maximum political advantage, but was eventually persuaded by Paulinus. He held a summit meeting on his return from his raid on the West Saxons at a great mead hall in a villa regalis somewhere on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds. It was probably a stage managed affair, and may have been the beginning of the emergence of statehood and of an institution which existed beside the person of the King himself. A witness recorded the deliberations. You are sitting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the half in the middle of the hall, and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters at one door and quickly flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears, but for a moment, what follows, or indeed went what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it[80]. The passage seems to have been a metaphor suggesting man’s short life on earth between the mysteries of what came before and afterwards, and the benefits of Christianity as vehicle for better understanding.

The first recorded church at York was a wooden structure built hurriedly in 627 CE to provide a place to baptise Edwin, King of Northumbria. Edwin converted to the Christian religion, along with his nobles and many of his subjects on 12 April 627 CE and was baptised at Eoforwic in the first wooden church amidst the Roman ruins which was later replaced by a larger stone church. The site of this first church was probably beside the old Roman principia or military headquarters, to the north of the current minster, in the current Dean’s Park. The stone church was not completed before Oswald’s day.

Paulinus then converted many of Edwin's subjects, including the future saint, Hild who would found Streanæshealh. Paulinus built churches. Mass immersions in the River Swale followed and he built another church at a royal residence at Campodonum, probably at Doncaster.

Within a year Edwin and gentis suae nobilibus ac plebe, all his nobles and a vast number of the common people, were baptised by Paulinus and his deacons. Greogory’s ambition to install a bishop in the ancient Roman colonia of York was fulfilled.

Paulinus then moved north to continue his work in Bernicia and thousands were baptised at Ad Gefrin. It has been suggested that the magnificent grandstand at Yeavering was constructed for Paulinus’ mass conversions, or alternatively that it was inspired by Paulinus.

Edwin’s conversion and those which followed laid the foundation for a Christian Anglo-Saxon state.

Edwin was killed at Hæthfelth, the Battle of Hatfield Chase, near Doncaster, along with his son Osfrith, on 12 October 633 CE by Cadwallon of Gwynedd and Penda of Mercia[81]. Edwin had been fostered by Cadwallon as a child, but Cadwallon was humiliated in Edwin’s Irish Sea campaigns of the 620s, and his revenge seems a natural course of things. Edwin’s severed head was brought to the unfinished wooden church at York and he was venerated as a saint and martyr after his death. Bede portrayed the year after Hæthfelth as the darkest days of Northumbrian history, a complete collapse of Edwin’s imperium. Cadwallon split Northumbria back to Deira and Bernicia and handed Bernicia to Æthelfrith’s son Earnfrith and Deira to Edwin’s cousin, Osric. He no doubt expected both sub-kings to act as his puppets. Paulinus and Queen Æthelburh fled to Kent. The Christian flame in Northumbria was extinguished. The only survivor of Paulinus’ mission was James the Deacon[82].

The archaeological evidence does not suggest a period of violence in the aftermath of Hæthfelth. There is no evidence of ravaging the land at York by Cadwallon. There is limited sign of disruption to normal community life, though Yeavering appears to have been burned to the ground. Penda returned satisfied with his booty, but Cadwallon set up his winter quarters perhaps at Aldborough. Over the following few years he indulged in looting and some attempt at control of Northumbria.

Oswald’s Return

Osric reverted to paganism, but was killed by Cadwallon in 634 CE after his rash attempt to besiege Cadwallon. Earnfrith was also killed by Cadwallon in about 634 CE after demonstration of his weakness when he sued for peace. Cadwallon had decided it was easier to rule both kingdoms as tyrant.

It was in this anarchic period that Oswald, trained in Dál Riata and Iona, made his re-entrance. News of the defeat at Hæthfelth reached him in Dál Riata. The investment in Oswald’s upbringing was now a card to be played by the Ionan community. The future of Bernicia and Deira were of importance in distant Argyll and Iona in the game being played for influence. Oswald’s valour in battle had attracted Bernician exiles to join him. In the aftermath of Hæthfelth and Earnfrith’s weak response to Cadwallon, Oswald took counsel with his lord, Domnall Brecc, and his Ionan abbot Ségéne, who also supplied his own warrior monks.

Oswald appeared without warning, faster than news could travel, probably by sea via the Solway Firth and Rheged, and defeated and killed Cadwallon at the Battle at Heavenfield[83], near Hexham and united Northumbria once more. Bede tells of a vision of St Columba on the night before the battle. This was a world of miracles, where such visions had a role to play. Oswald’s army probably approached Cadwallon’s army along the Roman Wall at Corbridge attacking an unprepared army at dawn, forcing them to flee until they were overwhelmed at a river crossing where Cadwallon was cut down. He erased the shame of defeat and devastation at Cadwallon’s hands and restored the northern kingdom to its former glory and primacy[84]. Oswald was also a Christian king, but one trained in the Celtic traditions of Iona. during daylight.

Mural of the Battle of Heavenfield at Helmsley Parish Church

Oswald restored the Bernician line of Æthelfrith to power. After this point, Æthelfrith's descendants continued to rule until the early eighth century. Edwin’s unification of the northern Kingdom had not outlasted him, and his reforms were renounced by his immediate successors. The rise of Penda and of Mercia, and the return from Irish exile of the sons of Æthelfrith, tied the Kingdom of Northumbria through the sea connections to the Celtic and Irish kingdoms for several generations.

Oswald’s triumph made him the undisputed and legitimate king of Bernicia and through his mother Acha, to Deira. The two territories were now held together as a single house. Oswald was soon the undisputed overlord of all the lands north of the Humber as far as the Firth of Forth. He expanded to the Firth of Forth, destroying the Goddodin and seizing their fortress at Edinburgh. Although not depicted as such by Bede, he was as ruthless as his predecessors. He had ambition and vision to establish a new political powerhouse.

Oswald was King of Bernicia and Deira 634 to 5 August 642 CE. Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years from AD 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde and Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the Whiteblade or Blessed arm of legend, he won and lost his kingdom in Battle. He was the first English king to die a Christian martyr. He is the embodiment of the romantic hero; the righteous exiled prince whose destiny is to return triumphant to reclaim his kingdom[85]. He forged a hybrid culture of Briton, Irish, Scot and Anglo Saxon which gave rise to a glorious age of arts and language symbolised by his foundation of the monastery on Lindisfarne and the sumptuous manuscripts later crafted there by Northumbria’s monks. He was the model of Tolkein’s Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings.

Oswald, c 12^th century, Durham Cathedral

Although Edwin had first converted, it was Oswald who spread the religion widely through the northern Kingdom. Oswald spread the Celtic form of Christianity in his traditionally pagan lands. Oswald had been taught in Iona. Unsurprisingly therefore, once he had returned to Northumbria in 634 and found he needed to replace the churchmen who had fled the previous year, he looked to his own spiritual alma mater rather than to distant Canterbury[86].

Oswald’s relatively brief reign was a busy one, of intense military, political and diplomatic activity. Despite a pagan heritage, he was Irish in upbringing and outlook. Yet unlike Gaul, Britain still had no functioning towns nor civil service, no professional judiciary, standing army, nor coinage. Oswald had inherited a kingdom ravaged by a year of anarchy and rape, but within a year of his victory, he was acknowledged as overlord of much of Britain. Oswald married Cyniburh, probably the daughter of Cynegisl king of the Gewisse, or West Saxons in 635 CE and they had a son, Œthelwald.

Lindisfarne

The Ionan abbot Ségéne probably travelled to Oswald’s court, perhaps at Bamburgh, to ordain Oswald as king on the same basis that Colm Cille had ordained Áedán mac Gabráin as king of Dál Riata. As Bamburgh was within sight of Lindisfarne, Oswald may have told his Ionan guests about the magic of the place. They may have been impressed with its resemblance to Iona and its proximity to the seat of Bernician power.

Within months of his victory over Cadwallon, Oswald asked the Irish monks of Dál Riata to send a bishop to help the conversion of his people. An austere bishop had little success and was replaced by Aidan who was probably already a senior figure in the Irish church.

Mural at Helmsley Parish Church

Oswald gave the island of Lindisfarne to Aidan as his episcopal see. This was a deliberate foundation of a church on the Irish model, fully supported by the new King. It reflects the ambition of the Irish form of Christianity to found new lands on the North Sea coast. Aidan began to construct a cluster of wooden buildings of hewn oak comprising a small church, cells for the monks and a guesthouse. A watchtower followed and a dormitory. The isle of Inner Farne provided further solitude to Aidan and his fellow monks. There was enough land on Lindisfarne to grow crops and pasture animals, with inshore and offshore fishing. Aidan did not spent all his time on the island, but walked among scattered settlements to spread Christianity. He was once given a horse by the Deiran sub King Oswine, but gave it away to a pauper to Oswine’s horror[87].

Bede says that Oswald acted as Aidan's interpreter as Aidan didn’t really speak English and Oswald had learned Irish during his exile. Aidan may have had his own cell and church built at Yeavering, allowing him to associate with royal power, but avoid its excesses. The journey from Bamburgh to Ad Gefrin could probably be undertaken in a day.

The economic consequences of gifting land to the church foreshadowed by the gift of Lindisfarne

Patronage came from the kings. Their land had customarily provided the basis of obligations in food and service to the king. The core of the royal property portfolio was the royal shire, with the villa regis at its heart collecting renders and playing host to peripatetic kings. With render came the right to dwell in the royal shire. Generally kings gave land only as a life interest to reward their warriors. The lands were effectively leased and returned to the King on the death of the occupier. Estates were also conquered and redistributed.

Each shire comprised a unit able to supply a warband leader. Bamburghshire was one of the largest shires. Oswald would have journeyed between his royal estates constantly. Even small estates kept back sufficient resource from their surplus to meet appetites of kingly visits on a large scale.

Only two archaeological sites beside Ad Gefrin and Bamburgh of significant size have been identified in Bernicia. A crop mark suggests a significant site at Sprouston near Kelso[88]. Another site at Thirlings, with six halls, which has been reconstructed at Jarrow Hall[89], has evidence of rectangular post built structures which may have stored grain or overwintered animals[90]. There is another possible site, with similarities to the site at Yeavering, to the north in Gododdon lands, at Doon Hill near Dunbar[91]. Royal sites would also have emerged in the lands of the Deira. Cambodunum and Loidis, modern Leeds, were referred to by Bede as sites of Paulinus’ conversions[92]. Cambodunum was probably Doncaster[93], but has also been interpreted to Cleckheaton in the West Riding. Royal tribute centres focused on halls were probably an ephemeral feature, lasting for the first half of the seventh century.

A hide according to Bede was the size of land needed to support a single household. The hide was also a unit used to calculate how much a settlement owed in tribute or render. Its size depended on the productive wealth of the land. By the seventh century tracts of land were carefully assessed in hides. A ten hide estate according to one source supplied 10 vats of honey, 300 leaves, 32 ambers of ale,2 full grown cows, 10 geese, 20 hens, 100 eels, 5 salmon, and an amber of butter and some estates reached 300 hides. This was sufficient for the elite class to live well without labouring themselves. It was therefore the labour of peasants and small tenant farmers which provided a surplus that supported a warrior class and, in due course, a class of monks, abbots and abbesses. An early middle class, the drengs, were responsible for services such as truncage, the hauling of timber to the estate centre and had taxes such as merchat (marriage tax), and heriot (inheritance tax) imposed[94].

When land was given to the church those services were commuted to prayer in perpetuity.[95] Such land could not readily be reclaimed. Kings appeared to trade the uncertainty of pagan mortality for everlasting paradise in another world. This permanent alienation of land had implications. On the positive side, the monks were able to invest in their land by clearing scrub and woodland for fields and agriculture. The monastic community did not collapse on the death of the abbot. This provided a source for economic stability and increasing surplus. By the end of the seventh century, this allowed the scriptoria and magnificent books of Jarrow and Monkwearmouth and Lindisfarne to be produced. In more time this trend would foreshadow the pomp and majesty of the medieval prince bishops of Durham.

However it also meant that less land was available for the King’s use and to reward their warriors. In time this would lead to a shortage of earthly warriors.[96]

A renaissance of monastic foundation with Ryedale at its centre

Mercia was the last of the major Anglo Saxon kingdoms to emerge. Its name derives from mierce, or march, suggesting a border people between the Britons and the Anglo Saxon kingdoms. Oswald had engaged in a campaign to disrupt an alliance between Penda of Mercia and King Cynddylan of Powys. The defeat by Oswald of his ally Cadwallon in 634 CE must have been a blow to the emergence of Mercia. The culminating confrontation was at the Battle of Maserfelth, possibly at Oswestry in the Welsh mountains[97], though this was far from Northumbrian territory, when Oswald was killed by Penda, King of Mercia on 5 August 642 CE[98]. Oswald’s army was completely destroyed and the victory over Northumberland was absolute. There was not even anyone left to protect the King’s dead body and his followers were deprived of the important ritual of the burial of their king. Penda celebrated by placing Oswald’s hands and head on stakes. Mercia’s power was in the ascendancy.

Oswald’s last stand gave immediate rise to a popular cult. Oswald’s brother Oswiu brought up Oswald’s infant son, Œthelwald, and a year after Oswald’s death, Oswiu returned to the scene of the battle with an armed force and took Oswald’s bleached remains away with him. This was a risky enterprise deep into Mercian territory. Oswald’s martyrdom quickly become a popular cult. Within a short time strange events began to occur. The miraculous was part of everyday life. In time the popular cult became a cult of royal saints.

Oswald’s death provided a fresh crisis for Northumbria. His brother Oswiu was recognised as his successor in both Bernicia and later also Deira from after 15 November 642 CE to 15 February 670 CE, but Oswiu had first to establish his fitness to rule. Oswald had elevated the status of Northumbria to the leading of the English Kingdoms, with an institutionalised Christian church and the robustness of this northern imperium would now be tested. The immediate risk was that the new power under Penda would end the ascendancy of Northumbria. Oswiu inherited a position of military weakness with most of the Northumbrian army destroyed in battle.

Oswiu was another son of Æthelfrith who had been exiled with his brother Oswald to the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata, between the ages of 4 to 21. He became fluent in the Old Irish language. He had previously married an Irish princess, Fina and then Rhieinmelth. In about 642 CE, he married his cousin Eanflæd, Edwin’s daughter, and Abbess of Whitby. Rhieinmelth was ‘retired’ to the Lindisfarne community.

Oswiu initially struggled to exert authority over Deira. He ruled Bernicia, but Deira was ruled independently. Perhaps the renewed division of Northumbria was insisted upon by the victorious Penda and could not be resisted at first. For the first thirteen years of Oswiu’s reign, Penda was able to strike with periodic raids into Northumbria. In 649 CE Penda raided deep into Northumbria as far as Bamburgh which he tried unsuccessfully to burn, exploiting internal tensions.

Oswiu, who had his own warband from his exile in Dál Riata and Iona, first had to bide his time. He lacked Oswald’s charisma, but was a wily and ruthless politician. He was loyal to Lindisfarne and he gave Oswald’s skull to the Lindisfarne community.

Nevertheless, the early years of Oswiu’s reign witnessed the first signs of a new renaissance which was about to emerge and blossom in the north.

Wilfred was born into a well connected Northumbrian family in about 634 CE in the anarchic days of Cadwallon’s triumphs. There was a legend that the house where Wilfred was born had burst into flames to mark the occasion. At the age of 14, Wilfred’s connections were such that he was presented to Queen Eanflæd. She seems to have given him the task of caring for a disabled veteran of the royal household, Cudda, on Lindisfarne, as his pupil. So Wilfred began a religious life in his teens at Lindisfarne, possibly encouraged by an opportunity to escape from an unpleasant stepmother. The Hagiography of one of his supporters, Stephen of Ripon, the Life of Wilfred, provides a heavily biased record of his life[99].

Wilfred had been taught by Aidan, but in about 652 CE, he was given permission to travel to Rome on pilgrimage. He obtained Eanflæd’s support to leave Lindisfarne. He was sent to her cousin, the King of Kent and after a year of waiting, he joined Biscop Baducing, later known as Benedict Biscop, to cross the Channel. Benedict Biscop and Wilfred travelled together through to Arles. They reached Lyon in southern France, Gaul’s main city, where Wilfred remained for several years while Biscop continued to Rome. The Archbishop of Lyon offered to adopt Wilfred and confer estates on him and encouraged Wilfred to stay in the opulent city with a large province to govern. He was detained by flattery. He came to appreciate the rich Roman ecclesiastical ways. He eventually declined the offer and continued his journey to Rome but not until about 653 CE. Since the collapse of the Roman Empire, the population of Rome had plummeted to about 100,000, but to the Northumbrian visitors it must have seemed a metropolis. Palaces, baths, triumphal arches, aqueducts, fountains and other Roman relics remained. The great Christian basilica of St Peter’s had been built by Constantine the Great. By the late fourth century, Rome’s first bishop had started to be known as papa, which in time evolved to Pope. Wilfred was blessed by Pope Martin I before returning via Lyon, with a collection of relics. He must have taken with him a reverence of the Roman doctrines of Christianity. Wilfred enjoyed the trappings of the continental bishops, who far from Aidan’s rejection of the gift of a horse, enjoyed splendour and comforts, would not dream of travelling other than by horse, and lauded over their own estates, often with luxuries such as wine cellars. Indeed Wilfred spent another three years in Lyon, to enjoy those comforts before returning home. Wilfred by then a proponent of the Roman ways, quickly determined to replace Celtic with Roman traditions, settling initially in the more Roman Wessex.

Benedict Biscop, himself born into an aristocratic Northumbrian family, visited Rome six times, first in about 653 CE at the age of 25. He collected books and brought revolutionary ideas back to Northumbria.

Meanwhile Northumbria was becoming set in the ways of the Irish. The Canterbury mission of St Augustine had come to an end when his last companion, Honorius died in 653 CE and Lindisfarne had grown in influence, with Finan its abbot consecrating bishops including Cedd who was sent by Oswiu to found a see in Essex at Ythancæstir (Bradwell on Sea) and Tilbury.

In 646 CE a monastery had been founded at Heruteu, Hartlepool, with Heiu its first abbot. Hild became abbess of another monastery on the north bank of the Wear, possibly at Chester le Street.

Oswine, the son of Osric, who belonged to the rival Deiran royal family, had been made sub regulus, or sub king of Deira in 644 CE. Oswy and Oswine came into conflict in 651 CE when Oswine started a rebellion which had been seven years fermenting. However Oswine was unable to maintain his army and withdrew to Wilfaresdun, about ten miles northwest of Catræth, Catterick. He was betrayed by the local earl Tondhere, and Oswiu had him killed on 20 August 651 CE. In order to atone for the killing of Oswine, Oswy was persuaded by his influential queen, Eanflæd, to establish a monastery at Gilling Abbey. There is debate amongst historians about whether the site of his monastery was at Gilling West, near Richmond or Gilling East near Kirkdaleland[100]. On balance, the evidence seems to favour the latter.

Cornu Vallis

A discussion of the arguments regarding the location of Gilling Abbey.

After 651 CE, in part in recompense for the death of Oswine, there was an explosion of monastic endowment across Northumbria in a second wave of foundations, all following the Irish model of Lindisfarne. This explosion coincided with a new political culture and the early establishment concepts of statehood. The church was at the social and economic heart of Oswiu’s new imperium.

Aidan died eleven days after Oswine’s death on 31 August 651 CE and was buried in the cemetery at Lindisfarne. He had played an important role in educating the sons of Æthelfrith. Oswiu continued to support Lindisfarne and Aidan was succeeded by the Ionan priest Finan and later by Colman. Oswiu’s daughter Ealflæd had married Paeda one of Penda’s sons, who converted to Christianity and in 653 CE Oswiu’s son Alhfrith had married Cyneburh, Penda’s daughter, suggesting a wary truce between Mercia and Northumbria by this time.

Mural at Helmsley Parish Church

After Oswine’s death, Oswald’s son Œthelwald had become King of Deira at the age of about 16, from 651 to 654 CE.

In 654 CE Lastingham, a few kilometres from the entrance to Farndale, was founded by Cedd for Æthelwald so he could be buried there. Bede, wrote of how Oidilwald (Æthelwald), the son of King Oswald, who reigned among the Deiri, finding Cedd to be a holy, wise, and good man, desired him to accept some land whereon to build a monastery, to which the king himself might frequently resort, to pray, and where he might be buried when he died. So then, complying with the king's desires, the Bishop chose himself a place whereon to build a monastery among steep and distant mountains, which looked more like lurking-places for robbers and dens of wild beasts, than dwellings of men; to the end that, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, “In the habitation of dragons, might be grass with reeds and rushes;” that is, that the fruits of good works should spring up, where before beasts were wont to dwell, or men to live after the manner of beasts.[101]

So in this place Cedd built his monastery, very close to the entrance to Farndale, in a trackless moorland wilderness vel bestiae commorari vel hommines bestialiter vivere conserverant, a land fit only for wild beasts, and men who live like wild beasts.

Lastingham 653 CE The founding of a Celtic Christian monastery by Cedd, 2 km from the entrance to Farndale

Cedd The Lindisfarne monk and East Saxon Bishop who founded Lastingham

A place of wild beasts and men who lived like wild beasts Bede’s description of the wilderness of Farndale as a place of dragons and wild beasts The village and church of Lastingham, with its Norman crypt

By 655 CE any thawing of relationships between Mercia and Northumbria had ended. The Mercians attacked Northumbria for a third time with an army of enormous scale according to Bede comprising 30 legions, including those of kingdoms subdued to ally with Penda, such as East Anglia. Penda seems to have devastated the Northumbrian lands north to the Forth. It seems that Oswiu sued for peace in return for a very significant hoard of treasure which, although Bede denied it (since Oswiu later reneged on the deal), Penda seems to have accepted since he retired to the area around Leeds. It was there that Oswiu led a surprise attack on Penda. It is possible that the hoard of treasure may be the Staffordshire Hoard discovered at Hammerwich in 2009[102].

The Battle of the Winwead was fought on 15 November 655 between King Penda of Mercia and Oswiu of Bernicia, ending in the Mercians' defeat and Penda's death[103]. The battle took place on the River Went between Castleford and Doncaster, an area prone to flooding. Penda’s forces considerably outnumbered Oswiu’s. Oswiu launched a decisive attack at dawn and the Mercians were driven back to the swollen river from where there was no escape. Hundreds drowned in a disastrous encounter for the Mercians. According to Bede, the battle marked the effective demise of Anglo-Saxon paganism and it was the beginning of a period of Northumbrian ascendency. Penda was the last great pagan king of Anglo-Saxon England. Northumbria, Kent, Wessex, East Anglia and now Mercia were now Christian and only minor kingdoms such as Sussex and Essex remained pagan for a generation longer. Oswiu ruled over Mercia until 658 CE. He also subjected the Picts to his rule.

Œthelwald seems to have allied with Penda but then cautiously withdrew his troops to a safe location during the battle to await the outcome. After the battle he lost Deira. He may have been killed by Oswiu, or exiled. There is a local tradition that he became a hermit in Kirkdale[104].

Oswiu’s eldest son, Alhfrith, became then next sub-king of Deira, and he increasingly came under Wilfred’s influence, willing to challenge his father.

In consequence of his victory over Penda, and the birth of his daughter, Oswiu offered twelve small estates of ten hides each for the foundation of new monasteries, six in Bernicia and six in Deira, an attempt to join two people into a single kingdom. His even handed gift was to fulfil his project of unification. There was already a monastery at Heruteu (Hartlepool). Other early minsters included the already established Campodonum, and Donemutha.

There followed religious foundations in Deira which focused in the Vale of Pickering and in the area between York and Whitby, which may have included foundations at Kirkdale; Stonegrave and Coxwold, both referred to in a letter from Pope Paul I to Eadbert of Northumbria in 757 CE; Hovingham; Crayke[105]; Kirkbymoorside, Middleton and Kirby Misperton[106]. Lastingham seems to have already been established before Winwead, during the time of Œthelwald.

Whether a minster was established this early at Kirkdale, Kirkdaleland was therefore at the centre of a renaissance that was at the cultural heart of the emergence of a Christian-English identity at this time.

Streanæshealh, Whitby, was founded by Hild in 657 CE. Whitby continued to have an ongoing importance as a port, which was enhanced by the foundation of a monastery there. The other Bernician monasteries probably focused along the Tyne valley, including Gateshead, Bywell and Tynemouth. Ripon was first established by Eata, Aidan’s protégé and trained in the Irish manner at Lindisfarne. Yet Ripon was far from Lindisfarne and within a few years Eata was replaced after a coup. Wilfred returned to Britain at about the time Eata was given forty hides at Ripon to found a new monastery. Wilfred charmed Alhfrith, Oswiu’s son and the new sub king of Deira, and he was given ten hides of land to found his own monastery at Stanforda, perhaps Stamford Bridge. The self serving and ruthless Wilfred, of noble birth, and favoured by Queen Eanflæd became its abbot. Wilfred was then given Ripon with another thirty hides by Alhfrith. He expelled the community of Eata, in order to adhere to his preferred Roman traditions. He introduced the Benedictine Rule of the sixth century Italian abbot, Benedict of Nursia.

In about 660 CE, Ceolfrith entered the monastery of Gilling, probably in Ryedale, where his brother Cynefrith was abbot[107].

Only in the late seventh century, with the emergence of kings like Oswiu, did Kings become heads of state with a concept of statehood and kingship that might be recognised today. As the Kings became Christianised, their rights and obligations started to crystallise. Kings became lawgivers and judges, inspirers of poets and patrons of craftsmen such as metalsmiths. They started to chose principes, praefecti, duces and reeves. When they were able to fulfil these functions and remain alive for more than about seven years, they contributed to the longer term success of their kingdom.[108]

Whilst Oswald had been satisfied with a single royal foundation at Lindisfarne, Oswiu’s multiple foundations led to a multiplicity of relationships with his abbots. The church in Anglo-Saxon England (just as in Ireland and Pictish Scotland) was a natural extension of the aristocracy and was dominated by men and women of high birth[109]. Land was invested from the royal portfolio in a more subtle display of royal power. This laid down extended networks of dynastic obligations and their permanence encouraged the new institutions to put down roots[110]. The very early history of the development of the ecclesiastical landscape is not particularly clear. It consisted of Minster, ‘mother’, churches, which sat within large parishes known by the Latin name parochiae. Both minsters and parochiae had origins in the late seventh century and the Middle Saxon period. Parochiae and minsters were grouped together within a diocese. After the tenth century we see the development of smaller parishes, as opposed to parochiae, but this was part of a much larger set of landscape rearrangements. It has been suggested that the earliest diocese and boundaries probably coincided with the boundaries of later seventh century and Middle Saxon kingdoms. This would make much sense if, as seems probable, the conversion of the English to Christianity happened from the top down: convert the king or tribal leader and his territorial boundaries became those of the church he sponsored.[111]

After 655 CE Oswiu had become one of the most powerful rulers in Britain. He secured control of Deira, with his son Alhfrith served as a sub-king. For three years, Oswiu’s power over Mercia earned him recognition as Bretwalda. There is no record of military conflict from 655 to 670 CE, and Oswiu was able to focus on building a Northumbrian state. From the mid seventh and eighth centuries, Northumbria was the dominant kingdom in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly culturally, with links to Continental Europe and wide influence.

Continental Europe was chaotic in this period with conflicts between Visigoth leaders in Spain leading to the acquisition of Moorish mercenaries; and Germanic Lombards dominating in Italy. The Frankish Kingdom, founded by Clovis in the early sixth century fractured in the seventh century in wars between his successors, the Merovingian kings who derived their name from the legendry hero of the Salian Franks, Merovech. The Merovingian lands were divided between rival factions, an eastern branch of Austrasia, ancestor to the Holy Roman Empire and a western branch called Neustria. Northumbria’s bishop Wilfred supported the Austrasian faction and in doing so gained the enmity of the Neustrians. Churchmen and monks regularly crossed the North Sea back and forth during this period.

European Union, Brentrance

There was now a problem in Northumbria. There were different forms of Christianity competing in the same lands. In a spirit that was to define English history for the next thousand years, petty religious differences between Celtic Christianity from Ireland, Iona and Lindisfarne; and Roman from the papal tradition in Rome, were enough to cause turmoil. Different views on such things as the computes, the calculation of the date of Easter, and the cut of the tonsure, the practice of shaving hair on the scalp as a sign of religious humility, were issues of extreme aggravation.

There were broadly three strands of Christianity. The British Christians were dismissed by Bede as wicked and uncompromising, refusing to follow the instructions of the papacy. Bede believed the Irish Christians to be simply wrong, but had some admiration for their ascetic virtues and their influence of the Northumbrian kings. Rome’s direct connection with Britain was through Canterbury, but the Augustinian church of Rome had undertaken far less missionary work. Rome’s knowledge of the early Anglo Saxon church was patchy. In Canterbury authority was vested in the bishop and followed an established Roman hierarchy. The Irish church adopted a different model where the abbot of each monastery was supreme. The British church probably reflected the Irish more than the Roman.

The deployment of sub Kings by Oswiu was probably not weakness, but recognition of the need for more complex administration of a growing kingdom. However the young Alhfrith was growing in self confidence and more willing to challenge his father and Eanflæd shared Wilfred’s more Roman outlook. Oswiu probably still regarded increased Romanisation as a threat. There was an opportunity for men like Wilfred to forge careers in this new world. Although wary of the Roman influence, it may be that Oswiu did not need a direct challenge from his son to realise a need to resolve the issues. Eanflæd had brought Roman rituals to the royal court and James the Deacon had been following Roman practice in celebrating Easter for thirty years. Bede wrote that it is said that in these days it sometimes happened that Easter was celebrated twice in the same year, so that the king had finished the fast and was keeping Easter Sunday, while the queen and her people were still in Lent and observing Palm Sunday. [112]

Synod of Whitby 664 CE

The momentous agreement at Whitby, 30 km northeast of Farndale, which resolved incompatibilities between Roman and Celtic Christian traditions, and placed Britain onto the European stage

Alhfrith apparently clashed with his father over religious policy, which came to a head at Streanæshealh in 664 CE. Streanæshealh was situated beside a sheltered port accessible from the eastern coast of Britain and the ports of Gaul and close to the ecclesiastical sites along the coast. The abbey of Hild, Edwin’s grand niece, founded in the 650s bore no resemblance to the thirteenth century Benedictine abbey. Like Hartlepool, Streanæshealh was a double monastery under the rule of a single female abbess. Wilfred would have disliked the idea of a double monastery.

Oswiu, taught in childhood on Iona, had a natural tendency towards to Irish church. Hild’s sympathies lay with the Irish form. Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne was a hardliner on the Irish side. Cedd was then bishop of the East Saxons and an alumnus of Lindisfarne. If Alhfrith lost the debate, he would have to submit to his Bernician father and lose his independence. Agilbert was a Gallic bishop of Wessex and senior of the Roman party. He brought his own priest Agatho. James the Deacon was in the Roman camp. Eanflæd’s priest Romanus attended. As Agilbert spoke English badly, Wilfred was asked to plead the Roman cause.

The decision would be irrevocable. The kings of Wessex, East Anglia and Kent were not invited. This was a Northumbrian matter. Oswiu was perhaps portraying himself as Regis Saxonum. Whilst Bede saw the conference as the resolution of tension between the Irish and Roman churches, the British church was probably also represented.

Oswiu could no longer allow two traditions to continue side by side. The debate probably continued for days or weeks. In Bede’s summary, the King asked Colman to say which customs he followed and from where they originated. Colman appealed to the traditions of his forefathers and the authority of John and Colm Cille. Wilfred argued that Easter was universally celebrated in Rome where the apostles Peter and Paul had lived and taught and said that the practice was adopted across the world in Italy, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Egypt and Greece. When Colman agreed that St Peter held the keys to heaven, the king decided that it was unwise to contradict him. The decision was made in favour of the Roman tradition.[113]

Wilfred adopted the patronising position that Colman’s predecessors could be forgiven their ignorance owing to their rude simplicity, but that persistence would be a sin.

The decision that the future of England lay with the Roman rather than the Celtic church was a most important decision because it ensured that thenceforward British and intellectual attention would be directed towards Europe. The medieval period was also a time when the authority of the church played a central role in most aspects of the life of the nation. Before Whitby the church was altogether more fragmented, and its growth more organic. After Whitby it became a significant power in the land. The increasing importance of the church also promoted literacy and gave rise to a greater and more widespread use of written documents.[114]

As always, the Europeans won the negotiation. The Anglo-Saxons had chosen to join the European world. This was all firmly within the sphere of Kirkdale’s experience, and the people there likely lived in the same world where these momentous events were unfolding. One day, far in the distant future, Whitby would become the home of several significant Farndale families, including many seventeenth and eighteenth century mariners.

Oswiu had outflanked his son Ahlfrith, ingratiating himself with the papacy and deflecting his son’s attempt to isolate him from the southern kingdoms. The outcome cemented a dominance of Northumbria in the momentum towards a unified English kingdom which would follow centuries later, and gave Oswiu the political capital to continue his process of reform. After this, Alhfrith disappeared from the historical record. Ecgfrith was Deira’s Sub-King 664 to 670 CE.

Colman refused to accept the verdict and resigned the bishopric of Lindisfarne. His dismay was shared on Iona who did not accept Roman orthodoxy for another two centuries. Colman later took some but not all of Cuthbert’s remains with him. The portability of human remains provided a focus for veneration. King Edwin’s skull was the principal relic at York. Corporeal remains had become a commodity. The remains of ancestors were revered in barrows in the Bronze Age and continued to be adopted as physical elements of ritual.[115]

Oswiu took the opportunity to separate the monastic from the episcopal functions of the Northumbrian church and established a new see at York, in the centre of Deiran territory. By separating the offices of bishop and abbot, the king established a hierarchy whereby the king appointed an archbishop under whom bishops and abbots owed their allegiance. A form of civil administration developed from a hierarchy of delegation, the inception of administrative statehood.

By the late seventh century evidence from excavations at Fishergate suggests that York was minting coins and hosted a settlement of Frisian traders. Oswiu developed a model of kingship more like that of the much later Tudor period. He established a new hierarchy of patronage and opened new career opportunities to the growing Northumbrian nobility. As that patronage flowed towards the church, the bishops and abbots themselves gained increasing political capital.[116]

The stamping of Oswiu’s authority at the Synod of Whitby was the culmination of a process of the consolidation of the power of warlord kings by embracing a unifying culture, structured around a form of Christianity which established a sense of permanence and longevity. Bede’s History connected that process to the idea of a new unifying force of an English identity, which would embrace ambitions of the expansion of authority across the Anglo-Saxon world[117].

Following a solar eclipse, there was a well recorded and devastating plague across Britain in 664 CE. There was depopulation in the south and in the north it raged far and wide with cruel devastation, laying low a vast number of people[118]. When the Bishops of Northumbria, Essex and Rochester all died, Wilfred had an opportunity to become Northumbria’s new bishop, but since there were not sufficient bishops left to formally consecrate him in Britain, he was sent by Alhfrith for Francia where, as was his want, he stayed for some time. On his eventual return he was blown off course to the lands of pagan Sussex, where he escaped a mob. During Wilfred’s absence, in 666 CE Oswiu, who may not have approved when his son Alhfrith despatched Wilfred for consecration as a bishop, nominated Cedd’s brother Chad as bishop in Northumbria, consecrated by the Bishop of Wessex and two bishops of the British race. Oswiu continued to play both camps. When Wilfred returned, he had to retire to Ripon.

Nevertheless, Wilfred’s more legitimate consecration as a bishop in Francia was useful to the southern kingdoms who used him to appoint new priests. Oswiu allied with the King of Kent to curb Wilfred’s new power by appointing the priest Wigheard, to become the new Archbishop of Canterbury. On arrival in Rome however, Wigheard died of the plague.

A new archbishop was then installed in Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, an unlikely 66 year old Greek speaking monk from Asia Minor. He was born in southeast Turkey in about 602 CE. He would take the church and state reform to a new level in his twenty year career. He brought the English churches under a single authority launching a programme of change and centralisation. This was the groundwork for the Church of England. Theodore immediately wielded the power of the pope and Wilfred was restored to the see of Northumbria. Chad returned to Lastingham as abbot. Wilfred realigned with Roman practices, and began a restoration of Paulinus’ dilapidated church at York.

Northumbria’s Golden Age

Oswiu died from illness on 15 February 670 CE, aged 58. He was the first king of his dynasty to die in his bed. He was interred at Whitby, where his widow and daughter would become abbesses. Deira and Bernicia was divided between two of his sons. Queen Eanflæd retired to the abbey at Whitby.

The Tribal Hidage is a list of thirty-five tribes that was compiled in Anglo-Saxon England some time between the seventh and ninth centuries. It includes a number of independent kingdoms and other smaller territories, and assigns a number of hides to each one. It includes all the seven kingdoms of the Heptarchy except Northumberland but substantiates a picture of the evolution of kingdoms. It has been suggested that it was compiled by a Northumbrian King drawing tribute from the other kingdoms. The Tribal Hidage survives to us in the form of an 11th century manuscript, now in the British Library, which, to judge from the places mentioned, is based on much earlier information. The term hidage refers to a hide, which was a holding of land considered sufficient to support a family. It would seem that this document is a copy of a much earlier list which itemises the holdings of 35 named tribes, whose whereabouts and geography coincide with what we know about England in the late 7th century, say 680. Andrew Reynolds suggests that the Tribal Hidage is best seen as a one off snapshot of Middle Saxon England, rather than some sort of developing historical document.[119]

In the Tribal Hidage[120], Wessex was assessed at a large 100,000 hides, Mercia and East Anglia at 30,000 and Kent at 15,000. Kingdoms varied in size and the pattern of the preceding centuries was that family units secured the submission of their neighbours, enabling them to take on larger rivals, eventually styling themselves as King.[121]

Ecgfrith was King of Northumbria from September 670 until his death in 20 May 685. He had been Sub-king under his father Oswiu upon whose death he became king of all Northumbria. He ruled over Northumbria when it was at the height of its power[122]. Ecgfrith showed his military skill when he repelled attacks from the Picts and the Mercians. He was a capable ruler and continued his predecessor’s policy of aggressive territorial acquisition. He maintained Northumbria’s influence over the Picts north of the Forth and won back control of Lindsey over Mercia.[123]. The eight year old Ælfwine was Deira’s sub-king from 670 CE to 679 CE. Ælfwine, son of Oswiu of Northumbria and a brother of Ecgfrith, was still a boy in 670 CE, and his sub-kingship might have been intended to designate him as the heir of the childless Ecgfrith.

However Ælfwine was killed in battle against the Mercians at the Battle of the Trent in 679. Bede wrote In the ninth year of the reign of King Ecgfrith (in 679), a great battle was fought between him and Æthelred, king of the Mercians, near the river Trent, and Ælfwine, brother to King Ecgfrith, was slain, a youth about eighteen years of age, and much beloved by both provinces; for King Æthelred had married his sister Osthryth. There was now reason to expect a more bloody war, and more lasting enmity between those kings and their fierce nations; but Theodore, the bishop, beloved of God, relying on the Divine aid, by his wholesome admonitions wholly extinguished the dangerous fire that was breaking out; so that the kings and their people on both sides were appeased, and no man was put to death, but only the due mulct paid to the king who was the avenger for the death of his brother; and this peace continued long after between those kings and between their kingdoms. There were no further sub kings of Deira and Northumbria was ruled as a single province.

Wilfred benefited from Ecgfrith’s new acquisitions as he gained new ecclesiastical influences. Wilfred expelled monks from Ripon and built a stone church. This was a grander project than his restoration work at York. He constructed a building fit for a Roman bishop, comprising a basilica with a still surviving crypt. Nothing like it had been seen in Northumbria previously. He also commissioned a set of gospels written in gold on purple parchment. He was able to bring masons, glaziers, scribes and jewellers from Frankia.

There was no significant stone structure in Northumberland and no masons in the early seventh century. When Finan succeeded Aidan in 651 CE, he had built a church after the Irish method, not of stone but hewn oak, thatching it with reeds[124]. Oswald completed Paulinus’ wooden church in York in stone in the later 630s. Forty years later the church at York was derelict and there were no stone structures until Wilfred repaired the York church and had the abbeys at Hexham and Ripon built after 670 CE. The best wooden architecture was at Yeavering.

In contrast to Cuthbert, Wilfred was charismatic, ambitious and Roman in taste. When Wilfred constructed Hexham abbey in the 670s, his biographer wrote in awe that my feeble tongue will not allow me to enlarge here upon the depth of the foundations in the earth, and its crypts of wonderfully dressed stone, and the manifold buildings above the ground, supported by various columns and many side aisles, and adorned with walls of notable length and heigh, surrounded by various winding passages with spiral stairs leading up and down[125]. [126]

Churches in Britain had been monastic centres of monks and nuns. As new churches started to be built, often of stone, they adopted a function more as a mission station for conversion. These churches came to be known as minsters, sometimes closed institutions for a few pious aristocrats, and sometimes serving a wider community, though still on a small scale since parish churches for ordinary folk were still unknown. Preaching to ordinary folk was undertaken in the countryside, perhaps under a wooden cross, which in time may have become places marked by carved stone crosses.

From the mid seventh and eighth centuries, Northumbria was the dominant kingdom in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly culturally, with links to Continental Europe. The revolution in Northumbria had been driven initially by Æthelfrith, Edwin, and Oswald. It was consolidated by Oswiu. It was also pursued by ecclesiastical figures including Abbess Hild of Streanæshealh; Cuthbert, the monk bishop and hermit; Benedict Biscop, monastic founder and promoter of learning and founder of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow; Wilfred of Ripon, an early prince-bishop on the European stage; Bede; Archbishop Ecgberht, the King’s brother and educational pioneer and his successor Ælbert; and later by Alcuin.

The mysterious Frank’s Casket was found in the early nineteenth century in a private house in France and later bought by Augustus Franks from whose name it derives. It is an Anglo Saxon work of whalebone ivory, oblong in shape. It includes illustrations of Roman, Jewish, Christian and Germanic legends and uses runic and Latin script. It combines pagan and Christian themes. It includes the riddle The fish beat up the sea on to the mountainous cliffs. The king of terror became sad where he swam on to the shingle. It was probably made in Northumbria in the eighth century. The original casket is in the British museum[127] and there is a copy in the Jarrow Hall museum.

Northumbria was also home to the art of calligraphy and biblical texts were lovingly transcribed, culminating in the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Codex Amiatus[128], the early Bible that Ceolfrith took to the Continent.

Northumbria’s Golden Age Sixth and Seventh Centuries CE When Northern England was the European centre of knowledge and learning

Bede was born on lands belonging to the monastery of Monkwearmouth in the Kingdom of Bernicia, in about 672 CE on the lands of this monastery[129].

The Venerable Bede

This life of Bede and the history of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, providing context for the founding of Lastingham and Kirkdale, and the work of Alcuin and the York scholars

King Ecgfrith had been married at about the age of 16 to an East Anglian princess, Æthelthryth, a reluctant bride who maintained her virginity. Needing a legitimate heir, he had the marriage dissolved in 672 CE. He took a new consort, Lurminburh.

In 673 CE, Ecgfrith of Northumbria, impressed by Benedict Biscop’s account of his travels, gave him 70 hides of land on the north bank of the River Wear to found a monastery at Wearmouth, dedicated to St Peter. At the same time Wilfred seems to have benefited from the royal marital crisis when Æthelthryth left him estates in the Tyne valley and he created an abbey complex at Hexham in 673 CE in even more ambitious style than at Ripon. Behind a modern wooden gate, is an opening in the floor, from which a dozen steps descend. At the foot of this narrow stairwell is a tiny antechamber, and beyond that, a small, windowless room, only thirteen feet long and eight feet wide. Now evenly illuminated by electric light, it would originally have been lit by flickering lamps placed in the two niches in the walls on either side. This is the crypt of the Anglo Saxon church. It was created in the 670s, and it brings us as close as is physically possible to the world of its creator, St Wilfred.[130] The church above it was over 30 metres long and rivalled the Great Halls of the Northumbrian kings. It was built of stone, sourced from Roman sites along the line of Hadrian’s wall, and therefore adopted a permanence that the kings had been unable to achieve with their wooden structures.

Wilfred was becoming increasingly influential and at about this time he was involved in supporting the return to Francia of Dagobert II from exile, soon to take the Merovingian throne after a civil war in 675 CE. Wilfred seems to have had sufficient power, and warriors at his disposal, to support a successful foreign coup.

Yet the tide was turning again for Wilfred. It was at about this time that Wilfred learnt that Theodore wanted to reform the structure of the English church and divide Northumbria into smaller sees, following Gregory’s original intention of two metropolitan archbishoprics with 12 bishops beneath each, and at this time the increasingly powerful Wilfred seems to have lost the King’s favour. Theodore convened the first nationwide Synod of the Church at Hertford in 672 CE, which provided for regular further synods. The synod reaffirmed the authority of Canterbury and stamped on freelance activities by bishops like Wilfred.

Cuthbert was increasingly revered and replaced Wilfred in the King’s favour. In 684 CE Theodore appointed Cuthbert as bishop of Hexham. Cuthbert was a native Northumbrian who had been prior of Melrose Abbey. He was about the same age as Wilfred, but his opposite in character, being far more pacific. He had retired to be a hermit on Inner Farne in 676 CE for about a decade before he was appointed bishop after a personal delegation led by Ecgfrith pleaded with him to do so. He was consecrated as Hexham’s new bishop in York. Cuthbert died in 687 CE having been Lindisfarne’s prior, a reluctant bishop of Ecgfrith and later a hermit on Inner Farne. His remains were returned to Lindisfarne after his death.

Theodore visited Northumbria at Ecgfrith’s request where he convened a synod in 687 CE. Ecgfrith and Theodore agreed that Northumberland would be divided into four dioceses of York, Hexham, Lindisfarne and Abercorn on the Forth. Wilfred was set to lose three quarters of his domain. He travelled to Rome to appeal the decision. He returned a year later with a papal bull in his favour, but the King ignored the interference in what he considered to be a matter within the royal prerogative. Wilfred was imprisoned for a while. He was later freed into exile where he settled among the now Christian South Saxons (Sussex).[131]

The young Bede was sent to the monastery of St Peter at Monkwearmouth at the age of seven in 679 CE as puer oblatus. He was initially educated under Benedict Biscop. Hild died at Whitby in 680 CE and Eanflæd with her daughter Ælfflæd became abbess. Aebbercurnig (Abercorn) was established with a Northumbrian bishop on the Forth[132]. In 681 CE a sister monastery to Monkwearmouth was founded at Jarrow with a group of 17 or 22 brethren. Although two different sites, they functioned as a single monastery.

In the 680s King Edwin’s bones were moved to Whitby, confirming its links with the Deiran kings. After his death in 632 CE, his skull had been taken to York and placed in Paulinus’ church. Whitby seems to have been elevated to the principal religious site of the Deiran royal family.

It was by about 685 CE, that a minster was first built at Kirkdale, though Kirkdale may have been part of the establishment of twelve monasteries after 655 CE. We will return to Kirkdale in Scene 3.

Ecgfrith was defeated at the Battle of Nechtansmere against the Picts of Fortriu in which he lost his life. He was defeated in narrow passes in the midst of inaccessible mountains. This was a heavy blow to the expanding Northumbrian kingdom. Nechtansmere was a turning point and the British to the west reversed the tide of conquest while the Picts in the north recovered their territories to the Forth. Never again would a Northumbrian king wield imperium over the larger part of Britain[133]. Aldfrith, another son of Oswiu, was King of Northumbria from after 14 December 685 to 14 December 705. He was England’s first literate king and a scholar who recorded two great poems, Beowulf and Widsith in writing. He received news of Ecgfrith’s death when studying on Iona. He extended the use of coinage.

Sceats or Sceattas (pronounced Shatters) were small Anglo Saxon silver coins minted in Britain and Frisia between about 690 and 790 CE. There were two series, referred to as primary and secondary. They were associated with Kent, East Anglia, Wessex and Mercia. But Northumbrian sceattas were some of the earliest English coins to consistently name the monarch on the coin itself, indicating royal control over the currency. Kings such as Aldfrith (685 to 705 CE), Eadberht (737 to 758 CE), and Æthelred I (774 to 779 and 790 to 796 CE) are known to have issued them.

Aldfrith married Cuthburh. He was a man of learning. Some of his works and some letters written to him survive. Aldfrith’s kingdom was one of lasting creativity, which saw the production of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Codex Amiatinus, and the early works of Bede. His reign was relatively peaceful, though marred by disputes with the tricky Bishop Wilfrid.

Perhaps with their minds focused after the Pictish defeat, Theodore, Wilfred and the new king reached a period of reconciliation.

In 686 CE, plague which devastated the Anglo Saxon world and Northumbria, broke out at Jarrow. It had wiped out the community of Lindisfarne and Ceolfrith recorded that only two surviving monks at Jarrow were capable of singing the full offices[134]. One was Ceolfrith and the other a young boy, who according to the anonymous writer had been taught by Ceolfrith. The two managed to do the entire service of the liturgy until others could be trained. The young boy was almost certainly Bede. Bede survived the plague.

Wilfred returned to Northumbria in about 687 CE. He was initially restored to the diocese of Hexham and given Lindisfarne, though unbeknown to him, this was a temporary measure. Soon he was restored to the bishoprics of York and Ripon.

Ceolfrith was appointed abbot of the combined Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery in 688 CE. He doubled the number of books in the libraries of the monastery. Thanks to Biscop’s generosity, Wearmouth-Jarrow was fantastically wealthy, and boasted perhaps the finest library in Britain. It was this unrivalled collection of imported books that enabled Bede, who was placed in the community in 680 as a boy of seven, to become one of the greatest historians of the Middle Ages. This was also driven by Northumbria’s wealth in cattle and the three Bibles produced under Ceolfrith would have required the skins of 1,500 calves. At the same time the monks of Lindisfarne created the beautiful Lindisfarne Gospels to adorn St Cuthbert’s tomb. Aldfrith was the sponsor of a Northumbrian Renaissance.[135]

Meantime Aldfrith, deciding to uphold the intentions of Theodore, had redistributed the bishoprics of Hexham and Lindisfarne to new bishops, frustrating Wilfred’s ambitions again. Benedict Biscop died in 689 CE and Archbishop Theodore died in 690 CE. Wilfred hoped he might restore his former power, but once again wearied by Wilfred, King Aldfrith banished the troublesome priest. There is no recorded evidence of Wilfred’s movements for the following decade. He seems to have gone to Mercia and made another appeal to Rome. In 703 CE Wilfred fell out with the new archbishop of Canterbury. Tensions with Wilfred resurfaced when a council was summoned at Austerfield south of Doncaster, by Theodore’s replacement, Berhtwald. Aldfrith and most of the other bishops of the kingdoms were there. Wilfred’s arrival led to immediate argument. The frustrated Wilfred set out once again for Rome, at the age of 70.

In 700 CE Ceolfrith instructed the monks of Jarrow and Wearmouth to make three copies of the pandect of the Bible into one great volume. Two copies made for Wearmouth and for Jarrow have been lost but one, the Codex Amiatus (after the location where it was later found), was delivered to Rome and survives, now in Florence. Bede wrote his first works, De Arte Metrica and De Schematibus et Tropis; both were intended for use in the classroom. Bede’s books are not just marvels of scholarship but evidence of a sort of early industrial revolution, which required animal husbandry and processing on a dramatic scale to produce thousands of sheets of perfect vellum; inks and paints for writing and illumination; leather for bindings; glass for windows. Bede is a fitting legacy for the luck and achievements of the Idings, who not only forged the first Anglo Saxon state sufficiently robust to survive the death of its kings, but which forged a hybrid culture of Angle and Scot, Briton and Irish, whose exuberance and craft, sophistication and heroic scale is an enduring linguistic, architectural and literary monument.[136] Bede became a priest in 702 CE.

Aldfrith’s son Osred was a child when his father died, and it is assumed that Eadwulf I usurped the throne and was King of Northumbria from 704 to 705 CE. Eadwulf seems to have been exiled to either Dál Riata or Pictland. The son of Aldfrith, Osred did not directly succeed his father as Eadwulf I seized the throne in 705 CE, but held it for only a few months. Osred was King of Northumbria from 14 December 705 to 716 CE.

Although another judgement in Rome in 705 CE, was an inconclusive one, Wilfred was restored as bishop of Hexham under Osred in 706 CE, probably influenced by Abbess Ælfflæd. The Archbishop of Canterbury travelled to Northumbria, at a place on the River Nidd, to find a resolution. At the same time Wilfred was restored to Ripon, along with its wealth. He seems to have been satisfied with his restoration to his two favoured monasteries. In 708 CE, some monks at Hexham accused Bede of having committed heresy in his work De Temporibus. The standard theological view of world history at the time was known as the Six Ages of the World. In his book, Bede calculated the age of the world for himself, rather than accepting the authority of Isidore of Seville, and came to the conclusion that Christ had been born 3,952 years after the creation of the world, rather than the figure of over 5,000 years that was commonly accepted by theologians.

Also at this time, Nectan Mac Der Ilei, King of the Picts, became a monk and asked the Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery to help him reform the Pictish Church, asking Ceolfrith for advice on the calculation of easter and the Roman tonsure, and the building of churches in the Roman style.

Wilfred died at the age of 75 on 24 April 710. The epitaph on his tomb was Wilfridas magnus, Wilfred the Great.

In 714 CE the Northumbrian minor nobleman Willibrord, then bishop of Utrecht, baptised Pippin, the son of Charles Martel. Willibrord was taught by Wilfred at Ripton and adopted Wilfred’s loyalty to Rome. Pippin saw religion as a tool of policy and by supporting the Rome orientated Anglo-Saxon missions he positioned himself as a son of the church in contrast to the dynastic loyalty of the Frankish church. Over time, as chief minister, Pippin started to act as if he were the king himself. The Northumbrian reach was wide.

Osred reached his majority in 715 or 716, but within a very short period he was killed. In the same year Abbot Ceolfrith left for Rome with the Codex Amiatus, visiting cornu vallis en route.

Bede wrote De temporum ratione, Concerning the organisation of time, in about 725 CE and completed his Historia Gentis Anglorum Ecclesiastica and other historical works including History of the Lives of the Abbots by about 731 CE. He also compiled a list of his books including commentaries on the books of the Bible. His works include treatises on grammar, orthography (spelling), metrics, computus (the mathematical and astronomical calculation of time), and natural history. He popularised the system of dating years after the birth of Christ. He produced handbooks on Latin grammar, spelling and composition of verse. He travelled to York to visit Ecgbert, then bishop of York. The See of York was elevated to an archbishopric in 735 CE, and it is likely that Bede and Ecgbert discussed the proposal for the elevation during his visit. Bede hoped to visit Ecgbert again in 734 CE but was too ill to make the journey.

Bede died on the Feast of the Ascension, on Thursday 26 May 735, on the floor of his cell. He was buried at Jarrow. He left a fresh Anglo-Saxon way of learning. The Benedictine monasteries had become the main focus of learning by the sixth century, following the disintegration of the Roman empire. Benedictine monasteries were repositories of learning as they focused on prayer, study and manual labour. Study was intended to assist an understanding of the Bible through copying scripts. Roman knowledge through an understanding of Latin was an instrument to assist Christian understanding. Over time, this became the basis of early education. Bede had introduced an educational system based upon training in Latin and loosely on the liberal arts, liberalia studia, the basic literary and numerical studies adopted from Roman education. Pythagoras argued that there was a mathematical and geometric harmony to the cosmos or the universe and his followers linked the four arts of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music into one area of study to form the disciplines of the medieval quadrivium. Over time, rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic or logic became the educational programme of the trivium. Together they came to be known as the seven liberal arts. However Bede did not wholly embrace the liberal arts himself.

Eadberht was King of Northumbria from 738 to 758 CE. For some twenty years King Eadberht reigned with relative stability represented by more or less regular coin issues[137]. His reign was a return to the imperial ambitions of seventh-century Northumbria and a period of economic prosperity. Among Bede’s pupils was Eadberht’s brother, Ecgbert, who had became Archbishop of York in the year of Bede’s death. It was at York, that Ecgbert continued Bede’s work. Ecgbert founded a school attached to the cathedral for the sons of local nobles. These were peaceful and stable years in Northumbria, before the arrival of the Vikings at Lindisfarne in 793 CE.

Alcuin was born in Northumbria, probably sometime in the 730s. Little is known of his parents, family background, or origin but he was probably of noble English stock[138].

As Ecgbert’s responsibilities increased, he entrusted the running of the school to his kinsman and pupil, Aethelbert. The fame of the school grew under Aethelbert and pupils came from across the country and from overseas. Aethelbert travelled to the Continent to collect books and he spread knowledge of the school. He made it his mission to collect books from across Europe and used his own private wealth to amass a remarkable library[139]. Alcuin, in his longest poem, later included a bibliography of this remarkable library.

It was during Aethelbert’s time that Alcuin joined the school in the 750s and became Ecgbert and Aethelbert’s favoured pupil and a great friend of Aethelbert. The young Alcuin therefore came to the cathedral church of York during the golden age of Archbishop Ecgbert and his brother, the Northumbrian King Eadberht. King Eadberht and Archbishop Ecgbert oversaw the re-energising and reorganisation of the English church, with an emphasis on reforming the clergy and on the tradition of learning that Bede had begun. Ecgbert was devoted to Alcuin, who thrived under his tutelage.

By then, the York school was known as a centre of learning in the liberal arts, literature, and science, as well as in religious matters and Alcuin added impetus to its evolution. The cathedral had links to the court of the Frankish King Charlemagne, soon to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. At the northwest corner of the great agricultural lands of Pickering and York, Kirkdale, our ancestral home, remained firmly on the European stage in the eighth century.

Alcuin and the birth of modern education

The world of Ecgberht and Aethelbert, successors to Bede, and their pupil Alcuin, who took York’s powerhouse of knowledge to the court of Charlemagne to pioneer the European educational system

Although this was an unsettling time for the Northumbrian kings, the York school nevertheless thrived. Oswulf, King of Northumbria from 758 to 759 CE, was murdered the year after he became King by his bodyguards at Market Weighton on 24 July 759. Æthelwald Moll seized the throne after Oswulf’s murder and was King of Northumbria for seven years until he was deposed by Alhred. After his removal from the throne Æthelwald became a monk, perhaps involuntarily. Alhred became King of Northumbria from 765 to 774 CE. Little is said of his reign in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle other than that he became king, and was then deposed and exiled in 774 CE. It was in 766 CE that Charles I became King of the Franks.

Aethelbert succeeded Ecgbert as Archbishop on 24 April 767. Alcuin’s ascendancy to the headship of the York school, the ancestor of St Peter's School, began after Aethelbert became Archbishop of York. Around the same time, Alcuin became a deacon in the church. He was never ordained a priest and there is no evidence that he took monastic vows, though he lived as if he had. Religious boundaries were fluid at that time without a sharp division between disciplines.

Alcuin taught the seven liberal arts. He stressed the correct use of Latin and wrote textbooks in Latin. He followed Bede’s method of question and answer. He promoted the study of the calendar, the computus, and especially the once controversial calculation of the date of Easter. He gave elementary instruction in music, arithmetic and geometry. He enjoyed riddles, jokes and puns in his teaching methods. He made arithmetical puzzles and riddles such as his famous river crossing riddle[140] and seems to have been an excellent communicator. Alcuin developed a friendly literary circle where its members had nicknames[141], Alcuin was called Flacchus and a favoured pupil, Sigewulf, was known as Vetulus, ‘little old fellow’.

In 758 CE Eadberht abdicated in favour of his son Oswulf and became a monk at York, urged to do so by the patrician Æthelwald Moll.

In 781 CE, Alcuin was sent to Rome to petition the pope for official confirmation of York's status as an archbishopric. On his way home, he met Charlemagne in the Italian city of Parma. At the invitation of Charlemagne, Alcuin left York for Charlemagne’s court in 782 CE. There is a suggestion that he was in York for a while longer and didn’t leave for Charlemagne’s court until 786 CE. Alcuin's joined an illustrious group of scholars whom Charlemagne had gathered around him, the mainsprings of the Carolingian Renaissance. They included Peter of Pisa, a Latin Grammarian[142]; Paulinus of Aquileia; Rado; Abbot Fulrad; and Paul the Deacon, a Lombard historian[143]. Alcuin would later write, the Lord was calling me to the service of King Charles. Alcuin became master of the Palace School of Charlemagne in Aachen, Urbs Regale. He became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court, where he remained a figure in the 780s and 790s[144].

As the eighth century progressed Charles, later Charlemagne (King of the Franks from 768 CE; King of the Lombards from 774 CE and Holy Roman Emperor from 800 CE, died 814 CE), presided over a Carolingian renaissance, with Alcuin of York at the heart of his cultural and educational reforms. By the later eighth century the Pope, fearful of Lombard dominance, sought the protection of Charles the Great of the Franks.

The Franks were a Germanic people who had expanded west across the Rhine in the late fifth and sixth centuries in the time of their King Clovis (died 511 CE) and occupied central and eastern Gaul. Under Charlemagne’s leadership, the Carolingian Empire came to occupy most of western Europe except Spain and southern Italy. The tradition of scholarship continued under his successors Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, but lost its momentum as Europe became less stable and the focus shifted towards Germany with the accession of Otto I in 936 CE.[145]

By the mid eighth century the old Carolingian kings in Frankia had become so weak that Pippin had sought and received the Pope’s permission to replace them, founding the Carolingian dynasty named after Pippin’s father, Charles. The Merovingian kings were displaced by their own chief ministers when Pippin became King of the Franks. Pippin was the first Carolingian King from 751 CE and father of Charles the Great. The English system of provincial church organisation brought to England by Augustine, was introduced into the Frankish Kingdom after the Germanic Church Council in 742 CE. Pippin was anointed, with holy oil poured over his head[146], symbolising the granting of a divine power, a new approach to the consecration of Frankish kings. Pippin’s sons including Charles were anointed by Pope Hadrian I in another ceremony.

However Northumbria’s Golden Age was not to last. By the mid eighth century Mercia was growing in ascendancy.

After the Romans had abandoned Britain, London had fallen into ruin. The ruins may not have been occupied until St Augustine’s mission in the sixth century after which the bishop of the East Saxons, Mellitus established himself in the deserted city, drawn by its classical associations. These were mysterious places, the work of giants. At about this time a new settlement was established about a kilometre west of the Roman town of Londinium, and it became known as Lundenwic[147]. This settlement had seen rapid expansion in the mid seventh century, fuelled by international trade. By the 670s there was a new wharf along the Strand. The new settlement thrived as it was located in a place able to capitalise on the industry of agricultural hinterlands fed by the Thames, and a route to the Continent downstream on the same river. By the early eighth century, Mercia was dominating its control of Lundenwic, particularly in the time of its King Æthelbald (716 to 757 CE). This was the source of Mercia’s dominance. Bede recorded that by 731 CE all the kings south of the Humber were subject to Æthelbald’s authority. In 757 CE Æthelbald was killed in a civil war and Offa (ruled 757 to 796 CE) became king of Mercia and dominated the southern kingdoms, establishing Offa’s Dyke as a barrier to the non Anglo-Saxon British lands of the west. His dominance never extended to Northumbria, though he gave his daughter Ælfflæd in marriage to the Northumbrian King Æthelred I in 792 CE.

The reason that Offa built his dyke as a defence against the Britons and not the Northumbrians, East Anglians or West Saxons was that despite their differences and occasional violent episodes, by this date the people in these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms regarded themselves as a single ethnic group, a group that we can reasonably start to describe as ‘English’. The word of course derives from Angli, or Angles, which had earlier signified the settler peoples to the north of the Thames – the East Angles, the Mercians and the Northumbrians, but increasingly during the eighth century people were using Angli as a general term to describe all the Germanic speaking peoples in Britain, including those who at other times had been referred to as Saxons and Jutes. Bede, for example, sometimes used Angli in a narrow sense, in reference to the people of Northumbria. But he more frequently employed the phrase gens Anglorum to mean something like ‘the English people’, not least in the title of his most famous work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English people, completed in 731.[148] It was not however entirely a one way direction in the evolution of the Angle and Saxon badges and Saxon came to mean the same thing and the phrase Anglo-Saxon therefore later evolved as a catch all to describe the folk Germanic peoples of this period.

Mercians, Saxons and Northumbrians were increasingly feeling a sense of kinship, whilst growing less well disposed to the Britons in the west. The barbarian Germanic incomers had long regarded the indigenous Romano-British people as inferior, with little to emulate, a people of low status. The Germanic speakers across Europe often referred to old Roman communities as walas, or foreigners, in English waelas, a synonym for walh meaning slave, and the name taken by Wales derived from this root, as did the people of the corn-walas. A clear linguistic and religious divide sharpened the hostility between the Anglo Saxons and the Britons. When Æthelfrith of Northumbria massacred the British monks of Bangor-Is-Coed near Chester in 614 CE, Bede had little sympathy, dismissing the Britons who oppose the English through their inbred hatred and the whole state of the catholic church through their incorrect Easter and their evil customs.

The idea of an English nation, which had its inception in the Kingdom of Northumbria, framed in the story of Pope Gregory’s encounter with the Deiran Anglian slaves in Rome, and captured in the Ecclesiastical History written by Bede on the Northumbrian coast, was spreading through the Anglo-Saxon world.

Over time however, the population was gradually assumed into a new mixed Anglo Saxon identity.

Scene 3 – Kirkdale

By about 685 CE, and perhaps earlier, a minster was first built at Kirkdale. It was probably at this time that it was dedicated to St Gregory, the same Pope Gregory who had put the land of the Angles onto the European political map, and its dedication to the Roman pope reaffirmed the new association with Rome and the Pope recently agreed at the Synod of Whitby. The Deiran monarchs became closely associated with Rome, and with Gregory in particular. As did Kirkdale itself. If there were pre Christian practices at Kirkdale, then the shift from pre Christian to Christian might have been a natural one.

Introduction to Kirkdale and its Minster An introduction to several pages which tell the history of Kirkdale and its vicinity

Anglo Saxon Kirkdale Kirkdale from its founding in about 685 CE to the beginning of the Scandinavian period in about 800 CE

The Kirkdale Saxon Artefacts Ornate sarcophagus lids and Saxon artefacts to be found in Kirkdale Minster and embedded into its walls which will transport you to the Eighth century CE

Cornu Vallis An exploration of the association of the last resting place of Ceolfrith of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow before his journey to Rome and the Horn Ridge which overlooks Farndale

Kirkdale became a religious and political focal point of the relatively stable and prosperous lands in its vicinity. So the distant ancestors of modern Farndales likely lived in this place of profound influence on the future evolution of a nation.

There’s a suggestion that Kirkdale may have been the place known as Cornu Vallis, the horn valley, where Ceolfrith, by then the recently retired abbot of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow visited en route to Europe to deliver his Codex Amiatus[149]. This might suggests links between Kirkdale and the Tyne valley and Jarrow, where Bede wrote his histories.

Kirkdale and Lastingham are about six kilometres apart and have long been closely associated. It is likely that Kirkdale also had a close relationship with the growing secular town of Kirkbymoorside.

The Kirkdale archaeologists have found evidence of symbolism and the burial of special dead, so in the middle Anglo Saxon period, Kirkdale likely had a special significance to the local hierarchy of that time. Kirkdale might have been attached to a local estate and the presence of the church at Kirkdale must have been a spiritual force which consolidated local hierarchies, providing social cohesion. It must have been an important expression of the new religion, which would have created local identity.

Kirkdale probably had an important relationship by the eighth century with what was by then already perceived as the past. This can be seen in its use of earlier Roman materials and as a symbol of its close associations with Christian Rome, including through its dedication to St Gregory. The archaeologists found blown glass in the Roman fashion which might suggest a continuation of techniques from the Roman period. There may have been an importance of Romanitas, a Latin word, coined in the third century, meaning Roman-ness a link with things Roman, the collection of political and cultural concepts and practices by which the Romans defined themselves[150]. Another artefact of the early ninth century may have been imported from a significant, possibly Italian centre and was perhaps a relic fragment.

There are significant above ground grave structures which were likely to have been associated with elite members of society. Their position in the building might have been focused with vibrant paint and possibly the play of light[151]. The symbolism of these finds was likely to have been understood by an informed audience. One design was probably reference to a chalice. There were probable theological messages and symbolism in these artefacts.

Our ancestors lived amongst a rich cultural group near the centre of political influence.

An ancestor tilling the fields beside the newly constructed minster at Kirkdale in about 685 CE

The land had been worked intensively during the Roman era. The villa owners had grown rich by exporting wheat to feed the armies across the Empire. Intensive cereal production collapsed after the decline of Roman influence. Evidence of pollen samples nevertheless suggests that secondary woodland did not expand dramatically over the land where wheat had been grown. There may have been a period during which sheep, cattle and pig rearing allowed the indigenous population to draw their protein from secondary products including milk, butter and cheese. Early Anglo-Saxon settlers may have focused their efforts on lush meadows to provide winter fodder and herds may have grazed over wide tracts of land. The human population may have been increasingly dispersed and often mobile, driving herds between summer and winter grazing.

By the Middle Anglo-Saxon period of the seventh to early ninth centuries, Anglo-Saxon farmers turned back from pastoralism to rely increasingly on arable farming, growing wheat and barley[152]. This was probably the period when the open field system materialised. There is mixed evidence of the timing of the transition and no doubt it varied across different regions.

The overwhelming majority of the English population of Anglo-Saxon England lived in the countryside, grew crops, herded livestock and were self-sufficient.

Agriculture

Kirkdaleland seems to have been a stable region, and the individuals who are the subject of the Farndale Story, were likely to have been amongst the pioneers who ploughed the land and reestablished arable crops in the Middle Anglo-Saxon period.

Scene 4 - The end of the Golden Age

Moral degradation

Bede had foreseen a moral degradation which would be blamed for the end of Northumbria’s Golden Age and the arrival of Scandinavian raiders, when he wrote to Egbert, York’s bishop that it is reported of some bishops that they have no men of true religion or self control around them, but instead are surrounded by those who give themselves to laughter, jokes, storytelling, eating, drinking and other seductions of the soft life. He worried that there were many folk in settlements in inaccessible mountains and dense forests who had not seen a bishop over the course of many years. Bede also recognised that the alienation of increasing areas of land to the church meant that in these favourable times of peace and prosperity, many of the Northumbrian race, both noble and simple, have laid aside their weapons and taken the tonsure, preferring that they and their children should take monastic vows rather than train themselves in the art of war. What the result will be, a later generation will discover. Bede worried about the combined threat from an end of religion and an inability to defend the homeland.

Northumbrian society had been founded on a social contract exchanging the life interest in gifts of land for military service and food renders. This supported a royal military elite who represented their people and defended the land. The commutation of such renders to monastic grants removed these royal lands in perpetuity. For a time this brought stability through an investment in the church. In time however it became the basis for the avoidance of military service and an over indulgence which would leave the kingdom unable to defend itself. The rich but unprotected monasteries of Northumbria became an obvious target. The grand foundations of Wilfred may have been a portent of the problem. [153]

On 8 June 793 CE a band of heathen men landed on Lindisfarne, plundered the monastery and slaughtered many of the monks. Younger monks were taken away, probably to be sold as slaves. It was because St Cuthbert was so passionately venerated that before the men called ‘the wolfcoats’ and ‘the beserks’ could do his remains harm, the Lindisfarne monks, knowing that precious shrines were a favourite target of the Viking sea-raiders, took his body from Lindisfarne and spent seven years wandering with it, looking for some safer place of refuge.[154]

By 793 CE, terrible portents came about over the land of Northumbria, and miserably frightened the people, there were immense flames of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. On 8 January 793 CE the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne island by looting and slaughter[155].

The term Viking became popular in the nineteenth century and may derive from a southern stretch of Olsofjord known as the Vik, the Old Norse word vic meaning ‘bay’, or from a Scandinavian term for pirates. In time the phrase was replaced by terms such as heathens, Danes, pagans or north men and as they settled from the mid ninth century they are perhaps best simply referred to as Scandinavians. The Russian Viking settlers tended to come from Sweden whilst the Shetlands and Orkney, Ireland, the Faroes, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Iceland and Greenland were colonised from Norway.

The Scandinavians were traders with the Frankish, Irish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but from the periphery of the European stage. The raids were probably driven primarily by opportunity for plunder, but may also have had a religious aspect, in a clash with their Christian neighbours. Indeed the relatively recent conversions of the Anglo-Saxons from beliefs of the same root as the Scandinavians, may have meant that the raids were a resurrection of demons from their past.

Alcuin later wrote to Æthelred that never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments, a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.

The Northumbrian Golden Age and its traditions of manuscript production were broken by the following years of Scandinavian disruption. Many monks were killed on Lindisfarne and treasures lost. The archaeology suggests that life of a sort continued on the island. The Viking onslaught had a catastrophic impact on culture although ordinary people probably continued to go about their lives much as before. It may be that the folk who lived in Kirkdaleland were largely unaffected by the violence.

The Scandinavian raiders ravaged the north east monasteries and may have damaged Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. In 795 CE Iona was sacked by the Vikings.

Alcuin’s final years

In 796 CE, Alcuin was made abbot of Marmoutier Abbey, in Tours, in Western Francia, near Orleans, where he remained until his death. Upon the death of Abbot Itherius of Saint Martin at Tours, Charlemagne put Marmoutier Abbey into Alcuin's care, with the understanding that he should be available if the king ever needed his counsel. Offa died on 29 July 796. He was succeeded by Ceonwulf who quickly faced rebellion. Ceonwulf invaded Kent and re-established authority in the southern kingdoms except in Wessex.

Northumbrian kingship had become somewhat anarchic by this time. Osbald, a violent man and most likely a murderer, was King of Northumbria during 796 CE. On 9 January 780, he had killed Bearn, the son of King Ælfwald by burning him to death at Selectune, possibly Silton, North Yorkshire. Alcuin often sent him letters of advice, urging him to give up his extravagant way of life. Alcuin told him, disapprovingly that Luxury in emperors means poverty for the people. He ruled for 27 days before being abandoned by the royal household and deserted by his people. He went into exile in Lindisfarne. Alcuin continued to chastise him: My dear friend Osbald ... I am disappointed in you for not taking my advice. I urged you in my letter that you should give up this way of life. Do not add sin to sin by ruining your country and shedding blood. Think how much blood of emperors, princes, and people has been shed through you and your clan. Eardwulf was King of Northumbria 796 to 806, with possibly a second reign from 808 until 811. In 798, early in his reign, Eardwulf fought a battle at Billington Moor against a nobleman called Wada, who had killed King Æthelred. Wada was defeated and driven into exile.

Charlemagne became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Day 800. Alcuin died on 19 May 804 and was buried at St. Martin's Church. His epitaph was composed by Alcuin himself. O thou who passest by, halt here a while, I pray, and write my words upon thy heart, that thou mayst learn thy fate from knowing mine. What thou art, once I was, a wayfarer not unknown in this world; what I am now, thou soon shalt be. Once was I wont to pluck earthly joys with eager hand; and now I am dust and ashes, the food of worms. Be mindful then to cherish thy soul rather than thy body, since the one is immortal, the other perishes. Why dost thou make to thyself pleasant abodes? See in how small a house I take my rest, as thou shalt do one day. Why wrap thy limbs in Tyrian purple, so soon to be the food of dusty worms? As the flowers perish before the threatening blast, so shall it be with thy mortal part and worldly fame. O thou who readest, grant me in return for this warning, one small boon and say: 'Give pardon, dear Christ, to thy servant who lies below.’ May no hand violate the sacred law of the grave until the archangel's trump shall sound from heaven. Then may he who lies in this tomb rise from the dusty earth to meet the Great Judge with his countless hosts of light. Alcuin, ever a lover of Wisdom, was my name; pray for my soul, all ye who read these words.

The ascendancy of Wessex

Virtually nothing is known of either Northumbria or East Anglia in the ninth century; whatever annals and charters were produced were lost through Viking destruction[156].

Scandinavian raids were growing more ambitious by the 830s. In 834 CE they attacked Francia’s largest wic, Dorestad. Egbert of Wessex held a great council at Kingston upon Thames to discuss the Scandinavian threat and to appoint his son, Æthelwulf (839 to 858 CE) as his successor.

The Genealogy of the House Wessex

The family tree of the Kings of Wessex, the Anglo-Saxons, and the English

Alfred, the youngest son of Æthelwulf and grandson of Egbert of Wessex, was born in Wantage in 849 CE. According to his hagiographical biographer Asser, he surpassed all his brothers, both in wisdom and in all good habits. His public relations team surpassed themselves.

The Vikings began to winter in Thanet and Sheppey in Kent in 851 CE. A fleet of 350 ships captured Canterbury and London[157]. Norsemen had been overwintering in Ireland since the 830s, building bases for ships or longphorts. This was the first time they spent a winter in an English kingdom. This was escalation.

Æthelwulf of Wessex died in January 858 CE. Æthelbald immediately took Æthelwulf’s 14 year old widow to be his own bride denounced by Alfred’s biographer Asser as against God’s prohibition, and Christian dignity, and also contrary to the practices of the pagans. However the union gave Æthelbald the advantage of a Frankish queen whose children would be in a stronger position than his brothers in future claims to the throne. Æthelbald died in 860 CE, before he had produced any children. Whilst it was expected that the western kingdom of Wessex would pass to Æthelred, the fourth son, keeping the kingdom divided, Wessex was added to the domain of Æthelberht, uniting the larger kingdom. Raiders sacked Winchester that year.

In Northumbria in 862 CE, King Osberht was deposed as king by Ælla, a king with no hereditary right, who was King of Northumbria 862 to 866 CE. As a result there was great civil strife. While Ælla was described in most sources as a tyrant, and not a rightful king, one source records that he was Osberht's brother.

The Scandinavian raiders had been focusing their attention on the Frankish kingdom for several years, but after Charles the Bald won a victory on the Marne and then constructed a fortification across the Seine, the Frankish kingdom became a less attractive target to the Vikings who reverted their attention to southern England. In 864 CE a Viking army occupied the Isle of Thanet and though bribed with money, they continued into the eastern part of the Kingdom of Wessex.

The Great Heathen Army, mycel hæþen, invaded the Anglo Saxon Kingdoms in 865 CE, posing a new threat on a scale not yet encountered. According to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle the army was led by Ivar, later linked to Ivar the Boneless, son of Ragnar Lothbok, possibly the same as an Ivar in Ireland who disappears there in the records at about the same time. They made their winter camp in East Anglia, but made peace, presumably extracting more bribes. They consolidated their position there. Northumbria was already in disarray[158]. The Great Heathen Army, supported by the greatest fleet yet seen, marched on Northumbria in the late summer of 866 CE. They may have been attracted there by the political chaos. They seized York on 1 November 866, with little resistance, but they did not capture Ælla. Ragnarssona þáttr, The Tale of Ragnar's sons, provides legendary accounts of the Viking conquest of York[159] associating the semi-legendary king of Sweden Ragnar Lodbrok and his sons, Hvitserk, Björn Ironside, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, Ivar the Boneless, and Ubbe.

In the spring of 867 CE Ælla and Osberht united in an attempt to push the invaders out of Northumbria, leading to the battle of York on 21 March 867 CE. They were defeated. According to the stories, Ragnar had been killed by Ælla, and the army which seized York in 866 CE, led by Ragnar's sons, avenged his death by subjecting Ælla to the blood eagle. This was a legend that derived from an eleventh century verse, which probably meant no more than that his body was left for the eagles.

Nevertheless, a new age, heavily influenced from Scandinavia, had begun in Northumbria.

Go Straight to Act 5 – Scandinavian Kirkdale

or

Return to the Matrix

Anglo Saxon Kirkdale

This is a new experiment. Using Google’s Notebook LM, listen to an AI powered podcast summarising this page. This should only be treated as an introduction, and the AI generation sometimes gets the nuance a bit wrong (for instance the link between Kirkdale and Cornu Vallis is more opaque than the AI summary picks up). However it does provide an introduction to the themes of this page, which are dealt with in more depth in the text.

---

[1] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 1, chapters 12 to 23.

[2] De excidio Britanniae, Gildae.

[3] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

[4] Little Kingdoms, Alex Harvey, 2025, Pen & Sword Books.

[5] De excidio Britanniae, Gildae. Part 1 Section 19.

[6] Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters, Book 8, Letter VI to his friend Namatius, 480 CE, Section 13.

[7] Post-Roman Birdoswald , History of Birdoswald Roman Fort, English Heritage.

[8] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 31 to 39.

[9] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 23.

[10] St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context, Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, 2021, page 288.

[11] St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context, Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, 2021, page 288.

[12] The Golden Bough: a study of magic and religion, Sir James George Frazer, 1922.

[13] St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context, Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, 2021, page 285.

[14] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 1 chapter 14.

[15] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 1, chapter 22.

[16] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 29; the Gallic Chronicle, 452 CE.

[17] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 34.

[18] Ship Figurehead, British Museum, Museum Number 1938,0202.1.

[19] The Nydamboat.

[20] Clinker-built describes a traditional boatbuilding method where hull planks overlap each other, like shingles on a roof, rather than joining edge-to-edge (carvel-built), creating a strong, durable, and distinctive look with visible seams, famously used in Viking ships and still seen in many small, robust vessels today.

[21] The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham Part VIII: The Cremations, Jacqueline I McKinley, 1994, East Anglian Archaeology Report No 69.

[22] Claw Beaker, British Museum, Museum Number 1947,1009.1.

[23] Saucer brooches, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

[24] Cruciform brooch, British Museum, Museum Number 1876,0212.69.

[25] Experiments in Anglo Saxon Carving, The Sutton Hoo Ships Company.

[26] Anglo-Saxon copper-alloy square-headed brooch from West Heslerton, Yorkshire.

[27] An Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Norton, Cleveland, S J Sherlock and M G Welch, 1992, Council of British Archaeology.

[28] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 40.

[29] Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 21.

[30] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 226 to 227.

[31] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 39 to 41.

[32] The English, 1994, Professor Geoffrey Elton.

[33] De Origine et situ Germanorum, Tacitus, 98 CE, Chapter 40.

[34] Thorsberger Moor; Thorsberger Moor, Ancient Village of Settlement in Schleswig-Holstein, The Megalithic Portal.

[35] Genetic study provides new insights into Anglo-Saxon migrations, University of Huddersfield.

[36] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 1, chapter 1. In the Ecclesiastical History, Bede referred to the River Derwent as Deruuentionis Fluvii, the river where oak tress grow abundantly.

[37] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 89 to 93.

[38] The West Heslerton Assessment, Edited Dominic Powelesland, Internet Archaeology.

[39] Cottam B: an Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian settlement in East Yorkshire, Dave Haldenby, Julian D Richards,, 2016, Archaeology Data Service.

[40] Cottam: An Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, Julian Richards, Archaeological Journal, Volume 156, 1999; Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Cottam: linking digital publication and archive, Julian D Richards, University of York.

[41] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 45 to 65.

[42] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 50.

[43] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 65 to 73.

[44] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 75 to 80.

[45] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 51.

[46] The Seafarer, Early Medieval England.

[47] Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski, 1922, Chapter VI.

[48] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 90 to 107.

[49] Historia Anglorum, History of the English Peoples, c 1129, Henry of Huntingdon, Volume 1, Chapter 2, the English Kingdoms.

[50] Late Anglo-Saxon England: Life and Landscape, Andrew Reynolds, 1999.

[51] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 110 to 119, 148 to 149.

[52] Why 536 was the worst year to be alive, Ann Gibbons, Science, Volume 362, 2018, page 733.

[53] Historia Brittonum, Nennius.

[54] Bede, Ecclesiastical History; Anglo Saxon Chronicle.

[55] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 197 to 198.

[56] A History of Britain, At the Edge of the World, 3,000 BC to AD 1603, 2009, Simon Schama, page 45.

[57] The Battle of Catreath, Early British Battles, David Nash Ford.

[58] Y Gododdin, Aneurin, with English translation by Rev John Williams Ab Ithel, 2009.

[59] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 29.

[60] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 27.

[61] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 7.

[62] Aberlemno II, Ancient Scotland.

[63] Historia Brittonum.

[64] Battle of the River Idle: A nation is born, Richard Darch, 10 April 2021.

[65] The Little History of Yorkshire, Ingrid Barton, 2024, page 35.

[66] History of Skellig Michael, Skellig Islands Tours.

[67] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 88 to 89.

[68] Robert the Bruce, the Champion of a Nation, Stephen Spinks, 2024, page 20.

[69] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 39.

[70] Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 41.

[71] Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 120 to 140, 150 to 151.

[72] Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, Book II, Chapter 1.

[73] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 63.

[74] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 21.

[75] Ecclesiastical History, Bede, Book 2, Chapter 9.

[76] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 69 to 70.

[77] Pope Boniface V’s letter to Æthelburh, queen of the Northumbrians, urging her to persuade her husband to convert to Christianity, written in Latin at Rome, 625 and recorded by Bede in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book 2, chapter 11.

[78] The Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, British Museum.

[79] Prittlewell Princely Burial, Southend Museums; New Secrets from Prittlewell: reconstructing a burial chamber fir for a prince, Current Archaeology, 6 June 2019.

[80] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 2, Chapter 13.

[81] The Battle of Hatfield, Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society.

[82] James the Deacon, his life and legacy, St James the Deacon church.

[83] Heavenfield, A bit about Britain, 17 May 2016; St Oswald, National Churches Trust. The church at Heavenfield has an eighteenth century sundial whose gnomon tracks the passing of the hours during daylight (St. Oswald's Church, Heavenfield, 18th C sundial, Mike Quinn).

[84] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 77.

[85] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 3.

[86] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 89.

[87] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 168 to 169.

[88] Sprouston, Roxburghshire: an Anglo-Saxon settlement discovered by air reconnaissance, J K S St Joseph, Anglo Saxon England, Volume 10, pages 191 to 199.

[89] Thirlings Hall, Jarrow Hall.

[90] The early medieval settlement of Thirlings, Northumberland, Durham Archaeological Journal, Volume 7, pages 57 to 91.

[91] Doon Hill, History, Historic Environment Scotland.

[92] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 2, chapter 14.

[93] The Kingdom of Northumbria AD 350 to 1100, N J Higham, 1993, page 85 to 86.

[94] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 218 to 219; The Tribal Hidage; Britain after Rome, The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, 2011, Robin Fleming page 108 to 109.

[95] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 299.

[96] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 180 to 184.

[97] Oswestry History, Oswestry Town Council.

[98] The Battle of Maserfield, 5^th August AD 642, Richard Ward, 2020.

[99] Vita Wilfridi, Eddius Stephanus.

[100] Life of Ceolfrith, Anonymous, Chapter 2; Journeys from Jarrow, Richard Morris, 2004 Jarrow Lecture, page 19; Ecclesiastical History, Bede, Book 3, Chapter 14; Locating Ingetlingum and Suthgedling: Gilling West and Gilling East, Thomas Pickles, Northern History, Volume 46, Issue 2, 2009, page 313; The Life of Ceolfrith by an Anonymous Monk of Jarrow of the Eighth Century, chapter XXIX; From the translation of the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, Two Lives of Ceolfrith, Abbot of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, Carolinne White, 2024, The Cambridge Anthology of British Medieval Latin, 2024, pages 174 to 190; St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context, Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, 2021, page 293; Lastingham and its sacred landscapes, I Wood, 2008 Lastingham Lecture.

[101] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 3, chapter 23.

[102] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 82 to 83; Understanding the Staffordshire Hoard, Jenni Buttereworth, Historic England, 25 November 2022.

[103] The Battle of Winwæd and the Rise & Fall of Pagan Mercia, Matt Firth, 17 December 2025.

[104] This appeared in The Earliest English Kings, D P Kirby, 1991, page 78 but in the later 2000 edition, it is simply concluded that Oethelwald is not heard of again after the battle (page 81). The tradition probably relates to a later erroneous suggestion that the grave cover ST* was the Ethelwald Stone which led to theories about Kirkdale being the true location of the original monastery at Lastingham.

[105] Referred to in Historia de Sancto Cuthberto.

[106] Lastingham in its sacred landscapes, Ian Wood, Professor of Early Medieval History, The Fifth Lastingham Lecture, 2008, pages 13 to 23.

[107] Life of Ceolfrith, Anonymous, Chapter 2.

[108] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 198 to 200.

[109] A History of Britain, At the Edge of the World, 3,000 BC to AD 1603, 2009, Simon Schama, page 50.

[110] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 292 to 294.

[111] Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 114.

[112] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 306 to 309; The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 97.

[113] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 314 to 320; The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 98 to 99.

[114] Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 23.

[115] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 334 to 338.

[116] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 321 to 323.

[117] This was the inception of an idea of English national identity explored in the Nation State, In Our Time Podcast, 14 October 1999, BBC Sounds.

[118] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 3, chapter 27.

[119] Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 111; The Tribal Hidage, Cyril Hart, 23 October 1970, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Volume 21, pages 133 to 157.

[120] The Tribal Hidage, Cyril Hart, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Volume 21, 1971, pages 133 to 157.

[121] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 53.

[122] The Reign of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, Kenneth Harrison, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, Volume 43, 1971, page 79.

[123] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 108.

[124] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 3, chapter 25; The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 90.

[125] Vita Wilfridi, Eddius Stephanus, chapter 22.

[126] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 295 to 297.

[127] The Frank’s Casket, British Museum, Museum Number 1867,0120.1.

[128] A Brief History of the Anglo Saxons, The Beginnings of the English Nation, 2006, Geoffrey Hindle, page 60 to 91.

[129] The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Venerable Bede, Book 5, chapter 24.

[130] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 85 to 86.

[131] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 107 to 109, 112 to 116.

[132] Church and church museum, Abercorn, West Lothian, The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland.

[133] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 373.

[134] The Life of Ceolfrith, Chapter XIV.

[135] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 122.

[136] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 377.

[137] A Brief History of the Anglo Saxons, The Beginnings of the English Nation, 2006, Geoffrey Hindle, page 85.

[138] Vita Alcuini.

[139] The library of Alcuin’s York, Mary Garrison.

[140] Alcuin of York, Science Stories, BBC Sounds; Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes by Alcuin.

[141] The Social World of Alcuin: Nicknames at York and at the Carolingian Court, Mary Garrison.

[142] Peter of Pisa, Grammatical Works Attributed to Peter of Pisa, Charlemagne’s Tutor, Edited by Elke Krotz and Michael M Gorman, Speculum, July 2016.

[143] The World of Paul the Deacon and the Lombards: Geopolitical Perspectives in an Early Medieval Account, Valery Charachon, 2017 Medievalists.

[144] Alcuin, In Our Time podcast, BBC Sounds, 30 January 2020.

[145] Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 49.

[146] Christ is a title given to Jesus and means anointed one.

[147] See map at Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History, Francis Pryor, 2007, page 165.

[148] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 165.

[149] St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context, Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, 2021, page 293.

[150] St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context, Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, 2021, page 298.

[151] St Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire, Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context, Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, 2021, page 294.

[152] Evolving Anglo-Saxon agriculture, Bob Trubshaw, YouTube.

[153] The King of the North, the Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, Max Adams, 2013, page 380 to 383.

[154] A History of Britain, At the Edge of the World, 3,000 BC to AD 1603, 2009, Simon Schama, page 52.

[155] The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, 793 CE.

[156] The Anglo Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, Marc Morris, 2021, page 196.

[157] The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, 851 CE.

[158] The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, 867 CE.

[159] The Tale of the Ragnarssons, History Profiles, YouTube.